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Title: The state and counter-revolution
Author: Negation
Date: 1972
Language: en
Topics: the state, Counterrevolution, USSR, China, Vietnam, Hungary, state socialism, anti-Bolshevism, Leninism, New Left
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/state-and-counter-revolution-negation

Negation

The state and counter-revolution

They confront the fact that state-capitalism, the state-management of

production and society, the rule over society by the class of the state,

the bureaucracy, is still almost universally confused with “communism”

as Marx defined it, due in part to the conspiracy of silence and

distortion which unites the capitalists of both “East” and “West”.

Focusing our critique on the ‘New’ Left may appear to be beating a dead

horse. But it seems as if the necrophilial zombies of the movement

“vanguard”, in their pathetic enthusiasm to embrace every post-mortal

spasm of Bolshevik false consciousness, are still pumping their blood

into its putrescent carcass. An autopsy of this movement, a movement

that bills itself as revolutionary, cannot be understood without a

critical dissection of those collectivist bureaucracies it also presents

as revolutionary.

It is admitting nothing to admit Russia as an example of revolutionary

failure. The reality of bureaucratic counter-revolution has not been

grasped until China, Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, Algeria, etc. are

included as well. It is not enough to make vague criticisms of these

states; pointing to special local conditions, the peculiarities of

particular personalities in the leadership, or local “culture” as the

root of the problem. This kind of empiricism and eclecticism leaves

everything open for a repetition of those failures here, because it

blinds us to the deeper and systematic sources of that new form of class

society which disguises itself as “socialism”. It is only when the

phenomenon of state-capitalism is grasped in its totality and therefore

in its unity, that any coherence is attained.

I

State-capitalism, the state-management of production and society, the

rule over society by the class of the state, the bureaucracy, is still

almost universally confused with “communism” as Marx defined it, due in

part to the conspiracy of silence and distortion which unites the

capitalists of both “East” and “West”.

The dominant social relation of production in the so-called “socialist”

societies is still the capital-relation, i.e., the alienation or sale of

labour-power, the selling of daily life-time to capital. That this daily

life-time is sold in one place to competing private fragments of

capital, in another place to unified state capital, does not change the

essential relationship. The producers in either case sell away the use

(-value) of their daily lives, and thereby forfeit all control over the

world which they produce. They thus produce an alien world. That is, the

producers are still, in both places, proletarians, and wherever the

proletariat is, there is capital.

II

Despite their superficial divergences the ruling ideologists of these

countries all share what has been the common assumption of every ruling

class in history: that there must always be a separation between those

who lead and those who are led. They all began with and found their

justification in the Bolshevik model of state-capitalism. In the attempt

to “abolish classes” by the authoritarian use of state-power, the

Bolsheviks reconstituted a dominant bureaucratic class, headed by the

top executives of the “communist” parties of those respective countries.

Such a model contained at its source an unconscious

counter-revolutionary reversal, since as the representatives of the

workers, the party and its state became their new proprietors. In order

to consolidate their power, these new rulers actually had to oppose the

emancipation of the proletariat. Such was the case in Russia in 1921

where the communist workers of Kronstadt, who rebelled against the

domination of the party, were bombed, machine-gunned, and finally

massacred on the direct orders of Lenin and Trotsky.

It may be of interest to hear what Trotsky, professed today by YSA’s

militant evangelists as the libertarian disciple of Bolshevism, had to

say about workers’ democracy: “They (the Workers’ Opposition) have

placed the workers’ right to elect representatives above the party. As

if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that

dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of workers’

democracy....” The “Revolutionary historical birthright of the party”

obliges it “to maintain its dictatorship... regardless of the temporary

vacillations even in the working class,” and “does not base itself at

every given moment on the formal principles of workers’ democracy”.

III

But the incendiary spirit of authentic revolt could not be extinguished.

