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Title: Terrorism or Revolution Author: Raoul Vaneigem Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: revolution, anti-left, insurrection, situationist, terrorism, Everyday life, Ernest Cœurderoy, subversion, May 1968 Source: Retrieved on May 24, 2022 from https://libcom.org/article/terrorism-or-revolution-introduction-ernest-coeurderoy-raoul-vaneigem. Notes: Written by Raoul Vaneigem, 1972. Translated from the French and published by Black Rose, 1975. | Author's note (5 January 1972): the ensemble of these notes constitutes the outline of a work that will be prepared under a more appropriate form.
May 1968 drew the line of demarcation "between the reformists of
survival and the insurgents of the will to live." Despite the ebbing of
the revolutionary tide and the return of the class struggle to the
contours it followed the day before the great upheaval, nothing is quite
the same, for in that moment the "party" of depassement was reborn. Now.
The Social Question has ceased to be posed in terms of having. It
appears now as what it had been in fact, a construction of concrete
being, an emancipation, not of the citizen, but of the individual.
Survival is extending itself to all of existence. In generalizing itself
under the pressure of its own inner drives, the imperialism of the
commodity simplified the choices. There is nothing more urgent than
quick and effective intervention against the system of survival.
The experience of May '68 brought the political once again to class
consciousness, consciousness of itself. It will either liquidate the
power of the commodity and substitute generalized self-management for
it, or it will survive to regret its failure.
The outcome of the confrontation to come depends on the offensive and
defensive power of the revolutionary wing of the proletariat, on those
who have not only consciousness but also the power of intervention: the
workers at the point of production and distribution. They have in their
hands the roots of a reversed world; they can destroy the economy. Now
shields receiving all the blows and serving after the battle as
safeguards for the new bosses, they must become the invincible army of
generalized self-management.
We are experiencing the last days of culture. There is no more
anti-culture, no counterculture, no parallel or underground culture.
Operating under these sociological distinctions or the progressive
reduction of culture to the spectacle, a spectacle which reduces the sum
of the categories of real life to survival in a space-time when the
commodity is not only produced, distributed and consumed but also
generalized as necessity, chance, freedom, duration, and representation.
Culture then enters the economy as a luxury article available to all.
Blessed with the label of intellectuality, culture is the thought of the
spectacle, its separated intelligence. Formerly preoccupied with glory
or posterity, today artists and thinkers punch in as skilled workers in
the language factory, to be paid in tokens of prestige.
Culture becomes one of the self-regulating mechanisms of power.
Incitement to the overconsumption of images and knowledge corresponds to
the necessity of balancing the overproduction of ideological attitudes,
of lies imposed on daily life by the dominant society. Its decline and
subsequent reinforcement follows the movement of the spectacle itself.
Thus it creates a propitious zone for sabotage and diversion, for direct
subversive action.
At the same time as it reveals itself as a separated sphere, culture
acts against it. As it issues from daily life and its creativity, the
cultural work cannot be reduced purely and simply to the spectacle
without revealing the trace of human practice impinging [on] it. Even as
the language of power fails to fully supplant poetry, and just as life
is never quite reduced to survival, so the market system fails to
transform the cultural creation into a pure commodity. This check marks
at the same time the place of the reversal of perspective, the point at
which the creativity brought forth in the past is reinvested in the
project of generalized self-management.
Dada and Surrealism erred in not associating the liberation of lifelike
poetry with the revolution of everyday life. As soon as culture begins
to question itself as separation, it attempts to continue itself as
radical theory. But it falls backward into ideology if it fails to
develop the expression of the will to live underlying it in a
perspective of collective struggle. Thus culture faces two choices: to
be reduced to the spectacle as a renewable and immediately reabsorbed
pseudo-autonomous fragment, or negate itself by realizing itself in real
life.
At the instant it rediscovers its origin, spiritual creation also
reaches its end as separated activity. Those who strive to seize it at
the roots of multidimensional life cannot be distinguished from those
who are prepared to divert history to realize the imaginary.
Our society of survival is founded on the system of absolute exchange.
Values and principles commonly admitted and universally transgressed are
swept along into the infernal cycle of interchangeability. In an
irregularly accelerated rotation of shitty water toward the sewer pipe,
the spectacular whirlpool reunites the ensemble of praised, blamed,
encouraged, permitted, condemned and judged attitudes.
