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Title: MAYDAZE! Author: For Ourselves Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: alienation, communist, individualism, May Day, the left Source: Retrieved on 9/28/2020 from http://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/MayDaze/MayDaze.htm
This is supposed to be a celebration, but there is a stale scent about
it — the scent of failure held up as success, of moldy platitudes held
up as useful, critical ideas — the scent of an old, dying world, not the
fresh air of a new one. Once again people come together because, deep
down, all of them are fed up with their present existence; all of them
want a life of unstifled tenderness, free creativity, limitless
adventure. And once again, the Left, like the constipated rhinoceros it
is, has managed after immense grunting and straining to produce the same
dry, evil-smelling little pellets of slogans:
Never mind that a movement which could enforce the granting of even one
of the first three demands would be easily strong enough to overthrow
capitalism... let's just keep on pestering Mommy and Daddy.
With what swollen pride the organizers of this demonstration point to
the great days of the 1930's, when "millions of workers, led by
communists", marched and struck and achieved — WHAT? Their own
integration, via the industrial unions of the CIO, into a militarized,
state-regulated capitalism. From there they marched right off into World
War II, with the "communists" urging them on to the slaughter and
helping to break their strikes, all in the name of anti-fascism. It was
above all, World War II, with the changes it made possible in the
economies of the Western powers, and the huge destruction of workers,
and of means of production it entailed, that gave world capitalism the
chance to reconstruct — very profitably — the same world it had
devastated.
After 30 years capitalism is again in difficulties, more than likely as
the prelude to its final crisis. Certainly it has pretty well used up
all the checks and balances — including wage and-price controls,
nationalizations, money-manipulation, expanded welfare and military
spending, and massive looting of nature everywhere (and of the human and
natural resources of the Third World, in particular). The Left breathes
a sigh of relief — now it can begin protesting all the same things it
protested in 1935; it can "organize" workers who are once again
desperate enough to listen to it. It can find new fuel for its
delusions, ranting about "the bosses" and their "profit system". Gimme
that ole time religion!
But capitalism is not just a "system" run by an evil force called
"bosses"; it is a mode of social reproduction in which workers
necessarily and actively reproduce — via wage-labor — their own everyday
lives. As long as human beings sell their labor-power, they sell with it
the power to shape their own world; they make alien their powers to
create a world built in the image of their needs, desires and pleasures.
Instead, an alien world — a world and daily life are produced, consumed
and reproduced in the image of capital (an accumulated surplus of
alienated-labor). Capital, in its forms of (1) money — its medium of
exchange-value, (2) commodity — its economic product, and (3) the
spectacle — its social product, is protected by the State apparatus and
ensured by continued self-alienation. With capital in the "East" as the
property of the State-Party and in the "West" as the property of private
and corporately-monopolized interests — directors of capital's world
architecture — "bosses" and "bureaucrats" alike, must push and pursue
the market-values of capital or cease to be capitalists.
Capitalism creates a global system of production, a material community
via the world market, but only by destroying all the old partial
communities — tribe, village, region, etc. It unites the world,
paradoxically, as separate, as divided into nation-states, enterprises,
nuclear families and so forth. It has developed in us productive forces
— desires, creativity, knowledge, skills — that it is less and less able
to put to human use. Instead, it must either channel them into producing
garbage and death-machines, or else repress and destroy them by the
subtle violence of conditioning — or, the gross violence of war and
starvation. Through capitalism we have developed the power to end
scarcity and the competition it engenders, to create the first full
human community, a global association where "the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all", a world without
States, classes, forced tranquility or the blackmail called "work".
Thus, what we face is not just the crisis of capitalism, but the
culmination of all previous history.
The Leftists who organized this demonstration want to revive the grand
old institution of International Workers' Day. As usual they are 100
years too late. May Day belongs to the workers' movement of the 19th
century, to the period when the working class could and did force
general and lasting reforms from the capitalist class, while looking
forward to a time when it would be strong enough to overthrow
capitalism. But the very success of its reform struggles integrated it
into the "system"; they merely improved themselves as human spectacles
and human commodities. With the outbreak of World War I, this old
workers' movement split into warring national fragments. Its
revolutionary and internationalist minority organized, by 1918, into
armed workers' councils and such short-lived political formations as the
K.A.P.D. and fought as well as they knew for a communist society AND
LOST — while the majority looked on and did nothing. Submission to
hierarchical mass parties and trade unions along with disciplined
demonstrations and ritualistic strikes did well in FAILING the first
time: around; the ends spoke directly to what the workers' movement, in
general, and the Left in particular, theoretically and practically
sought (and still do seek!) to strangle revolution in its cradle. It's
no surprise that the workers' council movement died under the guns of
"Socialist"-led troops in Germany and of "Communist"-led troops in
Russia and Spain. Despite a few brilliant achievements like the
Kronstadt Soviet (a Russian word translated as "workers' council") and
the workers' collectives of Catalonia of 1936-7, it failed. Its greatest
"success", the Russian revolution, was isolated under appallingly
backward and hostile conditions, and finally crushed by "its
representatives" — the Bolshevik Party. The resulting state-capitalism,
a novel monstrosity, was marketed to the workers of the world as the
"Socialist Fatherland" by Communists Parties whose main activity was to
suppress the real communist movement wherever they found (and find) it.
