The Power of Negative Thinking, or Robin

Hood Rides Again

By Robert Chasse
Published by The Council for the Liberation of Daily Life

April 1968

I. Mystifications, or Who Killed Robin Hood

The trivial, catastrophic and extremely painful development of bourgeois society,

which in its initial revolutionary impetus gave birth to dialectics, is slow to close its
life cycle and has not yet led back to the broad and immediately inspiring perspective
it seemed to open at its beginning. In other words, potentialities that could be
visualized in thought -- dialectically apprehended -- these potentialities had to become
solid material reality before the consciousness of many could be affected by them.

Dialectical idealism is expression as end -- final emergence of Spirit into the light --
and justification of the bourgeois order. Dialectical materialism is expression as
beginning, as process, and hope: realization of the revolutionary project of the
proletariat. The realization of the one (materialism) will be the re-penetration of the
other into history as history, will be as it were the closing of that life cycle, which will
correspond to its realization. But a system of thought -- all have historically fitted this
role -- can be taken as explanation, as philosophy, as separation: ultimately, as
justification of the existing order -- justification of the bourgeois order by Hegel and
bases for the justification of socialism by Marx.

Marxism -- aside from being philosophy as philosophy, as another interpretation --

was the philosophic expression of the consciousness of the proletariat. The
development of capitalism and the struggle of the proletariat would bring the
proletariat into its consciousness. Marx assumed -- but this time for the purposes of
political struggle arising out of his personal desire to be involved in it -- that reality
would soon be ripe to reveal the truth of the thought and to awaken it in the minds of
many. Before the revolution is in the streets, it is in the minds of the people. This
awakening is not the problem of the apprehension, the "understanding" by
intellectuals of Marxist thought -- that is, the philosophic expression of proletarian
consciousness, which can only be apprehended by them as philosophic interpretation -
- nor is it a question of such an "understanding" by workers. The mere apprehension
of an idea as idea permits its manipulation by other ideas, themselves subject to
conditions that negate the idea.

The impossibility of having a revolution, but the objective (real) possibility of taking
power, led Lenin to subvert Marxism in order to justify what would become the
Bolshevik coup d'etat. Lenin (following Kautsky's example) reintroduced pre-
Hegelian dichotomies, and claimed Marxism as a philosophic expression of a
consciousness for the proletariat. From here came the idea that, left to itself, the
proletariat could only develop a trade union consciousness. From here also came the
idea that this consciousness for the proletariat -- to be effective, and to which the
proletariat could not come of itself -- had to be brought to it by an intellectual elite.
For Lenin: the professional revolutionary, the Party. The dictatorship of the
proletariat, which for Marx was an extension of the state over the time it would take to
change over from profit to use production (Marx over-estimated the state as the
decisive instrument in the social revolution), became, in the hands of Lenin,
dictatorship over the proletariat by the establishment of the party in the permanent
role of the state. Marxism became an ideology, as Leninism, at the service of a ruling
caste, who are in effect the new masters, the new owners, by virtue of their privileged
detention of power.

Fascism also necessitated a subversion of Marxism as expression of the consciousness

of the proletariat. Assisted by liberalism and Gentile, there was the necessity to
neutralize the dialectics of consciousness by a return to Hegel (for the pre-eminence
of the state, where the trade union consciousness -- syndicalism -- discovers its true
culmination and resolution, but where, effectively, the consciousness of the proletariat
is appropriated and negated) and to pre-Hegelian categories for the permanent duality
between subject and object, thought and action, being and consciousness (becoming).

The roots of the fascist 'myths' lie very close at hand: in liberalism. Fascism is
the reactive fear that liberalism will not be able to hold the fort. It was the fear that the
prevailing ideology (liberalism) could not resist the onslaught of a proletariat armed
with syndicalism on one side and the Leninist proletarian state on the other. Fascism -
- always a possibility within capitalism -- became necessary after the 'victory' of
socialism in Russia. It is the totalitarian form of liberalism: the rule of the fragmentary
in order to eliminate totality, the rule of the parcel of life over the whole; that is, the
effective negation of the whole of life.

Liberalism from the start affirmed and maintained the permanence of pre-Hegelian
dualities. It is the world of the fragmented that wills itself so: it is the ideology of the
specialist: the division of the world into mutually impenetrable -- unrelated -- parts.
The unrelatedness of things allows liberalism (and the specialists who find
justification through it), in the face of disintegration, to hope for reform and develop
napalm. As ideology, Classical Liberalism is merely the mask of free-enterprise
capitalism, and is passing, now that free-enterprise itself has passed. Its replacement,
Welfare Liberalism, is becoming the mask of monopoly capitalism, which is itself
gradually being absorbed out of the hands of the bourgeoisie by the state and its
operational arm, the bureaucracy. Welfare Liberalism will more and more manifest
concern for the "collectivity," abandoning its "individualistic" past (creating thereby
deepening dramas of conscience among the specialists), to meet the needs of
monopoly capitalism, and as such meet the concern for the "collectivity" manifest in
socialism -- as both move increasingly to state capitalism, moving toward a
permanently proletarianized (degraded) life.

It is no accident that western liberal democracies, socialism, Leninism (in its

prolongation: Stalinism), and fascism got together to destroy the revolution in Spain.
The ones [sic] by withholding aid, the others by sapping from within, and the last, led
by little Caudillo, bringing the actual tanks, guns and bullets necessary to make the
graveyards. These totalitarian ideologies (mystifications) have all found their root in
the objective need to establish or maintain operating forms of capitalism.

It is not accidental (fortuitous) that Mussolini called himself a socialist, or that

German fascism was called National Socialism. Liberalism was -- and continues to be
in modified form -- the ideological mainstay of the established and highly developed
countries of the west. Socialism became its counterpart where no bourgeois class
existed or was eliminated and replaced by a bureaucracy operating a bureaucratic
capitalism.

Lenin's search for a justification for taking power was also a search for the fulcrum for
the exercise of that power. What was necessary (for him) for the underdeveloped
countries subject to the imperialism of western capitalism was a weapon that an
underdeveloped country could wield against imperialism, that is, an incipient
capitalism that already had the characteristics of monopoly capitalism: bureaucratic
capitalism. After that, it was easy for him to establish the permanence of the state (the
extinction of the proletarian state is specifically ruled out in The State and
Revolution, until after the socialist revolution, and who knows how long that will take
in passing?). Necessity, concealed in what happens, only appears at the end.