The commodity system produces the objectivity of vacuity through a
developing movement that sucks in all of humanity to the profit of its
concrete and oppressive abstraction. Previously, we were quiescent for a
boss; henceforth, we survive for an entity, a phantom. What weighs on us
is no longer capital but the logic of the commodity; no longer does the
power of a person or a class conscious of its predominance, nor even of
a cynical caste, rule. Rather, it is a machine -- whose directors, like
the officers of Kafka's penal colony, are only despicable cogs condemned
to rust of hardening arteries and early senility -- that runs the show.
The State -- the nerve and muscle center of spectacular commodity
organization; the mind and secular arm of exchangist totalitarianism --
has been converted, through decline and reinforcement, in a cybernetic
power, into self-regulation of general disorder, into a legality of that
which no longer has any laws. Its power succumbs to the imperatives of
accumulation, reproduction, and socialization of the commodity to the
degree that it disperses itself to reach into every nook and cranny, in
order to transform people into citizens of the whole (in the sense that
one speaks of all-powerful eunuchs).
Citizenship is identified with the right to be forced to partake of the
spectacle, which transforms the promotion of all beings and things
reduced to commodity status into varieties of nihilism. It is this
double feeling of frustration -- as human being and as
citizen-spectator-producer-consumer of encroaching emptiness -- that in
May 1968 unleashed a first chain reaction in which subjective energy in
the process of liberating itself shook French society to its
foundations. In a flash, the immense hope of the reversal of a world
reversed was illuminated -- a matter of taking the time to ask oneself,
"And if it was possible?" -- to even the darkest consciousness.
What is shown by the anger and rancor that today continue to nourish
physical repression, exorcism and the sort of psychological repression
in which they want to institutionalize an "insane" person because he or
she denounced the dominant madness is the violence by which destroyed
passion is converted into the passion to destroy.
For the first time, the return of the social revolution has thrown the
old world into chaos. The great fear of the million pourri has marked
its class frontiers with emotional excrement. Even if it is very well
known in the offices and factories that the bosses stink, it is good to
know from now on that they smell only of the commodity system they
protect. And, especially where there are bosses, you can smell the
State, and the hierarchical power that is its essence.
May 1968 revealed to a great many people that ideological confusion
tries to conceal the real struggle between the "party" of decomposition
and the "party" of global depassement. But the reflux of the
revolutionary movement, which undertook the collective realization of
individual desires, recompressed the memory of authenticity, of real
life without constraints, back into the spectacle.
Without a doubt, the interrupted feast has brutally returned to all the
anguishes, all the phantasms of stasis, but the general dissatisfaction
bears the mark of the blow that failed to drain it as one would drain an
abscess. Spectacular commodity society has recuperated a greater part of
the forces that are radically struggling against it into a new
dichotomy. The pocket ideologies are regrouped around a bipolar
distinction or antagonism between leftism, which takes and falsifies the
spirit of global revolution, and rightism, which opposes it with all the
energy of agonized or accepted renunciation.
The illusion of possible confrontation bears the alienating reality of a
confrontation of illusions. Thus the spectacle contradictorily presents
the "party" of survival as a comedic drama and palms off the
anti-spectacular hostility of the "party" of life and the project of
generalized self-management as a leftist ideology. The insurrectional
reality of May disappeared under the lie and enters into the perspective
of power. But the leftist clowning-around is so poorly disguised that
the space-time momentarily suspended now appears as a vacuum that
nothing but revolution can fill.
For power, the revolution does not exist outside of the spectacle; thus,
in the dominant language, rightism and leftism express the necessary
recuperation of the real conflict. Moreover, if the "party" of
depassement is late in efficaciously revealing itself, there will be
nothing to oppose the launching of a grotesque and bloody civil war, the
melodrama of fascism and anti-fascism.
The protagonists polish their roles. The choir of the right chants,
"Order, State, hierarchy, commodity." This strain runs, not without some
difficulties, from the altos to the basses: "Neo-fascism, conservatism,
Stalinism, social democracy, trade unionism, Trotskyism." In the choir
of the left, where they shout until breathless, contestation has fallen
heir to the remains of anarchism and the handful of partial claims taken
as absolutes (women's liberation, gay liberation, children's liberation,
koala liberation), groupism, anti-groupism, individualism, spontaneism,
and councilism -- all vocalized in critical critiques. Whereas
situationism, alone in the corner, gives the pitch, and makes as if to
strike all who pass within its reach.