It rose again in Spain in July of 1936 to reassert the unfulfilled

promise of the revolutionary project. During the civil war, which was

initiated by the Fascists after the assumption of power by the liberal

Republican government, factories were seized, and worker’s councils made

their appearance in Catalonia. In federation with each other, they

self-managed and began the reorganization of production and

distribution. They took preliminary steps toward the abolition of the

money-wage. Peasant communes collectivized the lands. This social

revolution was, from its very inception, opposed by the Republican

government and its Stalinist ministers, who denied raw materials to

factories under councilist self-management and withheld arms from the

anarchist militia at the Aragon front. This revolution was not defeated

by the guns of Franco, but through the treachery of the bourgeois

government, its Stalinist agents, and the failure of the workers’ and

peasants’ councils to demand that their democratic federation be the

absolute power in anti-Fascist Spain, rather than accept any dualism

with the State. However, the Spanish experience represents “the most

advanced foreshadowing in all time of a proletarian power”, and one

which thrived for over a year until repressed by the violence of the

“left-wing” State.

IV

Proletarian revolution broke out again in Hungary in 1956. The insurgent

workers of Budapest generated what became a national demand for the end

of the party dictatorship and bureaucratic nationalization. They

constituted workers’ councils in factories and called for workers’

management of the economy. This short-lived period, when workers’

councils in power ran the entire country, and organized both the

continuance of production and the armed defense of the revolution, saw

its defeat in the ruthless repression by the Russian Army, in which

every major city was pounded with artillery, and invaded by tanks. These

bureaucrats knew they were fighting a whole society that was seeking to

free itself.

But the overwhelming effect of the Russian invasion tends to obscure an

internal source of the Hungarian failure: in the false consciousness of

the workers themselves. Rather than calling for the abolition of the

state, and for the undisputed power of the workers’ councils, they

demanded merely a “better” state under Nagy, with the workers’ councils

as a secondary power. They sacrificed, to the trappings of nationalism,

the possibilities of their movement spreading beyond the national

boundaries of Hungary (which might have saved them). “The tradition of

the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the

living.” (Karl Marx)

It might be instructive to note what Mao Tse Tung, the present

ideological superstar of the New Old Left, had to say about this further

attempt to resume the authentic revolutionary movement: “As I have said,

in our society, it is bad when groups of people make disturbances, and

we do not approve of it. But when disturbances do occur, they force us

to learn lessons... It is clear to everybody that the Hungarian events

were not a good thing. But they too had a dual character. Because our

Hungarian comrades [i.e., the Russians] took proper action in the course

of these events, what was a bad thing turned ultimately into a good

thing. The Hungarian state is now more firmly established than ever, and

all other countries in the socialist camp have also learned a lesson.”

V

Large factions of the New Left are still enthralled by the spectacle of

the “Cultural Revolution” in China. They have been fooled into believing

that this conflict of the bureaucratic ruling class with itself

constitutes some kind of genuine revolution. They should have noticed

that every time the real class struggle — the struggle between the

proletariat and the bureaucracy (both factions) — raised its head, the

Army was hastily brought in.

In the capitalist society of the United States, the “Democratic” and

“Republican” parties are but the two major factions — respectively the

left and right wings — of a single ruling capitalist party and class, in

whose minor conflicts and rivalries the masses are allowed to

participate. Similarly, the “Cultural Revolution” in China is the result

of a split in the dominant bureaucratic party (the “Communist” Party)

and class. Here the masses involvement served once again as an

instrument of ruling class politics.

A real revolution would have meant fundamental changes in the social

relations of production. In response to this statement, our native

Mao-mongers point to the formation of the “Revolutionary Three-In-One

Committees” in China. These Committees, presented by the Mao faction of

the Chinese bureaucracy as a radically new form of management coming out

of its “Cultural Revolution” are, even formally, merely another mode of

state management in which a member of the Party local cadre and a member

of the local unit of the Army — two representatives of the state —

hand-pick a third from among the ranks of the local workers in a

factory. Thus, on formal grounds alone, this organ is an utter fraud as

a form of workers’ management since it is not only the state which

decides in any crucial case, but in every case. The “Revolutionary

Three-In-One Committee” is, on the face of it, only a special form of

bureaucratic management designed to mystify the real relation of

state/class rule. It allows the workers the illusion of participation in

management, whereas actually, they are only agents in their own

alienation to the state.

