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Title: Armed Joy
Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno
Date: 1977
Language: en
Topics: anti-work, critique, insurrectionist
Source: Retrieved on April 8, 2009 from https://www.alphabetthreat.co.uk/elephanteditions/pdf/armedjoy.pdf
Notes: Translated by Jean Weir. Original title “La gioia armata” 1977 Edizioni Anarchismo, Catania. 1998 Elephant Editions, London. Elephant Editions, B.M. Elephant, London WC1N 3XX

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Armed Joy

Introduction

This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary

struggles that were taking place in Italy at the time, and that

situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when

reading it today.

The revolutionary movement, including the anarchist one, was in a

developing phase and anything seemed possible, even a generalisation of

the armed clash.

But it was necessary to protect oneself from the danger of

specialisation and militarisation that a restricted minority of

militants intended to impose on the tens of thousands of comrades who

were struggling with every possible means against repression and against

the State’s attempt—rather weak to tell the truth—to reorganise the

management of capital.

That was the situation in Italy, but something similar was also

happening in Germany, France, Great Britain and elsewhere.

In Italy it seemed essential to prevent the many actions carried out

against the men and structures of power by comrades every day from being

drawn into the planned logic of an armed party such as the Red Brigades.

That is the spirit of this book. To show how a practice of liberation

and destruction can come forth from a joyful logic of struggle, not a

mortifying, schematic rigidity within the pre-established canons of a

directing group.

Some of these problems no longer exist. They have been solved by the

hard lessons of history. The collapse of real socialism suddenly

redimensioned the directing ambitions of the Marxists of every tendency

for good. On the other hand, it has not extinguished, but possibly

inflamed, the desire for freedom and anarchist communism that is

spreading everywhere, especially among the young generations, often

without having recourse to the traditional symbols of anarchism—its

slogans and theories also being seen with an understandable, but not

shareable, gut refusal to be infected with ideology.

This book has become topical again, but in a different way. Not as a

critique of a heavy monopolising structure that no longer exists, but

because it can point out the potent capabilities of the individual on

his or her road, with joy, to the destruction of all that oppresses and

regulates them.

Before ending I should mention that this book was ordered to be

destroyed in Italy. The Italian Supreme Court ordered it to be burned.

All the libraries that had a copy received a circular from the Home

Ministry ordering its incineration. More than one librarian refused to

burn the book, considering such a practice to be worthy of the Nazis or

the Inquisition, but by law the volume cannot be consulted. For the same

reason the book cannot be distributed legally in Italy and many comrades

had copies confiscated during the vast wave of raids carried out for

that purpose.

I was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for writing this book.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Catania, 14 July 1993

I

In Paris, 1848, the revolution was a holiday without a beginning or an

end.

Bakunin

Why on earth did these dear children shoot Montanelli in the legs?

Wouldn’t it have been better to have shot him in the mouth?

Of course it would. But it would also have been heavier. More vindictive

and sombre. To lame a beast like that can have a deeper, more meaningful

side to it that goes beyond revenge, beyond punishing him for his

responsibility—fascist journalist and bosses’ lackey that he is.

To lame him forces him to limp, makes him remember. Moreover, laming is

a more agreeable pastime than shooting in the mouth with pieces of brain

squirting out through the eyes.

The comrade who sets off in the fog every morning and walks into the

stifling atmosphere of the factory, or the office, only to see the same

faces: the foreman, the timekeeper, the spy of the moment, the

Stakhanovite-with-seven-children-to-support, feels the need for

revolution, the struggle and the physical clash, even a mortal one. But

he also wants to bring himself some joy now, right away. And he nurtures

this joy in his fantasies as he walks along head down in the fog, spends

hours on trains or trams, suffocates in the pointless goings on of the

office or amidst the useless bolts that serve to hold the useless

mechanisms of capital together.

Remunerated joy, weekends off or annual holidays paid by the boss is

like paying to make love. It seems the same but there is something

lacking.

Hundreds of theories pile up in books, pamphlets and revolutionary

papers. We must do this, do that, see things the way this one said or

that one said, because they are the true interpreters of the this or

that ones of the past, those in capital letters who fill up the stifling

volumes of the classics.

Even the need to keep them close at hand is all part of the liturgy. Not

to have them would be a bad sign, it would be suspect. It is useful to

keep them handy in any case. Being heavy they could always be thrown in

the face of some nuisance. Not a new, but nevertheless a healthy

confirmation of the validity of the revolutionary texts of the past (and

present).

There is never anything about joy in these tomes. The austerity of the

cloister has nothing to envy of the atmosphere one breathes in their

pages. Their authors, priests of the revolution of revenge and

punishment, pass their time weighing up blame and retribution.

Moreover, these vestals in jeans have taken a vow of chastity, so they

also expect and impose it. They want to be rewarded for their sacrifice.

First they abandoned the comfortable surroundings of their class of

origin, then they put their abilities at the disposal of the

disinherited. They have grown accustomed to using words that are not

their own and to putting up with dirty tablecloths and unmade beds. So,

one might listen to them at least.

They dream of orderly revolutions, neatly drawn up principles, anarchy

without turbulence. If things take a different turn they start screaming

provocation, yelling loud enough for the police to hear them.

Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event.

II

I call a cat a cat.

Boileau

We are all concerned with the revolutionary problem of how and what to

produce, but nobody points out that producing is a revolutionary

problem. If production is at the root of capitalist exploitation, to

change the mode of production would merely change the mode of

exploitation.

A cat, even if you paint it red, is still a cat.

The producer is sacred. Hands off! Sanctify his sacrifice in the name of

the revolution, and les jeux sont faits.

‘And what will we eat?’ concerned people will ask. ‘Bread and string,’

say the realists, with one eye on the pot and the other on their gun.

‘Ideas,’ the muddling idealists state, with one eye on the book of

dreams and the other on the human species.

Anyone who touches productivity has had it.

Capitalism and those fighting it sit alongside each other on the

producer’s corpse, but production must go on.

The critique of political economy is a rationalisation of the mode of

production with the least effort (by those who enjoy the benefits of it

all). Everyone else, those who suffer exploitation, must take care to

see that nothing is lacking. Otherwise, how would we live?

The son of darkness sees nothing when he comes out into the light, just

like when he was groping around in the dark. Joy blinds him. It kills

him. So he says it is a hallucination and condemns it.

The flabby fat bourgeois bask in opulent idleness. So, enjoyment is

sinful. That would mean sharing the same sensations as the bourgeoisie

and betraying those of the producing proletariat.

Not so. The bourgeois goes to great lengths to keep the process of

exploitation going. He is stressed too and never finds time for joy. His

cruises are occasions for new investments, his lovers fifth columns for

getting information on competitors.

The productivity god also kills its most faithful disciples. Wrench

their heads off, nothing but a deluge of rubbish will pour out.

The hungry wretch harbours feelings of revenge when he sees the rich

surrounded by their fawning entourage. The enemy must be destroyed

before anything else. But save the booty. Wealth must not be destroyed,

it must be used. It doesn’t matter what it is, what form it takes or

what prospects of employment it allows. What counts is grabbing it from

whoever is holding on to it at the time so that everyone has access to

it.