What has come about is the socialist perspective, in all its manifestations: Stalinism,
Maoism, Castroism, and the various African socialist-nationalisms. In a current
Russian definition to which all these ideologies could adhere, the state is no longer the
state over the people, but a state of the people, finding Hegel again, and at the service
of a repressive organization of life, in a final reification of the social question.
*

The polarization of means and ends -- thought and action -- into logical categories
reveals a true antagonism between them in the bourgeois world. Thought is always
separated from action, always hobbles after occurence. Or else [it] is discombobulated
and deals with other [matters]. In his dirge to the bourgeois world, Spengler noted that
there are two fundamental -- irreconcilable -- kinds of men: those who think and those
who do. Malraux, another bourgeois haunted by the primacy of death, said: "Man
conceives of himself but it is in no way necessary that he do so (and many don't). The
essential drama, or problem, is in the opposition between two systems of thought, one
which tends to question man and life, the other to suppress all questioning by
activity."

The means elicit the emergence of the ends that realize them. The action you engage
in engages you. Not to act is another form of action. Action always generates the
thought, as thought generates the action. These opposites always fuse. The rest is
liberalized fiction.

The radical who penetrates a group to radicalize it, who parcelizes himself, to bring
some of its members up to his degree of radicalization, also enters on the level of the
group. He is of them immediately. Any subsequent radicalization therefore is
something other than thought, mediated by his creation of the conditions that negate
that thought.

The socialist parties (the Social Democrats, the communists and the 55 other varieties)
have practiced this at the level of the organization of society. They penetrated with a
view to transforming it and were indeed transformed by it. Their work was in fact
work for the perpetuation of the social order. This, which seemed to be an occasional
tactic, is now revealed to have been a strategic change permitted, then necessitated, by
the subversion of Marxism practiced by the theoreticians of Social Democracy.

II. The Social Climate of Confusion

The political party of the past century that has wanted to be revolutionary, by
subverting others in power plays and faction fights, aimed on the one hand at
dislocating every other contending party, and, on the other hand, at entering the
parliamentary game in an effort either at some sort of dislocation there or coming into
revolutionary power with the sanction of the state. The parties of socialism have all,
according to their lights, gone the way of complete failure. But the failure of their
action has left intact in the minds of some the theory that these parties share and that
informed their action. It is the socialist perspective. By not being the end of class-
societies, by not being the social revolution, it opens the possibility for a new
hierarchicalization of life: with a ruling caste holding state power (developing a
bureaucratic capitalism) over an amorphous, permanent proletariat. The revolutionary
moment is for them an embarrassment: it is the time when men become masters of
their own lives, and they conceive of it as a transitional phase, a moment of
discomfort between moments of power, assumed always for the benefit of one class,
which -- as they wield power in its name -- must become a permanence.

Hence the reconstitution (beginning with the structure of the party itself) of
hierarchies present in the prevailing organization of life. Their mass bases,
constituencies, dual powers, and parallel institutions keep the hierarchization of life:
keep the militants below who execute more or less blindly the dictates of the leader-
theoreticians above, pending their total abandonment of power to new representatives,
new specialists of political power.

We are entering, they say, into a qualitatively new world of abundance, the so-called
post-scarcity society. Not quite. We are entering a world that more and more imposes
poverty -- not the residues of material poverty, an administrative problem, but the
poverty of existence that emerges with the disappearance of material poverty -- as we
enter into the possibility for abundance, the free development of life. The proletariat is
not the industrial workers, not even all workers lumped together. As jobs disappear,
the proletariat also becomes the workless: there can only be unemployment where
employment is a possibility. The proletariat is the result of the disintegration of
society, the result of [an] artificially produced poverty of existence. It is the negation
of class society, not its continuation by other means. Emancipation will only be
complete when the real man [sic] has organized and recognized his own powers as
social powers, so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as
political power.

In the socialist perspective, the workers -- and particularly the industrial workers as
vanguard -- are the proletariat, at the root of society, and destined to be kept there.
The struggle evolved -- and continues to evolve for those who still function within this
perspective -- around the vanguard, at the service of the work ethic. The proletariat
became a permanence in order to maintain socialism in one country or to get power
out of the end of a gun. It was transformed into an ideology -- passing from negation
of class society to permanent instrument of its disappearance -- aimed explicitly at
maintaining a mystification necessary to preserve the new set of masters.

Such a line of thought is obviously barred for those who do not see the socialist
bureaucracy as a ruling class, or who ignore the specificity of this class by enveloping
it in the classical conditions of bourgeois power. So we hear that only a "socialist
America" could consider reversing the trend of the appropriation of world wealth by
the United States and Western Europe. The control of abundance is not just changing
the way it is parceled out, but redefining its every orientation. That orientation can
hardly be considered redefined by economism: the economic incentives of recent
reputation which, less than use-production, are hand-outs, further impetus to produce
for the state. Poverty is still imposed, men are still dispossessed -- work is still turned
against the individual as an instrument for domination.

The socialist perspective aims at a political revolution already consummated wherever

capitalism dominates. To fail to understand this clearly (imbed it in revolutionary
theory, translate it into practice) may again lead those who wish to transform the
world into a re-enactment of a moment of change already in the past.

The Paris Commune re-experienced the French Revolution. One of the initial orders
proclaimed the separation of Church and State rather than the dissolution of religion
and the scattering of priests. The theoretical and practical activity of the French
Revolution was assumed by the Assembly, giving too much of its actions and
deliberations an aura of the unreal. It is only toward the last that the Commune came
into its own, up from the street, but it was cut down. Those who remember that Marx
did not really influence the Commune also should know that he, with his under-
estimation of the preemptive role of the state, would have had difficulty
circumventing such a development. He saw in the Assembly the elements of the state
of his transitional or socialist phase.

Guevara analyzed that military affairs could accelerate both the process of
decomposition of South American oligarchies, and the radicalization of the peasantry.
The analysis depends on a generalized discontent among the people that the guerillas
hope to polarize in their favor. It is the transposition of the Maoist approach to the
South American climate. The key is not to abolish the power of a ruling class but to
assume it, in a nationalist perspective, and put the country at the service of an efficient
bureaucracy. It is the palace revolution, the coup d'etat. The socialist perspective --
necessarily linked to nationalism -- was adopted by Castro after he came to power, in
the same way that he was led to incorporate the Cuban Communist Party. It was the
most viable form of institutionalizing the new bureaucracy that constitutes in all cases
the replacement of the old ruling class. The positions of the Cuban Communist Party
against Castro -- he was an adventurist -- are too well known to be documented here.
Only to be noted is that such ideological arguments have no weight before the
common aim: the assumption of power. Equally well known is the progressive and
complete retreat from leaving power in the hands of the people. The councils of farm
and factory rapidly became rubber stamps, as they are in Yugoslavia, of everything
but the frills. They are free to make the decisions that change nothing. They are free to
agree to the decisions of the ruling bureaucracy.

