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Title: The revolutionary project Author: Alfredo M. Bonanno Language: en Topics: revolution Source: Retrieved on 2013-05-12 from http://pantagruel-provocazione.blogspot.com Notes: Published in “Anarchismo” n. 59, January 1988 (Italy).
It is not easy to grasp the various aspects of revolutionary activity.
It is even more difficult to grasp everything in terms of a complex
project that has its own intrinsic logic and operative articulation.
That is what I mean by revolutionary work.
We all, or nearly all, agree as to who the enemy is. In the vagueness of
the definition we include elements from our personal experience (joy and
suffering) as well as our social situation and our culture. We are
convinced that we know everything that is required in order to draw up a
map of enemy territory and identify objectives and responsibility. Times
change of course, but we don’t take any notice. We make the necessary
adjustments and carry on.
Obscure in our way of proceeding, our surroundings also obscure, we
light up our path with the miserable candle of ideology and stride
forward.
The tragic fact is that things around us change, and often rapidly. The
terms of the class relationship are constantly widening and narrowing in
a contradictory situation. They reveal themselves one day only to
conceal themselves the next, as the certainties of yesteryear
precipitate into the darkness of the present.
Anyone who maintains a constant if not immobile pole is not seen as what
they are: honest navigators in the sea of class confusion, but are often
taken to be stubborn chanters of out of date, abstract, ideological
slogans. Anyone who persists in seeing the enemy inside the uniform,
behind the factory, at the ministry, school, the church, etc., is
considered suspect. There is a desire to substitute harsh reality with
abstract relations and relativity. So the State ends up becoming a way
of seeing things and individuals, with the result that, being an idea,
it cannot be fought. The desire to fight it in abstract in the hope that
its material reality, men and institutions will precipitate into the
abyss of logical contradiction, is a tragic illusion. This is what
usually happens at times like this when there is a lull both in the
struggle and in proposals for action.
No one with any self respect would admit to the State’s having any
positive function. Hence the logical conclusion that it has a negative
one, i.e. that it damages some to the benefit of others. But the State
is not simply the idea State, it is also the ‘thing State’, and this
‘thing’ is composed of the policeman and the police station, the
minister and the ministry (including the building where the ministry has
its offices), the priest and the church (including the actual place
where the cult of lies and swindling takes place), the banker and the
bank, the speculator and his premises, right down to the individual spy
and his more or less comfortable flat in the suburbs. Either the State
is this articulated whole or it is nothing, a mere abstraction, a
theoretical model that it would be absolutely impossible to attack and
defeat.
Of course, the State also exists inside us. It is therefore also idea.
But this being an idea is subordinate to the physical places and persons
that realise it. An attack on the idea of State (including that which we
harbour inside us, often without realising it) is only possible if we
attack it physically, in its historical realisation standing there
before us in flesh and blood.
What do we mean by attack? Things are solid. Men defend themselves, take
measures. And the choice of the means of attack is also open to
confusion. We can (or rather must) attack with ideas, oppose critique to
critique, logic to logic, analysis to analysis. But that would be a
pointless exercise if it were to come about in isolation, cut off from
direct intervention on the things and men of the State (and capital of
course). So, in relation to what we said earlier, attack not only with
ideas but also with weapons. I see no other way out. To limit oneself to
an ideological duel would merely increase the enemy’s strength.
Theoretical examination therefore, alongside and at the same time as
practical attack.
Moreover, it is precisely in the attack that theory transforms itself
and practice expresses its theoretical foundations. To limit oneself to
theory would be to remain in the field of idealism typical of the
bourgeois philosophy that has been feeding the coffers of the dominant
class for hundreds of years, as well as the concentration camps of the
experimenters of both Right and Left. It makes no difference if this
disguises itself as historical materialism, it is still a question of
the old phagocytic idealism. Libertarian materialism must necessarily
overcome the separation between idea and deed. If you identify the enemy
you must strike, and strike adequately. Not so much in the sense of an
optimal level of destruction, as that of the general situation of the
enemy’s defence, its possibilities of survival and the increasing danger
it represents.
