Discussion of Failure with Frére Dupont

My text on Failure and Its Possible Remedies was prompted in part by my recollection of a comment that Frére Dupont made to my a few years ago. I sent my text to Dupont. It took some time to reach him, as I sent it to an old email address that he now rarely uses; however, soon afterwards he published his observations on the Salon de ver Luisant discussion board. His critique, and my response to it, are reproduced below.

1) Frére Dupont's critique, 5 June 2009

"However, it seems reasonable to take the nature and extent of both private messages and public commentary as an indicator of the impact of what I have said. If so, I have to admit that my writings have had almost no effect whatsoever. In the main, they have been ignored, rejected or misunderstood. At best, they have been offered a rather generalized and unwanted praise and then simply put aside. "

One possible reason for this is that the method Wayne Spencer uses is to give a general descriptive explanation of social relations; it seems to me that this is no longer adequate for a number of reasons, the most important of which is the general descriptive mode itself. It is not clear how anyone is meant to relate to such material, there are not enough strong images, not enough theoretical elaborations/formulae, not enough practical/applicable perspectives which may be utilised in a person’s everyday life.

It would be useful if Wayne Spencer pursued this theme of disconnection further but he does not and unfortunately places his lack of influence within the milieu on a purely theological level, that is on this occasion, at the level of that old argument concerning the true nature of immiseration. He is certainly mistaken in this attribution and it is indicative of his isolation if he considers that such a small interpretive issue is significant enough for everyone else to send him to Coventry. In fact, most people (inside and outside of the milieu) aren't really interested in discussing ideas full-stop, this in itself is a matter for investigation although not necessarily to be regretted – the failure of the penetration of ideas has its positive features.

"Everywhere one looks, however, Marxists, anarchists and other revolutionaries absurdly proclaim that for several decades wages have catastrophically fallen, precariousness has catastrophically risen, and social security provisions have been decimated. This picture of general desolation is doubtless useful."

He then, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, argues that because other ‘revolutionaries’ locate immiseration at the level of economic hardship rather than, as Wayne Spencer does, at the level of ‘affluent alienation’ they are unable to articulate the concerns of ‘ordinary people’. It is this disconnection of ‘revolutionary’ theory and perception from actual lived conditions that causes the lack of interest in such perceptions and theory:

"At the same time, however, this denial of reality makes itself incomprehensible and irrelevant to that very majority. Ordinary people will accept the practical, reformist assistance that leftists here and there offer when it seems calculated to make their life more comfortable within the society of alienation; but they easily recognize the revolutionary ideology that is bolted on to it as messianic, delusional, unconnected with their daily lives, and superfluous. Even the long-prayed-for profound economic crisis, that terrible external compulsion that leftists hoped would force the workers and themselves to take the road of revolution, has not changed this state of affairs. 2009 is not 1848 or 1929. A crisis in an advanced economy turns out not to have the same practical consequences for the majority of workers as it does in less developed economic conditions. It has left the majority largely untouched. It has provided no impetus to revolution whatsoever."

Presumably, his implication is that if others adopted Wayne Spencer’s analysis then the ‘ordinary people’ would have much more interest in ‘revolutionary’ politics. In this, he falls into a conventional fallacy within ‘revolutionary’ thought which begins by externalising problems and locating error within others but at the same time preserves the ideal of a potentially galvanising discourse. He does not, perhaps cannot, bring himself to develop his enquiry to its most radical point, namely the question, what if ‘ordinary people’ are no more interested in the right ideas than they are in the wrong ideas? In other words, he does not examine the (absence of a) role for consciousness. He does not consider the possibility that 'ideas' belong to an earlier impoverished age, an age which, elsewhere in his argument, he is convinced that we have left behind.

At some level he recognises ‘ordinary people’ s’ refusal of consciousness and attributes this (rightly or wrongly) to the spectacle which he then goes on to define:

"If revolutionary theory is to be made pertinent and dangerous to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, it must renew its critique of the dominant ideas of happiness, a critique that has been progressively abandoned over the past 30 years."

He seems to locate the problems of the spectacle externally, as a set of oppressive, miragic tableaux vivant and gives a list of 8 different forms of ‘spectacle’. The possibilities which each of the eight circles of hell express for their consumers are merely denounced, and this in itself becomes a 9th spectacle, that of externalisation and denunciation.

Of course, it is true that neither trade unionism nor psychogeography, neither dumpster diving nor rap, adequately express our potential or actual human relations but then nor does the denunciation of them. It remains true that within every commodity there remains an uncommodified surplus related to need and inter-human relations, a human element... and it is the recognition of this element which causes us to consider that social revolution must be located simaltaneously at the level of social reproduction as well as within human social relations.

Wayne Spencer argues that it is necessary to further develop the critique of the actualities of the spectacular form of happiness, and I think he is correct in this – but it is not enough. He needs to contain within his analysis (if he too, is not to become one-sided and thus spectacular) the possibility that this analysis whilst ‘true’ will most likely have no impact whatsoever. He also needs to include a ‘therapeutic’ element, by which I mean a practical application of his ideas and relations to existing ideas and relations in which a former state may be demonstrably released from its binds. He needs to relocate his ‘general’ critique and adopt instead a more personal approach (which because it is personal will be generalised by forces operating at a level above his person).

His suggestion of a journal dedicated to his analysis seems to me a good idea (provided that it is internally dynamic/scientific in its rigor – that is, blithely embracing of its failures). I look forward to it, and wish to aid it – an increase in the number of critical journals and websites (in other words formal structures) will increase both the rate and the density of critique.

2) Wayne Spencer's response, 12 July 2009

I am grateful to you for the observations on my text On Failure and its Possible Remedies that you posted to the Salon de ver Luisant discussion board. I am afraid that I have very little interest in the Salon itself. I do not doubt that it contains a certain margin of searching thought from individuals who have a real desire to confront the miserable impasse in which we find ourselves. Far more common, however, are abstract discussions of perfectly useless fragments of leftist, academic and cultural ideology. The need for a reconstruction of theory and practice may be all too great, and the opportunity to counter the world of alienation in which we live may be all too small, but we can at least recognize the obvious dead ends around us and refuse to enter into pseudo-dialogue with those who are content to play futile little games against their mildewed walls. I am, therefore, sending this response direct to you. If you choose to also post it to the Salon, that is entirely a matter for you. I do not seek to place any restrictions on your use of what I have said.

You suggest that one possible cause of the inefficacy of my writing is its reliance of a “general descriptive explanation of social relations”. I am not entirely sure what you mean by this, which makes it somewhat difficult to evaluate your criticism. But perhaps I can approach the matter by way of the three more specific deficiencies to which you afterwards refer.

You first say that material such as mine lacks “enough strong images”. It is noticeable that your own critique of my text itself contains no strong images whatsoever. This suggests that you do not regard such images as an essential requirement of effective communication. Yet you do not say when, for whom, or why their use is necessary or desirable. You also offer no evidence, or even suggestive anecdotes, to show that the ability of revolutionary theory to achieve the particular ends at which it aims co-varies with the vividness of its imagery. I do not think your perspective can be taken as self evident. After all, the use of searing metaphors and attention-grabbing graphics is not without its dangers. A taste for violent manifestations of social failure and conflict is all too widely cultivated amongst the many passive connoisseurs of decomposition. We must be careful not to end up as mere producers for this degraded marketplace of degradation.

You next refer to an insufficiency of “theoretical elaborations/formulae”. It would have been more helpful if you had referred to particular deficiencies of elaboration or formulation to be found in particular texts of mine. Your entirely general observation is of very little assistance, I’m afraid.

Finally, you refer to a shortage of “practical/applicable perspectives which may be utilised in a person’s everyday life”. I would hope that what I have said is not wholly lacking in useable perspectives. For example, I have written about the need:

(i) to repudiate trade unions and instead practice strategy, tactics, and communication by and for ourselves;

(ii) to recognise and act on the basis that that the commodity consumption and domestic life that alienated labour permits is as alienated as that labour itself;

(iii) for marginal rioters to develop and promulgate an account of their actions that recognizes the more affluent and secure alienation of the majority of the proletariat and quickens dissatisfaction with it;

(iv) to recognize and act on the basis that that the worlds of popular culture and gangsterism are continuations of the alienation of individuals and in no way antidotes or alternatives to it;

(v) to recognize and act on the basis that the dominant society defends itself as much by false critiques and inconsequent discussions of incidentals as it does by police clubs or naïve proclamations of its supposed perfections; and

(vi) to recognize act on the basis that the proponents of genuine representative democracy and civil society in Iran are the agents of a reconstituted alienation.

It seems to me that these points are hardly banalities amongst ordinary people and can serve as productive points of departure for, amongst others, the current wildcat strikers in Britain’s oil refineries, the rioters in French banlieues, the rioters in Greece, some of the protesters brought into the streets after the Iranian presidential election, and anyone watching or participating in the furore about the expenses of Members of Parliament. But it is true that in general I have not attempted to set out in detail what the practical consequences of my writings are. This is in part because it falls to each individual to determine what particular practical steps can effectively be taken against the specific landscape of subjective and objective alienation in which he or she is placed. It is also because my writings are conceived as invitations and preliminary contributions to a process of theoretical and practical reconstruction that I am seeking to begin not end. At bottom, perhaps, what I am seeking to do is to persuade some of those who are disaffected with the lives available in affluent capitalism to put away a few of the childish things with which they have sought to conceal, console, repair, dismiss or execrate the unhappy state of their existences and to begin to reflect, for themselves and in unmediated dialogue with others, on what a practical course of contestation directed against the social sources of their desolation might involve.

However, I am increasingly coming to the view that it is necessary to go further than I have to date in taking account of how very far the vast majority in the affluent countries have moved from any sense of social revolution as an individual and social possibility. How can this be done? Two responses have come immediately to mind. The first is to create relatively straightforward material that (i) encourages people to admit to themselves their unhappiness and disaffection with their lives; (ii) offers the suggestion that their ennui is caused by a reversible domination of individual and collective life by an alienated system for the production and consumption of commodities; and (iii) urges them to step beyond the journalistic, commercial, political, philosophical, academic, religious or common sense thought of their era when thinking and acting in relation to the real poverty of their everyday lives. Victory will go to those who can face, feel and fight their misery without fleeing or falling in love with it.

A second response that occurs to me is to seek to promote the notion that practical negation consists in treating work, consumption and permitted social life as enemies (or as the work of enemies, if you prefer). We can also be more specific about what this means. For example, I recently said to another correspondent: “Outside of work, we should treat ‘the machinery of permitted consumption’ (to take a phrase from Guy Debord) and the machinery of social indoctrination and seduction as our enemies. For example, the launch of a new line of commodities, a new season of fashion, clothing or sport, or a new tour by a musical or theatrical group, is tantamount to a renewed attack upon us that falls to be physically disrupted and denounced (by invasions of the venues, for instance). Equally, a wedding or other family ritual, a school reunion, a holiday, an educational course, the making and broadcasting of television and radio programmes, another night down the pub, etc, etc, should be understood and treated as curses and blights on our lives to be resisted, as concrete mechanisms for the perpetuation of alienation that must be crippled by action. Each of us needs to consult our individual everyday lives in order to determine the particular ways in which we reproduce the world of alienation and then embark on an evolving, practical course of individual and collective contestation directed at that reproduction”. Even if a lack of support within the wider society makes it difficult to put this (and an analogous attack on work) into practice for the time being, we can at least begin by viewing the facets of our individual and social life with the contempt that appallingly destructive enemies deserve. If you have a liking for rather romantic comparisons, you could say that, like partisans confronted with an occupying power that seems overwhelmingly strong, we should at any given time do whatever we can to seek out the weaknesses in the forces arraigned against us (including, of course, those that we bring to bear against ourselves), while carefully looking out for the moment when we can do more. But, as a minimum, let us corrode within ourselves the sense that what we are doing with our lives is worthwhile. Let us keep the home fires burning.

But I am doubtful that a change in form or content would greatly alter the effectiveness of my public writing. Before the perspectives I have briefly outlined above coalesced to any degree, I published a text on the current economic crisis (Their Passed-away Builders) that was something of a departure from my previous efforts, if only because it used the first person plural “we” quite extensively in an attempt to address the reader and his or her life more directly and reveal that I did not regard myself as having transcended the stupidities of our times. Of course, I have could have gone further than I did; nonetheless, the fact that this text shared precisely the same fate as its predecessors prompted me to think that something more fundamental than my mode of address was responsible for the indifference with which I was largely being received.

I first considered that small minority of the population that call themselves revolutionaries. I have read a good deal of Marxist and anarchist literature in the past few years. I have noticed quite a number of differences between my views and those to be found in the books, periodicals, websites, videos and leaflets I have seen. The one that seemed to me to most striking and salient was that I regard mass affluence as having persisted in the West down to the present, whereas other revolutionaries typically think that it either never existed or was definitively reversed at the beginning of the 1970s. You dismiss this theoretical divergence as irrelevant, but I think you are too quick to do so. The notion that capitalism has failed because it has not delivered the quantity of material goods and benefits we need for basic physical survival is close to the very centre of the critique and propaganda that contemporary revolutionaries advance. I suspect you underestimate how difficult it is for revolutionaries to relinquish this guiding principle of leftist thought. But in the end, I have almost no hope or interest in the current generation of revolutionaries, so let us waste no more time on this point.

I also considered those who are outside the revolutionary movement. The central notion I proposed was that “if we do not rebel against our narrow lives, this is more than anything else because we have been seduced by the dominant society’s ideas of happiness”. I then briefly outlined eight “contemporary notions of happiness” that I feel are in need of “nuanced critique”. In response, you write: “He seems to locate the problems of the spectacle externally, as a set of oppressive, miragic tableaux vivant and gives a list of 8 different forms of ‘spectacle’”. But this is your conception of the eight “spectacles”, not mine. In Their Passed-away Builders (section 4) I referred to how the huge increase in personal consumption since the early 1980s has been capitalism’s attempt “to realize by way of the commodity our real and manufactured desires for autonomy, excitement, uniqueness, community, solitude, beauty, intimacy, oblivion, knowledge, adventure, frenzy, stillness, sensuality, creativity, rebellion, and so on”, and I certainly see a proper understanding of the particular ends that consumption serves for the consumer as an integral part of the critiques I called for. That said, I would approach with considerable caution the notion of an “uncommodified surplus related to need and inter-human relations, a human element”. Capitalism fosters particular forms or content of social life, particular social needs, through socialization, through publicity as to what is natural, achievable or desirable, and through the quietly insidious process of adaptation to what is possible in our places of confinement in existing society. We must not confuse these with essential human needs. In this connection, perhaps we should keep the unhappy example of the family in mind. No doubt the family might be said to address various human needs. Nonetheless, as Robert Cooperstein said back in 1974: “The family, tentatively defined as any collection of individuals who on a daily basis support and maintain one another in a state of mutual survival, is an essential ingredient of capitalist society. Briefly, it is that first factory of alienation that renders all subsequent degradations possible, while at the same time the sum total of these degradations make the family possible” (see Some Notes on the Reproduction of Human Capital).