Transferred to the United States, much of this has merely become the portrait of a nice
violence, that could, from the outside, bring down the ruling class here, if enough
young American hotbloods would only disappear into some South American jungle,
or take to the streets, the shaded windows or the rooves, rifle[s] at the ready. To the
mystique of peace prevalent in the peace movement is substituted the mystique of
violence in an emerging "violent movement." I lump into this term those new monks -
- devotees and dilittantes -- of violence who claim to have no "ideology," they "only
want to make a revolution." Their's is the ideology (mystification) of revolution. Their
direction is essentially that they have no direction. Most of them don't even know they
want to die. It is not a transformation of life that is in view, but a tactic that will throw
the ruling class into disarray, and it will respond perhaps by retiring to the countryside
to play golf. The suicide of several thousand people marching to meet the military
apparatus and a largely unloving population is passed over in silence, or entertained as
a "beautiful movement," another Commune perhaps, where men who have failed also
die on the barricades in memory of what they thought they had and what might have
been. One of these groups of the violent movement had a vision -- if unwittingly -- of
the truth when it wrote: "At least death is on our side." No doubt. And floral
arrangements on tombstones.

Into this mishmash of Maoism, peace movement and violent movement (the last two
are aspects of the same mentality, the same spirit, which is the spirit of suicide) have
entered those who ultimately will make use of it, if not enlist them all: the established
advocates of the socialist perspective, with all their factional fights, infiltrations,
hierarchizations. Among people whose action struggles for a theory, they offer their
mystification of theory. They prefer the Chinese to the Russian model of bureaucracy
and offer as a fundamental choice as others here offer Republicans or Democrats as a
fundamental choice.

The socialist perspective flourishes where theory and practice are separated, where
militants (activists) below may go along [with] the prevailing line set by the
theoreticians-masters above, who necessarily think of their militants as troops; and, as
troops hobbling after them, a necessary cocommitant to an ascension to power, for the
greater glory of socialism in more countries.

The structure of Students for a Democratic Society -- and the social climate of
confusion -- has allowed for the simultaneous development of a reformist and a
radical wing. The reformers have the upper hand.
SDS began with the modest slogan, in loco parentis, directed at university
administrations. It accused them of taking up the role of parental -- paternal --
authority on the campus, with all of the control on thought and behavior which that
implied, in an atmosphere hypothetically devoted to the free inquiry of open minds.
That inquiry was not free or the minds [not] open was hardly questioned. It would
have led to the mentor of the university: the prevailing social structure, and the state.

So far as the social structure was concerned, the organization called for a reform of
the Democratic Party. The logic was simple. There is a reactionary coalition of
southern Democrats and northern Republicans. Congress is dominated by committees.
The committees are dominated by committee chairmen. The chairmanships are
accorded by the seniority system. The southern Democrats, having an iron grip over
their constituencies, only leave Congress to receive their funeral orations. They
control their constituencies because the negroes don't vote. Tactic (which joined the
tactic of SNCC or Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party): register the negro, get in
new representative blood, oust the chairmen, the chairmanships will then pass to more
liberal northerners -- the reactionary coalition will be broken -- and the cause of
Democracy in America will be saved.

The direct descendants of the tactic to reform the Democratic Party are the
Community Action projects, with their reformist approach to social action. What is
wrong with reformism is not the desire to ameliorate the immediate conditions of a
number of people, but rather that these reforms are gotten to transform the same
number of people into constituencies. The whole scheme operates entirely within the
horizon of the prevailing organization of life. A constituency is political power
separated from social power. Reform, in ignoring the revolutionary possibility, works
now as ever for the continuation of the prevailing structure, and sanctions what
ostensibly it negates.

Participatory democracy becomes not the face to face democracy of citizens

exercising power without the mediation of representatives, but merely the desire to
have more people go to the ballot boxes, more people join in the spectacle of
elections. "By 1957, the 20,000,000 ballots cast in the election of Miss Rheingold
made it the largest election in the United States outside of that for President"
(Boorstin).

The "multiple issue" orientation of SDS signifies not a total attack upon the prevailing
organization of life, but a separate and separated -- a fragmentary and parcelized --
approach to a number of "issues" that for the most part are directly linked to the
marginal character of student life. This plethora of fragmentary issues finds its echo in
the desire for decentralization and leaderlessness (which is less the absence of leaders
than the creation of the conditions for leaders to take over) within SDS chapters. It is
the desire of each of the chapters to be able to pursue their thing, along their own
lines, unrelated to what everyone else is doing. Democracy, they call it.

The draft enters as an enveloping issue: it touches all students, and as such becomes
an effective tool in the hands of those who wish to place the plethora of fragmentary
issues at the service of a unifying perspective. Centralization becomes the artificial
imposition of unity over the fragmentary in exchange for the abandonment by the
militants of their real power to those -- at the head, the steering committee, what have
you -- who speak and determine in their name.

Within SDS, with this past and these perspectives, is reinforced the need for
developing a power base. There is a reinforcement of the need for centralizing power
in the steering committee, the need for a mass base, a constituency, militants, bodies:
bodies to hold flags, to march, to be put in front of tanks, in front of stone walls. The
problem here is not to deny the stone wall, but to see it emerge as it were out of the
fragmentary and fragmented attack upon the prevailing organization of life. There is
feeble assistance, but assistance [nonetheless], by the Radical Education Project,
which, from its proclaimed purpose of reinvestigating or simply investigating the
American scene, conceals its theoretical foundation in the socialist perspective.

Many in SDS have a healthy intuitive distrust of the obvious hierarchies of the little
parties (Progressive Labor, Trotskyites, not to speak of the CP itself): it is the
independent ideologues (mystifiers) and ideology (mystification) of the socialist
perspective that can reach and subvert them -- the Monthly Review, Studies on the
Left, Marxist-Humanists, Independent Socialists, the Guardian (old and new), Maoists
(Debrayists, Cheists), on to include the IWW on one end of the spectrum and the little
theoreticians up from liberalism like Hayden on the other.

Many of those who are still called -- and still call themselves -- militants have seen in
the relative autonomy of SDS chapters not the early forms of another hierarchical
organization -- which it is -- but a healthy rejection of hierarchies, cell bosses, party
chairmen, secretaries. They have been swept off their feet by anarchism, which
conceals beneath an affirmation of the individual his abdication to the domination by
the cohesive community. The anarchists speak of duty to the community as those they
fight speak of duty to the party or the nation.

It should be noted that the preeminence of the community over the individual is
founded in the necessity to organize the population around the struggle against want.
All of the splendid affirmations of individual liberty by anarchism are mediated by
this necessity. But with the passing of the necessity, the anarchists have maintained
the communitarian model as the foundation of the liberation of the individual.
In its day, anarchism functioned as an affirmation of the individual against those who
tended to objectify -- reify -- the individual as a cog in the "objective need" to install
in a capitalist mode of production the socialist perspective. It is the affirmation of the
individual that we keep in memory of anarchism. It is the individual that matters. It is
each one of us who must refuse to sacrifice himself for the boss -- be it community,
farm, factory, party, or state.