If you strike it is necessary to destroy part of their structure, thus
making their functioning as a whole more difficult. All this, if
considered in isolation, runs the risk of seeming insignificant. It does
not manage, that is, to convert itself into something real. For this
transformation to come about it is necessary for the attack to be
accompanied by a critical examination of the enemy’s ideas, ideas that
are part of its repressive and oppressive action.
But does this reciprocal conversion of practical action into theoretical
and theoretical into practical come about as something imposed
artificially? For example, in the sense of carrying out an action then
printing a fine document claiming it. The ideas of the enemy are not
criticised or gone into in this way. They are crystallised within the
ideological process, appearing to be massively in opposition to the
ideas of the attacker, transferred into something quite ideological. Few
things are as hateful to me as this way of proceeding.The place for the
conversion of theory into practice and vice versa, is the project. It is
the project as an articulated whole that gives practical action a
different significance, makes it a critique of the ideas of the enemy.
It derives from this that the work of the revolutionary is essentially
the elaboration and realisation of a project.
But before discovering what a revolutionary project might be, it is
necessary to agree on what the revolutionary must possess in order to be
able to elaborate this project of theirs. First of all courage. Not the
banal courage of the physical clash and attack on the enemy trenches,
but the more difficult one, the courage of one’s ideas. Once you think
in a certain way, once you see things and people, the world and its
affairs in a certain way, you must have the courage to carry this
through without compromise or half measures, without pity or illusion.
To stop half way would be a crime or, if you like, is absolutely normal.
But revolutionaries are not ‘normal’ people. They must go beyond. Beyond
normality, but also beyond exceptionally, which is an aristocratic way
of considering diversity Beyond good, but also beyond evil, as someone
would have said.
They cannot wait for others to do what needs to be done. They cannot
delegate to others what their conscience dictates to them. They cannot
wait peacefully to do what others itching to destroy what oppresses them
like themselves would do if only they decided, if only they were to
awake from their torpor and from allowing themselves to be swindled, far
away from the chatter and confusion.
So they must set to work, and work hard. Work to supply themselves with
the means necessary to give some basis to their convictions.
And here we come to the second thing: constancy. The strength to
continue, persevere, insist, even when others are discouraged and
everything seems difficult.
It is impossible to procure the means one requires without constancy.
The revolutionary needs cultural means, i.e. analyses and basic common
knowledge. But studies that seem very far from revolutionary practice
are also indispensable to action. Languages, economy, philosophy,
mathematics, the natural sciences, chemistry, social science and so on.
This knowledge should not be seen as sectarian specialisation, nor
should it be the dilettante exercises of an eccentric spirit dipping
into this and that, desirous of knowledge but forever ignorant due to
the failure to possess a method of learning. And then the technics:
writing correctly, (in a way that reaches one’s objective), speaking to
others (using all the techniques on the subject), which are not easy to
learn and are very important, studying (this is also a technique),
remembering (memory can be improved, it does not have to be left to our
more or less natural disposition), the manipulation of objects (which
many consider a mysterious gift but instead is technique and can be
learned and perfected) and others still.
The search to acquire these means is unending. It is the revolutionary’s
task to work continually to perfect these means and extend them to other
fields.
Then there is a third thing, creativity. There can be no doubt that all
of the above means would be useless, simply specialisation as an end in
itself, were they not to produce new experiences, continual modification
in the means as a whole and the possibility of putting them to use. And
it is here that it becomes possible to grasp the great force of
creativity, i.e. the fruit of all the preceding efforts. Logical
processes become no more than a basic, unimportant element, whereas a
different, total new one emerges: intuition.