The pattern of this pseudo-revolution was little different from that of

normal alienated daily life: from producing surplus-value for a unified

ruling bureaucracy, the proletarian masses were turned to performing

political surplus-labour for rival factions of a rent bureaucratic

ruling class.

VI

On November 2, 1956, at exactly the same time that Soviet tanks were

rumbling through the streets of Budapest, the Ho Chi Minh government

faced its most important uprising of dissatisfied peasants. Ho reacted

to the rebellion with eminently practical measures. Hanoi, acting as any

colonial power would have done, sent their 325^(th) division to crush

the rebels. Bureaucrats are the same the world over.

The Viet Minh always was a good Stalinist organization. This explains

their liquidation of any self-governing organs of popular

administration, as well as the systematic assassination of revolutionary

militants not affiliated with the Viet Minh. Such was the case in the

autonomous workers’ insurrection in Saigon in 1945. In August of that

year the rebel workers of Tramway Company who took over and managed the

enterprise themselves were denounced as traitors and reactionaries when

they refused representation by the Viet Minh. Despite this attempt at

bureaucratic manipulation the workers organized themselves into a

proletarian militia to fight the French. Meanwhile, the local Stalinists

were far more concerned with arresting and shooting their revolutionary

critics than with pursuing any struggle against the French imperialists.

In the same month Ta Tu Thau, a popular local insurgent, was arrested

for his encouragement of workers’ and peasants’ councils in place of

Viet Minh rule. He was “tried” before “peoples’ committees” and three

times declared innocent. As there was little point in arranging a fourth

trial, he was shot a few days after his third acquittal.

One fact emerges from any critical look at Vietnamese history: that what

happens in Vietnam is mostly determined in Moscow, Peking, and

Washington. The New Left’s fetishization of Vietnam blinds it to what

lies behind the fallacy that the Vietnamese struggle is self-determined:

the external manipulation of the war from Washington, Moscow, and Peking

through their decisive military and economic support.

A more basic point is the similarity in the social structure of the

three world powers that have dominated (prevented) the historical

development within Vietnam, a similarity not only to each other’s but to

that of the Vietnams as well. All five are class societies in which

there is a class that manages and a class that obeys. Each of these

systems is based on the accumulation of capital. Workers in all those

societies are wage-labourers (in South Vietnam increasingly so due to

forced urbanization) who have no control over the use of their lives.

That Vietnam, both North and South, China, Russia, as well as America

are all capitalist should by now surely escape no one.

VII

The mass movements occurring in these countries were, in fact, social

revolutions in the exact sense that they overturned the old social

relations and established new ones. But the content of these revolutions

was not and could not have been communist society, communist social

relations. On the contrary, their real content was economic development:

specifically, a certain form of capitalist development; state-capitalist

development. The new social relations they established were

capital-relations, specifically, the relation of state capital. Thus

they were revolutions, but not communist revolutions. Rather, they were

substitutes for, or variants of, the classical bourgeois revolutions

(such as occurred in England in the 1660’s and France in the late

1700’s) in late-to-capitalize societies for whom the strength of

already-developed foreign capital (English, French, etc.) had forever

closed the classical capitalist road.

These revolutions certainly contained proletarian elements. This was

true especially in their early phases due to the premature strength of

the wage-labouring class in these societies (a strength not based on

their internal development, but on external stimulation due to the

penetration of advanced foreign capital). For this reason, the

consolidation of bureaucratic rule can be seen as a counter-revolution

to these proletarian tendencies.

VIII

The relationship between North Vietnamese state-capitalism and the

state-capitalist movement here at home is only the clearest and most

present-to-mind example of the general connection between world

pseudo-socialism and the pseudo-socialist movement in the U.S.