John Lewis of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee once explained that
all the blacks needed to get their civil rights was to ask for them. The asking led to the
March on Washington, "the greatest assembly for a redress of grievance that this
capital has ever seen" (New York Times, Aug. 28, 1963). Then, "Mr. McKissick said
several times during his testimony that the civil rights movement, as originally
conceived, was dead. It died with the March on Washington in 1963, he said, because
it dealt strictly with integration. A vacuum now has been filled with black power, he
said" (New York Times, Dec. 9, 1966). To the illusion of John Lewis, which was the
illusion in SNCC, succeeds the illusion of black power. It took three years.

"Advocacy of 'revolution' is a tactic to appeal to those who respond to the 'language'

of revolution" (New York Times, Jan. 22, 1968). Professor Charles V. Hamilton, who
said this, has co-authored a book on black power with Stokely Carmichael, the man
who has so much upset the powers that gyrate with all his talk of revolution.

In their book, the following tactic is suggested: if a representative of black interests no

longer represents these interests, the constituency must revoke his mandate. And so
black power is not conceived as a negation of the prevailing order but as an
affirmation of a specially deprived special interest group within the legislative body.
(Congress, by the way, does not represent the living -- nor does any legislature --
except as they come through the economic interests of a section (division) of the
country. Congress has represented, from a time when the economic divisions in the
country separated along real lines, sectional economic interests. These divisions no
longer significantly exist: the same corporations own the factories in Maine, or
Connecticut, Tennessee or California. The upshot, in Congress, has been not to
compromise over differences due to the allegiance to different bosses, but to
compromise over the way in which the booty will be divided. What are the real
interests of the black people -- or the white -- Mr. Carmichael?)

He said (Prof. Hamilton again), "middle class Negroes who formerly had sought to
work with the established system were now joining black power groups in increasing
numbers, raising the level of black leadership" (emphasis added).
Unmistakably, the black power enterprise is an attempt by the "black bourgeoisie" --
how is it different from the white? -- to control the blacks. It is not necessary that they
assume the head -- that they really control -- but merely that they appear to do so.
Institutionalizing the image of their domination, and introducing the presence of
despair -- the despair of those who will take the image for the real thing, and wonder,
perhaps, where the revolution went. This black parliamentarianism represents a
fundamental reabsorption of the blacks by the prevailing structure. And the blacks
will be left with religion, and the reaffirmation of the subordinate role (slave role) of
the female: they will continue to be deprived materially of what the heavens of
religion grant them (in heaven), the possibility of being (which is becoming) men.

Racism -- to which blackness is a response -- is not in the nature of man [sic], or of

the white man, but of the prevailing system. Blackness as a fundamental trait against
the system is merely a specific of it. And now that capitalism rises in Africa, racism is
manifesting itself there, against those who are not black. From the fear of
extermination -- which has economic objectivity not only for the blacks: Vietnam also
functions as an exterminator, though even here the blacks on the bottom of the pile
suffer out of turn -- the defense of blackness leads to a defense of all the Hamiltons
and Carmichaels and Powells and Elijah Mohammeds, in an indiscriminate
agglomeration of classes that can only serve the class that rules.

Rap Brown said, "violence is part of your culture." Is it not part of his culture? The
illusion of blackness as something other than the color of his skin haunts him, as it
does any man who attempts to elevate race -- why not social position? -- to the level
of a characteristic in what would presumably be some definition of the nature of man.
He also said, "the black movement is a leaderless movement." If by that he meant that
the movement (himself included) must struggle against all those who pose as leaders
and attempt to channel the struggle by way of the black power advocates, his
agreement with the Black Power Conference in Newark in 1967 remains to be
explained away. He also speaks with a forked tongue. At best he reminds one of the
trade unions, of all those anti-bureaucratic workers who find themselves presided over
today by a powerful bureaucracy.

"Summer rioting is healthy for individual rioters because it gives them a

psychological lift to confront the oppressive 'system' " (Hamilton again). Despite the
comfortable locution, the "individual rioter" is the element that can dislocate the
whole dream of these unhealthy gentlemen. In Detroit, in 1967, they did not spare the
shops with the black power slogan "black owned" or "soul brother" (which should
have read "your soul, brother"): and whites joined in. It is the individual rioter who
lives in imposed poverty, on the margin of the dying labor force; it is he who has
nothing -- but nothing -- to gain from being appropriated once again by a new set of
old masters. There is a race between his visceral rejection of the prevailing
organization of life -- its transformation into consciousness as conscious existence --
and exhaustion, indifference, apathy, where the streets of Harlem or Hough or Watts -
- even with a flood of cars and television sets, even with a deluge of commodities --
are accepted with the same permanent indifference as the fields and jungles of
Vietnam. That despair constitutes the victory of the Powells, Hamiltons, and
Carmichaels of the earth, aligned as they are with all the Johnsons and Kennedys, De
Gaulles and Maos, all those who speak to men in the name of something more than
them.

Fundamentally, there must be a refusal to sacrifice oneself for the boss -- of the farm,
the factory, of the party, or the state, no matter what his color or the decorations on his
hat or shoulder. On the portal of one of the medieval churches, the people of those
times put this understanding graphically: the greats of the earth -- all the kings and
princes, all the popes and nobles -- are chained one to another in a line going to hell.

The nature of man is what we will make it.

The activism of the last few years arose out of individual rebellion against the
prevailing organization of life. Some came for moral reasons or because their parents
had gone too far to the right or not far enough to the left, but all [rebelled] viscerally,
because life had somehow been turned into the show of life, where activity is an
abstraction from all activity, a passivity viewed as activity, so much lauded by
McLuhan as "involvement in depth."

It was necessary to strike out, to break the restraining bond, to march, carry flags and
banners, make slogans, write letters, address petitions to the government which -- if
displeased by all the noise -- could well afford to file all such things in the waste
basket, with a carbon copy to police files.

Slowly, many have come to realize that there is also the spectacle of opposition that
can be easily framed in the generalized spectacle of the prevailing system, that their
activity again has become an abstraction from activity, that they can march, then rush
home to watch themselves do so on television, which in turn is careful not to film
knots of demonstrators who might be willing to act for it. And so they turn in search
of an opposition, to stop participating in the spectacle of their own passivity.
*

Since revolution is the dissolution of existing social relationships, the activists destroy
beforehand the conditions for bringing it about. They reintroduce hierarchies: either as
followers of a leader-theoretician or as leader-theoreticians who seek to raise and
maintain a mass base, a constituency. If a mass base struggles for the power of its
masters, the masters already hold the power in the name of the mass base; it is already
the old world in the expectation of the new. The activist abandons his subjectivity --
his being -- to a new mediation by new representatives of political power, he re-
becomes in the very movement of his separation from the old world slave to his new
masters. It does not matter whether these activists are "independents" -- of the peace
or violent movements -- or belong to SDS or SNCC, or the established parties of the
socialist perspective.

