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<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Poverty_of_Student_Life">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Poverty_of_Student_Life</a></h3>
<h3 style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;">Pamphlet</h3>
<h2 style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 16px;"><i>On the Poverty of Student Life:<br>
considered in its economic, political, psychological,
sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a
modest proposal for its remedy</i></h2>
<b>
<h3 style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;">by<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/authors.php3?id=6">U.N.E.F.
Strasbourg</a></h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" align="left"></b></td>
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<div id="articletext" style="font-size: 14px;">
<blockquote style="margin: 16pt; font-size: 13px;
text-indent: 0px;"><i>First published in 1966 at the
University of Strasbourg by students of the university
and members of the Internationale Situationniste.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote style="margin: 16pt; font-size: 13px;
text-indent: 0px;"><i>A few students elected to the
student union printed 10,000 copies with university
funds. The copies were distributed at the official
ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year.
The student union was promptly closed by court order.
The judge's summation is reproduced<a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#"
onclick="return footwin('4','foot1')">here</a>.</i></blockquote>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">We might very
well say, and no one would disagree with us, that the
student is the most universally despised creature in
France, apart from the priest and the policeman.
Naturally he is usually attacked from the wrong point of
view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling
ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true
revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of the
student situation is currently taboo on the official
Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism
repress the obvious--that what is wrong with the
students is also what is wrong with them. They convert
their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The
radical intelligentsia (from<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Les Temps
Modernes</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>L'Express</i>)
prostrates itself before the so-called "rise of the
student" and the declining bureaucracies of the Left
(from the "Communist" party to the Stalinist National
Union of Students) bids noisily for his moral and
material support.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">There are
reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all
provided by the present form of capitalism, in its
overdeveloped state. We shall use this pamphlet for
denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by one,
on the principle that the end of alienation is only
reached by the straight and narrow path of alienation
itself.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Up to now,
studies of student life have ignored the essential
issue. The surveys and analyses have all been
psychological or sociological or economic: in other
words, academic exercises, content with the false
categories of one specialization or another. None of
them can achieve what is most needed--a view of modern
society as a whole. Fourier denounced their error long
ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws to the basic
assumptions of the science ("porter régulièrement sur
les questions primordiales"). Everything is said about
our society except what it is, and the nature of its two
basic principles--the commodity and the spectacle. The
fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the
details consign the totality to oblivion.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Modern
capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific
role in a general passivity. The student is no exception
to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a
rehearsal for his final role as an element in market
society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is
a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the
rites of more primitive societies with bizarre
precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from
social reality. The student leads a double life, poised
between his present status and his future role. The two
are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the
other is a mechanical event "in the future." Meanwhile,
he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing
into his initiation group to hide from that future.
Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">At least in
consciousness, the student can exist apart from the
official truths of "economic life." But for very simple
reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard
one. In our society of abundance," he is still a pauper.
80% of students come from income groups well above the
working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest
laborer Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back
from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in
the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has
yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat.
Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices
and authority of the family to become part of the market
even before he is adolescent: at fifteen he has all the
delights of being directly exploited. In contrast the
student covets his protracted infancy as an
irresponsible and docile paradise. Adolescence and its
crises may bring occasional brushes with his family, but
in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be
treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his
education. (If ever they stop screwing his arse off,
it's only to come round and kick him in the balls.)</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">"There is no
student problem." Student passivity is only the most
obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each
sector of social life has been subdued by a similar
imperialism.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Our social
thinkers have a bad conscience about the student
problem, but only because the real problem is the
poverty and servitude of all. But we have different
reasons to despise the student and all his works. What
is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his
complaisance in the face of the misery of others. For
him there is only one real alienation: his own. He is a
full-time and happy consumer of that commodity, hoping
to arouse at least our pity, since he cannot claim our
interest. By the logic of modern capitalism, most
students can only become mere<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>petits cadres</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(with the same
function in neo-capitalism as the skilled worker had in
the nineteenth-century economy). The student really
knows how miserable will be that golden future which is
supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the
present. In the face of that knowledge, he prefers to
dote on the present and invent an imaginary prestige for
himself. After all, there will be no magical
compensation for present drabness: tomorrow will be like
yesterday, lighting these fools the way to dusty death.
Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an unreal present.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The student is a
stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him,
the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new
family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of
autonomy. Real independence, apparently, lies in a
direct subservience to the two most powerful systems of
social control: the family and the State. He is their
well-behaved and grateful child, and like the submissive
child he is overeager to please. He celebrates all the
values and mystifications of the system, devouring them
with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast. Once,
the old illusions had to be imposed on an aristocracy of
labour; the<i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>petits
cadres</i>-to-be ingest them willingly under the guise
of culture.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">There are
various forms of compensation for poverty. The total
poverty of ancient societies produced the grandiose
compensation of religion. The student's poverty by
contrast is a marginal phenomenon, and he casts around
for compensations among the most down-at-heel images of
the ruling class. He is a bore who repairs the old jokes
of an alienated culture. Even as an ideologist, he is
always out of date. One and all, his latest enthusiasms
were ridiculous thirty years ago.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Once upon a time
the universities were respected; the student persists in
the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived
too late. The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By
this we mean the culture of a Hegel or of the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>encyclopédistes,</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>rather than the
Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.) has
vanished. A mechanically produced specialist is now the
goal of the "educational system." A modern economic
system demands mass production of students who are not
educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking.