All this beautiful old word has lost nothing from its splits, its
divergences, and its conflicts. But the clandestine pressure of enraged
consciousness and its practice imposes on the spectacle a Manichean
division, in which rightism and leftism support and mutually praise each
other in the vacuum they both experience as a common horror. Nihilism
only increases all the more.
As deficient as it is, leftist ideology, precisely because it is
deficient, holds the trace of radical theory in custody. Recuperated
into crumbs of the global critique that was principally elaborated by
the situationists, leftism keeps in its own way the memory of the
radical theory it falsifies. In leftism, the contestation appearing
everywhere takes the place of unity, and its ideological refusal of all
ideology takes the place of radicality.
All contestation enters into the mechanisms of self-regulation that
characterize the imperialism of the commodity. But it precipitates the
decline of the system, and this decline generalizes contestation. Where
else can one measure most simply the efficacy of contestation as an
element of decline if not at the center of gravity of
spectacular-commodity society, the State? The strikes of functionaries,
police officers, and magistrates are only amusing epiphenomena. What
really reaches the State, and which the State reflects everywhere as an
organ of mediation, repression and seduction, is the tendency of power
to fall. Thus it is that the force of nihilism, roused by the
development of the commodity system, takes hold and spreads willy-nilly.
How does the interaction of the tendency of power to fall, spectacular
antagonism, and the State on the road to cybernetization present itself?
The question has no meaning outside of the passional interest underlying
it, which is necessary to recall briefly. From the beginning of the
1960s, it was clear that the social malaise came from the degradation of
the passional atmosphere. Not only was the restriction of the space-time
of daily life condemned to repetition and linear flow, but roles --
substitutes for authentic realization -- were thrown into the general
devaluation. The appearance of passion was disappearing. It was
foreseeable, then, that the accumulation of exchange values without
passional value had to involve an empty passional usage, a taste of
nihilism that will go from crime without reason to the absurd defense of
defunct values, and which only the revolutionary project will be able to
restore to positivity. The disposition into leftism and rightism
organizes and regroups the nihilistic impulses, and puts the political
back on its feet, giving it a renewed passional vibrancy. Such gratuity
does not occur without increasing the importance of the ludicrous.
The more the tendency of power to fall becomes marked, the more rightism
clamors for a return to a strong State, with demonstrations of
xenophobia, nationalism, mediocrity. Its intervention slows the
reduction of the State to a cybernetized power, to the profit of its
national and police functions; it shackles the dynamism of the commodity
system, but not in a permanent manner, as the struggle between the old
Francoism and the Spanish technocrats shows. If cybernetization --
lacking regulation, pressured by oppositional ideologies and local
revolutionary actions -- slows down, the tendency of power to fall
slackens. The extreme wing of rightism sets the tone, in the concurrent
struggle for the reinforcement of the State, for the statist reformists
(liberals, Stalinites, socialists, Trotskyites and their baggage of
parties, unions, organizations, economic councils). Leftism is
reinforced to the degree that contestation responds to the
re-establishment of power, recuperates real opposition, and then aims at
borrowing from situationism its ideology of depassement, creativity and
immediacy, to which it can give, in the real violence of abstraction and
concrete consciousness of vacuity, only a practice of terrorist play.
To the contrary, as cybernetization progresses it revives the extreme
right within rightism and confirms the power of the technocrats. The
fall of authority deactivates leftist violence to the profit of an
ideology that takes from situationism its unitary appearance and its
anti-ideological ideology, and which is going to bring forth the
"humanization" of the commodity system from a reformism of daily life
and from communal experiences.
The irregularity of the commodity system allows such tendencies to occur
today simultaneously, without reaching a stage of paroxysm. However,
outside of the revolutionary perspective, the only way is terrorism. If
the ideological antagonism between rightism and leftism prevails, civil
war is inevitable. If, on the contrary, the self-regulation of the State
intervenes, if the antagonism rots, we are returned to insoluble
problems of survival and boredom, to the passion to destroy. In one case
as in the other, nihilism wins.
