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Title: Anything Can Happen Author: Fredy Perlman Date: September, 1968 Language: en Topics: France 1968, students, universities, social sciences, liberals, ideology, authoritarian left Source: “Black and Red” Number 1 Notes: Scanned from original. Capitalization and punctuation as in original.
“Be Realists,
Demand the Impossible!”
This slogan, developed in May by revolutionaries in France, flies in the
face of common sense, especially the “common sense” of American
corporate-military propaganda. What happened in May also flies in the
face of official American “common sense.” In fact, in terms of American
“common sense,” much of what happens in the world every day is
impossible. It can’t happen. If it does happen, then the official
“common sense” is nonsense: it is a set of myths and fantasies. But how
can common sense be nonsense? That’s impossible.
To demonstrate that anything is possible, this essay will place some of
the myths alongside some of the events. The essay will then try to find
out why some of the myths are possible, in other words, it will explore
the “scientific basis” of the myths. The essay, if successful, will thus
show that anything is possible: it’s even possible for a population to
take myths for common sense, and it’s possible for mythmakers to
convince themselves of the reality of their myths in the face of reality
itself.
don’t have the power to do so. People are powerless because they have
neither the ability nor the desire to control and decide about the
social and material conditions in which they live.
impossible, for example, for university students to fight against the
institution which assures them a privileged position. Those students who
study do so to get high grades, because with the high grades they can
get high-paying jobs, which means the ability to manage and manipulate
other people, and the ability to buy more consumer goods than other
people. If learning were not rewarded with high grades, high pay, power
over others and lots of goods, no one would learn; there’d be no
motivation for learning.
factories, to want to decide about their production. All that workers
are interested in is wages: they just want more wages than others have,
so as to buy bigger houses, more cars and longer trips.
obviously satisfied with what they’re doing, otherwise they wouldn’t be
doing it.
dissatisfaction by buying and by voting: they don’t have to buy the
things they don’t like, and they don’t have to vote for the candidates
they don’t like. It’s impossible for them to change their situation any
other way.
would be impossible for them to get together; they’d only fight each
other, because white workers are racists, black nationalists are
anti-white, feminists are against all men, and students have their own
specific problems.
destroy the State and the police and military potential of a powerful
industrial society like the United States.
Millions of students all over the world--in Tokyo, Turin, Belgrade,
Berkeley, Berlin, Rome, Rio, Warsaw, New York, Paris--are fighting for
the power to control and decide about the social and material conditions
in which they live. They are not stopped either by the lack of desire,
or by the lack of ability; they are stopped by cops. Perhaps they’re
inspired by other fighters who held on against cops: the Cubans, the
Vietnamese...
Students in Turin and Paris, for example, occupied their universities
and formed general assemblies in which all the students made all the
decisions. In other words, the students started running their own
universities. Not in order to get better grades: they did away with
tests. Not in order to get higher paying jobs or more privileges: they
started to discuss the abolition of privileges and high paying jobs;
they started to discuss putting an end to the society in which they had
to sell themselves. And at that point, sometimes for the first time in
their lives, they started learning.
In Paris young workers, inspired by the example of the students,
occupied an aircraft factory and locked up the director. The examples
multiplied. Other workers began to occupy their factories. Despite the
fact that all life long they had depended on someone to make their
decisions for them, some workers set up committees to discuss running
the strike on their own terms, letting all workers decide, and not just
on the union’s terms-and some workers set up commissions to discuss
running the factories themselves. An idea which it’s pointless to think
about in normal times, because it’s absurd, it’s impossible, had
suddenly become possible, and it became interesting, challenging,
fascinating. Workers even began to talk about producing goods merely
because people needed them. These workers knew that it was “false to
think that the population is against free public services, that farmers
are in favor of a commercial circuit stuffed with intermediaries, that
poorly paid people are satisfied, that ‘managers’ are proud of their
privileges.” [1] Some electronics workers freely distributed equipment
to demonstrators protecting themselves from the police; some farmers
delivered free food to striking workers; and some armaments workers
talked about distributing weapons to all workers, so that the workers
could protect themselves from the national army and police.