Finally, there is one aspect of your critique that puzzles me. At one point, you say: “He does not, perhaps cannot, bring himself to develop his enquiry to its most radical point, namely the question, what if ‘ordinary people’ are no more interested in the right ideas than they are in the wrong ideas”. In itself, this does not puzzle me, because my text expressly recognizes the very point you suggest I am unwilling or unable to face. As I put it in the final paragraph:

“It also has to be admitted that the efforts of revolutionaries are neither necessary nor sufficient to create social revolution. They are not necessary because the mass of the proletariat is capable of deriving its revolutionary theory and practice from its own practical experience of commodity alienation without reference to what has been said and done by revolutionaries; they are not sufficient because history provides no guarantee that the rest of the proletariat will at any given time agree that revolution is necessary and desirable. So be it. We do what we can” [italics added].

It is what comes next in your critique that leaves me uncertain:

“In other words, he does not examine the (absence of a) role for consciousness. He does not consider the possibility that 'ideas' belong to an earlier impoverished age, an age which, elsewhere in his argument, he is convinced that we have left behind”.

Two interpretations of this passage come to mind. The first is that you are intimating that the material development of capitalism has eliminated any possibility of a desire for revolution on the part of most ordinary people. The second is that you consider that any modern revolution will rely wholly on non-conscious cognitive and affective processes and thus will be conducted by people who will not be aware of what they are doing. It seems uncharitable to attribute either view to you. Perhaps, therefore, you could say a little more about your perspective.

Before concluding, I should like to thank you for your interest in my proposed journal. Unfortunately, as I expected, the project is still-born. Only two other people expressed a tentative interest in the project, and subsequent discussion has suggested that our respective views are too far apart to permit effective collaboration.

[...]

Regards

Wayne Spencer

A Discussion of Failure with Dave Stratman

The following is an exchange of correspondence with Dave Stratman of New Democracy, prompted by my text On Failure and its Possible Remedies.

1) Dave Stratman to Wayne Spencer, 4 May 2009

Dear Wayne--

My friend and colleague John Spritzler recently forwarded to me On Failure and Its Possibilities, and I have since then read Gasping from Out the Shallows and On Lice and Fleas, all of them extraordinarily insightful and provocative pieces. I would like to offer some comments from a point of view which John and I and other friends have discussed and developed over the years since the publication of my book, We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life (New Democracy Books, 1991), with a view to opening a discussion.

We find that, while we have seemingly a very different starting point from yours, we arrive at similar places. We are strongly in agreement with your analyses of various struggles--British miners, South Africa, Poland, Iran--and of trade unionism, reformism, and the need and possibility of revolution.

In "Failure" you suggest some tentative principles of agreement for participants in a joint project:

1) The affluent alienation of modern conditions of production and consumption can no longer be endured and is the foundation of our discontent. Self-managed, social revolution is the only solution capable of practically dissolving the alienation of human activity inherent in all work and all consumption the dominant society produces.

Agreed.

2) All notions of revolution derived from Bolshevism are false.

Again, agreed. But the roots of Bolshevism lie in Marxism, which must likewise be rejected. Marxism presents a vision of workers dehumanized by capitalism and motivated--like capitalists--by self-interest. Lenin was thus presented by Marxism with the question, Who will act on behalf of society? His answer: the Party. Lenin discovered how to operationalize Marxism as a revolutionary theory. (My critique of Marx and Lenin are available at Hope and Revolution; Communism and Counterrevolution ; From Marx to Lenin )

A new revolutionary movement must be based on a new understanding of human motivation and development.

3) All notions of struggle and progress associated with trade unionism are false.

Agreed, the unions are capitalist control mechanisms, designed to discipline the working class. But the language is a little unclear here. At first I thought you were rejecting all struggle by workers at the point of production, but your (perceptive and correct) analysis of the British miners strike makes clear your belief that the strike had revolutionary possibilities had the miners rejected the control and ideology of the NUM, framed their struggle in terms of revolution against capitalist society, and appealed to the entire British working class on this basis. (I make a similar point in my book.)

There is a revolutionary component in every struggle initiated by workers in the workplace; the question is whether that revolutionary component is expressed and made the leading element of the struggle (or as you express it somewhere, "the point of departure must be departed from very quickly," or words to that effect) or is buried and forgotten, if perceived at all.

The apparent issues in any strike--wages, safety, etc.--are merely the occasions for struggle. Underlying class struggle are two opposing sets of values and human relationships, and two opposing--though not often articulated--views of what it means to be a human being. It is only in becoming conscious of the real--revolutionary--meaning of their struggles and by articulating revolutionary goals that workers can break out of the capitalist/union framework and succeed.

4) All reforms are false.

Agreed. But see the answer to 3). We have been experimenting for some years in using individual issues as jumping-off points for revolutionary analysis and organizing with mixed results.

5) All separate artistic creation is paltry and false.

Agreed, I suppose, though I'd like to see more discussion of just what this means.

6) All academic ideas about social life are false. All social relations within academia are alienated. All aspects of the academy serve to support and perpetuate the dominant system.

Agreed, though I'm afraid your comparisons of the conditions of present-day workers in the West with those in Victorian times fall into the category of "academic." I mean, what do you say to a man who is losing his home--Just think, things were worse 100 years ago?

Here in a nutshell is our approach:

The reason capitalist and Communist societies turned out the same--class societies in which a small elite holds the money and the cards--is that they are based on the same paradigm, in which the mass of mankind are viewed as the passive beneficiaries or victims of the actions of elites in a history driven by economic forces. In this paradigm, economic development is the basis of human development, and inequality is essential to economic development until that blissful stage of pure communism is reached.

Needless to say, a real transformation of society cannot be based on this paradigm. A new revolutionary movement will require a new understanding of human beings and their development.

We propose that the struggle to humanize the world is the most essential and pervasive of human activities, and one in which most people are engaged in their everyday lives. Most people, in the little part of the world they think they can control--with their wife or husband, their friends, their co-workers, their students or patients--are engaged in a struggle against the dehumanizing influence of capitalism on their lives. To the extent that they have supportive human relationships in any aspect of their lives, people have created them by struggling to transform capitalist relations into their opposite. The most intimate acts of love and personal kindness and the most public and collective acts of revolutionary struggle are on a continuum of struggle to humanize the world.

Revolution is possible because most people are already engaged in a struggle to create a new society. The problem is that they seldom get very far. The capitalist system is extremely powerful, and people's everyday struggles are invisible to the historical alternative, Marxism. But people don't get very far mainly because the meaning of the struggles in which they are already engaged is not clear to the people engaged in them. As you quote from the SI, "Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives."

The role of revolutionaries is to make people more aware of the revolutionary significance of the struggles in which they are engaged so that they can bring them to their revolutionary conclusion.

We have applied this outlook to various settings over the years: Revolution (We Can Change The World, Hope And Revolution); Israel/Palestine (Is It Realistic to Demand the Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees?); unions (How the Unions Killed the Working Class Movement); education (You'll Never Be Good Enough: Schooling and Social Control); electoral politics (No To Politics, Yes To Mass Refusal); health care (Market-Driven Health Care And Social Control), and many others, to be found on our web site http://newdemocracyworld.org/.

A few random thoughts and questions:

1. I have long felt that much of our analysis (in New Democracy) tends towards leftist/economist complaints about unemployment, healthcare, etc., and fails as a revolutionary critique. It isn't clear to me though what a critique of society (as opposed to your excellent critique of certain struggles) such as you propose would look like. Do you have examples?

2. Our critique consists essentially of a view of people, and our view of capitalism derives from that. Yours is essentially an analysis of the alienated nature of life under capitalism. Interestingly though our views of revolution--and our critique of the various obstacles to it, such as the unions, liberalism, Solidarnosc, etc.--are strikingly the same.

3. Though we quite agree with your critique of trade union and leftists' pseudo-oppositional focus on wages, etc., you may be dismissing "economic issues" too easily. It's true that conditions for Western workers are nowhere near those of Victorian times. But it is also true that the ruling class has mounted a three-decades-long counterrevolutionary attack on workers on many fronts--economic, political, cultural--designed to make their lives less secure and them more frightened, which has had devastating results. This attack and its consequences in people's lives have to be considered in our analysis of contemporary society. Then too assuring someone about to lose his home or his pension or health care for his family sounds extremely uncaring, if not downright arrogant.

4. We reject the "the worse the better" school of thought, which I assume you do too (or do you simply think that things are nowhere near bad enough to matter?). Thus our view of, say, the French May: that it occurred when French workers were at the peak of their earning power--and the peak of their self-confidence--thus proving the falsity of left/Marxist expectations. This is true also of the social uprising in the US and elsewhere during the late 1960s-early '70s, the "revolution of rising expectations"; workers wages in the US peaked in 1973. Revolutions are based on hope and self-confidence, not despair. The task of the revolutionary movement is to restore hope and self-confidence to the working class so it can win.

5. In your view, do workers resist capitalism in everyday life, or are they merely passive? And if they do resist, how and when?

6. You write ("Failure") that your objective is "to contribute to the reader's understanding of the alienated world in which we live and thereby to the development of the individual's practical refusal of that world." Can you explain what you mean by "practical refusal of that world?" Can you give examples? Later you mention "a practical programme of negation directed at the roots of their alienation." Again, can you offer examples, other than the quite bizarre antics of the Metropolitan Indians?

7. In your view, what is it we should do as revolutionaries--aside from starting a journal, that is. We have an answer to this: to help workers see the meaning of the struggles in which they are already engaged. I gather that that is your view also, though our understanding of that meaning seems to differ.

8. What is your view of what revolutionary society would look like? John Spritzler has spelled out some tentative views: After the Revolution, What?; What Kind of Society Do We Want?

If you will send me your postal address, I would be pleased to send you a copy of my book, We CAN Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life, and a copy of John Spritzler's eye-opening book on WWII, The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II, as small gifts. (My book is also available online at our web site.)

Congratulations on your quite brilliant writing and your efforts to spur discussion on the prospects for revolution. We hope that we can find some common grounds for useful discussion.

Dave Stratman

2) Wayne Spencer to Dave Stratman, 6 May 2009

Dave,

Once again, thank you for your message, which raises a number of interesting questions and issues.

You argue that Marxism must be discarded along with Bolshevism. For my part, I would stress that the task of the revolutionary theorist is not to choose between or amongst bodies of thought as a whole, but rather is to construct an adequate and properly evolving understanding of contemporary society and contemporary struggles (including, of course, his or own role within those) from whatever material serves that purpose. Some sources have in practice proved themselves to be such comprehensive failures that they are indeed wholly unusable (for instance, the Bolshevik conception of revolution) but I am not sure that Marxist thought in its entirety is one of them. One undoubtedly has to be merciless to those elements of Marxism that sustained such disasters as totalitarian states ruling in the proletariat’s name and social democratic parliamentary reformism. Yet this does not seem to account for all of what Marx and some his successors said and did. Marx’s theory of alienation, for instance, remains an important tool for developing a critical comprehension of everyday life in modern capitalism. Moreover, the fact that some currents of Marxism, notably that of council communism, managed to marry elements of Marxist thought with an anti-Leninist theoretico-practice would seem to be proof that Leninism is not a necessary and inevitable consequence of every conceivable reconstruction or application of Marx’s theories. In the end, however, the proof of Marxism is in the eating. If there is in fact a use for elements of the theory, then the way to demonstrate that is to actually make profitable use of them in the here and now. It would seem that the matter can hardly be settled in the abstract.

You have asked about the inclusion of the rejection of separate artistic creation in the rather skeletal principles I proposed for discussion in relation to the journal. In the first instance, this concerns an important conception of revolutionary transformation at the level of everyday life developed by the situationists. To conflate two passages from the Situationist International:

“We are against the conventional forms of culture, even in its most modern state; but not, obviously, in preferring ignorance, neo-primitivism or petty-bourgeois common sense. There is an anti-cultural attitude that favours an impossible return to the old myths. Against such a current we are of course for culture. We take our stand on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after it. We contend that it is necessary to realize culture by superseding it as a separate sphere; not only as a domain reserved for specialists, but above all as a domain of a specialized production that does not directly affect the construction of life — not even the life of its own specialists. […] The situationists consider that [opposition to the universally dominant social system] implicitly requires the real abolition of all class societies, of commodity production and of wage labour; the supersession of art and all cultural accomplishments by their re-entry into play through free creation in everyday life — and thus their true fulfilment […].” (from The Avant-Garde of Presence (1963) and a short notice of 1965).

It also has to do with a recognition of the forces of recuperation arraigned against a revival of revolutionary theory and practice, a recognition that in this instance focuses on the ways in which artistic projects have mutilated situationist theory in order to accommodate it to aesthetic pursuits and more generally have served as important sources for pacification and consumption in overdeveloped capitalism. My short sentence was intended to render the journal unpalatable to sophisticated hucksters of artistic theory and practice. In the same way, the subsequent statements about academia were aimed at repelling any dutiful students or lecturers who have developed an abstract taste for revolutionary theory from their handling of a few misunderstood fragments of texts for the purposes of academic publication or passing examinations.