Hence the decline of the universities and the automatic
nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The
university has become a society for the propagation of
ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the rhythm of the
production line; without exception, university teachers
are cretins, men who would get the bird from any
audience of schoolboys. But all this hardly matters: the
important thing is to go on listening respectfully. In
time, if critical thinking is repressed with enough
conscientiousness, the student will come to partake of
the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him the
final truths of the world. Till then--a menopause of the
spirit. As a matter of course the future revolutionary
society will condemn the doings of lecture theatre and
faculty as mere noise--socially undesirable. The student
is already a very bad joke.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The student is
blind to the obvious--that even his closed world is
changing. The "crisis of the university"--that detail of
a more general crisis of modern capitalism--is the
latest fodder for the deaf-mute dialogue of the
specialists. This "crisis" is simple to understand: the
difficulties of a specialised sector which is
adjusting(too late) to a general change in the relations
of production. There was once a vision--if an
ideological one--of a liberal bourgeois university. But
as its social base disappeared, the vision became
banality. In the age of free-trade capitalism, when the
"liberal" state left it its marginal freedoms, the
university could still think of itself as an independent
power. Of course it was a pure and narrow product of
that society's needs--particularly the need to give the
privileged minority an adequate general culture before
they rejoined the ruling class (not that going up to
university was straying very far from class confines).
But the bitterness of the nostalgic don (No one dares
any longer to speak in the name of nineteenth century
liberalism; so they reminisce about the "free" and
"popular" universities of the middle ages--that
"democracy of "liberal".) is understandable: better,
after all, to be the bloodhound of the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>haute
bourgeoisie</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>than
sheepdog to the world's white-collars. Better to stand
guard on privilege than harry the flock into their
allotted factories and bureaux, according to the whims
of the "planned economy". The university is becoming,
fairly smoothly, the honest broker of technocracy and
its spectacle. In the process, the purists of the
academic Right become a pitiful sideshow, purveying
their " universal" cultural goods to a bewildered
audience of specialists.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">More serious,
and thus more dangerous, are the modernists of the Left
and the Students' Union, with their talk of a "reform of
University structure" and a "reinsertion of the
University into social and economic life", i.e., its
adaptation to the needs of modern capitalism. The
one-time suppliers of general culture to the ruling
classes, though still guarding their old prestige, must
be converted into the forcing-house of a new labor
aristocracy. Far from contesting the historical process
which subordinates one of the last relatively autonomous
social groups to the demands of the market, the
progressives complain of delays and inefficiency in its
completion. They are the standard-bearers of the
cybernetic university of the future ( which has already
reared its ugly head in some unlikely quarters). And
they are the enemy: the fight against the market, which
is starting again in earnest, means the fight against
its latest lackeys.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">As for the
student, this struggle is fought out entirely over his
head, somewhere in the heavenly realm of his masters.
The whole of his life is beyond his control, and for all
he sees of the world he might as well be on another
planet. His acute economic poverty condemns him to a
paltry form of survival. But, being a complacent
creature, he parades his very ordinary indigence as if
it were an original lifestyle: self-indulgently, he
affects to be a Bohemian. The Bohemian solution is
hardly viable at the best of times, and the notion that
it could be achieved without a complete and final break
with the university milieu is quite ludicrous. But the
student Bohemian (and every student likes to pretend
that he is a Bohemian at heart) clings to his false and
degraded version of individual revolt. He is so
"eccentric" that he continues--thirty years after
Reich's excellent lessons--to entertain the most
traditional forms of erotic behavior, reproducing at
this level the general relations of class society. Where
sex is concerned, we have learnt better tricks from
elderly provincial ladies. His rent-a-crowd militancy
for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real
impotence.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The student's
old-fashioned poverty, however, does put him at a
potential advantage--if only he could see it. He does
have marginal freedoms, a small area of liberty which as
yet escapes the totalitarian control of the spectacle.
His flexible working-hours permit him adventure and
experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and
freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the
straight-jacketed space-time of lecture hall and weekly
"essay . He is quite happy with this open prison
organized for his "benefit", and, though not
constrained, as are most people, to separate work and
leisure, he does so of his own accord--hypocritically
proclaiming all the while his contempt for assiduity and
grey men. He embraces every available contradiction and
then mutters darkly about the "difficulties of
communication" from the uterine warmth of his religious,
artistic or political clique.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Driven by his
freely-chosen depression, he submits himself to the
subsidiary police force of psychiatrists set up by the
avant-garde of repression. The university mental health
clinics are run by the student mutual organization,
which sees this institution as a grand victory for
student unionism and social progress. Like the Aztecs
who ran to greet Cortes's sharpshooters, and then
wondered what made the thunder and why men fell down,
the students flock to the psycho-police stations with
their "problems".</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The real poverty
of his everyday life finds its immediate, phantastic
compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In
the cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role
of the dutiful disciple. Although he is close to the
production-point, access to the Sanctuary of Thought is
forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern
culture" as an<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>admiring
spectator.</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Art
is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He peeks at
the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its
fish-fingers from the cultural supermarket. Consuming
unreservedly, he is in his element: he is the living
proof of all the platitudes of American market research:
a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational
preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and
irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Impervious to
real passions, he seeks titillation in the battles
between his anaemic gods, the stars of a vacuous heaven:
AIthusser -- Garaudy-Barthes -- Picard -- Lefebvre --
Levi-Strauss -- Halliday-deChardin -- Brassens... and
between their rival theologies, designed like all
theologies to mask the real problems by creating false
ones: humanism -- existentialism -- scientism --
structuralism -- cyberneticism -- new criticism --
dialectics-of-naturism -- meta-philosophism...</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">He thinks he is
avant-garde if he has seen the latest happening. He
discovers "modernity" as fast as the market can produce
its ersatz version of long outmoded (though once
important) ideas; for him, every rehash is a cultural
revolution. His principal concern is status, and he
eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important
and "difficult" texts with which mass culture has filled
the bookstores. (If he had an atom of self-respect or
lucidity, he would knock them off. But no: conspicuous
consumers always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read,
so he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them
vicariously through the gaze of his friends. He is an<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>other-directed
voyeur.</i></p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">His favorite
reading matter is the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>kitsch</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>press, whose
task it is to orchestrate the consumption of cultural
nothing-boxes. Docile as ever, the student accepts its
commercial<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>ukases</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and makes them
the only measuring-rod of his tastes. Typically, he is a
compulsive reader of weeklies like<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>le Nouvel
Observateur</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>l'Express</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(whose nearest
English equivalents are the posh Sundays and<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>New Society</i>).
