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Title: Diversion Number 1 Author: Jon Horelick Date: June 1973 Language: en Topics: situationists, situationist international, american situationists, social commentary, radicals, 1970s Source: Scanned from original Notes: Note: Scanned from the print original, 2013. The print edition of Diversion Number 1 contains an unnamed section with 6 articles followed by a section titled The Practice of the Truth, which contains 5 articles. A leaflet inserted in the print edition, titled Beyond the Crisis of Abstraction and the Abstract Break with that Crisis: The S.I., is included here as a third section.
âThe rational is the highroad where everyone travels and no one is
conspicuous.â
-- Friedrich Hegel
ANTI-COPYRIGHT: All texts published in âDiversionâ can be freely
reproduced, translated or adapted without even indicating their origin.
No matter how severely the advanced modes of accumulating Capital may
seem to slap the fundamental laws of merchandise, they do not spring
from the violation but the excessive application of these laws. The
commodity reappears as a spectacle, in excess of all expectations
concerning its temporal limits, annihilating its own origins in utility
and the spacious premises for its self-eulogy: that is to say, the
entire planet. The sacred code of merchandise, the code of exploitation,
intends to rebuild the world of alienation all over again out of its
very debris.
The real and the imaginary life of merchandise are at opposite poles:
the one spells an over-equipped misery and routine, the other an
unfinished, primitive struggle for survival. According to its public
image, the raw historical accomplishment of the old bourgeoisie--the
physical domination of nature--is transubstantiated into the mysterious
realm of unachieved possibility. After decades of putrefaction pile up
with that domination, and the social alienation engendered by it,
Capital looks in its fierce resistance to time for an impulse to
reproduce itself through the conquest of this very decay. In a word,
natural alienation is no longer natural.
The menacing congestion of modern surroundings is the extreme sign of
our time surrounded by abstraction. From Shanghai to New York and from
Paris to Prague, urban space bears nothing but the vertical point of
view of hierarchical power. The universal relationship between glass
buildings and the corporate empire is not accidentally but essentially
spectacular. The commodity at work is necessary scenery, to be watched
and visualized, because it cannot be lived. The city consumes at once
the formless relativity of modern science and the abstract inertia of
art, in exile of people and imaginative collaboration. As the thin walls
of the urban complex exclude human privacy in order to trample the
desire to meet, to speak and act, the departures from mass congestion as
well as the points of seclusion issue nothing but packaged quiet. One
cannot travel free of the tourism of spectators because all vehicles and
all places belong to the hierarchy. In the space dominated by illusion,
urban spectators encounter the very illusion of space. Repressive
urbanism is characterized by âdead airâ and bogus games, crowds gazing
religiously at the competition of star-experts. The Astrodome autographs
urban life, towering over the field of play. Man becomes a spectator by
default of space, in a time confined to sacrifice and isolated
vacations.
Social alienation is the malicious culprit behind all discomfort and
tyranny existing in the spectacular city. After all springs of
regeneration are exhausted, social alienation becomes an immobile energy
which saps everyone of an authentic ease and in seeming urgency lures us
toward its superficial dissolution. Today, global capitalism issues
critical designs in regard to the rehabilitation of social space, space
whose capacity to accommodate exploitation was exploited in turn, in
order to prolong the massive conditions of economy. As known work holds
no obligation outside the production of objects whose value lies in
their exclusive ability to require others, popular designs, as urbanism
and as ecology, seek nothing but an immaculate emptiness, an extended
survival. The specialized division of the world, according to classes,
can induce various rationalizations within the irrational framework of
its material organization as well as various ideological
alternatives--starting with state bureaucratic capitalism--but it cannot
rationalize life itself nor impassion it. The bad joke on contemporary
ruling classes is this plain and simply: they too are choking on their
spectacle.
The long delay in the full deployment of technical innovations toward
human emancipation can be traced to the false consciousness which
transpired within the first international revolutionary movement.
In the historical hiatus, alienated industrial society inherited the
very techniques of delay, that is to say, numerous partial critiques as
sociology and ecology which graft the new opiate of reformism onto the
old myth of eternity. The new proletariat suffers today according to
conditions that were tragically pursued in a revolutionary manner by its
ancestors and which could never be pursued again except as a comedy.
Nothing exists in the atmosphere except techniques of integration,
techniques which resolve certain conflicts while creating others from
them. In a way, the advancing crisis of industrial society is the
product of too much survival rather than too little. Here, men are found
risking their own prehistory in the consumption of the most fundamental
elements (as food or oxygen) after the most absurd refinement and
diversification has been invested in them and only them up to the point
of near extinction. Wherever modern technology multiplied in force
without releasing social equality--which is everywhere--the perspective
of survival became inseparable from the tyranny of the State and the
banalization of life. Even from the highest citadels of state power,
shining over their mutilated territory and torn subjects, the key
bureaucrats talk ecology. Nixon, for example, played the computer-copy
of Robert Frost in his first State of the Union Address saddened by the
unfortunate failure of Capital in former days to expropriate
hygienically.
From the publicity of governments to the melodrama of militantism, the
redemption of existing conditions in all that is in question
ecologically. Insofar as the ecological perspective pouts faithfully
against prevailing social hazards from the playpen of separated thought
the fetishistic powers of capitalist technology are effectively as
natural for it as the false consciousness of men. In merely contesting
the external effects of Capital--apart from the relative significance of
every oppressive detail such as the automobile--the essential ridicule
of reification is masked again. Ecology accepts the old world of
classes, so much so that it defies its very existence, in the spirit no
less of modernity. The ecologists have merely conveyed quantitative
disapproval toward the guardians of state power, which crushes all
traces of the living, in reproaching not their technocratic rationale
itself but their failure to apply it.
Following in the footsteps of christian priests marching to colonized
regions to stamp out primitive tribes, these new missionaries expect to
rinse the urban proletariat clean with natural enzymes. When the smoke
clears--not from gunfire but a sanitary explosion of
technology--everyone will frolic admiringly around the electronic
maypole in thanks for the new balance achieved between men and their
price. In the noise filled desert of the city, maddened wanderers are
flocking not to the most subtle but the most backward mystification.
Unlike the political and syndicalist attachments of aspiring âdo
gooders,â the ecologically deluded receive no material compensations.
There are only spectacles: to follow Bookchin beyond faded anarchism
into an atmosphere of âideal stimuliâ ordered nicely on the sunset of a
system, an âecosystem,â and the fresh air of reconditioned technology
fashioned according to the behaviorism of a âGreek polisâ; to swarm
around McCluhanism and its police esthetics for mass communication where
youth nibbles on the images of technology and the technology of images
as the supine voyeur of domesticated capitalism; to become a romantic
aeronaut in the rocketship of Fullerism soaring above the stratosphere
of banalities in order to install a global satellite cafeteria with a
menu of non-radioactive television, dome be-ins and macrobiotic vending
machines.
The ecologists have only interpreted the conditions of the modern city.
But the point is to transform them. The great challenge for modern
capitalism lies in the relocation of Capital itself according to urban
ideology. From the redistribution of technology to the walking distance
to work, less inhabited regions and zones are expected to become
filtered, scaled down versions of existing cities streamlined according
to the isolation and separation which are characteristic of them.
Capitalist plannification hopes to revitalize the image of the
neighborhood against its actual historical foundation in restless
immigrant workers forcibly brought together as particles of an anonymous
mass. The cities sprawled with traffic and congestion as they were
brimming over with producers. Today, nothing more is sought than what
now exists erratically: the reinforcement of that quieter immobility
witnessed ephemerally in passing suburbs with their miniature apartment
complexes--restrictive mixtures of park and schoolyard--their familiar
police, their identical houses and linear streets. The automobile is
expected to go away, but the family will remain. At the same time, the
desperation of bureaucratic logic, as logic of desperation, is evident
in the level of mercantile concentration which actually plagues urban
centers today even at their outlying perimeters. In the flight of
Capital toward suburban areas, in pursuit of vast caravans of migrating
consumers, the new industrialists wonder âwho will be the last one to
turn out the lights?â in the old centers. This rhetoric affirms no doubt
the expansion of the present conditions of the city rather than the
desertion from them.
Photo caption: Solid Smog. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty holds a ring made
of compressed particulate smog. The compressed smog is a golden color
with glittering flecks in the synthetic stone of almost gem-like
hardness.
-- International Herald Tribune
The eucharist of ecological salvation is the ânew townâ which originated
in England and now finds wide reception everywhere in Western Europe and
in America. âMany,â writes Vance Packard, âwere designed specifically to
take the pressure off nearby major cities and are not especially
innovative in terms of community building.â
The very first experiment with the new town in Lentchworth, in 1920,
revealed the general social repression which is contained in it: the
planners failed to include a single pub in their original designs. At
best, the author (no less inconsistent than he is intellectually honest)
can locate the example initiated in Columbia, Maryland, which on the one
hand âdoes not permit billboards or utility polesâ and in which
greenery, woodland and traffic-free villages are brought into existence
and yet on the other hand still basks in the splendor of âpooled
religious facilitiesâ and space again âfinanced by private enterprise,â
by a âdozen different buildersâ...âThere is nothing,â said one resident,
âwe have control over.â Overall, the urbanistic-ecological formula is
evidently a modest proposal for extinguishing the awareness growing
among modern survivors, a species less predictable than ever, by way of
a superlative count of environmentalism. On their horizons, an ideology
without denomination awaits the next revolution.
One no longer knows the oppression of hunger but the poison of
consumption. The material conditions which reify people are those which
also expose them to the most fantastic forms of ridicule in which the
accidental fatalities of particular individuals parody the mechanical
banalization of lives day by day. Modern spectacular society reached the
summit of its absurd necessity as soon as the majority of spectators
were exposed to the biological hazards of primitive survival in
technical comforts. The risks of annihilation known to the past are
suddenly entangled in the annihilation of risks once assured by the
present. The submission of the spectator is laughably shortchanged. The
few comforts he knew and more often pursued erode in him in all their
agony, depriving him of the halo of alienation at bargain prices. The
price of his enriched survival becomes nothing less than his absolute
dedication to the spectacle, as earnest libertine of insipid consumption
and cheerful altar boy of pure spectacles. The spectacle is the home of
the new puritans of excess.
The long sleep of revolutionary class consciousness brought about the
present conditions of non-life. The dictatorship of the commodity now
abuses men to the extent that they are forced to walk, travel, eat,
drink, sleep and breathe miserably. At best, individuals sometimes find
themselves freely active in functions. In their social activity, they
are subjected to the time of the laboring spectator. In their natural
activity, they no longer feel themselves to be anything but an animal.
What is natural cannot become human; what is human cannot become
natural. The ecological future is nothing but this: to recover
satisfactory animal functions, separated from the sphere of all other
possible activity, as the sole and ultimate end of being alive.
Nevertheless, the ideological effort to intercept opposition before the
revolution is derived from a real moment of great distress for all
ideology. The shadows of the struggle for survival recovered in the
modern spectacle in order to decompress the next challenge to the
conservation of class tyranny cannot disguise the actual depth to which
their origin in the present has already become visible. If the
proletariat which is everywhere, is to tear out of the sky and the earth
the excrement of spectacular merchandise, it is not to restore the
survival of nature and natural survival. It is to subject the space and
time of the society of classes to its conscious desires and dispose once
and for all of its lie.
In 1970 a provisional version of this article appeared as âStrobe-Light
Tyrannies of Adolescenceâ, with the address Situationist International,
P.O.B. 491, Cooper Station, N.y.C. 10003. Both articles were written by
Jon Horelick.
âIn a country as untouched as America, which has developed in a purely
bourgeois fashion without any feudal past, but has unwittingly taken
over from England a whole store of ideology from feudal times, such as
the English common law, religion and sectarianism, and where the
exigencies of practical labor and the concentrating of capital have
produced a contempt for all theory which is only now disappearing in the
educated circles of scholars--in such a country the people must become
conscious of their own social interests by making blunder after
blunder....But the main thing is that things have started moving, that
things are going ahead generally, that the spell is broken. And they
will go fast too, faster than anywhere else.â
-- Frederick Engels, 1886
As the fragmentary representations of rebellion crumble away in their
illusion, the authentic subjects of revolutionary change have begun to
manifest their real historical existence as a class, even at first to
their own unawareness. In America, diverse yet equally powerless strata
have simultaneously opposed the same alienated conditions known to all
modern society. Following the most fierce and at the same time the most
mystified social antagonisms, all these strata at once have directly
combated the colonization imposed on all their lives by the hierarchy of
commodities. Such simultaneity provides the principle substance required
for their unification in the near future as an indivisible whole:
according to a new proletarian consciousness.
Beyond all the stage lights and cameras, what is the specter which
haunts the hierarchy of Wall Street and Washington? This trifle reality
which by official estimate consists of 80,000,000 people? This devowed
[sic] citizenry which to the eyes of Nixonianism is already known to
âthreaten the legitimacy of the State?â What is this mute shadowy figure
which panics its own official spokesmen with the winds of âriotingâ ânot
only in the ghetto but throughout the city?â Who are these flaccid,
fashionably clothed consumers who having encountered the false needs and
alien pursuit of spectacular commodities now suddenly demand âto be
treated as human beings?â Who are these ghosts of antiquity whose
insubordination met on several occasions police and army detachments
which were resisted in kind? Who are these anonymous men apt to wonder
âwhich is worse,â âthe federal government or the unionsâ and daring in
some cases even to call themselves âanarchist.â Why itâs the workers:
nearly all of you!
After thirty years of isolation, silence and decay, the American workers
are slowly beginning to recover their authentic historical work, the
work of negation. Such subversive work does not rise to the level of
economic struggle and reform. The rebelling workers have written their
name in the tremors of production and hardly its adjustments as their
own movement contains nothing less than life in the making: the end of
wage-labor, merchandise and classes. At the very moment that
overdeveloped capitalism has modernized its oppression, when the
prolonged nullity of work is brimming with contemplation and alienations
have multiplied in abundance, the workers themselves form an opposition
more complete and more conscious than ever before in modern history. In
the most advanced industrial country, ruling ideology prefers to
represent the worker within an ever more marginal identity, in denial of
that menacing estrangement at work which affects nearly everyone, from
the classical sector of labor to white collar personnel and lower
professional layers. From exactly this source, all the old forms of
oppression and misery have derived their brutal diversification and
refinement. Alienation has only become richer since man the worker has
become man the consumer bound body and mind to the endless pursuit of
alien objects in exchange for his extended labor and mute passivity. For
almost three years, the stereotyped image of conformist, unthinking
workers has been shattered by the real workers as they put in question a
way of life which has always separated them from themselves as much as
from each other. Having allowed no quarter, the subordination of the
workers to the exchange-value of commodities forcibly places them in the
clear light of total self-emancipation. From exactly those conditions
which simultaneously involve and repel them at the margins, the workers
are drawing the genuine desire for life rather than survival. With them,
radical effort no longer disintegrates inevitably in futility, defeat
and fratricide.
Where, you ask, has all this furtive, unacknowledged movement begun?
Well, it emerged on the least familiar battleground: the post offices.
Between the 16^(th) and 21^(st) of March, 1970, the wildcat strikers of
the post offices throughout the country acted for the first time of
their own accord after having evicted, at least momentarily, all the
trade union bureaucrats from their struggle. Their suppression of
âbusiness mailâ formed an elementary rebuttal of both the private
proprietors of Wall Street and the public administrators of the
machinery of state power. At that time, we affirmed the genuine
revolutionary capacity of the workers in view of the fact that such an
initial trouble could already bear so many radical features. We wrote
then...âAs the postal workers launch an assault against that which
assures the permanence of wage-labor (the trade union) the struggle
against the total injustice of class society is itself introduced. The
ruling order has responded forcefully not only to the temporary
disruption of the capitalist economy and the momentary defiance of state
power, but to the initial sign of an autonomous struggle of the workers
for direct power.â Indeed, theirs was the slightest and yet at the same
time the most profound gesture of dissent--the refusal to work. In a
matter of days, the State planted thousands of National Guardsmen in the
main centers of New York in order to retrieve its desanctified property
and bear down on the strikers. This disclosed both the military
foundations of the working milieu, of commodity relations, as well as
the proprietary interests submerged in the State. Who else but the very
masters of politics and economics would know the hidden danger of major
retardations in the process of commodity production, so much so that
they threatened to impose direct military constraints before the
slightest discontinuity falling within their jurisdiction, even against
a possible walkout of railway workers when the most conservative
grievances were at stake. In New York, the government suppressed an
instance of revolt which having freed itself of authoritarian discipline
was no longer predictable.
Starting on April 1, 1970, the truck-drivers of Cleveland occupied the
streets and main thoroughfares in and around the city for the duration
of thirty days. This was the first mobile occupation of urban space of
its kind. The truckersâ promise âto shut the town downâ spread from the
roadblocked highways of Florida to an armed clash in Teamstersâ
headquarters in Pennsylvania. The local media witnessed a âworkersâ
riotâ which cost 67 million dollars to Cleveland alone while the drivers
had the first glimpse of their own self-management. The means deployed
in the course of their immediate battle represented at the same time
their best goals, goals brought factually to immediate light without the
slightest knowledge. In deciding to sustain the circulation of food and
medicine, for example, the drivers were taking an initial part in
regulating the affairs of an entire city. During thirty days the
insurgents succeeded in deploying direct methods of sabotage and
physical violence without ideology. Not only had confrontations occurred
on the roads as well as at the depots but there were numerous instances
in which trucks had been dynamited. In using more violent methods, the
rebels were playing with the possibility of their power and an end to
compromise. As they withheld the main arteries of circulation from
commercial passage, the drivers were freeing their environs of
exchange-value. After the trucks with their various shipments were
cleared away, it was no longer the massive image of capital but rather
the sudden gathering of workers throughout the city which commanded the
cards of production, of everyday life. At this moment, the city opened
to the producers--rather than the hierarchy--in streets long deprived of
their opposition and thus the presence of almost everyone. The rebels of
Cleveland moved about their streets as freely as the insurrectionaries
of Watts once roamed them. The quality of their response was without
doubt insurrectionary. âMy son should see me now,â said one driver
holding up a V-sign, âmarching down Euclid Avenue.â Accordingly, all the
banalities of the street, even the slashing of tires, suddenly carried
universal significance. At the moment one hundred men could be summoned
to any point in Cleveland within an hour by way of âprowl patrol carsâ
with radio transmitters and a system of âchain telephone calls,â
liberated communication and spontaneous organization had become
concrete.
The revolutionary moment often finds its nature disclosed in the extreme
hostility manifest in turn by all its adversaries. In Cleveland, tough
mindedness bellowed from every quarter of power, from the press to the
municipal government. In insisting that such antagonism was anomalous,
the editors of the Plain Dealer depicted the antagonists themselves as
iconoclasts for whom the police represented âcossacks or pigsâ; various
manufacturing interests hollered vociferously about the grave chance of
economic extinction involving all the Capital of the city; black liberal
mayor, Carl Stokes, heeded their plea in requesting the same federal
troops which once crushed the black revolt of Detroit, Los Angeles and
Newark, which emerged on Kent State days later; and various militant
groups could imagine nothing better than the nationalization of the
trucking industry at the very moment the nationâs troops were actually
arriving in Cleveland. What else could happen? What else but a military
alternative existed in face of an independent formation of workers which
could burst out in laughter when learning that Teamster leader Presser
attributed their radical activity, from the grave of McCarthyism and
Stalinism, to âa hard core of 200 or more communists?â In the last days
of March, the National Guard bivouacked itself on the outlying highways
of the area in order to recapture the lost arteries of the city. The
first attempts to escort the passage of trucks in arms were themselves
repulsed by groups of rebels, bricks in hand. The drivers were not
risking their own lives merely in order to accumulate some additional
commodities. They had won the terrain for their emancipation, if not
that emancipation itself.
The following August, the toll booth operators of New York abandoned
their positions on the bridges at the peak of the rush hour. Their own
resistance immediately harmonized with the masses of working traffic
which were thereby permitted to move gratuitously at will for more than
a day. During the winter, the fuel deliverers in New York gave the key
bureaucrat of their union a ruthless thrashing. At the same time, the
street car drivers in San Francisco formed an immediate wildcat strike
as soon as several drivers harassed by police had battled with them in
the street. In March of 1971, the yellow taxi drivers ravaged a meeting
hall in Manhattan in direct response to an impenetrable monologue fixed
by their appointed bureaucrats with the support of vigilant goons. In
June, the drawbridge mechanics, in spite of their official passivity,
paralyzed the five boroughs of New York. They accomplished this by
robbing one vital part from all the bridges to the horror and dismay of
the oncoming corps of army engineers whose clumsy searches were of no
avail. The workers surrounded the bridges. In Brooklyn, the Verrazano
site remained under their control according to the force of an extreme
ultimatum. In August, the telephone workers, known to bear a significant
number of young dissidents that have started to band together in
independent groups, effectively compelled their official delegates to
initiate an unusually long work stoppage, lasting almost eight months.