Everyone? Of course, everyone.

And how will that happen?

With revolutionary violence.

Good answer. But really, what will we do after we have cut off so many

heads we are bored with it? What will we do when there are no more

landlords to be found even if we go looking for them with lanterns?

Then it will be the reign of the revolution. To each according to their

needs, from each according to their possibilities.

Pay attention, comrade. There is a smell of bookkeeping here. We are

talking of consumption and production. Everything is still in the

dimension of productivity. Arithmetic makes you feel safe. Two and two

make four. Who would dispute this ‘truth’? Numbers rule the world. If

they have done till now, why shouldn’t they continue to?

We all need something solid and durable. Stones to build a wall to stem

the impulses that start choking us. We all need objectivity. The boss

swears by his wallet, the peasant by his spade, the revolutionary by his

gun. Let in a glimmer of criticism and the whole scaffolding will

collapse.

In its heavy objectivity, the everyday world conditions and reproduces

us. We are all children of daily banality. Even when we talk of ‘serious

things’ like revolution, our eyes are still glued to the calendar. The

boss fears the revolution because it would deprive him of his wealth,

the peasant will make it to get a piece of land, the revolutionary to

put his theory to the test.

If the problem is seen in these terms, there is no difference between

the wallet, land and revolutionary theory. These objects are all quite

imaginary, mere mirrors of human illusion.

Only the struggle is real.

It distinguishes boss from peasant and establishes the link between the

latter and the revolutionary.

The forms of organisation production takes are ideological vehicles to

conceal illusory individual identity. This identity is projected into

the illusory economic concept of value. A code establishes its

interpretation. The bosses control part of this code, as we see in

consumerism. The technology of psychological warfare and total

repression also gives its contribution to strengthening the idea that

one is human on condition that one produces.

Other parts of the code can be modified. They cannot undergo

revolutionary change but are simply adjusted from time to time. Think,

for example, of the mass consumerism that has taken the place of the

luxury consumerism of years gone by.

Then there are more refined forms such as the selfmanaged control of

production. Another component of the code of exploitation.

And so on. Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my

comrade. If they try to justify this with the excuse that someone must

‘produce’ otherwise we will all lose our identity as human beings and be

overcome by ‘wild, savage nature’, we reply that the man-nature

relationship is a product of the enlightened Marxist bourgeoisie. Why

did they want to turn a sword into a pitchfork? Why must man continually

strive to distinguish himself from nature?

III

Men, if they cannot attain what is necessary, tire themselves with that

which is useless.

Goethe

Man needs many things.

This statement is usually taken to mean that man has needs which he is

obliged to satisfy.

In this way people are transformed from historically determined units

into a duality (means and end simultaneously). They realise themselves

through the satisfaction of their needs (i.e. through work) so become

the instrument of their own realisation.

Anyone can see how much mythology is concealed in statements such as

this. If man distinguishes himself from nature through work, how can he

fulfil himself in the satisfaction of his needs? To do this he would

already have become ‘man’, so have fulfilled his needs, which means he

would not have to work.

Commodities have a profoundly symbolic content. They become a point of

reference, a unit of measure, an exchange value. The spectacle begins.

Roles are cast and reproduce themselves to infinity. The actors continue

to play their parts without any particular modifications.

The satisfaction of needs becomes no more than a reflex, marginal

effect. What matters is the transformation of people into ‘things’ and

everything else along with them. Nature becomes a ‘thing’. Used, it is

corrupted, and man’s vital instincts along with it. An abyss gapes open

between nature and man. It must be filled, and the expansion of the

commodity market is seeing to it. The spectacle is expanding to the

point of devouring itself along with its contradictions. Stage and

audience enter the same dimension, proposing themselves for a higher,

more far-reaching level of the same spectacle, and so on to infinity.

Anyone who escapes the commodity code does not become objectified and

falls ‘outside’ the area of the spectacle. They are pointed at. They are

surrounded by barbed wire. If they refuse englobement or an alternative

form of codification, they are criminalized. They are clearly mad! It is

forbidden to refuse the illusory in a world that has based reality on

illusion, concreteness on the unreal.

Capital manages the spectacle according to the laws of accumulation. But

nothing can be accumulated to infinity. Not even capital. A quantitative

process in absolute is an illusion, a quantitative illusion to be

precise. The bosses understand this perfectly. Exploitation adopts

different forms and ideological models precisely to ensure this

accumulation in qualitatively different ways, as it cannot continue in

the quantitative aspect indefinitely.

The fact that the whole process becomes paradoxical and illusory does

not matter much to capital, because it is precisely that which holds the

reins and makes the rules. If it has to sell illusion for reality and

that makes money, then let’s just carry on without asking too many

questions. It is the exploited who foot the bill. So it is up to them to

see the trick and worry about recognising reality. For capital things

are fine as they are, even though they are based on the greatest

conjuring trick in the world.

The exploited almost feel nostalgia for this swindle. They have grown

accustomed to their chains and become attached to them. Now and then

they have fantasies about fascinating uprisings and blood baths, then

they let themselves be taken in by the speeches of the new political

leaders. The revolutionary party extends capital’s illusory perspective

to horizons it could never reach on its own. The quantitative illusion

spreads.

The exploited enlist, count themselves, draw their conclusions. Fierce

slogans make bourgeois hearts miss a beat. The greater the number, the

more the leaders prance around arrogantly and the more demanding they

become. They draw up great programmes for the conquest of power. This

new power is preparing to spread on the remains of the old. Bonaparte’s

soul smiles in satisfaction.

Of course, deep changes are being programmed in the code of illusions.

But everything must be submitted to the symbol of quantitative

accumulation. The demands of the revolution increase as militant forces

grow. In the same way, the rate of the social profit that is taking the

place of private profit must also grow. So capital enters a new,

illusory, spectacular, phase. Old needs press on insistently under new

labels. The productivity god continues to rule, unrivalled.

How good it is to count ourselves. It makes us feel strong. The unions

count themselves. The parties count themselves. The bosses count

themselves. So do we. Ring a ring o’ roses.

And when we stop counting we try to ensure that things stay as they are.

If change cannot be avoided, we will bring it about without disturbing

anyone. Ghosts are easily penetrated.

Every now and then politics come to the fore. Capital often invents

ingenious solutions. Then social peace hits us. The silence of the

graveyard. The illusion spreads to such an extent that the spectacle

absorbs nearly all the available forces. Not a sound. Then the defects

and monotony of the mis-en-scene. The curtain rises on unforeseen

situations. The capitalist machinery begins to falter. Revolutionary

involvement is rediscovered. It happened in ’68. Everybody’s eyes nearly

fell out of their sockets. Everyone extremely ferocious. Leaflets

everywhere. Mountains of leaflets and pamphlets and papers and books.

Old ideological differences lined up like tin soldiers. Even the

anarchists rediscovered themselves. And they did so historically,

according to the needs of the moment. Everyone was quite dull-witted.