Another question you have raised is about the compatibility of our respective views of contemporary social struggles. I hope that I not doing you too much of an injustice if I say that you take the view that a conception of human life inconsistent with that on which the dominant society rests is expressly or by implication to be found in all workplace struggles by workers and all efforts to fashion supportive human relationships within or without working life. If that is a correct synopsis of your position, I would have to admit that there is some distance between us. Struggles are typically fought for specific ends and specific reasons. I think you have gone too far in disregarding what people actually say, do and desire in their struggles. I would suggest that many contemporary struggles arise from, and are pursued in accordance with, openly or tacitly held ideologies that take the fundamental forms of life within advanced capitalist society as inevitable or desirable. What they typically seek is to render life within that society more comfortable or endurable by reversing breaches of bourgeois or bureaucratic norms or by making perfectly achievable adjustments in the distribution of the risks and rewards offered to submission. Moreover, their actions are directed and tailored to achieving these goals and these goals alone and are promptly discontinued when their narrow objectives are achieved or success within the confines of the existing society is judged to be impracticable. It seems to me that your understanding of these struggles as tending logically to the abolition of the dominant society is an external imposition on what are in fact coherent and delimited attempts to carry on living within that society. Equally, your efforts to persuade those involved that they do not know what they want and do not know what they are doing are all too likely to be resented as a typically leftist attempt to manipulate, misrepresent and misdirect the actions of ordinary people in the interests of an alien ideology. In short, I think that such struggles constitute not the false pursuit of a true discontent but rather the true pursuit of a false discontent.

These distinctions may seem rather fine ones, but I suspect that they do have substantive consequences. I would suggest that an important reason for our failure to escape capitalism is the superficiality of the discontents on which we act. I wonder whether your position, which tends to laud those discontents as fundamentally antithetical to the dominant society and requiring only a true consciousness of what they already are, tends to make you too little uncritical towards the full array of our collaborations, captivations and compromises with the society. If so, now is not the time to be too indulgent to ourselves. I also wonder whether your views incline you to overlook the social function that superficial dissatisfaction serves. You point out that “the ruling class has mounted a three-decades-long counterrevolutionary attack on workers on many fronts”. I would agree, but this attack involves far more than the crude revanchism that is recognized by leftism and is here and there practised by the more reactionary branches of state and management. It has also featured a huge and ever-changing patchwork of public and private programmes aimed at reforming everyday life so as to make it more palatable to those who produce and consume it. Superficial dissatisfaction is the subjective correlate of this attempt to refine alienation, the cast of mind that feeds and sustains the endless process of identifying, displaying, discussing and mitigating the symptoms of alienation through which the dominant society refines itself. Your stance would seem to place you in danger of serving as revolutionary cheerleaders of this process.

Turning to your “random thoughts and questions”:

1) I think my text Their Passed-away Builders perhaps contains more in the way of “a critique of society (as opposed to [the] critique of certain struggles)”. You may wish to consult that. In addition, no small part of my social critique reflects points already brought forward by situationist theory. You may, therefore, wish to read, amongst others, the fine critique of Berkeley life in On the Poverty of Berkeley Life and the Marginal Stratum of American Society in General, the text by Chris Shutes to which my Gasping is a response, and the venerable On the Poverty of Student Life. I hasten to add, however, that these texts were critiques of specific milieus in specific times and places. They should not be taken as universally applicable. Furthermore, situationist theory has never been a complete, unified and invariably correct block of thought. I should not be taken to agree with every utterance made by self-proclaimed situationists or the members of the Situationist International.

2) I would prefer to defer proper consideration of what differences there are between your “view of people” and my notion of alienated life until I have had a chance to read the more extensive treatment of your position which I presume can be found in your book. At present, I wonder whether you the non-capitalist conception of human life to which you appeal is too static, abstract and intangible to serve as a useful tool of revolutionary theory.

3) My approach to the results of the counter-revolutionary attack on workers is guided by my own experiences and perceptions and the large-scale quantitative data that I have seen. Both of these sources suggest to me that the results for the majority have not been “devastating” in the ways that left-wing thought typically alleges. It seems that America is in some respects an exception, but in general incomes and social security expenditure have risen and not fallen, hours of work have more or less remained the same (or even fallen in places), and if anything the security of people’s jobs (as measured, for instance, by the length of time people have remained in the same job) may even have increased. In my view, if we are to recapture the idea of social revolution as revolt by the overwhelming majority, we have to recognize this and not take as typical the materially rather impoverished or precarious social conditions that in fact afflict relatively few members of our society. The sheer hallucinatory quality of many leftist accounts of contemporary life simply staggers me, so much so that I have sometimes been moved to suspect that the authors may never have actually walked down a typical street in a typical town or visited an average home, workplace or shop. This is not to deny that economic struggles are advantageous or even unavoidable as means of securing the wherewithal to survive within the dominant society. I have myself been involved in many. Why live with less when you can live with more? But I do suggest that these struggles have almost nothing to do with revolutionary change. They are one of the means by which we cement ourselves into the society that destroys us. We should frankly recognize this self-destructive quality of what we are doing and not pretend that in feathering our prison bed we are opening the way to revolution. Of course, when I say “we” in this instance, I mean self-identified revolutionaries. Ordinary workers are rarely so deluded as to mistake the banal means and ends of wage strikes, etc, as anything other than as an ordinary aspect of resignation to capitalism.

4) I would not go as far as saying that material deprivation can never serve as a cause of social revolution; however I would agree that it is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is also far from being sufficiently aggravated in the advanced western countries to serve as an operative reason for overturning the ruling order.

5) My knowledge of what other workers are and are not doing is inevitably incomplete. But my impression is that at the present time, at least in the advanced countries, workers are relatively quiescent. There is some resistance to the more egregious outrages of management and no doubt many workers quietly neglect every aspect of work they can get away with; however, the potentially revolutionary revolt against work, as seen in American, French and Italian and other factories at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, has, for the time being at least, abated. It now falls to be rediscovered, reinvented and intensified. The position outside the workplace is no better.

6) A "practical refusal of that world" and "a practical programme of negation directed at the roots of their alienation" can be taken as one and the same thing. It is a matter of refusing and attacking the forced performance of labour within the workplace, the forced consumption of commodities and ideologies outside the workplace, and alienated social relations everywhere. At work, it would seem necessary in the first instance to cultivate sabotage of the physical equipment of labour and a refusal to act in accordance with orders and procedures. Where the goods we create are not wholly useless, we can also do what we can to distribute them without payment (for example by refusing to collect payments and fares). The forms all this will take must depend of the specific forms of labour with which we are each confronted; but it seems essential that we forge practical connections with other disaffected workers and make the grounds of our rebellion public. Outside of work, we should treat “the machinery of permitted consumption” (to take a phrase from Guy Debord) and the machinery of social indoctrination, seduction and control as our enemies. For example, the launch of a new line of commodities, a new season of fashion, clothing or sport, or a new tour by a musical or theatrical group, is tantamount to a renewed attack upon us that falls to be physically disrupted and denounced (by invasions of the venues, for instance). Equally, a wedding or other family ritual, a school reunion, a holiday, an educational course, the making and broadcasting of television and radio programmes, another night down the pub, the functioning of local and national state bodies, etc, etc, should be understood and treated as curses and blights on our lives to be resisted, as concrete mechanisms for the perpetuation of alienation that must be crippled by action. Each of us needs to consult our individual everyday lives in order to determine the particular ways in which we reproduce the world of alienation and then embark on an evolving, practical course of individual and collective contestation directed at that reproduction. However, I have to say that if such public contestation is to escape suppression by the forces of order and incomprehension by workers in general, there must first exist significant numbers of people who have already crossed a far from negligible threshold of dissatisfaction with life as it is now led. I very much doubt that this dissatisfaction can be manufactured or accelerated by revolutionaries. There are some things you have to do by yourself.

7) What can revolutionaries do? Where workers are engaged in struggles that tend to go to the heart of contemporary alienation, then I would agree that we should “help workers see the meaning of the struggles in which they are already engaged”. Equally, we can perhaps assist a dissatisfaction that has festered without finding practical expression to comprehend its causes and consequences. But we are not ourselves separated from alienated consumption and alienated work. We are workers too. We should, therefore, take every opportunity that is available to us to stimulate and participate in rebellion in our own lives. We can also critique the various social ideologies and mechanisms that prevent fundamental dissatisfaction with the dominant society from emerging as a coherent and practical force.

8) What is my view of what revolutionary society would look like? I am afraid that this is too large a question to be properly addressed by a tired writer at the end of a long email message. I shall content myself with saying that first and foremost a revolutionary society must establish the power of workers’ and geographical councils over all aspects of social life. The Address to All Workers issued by the Enragés-Situationist International Committee and the Council for Maintaining the Occupations during the May 1968 events in France stated:

“What are the essential features of council power?

• Dissolution of all external power
• Direct and total democracy
• Practical unification of decision and execution
• Delegates who can be revoked at any moment by those who have mandated them
• Abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations
• Conscious management and transformation of all the conditions of liberated life
• Permanent creative mass participation
• Internationalist extension and coordination

[…]

In reality, what is necessary now has been necessary since the beginning of the proletarian revolutionary project. It’s always been a question of working-class autonomy. The struggle has always been for the abolition of wage labour, of commodity production, and of the state. The goal has always been to accede to conscious history, to suppress all separations and ‘everything that exists independently of individuals’”.

I would agree with this as the revolutionary point of departure. The rest will be decided by the councils.

Best wishes,

Wayne

3) Wayne Spencer to Dave Stratman, 22 June 2009

I am very conscious that I have been more than a little tardy in sending you my comments on your book, We Can Change the World. A visit to a friend did somewhat delay my reading of the book, and a subsequent injury I sustained to my arm whilst out walking has also left me disinclined to spend too long typing; but aside from these rather inadequate explanations for delay, I have no excuses.

I cannot do justice to your rich and stimulating book in an email message; however, I should like to offer a few abbreviated observations in an attempt to illustrate what I think are certain key differences between our perspectives.

At the heart of your book is the proposition that ordinary people hold to values and relationships that are inconsistent with those integral to capitalism. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the humane, cooperative and friendly notions of social life to which you draw attention are indeed widespread, I do not think that they constitute an effective foundation for revolutionary transformation. One central problem is the form these notions take. In effect, they are framed after the fashion of bourgeois moral thought and float over the landscape of social life as abstract ethical principles. When they return to concrete social relations and practices, they do so by means of fragmentary casuistic judgements that typically seek to evaluate the degree to which isolated individuals, actions or structures possess the abstract qualities they endorse. This form of reasoning is always vulnerable to the false collectivisms, solidarities, amiabilities and reforms that capitalism often uses to organise its operations, and it seems in practice to hinder rather than promote the progressive advance to a critical sense of totality on which social revolution depends. The alienation of individual and social life, an alienation that has its roots in the expropriation of the total labour power of society by capitalism and the return of the fruits of that labour to its dispossessed producers in the form of consumable goods and ideologies, is not easily grasped in terms of whether its manifestations are humane, cooperative and friendly in abstract terms. In support of this view, we surely need only consider the brute fact that the everyday notions you praise have subsisted for decades, even centuries, yet in that very long time they have moved their holders no nearer to social revolution. Worse still, perhaps, they have proved incapable of generating from within themselves a critical response to that failure. It would seem that we must found an evolving theoretical and practical critique of the shifting configurations of alienated existence that we find within and without ourselves on other bases.

But is it really the case that humane, cooperative and friendly values are as widespread as you suggest? I am somewhat doubtful. One way of approaching the question is to ask people about their values. Amongst others, the Eurobarometer public opinion project has done just that. In its latest poll (which you can find here), it found that just 13% of its representative sample of Europeans included “solidarity, support for others” in their three most important personal values, and only 19% did likewise for “equality”. Even if we treat this survey with the degree of scepticism that all opinion polls deserve, I think its results should give you some pause for thought. Equally, the fact that 84% of respondents to the survey were content to agree with the view that nowadays there is too much tolerance and that criminals should be punished more severely is not obviously consistent with your depiction of ordinary people’s values.

I also think that you have had too little regard to the limitations that I would suggest are not just incidental aspects of the values you highlight but part of their very essence. In particular, the practices of solidarity during struggles and mutual aid generally seem to me to be inherently defensive means of surviving within capitalism. Mutual aid seeks to provide individuals who are unable to secure the wherewithal to survive through work with temporary and minimal assistance until such time as they can earn a living for themselves by means of new or better paid alienated labour. It does not challenge alienated work or alienated consumption; it merely supplies some of their deficiencies during hard times so as to enable the life of alienation to go on. Workers’ solidarity is equally narrow. It brings people together as alienated labourers and during their delimited struggles with employers to maintain or advance their interests as alienated labourers. Far from being a strategy that is ripe to be shifted to a more offensive orientation, it is part of a culture of wary and proud surrender to capitalism. It is not the harbinger of a victory waiting to happen but an adjustment to a defeat that occurred long ago. The limitations of the old workers’ movement and the culture it sustained can be seen quite clearly in the quotations your book contains. For example, Peter Winkels, the business agent of Local P-9, says of the Hormel meatpackers strike that “we’re fighting for our families and for the next generation” (page 34), while another striker said “My father fought for my generation, and I’m going to fight for the next one” (page 38). There is no escaping the fact that what both of these individuals fervently wish is that the alienated labour that has destroyed their lives should also descend on their children’s lives. There are few sentiments more disgusting than this. In the same vein, Kath Townsend of Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures is quoted as saying “We went on strike to save our communities” (page 32). She does not seek the abolition of alienated social relations but their continuation without disturbance. Sadly for the British miners, their alienated and decomposing communities were doomed. It was merely a question of who was to destroy them: the government and the bosses or the miners and their families. Kath Townsend’s comments shed some light how it came to be that the state and the bosses prevailed: “The government was going to shut down our pits and destroy our communities. But it was on strike that we became a real community, more than we ever were” (page 32). However, if the community only became a real community during the strike, then it must have been an unreal community before it. It fell to the miners to turn ruthlessly against that unreal local world in its entirety and to challenge in theory and practice all of the miserable traditions of working class life that had permitted it to retain and reproduce its unreality for generation after generation. They did not do so. They held on to too many of their traditions (such as adherence to their trade union). They have now been scattered to the winds. For my part, I would precisely include a sense of solidarity that was inherently defensive and blindly reproduced as an abstract duty amongst the causes of their fatal inability to transform themselves.