By virtue of the duration of the antagonism and at the same time a
disastrous conclusion (an increase of 1 percent over the initial
settlement), American Capital showed the incapacity to yield unlimited
concessions at the very moment that the workers manifest the equal
possibility of taking the whole of the economy into their own hands.
From December 1971 to March 1972, the assembly line producers of
Lords-town, Ohio, manufacturers of the Vega, ruthlessly disrupted the
rhythm as well as the goal of the profit system. Noted for an average
age of 24, these neo-luddites consciously sabotaged well over a half
million cars. Their own act of immediate destruction repudiated at once
the well known defects, hazards, and mortality built in to the companyâs
schedule. Before the exasperations of economists and social
psychologists alike, their uncompromising response disclosed âthe wider
issue of how management can deal with a young worker who is determined
to have a say,â where âwages are goodâ and moreover where the âpressure
of unemployment had little effectâ (N.Y. Times). From within the
factories, the auto producers uncovered an initial unity between
subversion and everyday life. In holding their machines hostage, they
invoked the strict mandate of their delegates. This was done forcibly in
their disruption of labor-management negotiations at will. Nothing less
than a Council in embryo was developing in Lordstown. The workers of
Lordstown succeeded again in transferring the objective time of
production to the subjective time of the producers. The response to
Lordstown spread as far as Burbank, California. Between April and
September, 1972, the workers of Norwood, Ohio sustained the longest
controversy ever with G.M. Starting on November 3, 1972, the television
technicians, cameramen, lightmen and engineers subverted the C.B.S.
network. In six cities, they challenged monopolized media for the first
time. At Shea Stadium, as in Milwaukee and San Francisco, the television
hands stopped the spectacle. Amidst skirmishes with police, main cables
were severed by the strikers and the station was blacked out. There were
at least three arrests in New York alone. To the surprise of millions of
spectators, the passive entertainment of a football event met with
sabotage, or better yet, sabotage had become an entertainment which here
and there found the support of commentators and reporters. The spell of
the most incessant machinery of commercial conditioning and monologue
had been broken. As recently as February 13, 1973, some of the transit
workers in New York broke up a meeting of the mayorâs âWatchdog
Committeeâ where they prevented an exhibition of surveillance films.
In the same period, itâs equally important to note, in the slow
withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, the parallel movement of
anti-military resistance which compelled the government to disband the
civilian army and draft system. The critical awareness of the military
hierarchy and the imperialism of the commodity reached its apex in the
Navy last summer. The S.O.S. Movement (Save Our Ships) formed an
elementary point of reference for diverse hostilities which multiplied
spontaneously. On July 10, 1972, the carrier ship Forrestal was lit up
by clandestine arson. In other efforts to suppress ship movements to
Vietnam, the insertion of one paint scraper and two metal plugs in a
main gear of the Ranger prevented the carrier from functioning. In
September, the Enterprise failed to depart from San Diego without
extreme trouble. In November, violent, anti-racist skirmishes broke out
on two other ships, the Kitty Hawk and the Hassayampa. At that moment,
both the Saratoga and the Cruiser were attacked by arsonists. The
outrage conveyed by those in arms has truly enunciated the advanced
nature of the modern class struggle which is developing.
The revolt of the American workers arises out of the contemporary period
as the location for revolutionary opposition after the release of its
time. As early as 1965, this merger of forces and places was already
present in embryo in America. In âThe Rise and Fall of the Spectacular
Commodity Societyâ in Watts, the class context in which the insurgents
had battled the logic of merchandise and defied the power of the State
was already depicted by the Situationists when they wrote: âThe blacks
are not isolated in their struggle because a new proletarian
consciousness--the consciousness of not being the master of oneâs life
in the slightest degree--is taking form in America among strata whose
refusal of modern capitalism resembles that of the blacks.â Indeed,
there are many within the present rebellion at work that passed through
several other struggles to arrive at their own. The fresh level of
resistance is not contrary to that of the recent past but its very
center. Their similarity is manifest in the deficiencies as much as the
strengths of the present. From those who pillaged merchandise come those
who suppress the machinery of alienation. Who could ignore the genuine
likeness between the contempt of the Berkeley students for the cultural
hierarchy and the scorn of the wildcat strikers for the trade union
bureaucracy? No, there is hardly a lapse in the progression of practical
radical activity from the young rioters hurdling the fences at the
Newport Festival and the masses of spectators vandalizing Pittsburgh
after the World Series to the workers defending their highways in arms.
Among the potentially advanced strata of modern capitalism, the
thousands of youth who circumvented the poverty of the student milieu
expressed in their search for new relations, sexual and otherwise, the
first great refusal of the necessity of labor. Inevitably youth
rediscovered an ugly necessity. At the same moment, the struggle at work
encountered its youth and accordingly its responsibility toward the free
reconstruction of all values and behavior imposed by an alien present.
Neither the resistance to working on the part of the ânew
lumpenproletariatâ nor the revolt at work can ever come to anything
apart from one another. The one could never find the way to realize its
desires, to make its criticisms work; the other would reveal in its
failure to live differently that it had never really rebelled.
The radical combatants of the spectacular commodity and alienated labor
have recently conveyed their mutual reciprocity. In this, the bitter
winds of racial separation are slowly dying away. Those construction
workers who pummeled the war resisters at City Hall in New York under
the coordinated instructions of their managers, owners and shop stewards
represent the same minority which had the mercenary esteem of opposing
the workersâ battle against Standard Oil as scabs and provocateurs. They
constitute the most backward of sectors insofar as they are most
dependent on the State as well as the integrated trade union and
therefore acclaim their ideology with enthusiasm. They acquire all the
legal security which can assure them of their wage-labor, threatened by
advancing technology, as exclusive hereditary property. Rather than
opposing the specific relations of production, they support the
retardation of productive forces in the most archaic language of
bourgeois ideology: religion, race and nation. To the contrary, the
majority of worker-consumers face the same predicament as all those
separated entirely from the marketplace. For them, their very employment
within modern capitalism--an employment increasingly devoted to
manipulative ends--encompasses as much degradation as social security.
The lumpenproletarian and the modern worker face similar problems,
problems of life rather than survival. Their action transforms their
problems into burning ones. While the worker has opposed the active
nature of his scarce time, merely producing his own confinement, the
lumpenproletarian has revolted against the passive nature of his
abundant time, of just killing his time.
The unity between the two became visible within the very prison walls of
Attica. There, the well known rebellion of September 9, 1971, organized
itself internally according to Workers Coalitions. And there in the very
words of the New York Times, âracial animosity had been submerged in
class solidarity.â This was the first occasion in history that the
clandestine discussion of sociology led to insurrection from which
rebelling convicts manifest not the most backward but the most advanced
awareness of present conditions and the prospects for changing them.
Despite the least favorable circumstances, namely, a handful of police
hostages utterly dispensable to the State, the prisoners brought into
the open a great lesson in direct democracy, so much so that on the very
morning of the 14^(th), hours before the police invasion, they cared to
revoke their old delegates and appoint more radical ones. Among
prisoners varying from former chemical engineers, university students
and high school dropouts to industrial workers and unemployed, Blease
Montgomery, a poor white from North Carolina, announced to the world the
collective possibility of the majority of Americans: âI want everyone to
know we gonâ stick together, we gonâ get what we want or we gonâ die
together. â
If the demands of the 1,200 convicts altered in the course of six days,
it was because the prisoners themselves had changed with the act of
revolt. Under the transparent truth which grew from their liberated
collaboration, all stereotyped dogma shattered and dissolved: the
compulsive lie publicized before the cameras by attorney Kunstler, to
which he confessed much later, concerning âamnestyâ guaranteed to the
inmates by âThird World Countries just around the cornerâ; the opportune
reticence and withdrawn support of Black Panther officials from an
independent minded, undogmatic rebellion, etc. From the opposite side,
the equal disillusionment of many relatives of slain guards followed in
turn. âSomehow we felt that the name Rockefeller was written on every
bullet,â said one woman. Irrevocably, the arms of free speech and the
free speech in arms had spread. Without doubt, the Popular Manifesto
which appeared at the outset of the seizure constituted the first
revolutionary declaration of the new proletariat written in its own hand
against the modern State: âWe, the inmates of Attica prison, say to you,
the sincere people of society, the prison system of which your courts
have rendered unto, is without question the authoritative fangs of a
coward in power.â
Evidently, the American workers can do no less in responding to the
reified terms of their own dispossession than those social layers that
are confined from everything, even the urban milieu of consumption, the
very milieu which isolated them under the lie of cultural superiority.
The American Indian Movement, after the riot in Custer, North Dakota, on
February 8, 1973, reached the significance at Wounded Knee of an armed
struggle for territorial emancipation. For twenty days, the Indians have
forcibly occupied the area of Pine Ridge after looting the trading post
there of as much food and arms as they could find. Indians from all over
the U.S. and some white supporters furtively entered Wounded Knee under
the eyes of the F.B.I. and federal marshals by way of back paths and
amidst diversionary tactics. In holding the area, armed skirmishes have
ensued. Helicopters carrying newsmen and oncoming video trucks have been
fired upon. The Indiansâ disgust with the passive spirit of their own
Council and its leaders equals their contempt for the bureaucracy in
Washington. In speaking to reporters, one Indian spat on the ground and
muttered: âGovernments, Iâm sick of governments.â No matter how symbolic
the âlast standâ may seem to be at Wounded Knee--and in spite of the
ambiguity of its expectations and its organization--the direct
appropriation of one valley by three hundred rebels forms an
insurrectionary penetration of a space monopolized by bureaucratic
centralization.
The recent actions of the workers have illuminated the revolutionary
theory of our times. In advancing their own protest against prevailing
conditions beyond legal limits, the workers show that they are no longer
integrated into modern capitalism and its logic of reification. Their
own resistance injects the raw rebuttal of everything others have said
about them, from professors and journalists to movie stars and
militants. The mute nature of their past has vanished. In the present
moment of insubordination, the stars to which the workers once paid
homage, baseball players and television personalities alike, now follow
at their heel imitating their own dissident behavior, their own reality,
which pits itself directly against the fictitious power of commodities.
Not long after the summer of 1969, when the ambiguous radicalism of the
Movement, caught and reified in hierarchical division, withered away in
the sheer repetition of its boredom, these more profound enemies of the
spectacular society started to rally against the most significant of
obstacles: the blackmail of survival. Insofar as the workers will no
longer remain an innocuous gear within the machinery of affluence, their
action has rejected the given terms of that survival, namely, an
increasingly reified labor and a leisure time consumed in passivity. As
they try to pose their own dissent apart from external controls, the
American producers are again surmounting their own passive relation to
the commodity, the commodity which is nothing, after all, but the
abstract embodiment of their stolen labor.
Modern technology and its products have appeared to do everything
independently only so far as man, their producer, has been able to
control virtually nothing. As the necessity of wage-labor fades from our
furtive history, the hierarchy struggles to multiply the fetishism of
commodities in the partial time of its present. The slightest contempt
conveyed by the workers toward the reigning spectacle whose job is to
fetishize commodities leaves nothing as it was....The most visceral
gestures, as the queues of Queens subway riders and hordes of Long
Island commuters that suddenly refused to pay their fare or the
disappointed lines of patrons which attacked the owner of the Lugoff
theatres, acknowledge such an irresistible contempt. In such ways, the
workers have shown that it is they who can live without the commodity
system while it is the commodity system which cannot survive without
them. For no other force exists within the restraints of modern society
which can ever unite the means of production with the goal of life. It
is the wage and commodity forms which have grown old. Others have become
useless. The fresh hostility toward the dehumanization of merchandise,
toward activity, toward life as merchandise, emerges not from classical
conditions of economic poverty but conditions of uncontrolled, alien
abundance. Far beyond the mere redistribution of material wealth, such
hostility expresses the search for the complete reinvention of abundance
in each and every one of its aspects (profound and trivial alike).
Modern capitalism accidentally grants the workers one concession in this
direction which is âthe luxury to consider their time.â It is our hope
that the workersâ actions will one day be influenced by revolutionary
criticism, insofar as it is criticism appropriated as their own.
If the workers still have not spoken in their own voice, they have
already rejected the voices of others. Since the bitter lesson of the
thirties, the American workers most noticeably have avoided subscribing
to any of the possible ideologies of their superiors. Why has that
happened? It is because the most advanced of the old capitalisms can
best realize in itself the more and more bureaucratically rational
survival which the classical ideologies, Stalinist and Trotskyist alike,
have always withheld as their unique goal. In light of the fact that the
past workers movement was defeated by various hierarchies which had
advocated intermediary economic objectives, any reservoir of such
authoritarian reformism today hardly interests those beyond the pale of
economic poverty who know and refuse its source.
The workersâ disinterest in the âstudent revolutionâ contained, even in
the moment of their own resignation, the most understandable reasons.
The swaggering anarchist or marxist militants who glibly reproached the
American workers for being âfascistâ or âpetit-bourgeoisâ were willing
almost monosyllabically to trade in one advocacy of imperialism for
another. Feverishly, they ran to support the external terrain of an
ideology which the workers directly encountered and rejected more than
thirty years ago. After proclaiming the virtues of the enemies of their
enemy, the totalitarian bureaucratic States, they were surprised to find
themselves alone. The popular trend of black nationalism existing at the
university, among other ghettos, resembles the bureaucratic reformism
once imposed upon the workers by their own ascending elites. In the
American university, it is not so much the social origins as the goals
of the students which are so often petit-bourgeois. It was in view of
their duplicity, as prospective cadres of advanced capitalism, that
their bureaucratic revolutionary dreams could fall just as they had
swelled: perfunctorily. Naturally, as they were convinced that the
workers could never independently attain the stature of their vast
intellectual awareness, the most eloquent ideologists among them
(casting faithfully from their Leninist scripts) are more than ready to
think for the workers. The students are at the rear of proletarian
revolution. They have disappeared and the workers are here.
An utter parody seems to confront the workers (Stalinists posing as a
black workers council, Trotskyists attempting to make others
construction workers, academic theorists parading as radical america,
socialist revolution and the black and red...) and yet at the same time
such nonsense places a real barrier in their path: the actual
decompression of revolutionary popularization by parody and mimetism. Of
course, there are far graver hazards, in which the force of habit,
exceeding that of the trade union bureaucracy and even the armed
detachments of the State, is perhaps the deadliest hazard of all. The
tradition of dead generations weighs heavy on the minds of the living.
The wildcat strikers of the post offices succumbed at last to the voting
machines, the very âclosed ballotâ which they reviled, and their own
attraction to customary convenience--the provisions of a meeting hall or
free cups of coffee--allowed the political return of the trade union
bureaucrats. The insurgents of Cleveland elected âstrike leadersâ who
continued in their individual names to speak for them...The radical
students of Santa Barbara and Ohio went so far as to destroy banks and
university buildings but without ever bothering to make any general goal
explicit, even the âend of the universityâ ... the black youths who
bravely held the sporting goods store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn still
combated the menace of authority in the shadow of religion...Old shadows
of economy and culture linger beside fresh forms of action, actions
which for all they have not said, are nevertheless radical of
themselves. At such a time, the workers do not speak for themselves
because they have borrowed at first the language of the past, its terms
and its battle cries, a past that starts from and leads directly back to
the immediate present. Today such inchoate rebels have nothing to derive
from the past but a feast of stale crumbs as their talent for
emancipation carries all its stakes in the future. The earlier revolt of
the workers required an amnesia in regard to the future in order to drug
itself in its immediate survivalist demands. In order to arrive at their
own content, the modern workers must define both their past and future
in order to let the dead bury the dead. They will not begin themselves
until they have stripped away all the habitual costumes of the past. But
the workers, here and elsewhere, have not intended to disguise their
real feelings. Their intentions themselves are to be concrete as always.
At the level of an unspoken praxis the workers waver intensely between
the intervals of insubordination and acceptance in which their rebellion
is their only real, ephemeral vacation from atrocious routine. Whereas
they appear to fall back behind their point of departure, they are in
truth only just beginning to locate the revolutionary point of
departure, the situation, the relations and the methods under which
their own social activity can become significant. While the workers
hardly know as yet the prodigiousness of their goal, the creation of
history to be lived as their own, it is the consequences of their own
actions which drive them on.
The existing world of the spectacle is nothing but a re-proletarianized
world. It is this industrial world which founds itself contradictorily
on masses of workers initially related together on an international
scale by the division of labor only to be separated again in the very
production of their own dispossession. The modern workers remain
producers not of the community but commodities as they become not men in
the concrete but spectators consuming themselves in its alienated
images. At the same time, the very contradiction between their own
social power and the private property of the global hierarchy furnishes
them with the real, living capacity which can reverse inverted material
organization at its roots. The authentic importance of the workers,
against the parasite merchandise, lies uniquely in their ability to
destroy their own class themselves, their momentary presence in an alien
world, their old selves as workers. Insofar as the capitalist world has
reified the social product in separation from the workers, the workers
themselves cannot aim for the mere appropriation of existing conditions,
that is to say, the products, the means or positions abandoned by
separate power but rather for their uninterrupted transformation. Today,
proletarian life is extended to the banal consumer, the innocuous
citizen, the part-time gentleman. An extension of such life separates
men even from their own alienation in the name of the most absurd
values, the most artificial sacrifices. The new proletariat must finally
annihilate itself, its false consciousness, in order to become itself.
It must at once destroy and realize the hoarded riches of the bourgeois
world in consciously reconstructing all aspects of everyday life.
The long reign of capitalist domination, whose legacy is the bureaucracy
and its triumphant counterrevolution, is rooted in the ultimate failure
of the traditional workers movement. This movement stopped long ago,
vanquished by its own alienated forms of struggle. As opposed to the
former hierarchical parties and industrial unions, the authentic aspect
of the revolutionary past as an unmediated power is now sealed up within
the pure present imposed by the spectacular commodity. It is at first
forgotten history in exile. Today, specialists of revolt hope to spread
the bureaucratic relics of the past, even by resurrecting them through
its living, unconquerable aspect which is the Workers Councils, an
aspect that acknowledges no power other than its own. It is exactly this
revolutionary aspect which found its own thread of development in
America, in spite of the most brutally mystified conditions from which
the contemporary workers emerge as direct heirs. The American workers
inherit an unfinished history which begins with the occupation of the
Cincinnati breweries, the armed seizure of the mines in Telluride, the
Workers and Soldiers Councils of Seattle...This history of the
revolutionary proletariat and its form, the Councils, has found
realization nowhere as yet, from Peking to Paris and from Moscow to
Washington. Yet the modern class struggle returns everywhere, ever since
the revolutionary occupations of France and the anti-bureaucratic crisis
of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a struggle which, through trial and error,
gradually approaches an international revolutionary perspective again.
From the shores of England, wildcat strikes are in the vast majority
ever since the confrontation at Port Talbot, Wales, in the summer of
1969, when the rules of direct democracy were genuinely applied by the
insurgents. After the long strike of the coal miners two winters ago,
the fury of the longshoremen last July reached violent proportions
against both the State and the General Transport Union with an intensity
resembling that of the populace of Derry, Northern Ireland. This
February, the gas workers, as part of the nationally timed one-day
strikes organized by the unions, left their workplaces. But having
struck their work, they continued by striking against union authorities
and refused to return after a day.
An insurrectionary general strike broke out in the province of Quebec,
Canada last May. It was the first of its kind in North America. Street
battles developed in many of the thirteen cities involved. A ministerâs
home in Hauterville had been firebombed. During four hours, the city of
Sept-Illes remained in the hands of the popular masses. And in several
cities, the workers captured key radio stations.
In Australia, the workers of South Clifton occupied the mines last
spring after their closing by the owners. They demanded nothing less
than ârecognition of our ownership of the South Clifton Colliery.â
The blacks of South Africa are in revolt, since the radical
insubordination manifest by the dock workers in 1972. Despite a stiff
penal code as well as possible deportation from urban areas, the black
workers of Durban introduced the first wildcat general strike of its
kind in February, 1973. Police reinforcements were flown in with the
subsequent arrest of one hundred striking municipal workers. A
spontaneous rally of three thousand workers around the factories of
Hammersdale--outside Durban--led to a clash with police which was
dispersed in the end by tear gas and dogs.