Activists are elements for maneuverability, they are transformed into objects at the
service of slavery and sacrifice. The transformation of men into objects is the practice
of alienation. The activist of peace and the activist of violence join hands at the level
of the spirit they share, which is the spirit of suicide. What is destroyed is precisely
what must be preserved: subjectivity, the individual. We are the subjective existence
of society. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence.

To the alienation through activity of the activists succeeds the speculative alienation
of the intellectuals, the theoreticians. The major defect of theoreticians is that they
view the world as an object for observation, a case study, not as practical activity, not
subjectively. They do not grasp anymore than do those who function as their bodies
(troops) the significance of the practice of theory.

The only limit to participating in the total openness of an organization that is

revolutionary is that each member recognize and appropriate for himself the
coherence of the total critique that the organization makes of the existing world. The
coherence has to be both in the critical theory and in the relationship between the
theory and practical activity. A revolutionary organization radically criticizesseparate
power. That is, it criticizes the belief on the one hand that some men may think and
that others may do -- that ideas are a power unto themselves, separated from their
application into practical activity by those who think them. And it criticizes the belief,
on the other hand, in power separated from those it belongs to, to remove power from
the people and place it in the hands of representatives operating from a constituency, a
mass base, or in the hands of a party, a bureaucracy, a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The theory of practice is the practice of theory.

This clearly cuts across the lines of the socialist perspective that has a real opposition
to the present ruling class, but which ultimately merely wants to set up another:
accordingly, it is the worst enemy of any real attempt at the transformation of life. But
it also clearly cuts across those organizations of militants that presume to change the
existing world by the continued show of opposition, by continued leaflets signed
Forces of Liberation when the only forces of liberation are still only in the minds of
people. It is the illusion of the existence of a nonexistent theoretico-practice. It is
practice without theory, the militant or activist deprived even of his leader-
theoreticians, even having a kind of contempt for what [he] calls book-learning, which
is only [his] own avowal of the absence of theory. (And theory is first of all a
reflection upon life, not books.) The militant left to himself rediscovers himself as
object, playing someone else's game, at the service of sacrifice.

Their organizations all begin by saying: let the struggle begin. But to what could be a
clear beginning succeeds the show of opposition, centered around putting bodies in
the street, street meetings, picket lines, "going to the people" as the contemptuous
saying goes. Such organizations confuse a lack of leaders -- which is desirable,
necessary -- with a lack of theory, which is not possible. It invites not only the
appropriation of its action by the socialist perspective, but invites eventually that
perspective to determine its action by determining the conditions within which the
action will take place.

It is here that all the hierarchized organizations recruit the bodies they need to
function. It is here also that men prepare to die on the barricades for what, long before
the barricades, they have already abandoned.

There comes a moment in the life of many a man [sic] when he becomes suddenly
aware that all the old values, the values he has been brought up on and their
manifestations, have suddenly gone dead; it is the loss of illusion, the feeling of
having been taken. During and after the break there is an awareness that the system is
all of a piece. Each detail, no matter how minor -- a TV show, a professor's line, a
remembered scene -- sustains and reinforces the whole. This disintegration is nihilism.
It is still a continuation of the system by other means: the despair of a form of life is
still an affirmation of that life. Its first movement out of that life re-becomes
acceptance as soon as it is not transcended. The nihilism that passes through the
disintegration of all values -- where social dissolution becomes psychological
disintegration -- leads to suicide. Amphetamines and junk are the methods of suicide,
aside from all those every year who put a bullet in their heads. Here also reenters a
belief in the nature of man, mistaking the endurance of a condition for its permanence.
A human condition linked to a historical perspective always becomes, in that
perspective, the nature of man.
The hippies, following the beatniks, are recuperated and reintegrated into the
prevailing organization of life even as they are a sign of its dissolution. There are the
small businesses, the artisan work, the communitarian living. Founded on a
dissolution of the society, all such communities will disappear, dissolve as soon as the
effective dissolution of the individuals is recuperated by the society. The quiet use of
drugs, to blow your mind into another world, permits the uninterrupted acceptance
and existence of this one. The disintegration of religion for those who are still in need
of the mediation of the priests, reintroduces the I Ching, Zen, tables of understanding,
all the old religions now dying in the east; palmistry and alchemy, and the dreams of
magic, all the residual forms of religioisity that look like a reactivation of the religious
spirit, but which is unmistakably the death sign on the established western religions.
Man makes his gods in his own image, and needs them as long as men are cut off
(deprived) from being men.

The sexual revolution does not exist as expressed, only as lived and it is on all sides
poorly lived. The freedom to sleep with your neighbor is first of all the freedom of the
anti-bourgeois who imitates the bourgeois family. It is the painful, subterranean
awareness that will not go away that a piece of ass does not bridge the separation, that
back, flat on two backs, the penumbra is re-experienced as darkness and isolation.
This mundane bourgeois experience is re-lived by anyone trying to break of out the
bourgeois mold.

The whole hippie experience reveals and creates various illusions: the awareness of
the dissolution of society is the reconstruction of another society; the disintegration of
bourgeois "morality" is experienced as sexual liberation; the search through drugs for
the euphoria of bored minds is invested with liberatory potential. The whole, for the
bourgeois world, is viewed as subculture, marginal and recuperated by culture:
happenings, pop-op art, psychedelic colors and the films of Warhol. What seems to
have been rejected and destroyed is recreated in the piecemeal reconstitution of the
world of their fathers, as culture, for the delectation of a jaded ruling class.

It also happens that the nihilist loses what seems to be his [sic] apolitical style and
conceives of a political style as an adjunct to his life. He is recuperated immediately
either into the acceptable opposition of community action or the unacceptable but no
less recuperated socialist perspective. He becomes somebody's activist, somebody's
body for the show of opposition. But no one today assumes the socialist perspective
after the nihilist experience without pushing aside the feeling of despair that haunts
him, the feeling, profoundly, that he has abandoned something. That something is his
life.Partial emancipation makes total emancipation appears as a possibility. Yet we
find that a partial emancipation from the prevailing conditions is lived as though it
were total. The experience of it transforms the partial emancipation into slavery, and
again blocks the horizon to total emancipation. Whatever maintains in any way the
prevailing conditions is a continuation of slavery, imposed poverty, the relations
between men mediated by things, the world of commodity, show. The illusion of
freedom recreates the freedom to entertain illusions.