So now the problem comes to be seen differently. Nothing will be as it
was before. Numerous connections and comparisons, inferences and
deductions are made without our realising it. All the means in our
possession begin to vibrate and come alive. Things of the past along
with new understanding, old concepts, ideas and tensions, that had not
fully been understood become clear. An incredible mixture, itself a
creative event, which must be submitted to the discipline of method in
order for us to produce something, limited if you like, but immediately
perceivable. Unfortunately the destiny of creativity is that its immense
initial explosive potential (which becomes something miserable in the
absence of the basic means mentioned above) must be returned to the
realm of technique in the narrow sense of word. It must go back to
becoming word, pages, figures, sounds, form, objects. Otherwise, outside
the scheme of this prison of communication, it would be dispersive and
abandoned, lost in an immense fathomless sea.
And now one last thing, materiality. The capacity, that is, to grasp the
real material foundations of what surrounds us. For example, we require
suitable means in order to understand and act, and that is not so
simple. The question of means seems clear, but always leads to
misunderstanding. The question of money, for example. It is obvious that
without money one cannot do what one wants. A revolutionary cannot ask
for State financing to develop projects aimed at its destruction. They
cannot for both ethical reasons and a logical one (that the State would
not give it to them). Nor can they seriously believe that with small
personal subscriptions they will be able to do everything they want (and
consider necessary). Nor can they simply continue to complain about lack
of money or resign themselves to the fact that some things just can’t be
done for that reason. Even less can they adopt the stance of those who,
being penniless, feel their conscience to be at rest and, stating they
have no money, do not participate in the common effort but wait for
others to do so in their place. Of course, it is clear that if a comrade
does not have any money they cannot be held to pay for what they cannot
afford. But have they really done everything they can to procure some
for themselves? Or is there only one way to get hold of money: go
begging for it, letting oneself be exploited by a boss? I don’t think
so.
In the arc of the possible ways of being, including personal tendencies
and cultural acquisitions, two extreme kinds of behaviour polarise, each
of which is limited and penalising. On the one hand there are those who
accentuate the theoretical aspect, on the other, those who immerse
themselves up in the practical one. These two poles hardly ever exist in
the ‘pure state’, but are often accentuated enough to become obstacles
and impediments.
When exasperated to infinity the great possibilities that theoretical
study gives the revolutionary remain dead letters, becoming elements of
contradiction and impediment. Some people can only see life in
theoretical terms. They are not necessarily men of letters or scholars
(for the latter this would be quite normal), but could be any
proletarian, an emarginated person that grew up in the streets coming to
blows. This search for a resolution through the subtlety of reason
transforms itself into disorganic anxiety, a tumultuous desire to
understand that invariably turns into pure confusion, lowering the
primacy of the brain that they are trying to hold on to at any cost.
This exasperation reduces their critical capacity to put order in their
ideas, widening their creativity but only in the pure, one might say
wild, state, supplying images and judgement devoid of any organisational
method that might make them utilizable. This person lives constantly in
a kind of ‘trance’, eats badly, relates to others with difficulty. They
become easily suspicious, when not anxious to be ‘understood’, and for
this reason tend to accumulate an incredible hotchpotch of contradictory
thoughts with no guiding thread. The solution for getting out of the
labyrinth would be action. But according to the model of polarisation we
are looking at, this would have to be submitted to the dominion of the
brain, to the ‘logic’ of reason. So, the action is killed, put off to
infinity or lived badly because not ‘understood’, not brought back to
the pre-eminence of thought.
On the other hand, there is endless doing, the passing of one’s life
away in things to be done. Today, tomorrow. Day after day. Perhaps in
hope of a particular day that will see an end to this putting off to
infinity. Meanwhile no search for a moment’s reflection that is not
exclusively linked to things be done, or very little at least. Devoting
all one’s time to doing kills in the same way as devoting it all to
thinking does. The contradictions of the individual are not resolved by
action as an end in itself. For the revolutionary things are even worse.
The classic flattery that individuals use to convince themselves of the
validity and importance of the action they wish to undertake is not
enough for the revolutionary. The only expedient one can have recourse
to is to put things off to infinity, to better days when it will no
longer be necessary to dedicate oneself ‘exclusively’ to doing and there
will be time to think. But how can one think without the means to do so?