In Bolivia, the workers of La Paz barricaded themselves last winter in
the textile factories, in spite of declared martial law, âuntil the
ultimate consequences.â
In Israel and Lebanon, long after the fighting of 1967, the Civil War
has begun. Similarly, the student movement in Cairo entered into a
violent phase of confrontations with its own regime, although it was
mixed with reformist nationalist overtones. In November, the rebel
workers of a chocolate factory in Beirut clashed with their local
police. In Israel, there are rashes of wildcat strikes. Despite the
almighty Histadrut, fifty-two per cent of all work stoppages are
unofficial in Israel. The categories of labor involved have ranged from
truck drivers to doctors. Last Autumn, the port of Haifa remained
crippled for several weeks. On January 1^(st), the flickerings of a
general strike gripped Tel Aviv. At the same time, the revolt of Israeli
youth from school and the military ( in which at least 20,000 youths
cannot be accounted for) has stirred official alarm. For this, the
Israeli government imports 150 soldiers at a time from the Gaza Strip,
after their experience against the Arabs, in order to patrol the tense
streets of Tel Aviv. The Inspector General of police has revealed the
historical dialectic emerging in Israel. âThere are more guns around and
more people who have experience in using them.â
In Italy, general revolutionary crisis has continually evolved. For
nearly four years, no social equilibrium has existed there. âA country
on the outskirts of reasonâ cries out the bourgeois Italian press. Italy
is known to be the âcreeping Mayâ since the regional insurrectionary
upheavals in the South, in Battipaglia and Reggio, with their democratic
assemblies and their armed territorial occupation. The wildcat strike
movement of the industrial north continues to grow with the workers of
Pirelli and Fiat in the lead. In Milan, Turin and elsewhere, the workers
have at times invaded their deserted workplaces as they have been known
to destroy the cars of management. The government bomb provocation of
December 14, 1969 seemed at first to pacify the Italian proletariat.
Three years later, however, the means of production remain filled with
agitation and disruption according to national strikes by industry and
general strikes by the day. The unions and inseparably the Stalinist and
Socialist parties have sponsored the fragmentation of resistance. But
they have not sponsored its uninterrupted frequency. At the same time,
the Italian students have reached an extremism of action although the
usual Maoist-Stalinist ideologies still linger. Now, every few hours,
riot squads in Milan roar out to an embattled college or high school. At
the university of Milan, red flags fly indefinitely.
In Poland, the famous âDecember Revoltâ which rose three years ago left
nothing as it was before. After having combated their own natural enemy,
Gomulkaism, which was simply the liberal bureaucratic lie in power,
nothing any longer mediates the ongoing insurrectionary tide of the
workers and intellectuals. In the northern ports, the workers have begun
to renew their own revolutionary stance in organizational terms. They
battle the Trade Union Congresses, the prisons which withhold many of
their comrades of âDecemberâ and various measures of the bureaucracy.
After encountering forty years of totalitarian ideologies, from
Stalinism and Nazism to Gomulkaism, the popular masses have already seen
the bureaucratic exclusion of Gomulka for what it really was: the fall
of an elite, not a power.
Something has changed in the world since 1968 from which there will be
no turning back. Of course, much more is needed in order to realize a
different world. Very early in the game, we warned of the inevitable
âdismemberment of revolt which does not recognize itself for what it isâ
among the workers as well as the students. Certainly, we were correct
then to acknowledge the future futility of the American workers revolt
âoutside the appropriation of all power by the Workers Councils.â And
this clarification arrived rightly before the workers had even acted.
Three years later, after the workers have actually returned, it is
equally obvious that nothing is any longer the same, that the workers,
once having appeared to be this or that, now only need to know what they
have already done. The fate of America is again subject to the course of
action chosen by the workers. The opponents of the spectacular society
are slowly coming to realize that they are finished with the spectacle.
March 19, 1973
Photo caption: Intransigent inmates at Attica meet for the last time
with negotiators.
âOnly where the State ends, there begins the individual who is not
superfluous; there begins the song of necessity, the unique and
inimitable tune. Where the State ends, look there, my brothers! Do you
not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the superman?â
-- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
âAnd here these men are languishing in jail, being treated abominably,
while the âgreat men of the futureâ are coining thousands in the name of
revolution, and are already dividing up their future governmental
posts.â
-- Jenny Marx, A Letter to Weydemeyer, Jan. 10, 1852
âIf it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out might life
talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died unmarked,
unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our
triumph.â
--Bartolomeo Vanzetti
âWe are against the conventional form of culture, even in the most
modern state; but evidently not preferring ignorance to it, the
petit-bourgeois common sense of the butcher, neo-primitivism. There is
an anti-cultural attitude which favors an impossible return to old
myths. We are for culture, of course, against such a trend. We line up
on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after. We say that itâs
necessary to realize it, by surpassing it as a separated sphere; not
only as a domain reserved to specialists, but especially as a domain of
specialized production which does not directly affect the construction
of life--even the life of its own specialists.â
-- Number 8, Internationale Situationniste
So far we see only the poor aspect of modernization, the brutal
infiltration of fresh sources of life by ideology. What has become a
systematic--as opposed to unconscious--lie in power has fallen into
conflict with its unofficial past and therefore consciousness itself.
Official thought no longer bears the faintest residue of quality but
instead has become an absolute quantity of lies. It fills every second
with the omniscience of authority which knows everything because it
appears in everything. After having suffered under their pressure day by
day, the awareness of existing facts in their totality calls at the same
time for the practical resistance to these facts according to a general
reversal of perspective: revolutionary criticism.
The whole truth remains the one outstanding innovation beyond the reach
of alienated history and the totalitarian domination of the fragmentary;
an epoch whose partial achievements only fulfill the particular
interests of ruling classes. With the collapse of unitary myth, when the
separate categories of thought and action have shattered into others and
the entire space-time of individuals is dominated by the economy, the
consciousness of man is reduced to the consciousness of things. As
Websterâs Third edition tells us, consciousness as a thing is
reification. Today, reification monopolizes the planet as well as each
lived moment without geographic or socio-political limits. Men are now
as foreign from the modern world as they are familiar with its
contemplation. For us, the one arena of thought which withstands
reification is negative. Once mistaken for âSpirit,â the truth of
thought is nothing unless it is revolutionary and partakes directly in
its practical verification; as ruthless criticism which, while not
predominant, is an indispensable poetry of the future. The modern
experiment still has to be realized in regard to man: that is to say,
the free construction of everyday life. At one and the same time, the
free construction of everyday life constitutes the destruction and the
realization of known culture.
Presently, the mass production of culture on a universal scale
corresponds to the totalitarian reduction of subjective space, the
waning presence of men in places and time. Under the heavy artillery of
commodities, the personal and collective autonomy of individuals runs
the risk of disappearing from history in its first signs and symptoms
without ever synthesizing as history. Through the rapid degeneration of
impassioned, sensible experience, the spectacular image of merchandise
scatters the geometric rhythm of history and banalizes the will to live.
History is submerged in the surroundings of its opposite. Even the
faintest historical murmurings, contained at first in the new
intellectual discoveries of our time, turn with their amplification by
prehistory against themselves. But the disappointment encountered in
everyday life tends to expose everyday life itself as a disputable
reality.
How nicely are thoughts dehydrated and packaged for the production and
consumption of a space which always remains closed and a time which
simply passes. Market culture is at once the most vulgar and the most
rudimentary phase in the accumulation of false consciousness and
accordingly hierarchical power. Coca Cola is certainly less exotic than
the Madonna. Yet for that, so much more subtle must its enunciations
become.
There is no quarter given by the logic of merchandise in its quest for
an interchangeable world of subjects and objects enveloped by a
monologue without limits. To the principle of suffering known of the
ecclesiastical order have been added the material and contemplative
rights to a marginal social situation. To be cultured means entering
some critical operation within the hierarchy. The miserable laws of
commodities are at the source of enrichment. Yesterdayâs so-called lofty
conceptions have been transplanted to commercial propaganda, recycled,
and are now translated to the majority of alienated as thought
disinfected of perspective and substance, fragments of information,
innocuous commentaries. Society, culture and life have been modernized
to fit stillborn values, an infancy of reason, whose prestigious image
is gargling in the happy mouth of the status quo.
In their isolation, the more people observe, the less they know. The
more culture absorbs their days, the less they are. On the graft of the
cultural spectacle, mass observation simply induces geometric variations
on the passive properties of men. The modern spectator consumes the dead
center of appearances which attract him everywhere, as a viewer who
loyally acknowledges each positive feature of alienated power. He is the
common denominator of banalization, relative master over his own
inaction. He receives a fabulous array of views which appraise
everything he initiates, after he obeys. At the same time, the alienated
comforts imposed by spectacular ideology amass in the end the kind of
disenchantment which can no longer be fathomed in series nor amended in
dollars and cents. The irritations imposed by a leisure time consumed in
passivity inspire fresh opposition, in search of its total history. By
nature, the commodity form works consistently against itself as much as
for itself in spite of the weathered framework of its contradictory
development. Thus the delirious plunges of the intellect into the
hypnotic persuasions of exchange-value have simultaneously nurtured the
radical distillation of an unmerciful critique, an enlightened contempt.
This contempt is rising against false needs and their modes of
justification as carrier of a new conception of comfort: the comfort of
being oneself in a world organized according to desire, a world
commanded by subjectivity.
The global automation of the modern division of labor intensifies the
pulse of contradictory production. The technology of estrangement
installs at one and the same time the mechanical clash within the
relations of production, class against class, in the name of the overall
system of class power, and the social forces which can effectively
recognize that clash, manhandle contradiction, in order to destroy and
finally transcend alienated relations. The central antagonism between
the contemplative stature of work which eats away at the present and the
unitary setting of playful construction which can invade the future,
this is fast accelerating. Today there are the appearances of
technology, appearances which work for indignity against the technology
in the making, the technology of concrete man.
At present, technical innovations are harnessed merely to invent new
clusters of repression. The present technology continues to be
monopolized around the refinement of division and the mental degradation
of labor in the pay of mathematically disfigured priorities. Just as
profoundly, however, the advanced moment of alienation is by nature a
furnace in which extreme dissatisfaction burns the fuel of
insurrectionary wisdom. The spreading intellectual tasks of modern
labor, which composes a normal feature of highly evolved
industrialization, tends to invest in revolutionary criticism itself an
immediate, direct impact previously unknown to modern history; as format
for the sabotage of modern capitalism by the new proletariat.
The renewal of practical theory ranks without doubt among the most
powerful forces in social space and time, touching upon everyone and
everything, with the force of radical denunciation capable of ruining
all the designs of the specialists of power and with a whole application
which can permanently disarm the modern State.
Within the flattened universe of merchandise, everyday life is built and
consumed without ever being controlled. As all productive operations,
ruling culture is now visibly what it has always been in essence: a rich
power holding poor reference points whose products bear their beauty and
value in evading an extravagant use among many. The glory of the arts
has always risen with the fall of social action. An earlier age, whose
permitted commerce only released artistic impulses to production, an age
so much more eloquent and inaccessible, is forefather of present
conditions where interpretations all at once have become chores,
monopolized around an all inclusive display of things. From the art of
mythical pieces to the art of commonplace images, from the art which
sprang out of the market embryo to the art which immaculately conceives
the new miracles of merchandise, separation reigns.
For the modern organization of poverty, the trifles of integral culture
play an important part in prolonging its regime of archaic laws
according to their fantastic rituals and listless celebrations. In the
weary surplus of products--the dazzling affairs of pacified
consumption--every trace of the historical event at the source of
creation has disappeared. The slightest genuine glance at the historical
past, the revolutionary seizure which founded the existing order, evokes
a living contrast which is inadmissible within the absolute immediacy
required by the prevailing order whose apparent trans-historical
presence alone preserves its fragile decay. This contrast, the radical
stage of the young bourgeoisie, had already shaken the world at its
roots in breaking the fixed order of the land, in penetrating history
with the irrevocable model of political economy and the shattering of
the Church and natural isolation. Faltering, however, the free
individual associations announced by Capital penetrated the concrete
only half way. The eternal was routed by the partial invasion of
irreversible time, but time which soon became a new eternity of partial
changes. The release of social, that is to say, creative time slowly
became a museum piece. The flow of fresh machinery and knowledge which
could initiate the foundations of a new society blossomed on the
topography of abstraction. In the transformation of the starting-point,
the domination of nature, into the last objective available to history,
ideology was born.
Modern class society has included everyone in the vast multiplication of
productive forces which never acquire their social consequence. Only the
space identifiable with merchandise has enlarged--the vanishing space of
urban survival--in which thoughts are poor compensation. No matter how
strangely, the process of dead time goes on through the river banks of
the spectacle. Rather than having dissolved, the myth of a beyond has
descended to the terrestrial paradise of merchandise: the spectacle. The
spectacle is to merchandise what the Church was to god, and always the
twain shall meet. The irrational has collided with reason to blend
altogether the hybrid principle of the quantitative. Men are free
finally to engage in their own prehistory. Here, culture means
everything and nothing for time which thrives on its own carcass, a time
frozen in eternal transition and the image of space. The combat of
anxious subjectivity grows from the same time against the fragmentary
suspension of contradiction, Its own time is gradually exposing the
spectre of culture and the concrete prospects of transforming everyday
life. What can sway more power than the mystery of transcendence
shrouded in the quantifiable metaphysic of mere, insensible things? Only
the negation of the producer...
Throughout the twentieth century, the apparent radical alternative to
the private conditions of reification merely consists of its political
substitution. Rising in economically backward areas, it replaces the
total transcendence of existing conditions with their undifferentiated,
totalitarian concentration. The bureaucratic counterrevolution
ultimately permitted the global formation of the spectacular society. It
founded a patent formula of opposition derived mechanically from the
repressive discipline of existing culture and political economy.
Leninism is a borrowed dogma, the infantile revolutionary theory of the
primitive proletariat and the highest critical variation on the
reformism of traditional capitalism. It merely realized the âbourgeois
State minus a bourgeoisie.â What was going to be done, ever since 1905,
in synthesizing all the repressive laws known to modern civilization,
gave itself away even in theory, in underestimating the part played by
cultural and political superstructures in the making of history.
According to the radical intelligentsia which failed to seek its own
dissolution in the revolutionary victory of the masses, a conscious
society never arrived. As a consequence, contemporary society can now
synthesize its own plastic models of revolt, parcels of rebellion or
parcellized rebellion--no matter, as the youngest, most zealous
merchandise, the spectacle of youth.
At the stage where false needs govern every incident, culture
materializes--beyond recognition--in a world of objects. Productive
history, which first reduced man to a thing in order to conquer the rest
of nature, at this point devotes all its intellectual energies to his
limitless elevation in images. Under the direction of hierarchy, the
prestigious expansion of technological innovations crumbles into
calculated ridicule with a rainfall of absurd gadgets, prospective
instruments of dialogue and social consciousness pursue the refinement
of commodities which no longer transmit any use beyond their own, their
exchange-value. Always, ever more affluent means are being supplied in
order to multiply the limitations of experience, always, with the ebb of
pleasant discovery amidst the foam of a functional boredom without end.
Everyone and everything is subject to ideological technique inasmuch as
ideology itself balances the scales of exchange-value best of all
through the direct collusion of the modern masses in their own misery.
The mass possession of cultural knowledge takes place with the collapse
of use-value, after there is nothing left to be enjoyed apart from
acquisition itself. Merchandise, meager heir to aristocratic events,
locates its philosophy in the living room.
Ideological technique advances the neutralization of the lie with a new
civility which allows it to become no more or less innocuous than any of
the marginal phenomena mirrored on the screen. Every banality is founded
on the lie. What else is the lie of progress but the great big lie
succeeded by many little ones? Rival lies. from opposing political
systems to star commodity rivalries, are doubling the potency of
universal ideology. On one side, state capitalism can never rationalize
the whole of existing production. The bureaucratic class has justified
and protected its ownership of âthe Revolutionâ according to an absolute
dictatorship over social behavior down to the last cultural detail. On
the other side, private capitalism swiftly buys up cultural operations
in order to exempt consciousness more than to convert it. The
bourgeoisie establishes one principle, the freedom to sell and buy,
around which the public at large and tattered intellectual elites are
incited to choose their individual brands of irrelevance. Although
revolutionary criticism simply finds room for expression in the mass
media in inverse proportion to their âimpact,â the main stream of false
consciousness is supported by the dogma carried in abundance itself. As
ideology becomes pure information, false consciousness has descended to
the level of repressive automatism. Even the surrealist experiment,
having idealized its dream, its specialized language, became a technique
of commercial advertising which invades our sleep as well as every
waking hour. The enemy inherits every technique, every fallen experiment
in subversion.
Up to now, the richness of ideas has never attained the stature of
history to be lived, except, of course, for those notions which were
inseparably -insurrectionary, at irrevocable odds with dominant
ideology, i.e., the very mystique of thought âfor itself.â In addressing
the deformed character of the industrial revolution, Marx remarked that
both science and art had appeared to require the existing realm of
private life (an area of time dominated by the exclusive consciousness
of a privileged sector) in which misery functioned as the necessary
contrast for their charms. This well characterizes the quandary of
established intellect right up to the arduous pluralism of today. As
late as the 1930âs, when the gestures and sentiments of the limited
cultural arena were well inoculated with triviality and opened upon
vanquished masses the famous opponent of the repression lodged within
contemporary civilization, Freud himself, still defended the necessity
of the old contradiction. Oppressive labor had to continue inevitably.
And the human instinct âto play,â creative spontaneity and sexual
gratification, would not evolve within the everyday life of -unhappy
humanity but within the sublime stacks of a âhigherâ cultural
anthropology. Today the artifacts of everyday life are in full bloom.
The arts accompany the extended exclusion of modern workers from their
own production as supplementary compensation, after philosophy. The
sphere of cultural expression is by no means open to wider participation
and greater meaning but simply to a larger audience. There are more
spectators. Contemporary art has not aroused everyday life but rather
the compulsory domain of consumption, as âthe ideal commodity which
makes all the others sell.â It became a spectacle. The art for artists,
the criticism for critics, the science for scientists shows us a time
inflated with spectacle, a time in which everyone has become the
spectator.
As aristocratic society once concealed its domination and fractured
interests, its sacrifice of the community of individuals to the honor of
a few, through the unitary veil of christian myth, the spectacular
society advertises social alienation in a fragmentary series of positive
images. The incense of renunciation passes to the gaseous stench of
banalization. Through the communicating vessel of reification, social
alienation appears in the automatism of the spectacle as âinteresting
materialâ or âprofound subject matterâ for literature, museum galleries?
auto shows, film festivals, television and group therapy--to the ever
doubling passivity of everyone. Characters, like those of Godard, are
suddenly drawn from the most ordinary contexts in order to arrive at
even more ordinary tragedies: endless hallways, Coca Cola, Maoism,
instant suicide...The minuscule intoxication of shredded novelties sold
by the caretakers of the once avant-garde cultural estate establish
nothing for us but irony, ironies of life, irony as opposed to life.
Indeed, all the elegant particularities of bourgeois settings have
vanished except one. The artistic celebrities endure despite the
downhill turn of creative values, and so much The better, Without any.
In the arts, the topical âdeath of cultureâ enlivens a deadly culture as
an ideal mirror of spectacular contemplation. The tragic dilemmas which
grapple for the attention of the viewers reflect a time in which misery
has become a commodity and the commodity a spectacle. The old world
holds on to esthetics--with the esthetics of decay--against the creative
power that will be released by global revolutionary change. The museum
which is the modern city is glutted with purely nominal artists, pygmy
interlocutors between the beauty of cash and the art free of artists.
The proletariat alone can realize art.
In the calculated imprisonment of urban space, according to which modern
architecture moulds its illusions, every scrap of commodity survival
receives new importance. Every gesture, every habit, every exchange is
dramatized in order to inspire altogether an endless multiplicity of
spectacles. Whether fumigating body odors, broadcasting university
courses or televising assassinations and counter-murders, the medium and
the message of commodities impose one and the same destitution for
everyone, item for item, the same shares of dead time, the same portions
of cultural debris. Thanks to the mass production of advertisements,
news and entertainments, spectacular survival can now offer a fuller, a
richer and a more learned dayâs insignificance. The insignificant is
noticeably over-equipped. Surely this is the time of the studious
consumer, the informed slave, the mass curator of images.
As Hegel revealed in a decisively revolutionary manner, pure thought is
simply knowing alienation which attains the appearance of autonomy at
the expense of its actual self-division. Like the solitary omniscience
of the Brahman, contemplation constitutes nothing but a particularity in
the extreme, miles away from the totality of experience which stands to
be made. Thought which remains thought becomes an object of its own
fixation whose truth reclines into abstract self-identity. In the
trenches of alienated survival, the spectator represents the last
Brahman on the face of the earth. The world of believing has shifted to
the world of staring across a century of defeated revolutionary
attempts. The world of thought and practice have merged in the eyes, the
gay lights of abstraction. Certainly, the transformation of history in
consciousness led to the consciousness of historical transformation.
Heir to philosophy, proletarian revolution could only master the world
according to its own truth. According to an ideology, this has never
happened. Thought found structure by default of man. Philosophy came
into the hands of Madison Avenue, Peking Review and Pravda, including,
of course, the âDaily Newsâ type travelogue portrayed by Castroâs Granma
with its trotskyist and surrealist admirers. Quantity has still not
passed to quality, a century after Marx. The game which situates modern
society is none other than competition, operating under diverse
hierarchical specifications, everywhere. The rules are never
egalitarian, the chances are never real. In one hemisphere, the
alienated pursuit of money and goods is dominated by the past: the
family and its holy property. In the other, the Stateâs power is a new
certainty, a certainty which regulates the insidious struggle for
socio-bureaucratic status. The global dictatorship of false
consciousness verges on no consciousness.