The so-called “revolutionary movement” here has never detached itself

from the goal of “socialism” — i.e., state-capitalism — (with the

exception of the anarchists, who detach themselves from everything), and

its organizations reproduce within themselves the bureaucratic relations

and practices which already form the embryo of state-capitalism before

their would-be assumption of totalitarian power.

It is true that the present “movement” is the U. S. has been generated

largely by the protest against the Indochina war. This does not mean,

however, that no movement would have developed without it; in fact, the

preoccupation with Vietnam has distorted and deflected the emergence of

a real revolutionary movement here.

For examples of autonomous revolutionary activity that required no

external stimulation, we need only look to France in 1968 or Hungary in

1956 where people rebelled against their own impoverished existence and

the domination of their local masters.

In this country energy has been bled away from any genuine rebellion by

the priests of the new left who have given new life to the still-born

christianisms of duty, sacrifice, and martyrdom. In order to expiate

their own bourgeois guilt, the cretinous “serve the people” cult became

the new movement peace corps, whose Holy Crusade was dedicated to

bringing the “good life” of commodity fetishism to the domestic Third

World. This ideological Easter has also resurrected other symbolic acts

of devotion: rallies, peace marches, and vigils.

It may be that the mini-spectacle of demonstrations has hastened the

victory of North Vietnamese state-capitalism. And we would even grant

that the NLF bureaucrats are preferable to the parasites in Saigon, if

it were useful to make such a distinction. But this would only be

because the bureaucracy would foster an economic development which

would, inadvertently, lead to its own negation, to the possibility of a

total revolution and the end of this class as the new proprietor of the

Vietnamese.

On the contrary, had these great energies been successfully invested in

the production of our own revolution instead of into the social

quicksand of symbolic protest, the Vietnamese would have been liberated

in the process of liberating ourselves from the organization of “life”

that daily reproduces imperialism, domestic as well as foreign.

The global wealth locked up here, in the artificial enforcement of

scarcity, must be freed to eliminate the material poverty that has

always been the breeding ground of class society. Our own revolution

alone will strike the death blow to the administrators of our common

colonization. The ideology of anti-imperialism makes but a partial

critique of imperialism by seizing only upon one of its fragments,

failing to recognize the colonization of everyday life by capital the

world over; the most significant colony of the U.S. being the U.S.

itself.

IX

The ideologies of the various militant sects of the new left in every

way mimic those of the pseudo-socialist bureaucracies already in power.

Blind worship of Third World governments has led to the complete

ossification of what was once revolutionary theory. Marxism, beginning

as a revolutionary critique of all ideology, was recuperated to become

the ideology of a bureaucratic ruling class, and is used by the various

“communist” parties as a truncheon to beat back those persistent

dialecticians who dare to question the power of the state.

At the base of movement catechism is a facile analysis of capitalism.

Capitalism, for these advocates of partial solutions, consists of the

sum of its fragments: racism, sexism, imperialism — thus being defined

only by its most obvious excesses. Being preoccupied with the curable

side-effects of the market, our faithful guardians of revolutionary

incoherence leave uncriticized the most basic foundation of bourgeois

society: alienated (sold) labour and the universal power of the product

that dominates its producers and consumers: the commodity.

In the developing state-capitalist economies not only has the commodity

failed to disappear but has, in fact, never wavered from its traditional

role as the dictator over all social life. In these countries social

goods are produced by wage-labourers and are appropriated by the

bureaucracy (in the name of “the people”). These objects in turn are

bought back by the class that produced them, who in order to pay for

commodities must reduce themselves to a commodity, to be bought by and

sold to the state. (And, as in Western countries, the exquisite moments

of pilfery and theft provide a primitive point of departure for the

first real negation of commodity domination. Everywhere, the refusal to

pay is the refusal of sacrifice.)