Perhaps thought is automatic activity that one slips into when one stops
doing? Certainly not. In the same way as doing is not automatic activity
that one slips into when one stops thinking. The possession of a few
things then, courage, constancy, creativity, materiality, can allow the
revolutionary to bring the means they possess to fruition and build
their project.
And this concerns both the analytical and practical aspects. Once again
a dichotomy appears that needs to be seen in its inconsistency, i.e. as
it is usually intended by the dominant logic.
No project can be just one or other of these aspects. Each analysis has
a different angle and development according to the organisational
proposal, which needs to be assisted by other, similar analyses.
The revolutionary who is unable to master the analytical and
organisational part of his project will always be at the mercy of
events, constantly turning up after things have happened, never before.
The aim of the project, in fact, is to see in order to foresee. The
project is a prosthesis like any other of man’s intellectual
elaborations. It allows action, makes it possible, prevents it from
being extinguished in pointless discussions and improvisation. But it is
not the ‘cause’ of action, it contains no element of justification in
this sense. If correctly intended, the project itself is action, whereas
the latter is itself a project, becomes fully part of it, makes it grow,
enriches and transforms it.
A lack of awareness of these fundamental premises of the work of the
revolutionary often leads to confusion and frustration. Many comrades
who remain tied to what we could call reflex interventions often suffer
backlashes such as demotivation and discouragement. An external event,
(often repression) gives the stimulous to act. This often ends or burns
itself out and the intervention has no more reason to exist. Hence the
frustrating realisation that one has to begin all over again. It is like
digging away at a mountain with a spoon. People do not remember. They
forget quickly. Aggregation does not occur. Numbers decline. Nearly
always the same people. The comrade who can only act by ‘reflex’ often
survives by going from radical refusal, to shutting himself away in
disdainful silence, to having fantasies of destroying the world (human
beings included). On the other hand, many comrades remain attached to
what we might call routine interventions, i.e. those involving
periodicals (papers, reviews, books) or meetings (congresses,
conferences, debates, etc.). Here again the human tragedy does not fail
to present itself. It is not usually so much a question of personal
frustration (which also exists, and you can see it), as the comrade’s
transformation into a congressual bureaucrat or editor of barely
readable pages that try to hide their inconsistency by going into daily
events, explaining them according to their own point of view. As we can
see, it is always the same story.
So, the project must be propositional. It must take the initiative.
First operatively, concerning things to be seen or done in a certain
way. Then organisationally: how to go about doing these things.Many
people do not realise that the things to be done (in the context of the
class clash) are not set down once and for all, but take on different
meanings throughout time and in changing social relations. That leads to
the need for their theoretical evaluation. The fact that some of these
things actually do go on for a long time as though they cannot change,
does not mean that this is so. For example, the fact that there is a
need to organise in order to strike the class enemy necessarily
signifies extension in time. Means and organisation tend to crystallise.
And in some respects it is well that this should be so. That is not to
say that it is necessary to re-invent everything each time one
re-organises, even after being hit by repression. But it does mean that
this ‘resumption’ should not be an exact repetition. Preceding models
can be submitted to criticism, even if basically they remain valid and
constitute a considerable starting point. At this point one often feels
attacked by misinformed critics and preconceived ideas, and at all costs
wanting to avoid being accused of being an ‘irreducible’, which actually
sounds quite positive, but implies an incapacity to understand the
evolution of social conditions as a whole.
So it is possible to use old organisational models, so long as they are
submitted to a radical critique. But what could this critique be? In a
word, pointing out the uselessness and danger of centralised structures,
the mentality of delegating, the myth of the quantitative, the symbolic,
the grandiose, the use of the media, etc. As we can see, it is a
question of a critique aimed at showing the other side of the
revolutionary horizon, the anarchist and libertarian side. To refuse
centralised structures, organisation charts, delegates, quantity,
symbolism, entrism, etc., means to fully adopt anarchist methods. And an
anarchist proposition requires a few preliminary conditions.