The anarchists too. Some people woke up from their spectacular slumber

and, looking around for space and air to breathe, seeing anarchists said

to themselves, At last! Here’s who I want to be with. They soon realised

their mistake. Things did not go as they should have done in that

direction either. There too, stupidity and spectacle. And so they ran

away. They closed up in themselves. They fell apart. Accepted capital’s

game. And if they didn’t accept it they were banished, also by the

anarchists.

The machinery of ’68 produced the best civil servants of the new

techno-bureaucratic State. But it also produced its antibodies. The

process of the quantitative illusion became evident. On the one hand it

received fresh lymph to build a new view of the commodity spectacle, on

the other there was a flaw.

It has become blatantly obvious that confrontation at the level of

production is ineffective. Take over the factories, the fields, the

schools and the neighbourhoods and selfmanage them, the old

revolutionary anarchists proclaimed. We will destroy power in all its

forms, they added. But without getting to the roots of the problem.

Although conscious of its gravity and extent, they preferred to ignore

it, putting their hopes in the creative spontaneity of the revolution.

But in the meantime they wanted to hold on to control of production.

Whatever happens, whatever creative forms the revolution might express,

we must take over the means of production they insisted. Otherwise the

enemy will defeat us at that level. So they began to accept all kinds of

compromise. They ended up creating another, even more macabre,

spectacle.

And spectacular illusion has its own rules. Anyone who wants to direct

it must abide by them. They must know and apply them, swear by them. The

first is that production affects everything. If you do not produce you

are not a man, the revolution is not for you. Why should we tolerate

parasites? Should we go to work in place of them perhaps? Should we see

to their livelihood as well as our own? Besides, wouldn’t all these

people with vague ideas, claiming to doing as they please, not turn out

to be ‘objectively’ useful to the counterrevolution? Well, in that case

better attack them right away. We know who our allies are, who we want

to side with. If we want to scare, then let’s do it all together,

organised and in perfect order, and may no one put their feet on the

table or let their trousers down.

Let’s organise our specific organisations. Train militants who know the

techniques of struggle at the place of production. The producers will

make the revolution, we will just be there to make sure they don’t do

anything silly.

No, that’s all wrong. How will we be able to stop them from making

mistakes? At the spectacular level of organisation there are some who

are capable of making far more noise than we are. And they have breath

to spare. Struggle at the workplace. Struggle for the defence of jobs.

Struggle for production.

When will we break out of the circle? When will we stop biting our

tails?

IV

The deformed man always finds mirrors that make him handsome.

de Sade

What madness the love of work is!

With great scenic skill capital has succeeded in making the exploited

love exploitation, the hanged man the rope and the slave his chains.

This idealisation of work has been the death of the revolution until

now. The movement of the exploited has been corrupted by the bourgeois

morality of production, which is not only foreign to it, but is also

contrary to it. It is no accident that the trade unions were the first

sector to be corrupted, precisely because of their closer proximity to

the management of the spectacle of production.

It is time to oppose the non-work aesthetic to the work ethic.

We must counter the satisfaction of spectacular needs imposed by

consumer society with the satisfaction of man’s natural needs seen in

the light of that primary, essential need: the need for communism.

In this way the quantitative evaluation of needs is overturned. The need

for communism transforms all other needs and their pressures on man.

Man’s poverty, the consequence of exploitation, has been seen as the

foundation of future redemption. Christianity and revolutionary

movements have walked hand in hand throughout history. We must suffer in

order to conquer paradise or to acquire the class consciousness that

will take us to the revolution. Without the work ethic the Marxist

notion of ‘proletariat’ would not make sense. But the work ethic is a

product of the same bourgeois rationalism that allowed the bourgeoisie

to conquer power.

Corporatism resurfaces through the mesh of proletarian internationalism.

Everyone struggles within their own sector. At most they contact similar

ones in other countries, through the unions. The monolithic

multinationals are opposed by monolithic international unions. Let’s

make the revolution but save the machinery, the working tool, that

mythical object that reproduces the historical virtue of the

bourgeoisie, now in the hands of the proletariat.

The heir to the revolution is destined to become the consumer and main

actor of the capitalist spectacle of tomorrow. Idealised at the level of

the clash as the beneficiary of its outcome, the revolutionary class

disappears in the idealisation of production. When the exploited come to

be enclosed within a class, all the elements of the spectacular already

exist, just as they do for the class of exploiters.

The only way for the exploited to escape the globalising project of

capital is through the refusal of work, production and political

economy.

But refusal of work must not be confused with ‘lack of work’ in a

society which is based on the latter. The marginalised look for work.

They do not find it. They are pushed into ghettos. They are

criminalised. Then that all becomes part of the management of the

productive spectacle as a whole. Producers and unemployed are equally

indispensable to capital. But the balance is a delicate one.

Contradictions explode and produce various kinds of crisis, and it is in

this context that revolutionary intervention takes place.

So, the refusal of work, the destruction of work, is an affirmation of

the need for non-work The affirmation that man can reproduce and

objectify himself in non-work through the various solicitations that

this stimulates in him. The idea of destroying work is absurd if it is

seen from the point of view of the work ethic. But how? So many people

are looking for work, so many unemployed, and you talk about destroying

work? The Luddite ghost appears and puts all the

revolutionaries-who-have-read-all-the-classics to fright. The rigid

model of the frontal attack on capitalist forces must not be touched.

All the failures and suffering of the past are irrelevant; so is the

shame and betrayal. Ahead comrades, better days will come, onwards

again!

It would suffice to show what the concept of ‘free time’, a temporary

suspension of work, is bogged down in today to scare proletarians back

into the stagnant atmosphere of the class organisations (parties, unions

and hangers-on). The spectacle offered by the bureaucratic leisure

organisations is deliberately designed to depress even the most fertile

imagination. But this is no more than an ideological cover, one of the

many instruments of the total war that make up the spectacle as a whole.

The need for communism transforms everything. Through the need for

communism the need for non-work moves from the negative aspect

(opposition to work) to the positive one: the individual’s complete

availability to themselves, the possibility to express themselves

absolutely freely, breaking away from all models, even those considered

to be fundamental and indispensable such as those of production.

But revolutionaries are dutiful people and are afraid to break with all

models, not least that of revolution, which constitutes an obstacle to

the full realisation of what the concept means. They are afraid they

might find themselves without a role in life. Have you ever met a

revolutionary without a revolutionary project? A project that is well

defined and presented clearly to the masses? Whatever kind of

revolutionary would be one who claimed to destroy the model, the

wrapping, the very foundations of the revolution? By attacking concepts

such as quantification, class, project, model, historical task and other

such old stuff, one would run the risk of having nothing to do, of being

obliged to act in reality, modestly, like everyone else. Like millions

of others who are building the revolution day by day without waiting for

signs of a fatal deadline. And to do this you need courage.

With rigid models and little quantitative games you remain within the

realm of the unreal, the illusory project of the revolution, an

amplification of the spectacle of capital.

By abolishing the ethic of production you enter revolutionary reality

directly.