He generally feels that<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>le Monde</i>--whose
style he finds somewhat difficult--is a truly objective
newspaper. And it is with such guides that he hopes to
gain an understanding of the modern world and become a
political initiate!</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;"><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#"
onclick="return footwin('4','foot2')">In France</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>more than
anywhere else, the student is passively content to be
politicized. In this sphere too, he readily accepts the
same alienated, spectacular participation. Seizing upon
all the tattered remnants of a Left which was
annihilated more than<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>forty
years ago<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>by
"socialist" reformism and Stalinist counter-revolution,
he is once more guilty of an amazing ignorance. The
Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers'
movement, and so are the workers themselves, though more
confusedly. But the students continue blithely to
organize demonstrations which mobilize students and
students only. This is political false consciousness in
its virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the
universities a happy hunting ground for the manipulators
of the declining bureaucratic organizations. For them,
it is child's play to program the student's political
options. Occasionally there are deviationary tendencies
and cries of "Independence!" but after a period of token
resistance the dissidents are reincorporated into a<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>status quo</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>which they have
never really<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#"
onclick="return footwin('4','foot3')">radically
opposed</a>. The "Jeunesses Communistes
Révolutionnaires," whose title is a case of ideological
falsification gone mad (they are neither young, nor
communist, nor revolutionary), have with much brio and
accompanying publicity defied the iron hand of the
Party...but only to rally cheerily to the pontifical
battle-cry, "Peace in Vietnam!"</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The student
prides himself on his opposition to the "archaic"
Gaullist régime. But he justifies his criticism by
appealing--without realizing it--to older and far worse
crimes. His radicalism prolongs the life of the
different currents of edulcorated Stalinism:
Togliatti's, Garaudy's, Krushchev's, Mao's, etc. His
youth is synonymous with appalling<i>naiveté</i>;, and
his attitudes are in reality far more archaic than the
régime's--the Gaullists do after all understand modern
society well enough to administer it.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">But the student,
sad to say, is not deterred by the odd anachronism. He
feels obliged to have general ideas on everything, to
unearth a coherent world-view capable of lending meaning
to his need for activism and asexual promiscuity. As a
result, he falls prey to the last doddering missionary
efforts of the churches. He rushes with atavistic ardor
to adore the putrescent carcass of God, and cherishes
all the stinking detritus of prehistoric religions in
the tender belief that they enrich him and his time.
Along with their sexual rivals, those elderly provincial
ladies, the students form the social category with the
highest percentage of admitted adherents to these
archaic cults. Everywhere else, the priests have been
either beaten off or devoured, but university clerics
shamelessly continue to bugger thousands of students in
their spiritual shithouses.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">We must add in
all fairness that there do exist students of a tolerable
intellectual level, who without difficulty dominate the
controls designed to check the mediocre capacity
demanded from the others. They do so for the simple
reason that they have understood the system, and so
despise it and know themselves to be its enemies. They
are in the system for what they can get out of
it--particularly grants. Exploiting the contradiction
which, for the moment at least, ensures the maintenance
of a small sector--"research"--still governed by a
liberal-academic rather than a technocratic rationality,
they calmly carry the germs of sedition to the highest
level: their open contempt for the organization is the
counterpart of a lucidity which enables them to outdo
the system's lackeys, intellectually and otherwise. Such
students cannot fail to become theorists of the coming
revolutionary movement. For the moment, they make no
secret of the fact that what they take so easily from
the system shall be used for its overthrow.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The student, if
he rebels at all, must first rebel against his studies,
though the necessity of this initial move is felt less
spontaneously by him than by the worker, who intuitively
identifies his work with his total condition. At the
same time, since the student is a product of modern
society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his extreme
alienation can only be fought through the struggle
against this whole society. It is clear that the
university can in no circumstances become the
battlefield; the student, insofar as he defines himself
as such, manufactures a pseudo-value which must become
an obstacle to any clear consciousness of the reality of
his dispossession. The best criticism of student life is
the behavior of the rest of youth, who have already
started to revolt. Their rebellion has become one of the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>signs</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of a fresh
struggle against modern society.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">After years of
slumber and permanent counterrevolution, there are signs
of a new period of struggle, with youth as the new
carriers of revolutionary infection. But the society of
the spectacle paints its own picture of itself and its
enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the
world and its history. Fear is the very last response.
For everything that happens is reassuringly part of the
natural order of things. Real historical changes, which
show that this society can be<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>superseded</i>,
are reduced to the status of novelties, processed for
mere consumption. The revolt of youth against an imposed
and "given" way of life is the first sign of a total
subversion. It is the prelude to a period of revolt--the
revolt of those who can no longer<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>live</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>in our society.