Why does the Left try so hard to resurrect this corpse? The basic reason
is good old neurosis — an incapacity to face reality. Specifically, its
program, despite the modernist chrome-plating of "workers' control" and
so forth, is essentially the program of the old workers' movement, which
was to centralize capital in the hands of the State so as to develop the
productive forces to the socialist level. But capitalism has already
accomplished the essentials of this task, whether in its old private
form or else by means of bureaucratic peasant-based parties such as the
one that took power in China in 1948 or that are about to take power in
S.E. Asia. Such "National Liberation Movements" and "Socialist States"
can only be seen as progressive in the absence of a class-wide
revolutionary movement in the rest of the world. They are capitalist
revolutions that serve no useful function from the genuinely communist
point-of-view except that of creating a modern working class where none
existed before. In the advanced countries, this program — with all the
"good will" of its supporters to the contrary — is nothing less than a
counter-revolutionary diversion. It's but one more way of persuading the
working class to help rationalize and to update its own alienation and
exploitation.
Extreme? Hardly. Capital has now colonized almost every aspect of daily
life; one can hardly breathe without having to pay (in Tokyo they
already sell air from vending machines). All human relations become
money-exchange, commodity-exchange, and spectacle-exchange relations;
play, pleasure and the participation we seek in our daily lives all face
the extinction as exemplified by ticket and check stubs. From the time
we crawl out of bed to the time we crawl out again — at home, at work,
and in the streets — we (re-)produce an alien and hostile world. We set
the process into motion by selling our labor-power, by paying for goods
and services, by using our "free" time to forget the misery so that
we'll be able to go back for more another day — and another.... We, the
working class, (which includes all those whom the State pays not to work
— to stay out of a labor market which cannot absorb them) reproduce our
own misery. The slavery of all enforces the slavery of each.
The Left, though it wants a few changes in ideology, defends the working
class it is, including its traditional institutions such as the labor
unions and the family. But it is through these institutions that the
working class reproduces itself as a class for capital — repressed,
privatized, full of divisive local and sectorial prejudices (ethnic,
racial, sexual, regionalist, nationalist) and above all, SLAVISH,
crippled and incapable of running the world in its own interest. We are
not suggesting that individual workers should abandon the unions (until
the movement which makes them unnecessary is widespread, and — in a
world of closed shops, how could they?) any more than we are telling
members of families that still care for each other to split up. Many
unions still provide a certain minimal defense from the employers, just
as many families still provide the last remaining source of tenderness
and community for their members. Nevertheless, in a time when something
far better is really possible — when workers are openly rebelling
against the unions and men, women and children are openly rebelling
against the family — to defend these institutions is purely reactionary,
no matter how confused, limited and often pointlessly destructive the
rebellion against them may be at first. In a communist society, where
people create wealth according to their abilities and pleasures, and use
wealth according to their needs and desires, where there is a real,
universal community, unions and families alike would cease to exist
(although the unions, in particular, will have to be smashed on the way
to creating such a society) simply because people will not seek
protection from their own wealth.
The Left, of course, does not even begin to understand any of this.