As the parties reveal their attempt to grasp social movement in order to condition it to
their ends, the activists and nihilists reveal the disintegration of society. They reveal
their penetration into the dispossessed, for we are disposssed of the possibility of
abundance as we are of the possibility of liberation. They reveal their absorption into
the class that is the negation of classes, the proletariat.

It is only when the nihilist -- or activist -- rediscovers play that he rediscovers himself
as subject. Then the bourgeois world becomes the object of and for his play. He will
play with cops as a guerilla plays with columns sent against him (meet them
on his terms), play with all the "forms" and manifestations of the bourgeois world,
which is the equivalent of foiling them, doing a turnabout on them, for the purpose of
his own liberation.

III. The Transformation of the World

One day the government was having trouble with the people, so it decided to put the
leaders in jail. But the trouble continued, it got even worse. The government, seeing
the mistake of having left itself no one to bargain with, decided to return the leaders to
the people, hoping to reestablish a normal situation. By that time, the people had
gotten used to the absence and paid no attention to them anyway. It was the
beginning.

"A sedentary gathering of a few hundred youngsters in Washington Square [in New
York City] grew into an impromptu march of a few thousand. . . . Afternoon traffic
was slowed as the demonstrators chanted 'the war is over,' spun noisemakers and
banged gaily on cars they stalled as they tramped down the middle of streets or
crossed against lights.
"The tone of the five-hour affair was mainly cheerful. On the way up, the lighthearted
demonstrators followed a young man in a brown cape who was carried on the
shoulders of another young man. 'I don't know why they followed me,' he said, 'I
guess they want leadership.' " [Author's note: Thereby transforming his role of
spontaneous leader, of gamester, into a leader with followers.] He was deposed on the
way back, however, after he had shown respect for the Establishment's police arm. He
had led a 'hip hip hooray' for the police. Then, to the obvious astonishment of the
police, he had asked them which route they would prefer the marchers to take on the
way back.
"After obtaining a 215-pound volunteer to carry him back, the 121-pound leader took
off at the head of the parade. But the marchers ignored his request that they follow
this route. When last seen, he was on foot and alone." (New York Times, Nov. 26,
1967).

That was also a beginning.

The philosophers have only interpreted (justified) the world in different ways; the
point is to change it.

Liberation is individual or it is nothing. The individual is the pivotal element for and
of liberation. All organization is the negation of the individual first in that it creates
something other than the individuals who come then to form its parts. That other,
which is the product of common action, acquires life and, as life, endurance which
wills itself as permanence. Society -- and the organization that precedes it -- outlives
the individual. This biological detail is of immense social importance.

The problem is how to assure that the organization does not lead to a re-
hierarchization of the world, but to its uninterrupted transformation. It can only be the
basis for the new community, the new collectivity: it must be in incipient form that
which is and prefigures the new relationships between individuals. Those
relationships are, in effect, the forms at the level of daily life of the new collectivity.

No individual can be free unless the collectivity is free. And the collectivity can only
be free if it is the free association of individuals. Man is a social animal. Individual
freedom was always, historically, negated because the collectivity was organized
concretely for the struggle against want, a primary fact that preempted the freedom of
the individual, and made of it, at best, a paradise of the mind. The removal of forced
labor from the realm of man will allow men to rediscover in their non-alienated forms
the whole history of man's past, to rediscover for instance nature or competition, to
rediscover work. It is this liberation from the alienations of history that will constitute
the end of history.

We must assume that the proliferation of individuals -- of men whose consciousness

has become conscious existence (and in this sense consciousness is really a minority
problem) -- will engender, by being the contradiction within the absolute and
absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted transformation. The
dialectics is not of history -- much less of bourgeois history -- but of life.
2

Classical Liberalism defended the individual against the enveloping, undifferentiated

collectivity -- a weapon of the state -- in the name of individualism, for the benefit of
free-enterprise capitalism, where man is wolf to man, and all will turn out for the best
in the best of all possible worlds. In individualism, freedom is conceived as a right of
man not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the
separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the
circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself. It leads every man to see in other
men the impediment, not the realization, of his own freedom. Murder is always
incorporated.

The moment the individual, whose consciousness has become conscious existence,
gives up his rebellion for the sake of organizational cohesiveness, nurses an
unresolved opposition between members, he ceases to be an individual and is
recuperated by the wiles of the old world. At root, we wish to break with these men
who have forgotten their childhood, as the defenders of the old world have forgotten
theirs. Who remember of it only the images that broke it, dominated it -- who
remember only the history of their adjustment to the enveloping and sterilized adult
world.

There is no pleasure without pain. The old banalities return to us, but washed of their
inversions. For when the world as it is now organized uses the line, it has in mind the
permanence of pain, the endurance of this suffering. The old man, leaning at the
bridge, puffing eternally at his pipe, while the armies march forever by, the old man is
patience, the only consolation. Pleasure appears as a streak, a break, a momentary
usurpation that relieves and makes permanent the other. It gives birth to the sustaining
visions of paradises lost. But the paradises are all and always of the mind. The lot of
man, as you know, is to suffer. To repent. He killed his father, primal though he was.
He murdered God. He cut off the king's head. Visions and acts of liberation become
domination. Life is this. People who do not laugh, for they are pensive, distant,
contemplating with immeasurable sadness the laughter of their masks. Death, that
comes to put an end to a long and productive life becomes the ultimate injustice, the
last straw.

A definition of production could be, that which has no beginning, knows no rest and
has no end. For labor to be labor, it must be sustained: when labor retires, it is to die.

Yet, man is joy. A joy lost now between the hours when sleep is no longer sleep and
not quite waking, it is the imaginings of childhood, the fantasies of man awake. It is
imagination constructing and dissolving secret worlds, creativity sealed in characters
in a book, stone on churchwall, area between the ears. Man as joy is man at play. And
yet play, colonized in that it comes out in manners selected, allowed by the world,
feeds the continuation of the world as it is. Play is creativity that knows rest, that
knows silence and ends -- that experiences time as something other than that true
image of the assembly line: the endless circularity of the swiss clock, the non-ending
line in the perverted image of a cycle.

What we aim at, beyond want and external compulsion, is the play of life itself, the
manifestation of freedom. The problem is individual as consciousness of its need, it is
collective for its resolution: the one passes through the other, and lies already
imbedded in the other. The aim is also the weapon. The collectivity -- be it now
community or nation -- as suppression of the individual is ideology (mystification) at
the service of the prevailing organization of life.