Faced with a danger, ideology and its daily machinery
perform the usual inversion of reality. An historical
process becomes a pseudo-category of some socio-natural
science: the Idea of Youth.<br>
</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;"><br>
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<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Youth is in
revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth;
every generation espouses "good causes," only to
forget them when "the young man begins the serious
business of production and is given concrete and real
social aims," After the social scientists come the
journalists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is
contained by overexposure: we are given it to
contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In
the spectacle, a revolution becomes a social
aberration--in other words a social safety
valve--which has its part to play in the smooth
working of the system. It reassures because it remains
a marginal phenomenon, in the apartheid of the
temporary problems of a healthy pluralism (compare and
contrast the "woman question" and the "problem of
racialism"). In reality, if there is a problem of
youth in modern capitalism it is part of the total
crisis of that society. It is just that youth<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/140#"
onclick="return footwin('140','foot4')">feels</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the crisis
most acutely.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Youth and its
mock freedoms are the purest products of modern
society. Their modernity consists in the choice they
are offered and are already making: total integration
to neo-capitalism, or the most radical refusal. What
is surprising is not that youth is in revolt but that
its elders are so soporific. But the reason is
history, not biology-- the previous generation lived
through the defeats and were sold the lies of the
long, shameful disintegration of the revolutionary
movement.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">In itself
Youth is a publicity myth, and as part of the new
"social dynamism" it is the potential ally of the
capitalist mode of production. The illusory primacy of
youth began with the economic recovery after the
second world war. Capital was able to strike a new
bargain with labor: in return for the mass production
of a new class of manipulable consumers, the worker
was offered a role which gave him full membership of
the spectacular society. This at least was the ideal
social model, though as usual it bore little relation
to socio-economic reality (which lagged behind the
consumer ideology). The revolt of youth was the first
burst of anger at the persistent realities of the new
world--the boredom of everyday existence, the dead
life which is still the essential product of modern
capitalism, in spite of all its modernizations. A
small section of youth is able to refuse that society
and its products, but without any idea that this
society can be superseded. They opt for a nihilist
present. Yet the destruction of capitalism is once
again a real issue, an event in history, a process
which has already begun. Dissident youth must achieve
the coherence of a critical theory, and the practical
organization of that coherence.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">At the most
primitive level, the "delinquents" (<i>blousons noirs</i>)
of the world use violence to express their rejection
of society and its sterile options, But their refusal
is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of
actually escaping the contradictions of the system.
They are its products--negative, spontaneous, but none
the less exploitable, All the experiments of the new
social order produce them: they are the first
side-effects of the new urbanism; of the
disintegration of all values; of the extension of an
increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing
control of every aspect of everyday life by the
psycho-humanist po- lice force; and of the economic
survival of a family unit which has lost all
significance.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The "young
thug" despises work but accepts the goods. He wants
what the spectacle offers him-- but<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>now</i>,
with no down payment. This is the essential
contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may
try for a real freedom in the use of his time, in an
individual assertiveness, even in the construction of
a kind of community. But the contradiction remains,
and kills. (On the fringe of society, where poverty
reigns, the gang develops its own hierarchy, which can
only fulfill itself in a war with other gangs,
isolating each group and each individual within the
group.) In the end the contradiction proves
unbearable. Either the lure of the product world
proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to do his
honest day's work: to this end a whole sector of
production is devoted specifically to his
recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, scooters,
transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of
the consumer. Or else he is forced to attack the laws
of the market itself--either in the primary sense, by
stealing, or by a move towards a conscious
revolutionary critique of commodity society. For the
delinquent only two futures are possible:
revolutionary consciousness, or blind obedience on the
shop floor.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Provos</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>are the first
organization of delinquency--they have given the
delinquent experience its first political form. They
are an alliance of two distinct elements: a handful of
careerists from the degenerate world of "art," and a
mass of beatniks looking for a new activity. The
artists contributed the idea of the game, though still
dressed up in various threadbare ideological garments.
The delinquents had nothing to offer but the violence
of their rebellion. From the start the two tendencies
hardly mixed: the pre-ideological mass found itself
under the Bolshevik "guidance" of the artistic ruling
class, who justified and maintained their power by an
ideology of provo-democracy. At the moment when the
sheer violence of the delinquent had become an
idea--an attempt to destroy art and go beyond it--the
violence was channeled into the crassest neo-artistic
reformism. The Proves are an aspect of the last
reformism produced by modern capitalism: the reformism
of everyday life. Like Bernstein, with his vision of
socialism built by tinkering with capitalism, the
Provo hierarchy think they can change everyday life by
a few well-chosen improvements. What they fail to
realize is that the banality of everyday life is not
incidental, but<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>the
central mechanism and product of modern capitalism</i>.
To destroy it, nothing less is needed than all-out
revolution. The Proves choose the fragmentary and end
by accepting the totality.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">To give
themselves a base, the leaders have concocted the
paltry ideology of the provotariat (a
politico-artistic salad knocked up from the leftovers
of a feast they had never known). The new provotariat
is supposed to oppose the passive and "bourgeois"
proletariat, still worshipped in obscure Leftist
shrines. Because they despair of the fight for a<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>total</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>change in
society, they despair of the only forces which can
bring about that change. The proletariat is the motor
of capitalist society, and thus its mortal enemy:
everything is designed for its suppression (parties;
trade union bureaucracies; the police; the
colonization of all aspects of everyday life) because
it is the only really menacing force. The Proves
hardly try to understand any of this; and without a
critique of the system of production, they remain its
servants. In the end an' anti-union workers
demonstration sparked off the real conflict. The Prove
base went back to direct violence, leaving their
bewildered leaders to denounce "excesses" and appeal
to pacifist sentiments. The Proves, who had talked of
provoking authority to reveal its repressive
character, finished by complaining that they had been
provoked by the police. So much for their pallid
anarchism.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">It is true
that the Provo base became revolutionary in practice.