In spite of a lifetime of business propaganda about how “satisfied”
workers are with the cars, houses and other objects they receive in
exchange for their living energy, workers expressed their “satisfaction”
through a general strike which paralyzed all French industry for over a
month. After being trained for a lifetime to “respect law and order,”
workers broke all the laws by occupying factories which don’t “belong”
to them because, they quickly learned, the cops are there to see to it
that the factories continue to “belong” to capitalist owners. The
workers learned that “law and order” is what keeps them from running
their own productive activity, and that “law and order” is what they’d
have to destroy in order to rule their own society. The cops came out as
soon as workers acted on their dissatisfaction. Perhaps the workers had
known all along about the cops in the background; perhaps that’s why the
workers had seemed so “satisfied.” With a gun pointing at his back,
almost any intelligent person would be “satisfied” to hold his hands up.
Workers in Paris and elsewhere began to accept the students’ invitation
to come to the University of Paris auditoriums (at the Sorbonne,
Censier, Halle-aux-vins, Beaux Arts, etc.) to talk about abolishing
money relations and turning the factories into social services run by
those who make and those who use the products. Workers began to express
themselves. That’s when the owners and their administrators threatened
civil war, and an enormous police and military machine was deployed to
make the threat real. With this crass display of the “forces of law and
order,” the king stood momentarily naked: the repressive dictatorship of
the capitalist class was visible to all. Whatever illusions people might
have had about their own “consumer sovereignty” or “voting power,”
whatever fantasies they might have had about transforming capitalist
society by buying or voting, they lost them. They knew that their
“buying power” and “voting power” simply meant servility and
acquiescence in the face of enormous violence. The student revolt and
the general strike in France (like the Black Revolt in the U.S., like
the anti-imperialist struggle on three continents) had merely forced the
ever-present violence to expose itself: this made it possible for people
to size up the enemy.
In the face of the violence of the capitalist state, students, French
workers, foreign workers, peasants, the well paid and the poorly paid,
learned whose interests they had served by policing each other, by
fearing and hating each other. In the face of the naked violence of the
common oppressor, the divisions among the oppressed disappeared:
students ceased to fight for privileges over the workers, and joined the
workers; French workers ceased to fight for privileges over the foreign
workers, and joined together with the foreign workers; farmers ceased to
fight for a special dispensation, and joined the struggle of the workers
and the students. Together they began to fight against a single world
system that oppresses and divides students from workers, qualified
workers from unqualified, French workers from Spanish, black workers
from white, “native” workers from “home” workers, colonized peasants
from the whole “metropolitan” population.
The struggle in France did not destroy the political and military power
of capitalist society. But the struggle did not show that this was
impossible:
themselves from a police charge, but some students didn’t run from the
police; they started building a barricade. This was what the March 22
Movement called an “exemplary action”: a large number of students took
courage, didn’t run from the cops, and began building barricades.
and its repressive apparatus, yet they occupied and started running the
universities, and in the streets they returned the cops’ volley of
teargas with a volley of cobblestones. This too was an exemplary action:
workers in a number of factories took courage, occupied their factories,
and were ready to defend them from their “owners.”
over and start running them knew that they could not destroy the power
of the capitalist class unless all workers took over their factories and
defended them by destroying the state and its repressive power, yet they
occupied the factories. This too was an exemplary action, but these
workers did not succeed in communicating the example to the rest of the
workers: the government, the press, and the unions told the rest of the
population that the occupying workers were merely having a traditional
strike to get higher wages and better working conditions from the state
and the factory owners.
Impossible? All this happened in a two-week period at the end of May.
The examples were extremely contagious. Is anyone really sure that those
who produce weapons, namely workers, or even that cops and soldiers, who
are also workers, are immune?
A “social scientist” is someone who is paid to defend this society’s
myths. His defense mechanism, in its simplest formulation, runs
approximately as follows: He begins by assuming that the society of his
time and place is the only possible form of society; he then concludes
that some other form of society is impossible. Unfortunately, the
“social scientist” rarely admits his assumptions; he usually claims that
he doesn’t make any assumptions. And it can’t be said that he’s lying
outright: he usually takes his assumptions so much for granted that he
doesn’t even know he’s making them.
