The Annals of Significant Failure

Correspondence with Siddiq Khan

2012-02-11T20:12:00.003Z

An (ongoing) exchange of correspondence between myself and Siddiq Khan about what we can do to hasten the end of this rotten world can be found on his Love Letters Journal.

The Palace of Exile: Fragments from the Notes of a Tourist in Prague

2012-02-11T19:37:00.008Z

“From time to time I tried to realize my unhappiness. I barely succeeded.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 25 January, 1912)

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Work has once again become insufferable. Why? Where should I begin? Interfering managers and infuriating targets? Smiling contempt and “meaningless achievement” (Kafka)? Perhaps the staff cuts that remind me that I am nothing more than a disposable tool of management or the growing insistence that I engage enthusiastically in my alienation? Suffice it to say that being compelled to spend so much time, with so many other people, creating this absurd and unwanted society has left me sorely in need of a break. Not that it will really help. Everything will be the same when I return. All the same, I shall go. We have become used to making these false choices. “Anything is better than working,” we tell ourselves. We then take a week or two off in the very world that work has built.

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“Of course, to a certain extent this is a belief that I grasp at when I am already on the window sill.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 15 August, 1913)

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The alienation of work cannot be softened or escaped, it can only be abolished. Alas, the systematic revolutionary reconstruction of this society, the taking back and transformation of the social, economic and political powers that have escaped us, is not immediately at hand. What is worse, in many time and places, profound dissatisfaction with everyday life has been so deeply buried that it is, for the time being, entirely subterranean. How is one to live in these frozen lands? Amongst other things, we must surely take what pleasures we can, when we can. But the pleasures we are able to enjoy, the tastes they gratify, are so often small, unworthy and imposed. If we are not to shrivel into petty cogs of consumer capitalism, we must, I think, unsettle our pleasures: trip them up, force their shortcomings before our unwilling eyes, poison them even as we swallow them down. If this means that, sooner or later, the permitted pleasures come to be unbearable to us, then so be it.

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To the airport by rail. The usual ugly trains and tiresome changes. The usual frustrating crowds. The problem is not the number of people but the void between them: the lack of real social relations. The same ubiquitous dreams of happiness, the same obligations, may draw us to the same spaces. They may even prompt us to exchange money now and again. For practical purposes, however, we are nothing to each other but obstacles. We decide and do nothing together.

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In the same way, the repulsive quality of airports is not a matter of their admittedly stupendous ugliness alone. What is most bleak about them is that they are mechanisms for the mechanical transportation of separated bodies and other commodities. All the passengers have in common is that they are being moved for money.

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Airports have a habit of looking like warehouses for people because that is what they are.

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In this airport, the sole way to reach the waiting area is through the middle of a shop. The marketing of cynicism, brutality and despair has no place here. Everything is bright and supposedly elegant. If life sometimes seems a little drab (and who in an airport could deny this?), it can be remedied, the smiling surroundings imply, by a dash of stylishness. This antidote of style has no substance. In our world, there is no graceful use of life. There are only symbols of sophistication to display in its absence.

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The café in which we while away too much time drinking mediocre coffee is, inevitably, filled with background music. What would happen if the music was turned off? Would the profound absence of life, if once laid bare, drag everything and everyone into a singular and paralyzing desolation?

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The waitress has a cheerful and pleasant air. It is not hard to allow yourself to be charmed by this. But it is probably deceptive mimicry on her part. At least, I hope so. There is nothing cheerful or pleasant in her situation. She has no reason to be amiable to me. She is selling a commodity on behalf of her employers and I am buying it. That’s all. There is nothing between us as individuals. The quality of the transaction would be the same if I ordered from a vending machine.

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In an airport, one mainly waits. It would be tempting to say that life is suspended there, were it not that life is no less absent elsewhere. Outside the airport, our lives may be busy but they are equally passive, in the sense that they defined in every respect by our subservience to the economy and the state. The inertness of waiting makes our position clear. We do not like this. It chafes against our illusions.

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The illusion of freedom is paper-thin in an airport. One is rudely and nakedly pushed around by one imposed procedure, one authority, after another.