It is difficult even to talk about such things because it does not make

sense to mention them in the pages of a treatise. To reduce these

problems to a complete and final analysis would be to miss the point.

The best thing would be an informal discussion capable of bringing about

the subtle magic of wordplay.

It is a real contradiction to talk of joy seriously.

V

Summer nights are heavy. One sleeps badly in tiny rooms. It is the Eve

of the Guillotine.

Zo d’Axa

The exploited also find time to play. But their play is not joy. It is a

macabre ritual. An awaiting death. A suspension of work in order to

lighten the pressure of the violence accumulated during the activity of

production. In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an

illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is

monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital.

When we become conscious of the process of exploitation the first thing

we feel is a sense of revenge, the last is joy. Liberation is seen as

setting right a balance that has been upset by the wickedness of

capitalism, not as the coming of a world of play to take the place of

the world of work.

This is the first phase of the attack on the bosses. The phase of

immediate awareness. What strikes us are the chains, the whip, the

prison walls, sexual and racial barriers. Everything must come down. So

we arm ourselves and strike the adversary to make them pay for their

responsibility.

During the night of the guillotine the foundations for a new spectacle

are laid. Capital regains strength: first the bosses’ heads fall, then

those of the revolutionaries.

It is impossible to make the revolution with the guillotine alone.

Revenge is the antechamber of power. Anyone who wants to avenge

themselves requires a leader. A leader to take them to victory and

restore wounded justice. And whoever cries for vengeance wants to come

into possession of what has been taken away from them. Right to the

supreme abstraction, the appropriation of surplus value.

The world of the future must be one where everybody works. Fine! So we

will have imposed slavery on everyone with the exception of those who

make it function and who, precisely for that reason, become the new

bosses.

No matter what, the bosses must ‘pay’ for their wrongs. Very well! We

will carry the Christian ethic of sin, judgement and reparation into the

revolution. As well as the concepts of ‘debt’ and ‘payment’, clearly of

mercantile origins.

That is all part of the spectacle. Even when it is not managed by power

directly it can easily be taken over. Role reversal is one of the

techniques of drama.

It might be necessary to attack using the arms of revenge and punishment

at a certain moment in the class struggle. The movement might not

possess any others. So it will be the moment for the guillotine. But

revolutionaries must be aware of the limitations of such arms. They

should not deceive themselves or others.

Within the paranoid framework of a rationalising machine such as

capitalism the concept of the revolution of revenge can even become part

of the spectacle as it continually adapts itself. The movement of

production seems to come about thanks to the blessing of economic

science, but in reality it is based on the illusory anthropology of the

separation of tasks.

There is no joy in work, even if it is selfmanaged. The revolution

cannot be reduced to a simple reorganisation of work. Not that alone.

There is no joy in sacrifice, death and revenge. Just as there is no joy

in counting oneself. Arithmetic is the negation of joy.

Anyone who desires to live does not produce death. A transitory

acceptance of the guillotine leads to its institutionalisation. But at

the same time, anyone who loves life does not embrace their exploiter.

To do so would signify that they are against life in favour of

sacrifice, self-punishment, work and death.

In the graveyard of work centuries of exploitation have accumulated a

huge mountain of revenge. The leaders of the revolution sit upon this

mountain, impassively. They study the best way to draw profit from it.

So the spur of revenge must be addressed against the interests of the

new caste in power. Symbols and flags. Slogans and complicated analyses.

The ideological apparatus does everything that is necessary.

It is the work ethic that makes this possible. Anyone who delights in

work and wants to take over the means of production does not want things

to go ahead blindly. They know by experience that the bosses have had a

strong organisation on their side in order to make exploitation work.

They think that just as strong and perfect an organisation will make

liberation possible. Do everything in your power, productivity must be

saved at all costs.

What a swindle! The work ethic is the Christian ethic of sacrifice, the

bosses’ ethic thanks to which the massacres of history have followed

each other with worrying regularity.

These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce

any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. That it is

possible to assert one’s will to not produce, so struggle against both

the bosses’ economic structures and the ideological ones that permeate

the whole of Western thought.

It is essential to understand that the work ethic is the foundation of

the quantitative revolutionary project. Arguments against work would be

senseless if they were made by revolutionary organisations with their

logic of quantitative growth.

The substitution of the work ethic with the aesthetic of joy would not

mean an end to life as so many worried comrades would have it. To the

question: ‘What will we eat?’ one could quite simply reply: ‘What we

produce.’ Only production would no longer be the dimension in which man

determines himself, as that would come about in the sphere of play and

joy. One could produce as something separate from nature, then join with

it as something that is nature itself. So it would be possible to stop

producing at any moment, when there is enough. Only joy will be

uncontrollable. A force unknown to the civilised larvae that populate

our era. A force that will multiply the creative impulse of the

revolution a thousandfold.

The social wealth of the communist world is not measured in an

accumulation of surplus value, even if it turns out to be managed by a

minority that calls itself the party of the proletariat. This situation

reproduces power and denies the very essence of anarchy. Communist

social wealth comes from the potential for life that comes after the

revolution.

Qualitative, not quantitative, accumulation must substitute capitalist

accumulation. The revolution of life takes the place of the merely

economic revolution, productive potential takes the place of

crystallised production, joy takes the place of the spectacle.

The refusal of the spectacular market of capitalist illusions will

create another kind of exchange. From fictitious quantitative change to

a real qualitative one. Circulation of goods will not base itself on

objects and their illusionist reification, but on the meaning that the

objects have for life. And this must be a life meaning, not a death one.

So these objects will be limited to the precise moment in which they are

exchanged, and their significance will vary according to the situations

in which this takes place.

The same object could have profoundly different ‘values’. It will be

personified. Nothing to do with production as we know it now in the

dimension of capital. Exchange itself will have a different meaning when

seen through the refusal of unlimited production.

There is no such thing as freed labour. There is no such thing as

integrated labour (manual-intellectual). What does exist is the division

of labour and the sale of the workforce, i.e. the capitalist world of

production. The revolution is the negation of labour and the affirmation

of joy. Any attempt to impose the idea of work, ‘fair work’, work

without exploitation, ‘self-managed’ work where the exploited are to

re-appropriate themselves of the whole of the productive process without

exploitation, is a mystification.

The concept of the selfmanagement of production is valid only as a form

of struggle against capitalism, in fact it cannot be separated from the

idea of the selfmanagement of the struggle. If the struggle is

extinguished, selfmanagement becomes nothing other than selfmanagement

of one’s exploitation. If the struggle is victorious the selfmanagement

of production becomes superfluous, because after the revolution the

organisation of production is superfluous and counter-revolutionary.

VI

So long as you make the throw yourself everything is skill and easy

winning; only if you suddenly become the one catching the ball that the

eternal playmate throws at you, at your centre, with all her strength,

in one of those arcs of great divine bridge builders: only then is being

able to catch strength, not yours but of a world.

Rilke

We all believe we have experienced joy. Each single one of us believes

we have been happy at least once in our lives.

Only this experience of joy has always been passive. We happen to enjoy

ourselves. We cannot ‘desire’ joy just as we cannot oblige joy to

present itself when we want it to.