Third-Worldism, the ideology that enables an impotent movement to

sustain itself on the vicarious satisfaction it gets from the struggles

of burgeoning bureaucracies elsewhere, is profoundly ignorant of one of

Marx’ most important insights: that a communist revolution is not merely

a revolt against misery, but an upheaval that generates and sustains a

new set of social relations; a classless society. Installing the new

class of the state, the state-bourgeoisie, the anti-colonial coups of

China, North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and Algeria reproduced once

again that infamous historical separation between those who rule and

those who are ruled.

The decrepit reformists of New American Movement would still have us

believe that revolution is primarily about welfare, ecology, and

national health insurance. They only reflect, however, what is the

generalized mode of recuperation (the deflection into partial solutions)

of any articulated defiance. The spectacle of opposition offers up for

our passive consumption a whole assortment of false conflicts, whereby

the primary contradiction in the world is seen not between capital and

labour but between men and women; good leaders and bad leaders; “groovy”

capitalists and “pig” capitalists; oppressive laws and liberal laws; the

Viet Cong and American Imperialism. From the point of view of Power it

is important for everyone to take a stand on each separate issue in

order to forget about the totality.

X

The Spectacle is the organization of appearances made possible through

modern means of communication. The facility with which images can be

detached and alienated from their sources, and reorganized for

re-presentation in accord with the ideology of power, forms the

technical basis of the unprecedented amplitude of the modern spectacle,

where “everything that was once directly lived has moved into its

representation.”

The organization of spectacular activity is the organization of real

social passivity — the grouping of human beings as spectators around the

unilateral reception of the images of their own alienated life. The

spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among

people mediated by images. If capital is the dominant social relation of

production, the spectacle is that social relation as a social relation

of communication. That is, the spectacle is capital to such a degree of

accumulation that it becomes an image, i.e., becomes visible. Since the

present social world is nothing other than capital in its concentrated

self-deployment, the spectacle is capital creating a world in its own

image. Capital is the material God, and the spectacle is religion

materialized.

All opposition to the spectacle is absorbed and re-presented as the

image of opposition. The various actors in this arena of false conflicts

— politicians and political parties — attempt to dissimulate the real

conflict which is with Power itself. And, as the pitiful sideshow of

this spectacular conflict, there is the court jester of Capital, the New

Left. This counter-spectacle of false opposition has become a necessary

part of the reproduction process of the spectacle. It forms a vital

feedback loop which locates for the spectacle trouble-spots within its

domain which require modernization, and thus, decompression. It is a

safety-valve. on the pressure-cooker of capital’s contradictions,

alerting Power to its particular excesses without ever challenging Power

itself, that is, Power in general.

XI

In order not to limit our critique of various forms of false

consciousness to the sub-Leninist left, we must expose the vapidity of

other movements that have also portrayed themselves as opponents to

capitalist society, specifically the neolithic know-nothings of the

“counter-culture” and the underdeveloped proselytizers of present-day

(Bookchinist) anarchism.

It is difficult to make a unified critique of an ideology so chaotic, so

fragmented, so eclectic, and so incoherent as is anarchism. In that

sense the difficulty of making the critique of anarchism verifies our

critique of it. But this much can be said: the valid moments of

anarchism, revolutionary anti-statism, and emphasis on the individual,

can have no quarrel with our perspective: revolutionary (communist)

egoism, the critique of state-capitalism, and the strategy of the

workers’ councils, that is, of the anti-statist dictatorship of the

proletariat.

What we leave behind is what must be discarded — the incoherence, the

slobbering eclecticism, the philosophical idealism and moralism, the

mysticism, the thousand and one crochets and fetishes (to each anarchist

ideologue, his own). In separating ourselves from anarchism, we also

mean to separate ourselves from the movement critique of anarchism. What

the movement rejects in anarchism is precisely our only point of

convergence with it, namely its firm insistence, however abstract, on

the immediate negation of the state. The movement critique of anarchism

— insistence on the “necessity” of the “socialist” state — merely

parrots the ideological self-defense of the state-capitalist

bureaucracies.