Elsewhere in your book you are enthusiastic about social phenomena that seem even more remote from revolutionary social transformation. For example, in the field of education you describe your involvement in struggles for better education in Boston during the mid-1970s (chapter one) and Minnesota during the mid-1980s (chapter four). In neither instance was the form and content of an educational system that exists solely to instil the attitudes, motivations and skills that capitalist society require fundamentally challenged. Undoubtedly you proposed changes that would change the curriculum in certain respects and encourage higher expectations, self-esteem and critical thinking from students and greater involvement from parents, but all of this can be accommodated within advanced capitalism. For instance, I am not sure there is very much difference between the “education for democracy” you have proposed and the “ideal list of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and intended behaviour” set out in chart 5.18 of the Commission of the European Communities’ working document Progress Towards the Lisbon Objectives in Education and Training: Indicators and Benchmarks 2008 (which can be found here). One thing that is noticeably absent from your accounts of educational struggle is any reference to encouraging students to practically repudiate the authority of parents and teachers, without which any transformation of education will be hierarchical and empty. But to my considerable astonishment, it appears that you regard the family as an exemplar of the social relations you wish to see. A complete critique of the family and “the frightful knot of serpents in the ties of blood “(Paul Eluard) is beyond the scope of this message. Suffice it to say that I agree with what Robert Cooperstein said back in 1974: “The family, tentatively defined as any collection of individuals who on a daily basis support and maintain one another in a state of mutual survival, is an essential ingredient of capitalist society. Briefly, it is that first factory of alienation that renders all subsequent degradations possible, while at the same time the sum total of these degradations make the family possible” (see Some Notes on the Reproduction of Human Capital.

It seems to me that what I consider to be your tendency to inflate the subversiveness of the family, educational reform, and humane, cooperative and friendly notions of social life has its roots in an excessively narrow view of the character of contemporary capitalism. You appear to take capitalism’s vaunted individualism seriously. This is a cardinal error. As Daniel Denevert once said: “Everything is said about the spectacle except what it always and fundamentally is: the colonisation of the point of view of the individual by the point of view of the collectivity”. The isolated and free individual exists only in the spectacle. In reality, capitalist society is fundamentally collectivist. Whether it is the family, the firm, the school, the club, the nation, or any of the other innumerable forms of social relations in contemporary capitalism, the collective prevails over the individual. Even in the sphere of consumption, where the individual appears to be free to indulge his or her individual urges and fantasies without the slightest regard to others, the reality is that individuals assimilate themselves into collective tastes and a social organization of consumption that absolutely dominates them. A second error lies, I think, in your acceptance (notably in chapter six) of a picture of contemporary capitalism as grimly dedicated to deindustrialization, deskilling, casualization, ever-lowering standards of living, ever-increasing attacks on education, etc. There is no doubt that each of these phenomena represent particular interests of particular factions of the dominant society at particular times; however, it seems to me to be false and incomplete to represent them as representing the sole or even predominant objectives of the capitalism of our times. I do not wish to bombard you with statistics; instead I shall merely refer you to the books Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy by Francis Green (Princeton University Press, 2005) and New Capitalism? The Transformation of Work by Kevin Doogan (Polity Press, 2009) for some initial data that point to the conclusion that for majority of people in the advanced economies work has become better-skilled, better-paid (although not necessarily in the USA) and longer-term over the past few decades. More than this, you seem to me to fail to notice that the interests that capitalism has in, amongst other things, reproducing a healthy, appropriately-skilled and motivated workforce; remedying deficiencies that produce potentially dangerous dissatisfaction or hinder the achievement of its own objectives; and creating social space and individual lives that justify the appropriation of humanity’s vast productive powers to itself and to its subjects all produce countervailing forces to the race to the bottom that its more Neanderthal proponents and administrators would otherwise pursue. Viewed in this broader light, the abstract qualities of humane, cooperative and friendly notions of social life that you vaunt, and the educational reforms you have pursued, may appear less as challenges to capitalism than the basis of a reformed collectivism better adapted to securing workers productive and consenting participation in a modernized capitalism. As for the area of consumption, nothing could be further from the governing spirit of capitalism’s last 30 years than Business Week’s 1974 idea of “doing with less so that big business can having more” (page 122). Leaving aside the point that what capitalism has in effect sought to do in many places, with some success, is to increase both corporate profits and the real wages of employees, it seems to me of central importance that capitalism increasingly rests its claims to legitimacy on its ability to make the vast majority of the population happy (and even, from time to time, veritably ecstatic). The sour-faced plea for renunciation of Business Week’s editorial captures precisely nothing of this; indeed, even where renunciation is sold in the modern spectacle, it is typically offered as part of an ideology of voluntary simplicity that leads to supposedly uncommodified contentment. On page 98 of your book, you note, quite correctly, that: “Those aspects of the student movement that were peculiar to the young – drugs, the ‘counterculture,’ rock ‘n’ roll – were the least revolutionary”. Your theoretical work would be greatly strengthened, I would suggest, by considering what it says about capitalism that drugs, counter-cultures, rock ‘n’ roll and other analogous products are now a far from insignificant part of both the spectacle’s spectrum of ideas about the good life and the actual lives of many ordinary people within capitalism.

Finally, I would turn to your theory of organization. Your notion that it is necessary for the ordinary membership to create an enlightened leadership to help it attain clarity and confidence and enable it to act by itself (page 269) is to me wholly untenable. The first step towards the autonomous pursuit of revolutionary practice is to repudiate hierarchical organization and to pursue one’s theory and practice alone or as full participants in egalitarian associations, as appropriate. We must begin by taking our own course: by making our own individual mistakes and by struggling without any hierarchical mediation to develop our thought and practice in the light of our errors, our failures and the particular tasks that lie ahead if we are to negate the social alienation that confronts us as individuals. However badly we may begin and proceed, autonomous thought and practice can only be conquered by and for ourselves. It cannot be handed down as a gift by smiling therapeutic hierarchs whom we somehow or other distinguish from charlatans and then sweetly trust to slowly loosen the bonds in which we have wrapped ourselves by entering into a subordinate relationship in the first place. You do not abolish dependency by indulging in it. Dependency must be rejected wherever we see it and ultimately destroyed by us, not entered into yet again in the perfectly delusional hope that this time it will kindly abolish itself and set us free.

In the end, do the various differences I have outlined make any practical difference? I think they do. First, your view that the proletariat lacks only the confidence and insight that would allow it to generalise its existing convictions discourages a theoretical and practical assault on the umpteen ways in which we have been seduced by capitalism’s visions of consumable contentment. Second, your narrow view of capitalism encourages you to endorse social struggles and social changes that may conflict with the most revanchist of capitalist ideologies yet serve only to modify capitalism. Third, your theory of organization seeks to combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle and sabotages the practical struggle for individual theoretical and practical autonomy that is the only possible basis for genuine social revolution. I fear, therefore, that our differences preclude any substantive cooperation between us.

Best wishes,

Wayne

A Discussion of Failure with Jared "Squee"

The publication of my text 'On Failure and its Possible Remedies' led to an exchange of correspondence between Jared "Squee" and myself. As the issues we discussed may be of interest of others, I have, with Jared’s agreement, reproduced our exchange here. Jared’s initial message and my response are given in their entirety. These are followed by an extract from a subsequent message from Jared in which he summarizes a message of his that was lost before it could be sent.

1) Jared “Squee” to Wayne Spencer, 29 April 2009

Wayne,

I just finished reading your "On Failure" (posted to anarchistnews.org) and a portion of what you have posted to your blog. I feel that I could lend some insight from the experience of a young writer with similar perspectives. About the apparent reception you have had of the 3 texts you mention... that seems fairly normal to me and the analysis of why this has happened may be a bit premature. Society is over-saturated with information... you obviously recognize this. But, it looks like you are missing an analysis of why the information that becomes popular does become popular and the contemporary methods of marketing behind it. I am not writing this to advise you on marketing, but even the media that becomes "viral" over the world-wide-web is the result of very well placed and inconspicuous advertising that largely depends on the capacity for said media to generate profit via content (either as content that will produce search engine hits or that will excite a sites spectator into trusting consumption). As far as the world outside digital resources goes, at least in the US, there is not much of a culture for the reception of theory (unless we mean by "theory" some mushed up scientific writings like Richard Dawkins or reinforcing addendums to already existing theoretical trends). The "revolutionary" networks are not much different and even though there is a revitalization of interest in Situationist theory... there is a very small portion of people that would have any time or interest in reading (and "reading" is one of the big key reasons here) much in that way of writing.

The closest thing that I have seen circulating widely to your writing is "The Coming Insurrection" and its popularity is definitely due to something that you had mentioned - the relationship of the text to a current event in the relative milieu. The remedies that you suggest would thus make for amazing works that I myself would be excited for the development of... but they would still be works without a seasoned audience. Some of the most popular theoretical work today is also in a completely different format: video. This is a huge point to consider, especially when you see everyone at least notice "The Secret", "What the Bleep", etc. (unless this is strictly an United States phenomena). I do not think that producing a journal with the content you mention would be a bad idea - but to gain readership, it will still take some sort of marketing scheme or another to get the spectators neurons firing and what-have-you. Even when it comes to radical groups endorsing your work, there is a labyrinth of group politics and loyalties that will get in the way. This is not to say though that there is not a great opportunity to interact with others with similar notions, but I am really starting to believe that literature is a dead means to popularizing theory.

Sorry if this is all too idiotic, but I loved what I read from you thus far and could not help myself to offering what I could so that you may see that you are being pretty damn hard on yourself when the silence of others is more-so approval that does not know how to give itself, change that does not know how to apply itself to every day life, and interest that does not know how to show itself. I personally know the experiences that you are talking about, even with mere comments on message boards this stuff happens. But it is worth reminding yourself that in that silence, there ARE those that have gained a lot from your work without the slightest clue as what the appropriate response is. They will likely just apply what they can of your writing with their close friends and never mention the source - a strange symptom of the search for authenticity in this society and a lack of truly understanding those that are not using ideas for mere social capital.

Anyway - good luck and keep writing!
Jared "Squee"

2) Wayne Spencer to Jared "Squee", 30 April 2009

Jared,

Thank you for taking the time to send me your interesting thoughts on my text, ‘On Failure’.

I am aware that it is possible to consider the impact of a text in terms of its exposure as well as its reception. I am also aware, at least to some degree, of how the best travelled regions of the World Wide Web are, in one way or another, structured by seductive or prominent interconnections (with the result that much online browsing consists of moving around between quite a limited array of corporate-dominated or government sites). If I did not dwell on these matters in my article, this was more a matter of deliberate omission than theoretical blindness. A person who lacks the motivation to conduct an assiduous search outside the usual channels for material that may help to shed light on his or her alienation, or who finds attractive the blandishments by means of which spectacular thought and entertainment beckon to the passer-by, is, at bottom, colonized by spectacular taste. I took the view, therefore, that such propensities need not be addressed separately from the general matter of the continued influence of the spectacle’s ideas of happiness.

A similar point occurred to me in relation to the distaste for theory that you have, quite correctly, highlighted. The notion that theory is cold, irrelevant to daily life and inferior to the frivolous consumption of fun rests upon spectacular forms of thought and feeling. Once again, I thought, it could be collapsed into the general discussion of alienated happiness that I had in mind.

What I have not considered in any serious way is the possibility of presenting my own observations by way of video, in part because I am keenly aware that my lack of technical knowledge about the mechanics of film-making is likely to make the process extremely time-consuming and vexatious. In itself, the widespread preference for video does not incline me to take up the medium. It has to be borne in mind that I am not in search of just any readers or viewers. Revolutionary theory is communication by and for the dissatisfied. I am very doubtful that persuasion by revolutionaries is capable of making an individual dissatisfied in the first place. Rather a certain far-from-negligible threshold of dissatisfaction must have been attained before revolutionary thought seems anything other than ludicrous to a person who encounters it. I suspect that one is unlikely to find too many persons of this description amongst the enthusiasts for ‘The Secret’ or ‘What the Bleep’. On the contrary, what I shall uncharitably call the depraved taste for consuming video inanities strikes me as one aspect of a puerile frivolity that serves as one of key subjective bases of the current stage of capitalism. I see no need to pander to this species of smiling surrender. Of course, it does not follow that video must be eschewed as a whole. However, I would suggest that revolutionary video-making must precisely make itself as unpalatable as possible to the giddy consumer.

As for 'theoretical videos', I have seen a lot of films on social and political issues over the last several years but I have been impressed by few. In general, the theory they employ (including the theory of their own practice) seems uninteresting or underdeveloped. The narrative elements of such works are, in my experience, mostly taken from liberal or leftist ideology; the visual style usually rests on clichés derived from conventional documentary expositions, art cinema, or music video; and the objectives they pursue in relation to the audience rarely seem to go beyond exciting the indignation of leftist-liberals and obtaining the approval of cultural consumers, fellow artists, and the institutional figures who award grants, degrees and exhibitions.

I do not myself see too many parallels between my own work and ‘The Coming Insurrection’; but I gather that the English translation circulating on the web is not an especially good one, so it may be too soon to draw any conclusions about this. What ‘The Coming Insurrection’ does, perhaps, illustrate is the unhappy truth that notoriety and celebrity heavily influence many people’s reading preferences. Without the French state’s clumsy denunciation of the text and arrest of its alleged authors, it would probably have attained only the usual obscurity. At the risk of repeating myself beyond endurance, a curiosity or enthusiasm that is guided by whatever sensational stories about revolutionaries that happen to be crossing the spectacle’s firmament at any given time is not an entirety creditable one.

Having said all that, I am sure that you are right that increasing the visibility of my work would not be an entirety bad thing. Abandoning the blog in favour of a website that has been designed so as to optimize the probability that it will be detected by relevant web searches would seem a sensible first step.

I also agree that one should not disregard the possibility that there exist readers who have found something of value in what I have written but who remain in baffled silence as to the practical implications. I am sympathetic to this quandary. No amount of rhetoric can disguise the fact that we live in bad times for revolutionary contestation in the advanced capitalist countries. To borrow a phrase from Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, the objective conditions for revolutionary transformation “are not only ripe, they have begun to rot”; the subjective conditions, however, are desperately underdeveloped. This can make it all but impossible for isolated individuals to develop a practical negation of the alienations they encounter within their everyday lives, for in the face of a unified wall of incomprehension and complacency, one can often do little. Yet there is always the possibility of publicizing one’s discontent and one’s understanding of its causes, even if only anonymously. It is a recourse I would recommend to others.

I would stress in passing that although a theory of the revolution of everyday life can undoubtedly be applied with friends, it cannot, without being transformed for the worst, be confined to friends and the relationships between friends. Any social revolution that is worthy of our participation must include the transformation of friendship; however, a practice that remains within the narrow dimensions granted to friendship in the dominant society will quickly descend into niggardly and ineffectual reforms of selected elements of private life.