All this separation between ourselves and joy depends on our being

‘separate’ from ourselves, divided in two by the process of

exploitation.

We work all the year round to have the ‘joy’ of holidays. When these

come round we feel ‘obliged’ to ‘enjoy’ the fact that we are on holiday.

A form of torture like any other. The same goes for Sundays. A dreadful

day. The rarefaction of the illusion of free time shows us the emptiness

of the mercantile spectacle we are living in.

The same empty gaze alights on the half empty glass, the TV screen, the

football match, the heroin dose, the cinema screen, traffic jams, neon

lights, prefabricated homes that have completed the killing of the

landscape.

To seek ‘joy’ in the depths of any of the various ‘recitals’ of the

capitalist spectacle would be pure madness. But that is exactly what

capital wants. The experience of free time programmed by our exploiters

is lethal. It makes you want to go to work. To apparent life one ends up

preferring certain death.

No real joy can reach us from the rational mechanism of capitalist

exploitation. Joy does not have fixed rules to catalogue it. Even so, we

must be able to desire joy. Otherwise we would be lost.

The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the

fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals

is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about

through the search for play.

So, play means something different to what we are used to considering it

to be in the dimension of capital. Like serene idleness, the play that

opposes itself to the responsibilities of life is an artificial,

distorted image of what it really is. At the present stage of the clash

and the relative constrictions in the struggle against capital, play is

not a ‘pastime’ but a weapon.

By a strange twist of irony the roles are reversed. If life is something

serious death is an illusion, in the sense that so long as we are alive

death does not exist. Now, the reign of death, i.e. the reign of

capital, which denies our very existence as human beings and reduces us

to ‘things’, seems very serious, methodical and disciplined. But its

possessive paroxysm, its ethical rigour, its obsession with ‘doing’ all

hide a great illusion: the total emptiness of the commodity spectacle,

the uselessness of indefinite accumulation and the absurdity of

exploitation. So the great seriousness of the world of work and

productivity hides a total lack of seriousness.

On the contrary, the refusal of this stupid world, the pursuit of joy,

dreams, utopia in its declared ‘lack of seriousness’, hides the most

serious thing in life: the refusal of death.

In the physical confrontation with capital play can take different

forms, even on this side of the fence. Many things can be done

‘playfully’ yet most of the things we do, we do very ‘seriously’ wearing

the death mask we have borrowed from capital.

Play is characterised by a vital impulse that is always new, always in

movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with

this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It

gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do

everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it.

It is in the ever new excitement of play, quite the opposite to the

alienation and madness of capital, that we are able to identify joy.

Here lies the possibility to break with the old world and identify with

new aims and other values and needs. Even if joy cannot be considered

man’s aim, it is undoubtedly the privileged dimension that makes the

clash with capital different when it is pursued deliberately.

VII

Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on

the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real

desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant,empty, bored, drinking some

tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN.

The Angry Brigade

The great spectacle of capital has swallowed us all up to our necks.

Actors and spectators in turn. We alternate the roles, either staring

open-mouthed at others or making others stare at us. We have alighted

the glass coach, even though we know it is only a pumpkin. The fairy

godmother’s spell has beguiled our critical awareness. Now we must play

the game. Until midnight, at least.

Poverty and hunger are still the driving forces of the revolution. But

capital is widening the spectacle. It wants new actors on stage. The

greatest spectacle in the world will continue to surprise us. Always

more complicated, better and better organised. New clowns are getting

ready to mount the rostrum. New species of wild beasts will be tamed.

The supporters of quantity, lovers of arithmetic, will be first on and

will be blinded by the limelight, dragging the masses of necessity and

the ideologies of redemption along behind them.

But one thing they will not be able to get rid of is their seriousness.

The greatest danger they face will be a laugh. In the spectacle of

capital, joy is deadly. Everything is gloomy and funereal, everything is

serious and orderly, everything is rational and programmed, precisely

because it is all false and illusory.

Beyond the crises, beyond other problems of underdevelopment, beyond

poverty and hunger, the last fight that capital will have to put up, the

decisive one, is the fight against boredom.

The revolutionary movement will also have to fight its battles. Not just

the traditional ones against capital but new ones, against itself.

Boredom is attacking it from within, is causing it to deteriorate,

making it asphyxiating, uninhabitable.

Let us leave those who like the spectacle of capitalism alone. Those who

are quite happy to play their parts to the end. These people think that

reforms really can change things. But this is more an ideological cover

than anything else. They know only too well that changing bits is one of

the rules of the system. It is useful to capital to have things fixed a

little at a time.

Then there is the revolutionary movement where there is no lack of those

who attack the power of capital verbally. These people cause a great

deal of confusion. They come out with grand statements but no longer

impress anyone, least of all capital which cunningly uses them for the

most delicate part of its spectacle. When it needs a soloist it puts one

of these performers on stage. The result is pitiful.

The truth is that the spectacular mechanism of commodities must be

broken by entering the domain of capital, its coordinating centres,

right to the very nucleus of production. Think what a marvellous

explosion of joy, what a great creative leap forward, what an

extraordinarily aimless aim.

Only it is difficult to enter the mechanisms of capital joyfully, with

the symbols of life. Armed struggle is often a symbol of death. Not

because it gives death to the bosses and their servants, but because it

wants to impose the structures of the dominion of death itself.

Conceived differently it really would be joy in action, capable of

breaking the structural conditions imposed by the commodity spectacle

such as the military party, the conquest of power, the vanguard.

This is the other enemy of the revolutionary movement. Incomprehension.

Refusal to see the new conditions of the conflict. The insistence on

imposing models of the past that have now become part of the commodity

spectacle.

Ignorance of the new revolutionary reality is leading to a lack of

theoretical and strategic awareness of the revolutionary capacity of the

movement itself. And it is not enough to say that there are enemies so

close at hand as to make it indispensable to intervene right away

without looking at questions of a theoretical nature. All this hides the

incapacity to face the new reality of the movement and avoid the

mistakes of the past that have serious consequences in the present. And

this refusal nourishes all kinds of rationalist political illusions.

Categories such as revenge, leaders, parties, the vanguard, quantitative

growth, only mean something in the dimension of this society, and such a

meaning favours the perpetuation of power. When you look at things from

a revolutionary point of view, i.e. the complete definitive elimination

of all power, these categories become meaningless.

By moving into the nowhere of utopia, upsetting the work ethic, turning

it into the here and now of joy in realisation, we find ourselves within

a structure that is far from the historical forms of organisation.

This structure changes continually, so escapes crystallisation. It is

characterised by the self-organisation of producers at the workplace,

and the self-organisation of the struggle against work. Not the taking

over of the means of production, but the refusal of production through

organisational forms that are constantly changing.

The same is happening with the unemployed and the casual labourers.

Stimulated by boredom and alienation, structures are emerging on the

basis of self-organisation. The introduction of aims programmed and

imposed by an outside organisation would kill the movement and consign

it to the commodity spectacle.