What are the ad men and cyberneticians designing within your
contemplations? Unhappiness in the inevitable encounter with stark
reality; instant contentment before the imaginary comforts and
mechanical oppositions handed to you on a silver platter by the present
world. With every ambiguous rejection of alienation, the consciousness
of alienation fatally swells. Insofar as the values, thoughts and
patterns of behavior imposed by an alien reality are hardly attractive
any more in themselves, their habitual force alone must attend to most
of the convincing. Ideology is thoughtless in its own climate. Worn thin
and frail by the pains taken to prolong the surroundings of the
irrational, surroundings which lack the slightest sense whatsoever, the
dosage and application of ideology has stepped up intensively. As the
hierarchy materializes more and more calculably in time, and becomes
equally surmountable in turn, ideology constitutes the substance of
commodities whose grossly fetishized laws can only survive through the
oblivion of the producers themselves. The fallen credibility of all
dogma has been compensated by the fierce changeover to subliminal
techniques. Everyone is subject to the instant colonization of their
time by the unilateral message of the spectacle, a message which removes
them from each moment in order to fill the void with the image of their
absence. Beyond the id, one is certain to stumble across another can of
7-Up. Ideological technique has become blatant: systematic conditioning
and still more conditioning at every level. The devices of falsification
themselves emerge from the following hypothesis. Either the rhythm of
banalization will infect men with an utter disinterest in themselves as
living subjects--not to speak of others--or drive them instead toward
unconscious reactions; radical acts deprived of perspective; outrage
possessed by ideology. Personal and collective escapism, jaded
alienations, sinister inertia âfor one and allâ pave the absolute
condition of spectacular existence. âEveryone is allotted their specific
role in a general passivityâ (The Poverty of Student Life).
At the mass gatherings of isolated, fragmented individuals which revere
a diversity of spectacular identities, one enters the holy communion of
mediocrity. Throughout the pastimes of aimless peer groups, from the
factory athletic team to the authoritarian wilderness of the street
gang, one must never violate the stereotyped behavior of normal routine
in order to externalize his isolation in common. The spectacle of
opacity is epitomized by hierarchical groups of militants. There, the
presence of each atomized individual, each follower attracted to the
nucleus of star leaders, enlarges the nullity of the other. Within the
mass of admirative spectators, every person is forever ready to dispute
the value of others in furtive conversation while always remaining
reconciled with his unqualified and habitual acceptance of everyone.
Sacrifice and manipulation are envisaged as the best tools of practical
realism. This is the political quintessence of the spectacular milieu,
by-product of former ideologies which shattered with the complete
integration of state socialism into the world market, after having
suppressed on each revolutionary occasion in the past the absolute power
of Workers Councils. The revolutionary game with time will remain caught
in the terminology of the spectacle so long as an image motivates the
decision to act. Unknowingly, Nietzsche has put the cards on the table
for us. âI do not love your festivals either. There are too many actors
there and the spectators, too, often behaved like actors.â
Caption for illustration: THE CYBERNATION OF THE DIALECTIC
This graphic representation appeared in the California Engineer in an
article by Bruce Gardner entitled Marxism and Philosophy. The author
claims to find some of the sources of his inspiration in the
Situationist International as well as Anarchos. Not bizarre enough, he
has drawn his mathematical insignia of the dialectical triad in Marx
according to the basic âformalâ dimension of alienation. A distressing
gastronomy, ârealityâ is digested as âknowledgeâ and simultaneously
âexcretedâ in polluted technology. In this marxist naturalism I.B.M. has
found a friendly nutrient.
The most withered ideology has renewed its ludicrous strength in
proclaiming the impotence of thought. Because there is nothing more
which can be said for its part, nothing more is there to think about or
say. Suddenly, the world has become infinitely subtle, incomprehensibly
complex, unapproachably modern and permanent. Ideology has died only
theoretically. It rules over the kingdom of its abandon concerning
events which now escape precise apprehension. The amorphous state of
presence-absence oils the greaseless sleight of hand of grown-up
mystification, in the fatherland which may not convince you but which
will certainly bore you! A formless perspective rolls off the conveyor
belt as the last article of dogmatic prehistory, dogmatism without name
or title. Clearly, there is no general point of view which emerges any
longer from modern ideology except the persistent celebration over the
defeat of history in its historical perspective. Nothing occurs any
longer within the labyrinth of ideas, once rich with forms and styles,
except for the occasional rumination of the labyrinth itself in the
contentment of its menopause. Here and there, one can detect the
pitter-patter of the âcounter-culture.â
The inveterate nags who guard over history seen as an idea (minus ideas
themselves) are the wrinkled specialists of abstract history which
reproduces its means in order to avoid its ends. Prehistory found its
spectacles! All that remains of the metaphysics of traditional thought
is the faint odor of the original abstraction. For example, take the
most modern Airwick of social science, the science of psychology. Since
the writings of such imbeciles as Jaspers and Lemaitre, the most lofty,
super-egocentric dreams of psychoanalysis imagine the wide incidence of
neurosis--which emanates in reality from the excessive alienation of
human nature--to be the perfect stimulus for a psychiatric
transfiguration of the globe; the totality as a mental hospital.
Imagine, the libidinal cathexis of the human race within a psychiatric
clinic...
The commodity did not need the Church in order to become the spectacle
of the masses. But it needed the conservation of the Church to maintain
the masses of the spectacle. Before power was restored, the myth had to
be restored that consecrates power. Today, as the Reverend Billy Graham
has claimed, even the youthful consumers of the image of rebellion think
of âGodâ or âdeathâ on an average of every ten minutes. In the Mexican
parish shown above, however, there are no people present--only these
dogs-- as the Reverend Laureiro says his daily Mass.
Simultaneously, the central void which is the lot of contemporary
thought tends to provoke the multiplication of marginal intellectual
critiques. The unrelenting squabbles issued by rival ideologies obscure
the real problems and genuine antagonisms that concern the emancipation
of reality from all systems. Sartre / Camus, Stalin / Trotsky, Aragon /
Dali, Marcuse / Norman O. Brown...They compose the bad renditions of an
original flop, already discredited by the practical developments of its
own time. Simply scratch the surface of modernism, you find the greyest
matter of power. Critical thought renewed for its own sake will never
arrive too late to the fast of history, a fast which reserved the
setting for its sobriety years ago. Anything which remains interpretive
is ideology.
Whereas the Hegelian critics of the last century substantiated the total
unification of reality in the form of an idea, the
structuralist-formalists at the heart of contemporary ideology are
content to scatter the separations of the present world under the heels
of their unthinkable language. Not a word can be uttered about the
practical history of modern reality, and modern reality becomes nothing
more than the language which it utters. Evidently, the âmangled formsâ
have become absolute in the gullet of anemic ideology which through the
wear and tear of age old application falsely has lost the very chord of
thought, both past and future, in the voice of an eternal present. The
menu scheduled for the âinternational think tankâ which convenes among
twelve nations sometime this year (âworld health,â âurban growth,â
âpollutionâ) says much about the ways and means of ideological verbiage.
Every particle of practical inquiry is broadcast in order to elude the
center of the social question, the inquiry into liberation and the
liberation of inquiry itself. The merchants of state power have
deliberated a thousand and one self-critical sessions in the language of
survival, in words that carry the actual reality of alienation in
depicting the mere sediment of social distress. In the barren
surroundings of spectacular existence, the significations have taken on
all significance. The mediations of desire are robbed of their immediacy
and ossify. The language of action, whose first shimmerings dwelled in
the vital repudiation of art by dadaism and surrealism, finally tumbled
into the reconditioned mortar of historical separation. The linear words
of abstraction monitor the dead weight of the past over the minds of the
living. They mutter their powers of suggestion austerely, as penitent
heirs to the gallant armor of concepts and ideas. Bureaucratic speech,
formal colonizer of everyday life, administers the psalm âsay anythingâ
against the possible poetry which âsays everything.â The spectacle of
merchandise plays the parts both of oppressor and oppressed. It speaks
so that we cannot be heard. Spectacular commodity relations intend to
leave men wordless in their endless volume. In the harmless speech of
commodities, one can still smell the bad odor of the gas chamber.
âStyle flows from a worthy theme,â declared the blind puritan poet of
English capitalism. Indeed, the real movement which suppresses all
conditions existing independent of individuals, that communism which
exists nowhere as yet, can alone sponsor a renaissance of human
relations in the time free of exchange-value. The contemplations which
arrive at nothing and always return to the circle of alienation stand to
be surmounted by revolutionary poetry, by the anti-spectators of the
future. These combatants of the old word [sic] are gathering at the pole
of active dialogue. At the side exits of the modern theatre, one already
finds the disgust of growing minorities, driven from the crowded
congregation of anonymous audiences, in flight from the confusion and
isolation which haunt them again and again. For us, nothing less than
the force of maximum disturbance, in direct antagonism with the settled
state of spectators, can effectively publicize the shame of the ruling
spectacle of passivity and make it still more shameful. Before the
immobile smiles of an ever more absurd world, the ruthless critique
cannot make itself known without resorting to the parody form.
The renewal of practical criticism of existing conditions cannot hope to
free everyday life of oppression without establishing once more the
language of historical freedom itself, in annihilating all the
conventional chains which have confined a conscious understanding of the
modern world. Revolutionary praxis must first criticize the fixations
attached to the defeated revolutionary tradition itself. Until today,
the critical alternative to what exists appears scattered in separate
categories, restrained by fixed systems, compressed by the logic of
separation. Revolutionary theory must dominate the whole of its own past
through a new use of all former criticism. Plagiarism becomes necessary.
Progress requires it. It squeezes the phrase of the author, makes use of
its expression. It rubs out a false idea and replaces it with a true
one. In diversion, the unshakable stature of truths which have frozen
into respectability--as ideology--collapses irrevocably. The radical
transfer of thoughts to the thought of totality at once destroys their
former limitations and places them in an interdependent whole from which
they can draw their only significance. The technique of diversion spells
violation of the linguistic contract, an insurrectionary upheaval
against the rules of established speech. It assaults that speech founded
on the marketplace which has censored and abbreviated all the natural
ties of words with historical movement. Expression diverted is criticism
already communicated and clarified, in the phase of living speech and
inseparably the speech of the living. One day liberated experience will
be so rich it will not have to be spoken about. It will be life at its
highest moment.
The ever widening division between manual and intellectual labor forever
poisons everyday life. This is also the time when the experts are lost
in the narrowness of their own expertise. The missionaries of a pure,
instrumentalist rationality possess the finest instruments of
calculation with which they comb a universe of detail less and less
assertively. The trite, enervated contradictions which they embody
really correspond to the actual decay which sets in over all aspects of
life. The social praxis of our age is plagued with troubled sleep, in
long need of negation and transcendence. The movements and schools which
rise and fall without bearing the slightest consequence are signs of a
great social loss and equally the need for new life. Everything which is
missing on the plains of modern culture, that stockbroker which
speculates with shares of everyday life, has become possible at the
frontiers of qualitative change. The rigor of free choice accented by
existentialism becomes concrete with the formation of revolutionary
society, the liberation of history in which each individual will be free
to invent his own. The marginal exploration of the imaginative
introduced by art finds the moment of being lived apart from merchandise
as well as superstition. The discovery by psychology of the repressive
function of the family, the role and taboos within authoritarian society
can end in the practical dissolution of the framework of survival--the
playful federation of Workers Councils--the simultaneous presence of
reason and men. The modern spirit of scientific relativity can acquire
full application beyond the restraints of reification, in passing to the
science of the totality, revolutionary praxis; the annulment of all
sides of the myth of historical determinism according to a plan whose
verification is bound up with practice; as truth, neither predestined
nor utopian, which âman must prove.â
The extension of prehistory has provoked the extension of its negation
without limits. The value of revolutionary theory today depends on the
consequence of those who put it to use, or who fail to. The radical
masses are sole bearer of the anti-hierarchical principle and the famous
theory of praxis. They alone can transform theory into an objective
force to the extent that they speak themselves for their own
emancipation. For them, theory can serve simply as a tool which helps to
clarify fresh desires and felt historical objectives. The truth will
have an urgency for them, as it has for us, inasmuch as it concerns
their own struggle for life, an urgency to think unknown to all
âthinkersâ and a thought which they will never know. Inversely, the
specialists of the revolutionary proletariat have appropriated the
revolution to the exclusion of the proletariat itself. The apparent
humility of the radical intelligentsia consists forever of speaking
down, from the mist of new hierarchies, not in order to raise others
higher but fatally to dominate them with the image of their dependence.
The bolshevik concentration of power, coordinated around the âdemocratic
centralismâ of professional intellectual revolutionaries and leading
worker elites, never disappears in the coherent enrichment of the masses
but always returns as the permanent feature of the Socialist State
dictatorship which refuses to âwither away.â Ideology is the
concentrated private property of prehistory, in the possession of
bureaucratic power whose eternal proclamation of âhistorical necessityâ
represents nothing but its own. The revolutionary intelligentsia
constitutes a power pitted against the intelligentsia itself, against
the mechanical evolution of âhappy societyâ envisaged by utopian myths
and the unhappy transitions forecast by bureaucratic dogmas. Its victory
is seen in its dissolution. Its answer to the specialist is the
amateur-professional.
In the revolutionary game, the individual who towers above the rest or
falters under all the others must be eliminated so that its impassioned
organization may reawaken as a whole and reawaken at best the search of
everyone. It supposes that in the natural order of things there are many
possible complementary talents which can spur each other to subversive
action. It abominates the rule of minorities and recognizes their
danger; it desires, as protection against the enlightened critic,
another critic.
One knows since Feuerbach the objective power of man as a species. Now
is the time to realize the roots of that power, the power of autonomous
subjects, power which evolves not against man but for him. Power by
division is fast coming to its close. Yet only the accelerated
excellence of the next whip of the revolutionary class struggle can
effectively liquidate the present world of misery and boredom. One can
be more certain of the technical and intellectual capacities which
present conditions must give over to the immense tasks of the
revolutionary project than the existing intentions of individuals who so
often know and donât know. The will to live will be the central talent
which confronts a time of resignation and compromise and leads to the
others. Surely, we ourselves will be the ultimate cause of our defeat or
our victory.
Karl Korsch rightly emphasized the fact that any renewal of the marxian
system as a whole would constitute a âreactionary utopiaâ. In respect to
the present conditions of revolutionary criticism which begin for the
most part even as an ideology to the left of traditional Stalinism and
Maoism, one must also recognize the âreactionaryâ nature of every
eclectic view which still preserves an attachment with either of the two
main traditions of the revolutionary past. From the workerism expressed
by the anarcho-syndicalists of Solidarity to the Marxism advocated by
Socialist Revolution, there is nothing but a concession to some doctrine
and a doctrine of concessions. The present critique of the totality
cannot begin without abandoning the sides of both economism and ethics.
The anarchist and marxist movements failed long ago. On the one hand,
the mythical economic crisis of modern capitalism has never delivered
the social revolution nor has the âWorkers Stateâ ever issued the
emancipation from work according to its bureaucratic modalities. On the
other hand, the pure will of the radical masses in spontaneous action
has never led of itself to the destruction of hierarchical power, in the
absence of revolutionary theory and precise democratic organization
deployed by the masses themselves. The only critique of the modern world
is unitary, a critique which refuses to tolerate any form of separate
power in its combat against all aspects of alienation. The renewal of
the revolutionary perspective is founded on one initial premise: the
revolution itself must be totally reinvented. Every idea of the
âinevitabilityâ of the revolution must be overthrown in view of its
authentic possibility. Accordingly, the critique of anarchism and
marxism set the precondition for the negation of politics in our epoch,
as the critique of the spectacular commodity and art forms the prelude
to the positive reconstruction of everyday life.
âFrom the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority,
have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work
into their own hands, have organised control over the insignificant
capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their
capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly
corrupted by capitalism--from this moment the need for government of any
kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy,
the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic
the âstateâ which consists of the armed workers, and which is âno longer
a state in the proper sense of the wordâ, the more rapidly every form of
state begins to wither away.â
-- Lenin
âA socialist society can therefore only be built from below. Decisions
concerning production and work will be taken by workersâ councils
composed of elected and revocable delegates. Decisions in other areas
will be taken on the basis of the widest possible discussion and
consultation among the people as a whole. This democratisation of
society down to its very roots is what we mean by âworkersâ power.ââ
-- Solidarity
â...The overestimation of the State as decisive instrument of the social
revolution;
âThe mystical identification of the development of capitalist economy
with the social revolution;
âThe ambiguous future development of this first form of the marxian
theory of revolution by the artificial graft of a theory of communist
revolution as two phases; this theory, directed on the one hand against
Blanqui, on the other hand against Bakunin, hides from the present
movement the real emancipation of the working class, and pushes it into
an undetermined future.
âHere the point of insertion of the leninist or bolshevik development
comes; and under that new form marxism has been transferred to Russia
and Asia...â
-- Karl Korsch
âThe State, however popular it be made in form, will always be an
institution of domination and exploitation, and it will therefore always
remain a permanent source of slavery and misery. Consequently there is
no other means of emancipating the people economically and politically,
of providing them with well-being and freedom, but to abolish the State,
all States, and once and for all do away with that which until now has
been called politics.â
-- Bakunin
âLet us concede for the moment that the bureaucracy is a new âclassâ and
that the present regime in the USSR is a special system of class
exploitation. What new political conclusions follow for us from these
definitions? The Fourth International long ago recognized the necessity
of overthrowing the bureaucracy by means of a revolutionary uprising of
the toilers. Nothing else is proposed or can be proposed by those who
proclaim the bureaucracy to be an exploiting âclass.â The goal to be
attained by the overthrow of the bureaucracy is the reestablishment of
the rule of the soviets, expelling from them the present bureaucracy.
Nothing different can be proposed or is proposed by the leftist critics.
It is the task of the regenerated soviets to collaborate with the world
revolution and the building of a socialist society. The overthrow of the
bureaucracy therefore presupposes the preservation of state property and
of planned economy. Herein is the nub of the whole problem.â
-- Leon Trotsky
âNevertheless, the majority of workers will strike for higher wages and
continue to be preoccupied with quantitative issues until they
understand fully that they are producing their own needs themselves,
needs that they might not want to have. Only when they are made
conscious of the discrepancy between bourgeois thought and practice and
of the radical dissociation of their own thoughts and feelings by the
further expansion of material production and increased social
impoverishment by the practice of a revolutionary party will the
majority of the proletariat begin to transform its consciousness.â
-- Socialist Revolution
âOur cities must be decentralized into communities, or eco-communities,
exquisitely and artfully tailored to the carrying capacity of the
ecosystems in which they are located. Our technologies must be readapted
and advanced into eco-technologies...The administration of humans must
be replaced by the administration of things. The revolution we seek must
encompass not only political institutions and economic relations, but
consciousness, life style, erotic desires, and our interpretation of the
meaning of life.â
-- Murray Bookchin
âBut the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery, and wield it for its own purposes...At the same pace at which
the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the
class antagonism between capital and labor, state power assumed more and
more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a
public force organised for social enslavement, of an engine of class
despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the
class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power
stands out in bolder and bolder relief.â
-- Marx
âThe Workers Councils are in the times to come the form of
self-government which will replace the forms of government of the old
world. Of course, not for the entire future; no form as such is for
eternity. When life and work as a community have become customary and
man controls his own life entirely, necessity gives way to freedom and
the strict rules of justice established before dissolve in spontaneous
behavior. Workers Councils are the organizational form for the
transition period in which the working class is fighting for power, at
once destroying capitalism and organizing social production.â
-- Anton Pannekoek
âThe greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is neither
urbanistic, technological, nor esthetic. It is the decision to rebuild
the entire territory according to the needs of the power of the Workers
Councils, of the anti-state dictatorship of the proletariat, of
executory dialogue. And the Councilsâ power, which can only be effective
if it transforms existing conditions in their entirety, cannot settle
for less a task if it wants to be recognized and recognize itself in its
world.â
-- Guy Debord
âLenin always did his best to guard against being misunderstood. We
especially of the underdeveloped countries should not misunderstand his
views. We may claim that they are utopian, visionary, unrealistic,
unworkable, a fantasy. We should bear in mind that these were exactly
the charges that the majority of the colleagues made against him in
March, 1917, when he arrived in Russia, and, almost alone, hurled the
masses of Russia at the bourgeois regime and initiated a new epoch in
world history, with the slogan, âAll power to the Soviets.ââ
-- C.L.R. James
âThe councils are the transformation of strike committees under the
influence of the situation itself, and in response to the very
necessities of the struggle, in the very dialectic of this struggle. Any
other attempt to formulate at any moment in a struggle the necessity to
create workers councils rises from a councillist ideology such as one
sees under diverse forms among certain unions, the P.S.U., the
Situationists. The concept itself of the council excludes all ideology.â
-- I.C.O., Workers Information Correspondence
âWe have had a long discussion about it, and I have always considered
self-management to be a genuine revolutionary institution in the
aftermath of the revolution, but not before. Because if it occurs before
the revolution--apart from the fact that I donât see how it can occur
from within a functioning capitalist system--if it succeeds, the result
of self-management would be with all probability that in one specific
plant the workers would develop interests created by the better
functioning of that said plant. That is to say it would create an
autonomous self-interest within the established system. But by
self-management one understands that to mean workers control in the
majority of factories; at least in key industries. I say that this is
already the revolution. One hardly presumes for example that if a
corporation such as General Motors is taken, the powers that be are
going to look on peacefully as the corporation is transferred to workers
control.â
-- Herbert Marcuse
âGranting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character
to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the
conservatism inherent in such an organ. If the tactics of the socialist
party are not to be the creation of a Central Committee but of the whole
party, or, still better, of the whole labor movement, then it is clear
that the party sections and federations need the liberty of action which
alone will permit them to develop their revolutionary initiative and to
utilize all the resources of a situation. The ultra-centralism asked by
Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a
positive and creative spirit. Leninâs concern is not so much to make the
activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party--to narrow
the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify
it.â
-- Rosa Luxemburg
âIf one ideally counts only on the âconceptâ of Council or, what is even
more euphoric, on the practical inactivity of I.C.O., to âexclude all
ideologyâ in the real Councils, one must expect the worst: we have seen
that historical experience does not justify an optimism of this kind.