These hacks who call only for "a decent life", who think the goal of
revolution, as well as its means, is higher and equalized wages for
self-alienation, better conditions to do it in, and social welfare as a
safety-valve for discontent... they have forgotten what life is, and
themselves, bear the scent of something already dead. The desperation
that transforms children into alcoholics, arsonists, ideologists and
murderers before they reach puberty makes one thing painfully clear:
communism, free human association, is no longer "a program" to be
realized in the distant future, but an immediate, basic, biological and
emotional NEED — one which grows more urgent every day. From now on, as
the workers of Watts and Detroit demonstrated in the 1960's, and as
those of Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Warsaw, Liverpool, Tel Aviv and Cairo
continued to demonstrate, the revolution BEGINS with the refusal of
wage-labor and the market — the refusal of sacrifice and submission, and
never ceases to refuse all constraints. Here, the old saying that we "do
not live by bread alone” acquires a new and marvelous meaning. The
community and festivity, the erotic and creative life that we so
passionately desire, can only be successfully achieved through a violent
break with the past... through the conscious rejection of all the old
habits and makeshifts which have helped us to (merely) survive up to
now. It is these habits and makeshifts — these defensive adaptations and
camouflages — which make us both capable of tolerating this world and
incapable of creating a new one. Only we ourselves, acting without any
authority but that of our needs and desires, can use the wealth of
creative potential stored up under capitalism to transform our lives and
our planet.
To be sure, all of this will require global planning and coordination,
before, during and after the final battle. But, if we are really going
to re-own our lives, the coordinating bodies at the local, regional and
global levels must be strictly mandated and subject to immediate recall.
This is not for the sake of "democracy", for the revolution is not
essentially a democratic process — rather, it is simply to ensure that
we all get what we want, and that where compromise has to be made among
conflicting interests it is we who work it out... not some
representative, bureaucrat or mediator. "Bookkeeping" and administering
the flow of our world production will still be necessary, but they can
and must become activities just like any other, without power of
privilege. The full application of modern communications and computer
technology, impossible under capitalism, will make possible worldwide
planning whose "center" is everywhere — based upon a continual balancing
out of our abilities and pleasures as producers (creators) and our needs
and desires as consumers (self-oriented hedonists and adventurers). The
tangled, strangled cobweb of capitalist organization, with its
separation into enterprises, corporations, committees and nation-states,
will be brushed away by the revolution itself, and the new organization
of life will grow up organically as production is resumed and
transformed by ex-workers, ex-students, ex-housewives, et al, who are
now simply — human beings — unconfined to any particular social role...
moving freely throughout the world as they experience new activities and
taste new pleasures.
To return to the present situations the re-owning of our lives begins on
a small scale with the re-owning of our intelligence, senses,
associations and passions. Everything can (and greedily must) be called
upon for use. Every aspect of the old world can be examined to see if we
find a want to preserve, convert or destroy it. The serums of false
consciousness and the empty phrases we exchange every day ("Have a nice
day", "That's life", "What's happening?", and "Did you come?" to excerpt
but a few) can be played with in such a way as to make clear what is not
really going on. In limited struggles like work-strikes and rent-strikes
the point is not to militantly push abstract "demands", but to selfishly
place the struggle within the context of the world-situation, and,
hence, to be realistic (concrete) about what can be accomplished.
Besides this, we need to begin finding out how our own immediate areas
fit into world production as a whole, what the important facilities are
that will need to be captured, occupied and held against the State
forces during the insurrection, how long a given city or region can hold
out in spells of isolation, and so on. In other words, we need to think
tactically and strategically. In this way the consciously communist
minority can help prepare themselves and the rest of their class — for,
make no mistake about it, it is a social war we are starting, a war
whose stake is the freedom to shape the whole world.
To many people, what we say here will come as no particular shock, for
our ideas and our practice are already in everyone's minds and daily
life activities at some level; we are only expressing the real movement
that has been emerging for a long time, which we call communism. Among
more conservative and repressed people, like the organizers of this
demonstration, we will no doubt continue to be very unpopular. But,
unlike the Left, which wants to recruit the "masses" into its
"revolutionary organizations" — and so, panders to their meanest
prejudices and most stupid anxieties, we have no interest in being
popular as such. Of course we want people to agree with us: but because
we have no interest outside the movement as a whole, because we do not
try to represent the interests of the working class but speak for our
own as a part of it, we feel that our own ends are best served by
telling the whole truth as we see it, however painful that truth may be
at times. As a class we will go on failing until we succeed; our
failures can be superseded — turned into success, if we selfishly
critique them as fiercely as we extend our more successful encounters
with the old world.
The old May Day ritual is part of our failure. In Moscow, it is the
occasion for a sacred parade of nuclear missiles; in Peking, for hymns
to the glory of Nation, Sacrifice, Family and Work. If we are going to
re-own our past, let it be as a part of re-owning our present. Let it be
as the workers of Szeczin, Poland made the Internationale their own
again in 1970 — by singing it as they looted State-owned stores, fought
off the Red Army and burned down the headquarters of the Communist
Party. May Day began when workers were fighting for the 8-hour day:
let's celebrate it once again — only when we have made our days and
nights our own once and for all.