But to invent a revolutionary consciousness their
first task is to destroy their leaders, to rally the
objective revolutionary forces of the proletariat, and
to drop the Constants and deVries of this world (one
the favorite artist of the Dutch royal family, the
ether a failed M.P. and admirer of the English
police). There is a modern revolution, and one of its
bases could be the Proves--but only without their
leaders and ideology. If they want to change the
world, they must get rid of these who are content to
paint it white.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Idle reader,
your cry of "What about Berkeley?" escapes us not.
True, American society<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>needs</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>its students;
and by revolting against their studies they have
automatically called that society in question. From
the start they have seen their revolt against the
university hierarchy as a revolt against<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>the whole
hierarchical system</i>, the dictatorship of the
economy and the State. Their refusal to become an
integrated part of the commodity economy, to put their
specialized studies to their obvious and inevitable
use, is a revolutionary gesture. It puts in doubt that
whole system of production which alienates activity
and its products from their creators. For all its
confusion and hesitancy, the American student movement
has discovered one truth of the new refusal: that a
coherent revolutionary alternative can and must be
found<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>within</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the "affluent
society." The movement is still fixated on two
relatively accidental aspects of the American
crisis--the Negroes and Vietnam--and the mini-groups
of the New Left suffer from the fact. There is an
authentic whiff of democracy in their chaotic
organization, but what they lack is a genuine
subversive content. Without it they continually fall
into dangerous contradictions. They may be hostile to
the traditional politics of the old parties; but the
hostility is futile, and will be recuperated, so long
as it is based on ignorance of the political system
and naive illusions about the world situation.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Abstract</i>opposition
to their own society produces facile sympathy with its
apparent enemies-- the so-called Socialist
bureaucracies of China and Cuba. A group like
Resurgence Youth Movement can in the same breath
condemn the State and praise the "Cultural
Revolution"--that pseudo-revolt directed by the most
elephantine bureaucracy of modern times.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">At the same
time, these organizations, with their blend of
libertarian, political and religious tendencies, are
always liable to the obsession with "group dynamics"
which leads to the closed world of the sect. The mass
consumption of drugs is the expression of a real
poverty and a protest against it; but it remains a
false search for "freedom" within a world dedicated to
repression, a religious critique of a world that has
no need for religion, least of all a new one. The
beatniks--that right wing of the youth revolt--are the
main purveyors of an ideological "refusal" combined
with an acceptance of the most fantastic superstitions
(Zen, spiritualism, "New Church" mysticism, and the
stale porridge of Ghandi-ism and humanism). Worse
still, in their search for a revolutionary program the
American students fall into the same bad faith as the
Provos, and proclaim themselves "the most exploited
class in our society." They must understand one thing:
there are no "special" student interests in
revolution. Revolution will be made by all the victims
of encroaching repression and the tyranny of the
market.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">An for the
East, bureaucratic totalitarianism is beginning to
produce its own forces of negation. Nowhere is the
revolt of youth more violent and more savagely
repressed--the rising tide of press denunciation and
the new police measures against "hooliganism" are
proof enough. A section of youth, so the right-minded
"socialist" functionaries tell us, have no respect for
moral and family order (which still flourishes there
in its most detestable bourgeois forms). They prefer
"debauchery," despise work and even disobey the party
police. The USSR has set up a special ministry to
fight the new delinquency.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Alongside this
diffuse revolt a more specific opposition is emerging.
Groups and clandestine reviews rise and fall with the
barometer of police repression. So far the most
important has been the publication of the "open letter
to the Polish Workers Party" by the young Poles Kuron
and Modzelewski, which affirmed the necessity of
"abolishing the present system of production and
social relations" and that to do this "revolution is
unavoidable." The Eastern intellectuals have one great
task--to make conscious the concrete critical action
of the workers of East Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest:
the proletarian critique of the dictatorship of the
bureaucracy. In the East the problem is not to define
the aims of revolution, but to learn how to fight for
them. In the West struggle may be easy, but the goals
are left obscure or ideological; in the Eastern
bureaucracies there are no illusions about what is
being fought for: hence the bitterness of the
struggle. What is difficult is to devise the forms
revolution must take in the immediate future.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">In Britain,
the revolt of youth found its first expression in the
peace movement. It was never a whole-hearted struggle,
with the misty non-violence of the Committee of 100 as
its most daring program, At its strongest the
Committee could call 300,000 demonstrators on to the
streets, It had its finest hour in Spring 1963 with
the "Spies for Peace" scandal. But it had already
entered on a definitive decline: for want of a theory
the unilateralists fell among the traditional Left or
were recuperated by the Pacifist conscience.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">What is left
is the enduring (quintessentially English) archaisms
in the control of everyday life, and the accelerating
decomposition of the old secular values. These could
still produce a total critique of the new life; but
the revolt of youth needs allies. The British working
class remains one of the most militant in the world.
Its struggles--the shop stewards movement and the
growing tempo and bitterness of wildcat strikes--will
be a permanent sore on an equally permanent capitalism
until it regains its revolutionary perspective, and
seeks common cause with the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>new</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>opposition.