The transcendence of the primitive form of the Councils will be able to
develop only from struggles becoming more conscious, and struggles for
more consciousness. The mechanistic image of I.C.O. about the perfect
automatic response of the strike committee to ânecessities,â (which
shows that the Council will do very well all by itself in its hour, on
the condition above all that no one speaks about it), completely
mistakes the experience of the revolutions of our century, which shows
that âthe situation itselfâ is also quick to make the Councils
disappear, or to capture and recuperate them, as it is to make them
rise.â
-- Rene Riesel
âThe next revolution will only recognize as Councils sovereign general
assemblies of the base in the shops, plants, and neighborhoods, whose
delegates are always subject to recall, depending entirely upon the
assemblies. A councilist organization will never stand for any other
goal: it must translate into acts the dialectics which supersede the
static and one-sided terms of spontaneism and of openly or insidiously
bureaucratized organization. It must be an organization thrusting
revolutionarily towards the revolution of Councils; an organization that
neither disperses at the moment of declared struggle, nor
institutionalizes itself.â
-- Internationale Situationniste
The universal crisis of totalitarian bureaucratic society is now wholly
visible. At one and the same time, the complete deterioration of the
global alliance of bureaucratic power and the finished coexistence of
two camps once apparently irreconcilable, mark the troubled times in
which the bureaucracy can no longer explain itself away.
The prevailing atmosphere of common disequilibrium among rival
bureaucracies has its roots in the defeated Stalinist past from which
the bureaucracy as a whole can neither emerge completely nor return. No
matter how arbitrary, the liberal bureaucratic denunciation of
monolithic Stalinism--that excess of terrorism which applied to the
bureaucrats themselves--has caused an irreparable loss of ideological
infallibility from which the entire bureaucratic state order has never
recovered. From Peking to Belgrade, the furtive masters of state
capitalism maintain their monopoly over the whole of society and
moreover all expression according to fatigued ideology when ideology
still forms their one proprietary basis as a class. Now the ideological
fragmentation which tends to accompany the bureaucracy outside Russia
concludes as a fatal chapter in counter-revolutionary history.
After nearly twenty years, the new liberty acquired by the imported
counterrevolution has proven to offer only ephemeral victory for the
fledgling Party-State free to duplicate in its own way the totalitarian
archetype, as sovereign heir to its explosive contradictions. From
Maoism and Titoism to Castroism and Gomulkaism, the partial reform of
totalitarian society has epitomized the bureaucratic lie with every
dissimulation of âsocialist reconstruction.â In Yugoslavia, Poland and
Czechoslovakia, the auxiliary dictatorship has always encountered the
contradictory injury run in the course of its bureaucratic inheritance.
This dictatorship has torn apart the Stalinist doctrine in different
ways--and its theory of âsocialism in one countryâ--in order to
reestablish some fragmentary alternative which finds application in its
own totalitarian manner. The recalcitrant bureaucracy has actually
magnified the mode of totalitarian administration in denouncing its
ideological corollary. Henceforth, on one Caribbean island, miniature
China courtesy of Russian good will, the âsocialist manâ is evolving by
way of an immense army of vigilante squads dispatched by block and
massive labor camps which absorb thousands of dissidents at a time.
There, in the first rebelling Party of the Cominform, we see the sudden
reproach against ânationalism ââclass enemyâ that it now becomes, and
the overt return to orthodoxy in a country decentralized supposedly
according to a âsocialism of the managersâ years ago. In the largest
dogmatic Party of all in Asia, bureaucratic incapacity at the level of
preliminaries has been confirmed: that is to say, in agrarian
production. In the mother of bureaucratic domination, popular revolt
transpires within whole regions of the country.
The revolutionary masses have arrived in turn at the point of total
confrontation exactly where official Stalinism had dissolved in liberal
bureaucratic illusion long ago: that is to say, in Poland. There,
bureaucratic power has witnessed a unitary practical opposition emerging
without distraction. Let us first address the general features of that
revolt before revealing its particular origins. The famous revolutionary
outbreak of the 14^(th) of December, 1970, the âDecember Revolt,â
rejected above all the normal functioning of bureaucratic society
according to its concentrated exploitation. There, the bureaucracy
showed that it was unable to develop the ensemble of productive forces
without bringing about the radical awareness of the producers
themselves. In eliminating most vestiges of private property and
condensing the market economy in one essential commodity, social labor,
bureaucratic state capitalism merely intensified the opposition of
classes and installed an advanced proletariat on its own terrain--as in
Poland--deprived of illusion. In Poland, the radical masses answered the
degeneration of state power to the point where it could no longer
support its own domination except through a neuter image; in the words
of Minister Cyrankiewicz, a âscientific-technical revolution.â The
proximity of an economistic dogma to immediate material development laid
the ruling class open to brutal demystification with the slightest error
of judgment. In Poland, the manifestation of the error and its
consequences simply revealed how long the bureaucracy which existed
there had constituted a threadbare power.
The evolution of Gomulkaism was after all the simple evolution of its
own destruction as well as its transcendence by the revolutionary
opposition which walks its own path. The contradictory mixture of
radical historical sources and progressive illusion which formed the
base of Gomulkaism also lay at the heart of the revolutionary crisis
which ushered in its downfall. After this eclectic ideology has fallen,
there is no binding option which can fill the void of bureaucratic
reality. The seeds of its dissolution were sown in its formation.
Gomulkaism reemerged after an initial suppression by the rival Stalinist
faction between â48 and â56--as the illusory product of proletarian
insurrection. The armed rebellion of popular Poznan against the existing
Stalinist regime served subsequently to defend the Gomulkaist
alternative against external domination and secured its international
legitimacy. When the Russians left Poland in October, 1956, the new
bureaucracy was only prepared to abide temporarily by the festive orgy
of criticism which had broken out in conformity with the spirit of
tolerance implied by anti-Stalinism. Henceforth, the autonomous regime
showed nothing over fifteen years but an absolute identity with all the
arbitrary crimes associated with its predecessors. The âPolish Road to
Socialismâ gave nothing new to the proletariat, except Polish
expropriators.
To its very end, Gomulkaism conveyed an eclectic dogma more and more
intensely, talking Yugoslavian here, acting Russian there, falling
silent then suddenly reversing to the former at the moment of total
disequilibrium. As for its contents, nothing but the private ownership
of land was assured after 1956. Recoiling against its own exposure to
âbureaucratic excesses,â the new regime advanced formal internal
modifications in respect to the Party which it wanted to balance and
redeem and with time the State apparatus and regional bureaucratic
structures which it cared to harmonize and integrate. The conjunction
between social democracy and state communism attempted between â46 and
â48 reawakened fully in the new period in the framework of an internally
fluid dictatorship. The hierarchy itself retained its fixed supremacy
and the official guarantee of particular elites continued to stabilize
itself through automatic purges from the top down. The particular
strategy of Gomulkaism bubbled in a âmiddle course,â as median between
âorthodoxyâ and â revisionism.â One can say that Gomulkaism performed
the heart of its bureaucratic function in its initial phase. Certain
ephemeral concessions appeared through the course of its first three
years: purging the Stalinist clique completely, yielding intellectual
liberties and free communication and granting formidable wage increases.
The sweeping tokenism allowed time for bureaucratic reconsolidation.
Good intentions displayed, the bureaucracy proceeded to stigmatize and
destroy the remaining revolutionary tide. Censorship was reinvoked at
the same time that scattered residues of autonomous workersâ
organizations were suppressed. The editor and then the whole staff of
the revolutionary journal Po Protsu were thrown out of existence. The
street demonstrations which responded to the totalitarian revival were
smothered. In 1957, the striking street car drivers of Lodz were subdued
by police violence. By 1958, the Workers Councils which had risen of
their own accord in Poznan now had their relations with the State
mediated by âarbitration committees,â thus reducing them to a secondary
body of the well-integrated Trade Union. At the Fourth Trade Union
Congress, the following year, the Councils were wiped away completely in
the framework of the so-called Workers Self-Governing Congress which
consisted of an amalgamation of the Trade Union Works Council, the Party
Committee of the enterprise and Council delegates whose decisions were
subject to the approval of plant management itself. By 1959, rigorous
production quotas were reintroduced in keeping with tougher days. The
severe reduction of real wages followed. In 1960, six old Stalinist
officials reappeared in the government. Everything then which the
bureaucracy, released in crisis was retracted in the aftermath. âThe
main thing,â announced Gomulka, âis that the Polish people learn to work
hard and everything else holds secondary importance.
Complete radical opposition began to stir in turn. A new polemic reached
extreme proportions in the Communist Party itself beginning in 1965. The
young revolutionary intellectuals were no longer willing to tolerate the
showcase bureaucracy evoked by Gomulkaism. The celebrated denunciation
of Kuron and Modzelewski advocated âthe victorious anti-bureaucratic
revolution.â Later, in 1968, the Polish students began to agitate at the
universities and in the cities, in the form of an opposition to the
prevailing organization of life which simply demanded âsocialism in the
facts.â Thus, the âDecember Revoltâ had not introduced but synthesized
the revolutionary process. All the universal qualities present there
confirmed the abundance of historical experience lived by the Polish
masses in the radical past, an experience which frames their perspective
today. In December, the populace battled a counter-bureaucratic illusion
which could no longer hide in the external preoccupation with Soviet
imperialism. The elementary falsehood then exposed itself. Through the
sudden turmoil, the Gomulkaist regime nullified the origins of its own
justification, calling in futility for the Russian Army which knew
better than to come.
In the Five Year Plan of 1970, the traditional masters of Warsaw fatally
imposed the formal husk of reformism without delivering the goods. The
imposition of technocratic reform from above acted as the veritable
stimulus of revolutionary crisis. The formalist bureaucracy had tinkered
with the surface of technocratic modernity since the first days of the
National Economic Council under the direction of the noted
social-democratic economist, Oscar Lang. This eclecticism tended to
integrate new strata at the base of production into the bureaucracy by
extending the partial mechanism of market economy. The founding of more
autonomous industries according to the profit motive and more direct
relations between costs and prices simply intended to intensify the day
to day rhythm and volume of production. Nothing was to change, however,
in content, at the moment of full application. The bureaucrats still
showed their preference for heavy industrial investments as opposed to
the extension of consumer goods. In keeping with the spirit of supply
and demand, the technocratic novitiates retained the stationary level of
wages which existed already for ten years and yet intensified
simultaneously the barometer of prices for necessities without regard
for the fixed declining penury of the producers themselves. By the same
awkward logic, the old party hacks now chose to reduce the price of
scarce, luxury items on behalf of the immediate masters of the workers:
the technocrats. Consequently, the oppressive effects of the internal
modernization of bureaucratic power, that is to say, the harmonization
of the central political bureaucracy charged with the task of
ideological decisions and the regional and local managers responsible
for the immediate supervision of productive relations, found echo in the
cohesion of its opponents. The proletariat recoiled subsequently against
every level of the hierarchy, from the plant management at the workplace
and the regional apparatuses of the Party to the political apex of the
State. The authentic owners of social surplus value, once considered
sinful âto contemplate,â carried out an initial critique of their own of
the political economy without mediation.
Again, the practical rejection of the slightest detail imposed by the
totalitarian bureaucracy had the effect of calling the whole of social
life into question and releasing the total prospects for its
revolutionary reconstruction. Six days of unrelenting confrontation
formed what is known as the âDecember Revolt.â In their explosive
spontaneity, the radical masses abandoned those intermediary organs
which normally expressed and canalized opposition. Acting of their own
accord, the populace burned and destroyed every architectural symbol of
power which stood in its way, from Party headquarters in Gdansk to the
municipal police building in Szczecin. In Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin,
pillaging ran rampant. Sixty shops in Gdansk alone were burned and
looted. In Szczecin, police cars were overturned and destroyed and vast
crowds were heard shouting âGestapoâ as they battled with the police and
committed acts of arson. After the first few days, the troubles spread
as far as Lodz, Poznan and Katowice. In all this, the workers played the
decisive part in radical initiation at each succeeding interval of
crisis. The dock workers of Gdansk formed on the morning of the 14^(th)
the very first violent demonstration in the center of the city which was
joined immediately by vast numbers of women as well as students. By
Wednesday, the 16^(th), the government denounced âanarchist and hostile
forcesâ and swiftly dispatched 53,000 special militia to the first
revolutionary zone of Gdansk. The Warsaw bureaucrats knew the importance
involved in deploying vast regiments of anonymous soldiers to an area in
which popular insurrection had restrained the use of arms by local
forces from which elements of sympathy and direct support could
eventually be drawn. Under the heaviest risks, the populace demonstrated
the highest spirit of bravery as great in many ways as that displayed
once in Poznan. At a time when the whole international bureaucratic
order preferred to enjoy its power calmly and to show itself to be the
worthy adversary of private capitalism on the marketplace, the
bureaucracy had to resort to the maximum of repression in all its
history: 45 killed, 1,165 wounded. From these days, the bureaucracy
salvaged its class domination not by conciliation but by force in order
to terminate the military phase of an unresolved antagonism.
Despite the practical demystification cemented in the popular masses
when the smoke had cleared, political methods were still available at
first to the bureaucratic class, in correspondence with the immediate
level of the antagonism and its absorption in particular points of
contention. The changing of elites within the Party substituted the
mirage of an internal bureaucratic conflict within itself for the actual
external antagonism. Quite simply, the ideological turnover arrived post
festum. In the masquerade, the old ally Gierek now made his singular
debut in the most fashionable, democratic, anti-Gomulkaist garb. The
bureaucracy as a whole simply had grasped the opportunity to publicize
an inveterate âself-critique,â tearing out and segregating a part of
itself with which every previous crime and mishap was associated in
turn. Since the very beginning of the Bolshevik State model, the
bureaucrats have always been as arbitrary with each other in their
furtive internal domain as they have to be with the outside world. The
incident simply displays all the bureaucrats âgoing with the wind,â
reversing positions in appearance, in trying to preserve the sinecure of
bureaucratic authority itself.
Weeks later, the famous meeting held at the Warski Shipyard in Szczecin
brought the independent voice of the workers into the open for the first
time. On January 25, 1971, Gierek had been forced to arrive from Warsaw
to hear the grievances of persevering dock strikers. These grievances
were presented by delegates strictly mandated by a unitary base of
workers and which under their pressure had become public knowledge. Just
as the very context of ânegotiationsâ carried an adverse spirit of
mutual compromise, the demands themselves had not ceased to be partial:
free speech and complete access to the press, freedom of organizational
association improvised during the course of struggle, general
reelections to existing workersâ structures, etc. Unlike the
revolutionary examples of Petrograd and Hungary, the radical movement
still failed to pursue a generalized model of autonomous Councils.
Nevertheless, the barren status evoked by the ruling class, compelled to
give an explanation for what it had done, also confirmed the radical
position occupied already by the workers themselves. In the immediate
moment, however, the bureaucracy emerged in tact and exacted the anxious
approbation of everything, every particular in the administrative plan
and the cessation of residual work stoppages, on the basis of âgood
faith.â In exchange, the bureaucrats had offered a gesture of
âdemocratic toleranceâ which was to inform the workers of the decisions
made by power. Though having recognized that âour society is divided
into classes,â the insurgents had not acted upon all the consequences
implied by their burning dissatisfaction.
During the following March, the class antagonism broke out again.
Knowing that the directors of old abuses were hardly going to realize
vast changes, the machinists of Lodz--mostly women--invoked their own
work stoppage. Another delegation of bureaucrats arrived from Warsaw.
Intending to pacify hostilities with their presence, the bureaucrats
ended up by being chased away. Subsequently, in acquiring a hundred
million dollar loan from its superiors in Moscow, the bureaucracy was
finally able to muffle tensions at least ephemerally by retracting those
measures which had ignited the total question of power. The timing,
however, assured little stability in light of the fact that it was not
the old but the new regime which conceded. In retaining some vestige of
authority, the new regime completed the formal aspects of the
Reform--replacing âprofit-sharingâ for bonuses and leaving immediate
decision-making to regional factory associations--with the aim of
diffusing bureaucratic responsibility and easing what was felt to be an
economic dilemma. But in the autumn of last year, the workers began
again to question existing conditions, the conditions of work as well as
the veracity of their representative bodies. Without restraint, they
have fought the new regime in demanding the release of all those rebels
of âDecemberâ still imprisoned by the State. At the annual Congress of
the Trade Union last November, the brokers of labor value were unable to
push through a Uniform Code of Labor under the opposition, in Gierekâs
words, of âthese demagogues.â Clearly, the bureaucracy could no longer
retain the fragile bases of its power by way of an ideology of any kind.
The logic of a dying class reality has only become more and more absurd.
In the international reaction of rival bureaucratic Parties to the
bloody Polish revolution, eyes merely saddened in order to reinvigorate
their fossil polemics. Peking imagined a âcrisisâ of âSoviet social
imperialismâ at the same moment that an actual alliance was being
prepared in Warsaw itself with the very American ruling class which
continued to slaughter the Vietnamese at its own doorstep. Moscow in
turn now found in the Maoist clique âmore absurd inventions, greater
lies.â Each particular mask of opposition, from Paris to Bucharest, had
simply revealed the general paroxysm of all bureaucratic dogma caused by
the revolutionary disorder in Poland.
The amorphous adaptations and re-adaptations of the bureaucratic title
of ideological property shows that the bureaucrats were left speechless
long ago. The title is irrevocably charred in Poland where the
proletariat disposed of everything associated with the former âOctober
Leftâ of 1956. The new revolutionary currents have shown that they do
not forget. The eclectic radicalism contained in the past, radicalism
that failed to distinguish itself from the vague anti-Stalinist
opposition which remained tied to the liberal wing of the bureaucracy
and a technocratic model of Councils, is dead and gone. Mangled by
fifteen years of official institutionalization, the existing appearance
of Workers Councils cannot dissuade the new currents from seeking their
full, unmediated truth. These currents cannot avoid combating any less
the reservoir of inchoate ideology operating within the workers movement
which still envisages a âState founded on Workers Councils.â
In struggling to locate and realize its autonomous objectives, the
Polish proletariat has come to know that the arduous course of its long
historical struggle is inseparable from the totality of its mission. Its
practical critique of bureaucracy foreshadows the liberation of truth in
the world, as its means and equally its goal.
Raoul Vaneigem
This article appeared originally in the twelfth edition of
Internationale Situationniste.
âDo not sacrifice the present good for the good to come. Play for the
moment. Avoid every association with marriage or any other concern which
does not satisfy your passions at the first instance. Why work for the
good to come, since it will always be out of reach of your desires and
since you will have in sum-total only displeasure? This displeasure
would be not to be able to double the length of days, necessary for the
satisfaction of the immense circle of enjoyments you are bound to
encounter.â
--Charles Fourier, Notice to the Civilized Concerning the Next Social
Metamorphosis
In its non-achievement, the French movement of occupation in May â68 has
vulgarized in a confused way the necessity of transcendence. The
immanence of a total overthrow, felt by all, must now discover its
practice: the passage to generalized self-management by the founding of
Workers Councils. The point of arrival to which the revolutionary spirit
has brought consciousness now becomes a point of departure.
History responds today to the question posed by Lloyd George to the
workers and repeated in chorus by the servants of the old world: âYou
want to destroy our social organization, but what will you put in its
place?â We know the response, thanks to the profusion of the little
Lloyd Georges who defend the state dictatorship of a proletariat of
their choice and wait until the working class organizes itself in
councils to dissolve it and choose another.