I have no objections to readers using my work without citation or acknowledgement. As Ken Knabb once said: "Generally speaking, the practical reading of a radical text is characterized by a critical, seemingly almost callous attitude, which constantly has an eye out for what can be ripped off from it, and which cares little for the intrinsic merit of what can’t. Whereas the feeling 'This is absolutely fantastic! There’s so much I don’t know! I’m going to have to read a lot more of this!' announces the nascent theory colonization" ('Double Reflection', 1974). Amongst the elements that can often be winnowed out in this way is the name and identity of the author.

Finally, I have no interest whatsoever in securing the approval of established political groups. We are too far apart.

Best wishes,

Wayne

3) Jared "Squee" to Wayne Spencer, 5 May 2009

Haha, actually I just checked my "sent" box and see that I wrote you an email that didn't send. But, it said in so many words that I see your aims a lot clearer now and no longer find a lot of my earlier comments applicable. It also had some explanation on why I mentioned 'The Coming Insurrection': it is one of only a few recent Situationist-like texts that I have read. But, it wasn’t brought up in topical reference to your work […]

On Failure and its Possible Remedies

In June 2007, when my text On Lice and Fleas first appeared, one of the members of the partnership that writes under the pseudonym Monsieur Dupont asked me what I would do in the event of defeat. It would seem too soon to talk of defeat, but perhaps it is time to acknowledge and confront some measure of failure.

My writing (which includes the texts Gasping from Out the Shallows: Reflections on Revolution in the Early Twenty-first Century, On Lice and Fleas: Observations Starting from the Conflict Between Iran and the USA and Their Passed-away Builders: The “Credit Crunch”) is directed at two different audiences: those who already regard themselves as revolutionaries and those who do not. In both cases, my objective is the same. Stated in broad terms, it is to contribute to the reader’s understanding of the alienated world in which we live and thereby to the development of the individual’s practical refusal of that world. Reaching a judgement as to whether this objective has in any way been realized is, of course, a hazardous exercise, for the available data is sparse and the implications that can properly be drawn from readers’ silence is a matter of some conjecture. However, it seems reasonable to take the nature and extent of both private messages and public commentary as an indicator of the impact of what I have said. If so, I have to admit that my writings have had almost no effect whatsoever. In the main, they have been ignored, rejected or misunderstood. At best, they have been offered a rather generalized and unwanted praise and then simply put aside.

The reasons for this failure doubtless include the literary deficiencies of the texts. To my regret, what I write is too often ponderous and littered with accidental typing mistakes and careless grammatical errors that have been left uncorrected. But this can hardly be a complete explanation. A person who has a real, practical interest in confronting the alienation in which he or she participates will surely put up with a little ugliness when searching for material that may be useful to this end. Moreover, I think it is fair to say that my texts vary in the extent to which they are unreadable, yet there is no variation in their reception. More generally, I suspect one would struggle to find any correlation between the abstract literary merit possessed by items of revolutionary theory and the extent of their influence.

In the alternative, it might be suggested that my factual and theoretical statements contain many mistakes. I do not doubt that my writings abound with errors. Much of what I have published is of the nature of preliminary hypotheses. I had hoped that I would be able to refine these provisional conceptions through discussions with comrades with relevant information and experience. But this has happened rarely, and not just because many of the comments I have received have been vapid or unilluminating. Even in milieus or forums prone to ill-tempered denunciation and prolix discussions of the most arcane nuances of revolutionary theory, silence has generally reigned.

A third reason for failure that might be advanced is that the appearance of my texts has been accompanied by too little practical violence directed at the reigning order. Simple publication, it might be said, is not enough. It attracts no notice and fatally encourages the texts to be perceived as expressions of abstract thought. It is too timid to serve as a vehicle for theory that repudiates the dominant organization of life and discourse and exists only to be practised. There is some force in this line of critique. Yet it is necessary to avoid the opposite error of creating superficial, spurious or incomprehensible breaches of decorum simply in order to have something overtly practical to put alongside a text. Abstraction comes in many guises; the transient disruption of isolated and more or less arbitrarily selected fragments of everyday social life with a view to publicising a text is one of them.

I think one must look elsewhere for the roots of the prevailing lack of interest in my writings. When I began to write, what I had failed properly to appreciate is the extent to which self-styled revolutionaries have abandoned the critique of the modernised conditions of affluent alienation to be found in the advanced capitalist countries. The flight from reality into self-serving fantasy has been almost total, it seems. Capitalism continues to provide its miserable abundance of commodities to the vast majority of the inhabitants of Western Europe and North America, and even secures the physical survival of those for whom it can find no use in its offices, factories and armies. Everywhere one looks, however, Marxists, anarchists and other revolutionaries absurdly proclaim that for several decades wages have catastrophically fallen, precariousness has catastrophically risen, and social security provisions have been decimated. This picture of general desolation is doubtless useful. Notably, it helps to convince its adherents that their campaigns for better wages, conditions of employment and social welfare are not, as one might otherwise suspect, merely proposals for pseudo-oppositional reforms that would help to maintain the preconditions of an advanced, consumer capitalism, but rather are urgently necessary and radical refusals of the logic of the system. But this is not all. One other consequence of the leftist myth, one that is more pertinent to this discussion, is that it renders incomprehensible and seemingly irrelevant any revolutionary critique, such as mine, that seeks to stay close to the actual lives lead by the far-from-poor and far-from-insecure majority of the western countries. At the same time, however, this denial of reality makes itself incomprehensible and irrelevant to that very majority. Ordinary people will accept the practical, reformist assistance that leftists here and there offer when it seems calculated to make their life more comfortable within the society of alienation; but they easily recognize the revolutionary ideology that is bolted on to it as messianic, delusional, unconnected with their daily lives, and superfluous. Even the long-prayed-for profound economic crisis, that terrible external compulsion that leftists hoped would force the workers and themselves to take the road of revolution, has not changed this state of affairs. 2009 is not 1848 or 1929. A crisis in an advanced economy turns out not to have the same practical consequences for the majority of workers as it does in less developed economic conditions. It has left the majority largely untouched. It has provided no impetus to revolution whatsoever.

If an attachment to the past explains the lack of interest that revolutionaries show to modern revolutionary theory, it is to an attachment to the present that we must turn when considering the indifference of the mass of the proletariat. The spectacle’s unrelenting torrent of images and ideas continues to shape our inner selves and our outer world in its likeness. For all of our pretensions to autonomy and choice, what we think, feel, desire and do has its origins largely outside of us, in the array of desires, understandings, expectations and behaviours moulded to the reign of the commodity and the state that the spectacle presents to us. This colonization is not definitive or even very strong, but it is broad and its essence goes largely unchallenged. We are lost in an insubstantial but ubiquitous fog. And if we do not rebel against our narrow lives, this is more than anything else because we have been seduced by the dominant society’s ideas of happiness.

If revolutionary theory is to be made pertinent and dangerous to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, it must renew its critique of the dominant ideas of happiness, a critique that has been progressively abandoned over the past 30 years. Amongst other things, this would perhaps involve a nuanced critique of:

1) The mainstream spectacle, the worlds of high street shops, shopping malls, suburban homes, family life, family cars, sport, gardening, gossip, and holidays spent by the sea or in cities seen through the eyes of guide books; of newspapers, women’s magazines, popular television programmes, gymnasiums, guides to better sex on DVD, and trashy books and films despised by the critics; of run-of- the-mill jobs tolerated because they pay quite well or provide opportunities to meet the public, socialize with colleagues or exercise a little power or creativity within the narrow limits dictated by one’s employer. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of people who regard themselves and others like them as just “ordinary”.

2) The sophisticated spectacle, the world of design, elegance, the supposedly exclusive, and gentrification; of prize-winning books, broadsheet newspapers, self-help techniques, world music, the theatre, and arthouse films; of spiritual retreats, holidays off the beaten track, second homes, haut cuisine, artisanal goods, and slow food; of concern for the third world or eulogies to self-reliance and the rewards of enterprise; of straining one’s finances in order to have a large home in a good area and children capable of passing examinations; of careers, work in research centres, arts administration, the creative industries, therapies, or the tattered remnants of the professions. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who regard themselves as just a little above the vulgar.

3) The hedonistic spectacle, the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll; of the fast, the frenzied and the dangerous; of drunkenness, madcap escapades, exhibitionism, carnival, and choruses of collective laughter; of raves or nightlife in the regenerated cities. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who regard themselves as experiencing life to the full, if only during the evenings and weekends.

4) The youth culture spectacle, the world of the ever-changing tribes of the young and the gadgets, clothes, body shapes, haircuts, makeup, music, films, celebrities, slang, attitudes and poses that define them. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who may be subordinated by school, dependency on parents, and the menial jobs now left to the young but who nonetheless regard themselves as superior to the old, the uncool, and the passé.

5) The criminal spectacle, the world of drug-dealing, burglary and street crime; of respect, revenge, guns, knives, flash cars, hip talk, branded training shoes and sportswear; of hard men, bitches and the rap music about them; of dreams of movie gangsters, the hope of one day living like a rap star or a millionaire sportsman; of predatory hierarchies amongst prisoners. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who regard themselves as better than the sad losers who play the game.

6) The spectacle of decomposition, the world of resigned cynicism and contemptuous scoffing; of endless news of real and invented corruption, ineptitude, disaster, crime and conspiracy; of images of suffering, humiliation, disability and decay circulated for entertainment; of hooliganism, vandalism, bad manners, defiant stupidity, proud illiteracy, animal mutilation and other inversions of bourgeois sensibilities. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who hold the world in contempt yet find some measure of contentment in either acting out the decay themselves or watching others doing so.

7) The avant-garde spectacle, the world of conceptual art, artistic manifestoes, small galleries in fashionable parts of fashionable cities, corporate-sponsored major retrospectives of artists declared to be radical or innovative, the music covered by The Wire magazine, street photography, limited edition books and CDs produced by the artists themselves, state-subsidised electro-acoustic experimentation, psychogeographical walks, ‘visual culture’, experimental film, critical studies in the university, post-graduate exhibitions, a horror of any ‘foreclosure’ except that which accepts the basic economic and social forms of the commodity society as immutable, and the hip clothing, hip bars and hip milieus in which the buyers and sellers of the avant-garde are often to be found. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who consider that the separate world of art is a domain in which daring, insight, subversion, innovation or new forms of life can still be practised.

8) The alternative spectacle, the world of trade unionism, ecological activism, community campaigns, culture jamming, the open source movement, exhibitions of radical texts in state museums and university galleries, fair trade, alternative medicine, guerrilla gardening, anarcho-punk, protests in solidarity with the third world, protests in general, children’s rights, the New Age Movement and other claims of the paranormal, the World Social Forum, feminism, reduced consumption and other remedies for ‘affluenza’, welfare rights advocacy, the anti-war movement, ‘dumpster diving’, anti-globalization, campaigns against corporate abuses, and the short-term suspension of ordinary life found in rioting. In short, the whole of the lives and lies of those who believe that substantive and desirable improvements to everyday life can be brought about, or revolution approached, by changing one or more aspects of the dominant society and leaving the appropriation of labour and life by the commodity unchanged; of those satisfied with the display or repetition of an inadequate revolt.

The purpose of such an analysis of contemporary notions of happiness is not to produce an accurate description of the ways in which we live or a moralistic condemnation of them. Rather, it is to speak to, and deepen, the real currents of dissatisfaction with the dominant society. This dissatisfaction is not to be found in the struggles over jobs, wages and conditions so beloved by leftism. The conditions of real material deprivation that made such struggles imperative in the nineteenth and early twenty centuries were eliminated many decades ago for both the employed and the unemployed in the advanced western countries. What has followed is a continuous fabrication of needs and falsification of desires that serves only to sustain the huge and expanding demand for commodity consumption on which the survival of advanced capitalism depends. The economic struggles extolled by leftists and trade unionists have aided and abetted this process by resisting attempts by desperate or backward factions of capitalism to radically worsen the conditions of workers and by assisting in the global process that seeks to translate worker’s aspirations and dissatisfactions into terms that the system of capitalism can process. In effect, they are an ordinary part of the processes through which capitalism is adjusted so as to accommodate the workers and the workers are adjusted so as to accommodate capitalism. In the circumstances in which we find ourselves, these struggles are not an expression of the resistance of the workers but of their defeat. They renegotiate the terms of a capitulation to capitalism that has not been retracted; and, no matter angry they may be, what they ultimately express is our desire for sleep. The same can be said for many of the ‘struggles’ outside the workplace that leftists cheer on, organize or take over.

In search of profound disaffection with the reigning society, for the beginnings of a dissatisfaction that goes to the heart of the alienation of the commodity society, we must now look elsewhere. It is to the moments when we, the proletarians of the modern age, look at our work, our families, our surroundings, our hobbies, our possessions, our friendships, our aspirations and our dreams – when we look at the whole panoply of lies we live by and the kingdom of falsehood they support – and see, with a sense of desolation and despair, the utter hollowness of all that we are and all that we could become in this society, it is to these moments, and the steps leading up to them, that we must cleave. We must keep this authentic experience of the real nature of modern alienation from being dissipated by simulated happiness, suicide, the stupefaction of drink, drugs or psychotherapy, or any of the other means by which our thoughts and feelings are falsified and subdued. We must encourage the disaffected to think for themselves and act by themselves, and to pursue a practical programme of negation directed at the social roots of their alienation.

The development and diffusion of such a programme of critique clearly requires the efforts of more than one person. As one step, I would suggest the development of a journal to be published both in paper and internet form. The journal would seek to provide a concentrated critique of the alienated everyday life to be found in the advanced economies of the twenty-first century and to address such currents of radical dissatisfaction with the fundamental principles of that life as can be seen on or below the surface of social life. Its production would bring together a sufficient number of people who share certain basic theoretical positions and are capable of contributing as equals to a project to be conducted without hierarchy or passive followers. This collaboration would have as its sole purpose the production of the journal.

To serve as the basic shared theoretical principles of the project’s participants, I would tentatively suggest the following:

1) The affluent alienation of modern conditions of production and consumption can no longer be endured and is the foundation of our discontent. Self-managed, social revolution is the only solution capable of practically dissolving the alienation of human activity inherent in all work and all consumption the dominant society produces.

2) All notions of revolution derived from Bolshevism are false.

3) All notions of struggle and progress associated with trade unionism are false.

4) All reforms are false.

5) All separate artistic creation is paltry and false.

6) All academic ideas about social life are false. All social relations within academia are alienated. All aspects of the academy serve to support and perpetuate the dominant system.