The latter might seem (and in certain aspects is) less effective at
first. Results are more modest, not so obvious, have all the aspects of
dispersion and that cannot be reduced to one single project. They are
pulverised, diffused, i.e. they concern minimal objectives that cannot
be related to one central enemy immediately, at least as this comes to
be presented in the descriptive iconography that power itself has
invented. Power has every interest in showing its peripheral
ramifications and supporting structures in a positive light, as though
they had purely social functions that are indispensable to life. Given
our incapacity to expose them, it effectively conceals the connections
that pass from these peripheral structures to repression, then to
consensus. This is the not inconsiderable task that awaits the
revolutionary, who should also expect incomprehension concerning actions
when they begin to strike, hence the need for ‘clarification’. And
herein lies another trap. To make these clarifications in ideological
terms would reproduce concentration and centrality exactly. Anarchist
methods cannot be explained through an ideological filter. Any time that
this has happened it has simply been a juxtaposition of our methods on
to practices and projects that are far from libertarian.
The concept of delegating is criticised because it is a practice which,
aside from being authoritarian, leads to increasing processes of
aggregation. Refusal to delegate could lead to building indirect
aggregation, a free organisational form. Separate groups then, united by
the methods employed, not by hierarchical relations. Common objective,
common choices, but indirect. Not feeling the need to propose
aggregational relationships that sooner or later end up producing
hierarchical organisation charts (even if they are horizontal, claiming
to adhere to anarchist methods), which turn out to be vulnerable to any
increase in the winds of repression, where each does their own thing. It
is the myth of the quantitative that needs to fall. The myth that
numbers ‘impress’ the enemy, the myth of ‘strength’ before coming out
into the struggle, the myth of the ‘liberation army’ and other such
things.
So, without wanting it, old things are transforming themselves. Models,
objectives and practices of the past are revolutionising themselves.
Without a shadow of doubt the final crisis of the ‘political’ method is
emerging. We believe that all attempts to impose ideological models on
to subversive practices have disappeared for ever.
In due proportion, it is the world as a whole that is refusing the
political model. Traditional structures with ‘strong’ political
connotations have disappeared, or are about to. The parties of the left
are aligning themselves with those of the centre and the parties of the
right are also moving in that direction, so as not to remain isolated.
The democracies of the West are moving closer to the dictatorships of
the East. This yielding of the political structure corresponds to
profound changes in the economic and social field. Those who have a mind
to manage the subversive potential of the great masses are finding
themselves facing new necessities. The myths of the past, also that of
the ‘controlled class struggle’ are finished. The great mass of
exploited have been drawn into mechanisms that clash with the clear but
superficial ideologies of the past. That is why the parties of the left
are moving close to the centre, which basically corresponds to a zeroing
of political distinctions and a possible management of consensus, at
least from the administrative point of view.
It is in things to be done, short term programmes such as the management
of public welfare, that distinctions are arising. Ideal (therefore
ideological) political projects have disappeared. No one (or hardly
anyone) is prepared to struggle for a communist society, but they could
be regimented into structures that claim to safeguard their immediate
interests once again. Hence the increasing appearance of wider struggles
and structures, national and supranational parliaments.
The end of politics is not in itself an element that could lead one to
believe there has been ‘anarchist’ turning in society in opposition to
attempts at indirect political management. Not at all. It is a question
of profound changes in the modern structure of capital that are also
taking place on an international level, precisely because of the greater
interdependence of the various peripheral situations. In turn, these
changes mean that the political myths of the past are finished as a
means of control, resulting in a passage to methods better suited to the
present time: the offer of better living conditions in the short term, a
higher level of satisfaction of primary needs in the East, work for
everybody in the West. These are the new rules of the course.
No matter how strange it might seem, however, the general crisis in
politics will necessarily bring with it a crisis in hierarchical
relations, the delegate, etc., all the relations that have tended to put
the terms of class opposition in a mythical dimension. It will not be
possible for this to go on for much longer without consequences, many
people are starting to see that the struggle must not pass through the
mythical dimension of politics but enter the concrete dimension of the
immediate destruction of the enemy.