Each time that the proletariat takes the risk of changing the world, it
finds again the global memory of history. The establishment of a society
of Councils--until now confused with the history of its failure in
different epochs--unveils the reality of its past possibilities through
the possibility of its immediate realization. The evidence of it has
appeared to all workers since May when Stalinism and its trotskyite
residue showed, by their aggressive weakness, their inability to crush
an eventual movement of the Councils, and, by their force of inertia,
their inclination to restrain its appearance. Without truly manifesting
itself, the movement of the Councils was found present in an arc of
theoretical rigor wavering between two contradictory poles: the internal
logic of the occupations and the repressive logic of the parties and
unions. Those who still confuse Lenin and âwhat is to be done?â do
nothing more than manage a garbage can.
The refusal of all organization that is not the direct emanation of the
proletariat negating itself as proletariat has been felt by many to be
inseparable from the realizable possibility of an everyday life without
dead time. The notion of Workers Councils forms, in this sense, the
first principle of generalized self-management.
May marked an essential phase in the long revolution: the individual
history of millions of men, each day in search of an authentic life,
rejoining the historical movement of the proletariat in combat against
all alienations. This unity of spontaneous action which was the
passionate motor of the occupation movement can only develop its theory
and practice as one. What was in all hearts must pass to all heads. From
having proven that they âcould no longer live like before, not even a
little better than beforeâ, many tend to prolong the memory of an
exemplary part of life, and the hope lived a moment of a great
possibility, in a forceful direction which only lacks, in order to
become revolutionary, a greater lucidity concerning the historical
construction of free individual relations, concerning generalized
self-management.
Only the proletariat makes precise in negating itself the project of
generalized self-management, because it carries it objectively and
subjectively in itself. This is why the first precisions will come from
the unity of its combat in everyday life and on the front of history;
and from the consciousness that all demands are realizable in the
immediate but by it alone. It is in this sense that a revolutionary
organization must henceforth pride itself on its own capacity to hasten
its disappearance in the reality of the society of Councils.
The Workers Councils constitute a new type of social organization
through which the proletariat puts an end to the proletarianization of
mankind. Generalized self-management is only the totality according to
which the Councils cohesively inaugurate a way of life based on
permanent individual and collective emancipation.
From beginning to end, itâs clear that the project of generalized
self-management requires as many precisions as there are desires in each
revolutionary, and as many revolutionaries as there are people
dissatisfied with their everyday life. At one and the same time, the
spectacular commodity society establishes repressive conditions and
contradictorily, in the opposition that it creates, the positivity of
subjectivity. In the same way, the formation of the Councils, as the
outlet of the struggle against global oppression, creates the condition
for a permanent realization of subjectivity limited only by its own
impatience to make history. Thus generalized self-management fuses with
the capacity of the Councils to realize the imaginary historically.
The Workers Councils lose their significance outside of generalized
self-management. It is necessary to treat anyone who speaks of the
Councils in terms of economic or social organisms as a future bureaucrat
and immediate enemy, anyone who does not place them at the center of the
revolution of everyday life with the practice that this entails.
It is one of the great merits of Fourier to have shown the necessity to
realize immediately (and for us that is to say from the beginning of the
general insurrection) the objective conditions of individual
emancipation. For everyone, the beginning of the revolutionary movement
must mark an immediate elevation of the pleasure of living; the lived
and conscious entry into the totality.
The accelerated pace at which reformism leaves behind it some dejected
as laughable as the leftists--the multiplication in the tri-continental
colic of the heap of small maoist, trotskyist and guevarist
groups--proves the stench which the right and in particular socialists
and stalinists smelled of a long time ago: partial demands contain in
themselves the impossibility of a global change. The temptation to put
the old trick back in its proper bureaucratic skin is unquestionably
superior to combating one reformism in order to conceal another. Itâs a
final solution to the problem of recuperators. This implies resorting to
a strategy which releases general explosion in favor of insurrectionary
moments more and more near; and to a tactic of qualitative progression
of actions, necessarily partial, which contain as their necessary and
sufficient condition, the liquidation of the world of merchandise. So
long as one guards the law of immediate pleasure as a collective tactic,
there will be no cause to be anxious of the result.
It is easy to evoke here some possibilities, for sake of argument at
least, whose conceivable insufficiencies will be demonstrated in any
case by the practice of liberated workers--overtly within the strike and
more or less secretly during work--to inaugurate the reign of gratuity
by offering to friends and revolutionaries some products; in producing
some gift objects (transmitters, playthings, arms, ornaments, diverse
machines); organizing luxurious or excessive distributions of
merchandise in department stores; to crush the laws of exchange and
prime the end of wage-labor through collectively appropriating some
products of work; in making machines serve personal and revolutionary
ends; to depreciate the function of money by generalizing strikes
against payments (taxes, rent installment buying, transportation, etc.);
to encourage the creativity of everyone by setting in motion, even if
intermittently but only under workers control, sectors of supplies and
production and regarding the experience as a necessarily uncertain,
perfectible exercise; to liquidate hierarchies and the spirit of
sacrifice in treating the owners, managers, and union bosses as they
deserve, in refusing militantism; to emerge everywhere united against
all separations; to extract theory from all practice and inversely
through the composition of pamphlets, posters, and songs.
The proletariat has already shown that it knows how to respond to the
oppressive complexity of the capitalist and socialist states through the
simplicity of organization exercised directly by all and for all. The
questions of survival only pose themselves in our epoch with the
preliminary condition of never being resolvable. On the contrary, the
problems of history to be lived are clearly posed within the project of
the Workers Councils both as positivity and negativity; in other words,
as basic element of a unified and passionate industrial society, and as
anti-state.
Because they do not exercise any power separated from the decision of
their members, the Councils tolerate no power other than their own. To
encourage everywhere anti-state actions cannot be confused with the
anticipated creation of Councils thus deprived of absolute power
concerning their field of extension, separated from generalized
self-management, necessarily emptied of content and ready to be stuffed
with ideologies. The only lucid forces which can today respond to
finished history with history to be made will be revolutionary
organizations which are developing, in the project of the Councils, an
equal awareness of the adversary to combat and the allies to support. An
important aspect of such a struggle manifests itself before our eyes
with the apparition of a double power. In the factories, offices,
streets, houses, barracks, schools, a new reality is taking form, the
contempt for bosses, an attitude which immediately forces them to scream
for mercy. From now on this contempt must attain its logical conclusion
in demonstrating, through the initiative of the workers, that the
managers are not only detestable but useless, and that one can liquidate
them even from their own point of view with impunity.
Current history wonât be long to unleash, in the consciousness of the
leaders as that of the revolutionaries, an alternative which concerns
the two: general self-management or insurrectionary chaos; the new
society of abundance or social disassociation, pillaging terrorism,
repression. The struggle in double power is already inseparable from
such a choice. Our coherence demands that the paralysis and destruction
of all modes of government be indistinguishable from the construction of
Councils; that the elementary prudence of the adversary would, with all
logic, have to adapt itself to an organization of new everyday relations
in order to prevent the extension of what an american police specialist
calls âour nightmareâ, small groups of insurgents rising from the mouth
of subways, shooting from the roofs, utilizing the mobility and
indefinite resources of the urban guerilla to fell the police, to
liquidate the servants of authority, to sustain riots and destroy the
economy. But we do not have to save the managers in spite of themselves.
It will be enough to prepare the Councils and assure by all means their
self-defense. Lope de Vega shows in one of his works how some villagers,
fed up with the orders of a royal functionary, killed him while he was
asleep. They answered the judges charged with uncovering the guilty one
in the name of the whole village, âFuenteovejunaâ, a tactic which the
asturian miners apply to impudent engineers although confusedly
according to terrorist attachments. General self-management will be our
âFuenteovejunaâ. It is no longer enough for collective action to
discourage repression (e.g. as one judges the powerlessness of the
forces of order if, with the start of the occupations, the employees of
a bank squander some funds). It is still necessary that it encourages
progress toward greater revolutionary coherence. The Councils are the
order facing the decomposition of the State, contested in form by the
rise of regional nationalism and in principle by social demands. To the
questions which it poses, the police can respond only by estimating the
number of its dead. The Councils alone carry a definitive response. What
prevents stealing? The organization of distribution and the end of
merchandise. What prevents the sabotage of production? The appropriation
of machines by collective creativity. What prevents explosions of anger
and violence? The end of the proletariat by the collective construction
of everyday life. There is no justification for our struggle other than
the immediate satisfaction of that project; that which satisfies us
immediately.
Generalized self-management can sustain itself only by developing the
freedom lived by all. It is certainly enough to infer starting from its
elaboration its preliminary rigor. From now on, such a rigor must
characterize the revolutionary councillist organizations; inversely
their practice will already include the experience of direct democracy.
It is this which is going to tighten up the adherence to certain
formulas. Thus, a principle like, âthe general assembly is alone
sovereignâ also signifies that what escapes the direct control of the
autonomous assembly revives through mediation all the autonomous
varieties of oppression. Through its representatives, the entire
assembly with its tendencies must be present at the moment of decision.
If the destruction of the State essentially prohibits the repetitious
joke of the Supreme Soviet, it must still guard what the simplicity of
organization guarantees as the impossibility of the appearance of a
neo-bureaucracy. Precisely the richness of the techniques of long
distance communication, pretext for the maintenance or return of the
specialists, permits the permanent control of the delegates by the base,
the confirmation, the correction or the immediate retraction of their
decisions on all levels. Telex, computers, televisions, belong therefore
to the assemblies of the base. They realize their ubiquity. In the
composition of a Council--one can undoubtedly distinguish local, urban,
regional and international Councils--it will be a good thing that the
assembly elect and control an equipment section destined to receive
demands for supplies and to extend the possibilities of production; to
coordinate these two sectors an information section, in charge of
maintaining a constant relation with the lives of other Councils; a
coordination section, upon which rests, to the degree that the
necessities of the struggle permit, the enrichment of intersubjective
relations, responsibility for demands of passionate satisfaction, the
material assurance of individual desires, offering that which is
necessary for experimentation and adventure, harmonizing playfully
available funds for the organization of necessary tasks, (cleaning,
babysitting, education, kitchen assistance, etc.); and a self-defense
section. Each section is responsible to the plenary assembly; the
revocable delegates, submerged in the principle of vertical and
horizontal rotation, come together and regularly present their reports.
To the logical commodity system, which encompasses alienated practice,
the social logic of desires must respond with the practice it implies.
The first revolutionary measures will necessarily have an effect on the
decrease in hours of work and the largest reduction of servile work. The
Councils will be concerned with distinguishing their priority sectors
(food, transport, telecommunications, metallurgy, construction,
clothing, electronics, printing, armament, medicine, comfort, and in
general, the material equipment necessary for permanent transformation
of historical conditions), reconversion sectors chosen by the workers as
being worthy of subversion to the profit of revolution, and parasitic
sectors for which the assemblies will have decided pure and simple
suppression. Evidently, the workers of eliminated sectors (as offices,
administration, industries of the spectacle and pure merchandise, will
prefer 3 or 4 hours of freely chosen work per week within the priority
sector to eight hours of presence every day in a workplace. The Councils
will experiment with attractive forms of unpleasant tasks not in order
to hide their drudgery but to compensate for it by playful organization
and as much as possible in order to eliminate them to the profit of
creativity (according to the principle, âwork no, play yesâ). To the
degree that the transformation of the world will identify itself with
the construction of life, necessary labor will disappear in the pleasure
of history for itself.
To say that the councillist organization of distribution and production
prevents pillaging and the destruction of machines and supplies is still
placing oneself on the side of the anti-state. What the negative
conserves here of separations, the Councils, as organizations of the new
society, will come to end through a collective politics of desires. The
end of wage-labor can be immediately realized with the inauguration of
Councils, from the precise moment when the âequipment and provisionsâ
sector of every Council organizes production and distribution in
response to the desires of the plenary assembly. Then in homage to the
best bolshevik prediction, one will be able to call the pisspots in gold
and massive money âleninsâ.
General self-management implies the extension of Councils. At the start,
the zones of work will be taken in hand by the workers concerned,
grouped in Councils. In order to rid the first Councils of their
corporative features, the workers will open them as quickly as possible
to their companions, to the people of the neighborhood, to volunteers
coming from parasitic sectors in such a way that they rapidly take the
form of local Councils, fragments of the Commune (be they unities nearly
equivalent numerically, say from 8 to 10,000 people).
The internal extension of the Councils must go hand in hand with their
geographic extension. It is necessary to guard the perfect radicalism of
liberated zones apart from the illusion of Fourier concerning the
attractive character of preliminary communes and yet at the same time
without underscoring the seductive part which, once extricated from
lies, is carried by the whole experience of authentic emancipation. The
self-defense of the Councils thus illustrates the formula: âthe truth in
arms is revolutionary.â
General self-management will have its code of possibilities soon,
destined to liquidate repressive legislation and its millennial
influence. Perhaps it will appear in double power before the courts and
swines of punishment are annihilated. The new rights of man (the right
of each one to live as he pleases, to build his own home, to participate
in all assemblies, to arm himself, to live as a nomad, to publish what
he thinks--to each his own wall--to love without reservation; the right
to meet, the right to the material equipment necessary for the
realization of oneâs desires, the end of commodity-time, of history in
itself, the realization of art and the imaginary, etc.) awaits their
anti-legislators.
The succeeding failures of the majority of revolutionaries to
participate effectively in revolutionary organization manifest, in the
last analysis, the failure of the organization itself. An ineffective
stage of collective action proves nothing at root except the failure of
nearly every participant in knowing how to act for himself and for
others. Between October, 1969 and at least as it concerns us, April,
1971, the new revolutionary current initiated and sustained by the
situationists declined in force both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Despite the noticeable enlargement of the group, after the revolutionary
occupations in France, in May, 1968, real activity was dissipating
severely. The paralysis of critical publications and fresh types of
exemplary action coincided with an unceasing multiplication of internal
antagonisms, pseudo-expulsions, expulsions and breaks. The visible lapse
of almost all personal effort and imagination accumulated with the
internal breaks and expulsions.
The critical inertia of almost every situationist formed the radical
absence of spontaneous life from common association and induced in turn
the heavy, artificial presence of the âorganizational question.â With
persisting torpor in the formation of specific subversive projects and
the selection of tasks âto the manâ which goes hand and hand with them,
the second and third round of interpersonal judgments and expulsions had
become abstract. The judgments became abstract to the extent that no
working truth was present even among a few as their positive point of
contrast. The application of a group discipline (in response to a
reservoir of specific inequalities in combination with the insufficient
qualitative participation of many individuals) did not lead in turn
toward an extremism of coherence.
The problem of how to be more than a âgroup of theoreticiansâ and yet
still realize both an effective and equalitarian formation of the
radical critique never found its solution in the American section of the
S.I. The first number of Situationist International, printed in June,
1969, missed delivering a full revolutionary analysis, not only because
two of the three other American situationists failed to materialize
certain articles promised but also because of what was said and how it
was said. One cannot find in that publication just one positive
affirmation of all the historical forces existing visibly in America
then and, accordingly, the concrete prospects of the social revolution
which were carried in them. From June, 1969 to April, 1971, the failure
to prepare the task implied by that deficiency and then in turn to
realize the task transpired at two succeeding intervals with the
ultimate dissolution of the section. A minimum coherence never came,
that realization of radical theory which makes practice possible.
On November 7, 1969, an ultimatum of expulsion was issued from New York
by two members of the American section, Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell,
against the two others then in Europe, Tony Verlaan and myself. Less
than four weeks after the accepted geographic separation had begun, in
my case to exist up to a year, they posed their measure on the basis of
our failure to keep âclose contactsâ (apropos of an actual lax in
correspondence for approximately 17 days) and therefore, to
âparticipateâ as agreed in the section. The ultimatum demanded, at least
initially, an immediate response to the commentaries contained in former
letters from N.Y. as well as an adequate explanation for the lapse of
contact. The two claimed to represent a âqualitative majority,â insofar
as they considered themselves executors of a unanimous decision of the
section and would thus determine our expulsion or re-acceptance. In
reality, one could hardly have imagined more regarding âparticipationâ
during such a period than a common critical contribution in
publications. Instead, the most ideal expectation of sustaining and even
enlarging all common activity existed prior to the geographic separation
without the slightest preparation and specification: in the outline of
critical works, the personal choices, the order of priorities. The gross
absence of concrete organization now passed to an excessive measure of
formalism.
The ultimatum from New York was completely unacceptable in both its form
and its content. The bureaucratic logic of the measure revealed itself
in the term âqualitative majorityâ as much as in its abstract
identification of the brief interlude of silence in letters with the
withdrawal from âparticipationâ in âprojects.â The ultimatum was, after
all, simply the point of provocation. The very next day, the 8^(th),
Chasse and Elwell received three letters from us which contained
substantial evidence of interest and preparation for the forthcoming
elaboration of projects and collaborations. One of the letters, written
at my hand, informed them clearly of certain personal difficulties which
transpired with Verlaan in these preparations as well as in the process
of finding a suitable living location. Even the preliminary solution to
the difficulty was stated with the explicit intent to draw better
coordination, namely, to âdelimit our daily relations.â A day later, the
reasons and the reality had arrived in their hands, which annulled the
trivial bases of their precipitous measure and immediately required a
retraction. To the contrary, as their ultimatum evidently intended to
force the whole section to reconvene in New York--four weeks after a
common decision was made to the contrary and acted upon--their response
now was to form another ultimatum, to provoke Verlaan in particular, in
order to impose his expulsion in the end. As they were not content with
what was not said, they were now even less content over what was.
Evidently, the strikingly unharmonious relations which persisted among
the first three situationists, since their first encounters in the
summer of 1967, reached their last stage: the formalism of Chasse, the
activism of Verlaan and the weak, un-autonomous comportment of Elwell.
At a meeting in Paris in late September, the apparent formation of a new
solidarity between the three (myself having joined the group only months
before with the defect of natural ignorance in regard to many aspects of
past operations as well as some of the best theoretical texts)
supposedly had cohered. There, Verlaan agreed that his previous
restraint from participating in the first number of the magazine and his
frequent geographic departures were in themselves unjustifiable. Chasse
and Elwell had in turn recognized the mistaken part which each of them
played in a particular incident in the past which had disenchanted him.
In this incident, Chasse, who was then only considering his formal
adherence to the S.I., wrote to the situationists in Europe in respect
to Verlaan who was already a member. He stated his unwillingness to
become a situationist, so long as Verlaan remained a part of a student
commune which operated around Columbia University, the Radical Action
Committee, where in effect he had stayed for two months among people in
no way equal to him as a de facto leader and as a carrier of
entrism--dual organizational ties. Elwell now admitted his belief that
Chasse was mistaken in having mailed the letter without first showing it
to Verlaan, even though he continued to refuse to leave the commune
until much later. Chasse himself agreed. Certainly, none of the elements
of the common problem were in any way more or less detrimental and least
of all those manifest by Verlaan. The ultimatum, however, was radically
preemptive.
Our response to them in November simply proved to be an indulgence in
their rigidity and delirium. On the 10^(th), I wrote that âhasty
ultimatumsâ were âremaining a problem of the presentâ and three days
later demanded the recognition and retraction of the error. On the
17^(th), Verlaan opposed the measure in turn and expressed his disgust
with an âultimatum practiceâ on their part which was becoming âcyclic.â
In so doing, he recapitulated and introduced various faults which he
felt existed in them. Both Chasse and Elwell, now judging the manner of
his response to their initial provocation, claimed that he was simply
reversing âthe history of the section.â Accordingly, they authorized the
pseudo-elimination of Verlaan on the 26^(th). After having pretended to
accept the validity of my own presence in the American section, Chasse
and Elwell now claimed the right to expel Verlaan without a majority
vote, not on the basis of an ultimatum--in any case false and
provocative--but his reaction to it. Later, after they had been expelled
from the S.I. in turn, the two of them wrote an attack against the
situationists consisting of forty-six pages and an equally ridiculous
title, A Field Study In The Dwindling Force of Cognition, Where It Is
Least Expected. The text tries among other things to prove that the
countermeasure of expulsion directed against them by the French section
on December 19, 1969, sufficiently demonstrated the centralist role
which that section played. The judgment of centralism was evidently
their last rationalization. In truth, every section had already offered
its complete opposition to those bureaucratic ordinances which Chasse
and Elwell never failed to sustain. The prudent hypothesis formed by the
Italian section, namely, that the false measure of elimination does not
automatically eliminate those in turn who formulated it, had no real
significance in regard to their case of indefatigable bureaucratic
energy. But one must still recognize the error contained in the initial
form of their expulsion in its specificity. In the same way that Chasse
and Elwell could say in their polemic that they themselves committed âa
breach of democratic practiceâ in issuing their expulsion of Verlaan
without first notifying me of their intent, in spite of the known
stature of my opposition, one must indicate our own âbreachâ even though
nothing would have changed. This was at the root of their dissimulated
resignation on December 28^(th). At the Conference of Delegates at
Wolsfeld, on January 19, 1970, their resignation was refused by
everyone. Their expulsion was reiterated.