As culture is the commodity that sells all the rest, the “counter”

culture is but a new market-place promoting the consumption of

alternative commodities: rock stars instead of politicians, bellbottoms

instead of Brooks Brothers’ suits, the Whole Earth Catalogue instead of

Sears Roebuck. Trumped-up and inflated like Sugar Pops, with all the

illusion of substance, “life-style,” the Spectacle’s “new-and-improved”

substitute for living, is pandered by the geriatric stockholders of this

cultural counter-revolution to those who despair about actually changing

life. Packaging alienation in psychedelic wrappings is, for the dominant

class, the final solution to the “youth problem.”

The only attempt of the counter-culture to separate itself from the

dominant society and economy takes the form of the “commune.”

Indeed, communist society means nothing other than the society of

communes, but this has nothing to do with the squalid pig-sties jammed

with speed-freaks, acid-heads, and Maoists that occupy the

politico-hippie ghettoes of Berkeley, or the impoverished rural

settlements of youthful escapists from the urban and suburban middle

class. The term “commune” rather defines the indistinction of rural from

urban in the commune as a settlement-formation, a type of settlement,

and the common ownership — or rather, the non-ownership — of the means

of their production by the residents of the commune.

XII

The content of the revolution that marks the beginning of communist

society can only be conceived of as the NEGATION of capital, the

abolition of the capital-relation, of alienated labour. [For anyone who

takes Marx’ critique of political economy seriously, capital is not an

object, but a social relation of production surrounding the (social) use

of objects. For example, the revolutionary seizure of capital in the

form of factories, etc. and their councilist self-management by the

workers renders them no longer capital, even though they consist of the

same physical objects as before.] It can only mean the storming of

capital from within, by the proletariat as incorporated within capital,

at the point of production. It must mean the establishment of a new

social relation of production in place of capital: workers’ management

of production, the power of the federated workers’ councils, or, in

Marx’ phrase, the control of the production of society by “the

associated producers” themselves, thereby no longer proletarians.

NOT the state-ownership of the means of production (state-capital), but

their social ownership or socialization through their appropriation by

society as a whole in the form of the association of producers, the

federated workers’ councils, marks the beginning of socialism. The

social revolution is nothing other than this act of appropriation of

capital by society, the seizure of factories and all social facilities

by their workers themselves, and their administration by the

society-wide federation of factory and community councils, and (later)

of councilist communes.

By the councils we mean the popular assemblies of factories,

communities, etc. which self-manage their oollective work and affairs,

and which federate with other councils for deliberations and execution

of all common activities by means of elected, strictly mandated,

periodically rotating, and immediately revocable delegates. Their task

is (l) the organization of production and distribution (no longer

accomplished through the exchange-relations known as commodity, money,

and capita!), (2) the organization for the armed defense of the new

social relations, and (3) the transformation of the entire structure and

deployment of the social world and of objective wealth as inherited from

capital. The councils are the social organs for the self-management of

society as a whole and for the transformation of daily life. As the

definitive end of separate power, they have as their maximum programme

the end of all other artificial separations imposed by the old world,

exposing the enforced dichotomy between work and play, art and everyday

life, imagination and reality — all the fallacious divisions that have

embalmed the free creative activity of men and women since the beginning

of prehistory.

The councils, never anticipated by any theoretician, emerged

historically as the spontaneous creation of the revolutionary

proletariat: in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917 as the” Soviets,” in

Germany and much of middle Europe after the First World War, and in

Spain in 1936 where workers’ self-management of factories and farms was

practiced for a substantial period. And we have already mentioned the

case of Hungary, where the workers’ councils effectively ran the country

and organized the armed defense until repressed from without by the

overwhelming force of “Soviet” imperialism.

The eruption of workers’ councils in France was only narrowly averted by

the best united efforts of the French “Communist” Party, trade union

bureaucracy, and bourgeois government, who saw in the threatened

abolition of power the common danger of their mutual demise, during the

nationwide general strike, and the factory and university occupations

which occurred in June of 1968.

