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The Manifesto of the Cultural Liberation Front |
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by The CLF Collective Email: culturalliberation (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!) |
19 Jun 2001
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We’re going to create. Our art is our own; spontaneous, rebellious, and loud. It will permeate the senses, exfoliating the establishment from our pores, disseminating the seeds of free creativity while fertilizing against the usurpation of our abilities. |
For Immediate Release: Print and Distribute Widely
Manifesto of the Cultural Liberation Front
“I am nothing. I should be everything.” –Karl Marx
Unable to escape the demands and expectations of what we should be, barraged by images and sounds that portray a false and carefully structured ideal, restricted from social interactions outside those carefully orchestrated by the established societal order, deprived of virtually nothing of the sorts of material and superficial luxuries, but kept in constant need to improve and update these obsessions, stoned into the bitter tranquility of dark parks and deserted backyards, never high, isolated from the instrumentation and order of the state, chased, followed, searched and harassed. Sophisticated, brilliant and angry, brimming and spilling, ranting and craving, obsessed with alienation, thought, and the ever present and increasingly obvious death in which we live, creative, prepared, often bleak but constructively sarcastic, critical, and weird, armed with the power inherent to our existence in this time and place.
Such is the life of these suburbanoids, confined to a life of planning and order. We’ve smoked all the opiates of the masses; we’re not addicted. We do not wish to make jobs our life’s work, we wish to make our lives our life’s work. What is required of us is only the realization that the spontaneous itch in the back of our minds, the desire to destroy and tag, kick over, toss, and break can and must be cherished and utilized toward the fulfillment of something that still has life pumping through it, anything besides that which we see before us. Our goal is the end of perpetual boredom, the endless cycle of alienation.
Squad cars, boring teachers, zoning boards, and nosy neighbors tremble: your manicured lawns and one-track minds will not be spared this march. Ours is the fight for the full out toppling of the superstructure, the deconstruction of what we know because it is all we know; what surrounds and controls us can no longer hold our instinctual prowess. Ours is a fight that refuses to be cordoned off, packaged and sold. Yours is the counterculture. Ours is a culture, in tune with what we feel. We study. We talk. We listen. We’re well aware.
To the blinding glare of a cop’s flashlight we hold up our collective middle finger and fist. To the drones and doldrums of the modern classroom we spit relentless criticism. We will not move from here. Don’t make us tell you again. We’re winning because we’re thinking; we’re on the move because you bored us. Your little leagues and Girl Scouts will be no longer. You will not push us against our will. We are relentless. Mix our democracy and your cultural dictatorship, stir and let sit for adolescence; the steam of our resentment rises, the revolutionary compound forms.
We’re going to create. Our art is our own; spontaneous, rebellious, and loud. It will permeate the senses, exfoliating the establishment from our pores, disseminating the seeds of free creativity while fertilizing against the usurpation of our abilities.
The Cultural Liberation Front (CLF) is a collective organization that encourages and engages in active, creative resistance against the mass marketing machine that currently impresses, enslaves and consumes the psychology of America’s youth.
The Cultural Liberation Front seeks not only to heighten consciousness about the well-planned, pervasive attempt by this machine to market every possible aspect of being, including but never limited to: emotions, art, cultural and political movements, hobbies, diets, and fashion; but to also creatively deconstruct any visible, physical symbols of the conquest of profit over the fragile, but ever-marketable essence of human experience.
The Cultural Liberation Front promotes and demands the self-responsibility of its members when engaging in the creative process of resistance. True empowerment is only possible when the actor also writes the script, when the designer also realizes his design.
The Cultural Liberation Front supports the economic sabotage of private property deemed disagreeable, physically, structurally and mentally, with the goals of a society based on the advancement of community and creativity. The Cultural Liberation Front does not support, nor assume responsibility for actions that harm life, or the livelihoods of individuals. Further, the Cultural Liberation Front does not support nor claim responsibility for action taken by individuals against individuals for strictly selfish purposes (i.e. the resolutions of personal vendettas).
The Cultural Liberation Front supports vandalism, including but not limited to the transformation of advertisements and billboards, the creation of public art, strategic graffiti, street theatre, thoughtful pranks, hacking, and spontaneous action within the community.
The Cultural Liberation Front supports the creation of independent media and the dissemination of ideas by means of pamphlets, flyers, manifestos, etc. The Cultural Liberation Front distributes such materials in a spontaneous manner, strategically choosing the recipients of such material (i.e. malls and mall parking lots).
The Cultural Liberation Front understands that boredom is a result of a consumer society in which the only functional purpose and recreational outlet encouraged by this societal machine is that which urges its members to buy things and thereby sustain the perpetual conquest of capitalist culture.
“In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish society.” –graffiti from Paris, May 1968.
If your action is consistent with the Cultural Liberation Front, feel free to designate the initials, “CLF” at the site of your action.
This project is still very much in its nascent stages. For more information, please contact: culturalliberation (at) hotmail.com.
Special thanks to The Earth Liberation Front and Adbusters Magazine for direction and inspiration.
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