As in many other times and places, the formulation of some expulsions,
under the pressure of certain immediate events, were simply necessitated
without marking a definite level of theoretical or practical progress in
the actual life of the group. The âold problemsâ themselves had not been
resolved in a complete way here. Merely one aspect of them had been
negated. Much of the poor style of the American situationist activity
continued as it was. The absence of qualitative progress persisted even
after a break had occurred with the few remaining Europeans as the
result of our stated disapproval over two specific cases of expulsion
and resignation which had occurred there some months before. In early
April, with six months spent again in New York since the first breaks,
the activist outlook which had manifest itself in past times reappeared.
Activism reemerged from the side of Verlaan by default of a genuine
contribution and originality. Not only the originality but the very
struggle for it was diminishing in him between October and February.
Previously, the relations had almost broken completely in periods of
extreme discord over the most cursory common writing. Moreover, no
individual analyses emerged up to April except my own. As for Verlaan,
he had chosen at various intervals to rewrite not only finished parts of
incomplete texts but amended even key organizational writings with an
ever more obscure result. At a meeting on April 1, 1971, just after his
return from another six-week excursion to Europe, Verlaan failed to
offer anything new, as was promised, in regard to the completion of
articles involved in the publication of a second edition of our
magazine. He did bring much which was old.
Verlaan felt obliged to make a pseudo-critique of what was done, how it
was done and how it should have been done in New York during his
absence. This pseudo-critique actually concerned a clerical mailing as
well as one contact, Arnaud Chastel. Verlaan arduously stated his
opposition to the manner in which posters had been folded and to the way
in which readers on the old list were asked to âsend bread,â as it was
written on the back of envelopes in regard to publications sent them for
over a year. In addition, he indicated his belief that Chastel and
another ally, Steef Davidson, should have been âput together,â namely,
âbetter organized.â In response, I simply stated the core of the
militantism which such remarks contained in respect to âorganizingâ
others, others in whom I did not yet place full confidence and who did
not find that confidence in each other. Only a few months before,
Verlaan and I had formally threatened to cut off all relations in
particular with Chastel for the most abstract, insubstantial tendency to
voice criticism at the first moment over anything. On April 1, the
common decision to sustain a modified relationship with Chastel for whom
Verlaan admitted finally that he held his own âsuspicionsâ concerning
his contacts was maintained. Nevertheless, Verlaan showed in future
days--during which he preferred to continue working on the translation
and reproduction of other established texts--an arbitrary disloyalty to
the common decision and a persisting desire to maintain his criticism of
detail. Days later, we met again in order to speak with still another
contact, Ken Knabb, belonging to a group from California, which at least
then was anonymous and whose positions were self-admittedly very
elementary as this anonymity showed. In the past, Verlaan particularly
wanted to criticize the members of the group by mail in relationship to
many of the particulars involved in their preliminary activity. In any
case, at this meeting, in answer to a question posed by Knabb concerning
the type of relationship which existed between Chastel and us, Verlaan
quickly responded in this way. Upon the basis of the criticism which
Verlaan already put to me, Chastel was willing, as he too now agreed, to
join our group. The abstract urgency felt by Verlaan in organizing those
who were not equal or corresponding with them in detail after detail of
critical advice, now became obvious. He wanted to âorganizeâ them and
unite with them to the extent that he could not fulfill the game of the
qualitative on his own terrain--and no matter what was said there about
them. This evidently was hostile enough to former positions. Despite the
fact that Verlaan was unable to hold to the slightest agreement, the
trouble was still taken to arrange a meeting on the following day at
which time, I said, the matter would be settled at last âin one way or
another.â Although having lost trust in him, with little expectation of
an effective settlement in view of such arbitrariness, I made it
explicitly clear then that all other engagements and all other matters
were suspended until this sudden maneuver was resolved definitively. But
on the following day, he failed to appear. Among all his subsequent
excuses he included a delay resulting from previous engagements that day
with Chastel and others. After this absence, I broke with Verlaan on the
15^(th) of April according to the central fact that he could not âbe
taken at his word.â This genre of militantism, carried in the enthusiasm
of an âorganization man,â had completely obstructed all further struggle
for radical coherence. The desire to translate volumes of material, to
bask in an image of coherence on the laurels of past organization in
which one had played a very modest part, constituted the most patent
ideology.
In this light, it is necessary to criticize the preceding organizational
position which had been taken in New York--âThe Tendency for the Truth
of Practiceâ-- since September 21, 1970. Our criticism of the methods
and the practical reality which had existed in Europe was, after all,
glib. In our analysis, there was no element of self-criticism present.
We said very little about ourselves, our own part in past errors and our
difficulties. However, the refusal in turn of the five remaining
comrades of the âDeclarationâ initiated on November 11, 1970, to
recognize the disputable form as well as the bases involved in the past
elimination of Eduardo Rothe was certainly mistaken itself. The same was
true for the forced nature of the resignation imposed on Francois
Beaulieu who was attacked for being âpitiful.â As much as the comrades
in Paris had violated the basic rules of sectional autonomy in the
elimination of Eduardo Rothe, the following clarification should also be
made now. One must respect the spirit of irrevocable decision which was
present in Paris. A fundamental loyalty existed among all the
situationists there in living by the same rigor in the rules of the
game, as they applied not only to others but to themselves. It is
important to note, apart from the most severe conditions of inequality
under which judgments were made there, that every measure itself always
expressed a clear democratic majority. As for our objection to the above
two cases, our proposal to include the two departed comrades in a
âregroupmentâ was hardly qualified really. Certainly, our proposal for
âregroupmentâ itself offered no real specifications suitable in any way
to the vast dimensions of general practical inertia which had already
evolved.
April 8, 1973
The few examples of militant interest in the critical conception of the
spectacle have been as confused as they are academic. The rare instances
of theoretical discussion which are introduced are as helplessly
didactic as they are incoherent. Where refutations are cast toward the
global rejection of the spectacle, the utterances are always as meek as
they are arbitrary. This trend is expected. Like businessmen taking
accounts at their board meetings, various left-wing journals and papers
close the doors to open debate, shirk from the prodigiousness of their
adversary, yet pass for elusive allies while murmuring furtively under
marginal footnotes and anonymous titles, equally plaintive accords and
discords. Well, we donât want to hurt them and we donât want to scold
them, we only want to play with them a little to expose the mechanisms
of vulgarization.
The worse cases are not related to antipathy but obscurity. Certain
incoherent groups and individuals bearing common brand labels of
radicalism fall into this category. They have the merit of conveying the
most blind enthusiasm for anything, and toward us nothing but the most
contemplative theoretical interest and the most base practical
fragmentation. Many American âundergroundâ newspapers, like the Barb in
Berkeley and Fusion in Boston, wanted to simplify revolutionary theory
in favor of popular prejudice, but for intellectuals and not popularly.
The Tribe, also in Berkeley, rallied to the scandalous subversion which
was called for in the text, âThe Poverty of Student Life,â against the
circus of culture, professors and academic guerrilla warfare. Yet they
never understood a word about their own ideology or the truth of others.
They wanted to import a real sense of scandal in the service of their
radical professors as if the poverty was not there and they were not the
students. Certain other esthetes have viewed the spectacle as some
bizarre impressionist portrait which simply disturbs their thoughts and
fashionable dreams. Hegelianism seems to motivate their criticism minus
the dialectic.
An attitude of this kind appeared in August, 1970, in the Argentinian
review Contracultura. One article in it was entitled âThe Dependent
Spectacleâ whose author went under the pen name of Colador and whose
objective was to âfreely Argentinianize situationist theories.â The text
proved faithful to the language of a handful of intellectuals in Buenos
Aires who were interested in using a new vocabulary and fresh metaphors
to dress up their old objectives. This example of confusion arrived at
the pinnacle of pretension in treating the specific historical
conditions in the underdeveloped world with the most vague, picturesque
social philosophy, so much so that its conclusion manifests an
unapproachable ambiguity. The key misconception involves the
relationship between the global spectacle of merchandise and backward
economic zones: on the one hand, the spectacular image is seen as an
invasion from abroad which cannot be supported by local production
already deprived of its autonomous sources; on the other, the vast
distance between the imported âcontemplationâ and the actual
âpossessionâ of commodities is said to discharge psychic estrangement in
the spectator, âneurotic cargo,â âtension,â âirritationâ in place of
material alienation. It is this erroneous psychological reduction,
accompanied by a narrow geographic conception of alienated mediation,
which hobbles to the last paragraph. This paragraph is worth mentioning
for the sake alone of anthropological inquiry. Colador writes or
scribbles as follows:
In this way all that the proletariat gains from the world centers at the
point of having before it the illusion in block of a production that is
not exclusively produced by it, in finished alienation and the
edification of its partial historical mission (May, 1968), the
proletariat gains from the periphery qualitatively transforming its
neurotic cargo into unbridled desire to transpose the distance of the
contemplated-possessed, to recuperate its alienated product. Copying
plainly the model that the spectacle offers it, it begins to knock down
the weak local scaffolding. This desire finds immediate manifestation in
violence, its wise midwife. The Tupamaros and Che Guevara are the
individual and collective realization. the social appropriation, the
humanization of James Bond.
On November 8, 1971, we pointed our finger to this âpampa of
determinismâ in a letter directed to âThe Readers of Contracultura.â
Evidently, an image of negativism was as foreign to the critique of
modern spectacular society as Guevaraism was hostile. This critique
could not be mistaken for some ideal formulation which only finds the
contemporary peasantry and numeric minorities of workers vanquished in
futility. Beyond infantile image-making, one cannot glimpse, for
instance, at the Bolivian workers from the side of their struggle to
recuperate the alienated product without seeing at the same time the
side of their departure from themselves as an alienated product. In the
gallery of recuperations, the cultural critic had simply approached
politics as the Marxists would approach culture in the framework of a
Victorian tragedy motivated not by history but by impulse.
Global illusion haunts the radical intelligensia, illusion which pushes
again toward the peasantry under the title of Bolshevism as it enters
the horizons of industrial workers as socialist reformism. Other western
intellectuals have complemented the fragmentary portrayal of the
critique without illusions according to an insipid antiquarianism. This
text or that text is reproduced as a âdocument,â no more or no less.
Similarly, the actual objections felt by the antiquarian revolutionary
are posed in documentary terms. The American journal, Radical America,
epitomized the antiquarian in their publication of Guy Debordâs Society
of the Spectacle from which they hoped to design an additional
specialization consisting of new âsituationist-typeâ texts within their
own shadowy circles. As for Radical America, one must say that its
âhistorical researchâ always formed the least inspiring aspect of
Students For a Democratic Society which now is defunct. The beginnings
of the organization had shown, to the contrary, far more imagination.
The Port Huron Statement, issued in 1960, expressed an initial disdain
for all forms of power and every shade of falsehood. Subsequently, the
contempt failed to germinate within the limited battleground of the
university and even ended up in intellectual surrender. Some young
rebels had shown, after all, their exclusive concern with the
university, by agitating over and over again there, enjoying a sort of
refuge within it. As these âactivistsâ failed to criticize everyday
life, their theoretical heirs now seemed to treat the critique of
everyday life as a highlight.
These recuperators had simply seen as much opportunity in a
âsituationist dialecticâ as in a few miserable surrealist admirers in
Chicago in function of their traditional politics. Their new joy was to
reproduce theory other than their own, theory much of which is pregnant
with the old world, in order to supplement their empirical studies.
Months afterward, Radical America revealed its actual position in
publishing a special issue on Hegel and Lenin with a hand from some
allies of the Marxist philosophy journal, Telos. Evidently, there were
many different cooks, poets, philosophy professors and soft anarchists,
who could follow the package recipe faithfully. At one and the same
time, the following phenomenology revealed itself there: the
recuperators wavered between the contrary poles of Trotskyism and
Luxemburgism as they were unable at first to read more than the opening
three chapters of Society of the Spectacle. In turn, they tried to
redress their error by expressing at the margins a detail of opposition.
âLenin and Stalinism must be sharply separated. It is interesting to
notice that Stalin, stupid fuck that he was, first admitted to the
authenticity of Leninâs Testament in 1928, and subsequently lied about
it by presenting it as a Trotskyist fabrication....Since the politburo
in Moscow had agreed to keep the document secret, it demanded that
Trotsky write an outright denial, which was then reluctantly made by him
in the September 1, 1925 issue of Bolshevik...Guy Debordâs account of
this, carried away by the force of its rhetoric, blurs very important
details....â
Of course, no such âimportant detailâ exists, nor can they produce one
in order to redeem some bureaucratic variation to which they are
disposed or the transitions of one bureaucratic decision or another.
Their projected rhetoric is in itself of secondary importance in
comparison with their contemplative historical irrelevance, irrelevance
whose lips will be forever closed to the massacre of Kronstadt. This
kind of historical apology is merely the dust of a long
counter-revolutionary episode from which the twentieth century is only
now emerging. Let it equivocate over the 13^(th) Party Congress, let it
âsharply separateâ bureaucratic lies, let it file away its cardinal
sins. These people who indulge in some reformation of the past with a
folkloric methodology tied to its heroes, are foreign to historical
transcendence except as a spectacle. Laughably, they have set out
against the future, against a fresh activity realized in the world, by
virtue of adumbrated typography. This brand of recuperation will surely
fall away with its monographs while the revolutionary texts it borrowed
will remain.
In conclusion, we do not ask for worthier opponents than those we
mention. We will be well satisfied with the defeat of the dreary.
On Labor Day, 1971, we invoked the scandal known as âThe Kings County
Comicsâ. The comic strip was released at the actual hospital complex,
Kings County, which is situated on the periphery of the Brownsville
ghetto district in Brooklyn. Insofar as the hospital was familiar to us,
we decided to specify the revolutionary critique as well as to denounce
the conditions there. We simply used the opportunity presented by an
evacuated institutional location in order to revel in subversion.
The results were by no means marginal either among the patients or the
workers of the hospital. To the extent that the comic referred to
particular bureaucrats and administrative procedures known at the
hospital, word rapidly circulated about the comics in spite of a very
limited, clandestine distribution. At the same time, the scandal
encouraged the refusal to pay among the patrons as it advocated the use
of direct democracy among the employees in denouncing the repressive
aspects of their function especially. From friends and colleagues
employed at the hospital, we can relate the results which followed: much
of the hospital administration was inflamed the following day when it
found its employees gathering together in the reading and discussion of
the mysterious parody-denunciation which appeared on each of their desks
that morning; queues of patients found and read copies of the text in
defiance of the cashiers behind the pay booths who were enraged; no copy
of the âComicsâ ever returned to the central office of hospital
administration, as the directors had demanded.
The positive significance which the agitation accomplished was
underlined, moreover, by the simple fact that people in districts as far
away as Bedford-Stuyvesant had gotten wind of what happened. Certain
subjective conditions were presented for the first time among us in New
York. The composition as well as the diffusion of the text emanated from
diverse sources, namely, several comrades as well as their friends and
the sympathy and support of one or two workers at the hospital itself.
We had realized again an episodic agitation, without banality and
without interference, as we are certain that those we ridiculed will
never be quite the same.
The text entitled âTo the Readers of Contraculturaâ was issued on
November 8^(th), 1971. In the spring of 1972, we drew up the tract âHave
a Moment for the Examination of Reality?â in answer to the commercial
repression of revolutionary theory which had built up ever since the
first publications in 1969. It was circulated around key newsstands and
bookstores which automatically resisted all critical publications which
are independent of the monopoly of commercial distributors and are free
of commercial advertisements. There, we emphasized the spectacle of
obstruction which âlittle newsstandsâ and the âdistribution racketâ have
imposed, as outright censorship parallel to the political terrorism
known to bureaucratic state capitalism. We have continued to embarrass
those merchants who defend by virtue of habit and âproprietyâ the papal
lists of weekly journals and newspapers handed to them by various
middlemen. Moreover, the publishers and editors who have refused to
print English versions of Society of the Spectacle and On Knowing How to
Live for the Use of the Younger Generations, as at Grove Press and Avon
Books in New York, or those who worked to sabotage their publication, as
Porter Sargent in Boston, have not heard the last of us.
A cartoon-advertisement extracted from the present text, âThe Poverty of
Ecology,â in combination with the diversion of Marvel Comics, was issued
in 500 copies, preceding the publication of our magazine. This spring,
we published a Spanish version of the situationist text, âContributions
Serving to Rectify Public Opinion Concerning the Revolution in the
Underdeveloped Countriesâ by Mustafa Khayati. It appears under the title
âLa Verdad de los Paises Subdesarrollados en La Revolucion
Internacionalâ and it was translated by Julian Cordero. This text has
been circulated, in particular, in the Dominican Republic as well as in
New York. Five thousand copies of the present magazine have been issued
initially.
The chronological account of Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921, represents
the typical insufficiency of the historical specialist. The so-called
objective accuracy of the investigation actually consists of the
repetitive assertion of certain aspects of the historical question which
are by now presuppositions to any further exploration of the subject. In
the case of revolutionary Kronstadt, the author merely dwells on the
actual cleavage which existed between the revolutionary populace of the
island and the central bureaucratic authorities in Moscow. Avrich
bothers only to affirm the non-existence of a âWhite Reactionâ and the
existence of a true revolutionary spirit among the âzealotsâ who formed
the Provisional Revolutionary Committee. One could have learned as much
from the remarks of Lenin alone concerning the perspective of his
revolutionary adversaries when he said, for example, that âthey do not
want the White Guards and they do not want our power either.â At the
same time, this libertarian specialist from Columbia University has only
returned, tearfully, in the last analysis to the repression uttered
softly through his double logic:
âThe sailors, on the one hand, were revolutionary zealots, and like
zealots throughout history they longed to recapture a past era before
the purity of their ideals had been defiled by the exigencies of power.
The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, having emerged victorious from a
bloody Civil War, were not prepared to tolerate any new challenge to
their authority. Throughout the conflict each side behaved in accordance
with its own particular goals and aspirations. To say this is not to
deny the necessity of moral judgment. Yet Kronstadt presents a situation
in which the historian can sympathize with the rebels and still concede
that the Bolsheviks were justified in subduing them.â
One new element of the book is of marginal value. Avrich emphasizes the
defensive spirit which still existed fatally in the âthird revolutionâ.
In the process of forming an independent Soviet, the sailors and workers
of Kronstadt resisted the military advice transmitted by military
specialists as well as the extensive intervention of the specialists
themselves. The insurrection avoided the full attempt to form a
beachhead at Oranienbaum early in the struggle and to penetrate in turn
turbulent Petrograd. This defect had simply reflected the elementary
level of organization evoked in the initial moment of revolutionary
improvisation. It is not Avrich, but the anarchist revolutionary
analysis of Voline written long ago, that reveals the victorious truth
which was lived and represented by the insurrectionaries of Kronstadt.
âKronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the people to
liberate themselves from all yokes and achieve the Social Revolution, an
attempt made directly, resolutely and boldly by the working masses
themselves without political shepherds, without leaders or tutors.â
...
A principal landmark of revolutionary theory has finally been published
in English fifty years after its actual inception. In History and Class
Consciousness the young Georg Lukacs manifests an extremism of
philosophy which carries a double significance: as radical expression of
dialectical theory and at the same time as ideological device of
bolshevik polemicism. In the context of the twenties, the rediscovery of
the critical concept of alienation as motor force of the radical
historical process carried an extra-scientific character which was
decisively revolutionary in view of prevailing economism. Lukacs
arrived, in excess of his own political ties, in order to reaffirm the
essential interaction between the subject and object at the base of
dialectical materialism and to denounce in turn the degeneration of the
theory of praxis into the formalism of a natural âMarxianâ science and
its contemplative metaphysic of reformism. For the first time, the
effects of reification are understood to exceed the simple dimensions of
culture and the workplace. Simultaneously, the revolutionary
transformation of history is shown to depend on the âfree actionâ of the
proletariat for whom consciousness becomes a central necessity in
liberating itself. As always, however, the very best of bolshevik
analyses abandons the transcendence of voluntarism and determinism in
actual practice. There, the author retains the proletariat as a
philosophical subject in exchange for its externalized hierarchical
representation. In the last analysis, the Communist Party becomes the
organized form of class consciousness. âIt implies the conscious
subordination of the self to the collective will that is destined to
bring real freedom into being.â
The time has come to make our concept of democratic organization more
precise, to state our sense of rules, methods and objectives, in view of
how we want to live and to combat the old world.