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Turning the old dream of human flight into reality is an impressive technological accomplishment. It has been squandered on shipping, petty games, aerial bombing and air pollution. Capitalism can make no better use of the sky than it can the ground.

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I exchange a single word with the person sitting to my right. He sleeps through the rest of the flight. This is a relief. We share no practical project. We have nothing to say to each other beyond trivia. An hour’s empty chatter would have been a misery.

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“I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 28 July, 1914)

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A tunnel, such as a passenger cabin, often intrigues. You are surrounded on all sides by surfaces in close proximity. The atmosphere is also, perhaps, a little charged by claustrophobia. What might we do with this? Within an aircraft, light, sound, temperature and air pressure could all be varied. So too could the characteristics of the surfaces that bear upon us. What could be brought to life in this way? The answer of the current designers of passenger aircraft, whose conclusions are imposed upon us, is nothing. Nothing is meant to happen on their jets. Isolated units of humanity are quietly and passively carried from one place to another. The décor reflects this drab function. It settles for a reassuring intimation of technological modernity and as much of textbook elegance as can be conveyed by white pre-moulded plastic.

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The cabin attendants have largely given up the appearance of cheerful care they are paid to project. They seem to prefer the reserved air of competence associated with the professional. Perhaps this keeps at bay the unhappy thought that they are, to a large extent, airborne waiters. Not that there is any especial shame in being a waiter. It merely appears so to those who are concerned about their status in this society.

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From time to time, one musters a little interest in the land and sea to be seen from the window. It is hard to sustain. It is not our world. We soon tire of what we only see.

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A carton of salad, mass-produced in a factory and chilled to the point of tastelessness. Its plastic wrapping enjoins me to “Be Invited.” Pseudo-language for pseudo-food.

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The stewardess gives me a half a cup of coffee. She promises to return with more but doesn’t. I don’t complain. There is no more terrible thing than expecting someone to do his or her job properly. As with other forms of murder, it should not be indulged in lightly.

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Air travel contains its share of the paltry privileges this society extends to those it values most. The pallid elite in business class board the plane just a little before everyone else. They sit behind a small curtain that separates their seats from the identical ones beyond. They are entitled to a different set of equally mediocre goods. On arrival, the demands of the economy drag them away first.

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“Security with a smile” a sign at the transfer airport promises. The grim-faced official who snarls at me at the X-ray machine does not feel the need to act out this insincerity. He is not yet required to disguise his irritation and contempt with upturned lips. He should not be consoled by this easement. The corners of his mouth may be his own. During working hours, however, everything else is his employer’s.

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“You will see that you are nothing but a rat’s nest of miserable dissimulations.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 7 January, 1915)

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At Frankfurt airport, as the plane taxies across the runways, we are briefly surrounded by a lattice of multi-coloured lights laid across the tarmac. This saturation in colour is as lovely and unusable as a firework display seen over prison walls.

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The desolation of Ruzyně airport at Prague spreads into the surrounding area. Warehouses, light industrial estates, car parks, business parks, roads and other antitheses of human life cluster around the airstrip like secondary cancers. A merchandizer of masochism such as Will Self may find it profitable to walk through such wastelands, but for most of us the view from the 100 bus to Zličín metro station reveals all we need to know about the calamity that has descended.

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A five-star hotel (cheap during the off-season). A luxurious appearance, a calculated display of the emblems of the upmarket. There must, it seems, be expensive-looking fabrics and ostentatious padding behind the bed, even though they offer no practical benefits; and a very wide television, even though there is nothing to watch on it. Also, the bathroom must have marble-like surfaces, even though marble would serve no function in the room and the material actually used only looks like marble. It is a matter of pride that the entire building is so hot that one never feels the chills associated with poverty. No matter that this makes it all but impossible to sleep.

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The modern hotel breakfast buffet is an example of a consumer cornucopia. The guest is reduced to rummaging amongst a large array of rather poor goods indifferently prepared and presented by paid strangers. All you do is eat and perhaps exchange a little desultory conversation with the one or two people with whom you are sharing your isolated passivity. And as you are largely confined to eating, you typically eat too much. A true, wider satisfaction is impossible. You graze in vain until your stomach complains.