Most of us are tied to this idea of revolutionary organisation. Even

anarchists, who refuse authoritarian organisation, do not disdain it. On

this basis we all accept the idea that the contradictory reality of

capital can be attacked with similar means. We do so because we are

convinced that these means are legitimate, emerging as they do from the

same field of struggle as capital. We refuse to admit that not everyone

might see things the way we do. Our theory is identical to the practice

and strategy of our organisations.

The differences between the authoritarians and ourselves are many, but

they all collapse before a common faith in the historical organisation.

Anarchy will be reached through the work of these organisations

(substantial differences only appear in methods of approach). But this

faith indicates something very important: the claim of our whole

rationalist culture to explain reality in progressive terms. This

culture bases itself on the idea that history is irreversible, along

with that of the analytical capacity of science. All this makes us see

the present as the point where all the efforts of the past meet the

culminating point of the struggle against the powers of darkness

(capitalist exploitation). Consequently, we are convinced that we are

more advanced than our predecessors, capable of elaborating and putting

into practice theories and organisational strategies that are the sum of

all the experiences of the past.

All those who reject this interpretation automatically find themselves

beyond reality, which is by definition history, progress and science.

Whoever refuses such a reality is anti-historical anti-progressive and

anti-scientific. Sentenced without appeal.

Strengthened by this ideological armour we go out into the streets. Here

we run into the reality of a struggle that is structured quite

differently from stimuli that do not enter the framework of our

analyses. One fine morning during a peaceful demonstration the police

start shooting. The structure reacts, comrades shoot too, policemen

fall. Anathema! It was a peaceful demonstration. For it to have

degenerated into individual guerrilla actions there must have been a

provocation. Nothing can go beyond the perfect framework of our

ideological organisation as it is not just a ‘part’ of reality, but is

‘all’ reality. Anything beyond it is madness and provocation.

Supermarkets are destroyed, shops and food and arms depots are looted,

luxury cars are burned. It is an attack on the commodity spectacle in

its most conspicuous forms. The new structures are moving in that

direction. They take form suddenly, with only the minimum strategic

orientation necessary. No frills, no long analytical premises, no

complex supporting theories. They attack. Comrades identify with these

structures. They reject the organisations that give power, equilibrium,

waiting, death. Their action is a critique of the wait-and-see suicidal

positions of these organisations. Anathema! There must have been a

provocation.

There is a break away from traditional political models which is

becoming a critique of the movement itself. Irony becomes a weapon. Not

closed within a writer’s study, but en masse, in the streets. Not only

the bosses’ servants but also revolutionary leaders from a far off and

recent past are finding themselves in difficulty as a result. The

mentality of the small-time boss and leading group is also put in

crisis. Anathema! The only legitimate critique is that against the

bosses, and it must comply with the rules laid down by the historical

tradition of the class struggle. Anyone who strays from the seminary is

a provocateur.

People are tired of meetings, the classics, pointless marches,

theoretical discussions that split hairs in four, endless distinctions,

the monotony and poverty of certain political analyses. They prefer to

make love, smoke, listen to music, go for walks, sleep, laugh, play,

kill policemen, lame journalists, kill judges, blow up barracks.

Anathema! The struggle is only legitimate when it is comprehensible to

the leaders of the revolution. Otherwise, there being a risk that the

situation might go beyond their control, there must have been a

provocation.

Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a

new police prevent you.

Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no

is pointless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the

mental asylum.

Hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you.

Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that

‘work makes you free’.

Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself

VIII

There will be no revolution until the Cossacks descend.

Coeurderoy

Play is also enigmatic and contradictory in the logic of capital, which

uses it as part of the commodity spectacle. It acquires an ambiguity

that it does not in itself possess. This ambiguity comes from the

illusory structure of capitalist production. In this way the game simply

becomes a suspension of production, a parenthesis of ‘peace’ in everyday

life. So play comes to be programmed and used scenically.

When it is outside the dominion of capital, play is harmoniously

structured by its own creative impulse. It is not linked to this or that

performance required by the forces of the world of production but

develops autonomously. It is only in this reality that play is cheerful,

that it gives joy. It does not ‘suspend’ the unhappiness of the

laceration caused by exploitation but realises it to the full, making it

become a participant in the reality of life. In this way it opposes

itself to the tricks put into act by the reality of death—even through

play—to make the gloominess less gloomy.

The destroyers of the death reality are struggling against the mythical

reign of capitalist illusion, a reign which, although it aspires to

eternity, rolls in the dust of the contingent. Joy emerges from the play

of destructive action, from the recognition of the profound tragedy that

this implies and an awareness of the strength of enthusiasm that is

capable of slaying the cobwebs of death. It is not a question of

opposing horror with horror, tragedy with tragedy, death with death. It

is a confrontation between joy and horror, joy and tragedy, joy and

death.

To kill a policeman it is not necessary to don the judge’s robes hastily

cleansed of the blood of previous sentences. Courts and sentences are

always part of the spectacle of capital, even when it is revolutionaries

who act them out. When a policeman is killed his responsibility is not

weighed on the scales, the clash does not become a question of

arithmetic. One is not programming a vision of the relationship between

revolutionary movement and exploiters. One is responding at the

immediate level to a need that has come to be structured within the

revolutionary movement, a need that all the analyses and justifications

of this world would never have succeeded in imposing on their own.

This need is the attack on the enemy, the exploiters and their servants.

It matures slowly within the structures of the movement. Only when it

comes out into the open does the movement pass from the defensive phase

to attack. Analysis and moral justification are upstream at the source,

not downstream at the feet of those who come out into the streets,

poised to make them stumble. They exist in the centuries of systematic

violence that capital has exercised over the exploited. But they do not

necessarily come to light in a form that is complete and ready for use.

That would be a further rationalisation of intentions, our dream of

imposing a model on reality that does not belong to it.

Let’s have these Cossacks come down. We do not support the role of

reaction, that is not for us. We refuse to accept capital’s ambiguous

invitation. Rather than shoot our comrades or each other it is always

better to shoot policemen.

There are times in history when science exists in the consciousness of

those who are struggling. At such times there is no need for

interpreters of truth. It emerges from things as they are. It is the

reality of the struggle that produces theory.

The birth of the commodity market marked the formation of capital, the

passage from feudal forms of production to the capitalist one. With the

entrance of production into its spectacular phase the commodity form has

extended to everything that exists: love, science, feelings,

consciousness, etc. The spectacle has widened. The second phase does

not, as the marxists maintain, constitute a corruption of the first. It

is a different phase altogether. Capital devours everything, even the

revolution. If the latter does not break from the model of production,

if it merely claims to impose alternative forms, capitalism will swallow

it up within the commodity spectacle.

Only the struggle cannot be swallowed up. Some of its forms,

crystallising in precise organisational entities, can end up being drawn

into the spectacle. But when they break away from the deep significance

that capital gives to production this becomes extremely difficult.

In the second phase questions of arithmetic and revenge do not make

sense. If they are mentioned, they take on a metaphorical significance.

The illusory game of capital (the commodity spectacle) must be

substituted with the real game of the armed attack against it, for the

destruction of the unreal and the spectacle.