Of course, Frére Dupont might respond that it remains possible, even probable, that either my specific project of a journal or the wider goal of social revolution may not come to pass. This is true. The absence of a journal specifically directed to developing an up-to-date critique of the affluent alienation of the Western economies and a practical communication with the tendencies towards radical negation within those economies may well have a good deal more to do with the lack of potentially interested and capable parties than any mere failure to propose the notion of a journal publicly. We shall see. It also has to be admitted that the efforts of revolutionaries are neither necessary nor sufficient to create social revolution. They are not necessary because the mass of the proletariat is capable of deriving its revolutionary theory and practice from its own practical experience of commodity alienation without reference to what has been said and done by revolutionaries; they are not sufficient because history provides no guarantee that the rest of the proletariat will at any given time agree that revolution is necessary and desirable. So be it. We do what we can. We continue to seek out ways of waiting without despair or contentment. We remain consoled by the fact that there is nothing remarkable about us, from which it follows that anything we have felt, done and thought can be felt, done and thought by many others. We are kept just ahead of pessimism by the palpable inadequacy of the lives available to us and the decomposition and ineptitude that continually afflicts the dominant’s society’s massive efforts to convince us of the contrary.

26 April 2009

No copyright. Use and reproduce freely.

NOTE: This site also includes discussions of this text with Jared "Squee", Dave Stratman, and Frére Dupont.

Their Passed-away Builders: The “Credit Crunch”

In the days before man had completely established his domination over the animal world, the poultry of a certain country, unnamed in any record, met in solemn conference in the largest hall they could hire for their money: the period was serious, for it was drawing near Christmas, and the question in debate partook of the gravity of the times; for, in short, various resolutions, the wording of which has not come down to us were to be moved on the all important subject, ‘with what sauce shall we be eaten?’ (William Morris, Justice, 19 January 1884)

1.

The cascading set of economic maladies colloquially referred to as “the credit crunch” reveals with all too painful clarity the absurdity of both the dominant capitalist society and the lives we live within it. That global production and distribution should come to depend on reckless debt and the trading of such debt starkly demonstrates yet again how the capitalist economy exists outside the control and good sense of the individuals whose labour, creativity and desires it appropriates. That we did nothing of substance to challenge the absurdities of the autonomous economy, or even went so far as to pursue its delusive promises with relish, is one more reminder, for those who need it, of the timidity and nullity of the way we pretend to live.

2.

The state of affairs that is at present disintegrating around us has its roots in the defeat of working class militancy in the 1970s. In advanced capitalist countries, the 1970s saw the culmination of a movement of proletarian resistance to the alienation of work, a movement characterized by wildcat strikes, sabotage, theft, absenteeism, shoddy work, disdain for trade unions and contempt for management. However, we did not develop this rejection of the dominant society very far beyond a mere avoidance of the worst aspects of work. We contented ourselves with minimizing the burdens that work placed on us and taking flight into the distractions of consumption and what we imagined was the refuge of family life. We failed to sharpen our understanding of what we detested and what we desired. We failed to consider where our actions left us in relation to the forces ranged against us and what must next be done to strike at the alienation that continued concretely to confront us in the work we could not wholly avoid, in the commodity consumption to which our work gave rise, and across social life generally. We never grasped revolution as the only historical solution capable of practically dissolving the alienation of human activity. We stagnated, allowing the initiative to pass to our enemies. We meekly handed our dreams and dissatisfactions to capitalism to fulfil.

3.

As we failed to carry out our own social revolution, Thatcher, Reagan and the other proponents of neo-conservatism in the second half of the 1970s stepped forward to do it for us. In response to our narrow and confused wishes for individual and social change, the neo-conservatives offered a narrow and confused pseudo-revolution. The social democratic administration of capitalism was manifestly in decay. The neo-conservatives threw down a choice between economic collapse and a brutal restructuring that would eventually lead to economic revival, confident that we had not attained the theoretical and practical autonomy to make and impose a third option of our own devising. The problem, it was said, was not capitalism itself but our resistance to it. Equally, the freedom we too vaguely desired was to be found, we were told, not in the abolition of capitalism but rather in its intensification: in the freedom of capitalists and managers to make economic decisions unfettered by our protests and too stringent a regulation on the part of the state; in our voluntary, enthusiastic and active involvement in perpetual measures to increase efficiency and profitability; and in the greater choice of commodities that would be made available by the ensuing economic growth. The neo-conservatives’ bet that we remained profoundly colonized by the thought and feelings bred by the dominant society proved a good one. Of course, here and there we offered some resistance, drifting through trade unionist struggles demanding that we be permitted to continue in our uneasy sleep or indulging in riots that seized control of a few scattered streets only to return them to the state a couple of hours later; yet, in the end, we did not regard what we wanted as inconsistent with alienated labour and alienated consumption. Many of us embraced the new reaction willingly. Others took up empty pseudo-alternatives to it. For some, this meant sinking deeper into the trade unionism that had contributed in no small part to the poverty of our thoughts and actions. Others drifted off into charitable, social service or pressure group efforts to ameliorate the most glaring symptoms of the new order or into spiritual pursuits that left the inner and outer worlds mired in alienation but provided a comforting sense of connection with them. Still others retreated into a tiny domain of private or public consumption they thought would serve as a dignified refuge from the corruption, puerility and venality all around, or took up one of the lines of consumable hedonism that were increasingly made available by licit or illicit entrepreneurs who did not share the archaic petit-bourgeois scruples of the first neo-conservatives. The list of capitulations was a long one; the effect, however, was always the same: we left the making of history to capital and the state.

4.

Not every aspect of the promises of the neo-conservative pseudo-revolution has proved entirely false. Although enduring pockets of unemployment have emerged, the large majority of us have retained or obtained jobs. Moreover, although inequality has grown and a margin of material deprivation remains, the large majority of us in the advanced economies have seen our real wages and incomes increase considerably since the end of the 1970s, with the result that for many of us the 1950s, 60s and 70s seem like epochs of primitive penury. Even in the USA, where real individual earnings have remained relatively flat, real household incomes have grown sharply for the majority (if only because women have increasingly joined the labour force), leaving families with more money than ever to spend. This general increase in income (supplemented by earnings from the black and illegal economies) has helped to fuel the huge increase in personal consumption since the early 1980s through which neo-conservative capitalism has striven to realize by way of the commodity our real and manufactured desires for autonomy, excitement, uniqueness, community, solitude, beauty, intimacy, oblivion, knowledge, adventure, frenzy, stillness, sensuality, creativity, rebellion, and so on. But it has never been enough. Capitalism’s quest for profit has always demanded more; and lost in capitalism’s house of mirrors, fruitlessly pursuing a succession of distorted images held up as faithful reflections of who we are or who we wish to become, we have ourselves been tempted to spend more than we can earn to seek that which cannot be found. It is here that consumer credit enters.

5.

It is perhaps fitting that it should have been the housing market that precipitated the “credit crunch”. Our houses have been of singular importance to us, and not just because neo-conservatism has persuaded us to accept individual ownership of a small parcel of land in lieu of the collective self-management of society as a whole. Amongst other things, it is to there that we return from the work that we may tell ourselves is more creative and less constrained by authoritarian management than ever before but which only produces either commodities for sale or the people, processes and places that make the circulation of commodities possible. It is there that, in the name of love, parents assiduously destroy their children by moulding their thoughts, feelings and behaviours into the mediocre and alienated configurations required by the dominant economy, there that children impotently despise their parents for failing to match the particular juvenile image of coolness and modishness they have sheepishly bought from the competing purveyors of commodified popular culture, and there that both parents and children from time to time piously declaim the beauty of family life in an attempt to conceal from themselves and others the grim reality of shared incarceration. It is to there that we return after sordid local binges and holidays in distant places made very much like home by the universal reign of the commodity, fresh with disappointment yet hoping that conversation will make our dismal experiences seem and feel like the rich life we like to think we are living. It is there that we drag the audio-visual equipment, self-help books, cars, flat-pack furniture, exotic vegetables, shifting arrays of clothes, and all the rest of the useless junk that promises so much before it is bought but then is all too quickly replaced when it fails to deliver or something else loudly proclaims its virtues in the commercial spectacle. It is there that we entertain the friends who seem worryingly like strangers because after we have spent much of the day creating the world around us on the orders of our employers and in the interests of the commodity all that we have left to share are trivial concerns and private dramas, and there that we pass off those self-same trivialities and dramas as the very stuff of profound intimacy. It is there that we console ourselves for our social alienation and the physical isolation to which it leads by typing out electronic messages to dispersed networks of fellow isolates, like prisoners tapping on the bars and walls of their cells. It is there that we have repeatedly changed the décor of our dwellings rather than the lives we lead as a whole.

6.

The collapse of the particular variant of the capitalist economy that has held sway over the advanced western countries for the past thirty years now gives rise to a moment of choice. The misadventure that saw us willingly or reluctantly hoping that escape from the poverty of everyday life would be found somewhere within an escalation of the capitalist production and consumption that caused that poverty in the first place is now, for the time being at least, shipwrecked. We cannot continue acting and thinking quite as we have done before; and our stupidity and the social organization of stupidity have however briefly been exposed a little more plainly to the view. Yet, although the question of where do we go next has arisen, the social organization of appearances with which the dominant society surrounds us precisely encourages us to leave the making of this choice to others. We find before us a rapidly-shifting spectacle of politicians, corporate bankers and others with power manfully struggling to fashion and implement policies to restructure the national or global economy. At the same time, a myriad of media outlets offer us endless critiques to consider and opportunities to take up inconsequential commentary and debate. Everywhere, we remain wholly excluded from the real decisions. This is no surprise, for there exists in the society no mechanism by which such a decision could even in principle be made by us. It is the commodity and its state that rule social life everywhere. No matter how strong the cynicism and disdain with which we view the antics of those set above us, our participation in this spectacle merely ensures that this state of affairs, and these affairs of state, remain in place. No matter how much we are disgusted by the individual and collective absurdity made sharply evident by the “credit crunch”, our passivity inexorably guarantees that this absurdity will only be reformulated outside and against us.

7.

The society of the spectacle does not turn its decomposition to its advantage only by placing before us a pantomime of the rich and powerful struggling with economic disaster and then encouraging us to cheer or boo as we please. The worsening financial position that capitalism’s global difficulties has visited upon ordinary people also make its way into the spectacle of decomposition. From one direction, we are presented with the dramatic stories of those who have been worst affected, complete with despairing suicides, house repossessions, bankruptcies, unemployment and abandoned dreams. The fact that the spectator sits immobile before this catalogue of disasters is itself an advantage to the dominant society; however, the spectator is also drawn into revaluing the affluent wasteland that is his or her own life on the ground that at least it is not obviously as miserable of those who have fallen to the bottom of the heap. From another direction, spectators are led to consider themselves not as comparatively rich but as absolutely poor. Even a reduction of a few percentage points in GDP or disposable income is portrayed as a catastrophic fall from grace, a descent into a mire of desperate poverty, and newspapers, magazines and television programmes are awash with items containing advice on how to live more frugally or cheaply in the new era of “austerity”. A more specialized variant of this spectacle is directed at the unemployed themselves, urging them to regard their exclusion from the alienated roles of working life and the opportunities to consume beyond bare survival as a state of horrendous deprivation that must be reversed as soon as possible, in the first instance by acquiring new skills and a refurbished submission to sell to prospective employers. In these ways, a myriad of needs that exist in their present form only because they have been incorporated as more or less integral components of life within this society take on the dignity and urgency of basic human requirements, and we are drawn deeper than we already are into the disastrous habit of considering alienated work, alienated consumption and alienated social relations as the only possible realities. But this is not all. We can now feel not merely poor but deliciously or even virtuously poor. For some, there is the frisson of living in a dramatic moment of economic devastation or the thrill of personally descending into the exciting extremes of poverty merely by shopping in a cheaper supermarket, dropping the odd pseudo-luxury, eating out once or twice less a week or buying beauty products to use at home in place of expensive visits to salons. In the alternative, we can flatter ourselves that we are independent souls who do not indulge in vicious excess and stupid manufactured fads and see through consumer capitalism’s wiles. The result is that we blind ourselves to how the entirety of our lives remains enmeshed within the commodity economy and its spectacle of possible existences.

8.

One of the oldest ruses of the dominant society, one that has repeatedly disarmed our dissatisfaction and maintained our passivity, is a timely electoral contest for state power featuring an opposition candidate proclaiming a new and radical beginning. The high turnouts for the recent elections of Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama suggest that this mechanism continues to be effective. It matters little that every previous ‘radical’ departure of this kind has quickly descended into farce. It is equally unimportant that the candidates feverishly depicted by interested commentators of left or right as charismatic iconoclasts are all too palpably stilted bureaucrats with threadbare programmes that at best promise marginal renovations to the society of alienation. We who have failed to develop the capacity for autonomous thought and action, who have failed to begin a theory of practice and a practice of theory that refuses external ideologies, allow ourselves once again to put our discontents in the hands of political others and wait. It may seem a small matter to tick a box or press a button in an electoral booth, but in the same way that it is unwise to indulge a destructive narcotic addiction at the moment when you are hoping to give it up, so we are poorly advised to exercise yet again our entrenched habits of submission to external powers just when the matter of whether or not we will dictate the direction of historical change depends fundamentally on superseding those habits. The dominant society always has at hand one more little matter that makes a small difference within the terms of this society and that justifies a small postponement of radical change in favour of participation in reformist steps. Generations have told themselves that this or that emergency or contingency requires them to work within the society for the time being but of course that does not mean that they have abandoned the idea of radical change. Generations have died without taking a single practical step further forward.

9.