The<i>débâcle</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of
Laborism makes that alliance all the more possible and
all the more necessary. If it came about, the
explosion could destroy the old society--the Amsterdam
riots would be child's play in comparison. Without it,
both sides of the revolution can only be stillborn:
practical needs will find no genuine revolutionary
form, and rebellious discharge will ignore the only
forces that drive and can therefore destroy modern
capitalism.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Japan is the
only industrialized country where this fusion of
student youth and working class militants has already
taken place.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;"><i>Zengakuren</i>,
the organization of revolutionary students, and the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>League of
Young Marxist Workers</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>joined to form
the backbone of the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Communist
Revolutionary League.</i>The movement is already
setting and solving the new problems of revolutionary
organization. Without illusions, it fights both
western capitalism and the bureaucracies of the
so-called socialist states. Without hierarchies, it
groups together several thousand students and workers
on a democratic basis, and aims at the participation
of every member in all the activities of the
organization.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">They are the
first to carry the struggle on to the streets, holding
fast to a real revolutionary program, and with a mass
participation. Thousands of workers and students have
waged a violent struggle with the Japanese police. In
many ways the C.R.L. lacks a complete and concrete
theory of the two systems it fights with such
ferocity. It has not yet defined the precise nature of
bureaucratic exploitation, and it has hardly
formulated the character of modern capitalism, the
critique of everyday life and the critique of the
spectacle. The Communist Revolutionary League is still
fundamentally an avant-garde<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>political</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>organization,
the heir of the best features of the classic
proletarian movement. But it is at present the most
important group in the world--and should henceforth be
one of the poles of discussion and a rallying point
for the new proletarian critique.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">"To be
avant-garde means to keep abreast of reality" (<i>Internationale
Situationniste</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>8). A radical
critique of the modern world must have the totality as
its object and objective. Its searchlight must reveal
the world's real past, its present existence and the
prospects for its transformation as an<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>indivisible
whole</i>. If we are to reach the whole truth about
the modern world--and<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>a fortori</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>if we are to
formulate the project of its total subversion--we must
be able to expose its<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>hidden
history;</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>in
concrete terms this means subjecting the history of
the international revolutionary movement, as set in
motion over a century ago by the western proletariat,
to a demystified and critical scrutiny.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">"This movement
against the total organization of the old world came
to a stop long ago" (<i>Internationale Situationniste</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>1).<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>It failed</i>.
Its last historical appearance was in the Spanish
social revolution, crushed in the Barcelona "May Days"
of 1937. Yet its so-called "victories" and "defeats,"
if judged in the light of their historical
consequences, tend to confirm Liebknecht's remark, the
day before his assassination, that "some defeats are
really victories, while some victories are more
shameful than any defeat." Thus the first great
"failure" of workers' power, the Paris Commune, is in
fact its first great<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>success</i>,
whereby the primitive proletariat proclaimed its
historical capacity to organize all aspects of social
life<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>freely</i>.
And the Bolshevik revolution, hailed as the
proletariat's first great triumph, turns out in the
last analysis to be its most disastrous defeat.</p>
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<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The
installation of the Bolshevik order coincides with the
crushing of the Spartakists by the German
"Social-Democrats." The joint victory of Bolshevism
and reformism constitutes a unity masked by an
apparent incompatibility, for the Bolshevik order too,
as it transpired, was to be a variation on the old
theme. The effects of the Russian counter-revolution
were, internally, the institution and development of a
new mode of exploitation, bureaucratic state
capitalism, and externally, the growth of the
"Communist" International, whose spreading branches
served the unique purpose of defending and reproducing
the rotten trunk. Capitalism, under its bourgeois and
bureaucratic guises, won a new lease of life--over the
dead bodies of the sailors of Kronstadt, the Ukrainian
peasants, and the workers of Berlin, Kiel, Turin,
Shanghai, and Barcelona.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The Third
International, apparently created by the Bolsheviks to
combat the degenerate reformism of its predecessor,
and to unite the avant-garde of the proletariat in
"revolutionary communist parties," was too closely
linked to the interests of its founders ever to serve
an authentic socialist revolution. Despite all its
polemics, the third International was a chip off the
old block. The Russian model was rapidly imposed on
the Western workers' organizations, and the evolution
of both was thenceforward one and the same thing. The
totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucratic class
over the Russian proletariat found its echo in the
subjection of the great mass of workers in other
countries to castes of trade union and political
functionaries, with their own private interests in
repression. While the Stalinist monster haunted the
working-class consciousness, old-fashioned capitalism
was becoming bureaucratized and overdeveloped,
resolving its famous internal contradictions and
proudly claiming this victory to be decisive, Today,
though the unity is obscured by apparent variations
and oppositions, a single social form is coming to
dominate the world--this modern world which it
proposes to govern with the principles of a world long
dead and gone. The tradition of the dead generations
still weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the
living.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Opposition to
the world offered from within--and in its own
terms--by supposedly revolutionary organisations, can
only be spurious. Such opposition, depending on the
worst mystifications and calling on more or less
reified ideologies, helps consolidate the social
order. Trade unions and political parties created by
the working class as tools of its emancipation are now
no more than the "checks and balances" of the system.
Their leaders have made these organizations their
private property; their stepping stone to a role
within the ruling class. The party program or the
trade union statute may contain vestiges of
revolutionary phraseology, but their practice is
everywhere reformist--and doubly so now that official
capitalist ideology mouths the same reformist slogans.
Where the unions have seized power--in countries more
backward than Russia in 1917--the Stalinist model of
counterrevolutionary totalitarianism has been
faithfully<a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#"
onclick="return footwin('141','foot5')">reproduced</a>.