IX

Do it yourself.

‘Bricoleur’ Manual

It’s easy. You can do it yourself. Alone or with a few trusted comrades.

Complicated means are not necessary. Not even great technical knowledge.

Capital is vulnerable. All you need is to be decided.

A load of talk has made us obtuse. It is not a question of fear. We

aren’t afraid, just stupidly full of prefabricated ideas we cannot break

free from.

Anyone who is determined to carry out his or her deed is not a

courageous person. They are simply a person who has clarified their

ideas, who has realised that it is pointless to make such an effort to

play the part assigned to them by capital in the performance. Fully

aware, they attack with cool determination. And in doing so they realise

themselves as human beings. They realise themselves in joy. The reign of

death disappears before their eyes. Even if they create destruction and

terror for the bosses, in their hearts and in the hearts of the

exploited there is joy and calm.

Revolutionary organisations have difficulty in understanding this. They

impose a model that reproduces the reality of production. The

quantitative destiny of the latter prevents them from having any

qualitative move to the level of the aesthetic dimension of joy. These

organisations also see armed attack in a purely quantitative light.

Objectives are decided in terms of a frontal clash.

In that way capital is able to control any emergency. It can even allow

itself the luxury of accepting the contradictions, point out spectacular

objectives, exploit the negative effects on producers in order to widen

the spectacle. Capital accepts the clash in the quantitative field,

because that is where it knows all the answers. It has a monopoly of the

rules and produces the solutions itself.

On the contrary, the joy of the revolutionary act is contagious. It

spreads like a spot of oil. Play becomes meaningful when it acts on

reality. But this meaning is not crystallised in a model that governs it

from above. It breaks up into a thousand meanings, all productive and

unstable. The internal connections of play work themselves out in the

action of attack. But the overall sense survives, the meaning that play

has for those who are excluded and want to appropriate themselves of it.

Those who decide to play first and those who ‘observe’ the liberatory

consequences of the game, are essential to the game itself.

The community of joy is structured in this way. It is a spontaneous way

of coming into contact, fundamental for the realisation of the most

profound meaning of play. Play is a communitarian act. It rarely

presents itself as one isolated fact. If it does, it often contains the

negative elements of psychological repression, it is not a positive

acceptance of play as a creative moment of struggle.

It is the communitarian sense of play that prevents arbitrariness in

choice of the significance given to the game itself. In the absence of a

communitarian relationship the individual could impose their own rules

and meanings that would be incomprehensible to anyone else, simply

making play become a temporary suspension of the negative consequences

of their individual problems (the problems of work, alienation,

exploitation).

In the communitarian agreement, play is enriched by a flux of reciprocal

actions. Creativity is greater when it comes from reciprocally verified

liberated imaginations. Each new invention, each new possibility can be

lived collectively without pre-constituted models and have a vital

influence even*** by simply being a creative moment, even if it

encounters a thousand difficulties during realisation. A traditional

revolutionary organisation ends up imposing its technicians. It tends

unavoidably towards technocracy. The great importance attached to the

mechanical aspect of action condemns it along this road.

A revolutionary structure that seeks the moment of joy in action aimed

at destroying power considers the tools used to bring about this

destruction just that, means. Those who use these tools must not become

slaves to them. Just as those who do not know how to use them must not

become slaves to those who do.

The dictatorship of tools is the worst kind of dictatorship.

Revolutionaries’ most important weapons are their determination, their

conscience, their decision to act, their individuality. Arms themselves

are merely tools, and as such should continually be submitted to

critical evaluation. It is necessary to develop a critique of arms. Too

often we have seen the sanctification of the sub machine-gun and

military efficiency.

Armed struggle does not concern weapons alone. These alone cannot

represent the revolutionary dimension. It is dangerous to reduce complex

reality to one single thing. In fact, play involves this risk. It could

make the living experience become no more than a toy, turning it into

something magical and absolute. It is not by chance that the machine-gun

appears in the symbolism of many revolutionary combatant organisations.

We must go beyond this in order to understand joy as the profound

significance of the revolutionary struggle, escaping the illusions and

traps of part of the commodity spectacle through mythical and mythisized

objects.

Capital makes its final effort when faced with armed struggle. It

engages itself on its last frontier It needs the support of public

opinion in order to act in a field where it is not too sure of itself.

So it unleashes a psychological war using the most refined weapons of

modern propaganda.

Basically, the way capital is physically organised at the present time

makes it vulnerable to any revolutionary structure capable of deciding

its own timing and means of attack. It is quite aware of this weakness

and is taking measures to compensate for it. The police are not enough.

Not even the army. It requires constant vigilance by the people

themselves. Even the most humble part of the proletariat. So, to do this

it must divide the class front. It must spread the myth of the danger of

armed organisations among the poor, along with that of the sanctity of

the State, morality, the law and so on.

It indirectly pushes these organisations and their militants into

assuming precise roles. Once in this ‘role’, play no longer has any

meaning. Everything becomes ‘serious’, so illusory; it enters the domain

of the spectacular and becomes a commodity. Joy becomes ‘mask.’ The

individual becomes anonymous, lives out their role, no longer able to

distinguish between appearance and reality.

In order to break out of the magic circle of the theatricals of

commodities we must refuse all roles, including that of the

‘professional’ revolutionary.

Armed struggle must not let itself become something professional,

precisely that division of tasks that the external aspect of capitalist

production wants to impose upon it.

‘Do it yourself.’ Don’t break up the global aspect of play by reducing

it to roles. Defend your right to enjoy life. Obstruct capital’s death

project. The latter can only enter the world of creativity and play by

transforming who is playing into a ‘player’ the living creator into a

dead person who cheats themselves into believing they are alive.

There would be no sense in talking about play any longer if the ‘world

of play’ were to become centralised. We must foresee this possibility of

capital taking up the revolutionary proposal again when we put forward

our argument of ‘armed joy’. And one way this could come about is

through the management of the world of play from the outside. By

establishing the roles of the players and the mythology of the toy.

In breaking the bonds of centralisation (the military party) one obtains

the result of confusing capital’s ideas, tuned as they are into the code

of the spectacular productivity of the quantitative market. Action

coordinated by joy is an enigma to capital. It is nothing. Something

with no precise aim, devoid of reality. And this is so because the

essence, the aims and reality of capital are illusory, while the

essence, aims and reality of revolution are concrete.

The code of the need for communism takes the place of the code of the

need to produce. In the light of this need in the community of play, the

decisions of the individual become meaningful. The unreal illusory

character of the death models of the past is discovered.

The destruction of the bosses means the destruction of commodities, and

the destruction of commodities means the destruction of the bosses.

X

The owl takes flight.

Athenian proverb

‘The owl takes flight’. May actions that start off badly come to a good

end. May the revolution, put off by revolutionaries for so long, be

realised in spite of the latter’s residual desire for social peace.

Capital will give the last word to the white coats. Prisons will not

last for long. Fortresses of a past that survives only in the fantasies

of some exalted old reactionary, they will disappear along with the

ideology based on social orthopaedics. There will no longer be convicts.