The “social scientist” takes for granted a society in which there’s a
highly developed “division of labor,” which includes both a separation
of tasks and a separation (“specialization”) of people. The tasks
include such socially useful things as producing food, clothing and
houses, and also such socially useless things as brainwashing,
manipulating and killing people. To begin with, the “scientist” defines
all of these activities as useful, because his society could not run
without them. Next, he assumes that these tasks can only be performed if
a given person is attached to a given task for life, in other words if
the specialized tasks are performed by specialized people. He does not
assume this about everything. For example, eating and sleeping are
necessary activities; society would break down if these things were not
performed. Yet even the “social scientist” does not think that a handful
of people should do all the eating while the rest don’t eat, or that a
handful of people should do all the sleeping while the rest don’t sleep
at all. He assumes the need for specialization only about those
activities which are specialized in his particular society. In the
corporate-military society, a few people have all the political power,
the rest have none; a handful of people decide what to produce, and the
rest consume it; a handful of people decide what kinds of houses to
build, and the rest live in them; a handful of people decide what to
teach in classrooms, and the rest swallow it; a handful of people create
and the rest are passive; a handful of people perform and the rest are
spectators. In short, a handful of people have all the power over a
specific activity, and the rest of the people have no power over it even
when they are directly affected by it. And obviously the people who have
no power over a specific activity do not know what to do with such
power: they won’t even start learning what to do with it until they have
it. From this the “scientist” concludes that people have neither the
ability nor the desire to have such power, namely to control and decide
about the social and material conditions in which they live. More
straightforwardly, the argument says: people do not have such power in
this society, and this society is the only form of society; therefore
it’s impossible for people to have such power. In still simpler terms:
People can’t have such power because they don’t have it.
Logic is not taught much in American schools, and the argument looks
impressive when it is accompanied by an enormous statistical apparatus
and extremely complicated geometrical designs. If a critic insists on
calling the argument simplistic and circular, he’s turned off as soon as
the “scientist” pulls out figures calculated on computers inaccessible
to the public, and he’s turned out as soon as the “scientist” starts
“communicating” in a completely esoteric language which has all the
logical fallacies built-in, but which is comprehensible only to
“scientific colleagues.”
Mythological conclusions based on mythological assumptions are “proved”
by means of the statistics and the charts; much of “applied social
science” consists of teaching young people what kind of “data” to gather
in order to make the conclusions come out, and much of “theory” consists
of fitting this data to the pre-established formulas. By means of
numerous techniques, for example, it can be “ proved” that workers would
rather have high paying jobs than enjoyable or meaningful jobs, that
people “like” what they hear on the radio or see on television, that
people are “members” of one or another Judeo-Christian cult, that almost
anyone votes either for Democrats or for Republicans. Students are
taught one set of methods for gathering the data, a second set for
arranging them, a third set for presenting them, and “theories” for
interpreting them. The apologetic content of the “data” is covered up by
its statistical sophistication. In a society where eating depends on
getting paid, and thus where doing “meaningful work” may mean one
doesn’t get paid, a worker’s preference for high paying over meaningful
jobs merely means he’d rather eat than not eat. In a society where
people do not create and control what they hear on the radio or see on
television, they have no choice but to “like” what they hear and see, or
else to turn the damn thing off. People who know their friends would
look at them funny if they were atheists prefer to go to one or another
Church, and almost anyone who knows he’s in a society where he’d lose
all his friends as well as his job if he were a socialist or an
anarchist obviously prefers to be a Democrat or a Republican. Yet such
“data” serves as the basis for the “social scientist’s” conception of
people’s possibilities and impossibilities, and even of their “human
nature.”
The interviews, polls, and statistical demonstrations about people’s
religious affiliations, electoral behavior, job preferences, reduce
people to monotonous data. In the context of this “science,” people are
things, they are objects with innumerable qualities-and surprisingly
enough, each one of these qualities happens to be served by one or
another institution of the corporate-military society. It just so
happens that people’s “material tastes” are “satisfied” by corporations,
that their “physical urges” are “satisfied” by the military, that their
“spiritual tendencies” are “satisfied” by the cults, and that their
“political preferences” are “satisfied” either by the Republican or by
the Democratic party. In other words everything about American
corporate-militarism fits people just perfectly.
Everything is tabulated except the fact that a working person serves as
a tool, that he sells his living time and creative ability in exchange
for objects, that he doesn’t decide what to make, nor for whom, nor why.
The “social scientist” claims to be empirical and objective; he claims
to make no value judgments. Yet by reducing the person to the bundle of
tastes, desires and preferences to which he’s restricted in capitalist
society, the “objective scientist” makes the bizarre claim that this
bundle is what the worker is; and he makes the fantastic value judgment
that the worker cannot be other than what he is in capitalist society.
According to the “laws of human behavior” of this “science,” the
solidarity of students with workers, the occupation of factories by
workers, the desire of workers to run their own production, distribution
and coordination, are all impossible. Why? Because these things are
impossible in capitalist society, and for these “scientists” who make no
value judgments, existing societies are the only possible societies, and
the corporate-military society is the best of all possible societies.