XIII

In matters of revolutionary organization, we take as our starting point

the “Minimum Definition of Revolutionary Organizations” [1] of the

Situationist International [2] , as we do indeed seek “the international

realization of the absolute power of the workers’ councils.”

Beyond that, we maintain that the organizations which aim at the power

of the councils must be councilist in practice as well as in theory.

Practicing councilist democracy in their internal relations and in their

relations with one another, they sever themselves from all the gangrene

of the old Leninist ideology of hierarchical organization and party

vangardism, which still unites groups as “disparate” as the C.P. U.S.A.,

that palsied paragon of Stalinist orthodoxy, and the Third-Worldist

altar-boys of Venceremos.

The federation of councilist revolutionary organizations through their

mandated delegates forms a moment of the practical rehearsal of the

society of workers’ councils; of the necessary maturation of the praxis

of self-management.

By regarding themselves as essentially premature workers’ councils

engaged in the production of councilist revolution, they embody the

unity of councilist theory and practice, recognizing in selfmanagement

both the means and end of the struggle.

XIV

A few activities have been done locally that partially embodied the

critique presented here. The tactic of scandalizing false consciousness

in order to reveal it is one of the most potent of all in the primitive

stages of the authentic revolu tionary movemen t. In Berkeley, the

diversion of the Daily Cal by Point-Blank! and our distribution of the

fraudulent Warren Widener letters have demonstrated the possibilities of

this method. Also, secondarily, it momentarily captured for ourselves

the use of the media of the dominant spectacle, which disseminated a

critique of itself by reporting our activities.

Unlike these deliberate efforts, certain spontaneous acts have

manifested only a semi-conscious revolutionary content. The recent

widespread trashing of the local merchants of alienation expressed a

healthy disrespect for the commodity but because the rioters were mostly

unconscious of the radical nature of their own actions they could not

supercede them. The only hint of supercession came in the few instances

of limited but qualitative looting, the transition from mere abstract

destruction to appropriation. Although in such moments of play

individuals assert their human superiority over the dead things that

dominate them, this negation of commodity-capital is only a very shallow

beginning of the negation of capital, still very far from the point of

production.

The initial seizure of what became People’s Park contained an authentic

moment of revolutionary expropriation and of self-management but soon

became recuperated into a “therapeutic” gardening project. The

short-sighted militants, who might have otherwise generalized their

action and spread the logic of expropriation one step further, i.e., to

the looting of local supermarkets and the free distribution of food,

etc., instead dutifully watered with partial solutions the compost heap

of aborted struggles from which grew, once again, the ideology of

reformism and, simultaneously, the renewed strength of the Spectacle.

It is no wonder that the police and university authorities have done

nothing to take back the park, which, by now, has become just another

junkie-infested rat-hole amid the shoddy commodity wasteland of

Berkeley’s hip petty-bourgeoisie.

---

We don’t offer this perspective as mere “ideas”, as just one more

contemplative interpretation of the world. Our desire is to change it.

Ideas are alienated desire. What is deemed impossible in the world of

humans is surrendered to the world of ideals, where thought is reified.

Philosophy is only the historical accumulation of aborted, unlived

desire, the sublimating religion of impotent intellectuals.

The saturation of daily life by the logic of the commodity has made

everyone’s consciousness occupied territory. The global nature of

capitalist social relations has become a false backdrop that surrounds

all vision and blinds everyone to its existence. It is all one can see

and therefore cannot be seen at all.

It is the task of revolutionaries to create situations that pierce this

illusory boundary and reveal the possibility of a new, selfmanaged world

built according to the untrammeled desire of those who create it.

lt is only when we seize the consciousness of the totality that we can

seize the material totality. All ideals and causes are ideologies. We as

revolutionaries are concerned only with desires and the strategy and

tactics necessary to realize them.

[1] Available through us.

[2] The S.I. no longer exists as an international revolutionary

organization. However, its theoretical contribution has formed, for us,

part of the essential background of our own theoretical perspective.