Elsewhere, they have become a<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#"
onclick="return footwin('141','foot6')">static
complement to the self-regulation of managerial
capitalism.</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
official organizations have become the best guarantee
of repression--without this "opposition" the
humanist-democratic facade of the system would
collapse and its essential violence would be laid
bare.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">In the
struggle with the militant proletariat, these
organizations are the unfailing defenders of the
bureaucratic counter-revolution, and the docile
creatures of its foreign policy. They are the bearers
of the most blatant falsehood in a world of lies,
working diligently for the perennial and universal
dictatorship of the State and the Economy. As the
situationists put it, "a universally dominant social
system, tending toward totalitarian self-regulation,
is apparently being resisted--but only apparently-- by
false forms of opposition which remain trapped on the
battlefield ordained by the system itself. Such
illusory resistance can only serve to reinforce what
it pretends to attack. Bureaucratic pseudo-socialism
is only the most grandiose of these guises of the old
world of hierarchy and alienated labor."</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">As for student
unionism, it is nothing but the travesty of a
travesty, the useless burlesque of a trade unionism
itself long totally degenerate.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The principal
platitude of all future revolutionary organization
must be the theoretical and practical denunciation of
Stalinism in all its forms. In France at least, where
economic backwardness has slowed down the
consciousness of crisis, the only possible road is
over the ruins of Stalinism. It must become the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>delenda est
Carthag</i>o of the last revolution of prehistory.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Revolution
must break with its past, and derive all its poetry
from the future. little groups of "militants" who
claim to represent the authentic Bolshevik heritage
are voices from beyond the grave. These angels come to
avenge the "betrayal" of the October Revolution will
always support the defense of the USSR--if only "in
the last instance." The "under- developed" nations are
their promised land. They can scarcely sustain their
illusions outside this context, where their objective
role is to buttress theoretical underdevelopment. They
struggle for the dead body of "Trotsky," invent a
thousand variations on the same ideological theme, and
end up with the same brand of practical and
theoretical impotence. Forty years of
counter-revolution separate these groups from the
Revolution; since this is not 192O they can only be
wrong (and they were already wrong in 192O).</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">Consider the
fate of an ultra-Leftist group like<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Socialisme
ou Barbarie</i>, where after the departure of a
"traditional Marxist" faction (the impotent<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Pouvoir
Ouvrier</i>) a core of revolutionary "modernists"
under Cardan disintegrated and disappeared within 18
months. While the old categories are no longer
revolutionary, a rejection of Marxism à la Cardan is
no substitute for the reinvention of a total critique.
The Scylla and Charybdis of present revolutionary
action are the museum of revolutionary prehistory and
the modernism of the system itself.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">As for the
various anarchist groups, they possess nothing beyond
a pathetic and ideological faith in this label. They
justify every kind of self-contradiction in liberal
terms: freedom of speech, of opinion, and other such
bric-a-brac. Since they tolerate each other, they
would tolerate anything.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The
predominant social system, which flatters itself on
its modernization and its permanence, must now be
confronted with a worthy enemy: the equally modern
negative forces which it produces. Let the dead bury
their dead, The advance of history has a practical
demystifying effect--it helps exorcise the ghosts
which haunt the revolutionary consciousness, Thus the
revolution of everyday life comes face to face with
the enormity of its task. The revolutionary project
must be reinvented, as much as the life it announces.
If the project is still essentially the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>abolition</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of class<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>society</i>,
it is because the material conditions upon which
revolution was based are still with us. But revolution
must be conceived with a new coherence and a new
radicalism, starting with a clear grasp of the failure
of those who first began it. Otherwise its<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>fragmentary</i>realization
will bring about only a new division of society.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The fight
between the powers-that-be and the new proletariat can
only be in terms of the totality. And for this reason
the future revolutionary movement must be purged of
any tendency to reproduce within itself the alienation
produced by the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#"
onclick="return footwin('141','foot7')">commodity
system</a>; it must be the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>living</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>critique of
that system and the negation of it, carrying all the
elements essential for its transcendence. As Lukacs
correctly showed, revolutionary organization is this
necessary mediation between theory and practice,
between men and history, between the Dams of workers
and the proletariat<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>constituted
as a class</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(Lukacs'
mistake was to believe that the Boleheviks fulfilled
this role). If they are to be real- iced in practice
"theoretical" tendencies or differences must be
translated into organizational problems, It is by its
present organization that a new revolutionary movement
will stand or fall. The final criterion of its
coherence will be the compatibility of its actual form
with its essential project--<i>the international and
absolute power of Workers' Councils</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>as
foreshadowed by the proletarian revolutions of the
last hundred years. There can be no compromise with
the foundations of existing society--the system of
commodity production; ideology in all its guises; the
State; and the imposed division of labor from leisure.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The rock on
which the old revolutionary movement foundered was the
separation of theory and practice. Only at the supreme
moments of struggle did the proletariat supersede this
division and attain their truth. As a rule the
principle seems to have been<i>hic Rhodus hic non
salta.</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ideology,
however "revolutionary," always serves the ruling
class; false consciousness is the alarm signal
revealing the presence of the enemy fifth column. The
lie is the essential produce of the world of
alienation, and the most effective killer of
revolutions: once an organization which claims the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>social
truth</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>adopts
the lie as a tactic, its revolutionary career is
finished.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">All the
positive aspects of the Workers' Councils must be
already there in an organization which aims at their
realization. All relics of the Leninist theory of
organization must be fought and destroyed. The
spontaneous creation of Soviets by the Russian workers
in 1905 was in itself a practical critique of that<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#"
onclick="return footwin('141','foot8')">baneful
theory</a>, yet the Bolsheviks continued to claim
that working-class spontaneity could not go beyond
"trade union consciousness" and would be unable to
grasp the "totality." This was no less than a
decapitation of the proletariat so that the Party
could place itself "at the head" of the Revolution. If
once you dispute the proletariat's capacity to
emancipate itself, as Lenin did so ruthlessly, then
you deny its capacity to organize all aspects of a
post-revolutionary society. In such a context, the
slogan "All Power to the Soviets" meant nothing more
then the subjection of the Soviets to the Party, and
the installation of the Party State in place of the
temporary "State" of the armed masses.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">"All Power to
the Soviets" is<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>still</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the slogan,
but this time without the Bolshevik afterthoughts. The
proletariat can only play the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>game</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of revolution
if the stakes are the whole world, for the only
possible form of workers' power--generalized and
complete autogestion--can be shared with nobody.