Many a man senses the poverty of existence, feels the wrong that haunts him, but at
no point is the sense grasped, nowhere does it emerge into consciousness as a
condition he is subject to. The grasping here is not the intellectual handling of
ideas about a condition. Many (nearly all who think within the socialist perspective)
are aware of such ideas. But the poverty of existence has not emerged into
consciousness as their condition, the wrong is not to them (it is the humanist
syndrome: which is always the concern for the other man's style). After all, they have
fair jobs, or jobs they like, or women they love, or goods for consumption, or all these
things. It is for them a general condition, undifferentiated, vague, a problem for the
collectivity, which means other men, always. They themselves are free as the blown
ashes.

When the unbearable poverty of existence emerges as the poverty of one's own
existence, when the condition ceases to be undifferentiated and becomes personal,
consciousness as conscious existence expresses and founds the concretion of the
general condition.

Consciousness as conscious existence, in becoming awareness of the poverty of

existence -- of each individual deprived of the possibility of being a man [sic] --
becomes the expression of the desire for its transcendence -- becomes desire for life --
and joins play then not as diversion but as fundamental expression of becoming man.

I seek another, seek from another recognition which is the verification of my own
authenticity. And the recognition is mutual -- the recognition I seek I find also in my
myself as verification of the other.
The individual is not a static point, a level attained from which there is no departure.
He is a process, [and] that is a becoming, that only expresses itself in becoming. As
people change -- and they never fail to change -- the conditions for recognition
change. Recognition itself is not an abstract relation established between two other
abstractions, even if these were called "living individualists." The struggle is always
to transcendence. Being is becoming, is movement.

Our thoughts, words, our actions bring us together and separate us. Communication
permits as it were the on-going recognition necessary between us. The foundation of
communication is transparency. Fundamentally, transparency is to say, to express,
everything. It becomes crucial when differences -- oppositions -- between individuals
emerge. It is openness practiced, assumed both from oneself and from all others. This,
used by a clarified consciousness (no longer mystified), is the most potent weapon
against the wiles of the old world, the one confronted at the level of daily life.

But as the individual is not in isolation, neither are the individuals. We live --
oppressive mundanity -- in a bourgeois environment, every day, even through the
hours of our sleep. We are in the atmosphere of the dwindling force of cognition -- the
progressive inability of the bourgeois world to deal with the truth, which also
expresses its desire to actively conceal [the truth]. This relation to truth introduces a
profound uneasiness, which is the subterranean awareness, the feeling that all is lie
and dissimulation. (It finds its artistic expression in all the artists who see a crisis of
all communication in the crisis of communication in the bourgeois world.) That crisis
is its inability to tell and to face the truth: fundamentally, that it is passing. For the
bourgeois world like any other cannot conceive of its passing, which it otherwise
knows must be.

Communication among individuals who have become aware of their separation from
the enveloping reality becomes complicated in that they are not isolated from its
influence. It is not enough for one to recognize another once and for all, for the
recognition can be subverted -- and nothing subverts like reality, living experience.
Transparency as weapon is also the end.

The invisible insurrection of a million minds is not enough: for they must pass to
action, they must engage -- and be engaged by -- the real world. It is at this level --
beyond mutual affirmation and as its expression -- that the minds, become individuals,
must organize.

The [revolutionary] organization must create from the start the conditions for its
development and its supercession at every phase. Not only one but several -- many --
organizations can function on this basis: but they are one in reality, that is, beyond
appearance (the manner in which things exist).

The dwindling force of cognition -- which is materially founded and maintained by

the prevailing commodity economy, where men have materially based reasons for
being incapable of seeking the truth as well as [for] engag[ing] in the active
concealment of it -- also disappears as an element within the organization.
(His position as ace in the whole [sic] within the bourgeois world does not fail at some
point to engage Marcuse, an accomplished dialectician, in the dwindling force of
cognition. It is not accidental that he turns at the end ofOne Dimensional Man to a
technological gradualism, an intensification of the prevailing direction of technology
over life -- a revolution by the technocrats, no doubt? -- as the element for the
qualitative transformation of the world. It is an extension of the socialist perspective:
he also has lost the proletariat; that is, the effective negation of this development. He
says somewhere that an analysis which is not predicated on the possibility of its
supercession, defines itself in terms of established domination. And so it is with him.)

The organization achieves a relation to all things that is determined purely by content:
in accordance with its particular lay-out, it already combats formalism and
schematism, and insists on the equal rights of all available means of expression.
Talent calls talent.

Free expression of opinion replaces the "internal" discussions (all differences are
brought outside and publicly clarified: all elements of differences between individuals
are made accessible to all concerned) and replaces also the voting bound up with
factions, the bureaucratic wangling, maneuvering, frauds and disciplinary
proceedings. The sole compulsion derives from the conscience of the individual who
is prepared to stand up for his views and actions -- and change his mind, or change the
minds of those around him -- but who no longer knows the ridiculous fear of loss of
prestige associated with concern for the maintenance of his position, his role, his
mask.

The organization does away with all barriers between it and the environment, and
shapes with complete transparency for every man both its relations to society and its
internal mechanism. Such a transparency -- real, factual, immediately entering into
consciousness -- of all relations is only possible where commodity economy has
ceased to exist with equal reality, factualness, immediacy.

The elimination of the universally enslaving commodity economy is a strategic goal

of humanity -- the organization accordingly enters everywhere into the generally
desired dissolution of the existing conditions and is a day-to-day example of the
transformation of society as a whole.
The organization that desires to alter conditions that have become unbearable cannot
take a single practical step with revolutionizing the ruling conceptions that have also
become unbearable, without, that is, disclosing the dependence of the intellectual on
the material misery.

To accomplish its task, the organization needs the expression and elaboration of
theory. In order to prevent [...] the expression coming from the organization
becom[ing] the property of the organization, it is necessary that the theory maintain
the character of pure utility and that the writers not hesitate to destroy the relations of
property between one another or between themselves and other writers (in the past or
present) by incorporating thoughts, expressions, no matter how long, without proper
"credits" (acknowledging of property rights). In other words, that [the organization]
practice the anticopyright with all writing -- with all means of expression. Plagiarism -
- which is tosteal the products of another individual's spirit, imagination --
[dis]establishes within man the permanence of the prevailing property relations.

The organization that dissolves the commodity economy within itself reintroduces in
daily life that which in the bourgeois world (for daily life is bourgeois dominated) has
an equivalent for all values, all quality -- money. There is a quantity of it that will buy
health, art, love, a quantity for friendship, and one that will make friends of enemies.
Money is the supreme quantifier of all relationships after all relations have been
reduced to relations between commodities.

The need for money is the real need created by the economic system, and the only
need it creates (it is only through money that other needs become real). Money, which
has the appearance of a means, is the real power and unique end. It is the universal
and self-sufficient value of all things. It has therefore deprived the whole world, both
the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated
essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him. The more you have,
the less you are.

Neither the individual nor the organization can escape into relations that are not at
some point penetrated by the mediatory powers of money. Its concrete elimination lies
in the relation one establishes consciously with it in order to explode its content.