Given the value judgments of these experts (“who make no value
judgments”), everyone in American society must be satisfied. For these
valueless “scientists,” dissatisfaction is a “value judgment” imported
from abroad, for how could anyone not be satisfied in the best of all
possible worlds? A person must have “foreign based ideas” if he doesn’t
recognize this as the best of all possible worlds; he must be unbalanced
if he’s not satisfied with it; he must be dangerous if he means to act
on his dissatisfaction; and he must be removed from his job, starved if
possible, and killed if necessary, for the continued satisfaction of the
expert.
To the American social scientist, “human nature” is what people do in
corporate-military America: a few make decisions and the rest follow
orders; some think and others do; some buy other people’s labor and the
rest sell their own labor, a few invest and the rest are consumers; some
are sadists and others masochists; some have a desire to kill and others
to die. The “scientist” passes all this off as “exchange,” as
“reciprocity,” as a “division of labor” in which people are divided
along with tasks. To the “social scientist” this is all so natural that
he thinks he makes no value judgments when he takes it all for granted.
Corporations and the military even give him grants to show that it’s
always been this way: grants to demonstrate that this “human nature” is
lodged in the beginning of history and in the depths of the unconscious.
(American psychologists-especially “behaviorists”-make the ambiguous
“contribution” of demonstrating that animals also have a “human
nature”-the psychologists drive rats mad in a situation similar to a war
which the psychologists themselves helped plan, and then they show that
rats, too, have a desire to kill, that they have masochist
tendencies,...)
Given this conception of “human nature,” the strength of the
corporate-military system does not reside in the potential violence of
its army and police, but in the fact that the corporate-military system
is consistent with human nature.
In terms of what the American “social scientist” takes for granted, when
students and workers in France started to fight to do away with
“reciprocity,” “exchange,” and the division of labor, they were not
fighting against the capitalist police, but against “human nature.” And
since this is obviously impossible, the events that took place in May,
1968, did not take place.
The question of what is possible cannot be answered in terms of what is.
The fact that “human nature” is hierarchic in a hierarchic society does
not mean that a hierarchic division of people among different tasks is
necessary for social life.
It is not the capitalist institutions which satisfy human needs. It is
the working people of capitalist society who shape themselves to fit the
institutions of capitalist society.
When some people buy labor and others sell it, each fights to sell
himself at the highest price, each fights to convince the buyer and
himself that the next person is worth less.
In such a society, students who prepare to sell themselves as
high-salaried managers and manipulators must tell their buyers and
themselves that, as “professionals,” they’re superior to non-University
manual workers.
In such a society, WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) workers who sell
themselves for higher-paying, easier jobs, frantically tell themselves
and their buyers that they’re better, work harder, and are more
deserving than foreigners, Catholics, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and
Blacks; black “professionals” tell themselves that they’re better than
black manual workers; all whites tell themselves they’re better than all
blacks; and all Americans tell themselves they’re better than South
American, Asian or African “natives.” Since WASPS systematically succeed
in selling themselves at the highest price, everyone below tries to make
himself as much a WASP as possible. (WASPS happen to be the traditional
ruling class. If midgets systematically got the highest price, everyone
below would try to be a midget.)
To keep its relative privileges, each group tries to keep the groups
below from shaking the structure.
Thus in times of “peace” the system is largely self-policed: the
colonized repress the colonized, blacks repress blacks, whites repress
each other, the blacks, and the colonized. Thus the working population
represses itself, “law and order” is maintained, and the ruling class is
saved from further outlays on the repressive apparatus.
To the “social scientist” and the professional propagandist, this
“division of labor” is as natural as “human nature” itself. Unity among
the different “interest groups” is as inconceivable to the “social
scientist” as revolution.
While holding as “scientifically proved” that the different groups
cannot unite in an anti-capitalist struggle, the expert does all he can
to prevent such unity, and his colleagues design weapons just in case
people did unite against the capitalist system.
Because sometimes the whole structure cracks.
The same expert who defines the capitalist system as consistent with
“human nature,” with people’s tastes, wishes, desires, constructs the
arsenal of myths and weapons with which the system defends itself. But
what does the system defend itself against: human nature? If it has to
fight against human nature to survive, then by the expert’s own
language, the system is extremely unnatural.
Thus while some experts define the rebellion in France as impossible
because unnatural, their expert colleagues design the incapacitating
gases with which cops can suppress such impossible rebellions. BECAUSE
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.
1968
[1] Mouvement du 22 mars, Ce n’est qu’un debut, Continuons le combat,
Paris: Maspero, 1968.