Apparently the State enjoys the game of exciting the Cossacks of
nihilism, only to immediately calm them with the specter of civil war
and by repression distributed from one side to the other, though keeping
to the tradition of class justice. In so far as the State tends to be
seen as social conciliator, in this sense all the programs of the
parties or political groups specify its ideal unfolding. But a slight
regression, a grain of sand in the network, is sufficient for a crisis
to break or reveal its immediate reality. If capitalism stimulates
crisis, the spectacular-commodity system its runs no risk on this
account for the simple reason that it is in a state of permanent crisis,
that it is the self-regulation of the disorder provoked by the
accumulation and socialization of the commodity. Image of the "solved"
crisis in the inverse world of the spectacle, it absorbs the every day
more-profound crisis of the will to live in a time reduced to duration
-- to a time that measures and is measured itself.
At the slightest pretext -- economic recession, police brutality,
football riot, settling of scores -- social violence will retake its
course. Isn't this the best moment to become involved with radical
theory, to conduct oneself with moderation in working to forward the
international revolution? Because if the "party" of depassement fails to
liquidate the conditions of survivalism, it is self-destruction for all.
If the Cossacks are loosed, if the mercenaries and desperadoes of
nihilism begin to march, we have not done with laughing in blood.
There is no return to the past. If the society of survival has sworn to
paralyze us little by little, it is better to avoid dying slowly in the
cesspools of solitude, between boredom and pollution; it is better to
precipitate joyously the course of things and the death of reified
beings.
If the vise is tightened, many will think it preferable to die, taking
along with them, via the bomb, the machete or the mortar, all the petty
officers of survival: judges, priests, cops, bosses, foremen. These are
the conditions that Coeurderoy, Maldoror, the Scythes of Blok, and
Artaud called the basis of oppressed subjectivity. They wait in the
street, where the newspapers redistribute criminality, sifting the
diverse deeds that bring them to the accounting of rightism or leftism,
specifying roles and nourishing them according to stereotypes of anger
or indignation.
Good souls of the dominant language, it is you who incite to murder,
hatred, pillage and civil war. In the shadow of a cruel and ridiculous
spectacle arises the old war of the poor against the rich, which today,
masked and falsified by ideological refraction, is the war of the poor
who want to stay poor and the poor who want to stop being poor.
If history should wait to pronounce, through the voice of the
proletarians of the anti-proletariat, the liquidation order for the
commodity system, which they are capable of executing, the old forms of
legal and illegal violence would unify the two camps in the same
antagonistic self-destruction. In the extreme wing of rightism and in
the "situationist left," the terrorist game already prevails as the
ideological practice of the end of ideologies. If we do not save the
ludicrous, it will work out its own salvation against us.
Rightism has unleashed its unfortunates. The white terror announces
itself with the usual musty smells of fear. The leftist game hunt aligns
the dejected pieces in the satisfied resentment of the inability to
experience unconstrained pleasure. Young insolents, longhairs or Arabs,
pay the price of passions blocked in the spectacle, the price of a
voyeurism that approaches the efficiency of a police reflex in
repressing -- in what it sees and seeks to see -- the desire to really
participate.
Through the play of antagonisms, it will suffice that the cowardice of
friends of victims and victims in power cease to respond to the
cowardice of the petit-bourgeois cops for the tactic of reprisals to
prevail over exorcising demonstrations and Boy Scoutish protest.
A worker fires at his foreman, misses him, clumsily hitting a policeman
instead. The attorney of the Assises Court of Loire-Atlantique demands
and obtains the death penalty. The circle is closed. When the example of
the Baader-Meinhof gang spreads -- and everything is set up to incite it
-- the attorney will submit the punishment he inflicts himself, through
an intermediary, each time that, in the name of others, he represses his
own refusal of humiliations. A month does not go by without an
intervention by union hacks and bosses' commandos against wildcat
strikers, without the police imprisoning, mistreating or accidentally
killing. What better incitement to urban guerrilla warfare, to a savage
self-defense? As long as it is not admitted everywhere and without
reservation that it is necessary to destroy the commodity system and lay
the bases of generalized self-management, no repression, no promise, no
reasoning will succeed in deterring the rebels of survival from general
self-destruction and the train of logic according to which it is better
to kill a policeman than commit suicide, better to kill a judge than a
policeman, to lynch a boss than kill a judge, and loot a department
store, burn the Stock Exchange, devastate the banks, and dynamite the
churches, then lynch the bosses, because in the rules of the terrorist
game these are the pigs -- the judges, bosses, chiefs, the defenders of
the commodity and its system of death that they impose and whose
representation they multiply.