After having seen the menace of abstraction peering out from the most
eloquent critical discussions, always isolated from an ongoing public
praxis, the former use of the term âhistorical relationsâ seems to
satisfy the kind of association which does and ought to occur between
autonomous individuals at the base of the revolutionary group in this
sense alone. Our relations will be historical to the extent that they
are both subjective and practical. The key to the concrete truth of
revolutionary activity is contained in its capacity to spread its
relations and its practice. And, no doubt, in spreading the reality of
what it can do it extends the possibility of what it can be. But the
truth of each revolutionary is also the truth of his ability to be with
others in order to be himself and to make the group radically more. The
struggle of groups of individuals to be themselves expresses nothing
less than their own immediate struggle for a history of individuals. The
possibility of this history is inseparable from the actual struggles of
revolutionary groups, the sum-total of their talents and determination,
in combating the ruling spectacle.
The general question of what is now to be done involves nothing
principally but the everyday life of revolutionary organization. Both
the recurrence of formless, habitual encounters which never fail to
carry a mock ambience of critical harmony as the bad replacement for
qualitative works and in contrast the occasional intervals of real
collaboration must be left behind as the gross reflections of a finished
period. Collective revolutionary practice must still begin an elementary
exploration of situations, outside, although not excluding, the
subversion of the university and the cultural scene. Inseparably, the
compositions of tracts, posters, manifestoes and magazines must become
increasingly concrete, active analyses. Certainly, such an experiment
will require an enlarged deployment of many of the diverse techniques of
communication and inseparably the negation of their dominant use. But
the experiment must concern the individuals themselves, their immediate
way of life and the situations which chance as well as their radicalism
allows each of them to offer to the collective milieu of subversion. The
struggle of revolutionary groups cannot fix its horizons lower than the
formation of an everyday interaction between its members. And their
interaction in turn must also concern the immediate satisfaction of
their desire to play, that is to say, to act together. The question of
how to make theory more practical is inseparable from how each actually
lives day by day. From train turnstiles to evacuated workplaces and
consumer spectacles, the radical group must make its perspective known.
The situations which are not yet accessible will not exclude the
capacity to find them nor the desire to divert those which are most
familiar and, accordingly, most banal. One cannot make less of an
assertion without hiding in the pure shelter of theory and contemplative
organization. The truth of organization is its immediate subversion of
banalities within the concrete.
Here, and only here, can the new life of the revolutionary community
begin to be a history. The question âwhat would be fun to do tomorrowâ
presupposes a minimum proof of the capacity to express theory and
situate it among all those today who want to form new organizations and
all those endeavoring to enter them in the future. Previous experience
has shown that the mastery of fundamental theoretical expression through
the group, and ultimately through others, is hazardous and detrimental
as it existed. The point of entry into an anti-hierarchical group must
glow with the common meeting of achievements. Each can only approach the
collective game as the possible milieu for the refinement and extension
of his proven creativity, in the communication and publication of
radical theory as well as the arrogance of his refusal of power. Nothing
need be said about all those in the past who did not bother to
capitalize on the opportunity to write tracts, to study vital readings
and to master the dialectical method (without discipline) as well as the
initial patience and generosity of those who knew best.
At the beginning of new stages of radical experience, with the growth
and extension of organization, the radicalization of agitational aims
and even the desire to fulfill those which exist already in a superior
way, the usage of the arms of expulsion, ultimatum and breaks requires
the maximum possible delay until the minimum of collective projects is
set specifically in motion along with the choice of individual tasks.
After long trying experience, it is necessary to make that arm serve
concretely, wherever necessary, in the fundamental defense of the
absolute liberty of the group and each individual. Revolutionary
organization can no longer accept the paltry contents of its breaks any
more than it can accept the trite substance of its praxis. Accordingly,
the pure questions of bad conduct, the failure to participate in a real
schedule of disalienation, the deviation of individuals from a common
decision and agreement, deserve an interval of real criticism between
total acceptance and extreme measures of sanction. The search for
transitional methods should be no more tiring than are individuals to
whom they apply.
Under the peculiar atmosphere known to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of
anarchism--bearing the most stupid varieties of pacifism and
laissez-faire individualism--let us warn those in advance who do not
hold a âtaste for violenceâ that the present tasks before new
revolutionary groups here exclude all taste for non-violence and the
aversion for defending the truth. Let the whole spider web of mysticisms
and mystiques spare themselves the agony of approaching us.
There is no other adventure but the concrete. Today, we know where we
are. Others now must begin to surprise those who have already had the
honor to participate in the revolution. Clearly, the foul days of mix-up
with the small desires of reproducers, of amateur idealists and
âorganization men,â are behind us. In America, revolutionary theory has
found an initial place at last. Our time has not expressed the search
and the realization of a situationist theory but that revolutionary
position which was rediscovered by the situationists.
Crisis: The S.I.
Debord and Sanguinetti have attempted to continue the organizational
voice of the S.I. when the S.I. no longer exists in reality, to sustain
the S.I. by sustaining an organizational critique. For the succession of
individual and collective breakdowns which ended in an organizational
void, they have substituted an imaginary âBreakâ. Knowing the outline of
projects formulated during the former âorientation debate,â Debord and
Sanguinetti have thus succeeded in publishing a Situationist Manifesto.
Unlike the terrifying manifesto of 1848, however, their manifesto does
not announce the turning- point of the accelerated organizational
movement which is its radical axis. It conceals its irreversible
decline. Their book which is entitled, âThe True Break In The
Internationalâ, did not effectively end a void but simply came at its
end. Their critical work represents the best and at the same time the
very worst product of the situationist milieu, as thought of a
theoretical organization whose coherence was only unitary in thought
while divided against itself at the moment of its own self-negation and
transcendence: in other words, in its everyday existence and its
struggle for a scandalous practice.
The above situationist tendency has offered everything concrete at the
general level of critical theory itself (in defining the totality of new
revolutionary conditions) while retracting the total spirit of
specificity from the most important organizational crossings. They have
risen by neglecting the painful forest of subjective facts which made up
the tortuous identity of the S.I. Accordingly, they were at last able to
materialize their apparent critical force in the exterior exactly when
the true practical basis of the organization i.e. the near totality of
its members, had fallen, patently, irrevocably and incontrovertibly.
Judging this subjectively, Debord and Sanguinetti have fallen at the
moment they arose, or put another way, they will never be able to rise
again until the S.I. has also fallen for them. They have not inherited
the S.I. by virtue of their place in time or their critical
reformulation of its specificity, its poetry and dialectic. They have
only inherited its contemplation.
The essential fault contained in the above tendency consists of the
pretentious assertion of its own historical salvation of the S.I. from
the clutches of ideological degradation. Debord and Sanguinetti have
broken at best with an inert common activity which lost hold even of its
theoretical pre-requisites for creative participation, by default of
locating and enriching new practical terrain. But according to their own
conservative self-justification, they are even further away from this
terrain whose leading part can be replaced by no second. It is not
situationist theory itself which has been in crisis (as perspective for
the negation of all existing conditions by the producers becoming
creators) so much as the method of its organization.
If the âReal Break...â bears an ideology of partial truth anywhere, it
is exactly within those pages which deal with the given organizational
period of the S.I. between 1969 and 1971, where they exert a pure
synchronic portrayal of past expulsions, ultimatums, resignations and
breaks. These pages betray the traditional precision and completeness of
organizational reports, as the double of the organization itself in its
last phase. The incidental specificity is absent exactly because their
recuperation of the S.I. mitigates against specificity at the moment of
total loss and the virtual loss of the totality of its members. In this
way Debord and Sanguinetti did not become some political bureaucrats but
some bureaucratic idealists. Suffice to say that an international
association of revolutionaries has become mythical once it is sustained
by two or perhaps three of its original members.
Debord and Sanguinetti fail to tell the whole truth about the actual
regressions which developed in these years. The intersubjective
difficulties that evolved through this period corresponded first of all
to an enlarged terrain of possible practice, no longer confined to four
or five invaluable critics in Paris but joined by a considerable number
of young agitators. The subsequent failure to continue the coherence of
its critique equally and democratically among all the new participants
was reciprocal with its inability to supersede a purely theoretical
activity according to a superior experimental practice, more constant,
more specific in what it communicated and even more daring. Secondarily,
they forget to mention the real course of this internal breakdown, the
most false, the most true and the most irreconcilable moments which
occurred in the very deployment of extreme organizational modalities
against this deterioration. They say nothing minimally about a certain
spirit of indulgence and even exuberance which developed within the
sphere of exclusions and reciprocally the crude opposition at the least
to this indulgence.
Supposing that the extreme personality attacks waged by Debord and
Sanguinetti intend to spit on prehistory, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, model
adolescent throughout the greater part of the former crisis, must be
choking on his own saliva. Meticulously bypassing this aspect of the
past, he can join in a chorus of venomous denunciations, with the
highest sociological rejection of this foreign virus: Situationism.
Similarly, one may find the institutional presence of J.V. Martin after
a decade of virtual qualitative inertia. and essentially because he
risked almost nothing new, even the suppression of his geographic
isolation. Thus, the false moment of the subjective critique is
concentrated in the very account of this tendency i.e. the petty history
of exponential expulsions, in which each succeeding case worsens until
the very last, Rene Riesel, half a step away from their own toybox, and
after some fifteen -different departures. As for Guy Debord, his central
part in this historical parody revolves around the contradiction between
the course of his critical positions asserted during the real time of
the S.I. and the practical conclusions which were drawn by him in the
end. Without wanting to ignore the obvious stature and excellence of Guy
Debord over a period of many years (which were the most crucial for the
S.I. in many ways), he must be reproached for a certain myopia. In the
âApril Thesesâ of 1968, Debord introduced the first extreme moment of
negative self-recognition and transcendence when he wrote as follows,
âThe S.I. must now prove its effectiveness in a future stage of
revolutionary activity--or disappear.â No less right was he to stress
the intensity of this advance as âquickly increasing our possibilities
of interventionâ. By July, 1970, he was obliged to depict the new
inter-personal crisis which was stigmatizing this advance of the S.I.
with equal truth. âBetween the rupture and contentment in principle, it
seems that there has been no place for the real critiqueâ. In a matter
of days, Debord was again the first to attack a sort of
âpseudo-radicalism which manifests itself in an extremism of personal
eliminationâ, as evidenced in an internal conflict which had developed
in Italy. Thus, Debordâs position had slowly modified its original
dramatic extremes as this pseudo- radicalism fatally evolved while
forgetting that it was he himself who had Inaugurated the necessity of
progress through virtual ultimatum, seconded after the Eighth Conference
of the S.I., in âas many exclusions as necessaryâ in order to locate an
effective activity. While having resigned from the editorial committee,
in order to protest the inordinate responsibilities imposed on him
within the French section by all the other Parisian Situationists in
their languor or at the least in the weakening of their traditional
excellence (as the Parisian section in turn had complained at times of
the central role imposed on them by the âinfantalismâ of other
sections). Debord continued to defend the basic truth of these
expulsions late in the pileup, and despite this pseudo-radicalism, with
the ghost of a âweâ. He ends in a vain rush to conserve the S.I. by
retracting its practical goal. Today the assertive renunciation of
practical agitation, even to encounter proletarian practice (as so
flagrantly documented in âA Propos of Vaneigemâ), founds the
pseudo-critique of Situationism. Situationism in turn can renounce
everything, wavering between a pure critical orientation deprived of
organization and subjectivist metaphysics which goes so far as to
abandon its proletarian foundation. Looking back, the S.I. did only have
inequalities in the beginning, but it was hierarchical in the end.
The time of Situationism had become the time of the S.I. as a whole.
People there were reluctant to attain certain critical faculties of
others while others guarded their basic contentment with a common
theoretical orientation for the group. In this condition, the S.I. could
not approach a concrete recognition of itself as a whole, a real
appraisal of its immediate and previous capacities, what it still was
and equally what it had to become. It even lacked the awareness of its
given marginality due to the vanities, reservations and even fears that
are connected with the malaise of these twins, resignation and
minimalism. Accordingly, the abstract state of the S.I. tended to
increase with the verbal radicalization of its intentions, namely, âto
be more than a group of theoreticiansâ. Failing to define the authentic
terrain of participation, the subsequent breakdown of individual after
individual involved almost no historical substance, universal content or
direct practical alternatives. Pretending all the while that its
internal struggles were already on the terrain of practical preparation,
the S.I. became more and more isolated from direct historical
intervention, in a time reduced to organization theory for its own sake.
The old disciplinary modalities of the S.I. and its extended goal worked
against each other in the abstract, in the precipitous clash of various
internal relations struggling to realize âthe new form of human
relationsâ, apart from uninterrupted external resistance. One can say
with accuracy that the greater number of internal quarrels had emerged
through each succeeding pause in this very resistance. It was on this
terrain tied to the idea more than the practice of uncompromised
extremism that participants were in some way apt to go or to have others
go.
Situationism was allowed to develop through the prolonged theoretical
function of the S.I. Today, the example of the S.I., an internal
organizational rapture without positive synthesis, will serve to clarify
the hegelian conception which idealizes this rupture exactly because it
is a dialectic of return.
In the new moment of anti-hierarchical groups, the nightmare of social
alienation can never be dealt with in the same way without predicting
possible evolutions and planning to avoid them on the spot. The full
personal critique should be more and more customary at the earliest time
without the presence either of restraint or immanent rupture. At the
least, the mechanism of breaks must apply more and more specifically to
forewarned failure that contradicts the subversive progress which exists
in general, inverting the self-fissiparous nature of expulsion which
persisted between 1969 and 1971. Surely, exclusions have not been the
source but the product of our real problems. They are no problem for us
as long as they serve as real means which uncover each alienated
interference at its roots. But they can no longer be the parochial means
for resolving common inactivity, emerging From a generalized ultimatum
with its utilitarian necessity. These years in question exhibited the
opposite result, more silence and inertia, rising on the terrain of
glorified behaviorist judgment. With the profound diffusion of
negativity in the present world, the unity founded on the break with
alienated relations will reveal itself among autonomous revolutionary
groups themselves, among those whose practical opposition has become
their real life. With each new day, an increasing refusal of proletarian
conditions will leave them more and more harmonious among themselves.
The breakdown of the situationist milieu has left its mark on present
history as time lost for the revolutionary movement itself. This
occurred exactly at the moment when the S.I. had to release the total
use for its ideas as situated material power, in articulating the
restive expanse of working life within reach of the workers themselves.
In its abstract urgency, the S.I. retreated from the dialectical method
with the easy intellectual expectations of its immanent revolutionary
conclusion. Having drawn the historical goal of life from the total
critique of advanced capitalism, and essentially from the new class
struggles which form the central product of its extended alienation, the
Situationists tended to withdraw from the subjective pass in their
international development. They lost sight of the life present in the
class struggle, and accordingly the opportune necessity of an
intensified exemplary activity of their own, because they had lost sight
of their own concrete existence i.e. what was new and therefore
revolutionary about their own contradictions. To this day, the
international proletarian assault verifies itself through its own
objective practice, revealing the historical truth of its being exactly
at the moment of raw intervention, without plan and without visible
title, without an explicit knowledge of its own history and its own
theory which is the recognition of itself as a class. The present state
of the real movement tends to indicate the likelihood of the
popularization of situationist theory in a matter of years and perhaps
even months according to its own mounting suppression of existing
conditions. While this popularization will never arrive at one stroke,
it is even more true that situationist theory will belong to the masses
alone when the masses have subjected that theory to their own experience
and transformed it like any other productive force. In reality, the
presence of situationist theory in the masses will be identical with the
autonomous formation of workers councils and thus the beginning of the
revolution.
The revolutionary critique of our time is just starting to really enter
the search for its practical terrain more than this terrain itself; as
struggle, in other words, for its universal situation parallel to the
universal situation which is struggling to know. To the contrary, Debord
and Sanguinetti present an image of critical retirement, gazing at the
wonders of the modern class struggle instead of registering their
membership in the immediate struggle to conclude it once and for all.
While yielding more systematic structure to situationist theory in its
very relativity, they have released the mythical portrait of its
relative presence on working terrain. No one can hide their eyes any
longer from the central fact that revolutionary theory has been an
exterior truth to the extent that it has been communicated at the actual
margins of everyday life. It requires no great wisdom to see that the
medium of disalienated publicity is crucial (noting that the truth does
not guarantee its utility of itself); that its invention and combat
require theory and practice equally; the vastest struggle against the
ruling spectacle which has censored and fragmented the proletarian
opposition at its base. There is a line from an old and no less harmless
film which aptly characterizes the urgency of this immense task. âYou
canât but you will.â Today, itâs not that the Situationists have to face
the task of regroupment as much as they have to regroup for the above
task.
Situationism belongs, for the most part, to the student in his romance
with revolutionary extremism, that prestigious commodity which serves to
decorate the poverty of his life and equally his complicity with the old
world. The pro-situationist represents the proletarian ass backwards. He
is simply postponing his descent toward the spectacular alienation of
the cadre in the same period that the proletarian is Found fluctuating
in his departure from private life. All the same, Situationism is more
diverse in its social origins, having contained a proletarian side which
corresponds to an intermediary phase of the international class
struggle, as a bitter incapacity to live through and understand this
phase whose sudden advances now occur to its surprise and equally its
shame. In so far as the class struggle has arrived at higher forms of
tension, history itself starts to obliterate this dependent. The social
problems of the proletariat, which are the problems no doubt of the
conscious individual, have reached a breaking-point before its very
eyes. Thus, the proletarian side of Situationism corresponds, not to the
moment when the proletariat is absent from its struggle, but when the
situationist is absent from theory. When all of the strata which
supported Situationism (including the high bourgeoisie as well as the
classical lumpen proletariat) had lived this absence, the global
proletariat was sustaining the accelerated collective moment of its
history in which everything, even its burning deficiencies, became
concrete. Today, it welcomes its crisis, a crisis in which it comes to
know its true antagonists and refuses any thought other than the stakes
of its own life and their improvement. Rather than daydreaming any
longer in the delirious images of the reigning spectacle, each and every
one of its public gestures smashes their repressive mode of
conditioning. It is on the attack, and perhaps for the first time, it
can really speak about itself. While the existing proletariat is far
from suppressing the totality of determinants which underlie the
Reichean critique of character-in-revolt, the terms of its sovereignty
already exceed the Reichean situation. Accompanying the transition from
isolated to collective proletarian terrain (in a word, the reawakening
of the unitary social critique), Reichean theory tends to lose the
necessity for its categorical identity in the enrichment of life. In a
similar way, the more localized critique of Situationism will not
withstand the contemplative deficiency which is at the origin of its
attack unless it takes form as a passingâ critique and equally a
critique which passes. For this critique really manifested an infantile
moment in general within the new course of the international
revolutionary movement. Beyond Situationism, the workers are coming to
master the situation through the irreversible consequences of their own
action, and as a consequence, with a clearer anticipation of the
subjective-objective limits in which they must inaugurate a new society
antagonistic to alienation.
Debord and Sanguinetti have taken the liberty to contradict themselves
with ease when they define the future possibility or impossibility of
various Situationists who had known a failure within the S.I. equal in
its specificity to the S.I. itself. Their trans-historical judgment had
never been a practice of the S.I. in its real days. Their judgment could
appear exactly because the reality of the S.I. no longer existed.
Of the numerous oppositions which have emerged outside the domain of the
S.I. against Debord and Sanguinetti, the polemic composed by Jimmy
Lallement is among the most honest and least intellectualized. This
comrade has not extended a critique of the practical subjective
breakdown to the whole of the S.I. but the entire revolutionary movement
of the recent past whose troubles and setbacks were everywhere. And he
maintains the same practical concern in delimiting the self-critical
function attached to the revival of Reichean methods, their value and
necessity when deployed from an active position of strength. Despite
these virtues, there is still a shortcoming present in his âGazette 3â:
on the one hand, while searching for âthe general deficiencyâ witnessed
in the S.I., he still believes like Debord and Sanguinetti that the
âS.I. has not failedâ; on the other hand, like in many other polemics,
he exaggerates the importance of ridding the proletarian movement of a
generic situationist reduction without really questioning the idealistic
projection of a few Situationists who sustained their presence as the
S.I. and the consciousness of the proletariat as Situationist. The more
precise examination of the subjective stature of the existing
proletariat is overlooked (the very objective condition for fresh
critical intervention), an attribute which is already fundamental to the
situationist perspectives with the double specificity which they impart
to the historical encounter; an encounter which is equally their own.
The appearance of Diversion did not bear the intention of either
reviving a situationist theory or getting rid of one. It was simply
preoccupied with the real use for this theory in locating the route of
revolutionary praxis, the noose of unified opposition which tightens
around the neck of the old world as words and deeds become one. The new
anti-hierarchical groups which emerge today must be like a factory of
everyday life in which a half dozen or dozen rebels unite in order to
make the pressure of their critique rise throughout the world. Nothing
less will satisfy them than being fully satisfied with themselves.
Jon Horelick
DIVERSION P.O.B. 321 542 ATLANTIC AVENUE BROOKLYN, NEW YORK,
Compliments of some typesetters who diverted the use of their machines.