The ideological shift with which the dominant society is responding to the economic perturbations it is experiencing, a shift which also confronts us as a new practical project to maintain our passivity and alienation, is at present modest in scope. The main lines of this renovation of the thought and practice of the ruling circles are already fairly clear and include an increased willingness to add financial regulation and direct investment in ailing financial and industrial concerns to the battery of measures the state uses to sustain capitalism; they also tend to feature almost hysterical attempts to provide us with the means and willingness to increase our consumption. However, the parties seeking to determine the direction in which global society shifts at this moment of historical choice are not restricted to the familiar exemplars of political and economic power. The collapse of the current economic structures offers an important opportunity for ideologies that have long been denied influence in ruling circles by the hegemony of neo-liberal ideas. One such pseudo-alternative ideology champions peace, social justice, reduced inequality, a tempered consumerism, high quality jobs, etc. In effect, this leftism proposes to solve the problems of profitability and demand caused by the reduced availability of credit by increasing the income, and therefore consumption, of the less well off in the west and abroad. Put another way, it proposes to us that we continue to surrender our lives to alienation in return for a better standard of compensation. Another ideology seeking greater ascendancy is that of environmentalism. The blind growth of the neo-conservative economy has pushed the planet to the brink of economic catastrophe. In response, the various shades of green reformism wish to expand the industrial and research sectors directed to environmental purposes and create a system of capitalist production and distribution that is consistent with the environmental resources of the planet and thus is perpetual. To this end, they propose for us, amongst other things, a new ethos of alienated consumption that goes further in valuing quality over quantity in the matter of consumable illusions and a quest for an impossible satisfaction within capitalism increasingly focussed on the consumption of non-material goods that use fewer resources. Put another way, they rest their hopes for the permanence of capitalism on a cleaner but more intense colonization of our subjectivities by the commodity and its logic. The sale of frugal but false spirituality, culture, activities and community will replace the sale of shoddy objects. Green wage slavery will replace wage slavery of other colours.

10.

While the process of economic restructuring is underway, it seems reasonable to expect surges of other forms of the false opposition that challenge aspects of the system of alienation but take as granted the alienated production and consumption of commodities that lie at the heart of capitalism. Here and there, we can doubtless expect revivals of trade unionist struggles, although the trade unions themselves will often be rendered quiescent by a sense that little is possible for the time being within the capitalism that sets the limits of their thought and practice. This means that we shall be harangued, from both inside and outside the trade unions, to fight for what we already have by way of pay, security, conditions and pensions. Of course, the fact that we can be cast from employment into unemployment, or have our wages frozen or reduced, is one facet of our alienation, one manifestation of the basic fact that we serve a separate and autonomous economy as its slaves and the economy does not serve us. Let us, therefore, by all means refuse to accept the restructuring plans that affect not just us personally but also other workers. But alienation is neither abolished nor mitigated by preserving or improving the terms and conditions of our labour. Let us, therefore, by all means begin with a refusal to kowtow to plans for restructuring; but, if we do not wish to remain in the misery within commodity abundance in which most of us now subsist, let us on no account end there. We have tried ‘good’ jobs and ‘good’ wages; but they are not enough. We have already spent years striving to stay where we are in this society or to make ourselves better off in its terms; but no matter how successful we have been, we have still ended up lost. We simply cannot find an individual and collective life worth living in alienated work and the alienated world of consumption to which that work gives rise; it is time that we confronted in thought and deed our endlessly frustrated efforts to do so.

11.

One extreme wing of trade unionist reformism consists of the tattered remnants of the revolutionary left. Emboldened by the appearance of grave economic problems, and undeterred by a history of prognostic failure that has seen them earnestly predict the death crisis of capitalism in each of the last 100 years or so, the more ludicrous elements of this spectrum are once again fervently proclaiming that the end is nigh. But while they are waiting for the ever-worse–to-come promised by their musty theology to provide both them and us with an external motivation to take up revolutionary contestation, at least a few of them are loudly trumpeting a trade unionist fundamentalism. This may go as far as discarding as irredeemably corrupt the trade union form, but beneath its colourful revolutionary rhetoric its objective remains the usual paltry trade unionist aspiration to obtain more of what this society offers. All this deserves to be treated with contempt; and so too do the absurd sub-Dickensian fantasies of grinding material deprivation which these antiquarians confuse for the reality of the life of the ordinary worker in advanced capitalist societies. The ability of leftists to blind themselves to what is in front of their eyes is remarkable, but it is not a habit to be encouraged. Our point of departure must be the actual alienation and poverty of everyday life within generalized affluence that we in the west experience now and not the forms of impoverishment that afflicted our great-great-great grandparents. Let the dead bury the dead; negation begins at home: in and against the lived experience of the present.

No copyright

A discussion with Ken Knabb

The reflections on 2007 that I sent to Ken Knabb on 18 January 2008 led to a discussion between us. The following are the texts of our postings to date.

1) Ken Knabb to Wayne Spencer, 18 January 2008

Thanks for your message. I did not mind its lengthiness since it was all very interesting and well thought out and expressed. I suggest that you add it to your blog, slightly revised so as to refer to me in the third person (or if you prefer, left as is and presented as a "Letter to Ken Knabb"). It raises a lot of key issues on a lot of fronts, and might well help to sort out your relations with various people you know or have collaborated with in some of the projects you discuss.

Regarding your remarks on my post-Notice activities, you are no doubt partially right. On the other hand, I'm not sure that this is an either-or question. Meditation can indeed have some of the dubious aspects you mention, but it can also (or even at the same time) be a worthwhile venture for its own sake. Ditto folk music, rock climbing, or just about any other sort of art, sport, "spiritual" path, etc. It is possible to criticize such activities insofar as they contain illusions about themselves, but exclusively stressing such critiques sometimes becomes rather silly when the critiquers find that they have painted themselves into a corner where they hesitate to engage in anything whatsoever because virtually any sort of activity could be seen as representing some sort of compromise or cooption. I have indeed to some extent "stepped back from a critical examination of the development of contemporary alienation (and the resistance to it)", mostly because many of the manifestations of such resistance have never interested me. Rather than burn myself out arguing about things that I find obnoxious or boring, I find it more pleasant to do (and talk about) things that I find engaging.

Anyway, I encourage you to continue in this exploratory, experimental mode, and to communicate your findings ever more aggressively (via blogs, forums, emails, print publications, film, etc.) without being discouraged by initially disappointing responses.

Incidentally, what is your blog URL? I'm not sure you ever told me about it. (You might want to consider shifting to a website, which is scarcely any more complicated than a blog, but is suitable for more sustained texts as opposed to daily brief comments.)


2) Wayne Spencer to Ken Knabb, 20 January 2008

Thank you for your message.

I not wish to deny that there are pleasures and benefits to be found in meditation and the other activities you mentioned. However, I think we must be keenly aware that contemporary spectacular society increasingly secures the acquiescence of ordinary people (including, of course, ourselves) less through crude repressions than by means of the pleasures it fosters and delivers. If we are not to enter the spectacle of decomposition as one more voice condemning the dominant society in abstraction while at the same time extolling one or another consumable niche, we surely must be critical of our own pleasures and the pleasures of others. We should acknowledge that any pleasure that is consistent with the persistence of spectacular society is in all probability at least partly spectacular in nature; and, in that spirit, we should seek out and expose the alienated origins (or distortions) of the tastes we pleasurably indulge. Equally, we should not deny or conceal the awareness that such pleasures are inadequate, that the multiple confinements to which our pleasures are inevitably subject within a society of separation render them more or less paltry, especially when the possibilities of the epoch are considered.

What I have in mind is thus a balance between taking such pleasure as we can, if only to keep ourselves from depression, isolation and madness, and feeling and manifesting contempt and dissatisfaction toward those same pleasures.

Even if you take the view that you are pursuing a particular activity for its intrinsic rewards and not because one or other of the competing spectacles of consumable satisfaction has cultivated a taste for it, it is hardly likely that everyone else in the social environment in which that activity is conducted (such as a monastery or temple) is equally free of illusion. One outcome of your own participation in the activity will therefore be to support and advance the illusions indulged in by others. Is that not another good reason for making a clear and public statement of the ideologies that surround and suffuse the milieu, even if you feel you steer clear of them personally?

Be cruel with your pleasures and with everything that would keep them where they are, as it were.

For myself, one of the objectives I contemplate for my text on Berlin is precisely to attack the pleasures I take during my visits to the city.

You mentioned that you have never been interested in many of the manifestations of resistance to contemporary alienation. What actions do you have in mind here?

I think I shall take up your suggestion of adding my last message to you to my blog. The blog can be found at http://significantfailure.blogspot.com/.


3) Ken Knabb to Wayne Spencer, 21 January 2008

I understand the points you are making and agree with them to a certain extent. But I believe that if you stick too narrowly to these notions you will arrive at nothing but a very silly and pointless souring of everything you do. Strictly speaking, your points could apply to virtually anything — enjoying food and drink, making love, taking a walk in the woods, relaxing, dancing, humming a tune, playing a game, etc., etc. All of these things are indeed “allowed” by the current social system and could be said to “support” or “reinforce” it insofar as they help keep people physically and mentally functional, help prevent them from going insane or committing suicide, make the society seem somewhat more tolerable, take up time that might otherwise be devoted to radical activity, etc. Does that mean that each time you sit down to a meal with some friends you should remind them that what they are about to do is not revolutionary, and urge them to guard against the possibility that the pleasure of the food and socializing may tend to make them feel a little less angry and alienated? When I sing folk songs with some friends, would you suggest that I preface each song with a grim acknowledgment that singing it is “consistent with the persistence of spectacular society” and “at least partly spectacular in nature”?

As for ”clear and public statements”, I have made a number of relatively sharp critiques of the limitations of Buddhist ideas and practices (notably my two leaflets re engaged Buddhism, but also scattered remarks in “The Joy of Revolution,” The Realization and Suppression of Religion, my autobiography and elsewhere re the downsides of religion, the limits of nonviolence, etc.). Many of the people I have practiced Zen with over the years are well aware of my views, and some of them share them to some extent even if they do not fully grasp the whole situationist perspective. In any case, I don’t go there to discuss politics but to take part in the practice, which involves paying wholehearted attention to whatever it is we’re doing at the moment, however seemingly “paltry” and insignificant. Our present-day lives obviously fall far short of what they could be in a more sanely organized society, but I think it is missing the point to conclude that we should constantly “manifest contempt and dissatisfaction” toward the pleasures available to us now. A postrevolutionary society, if we are ever lucky enough arrive at one, will not be some nonstop orgasm. Its pleasures will still consist largely of simple little things like a kiss, a smile, a song, a cup of tea, a breath of fresh air, though such things will be multiplied and enrichened by the radically different social context in which they occur.

Just as I have no significant problem with many of these limited activities, I also have no problem if someone makes a more aggressive and explicit critique of them. I think that’s fine, I’m all for it if you happen to be particularly moved to do so. But you have to bear in mind that this sort of thing gets awfully old awfully fast. I disrupted a couple of poetry readings back in 1970 (the Gary Snyder reading and also the Ode on the Absence of Real Poetry Here This Afternoon that I read at an open reading), but I have not done so since then. If the issue comes up, I may tell someone that I like this or that poem but that on the whole I see certain limitations in poetry, and perhaps mention my Snyder disruption or the situationist ideas about the realization and suppression of art. I still feel very good about having done that Snyder disruption because it represented a personal turning point for me as well as a challenge for others — as I said in the autobiography, I believe that at that moment I was in a sense being more truly creative and “poetic” than Snyder was. But if I had continued to show up at every local poetry reading with substantially the same critique it would soon have become completely boring for me as well as for everyone else, and would have been unlikely to inspire any interest at all. You have to keep moving.

In this regard, I encourage you to approach Berlin with an open mind — ready indeed to call attention to its problems, but also ready to appreciate whatever you may discover that is new and unexpected. I will have no interest in reading a thousandth version of how alienated modern cities are, but I will read with interest a candid account of your experiences and experiments there, which will naturally include, but hopefully not be dominated by, your awareness of the city’s problematic aspects.

To sum up, if you feel deeply MOVED to express critiques of the illusions or limitations involved in this or that activity, by all means do so. But I think that people who DWELL on such things rarely accomplish anything but souring their own lives and boring everyone else.


4) Wayne Spencer to Ken Knabb, 30 January 2008

Thank you for the copy of your latest contribution to our discussion.

I agree with you that a narrow and mechanistic approach to questioning our pleasures would be self-defeating, ineffective and absurd. That is not what I am proposing. I am not suggesting that every pleasurable act should be prefaced or accompanied by public denunciation. Rather, I think that a suitable balance must be struck between the quiet indulgence in what we enjoy or need to survive and both:

(i) a subjective awareness, however intermittent or belated, of the limitations of what we are engaged in and the wider ideological delusions surrounding it; and

(ii) from time to time, appropriate, well-timed and well-placed public actions against those limitations and delusions.

Such a way of proceeding would have several aims. It would seek periodically to reconnect us with the dissatisfaction with concrete everyday life that should lie at the root of the desire and motivation for revolutionary change. It would prompt us periodically to confront at least a part of the shifting complex of external thoughts, tastes, desires and associated complacencies that we, in common with everyone else, adopt or absorb from fragments of the global spectacle and which tends to maintain us as producers and consumers of the commodity society. It would also, perhaps, prompt us to keep our theory more abreast of broad contemporary developments that affect the alienation of ourselves and others.

I agree that it is hardly plausible (or even desirable) to think that any post-revolutionary society will be perpetually orgasmic in nature. And far be it from me to disparage the pleasures of tea-drinking, whether before or after the revolution. However, the apparently basic pleasures you list do not exist in isolation. In practice, they are pursued and experienced as part of diverse ideologies of pleasure. I regard a critique of those surrounding ideologies as a central task of revolutionary theory.

Of course, I am aware of the criticism of Buddhist ideas and practices that you have expressed, and I am not suggesting that you have been wholly uncritical. One thing you do not seem to have developed, however, is an account of how those ideas and practices are being carried along by important changes within commodity society. In your Remarks on Contradiction and its Failure you went beyond the criticism of the particular ideas and practices that you and your colleagues were then concerned with and sought to show how those ideological phenomena pertained to “a wider and yet nonetheless delimited social stratum”. I may be mistaken, but it strikes me that you have not attempted anything analogous in relation to the social (including ideological) bases of contemporary Western Buddhism and other meditational practices.

For myself, my plan is not to write a candid account of my experiences and experiments in Berlin, although I recognise that that would have some value. Rather, I have it in mind to look in more general terms at some of the milieu and activities with which people like me are associated, as well as at some of the changes that Berlin has experienced since 1989.

2007 and I

On 6 January 2007, Ken Knabb, of the Bureau of Public Secrets, circulated his annual New Year News and Greetings to certain friends and acquantances. Intrigued by his example of looking back at his life and the wider society during the year just passed, I decided to reply to him in kind. This is what I wrote on 18 January 2008:

As you kindly sent me your reflections on the year just passed, I thought I would respond in kind.

2007 was a significant year for me, as it marked some important steps in my public return to a politics I had abandoned some 20 years ago. There were many reasons for this return, but some of the most immediate had to do with my consumption of culture.