Workers' control is the abolition of all authority: it
can abide no limitation, geographical or otherwise:
any compromise amounts to surrender, "Workers' control
must be the means and the end of the struggle: it is
at once the goal of that struggle end its<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#"
onclick="return footwin('141','foot9')">adequate
form."</a></p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">A<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>total</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>critique of
the world is the guarantee of the realism and reality
of a revolutionary organization. To tolerate the
existence of an oppressive social system in one place
or another, simply because it is packaged and sold as
revolutionary, is to condone universal oppression. To
accept alienation as inevitable in any one domain of
social life is to resign oneself to reification in all
its forms. It is not enough to favor Workers' Councils
in the abstract; in concrete terms they mean the
abolition of commodities and therefore of the
proletariat. Despite their superficial disparities,
all existing societies are governed by the logic of
commodities-- and the commodity is the basis of their
dreams of self-regulation. This famous fetishism is
still the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>essential</i>obstacle
to a total emancipation, to the free construction of
social life. In the world of commodities, external and
invisible forces direct men's actions; autonomous
action directed towards clearly perceived goals is
impossible. The strength of economic laws lies in
their ability to take on the appearance of natural
ones, but it is also their weakness, for their
effectiveness thus depends<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>only</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>on "the lack
of consciousness of those who help create them."</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The market has
one central principle--the loss of self in the aimless
and unconscious creation of a world beyond the control
of its creators. The revolutionary core of autogestion
is the attack on this principle. Autogestion<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>is</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>conscious
direction by all of their whole existence, It is not
some vision of a workers' control<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>of the
market</i>, which is merely to choose one's own
alienation, to program one's own survival (squaring
the capitalist circle". The task of the Workers'
Councils will not be the autogestion of the world
which exists, but its continual qualitative
transformation. The commodity and its laws (that vast
detour in the history of man's production of him-
self) will be superseded by a new social form.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">With
autogestion ends one of the fundamental splits in
modern society--between a labor which becomes
increasingly reified end a "leisure" consumed in
passivity. The death of the commodity naturally means
the suppression of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>work</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and its
replacement by a new type of free activity. Without
this firm intention, socialist groups like<i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Socialisme
ou Barbarie</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>or<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Pouvoir
Ouvrier</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>fell
back on a reformism of labor couched in demands for
its "humanization." But it is work itself which must
be called in question. Far from being a "Utopia," its
suppression is the first condition for a break with
the market. The everyday division between "free time"
end "working hours," those complementary sectors of
alienated life is an<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>expression</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of the
internal contradiction between the use- value and
exchange-value of the commodity. It has become the
strongest point of the commodity ideology, the one
contradiction which intensifies with the rise of the
consumer. To destroy it, no strategy short of the
abolition of work will do. It is only beyond the
contradiction of use-value and exchange-value that
history begins, that men make their activity an object
of their will and their consciousness, and see
themselves in the world they have created. The
democracy of Workers' Councils is the resolution of
all previous contradictions. It makes "everything
which exists apart from individuals impossible."</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">What is the
revolutionary project? The conscious domination of
history by the men who make it. Modern history, like
all past history, is the product of social praxis, the
unconscious result of human action. In the epoch of
totalitarian control, capitalism has produced its own
religion:<i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the
spectacle.</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In
the spectacle, ideology becomes flesh of our flesh, is
realized here on earth. The world itself walks upside
down. And like the "critique of religion" in Marx's
day, the critique of the spectacle is now the
essential precondition of any critique.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The problem of
revolution is once again a concrete issue. On one side
the grandiose structures of technology and material
production; on the other a dissatisfaction which can
only grow more profound. The bourgeoisie end its
Eastern heirs, the bureaucracy; cannot devise the
means to use their own overdevelopment, which will be
the basis of the poetry of the future, simply because
they both depend on the<i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>preservation
of the old order.</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At most they
harness over-development to invent new repressions.
For they know only one trick, the accumulation of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Capital</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and hence of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>the
proletariat</i>--a proletarian being a man with no
power over the use of his life, and who knows it. The
new proletariat inherits the riches of the bourgeois
world and this gives it its historical chance. Its
task is to transform and destroy these riches, to
constitute them as part of a human project: the total
appropriation of nature and of human nature by man.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">A realized
human nature can only mean the infinite multiplication
of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>real
desires<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>and
their gratification. These real desires are the
underlife of present society, crammed by the spectacle
into the darkest corners of the revolutionary
unconscious, realized by the spectacle only in the
dreamlike delirium of its own publicity. We must
destroy the spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of
commodity society, if we are to realize human<i>needs</i>.
We must abolish those pseudo-needs and false desires
which the system manufactures daily in order to
preserve its power.</p>
<p style="margin: 8pt; text-indent: 8pt;">The liberation
of modern history, and the free use of its hoarded
acquisition, can come only from the forces it
represses. In the nineteenth century the proletariat
was already the inheritor of philosophy; now it
inherits modern art and the first conscious critique
of everyday life, With the self-destruction of the
working class art and philosophy shall be realized. To
transform the world and to change the structure of
life are one and the same thing for the
proletariat--they are the passwords to its destruction
as a class, its dissolution of the present reign of
necessity, and its accession to the realm of liberty.
As its maximum program it has the radical critique and
free reconstruction of all the values and patterns of
behavior imposed by an alienated reality. The only
poetry it can acknowledge is the creativity released
in the making of history, the free invention of each
moment and each event: Lautréamont's<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>poésie
faite par tous</i>--the beginning of the
revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a
festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of
excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom.
A palace which knows only one rationality: the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>game</i>.
The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a
lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.</p>
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