There are also those who, basically not wanting to know what the work of
the revolutionary should be in the light of the above social changes,
come to support ‘soft’ methods of opposition, claiming that they can
obstruct the spreading of the new power through passive resistance,
‘delegitimation’ and such like. In my opinion this is a misunderstanding
caused by the fact that they consider modern power, precisely because it
is more permissive and based on wider consensus, to be less ‘strong’
than that of the past based on hierarchy and absolute centralisation.
This is a mistake like any other, deriving from the fact that in each
one of us there is a residual of the equation ‘power equals strength’
whereas the modern structures of dominion are dismantling themselves
piece by piece in favour of a weak but efficient form, perhaps even
worse still than a strong, boorish one. The new power penetrates the
psychological fabric of society right to the individual, drawing him
into it, whereas the latter remained external. It made a lot of noise,
could bite, but basically only built a prison wall that can be climbed
sooner or later.
The many aspects of the project also make the perspective of the
revolutionary task multiple. No field of activity can be excluded in
advance. For the same reason there cannot be privileged fields of
intervention that are ‘congenial’ to one particular individual. I know
comrades who do not feel inclined to take up certain kinds of
activity—let us say the national liberation struggle—or certain
revolutionary practices such as small specific actions. The reasons
vary, but they all lead to the (mistaken) idea that one should only do
the things one enjoys. This is mistaken, not because it is wrong that
one of the sources of action must be joy and personal satisfaction, but
because the search for individual motivations can preclude a wider and
more significant kind of research, that based on the totality of the
intervention. To set off with preconceived ideas about certain practices
or theories means to hide—due to ‘fear’—behind the idea, nearly always
mistaken, that these practices and theories do not ‘please’ us. But all
pre-conceived refusal is based on scarce knowledge of what one is
refusing, on not getting close to it. The satisfaction and joy of the
moment comes to be seen as the only thing that matters, so we shut
ourselves off from the perspective of the future. Often without wanting
to, we become fearful and dogmatic, resentful of those who do manage to
overcome these obstacles, suspicious of everybody, discontented and
unhappy.
The only acceptable limits are those of our capabilities. But these
limits should always be seen during the course of the event, not as
something that exists beforehand. I have always started off from the
idea (obviously fantasy, but good operatively) of having no limits, of
having immense capabilities. Then day to day practice has taken on the
task of pointing out my actual limits to me and the things that I can
and can’t do. But these limits have never stopped me beforehand, they
have always emerged as insurmountable obstacles later on. No
undertaking, however incredible or gigantic, has prevented me from
starting. Only afterwards, during the course of particular practices,
has the modesty of my capabilities come to light, but this has not
prevented me from obtaining partial results, the only things that are
humanly attainable.
But this fact is also a problem of ‘mentality’, i.e. of a way of seeing
things. Often we are too attached to the immediately perceivable, to the
socialist realism of the ghetto, city, nation, etc. We say we are
internationalist but in reality we prefer other things, things we know
better. We refuse real international relations, relations of reciprocal
comprehension, of overcoming barriers (also linguistic ones), of
collaboration through mutual exchange. One even refuses specific local
relations, their myths and difficulties. The funny thing is that the
first are refused in the name of the second, and the second in the name
of the first.
The same thing happens concerning the specific preparatory activity of
finding revolutionary means (instruments). Again, this decision is often
automatically delegated to other comrades. This is due to fear or
remorse which, if gone into carefully, have little to say for
themselves.
The professionalism that is flaunted elsewhere is not welcome in
anarchist methodology, but neither is downright refusal or preconceived
ideas. The same goes for what is happening concerning the present mania
for experience as a thing in itself, the urgency of ‘doing’, personal
satisfaction, the ‘thrill’. The two extremes touch and interpenetrate.
The project sweeps these problems aside because it sees things in their
globality. For the same reason the work of the revolutionary is
necessarily linked to the project, identifies with it, cannot limit
itself to its single aspects. A partial project is not a revolutionary
one, it might be an excellent work project, could even involve comrades
and resources for long periods of time, but sooner or later it will end
up being penalised by the reality of the class struggle.