A few years ago, my musical tastes moved from older mainstream jazz first to modern jazz, then free jazz, then the less jazz-inflected European free improvisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and finally to a form of music sometimes referred to as “reductionism” (borrowing an old formulation of mine, “reductionism” can be defined as wholly or partly improvised music that to a large degree utilizes microtonality, extended playing techniques, pianissimo dynamics, small gestures, silence, austerity, and unconventional sounds and timbres that blur the distinctions between music and noise). Along the way, I became intrigued by the notion (largely derived from the writings of improvising drummer Eddie Prévost) that the relations within freely improvising music ensembles and between such ensembles and the audience constituted a radical prefiguration of liberated, non-capitalist social relations. I also became convinced that reductionism’s refusal of the arbitrary conventions of tonal music and the loud and frenetic activity characteristic of certain sectors of contemporary society were subversive in nature. In the course of 2005 and early 2006, this philosophy of mine began to collapse. I was by then not just attending performances and listening to recordings, but also organising events as a volunteer member of a non-profit music promoter, writing reviews for publication online, and meeting and corresponding with musicians and some of the more dedicated aficionados of the genre. At length, I found it impossible to escape the conclusion that the political significance I imputed to the music existed only in my imagination. While many of the musicians were very pleasant individuals, almost none seriously regarded the music as having a substantial element of political praxis. Their perspectives were aesthetic, and their goal was the production of merely artistic performances and objects. Far from challenging the wider socio-political order, they sought only to find ways of operating within a framework of commodification, hierarchical social relations and cultural institutions that was largely taken for granted or viewed as unchangeable. They did whatever they needed to do to promote their music in a world of CD sales, concerts, state subsidies, radio programmes, etc. On the side of the audience, the supposedly radical effects of the music were equally hard to find. At bottom, the people who admired the music were much like any other musical fans. They avidly collected and discussed musical commodities, experiences and gossip. They had their heroes and their villains. They cherished the music simply as sound and analysed it in abstraction with the aid of various religious and philosophical views. They left each musical experience just as they entered it, returning to carry on their everyday lives of work and consumption much as before. In short, I recognised that the individuals involved in improvised music may in some instances have disdained the dominant society but their musical practices did not challenge that society. Moreover, neither musicians nor audience felt any great concern about the accommodation they had reached with the society. Whatever egalitarian relations it may transiently establish between performers in the separate world of the stage, improvised music helps produce and maintain everyday lives that are as a matter of practice resigned to the domination of the commodity-economy and its state.

My relationship with improvised music reached a point of crisis in early 2006. The music itself had been changing, shifting away from the quiet and austere sounds that I had enjoyed. More important, I had been working on a text, The New Improvised Music, that was intended to set out at length the political aspects of the music. The more I thought about the subject and interrogated my experiences, the more the philosophy I had meant to expand and expound turned to dust in my hands. The last draft I produced, dated March 2006, observes that the radical outcomes suggested as possible are not often found in practice. The text was then abandoned, having been circulated to a few friends and correspondents. I also dropped all my work as a critic and stepped down from the promoter with which I had been involved.

Another area of cultural consumption that led me to reflect more critically on my everyday life was the cinematic depiction of contemporary existence being produced by such directors as Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang and Hong Sang-Soo. Working with long takes, expressionless acting, minimal or fumbling dialogue, eventless or miserable plots, and ugly locales, this work can at times produce an unflinching portrait of the sheer, ghastly banality of everyday life in consumer societies. As such, it is a sobering experience. However, the films themselves offer no remedy for this evisceration of life, and neither do the practices of those involved in making and making available the film, consisting as they do of raising large amounts of state or private institutional money; constructing over time an aesthetic object under the hierarchical control of the director and various specialists; engaging in sustained conventional publicity for the benefit of capitalists, institutional managers and the passive public in order to secure and promote the release of the film; placing the film to be viewed in isolation by strangers who disperse afterwards; and then finally returning to the beginning of the cycle simply to repeat the process once again. It was necessary, I concluded, to step beyond the world of film. In order to negate the life the films portray, it is necessary to negate the world of which the making, showing and viewing of such films is an ordinary and supportive part.

A third cultural cause was a certain line of European fiction that takes a dark and sometimes savagely critical view of society, such as the work of the Austrian novelists Thomas Bernhard and Elfrida Jelinek. What I have already said about films applies equally to these books.

Of course, this cultural consumption did not have its effects in isolation from my everyday life as a whole. Rather it fed upon and advanced a dissatisfaction that was already there. I have not thought about this matter as much as I need to, however I suspect that the banalization produced by new waves of capitalist reconstruction of Britain’s cities and fresh economic growth played a significant part of the burgeoning of my dissatisfaction, especially when taken in conjunction with the mounting evidence of the serious environmental degradation arising out of capitalist production and consumption. The physical and social environments are being comprehensively remade. Production of commodities has reached such a fever pitch as to threaten the very survival of the planet. The individual is typically growing more affluent and consumes ever more. But what is the result? Nothing but mounting rubbish, in every domain of life.

My working life as a minor state functionary has doubtless also played a role. Having contrived to reduce the actual time I spend working to just an hour or two a day, I have created the opportunity to appreciate more vividly the misery and stupidity of the work I do. A sense that I probably have limited opportunities to escape through the fake novelty of taking up a new job (being too specialised and short of marketable skills), and that at age 43 my life is passing me by, also no doubt contributed, amongst many other things.

In an attempt to understand my life and the society in which I find myself, I read widely. Amongst other things, I took in academic social science, fashionable theorists such as Žižek and Negri, less fashionable figures such as Takis Fotopoulos, old Marxists such as Korsch, newer strands of Marxism such as that of CLR James, Castoriadis, and the Italian theorists of the 60s and 70s, plus a selection of contemporary anarchists and non-Leninist communists. Although I found some fragments of illumination here and there (for example, in the work of a group of British sociologists who have looked at the development of a hedonistic night-time economy to replace the decayed heavy industrial economy of parts of Britain), I was driven to the conclusion that only the work of the situationists provided a substantial basis for a critical theoretical engagement with the alienations of the ordinary person in advanced capitalist societies.

Looking around for contemporary material that draws on situationist theory, I soon found that the individuals who had been associated with the Declaration Concerning the Center for Research on the Social Question and the Notice Concerning the Reigning Society and Those Who Contest It and who had largely been responsible for extending situationist theory after the demise of the SI had largely abandoned the field. The one exception, of course, is you. I see that you have refined and added to your invaluable translations of the situationists (especially with your translation of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’) and that you added a number of new works of your own (notably the autobiography and ‘The Joy of Revolution’) in a new style that evidently aims for greater simplicity of expression. However, my sense is that in the post-Notice period you have somewhat stepped back from a critical examination of the development of contemporary alienation (and the resistance to it). Relatedly, you seem to have grown publicly rather uncritical about your own cultural consumption (Rexroth, rock-climbing, meditation, folk music, etc). This is not to say that there is no criticism at all, but at least some your personal enthusiasms touch on important developments in commodity society about which you are silent. For example, meditation would appear to be one facet of a constellation of ‘non-material’ and non-mundane consumption that now offers distinction, enlightenment or patient resignation to sectors of society who have either satisfied their basic needs to their own satisfaction or consumed the more ordinary and tangible commodities to the point of nauseous exhaustion. Moreover, in an age in which ecological pressures, and the patent failure of increased consumption to produce a better quality of life, might yet dictate a general shift away from resource-intensive consumption, ‘spiritual’ practices might perhaps best be thought of as an avant-garde laboratory for the reformed alienation of coming years. Your own experience might shed light on these hypotheses.

I also see some other familiar figures at work on the World Wide Web, for example Nick Brandt at Endangered Phoenix and the Wise brothers at Revolt Against an Age of Plenty. Unfortunately, these three appear to have been catastrophically affected by the rise of Thatcherism and the defeat of the miners, amongst others. They see the decimation of the old manufacturing industries and the resulting desperate lumpenproletarianization that has afflicted some of the working class areas those industries previously sustained. They also see some of newer types of work that have arisen, but only those with the very worst pay and conditions. What they do not perceive are the innumerable fairly or very well-paid jobs that survived Thatcherism or developed under or after it. The result is a frankly absurd caricature of poverty and dereliction that is far removed from the conditions of the average proletarian in modern Britain, one they share with the vast majority of anarchists and leftists, it seems. Brandt, Wise and Wise are undoubtedly right when they contrast the industrial militancy of the 1970s with the relative quiescence of today; however, it is a simple fact that the ordinary worker today is very considerably more affluent than his counterpart in the 1970s. That reality must be at the heart of any revolutionary theory about contemporary conditions in this country.

Looking further afield, I see numerous new translations of texts by the SI and former members of the SI albeit that the majority appear to be execrable (Bill Brown in particular has converted the unavailable into the unreadable on a quite industrial scale). Sadly, there appears to have been very few fresh and incisive applications and developments of situationist theory in recent years. Worse still, elements of the academy have taken up the situationists with gusto, transforming abstracted and misunderstood fragments of that theory into material for empty speculation, disarmed analysis, inconsequential debate, and the approval-seeking displays of bored students in search of qualifications.

During 2006 I decided that I should publish a text that would help clarify for myself why the revolutionary promise of the 1970s has not materialized and perhaps stimulate thought and debate amongst others considering the same issue from a revolutionary point of view. I also hoped that it would serve as a small contribution to resharpening situationist theory as a critical tool in contemporary conditions. The result was my text Gasping from out the Shallows, which was written over the Christmas period and then revised in early 2007. I printed a couple of hundred copies, some of which I offered to bookshops and distributors, and sent electronic copies to a few individuals I thought might be interested. I did not have any very definite expectations for the text, although I thought its criticisms of the proletariat and its assertion that the proletariat remained generally affluent might prove controversial. In the event, the response to date has been minimal. Sales have been quite slow. A few people have written to offer brief praise or brief criticism (the latter mostly being focussed on my comments about economic struggles), but in general it seems to have sparked little interest or public reflection. Why is that, I wonder? The text itself undoubtedly has problems. It was written quite quickly and revised even more quickly. I was very aware that the task of looking at four different areas of class struggle and providing the beginnings of an analysis of contemporary alienation was a huge one, and I was keen not to allow it to overwhelm me. In particular, I suspected it would prove easy to use deficiencies of structure or style as excuses for endlessly delaying, and ultimately abandoning, the project, so I had resolved to complete the text in a short time and then put it beyond prevarication or recall by publishing it immediately. In this way, I ensured that the text appeared but guaranteed that it would be deficient. Looking back at it now, I find the language rather turgid and the syntax sometimes wayward. The historical sections are also poorly structured and argued, with the result that my point has not been adequately conveyed in places. Other faults include a lack of concrete detail, which I suspect may make the discussion very abstract for those not familiar with the subject matter, and a failure to look at some of the issues dialectically. The text perhaps succumbs to catastrophism in its too rigid separation of the failed 70s and the contemporary period. It would have been better to examine the whole period from them to now more clearly and expressly in terms of the development of a proletarian dissatisfaction that has all along been entangled with the spectacle and that has sometimes been suborned and diverted by that entanglement and sometimes reacted against the recuperation that has resulted. I offered some remarks about how a continued adhesion to spectacular ideologies and practices contributed to the hobbling of proletarian resistance, but in each case that resistance simply disappears at some point in the text, as if some long-lasting absorption had abruptly descended.

In addition to the deficiencies of the text, and doubtless its invisibility to many, I suspect that a simple lack of interest in the kinds of question I raise has operated against my text.

Gasping was followed in June by On Lice and Fleas, a text built around the conflict between the Iranian and American governments. I intended that the text should range much more widely than a standard leftist tract denouncing American imperialism and perhaps the Iranian state. I wanted to look quite broadly at how the threat of such a conflict, and any actual conflict, might feed the false opposition that sustains rather than threatens the dominant society. I am not completely dissatisfied with the text. It is not sufficiently concrete in places and a couple of stupid last-minute changes served only to introduce errors; nonetheless, it’s generally better written than ‘Gasping’ and offers some pertinent and not-too-commonly expressed critical positions. That said, it was not directed at a concrete struggle and was launched into a vacuum. I have also relied on the internet to diffuse it amongst those interested, as well as emailing copies to a few rather far-left Iranian organisations (including the Komiteye Hamahangim, which I criticised). I doubt that has worked. One way or another, the text appears to have been a failure. As far as I can tell, it has made no impression whatsoever on anyone. A quick internet search suggests that it has been universally overlooked or ignored.

One of the recipients of the text was nothingness.org ‘situationist’ discussion list. In my experience, the list largely serves to exchange snide remarks, ancient texts, recommendations for cultural consumption, conventional discussion of news items, and absurd conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. I wondered, however, whether there may be a few lurkers who remained on the list just to pick up the odd useful item. My text prompted a lengthy discussion, albeit one concerned mostly with fragments of Gasping. It was a perfectly dismal experience. It may have led me to give some thought as to the relationship of theory to everyday life in a non-revolutionary epoch; but at length I became weary of arguing with people who seemed mainly concerned to deny that they themselves were proletarians or that proletarians were capable of becoming revolutionary. I signed off the list.

In terms of further texts, I have spent some time thinking about possible texts about Berlin (a city I visit quite often) and about the ideology of ‘affluenza’. They may be written this year. However, I am at present unsure that there is much point writing about such general phenomena.

I opened a blog this year, mostly because I was too lazy to start a website proper. I have added little to it beyond my two main texts. I do not have the time or inclination to engage in the habitual, daily commentary seemingly expected of the blogger. I am inclined to close it down. Indeed, a few weeks without the internet forced on me by a corruption in Windows made me aware of how much time I waste via the internet. For people generally, it seems in practice mainly to facilitate a ceaseless and enveloping immersion in inconsequence.

Finally, at work I have been involved in various strikes this year. The disputes concerned job cuts and a below-inflation pay deal. The public sector is the last redoubt of trade unionism in Britain, with membership rates of around 80%, I believe. The effects are nefarious. There is no conception of autonomous action, and not even the example of the postal workers has sparked the slightest interest in wildcat practices. The disputes have also, as usual, raised no passion or critical views of the wider system. Each strike is like a public holiday, with no discussion or debate before or after a strike and no collective activity; we all just shuffle off home for a day off. And, of course, the large majority of us know that we will survive the staffing reductions and the poor pay deal. Most of us would even survive forced transfer or redundancy (many may well be praying for the latter, as the payoff would be a good one). To some extent our indifference reflects the stakes for us.

My apologies for going on at such length.

[This message subsequently led to this exchange.]