Today illegalist exhortation has lost its obsolete voluntarism.
Spectacular organization incites violence with a greater imperative than
the anarchists of the past did. Hatred of the family does not need
apologists because the commodity system does not need the family. But
from the instant that rightism, the spectacular function of negative
nihilism, resuscitates paternal authority (despotic or reformist, who
cares?), it becomes the ludicrous reason for positive nihilism to
compensate with parceled violence for the loss of the unitary project of
generalized self-management.
The failure to bring children to awareness of their richness and their
spoilation, the trouble that the commodity system introduces among them,
which gets them directly and through the mediation of the family,
suffices to inject uneasiness into homes and parental associations.
There is nothing prophetic in assuring that such uneasiness is far from
being ended.
Splintered hatred strikes more cruelly than the unitary shock of
refusal. After the prisoners outside becomes the supporters of the
prisoners inside filthy bastilles, when the socially alienated free the
so-called mentally alienated, it is their at not seeing the end of the
society of survival that presides at the massacre of screws and
white-shirted police officers.
Lubricating the spectacular lie with the rest of the heavenly illusions,
priests attract popular anger more surely than the lightening that they
called down on the impious of yore. Managers of intimate alienation,
mountebanks of sacrifice, traditional messengers of inverted reality,
traveling salesmen of the toad of Nazareth and Saint Guevara, they
should know that nothing will save them save the critique in acts of
religion, the return of the bonfires of the Paris Commune and the
Spanish Revolution, the flame ecumenically brought from churches to
synagogues, from mosques to Buddhist temples, until not a stone of
divine infamy remains standing.
The march of nihilism scorns apocalyptic invocation. If the proletariat
does not promptly get rid of class society, the society of survival, the
spectacular-commodity system, the perspective of power -- if it does not
establish generalized self-management and social harmony through the
play of sovereign assemblies and their councils -- then the sickness of
survival risks generalizing the conditioned reflex of death.
In the past, Nazi fury has, in conditions much less favorable, set the
tone. The bait of abstract immediate profit -- ecological destruction is
only one aspect -- expresses (in repression and inversion) the
individual tension experienced by all regarding a multi-passional life.
If the weight of such a social inversion -- which is objectively
encouraged by the logic of the commodity -- blocks the reversal of
perspective, interdicts global depassement, despairs revolutionary
consciousness, and isolates and destroys attempts at insurrection, there
remains for us only the game of destruction in every sense, the pleasant
suicide of terrorism, the shooting of judges in a social Western in
which no one is unworthy of the bullet. All or nothing, but not
survival. The revolution or terrorism.
But the ascendancy of the spectacle today is not such that the
proletariat is completely dissimulated to itself. In vain and under the
cover of culturalization and its barkers, increasing proletarianization
reveals itself as a new negritude, as pride in being nothing, that is to
say, something on the level of appearance. No proletarian feels at ease,
which is hardly reassuring to those who would persuade him or her of the
contrary.
Furthermore, everything that evokes the dreams of subjectivity and the
hopes of the will to live continues to exercise an animating power on
the majority, despite gangsterish ideologies. As situationist theory
encountered before 1968 -- despite its limited diffusion -- the best
reception from souls spontaneously disposed to understand and practice
it, its ideological falsification has lost its rationale and passional
attraction only by winning the power to fascinate. The absurdity of the
use of words such as "spectacle," "survival," "individual realization,"
and "global critique" in the rounds of the dominant language shows well
enough that the spectacle recuperates radical theory poorly, and even
more poorly those people who practice it with critical consciousness of
possible recuperation.
If situationism became the panacea of leftism, its pseudo-unity in
decomposition, [then it is] that which can only disappear, be it in the
alienated reality of the terrorist game or in the movement of the
realization of the situationist project. Starting out as a critical
ideology, situationism can only become ideology in arms; from
pseudo-unity of refusal [to a] front of delinquents separately bringing
partial revolt on all fronts of oppression and the lie.
At its ultimate stage, such recuperation also throws light on essential
separation, principle of all hierarchy, of all sacrifice, of all
separations: the division between intellectual and manual.