There must be absolutely no attempt at accumulation in order to put money to work

making money. Money must always be at the service of the expression of the play of
the individuals at grips with the old world, who make of play the center from which
they activate and are activated.

*
It is commonly felt -- and thought -- that, under capitalist conditions, the masses are
excluded from theoretical understanding and that therefore it can only be grasped by
them or penetrate their consciousness as a practical movement. As the struggle takes
shape more clearly, we will only have to observe what is happening and make
ourselves vehicles of its expression.

But we must recognize that the difference in natural talents between individuals are in
reality much less than we believe. About such differences, Adam Smith says that they
are not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor. To which Marx added
concretely that in principle there is less difference between a sailor and a philosopher
than between a watchdog and a greyhound. It is the need for individualization and
quality production that will end mass life.

The intellectual tends to mystify understanding, as being simply the handling of

notional relations, abstractly. Perceiving a need for "understanding" by, say, workers
or students, he thinks they cannot understand as he does (a fair assumption), therefore
he must reduce, simplify, come to the level of their ability to perceive in his manner.
No such massification must take place. The intellectual also is subject to the practical
movement that has to penetrate his [sic] consciousness in order for him to grasp -- and
be grasped by -- the reality he has only been trying to explain.

Within the practical movement necessary, conceived here as quality that transforms
consciousness, lies concealed the quantity of experience -- of activity -- that allows
this or that individual to make the qualitative leap that transforms any level of
understanding into cohesive perception and consciousness as conscious existence.
Consciousness is a minority problem: it is fundamentally an individual problem
arising out of the interaction between the general (say, generally, social conditions)
and the particular (each individual).

The participation of the organization in practical activity, its presence in the world is
also its presence in the minds of men. They can witness its theory and practice. It is
each man therefore who decides to enter into a dialogue -- at the level of an exchange
of views -- with a number of individuals already in the organization. It is the result of
this dialogue that shows him and those already within the organization if the
consciousness is shared. This is the problem and the act of recognition. Once this
recognition has been established, it must be maintained with transparency (the
foundation of communication among individuals). If differences appear -- and the
course of reality will see that differences do appear -- they are either: 1). simple error,
misunderstandings, which the on-going transparency of relations will quickly correct;
or 2). antagonisms that reveal real opposition and therefore the need for a new
transcendence on both sides. For one or several individuals of the organization to be
cast into the void by exclusion, for recognition to cease, in effect, is really to cast the
whole organization into the void over an unresolved opposition -- opposition merely
suppressed by suppressing the individual or individuals that bring [the exclusion]
about.

Whoever wills to maintain an opposition, on the other hand, chooses to close off
communication, to end the transparency of relations, and so eliminates the condition
for his continued association with the organization. Since all differences emerge into
the open (the public), this separation would be self-evident.

The organization is the weapon for the effective negation of class-society; the
combined action of individuals. It has no formal power over the individual.

It has been suggested that a truly "democratic" organization would allow the masses
to enter at any time and take over the organization: determine its practical as well as
its theoretical content. However, the mass penetrating as mass (as undifferentiated
individuals) subverts because it brings to the organization a false consciousness,
which is consciousness mystified (dominated by the old world). In the name of
democracy -- rule by the mass, one of the most powerful illusions of the modern
world -- one would allow the practical directions and the theoretical content of the
organization to be returned to the old world, and appropriated.

This penetration by the mass was felt to be another safeguard against the hierarchical
party structure, as well as the condition for its removal. Many revolutionaries of the
past 70 years or so saw the revolutionary aims of parties subverted by their historical
structures, and the anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic unions subverted by an absence
(if not a specific renunciation) of revolutionary aims. And then, there were certain
examples, certain Workers Councils that -- with the union structure -- had been
involved in the best revolutionary moments of the past century. (It should be noted
that a dissolutive element present at the very beginning of some of these [unions or
councils] was that political parties were represented as other unions. Represented at
the level of individual representatives of labor were political weapons (parties),
representing the attempt to appropriate the political power of the individual
representatives.) The problem arose out of thought over the problem of the
administration of things.

The Seattle General Strike is informative. Briefly, the union bureaucrats were all off
to Chicago (to debate another General Strike that never came off). There had been no
general strike before, there were no concrete organizational (managerial) lines laid out
to follow. This was -- despite ideas about general strikes that were in the air of the
time -- uninitiated experience. The unions (craft unions, this was the AFL, mostly)
elected three representatives each, who then formed the General Strike Committee (an
Assembly, or if you will, a Workers Council). They immediately discovered the
syndrome of large bodies -- impediment to swift action -- and made subcommittees.
Here then were the uninitiated, the age-old "dumb" workers: in a few days, they were
confronted with and solved the problems of the administration of the city. The strike
merely lasted a week: but the time involved here is not what matters, similar
structures elsewhere and under more arduous conditions lasted much longer. The
problem is not to continue administration, but to initiate it effectively. They initiated,
and without waste. It was essentially the same union-based structure that made the
anarchists function throughout the civil war in Spain. Here, then -- in degrees varying
from a nonrevolutionary week in time of peace, to the duration of the war in Spain --
were the "dumb," anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic workers dismantling the myth of
all the bureaucracies: that effective management is not only the kingdom of the
bureaucrat, the functionary, but it takes the bureaucrat to even think up and solve the
problems of management, the problems of administration. This problem -- of the
administration of things -- is a false problem: it is not a problem.

The real problem for us who have the trade union movement experience
(revolutionary or not) as history, as knowledge, is the problem of individuation: the
conditions for the emergence of each man as free subjectivity.

The safeguard against subversion by the masses as masses is the mutual recognition of
individuals, it is selection that is self-selection. But the growth of the organization --
in confrontation with the old world, in the mundane every day -- the conditions for the
"mass" taking over would be found again in the increasing moments of change that
lead to the qualitative leap we commonly call the revolutionary moment: but the mass
would penetrate as individuals and it would be high time for them to take over what
then would really have become a common struggle.

We know that the proliferation of individuals -- of men [sic] whose consciousness has
become conscious existence -- will engender, by being the contradiction within the
absolute and absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted
transformation.

We apprehend the future through the distorting mirror of what is to be destroyed in

the present. Every projection into the future is in a sense a prolongation of the past.
Every Utopia [is] less a construction of the future than an elimination of the evils of
the present as mere negation, prolonged in time, and thereby fixed: reified. Everything
must be destroyed that is construed as impediment, whether an old building, an old
city or an old work of art, not to speak of an old civilization. There is no destruction
that does not also construct: but what elicits the construction is the destruction itself.
The supercession of a condition is not the apprehension of its need in thought. It is
only the conscious action of men [sic] upon the world that ultimately transforms it.