The criminalisation capital creates will be rationalised, it will be

processed through asylums.

When the whole of reality is spectacular, to refuse the spectacle means

to be outside reality. Anyone who refuses the code of commodities is

mad. Refusal to bow down before the commodity god will result in one’s

being committed to a mental asylum.

There the treatment will be radical. No more inquisitorial-style torture

or blood on the walls, such things upset public opinion. They cause the

self-righteous to intervene, give rise to justification and making

amends, and disturb the harmony of the spectacle. The total annihilation

of the personality, considered to be the only radical cure for sick

minds, does not upset anyone. As long as the man in the street feels he

is surrounded by the imperturbable atmosphere of the capitalist

spectacle he will feel safe from the asylum doors ever slamming shut on

him. The world of madness will seem to him to be elsewhere, even though

there is always an asylum available next to every factory, opposite

every school, behind every patch of land, in the middle of every housing

estate.

In our critical obtuseness we must take care not to pave the way to the

civil servants in white coats.

Capital is programming a code of interpretation to be circulated at mass

level. On the basis of this code public opinion will get used to seeing

those who attack the bosses’ order of things, that is to say

revolutionaries, as practically mad. Hence the need to have them put

away in mental asylums. Prisons are also rationalising along the German

model. First they will transform themselves into special prisons for

revolutionaries, then into model prisons, then into real concentration

camps for brain manipulation, and finally, mental asylums.

Capital’s behaviour is not dictated by the need to defend itself from

the struggles of the exploited alone. It is dictated by the logic of the

code of commodity production.

For capital the asylum is a place where the globality of spectacular

functioning is interrupted. Prison desperately tries to do this but does

not succeed, blocked as it is by its basic ideology of social

orthopaedics.

On the contrary, the ‘place’ of the asylum does not have a beginning or

an end, it has no history, does not have the mutability of the

spectacle. It is the place of silence.

The other ‘place’ of silence, the graveyard, has the faculty to speak

aloud. Dead men talk. And our dead talk loudly. They can be heavy, very

heavy. That is why capital will try to have fewer and fewer of them. And

the number of ‘guests’ in asylums will increase correspondingly. The

‘homeland of socialism’ has much to impart in this field.

The asylum is the perfect therapeutic rationalisation of free time, the

suspension of work without trauma to the commodity structure. Lack of

productivity without denial of it. The madman does not have to work and

in not doing so he confirms that work is wisdom, the opposite of

madness.

When we say the time is not ripe for an armed attack on the State we are

pushing open the doors of the mental asylum for the comrades who are

carrying out such attacks; when we say it is not the time for revolution

we are tightening the cords of the straightjacket; when we say these

actions are objectively a provocation we don the white coats of the

torturers.

When the number of opponents was inconsiderable, grape-shot was

effective. A dozen dead can be tolerated. Thirty thousand, a hundred

thousand, two hundred thousand would mark a turning point in history, a

revolutionary point of reference of such blinding luminosity as to

disrupt the peaceful harmony of the commodity spectacle. Besides,

capital is more cunning. Drugs have a neutrality that bullets do not

possess. They have the alibi of being therapeutic.

May capital’s statute of madness be thrown in its face. Society is one

immense mental asylum. May the terms of the counter-positions be

overturned.

The neutralisation of the individual is a constant practice in capital’s

reified totality. The flattening of opinions is a therapeutic process, a

death machine. Production cannot take place without this flattening in

the spectacular form of capitalism. And if the refusal of all that, the

choice of joy in the face of death, is a sign of madness it is time

everyone began to understand the trap that lurks beneath it all.

The whole apparatus of the western cultural tradition is a death

machine, the negation of reality, a reign of the fictitious that has

accumulated every kind of infamy and injustice, exploitation and

genocide. If the refusal of this logic is condemned as madness, then we

must distinguish between madness and madness.

Joy is arming itself. Its attack is overcoming the commodity

hallucination, machinery, vengeance, the leader, the party, quantity.

Its struggle is breaking down the logic of profit, the architecture of

the market, the programming of life, the last document in the last

archive. Its violent explosion is overturning the order of dependency,

the nomenclature of positive and negative, the code of the commodity

illusion.

But all this must be able to communicate itself. The passage from the

world of joy to the world of death is not easy. The codes are out of

phase and end up wiping each other out. What is considered illusion in

the world of joy is reality in the world of death and vice versa.

Physical death, so much a preoccupation in the death world, is less

mortifying than what is peddled as life.

Hence capital’s capacity to mystify messages of joy. Even

revolutionaries of the quantitative logic are incapable of understanding

experiences of joy in depth. Sometimes they hesitantly make

insignificant approaches. At other times they let themselves go with

condemnation that is not very different to that of capital.

In the commodity spectacle it is goods that count. The active element of

this accumulated mass is work. Nothing can be positive and negative at

the same time within the framework of production. It is possible to

assert non-work, not the negation of work but its temporary suspension.

In the same way it is possible to assert the non-commodity, the

personalised object, but only in the context of ‘free time’, i.e.

something that is produced as a hobby, in the time lapses conceded by

the productive cycle. In this sense it is clear that these concepts,

non-work and the non-commodity, are functional to the general model of

production.

Only by clarifying the meaning of joy and the corresponding meaning of

death as components of two opposing worlds struggling against each other

is it possible to communicate elements of the actions of joy. Without

illuding ourselves that we can communicate all of them. Anyone who

begins to experience joy even in a perspective not directly linked to

the attack on capital is more willing to grasp the significance of the

attack, at least more than those who remain tied to an outdated vision

of the clash based on the illusion of quantity.

So the owl could still take wing and fly.

XI

Forward everyone! And with arms and heart, word and pen, dagger and gun,

irony and curse, theft, poisoning and arson, let’s make... war on

society!...

Dejaque

Let’s be done with waiting, doubts, dreams of social peace, little

compromises and naivety. All metaphorical rubbish supplied to us in the

shops of capitalism. Let’s put aside the great analyses that explain

everything down to the most minute detail. Huge volumes filled with

common sense and fear. Let’s put aside democratic and bourgeois

illusions of discussion and dialogue, debate and assembly and the

enlightened capabilities of the Mafiosi bosses. Let’s put aside the

wisdom that the bourgeois work ethic has dug into our hearts. Let’s put

aside the centuries of Christianity that have educated us to sacrifice

and obedience. Let’s put aside priests, bosses, revolutionary leaders,

less revolutionary ones and those who aren’t revolutionary at all. Let’s

put aside numbers, illusions of quantity, the laws of the market. Let us

sit for a moment on the ruins of the history of the persecuted, and

reflect.

The world does not belong to us. If it has a master who is stupid enough

to want it the way it is, let him have it. Let him count the ruins in

the place of buildings, the graveyards in the place of cities, the mud

in the place of rivers and the putrid sludge in the place of seas.

The greatest conjuring trick in the world no longer enchants us.

We are certain that communities of joy will emerge from our struggle

here and now.

And for the first time life will triumph over death.