While the accumulation and socialization of the commodity entails the
tendency of power to fall, the devaluation of the role and function of
the intellectual coincides with the culturalization of the spectacle. In
absorbing culture, the spectacle tends to reduce the intellectual's role
to bureaucratic functions, while self-abstraction -- in the roles to
which the intellectual is submitted -- is keenly felt as promotion and a
regression toward intellectualism.
The spectator is intellectualized proportionately as the spectacle
drains the reservoirs of culture. So that in refusing to accept oneself
as spectator, as participant in general passivity, as ensemble of roles,
each comes to criticize his or her own forced intellectualization.
Different from the old rancor of the self-taught and the ignorant toward
people of patented culture, the spontaneous refusal of intellectualism
responds to a confused critique of the spectacle and roles. It is also
pleasing to see how, in the antagonism of the ideologies of right and
left, the intellectualism of the anti-intellectuals is dead set against
the intellectuals of anti-intellectualism. The intellectual -- that of
the academy, the cafe or the groupuscules -- secretes ideology as
generalized ideology intellectualizes the most besotted of the old
combatants. Social changes have been roused, even in the present, only
by the agitation of intellectuals, under their control, through the
mediation of culture. To consider how the radicality of Marx, Sade and
Fourier disappeared, how it begins to revive in the situationist
project, and how it is privy to becoming (in the hands of the new
university intellectual) an incomprehensible hodgepodge condemned twice
by terrorist practice (as its occult source and as its useless abstract
dimension) -- to do all this, it seems urgent to transmit that
radicality to those who know its use, since it comes from their practice
and only their practice can continue it without end. It is high time
that those who transmit and continue this radicality be already declasse
people who are already conscious of the struggle for the liquidation of
classes, revolutionaries who also live as unitarily as possible and want
to prove their efficiency by destroying the world of separations.
From those who are prepared to act alone because they know that
thousands of others are acting in the same way, will be born the "party"
of depassement, the resurgence -- in much more favorable conditions --
of what Marx and Engels called "our party."
Humanity will be destroyed neither by the disorder of anarchy nor by the
confusion of despotism (...); the result of the new conflict of these
two primordial powers of humanity will be nothing but a new revolution
that will conserve it. --- Hurrah, or the Revolution of the Cossacks.
As it moves along with the movement of accumulation and socialization of
the commodity, the old opposition between private capitalism and State
capitalism is abolished in the totalitarian reality of the
spectacular-commodity system.
Individualizing alienation, the universality of the commodity reveals to
each person the identity existing between all forms of repression and
the lie and the reductive movement in which life is changed into
survival. Contradictorily, all forms of refusal bear within themselves
the collective propagation of the will to live, individually
experienced.
Everything tends to become a commodity in a process in which what is
opposed to the imperialism of the commodity tends to become everything.
The revolution corresponds to this awareness. The root of
spectacular-commodity society is the commodity, being and object totally
transformed into exchange value. The root of generalized self-management
is humanity itself, the concrete individual in his or her unitary and
collective movement of liberation.
Though the refusal of hierarchy, the global critique, and permanent
analysis are indispensable, the diffusion of radical theory and its
practice will not escape the risks of ideological backsliding and
ethical voluntarism that attempt to oppose them as long as the root of
the commodity system remains untouched by a collective action in which
individual passions dominate and gather together, by a subversive game
in which real life adventure experiments with the destruction of the
commodity, through diversions and sabotage, and generalized
self-management.
To strengthen the will to live, to clarify the rationality of radical
subjectivity, to call for struggle against sacrifice, roles and
militantism makes real sense only in a practice whose efficacy
objectively founds the hope of radically changing the dominant
conditions. In the periods in which the analysis of new historical
conditions was elaborated, the exigencies imposed on the revolutionary
in the unity of his or her theory and practice necessarily called for
the establishment of coherence in an essentially defensive manner, in a
world in which everything attacked him or her. Failing to directly shake
alienating conditions, the offensive technique consisted of attacking
persons, treating as an enemy anyone who supported the dominant
conditions.
From now on, it is possible to demand less and obtain more from the
anti-militant revolutionary, because it is possible to pass to the
attack of the system, to participate effectively in striking against it,
and to prove by the practice of the subversive game the excellence of
the rationality that animates it.
Theory is not apprehended radically if it is not tried out. It only
superficially touches the individual who does not discover in it a way
of drawing out the will to live. Outside of such unity, the passions are
blocked up, turning against themselves. Theory is crumbled, ideology and
passions harmonize in an identical inversion. Either terrorism or the
subversive game. The stakes are critical. Since what the sociologists
have called the explosion of May -- because it blew them up -- the wild
beasts of spontaneity are on the loose. The self-regulation of power,
menaced on all sides as it menaces everywhere, puts its money on the
antagonism between rightism and leftism, and on its decline, to harness
subjective energy. But for anyone who suddenly discovers the unique
character of his or her subjective universe, the plurality of desires,
the violence of the will to live: can he or she exist any longer not
being innocently amenable to the act of throwing a little monkeywrench
into the machinery of daily brutality? The "party" of depassement will
be born from such acts, from such individuals. Its existence as a
collective manifestation is tied to this question: can each individual
multiply his or her chances for authentic life by destroying that which
destroys him or her? Generalized self-management will come from the
answer given in deeds.
Not only does the subjective game exclude, by virtue of its simple
coherence, all militant practice, all action that implies sacrifice,
renouncement or the accumulation of misery, but the apprenticeship of
self-management -- which is positivity -- incites to all the joys of
everyday life. At the places of intervention, the quest for impunity is
the most succinct tactical form of creativity.
Thus, instead of preaching revolutionary fortitude to the world, as is
the case when one resorts unilaterally to books, speeches, leaflets --
even if done critically -- it is better that radical theory be
communicated inseparably with the propagation of methods sabotage and
diversion, on the condition that the subversive players spread it on
their part, by every means, by propagating their particular techniques
and the types of actions they judge opportunely appropriate for
disrupting the system.
In fact, there is no factory where sabotage and diversion are not
cheerfully practiced. It is necessary to generalize them through
consciousness of the project that unites the liquidation of the
commodity system and apprenticeship in generalized self-management. The
presence of global critique gives maximum import, impunity and pleasure
to actions taken against fragments of the commodity. It is the
revolutionary dimension in the subversion and emancipation of everyday
individuals, the opening for collective depassement, the guarantee of
tactical and strategic rationality. The radical critique, in rejoining
the spontaneous subversive game, will reinforce the fundamental
practical unity that will permit all varieties of revolutionary action.
It is important that each person individually proves his or her
effective autonomy, so that accustomed to act alone with consciousness
of a common project, he or she learns never to tolerate what is done in
his or her name, never to act in the name of others, and to discover, in
the reinforcement of his or her will to live, the practical truth of
collective action.
From the start, it is out of the individual, with his or her passions,
creativity, imagination and insatiable lust for real experiences that
movements for social change burst forth. And no collective movement will
reach the qualitative force of radicality until it proves that it
increases the power of individuals over their own daily life. Being
radical, it places history at the service of individual happiness.
The conscious masses, the opposite of crowds, conditioned and
conditionable, are composed of individuals aware of their subjectivity
and its global exigencies! The imperialism of subjectivity develops, in
the course of the struggle, the sponatneity of collective
self-management! Each for themselves and self management for all!
Natural enemies of the bourgeoisie, which now is the group that
organizes survival, proletarians become revolutionaries only by
thwarting ideological tricks in the movement where their spontaneous
practice elaborates radical theory and is confirmed as practical
consciousness. At present, the accent has been placed, on the one hand,
on the elaboration of radical theory through an analysis of the old
world and through practice in which the analyst negates him or herself
as separated consciousness; and, on the other hand, but inseparably, on
its diffusion. The problem was to say everywhere to people: here are the
real reasons that guide your actions. Thus becoming conscious of their
misery and their richness, they recognize themselves in a common project
and, from there, act more effectively and with a better understanding of
what they really want. The May Days have revealed the result.
Now that degenerated leftism manipulates the remnants of the possible
revolution into the perspective of hierarchical power, it is time to
replace despair with pleasure: to arouse to radical theory by the
stimulation of its uses.
The principle that what is easiest to overthrow and destroy is also what
is most immediately concrete in the mechanisms of the
spectacular-commodity system, indicates well enough that the simplest
and most concrete function allows the best clandestine revolutionary
practice.
Were it only with regard to the ease of execution, with impunity and
efficiency, the pleasure of ludicrous subversion is -- from all evidence
-- the privilege of those who have the upper hand on the commodity in
gestation, of the workers in the sectors of production and distribution:
factories, warehouses, department stores, agricultural cooperative
centres, freight transport (truckers, railwaymen, dockers).
Practiced everywhere, sabotage and diversion are experienced there with
a maximum of happiness. In the vital sector of spectacular-commodity
society the manual worker is, from the point of view of revolutionary
struggle, the one who holds the raw material of generalized exchange.
Isn't it scandalous that, with or without factory occupations, strikers
have to this day never touched the commodity?
At best, in suspending production (rarely distribution), the striking
workers only superficially disturb the self-regulating mechanisms. But,
at this stage of intervention, it is no longer sabotage that has the
most import but, rather, diversion, the diversion of the raw material of
exchange, all the ways of removing it from the circuits of production
and distribution where it becomes exchange value, is accumulated,
reproduced, socialized: all the ways of putting it into the collective
service of the individual will to live.
The warehouses, supermarkets, priority industries (that is, those that
furnish the material equipment necessary for the realization of our
desires) could truly recover, at their actual level of development, the
functions filled in ancestral communities of free style (the
Trobrianders, for example) by the forge and the communal granary. The
impending strikes will be less boring, and thus more revolutionary, when
they offer the lure of human usage of the goods of production and
consumption.
How could strikers neglect, if the strike were truly theirs to begin
with, if they acted with full autonomy, to seize the stocks so as to
distribute them, to utilize them for their profit (arms, means of
pressure on the management and union leaders), or to destroy them if
they have no use value (gadgets, boxed putrefaction, polluting products,
etc.)?
Against the terrorism of theft, pillage and legal exploitation,
salesmen, women and checkout clerks should utilize trustworthy tactics.
They should, at the first hint of a strike, organize the free
distribution of products traditionally transformed into commodities, and
the diffusion of texts explaining how their new practice announces the
mode of social organization managed by all. It is possible to slip on
the individual label of a product a note giving the price of becoming
real again, specifying its wretched quality, its function as illusion
and so on. Subversive activity, more surely than calls to revolutionary
practice, brings into play this principle of satiable and insatiable
pleasure, this grain of authentic realization that is spread everywhere,
affirms liberty, specifies autonomy, destroys roles, ideologies,
authoritarianisms, repugnant behaviors (jealousy, avarice, contempt for
women, men, children, etc.). From within autonomy generalizing itself
through subversion aimed at the commodity system, it is survival that is
put into service in the name of life, thus founding the movement of
generalized self-management.
Thus, each profession discovers what hastens its end as each worker
discovers how he or she can destroy all that which is appropriated from
him or her, in order to appropriate him or herself all that he or she is
allowed to construct. Creativity has no limit.
From fear that only the death logic of terrorism has the upper hand, it
is necessary to open the gate to an anonymous and consciously oriented
insight against the order of things, not against its servants.
Ideologies are directed against people, the subversive game against
conditions. Terrorism shows small bosses that if they don't consume the
big bosses, they will be consumed by them first. The subversive
ludicrous is content just to shake the coconut tree of hierarchy, so
that no one remains there -- if it is not they who are strung up and
hung there -- and at the time to burn it. Likewise, it is preferable, in
the tactic of taking hostages, to threaten destruction of expensive
prototypes, stock, and computers, rather than bosses, who one will
execute in despair, for example, if one fails to obtain the disarmament
and retreat of repressive forces sent to break the insurrectional
strike. Clandestine experience and anonymous subversion offer to those
who fear hierarchical "superiors" -- not out of cowardice, but because
they know well enough that a proprietor of authority, ridiculous as it
is, has the powers of boredom and repression -- the occasion of
regaining assurance, of measuring the deception of roles, of discovering
him or self as original subjectivity, of no longer having this fear
which is the source of terrorism, of knowing this social feeling of
authentic richness that gives courage and resolution in the strike or
insurrection.
We are millions discovering, in confirming our own possibilities, a
revolution whose pleasure we want to relish at the point of running
risks, and we recognize fully the force of repressions in order to study
all the ways to avoid displeasure. Prudent or flamboyant, the subversive
player is never a candidate for martyrdom. The grand game of anonymous
subversion prepares for the international appearance of the "party" of
depassement in exemplary collective actions. In this style of radical
intervention, the individual is seized at the root in seizing the root
of the commodity world, becoming his or her own leader, hostile to all
leaders, giving to his or her authentic passions -- to love, play,
encounter, hate, create, dream -- their dimension of multidimensional
realization, their bed in the making of history.