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“It has meaning but is weak; its blood flows thin, too far from the heart.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 27 May 1914)

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At the centre of the city, Prague becomes a parody of itself, a fantasy of historical fragments and national stereotypes projected for the benefit of tourists. Despite this, one can still, amongst the back streets and courtyards of Staré Město, come across a few resonant places of promise. In his 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels excoriated “multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks,” “the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan” and “long narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately.” Of course, Engels was rightly outraged by the poor sanitation and flimsy construction of the rookeries of his time, but his hostility to the unmethodical layout of these warrens was misguided, as we can see from the desolations subsequently created by the architectural partisans of imposed regularity. It is precisely to the irregular, the intricate, the labyrinthine, the enclosed, that I am drawn. It is there that a few intimations can be found of a potent and poetic architecture, an urbanism capable of sustaining adventure, liberation and free social relations. There that the desirable city and the city of desire tingle in the distance.

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One of Prague’s more attractive features is its old doorways, with their statues, decorated panels, carved arches, trellis ironwork and house emblems. The question these enticing portals pose is “what lies within?” The answer, under capitalism, is “nothing much.” There is only ever work, commodity consumption, domestic life, or parking.

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In general, Prague at eye level is insufferable. It has been despoiled by commercial relations and vulgarized by commercial publicity.

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“Happy of heart I climbed the hill
To contemplate the town in its enormity
Brothel and hospital, prison, purgatory, hell.”
(Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, 1869)

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The tower at Petřín. The cold and misty day has covered the 299 steps in ice, which adds just a little excitement to my ascent and descent. It also ensures that not much can be seen from the top. There is a better view across the city from the Žižkov television tower. From such points of vantage, the tourist passively consumes a panoramic image of a city from which he or she is separated. It is the quintessence of tourism, one could perhaps say. The views are also popular with residents. They too consume images of life in Prague. As workers and good citizens, they are also required to produce them.

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A number of large crawling babies have been attached to the television tower. This empty incongruity gives tourists something to photograph. It also helps to market both the tower and David Černý, the celebrity artist.

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"Made jottings on the trip in another notebook. Began things that went wrong. But I will not give up in spite of insomnia, headaches, a general incapacity.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 29 July, 1914)

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One of the pleasures of visiting another part of the world is eating new and different food, and reacquainting oneself with not-easily-found pleasures, such as goulash. Commodification corrodes this pleasure. It spreads the standardized mediocrity of chains, converts a subset of the local cuisine into a stereotyped ‘tradition’ that is petrified or adjusted to the tastes of tourists, and fosters the pseudo-innovations of fashionable restaurants. It also typically ensures that the diner has reified relations of exchange with the staff and proprietor and no relations at all, beyond simple physical proximity, with everyone else in the establishment. Even on the busiest and most raucous of nights, a restaurant is occupied by the solitary.

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In Prague, as elsewhere, takeaway pizza is ubiquitous. It frees us from cooking, promises intensity, and always disappoints. It is yet another false liberation.

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I see almost no rowdy drunks in the streets and bars, despite the fact that the Czech Republic has the beer consumption per capita in the world. The bellowing sub-adventures that many of the British associate with free and intense living do not appear to be a large part of the local alienation. The two quietly-unsteady men next to me in the Restaurant Zlatý klas have perhaps been drinking and smoking at their table, without a break, since around 1968.

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The dream of the tourist is to enter local culture. This is impossible, for the tourist is a pure consumer who is excluded from the other roles the culture contains. It is also the dream of the local to possess what this culture promises. This too is impossible, for the culture is a collection of false promises: the lies of the commodity and the state.

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Who can deny the charm of an evening stroll through the upper reaches of a quiet and misty Malá Strana, “a small town apart within another town and even more dead” (Georges Rodenbach)? For just an hour or two, the ordinary dreariness of space and time seems to be suspended. And yet, what does it say about this society, and about us, when the city appears at its best precisely in the absence of other people? What does it say when the receding enchantment of Radnicke schody, with its winding stairs, shimmering stone and occluded air, leads only to an absurd ‘Mystic Pizzeria’ and a gallery of unapologetic trash?

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"Bitter, bitter, that is the most important word. How do I intend to solder fragments together into a story that will sweep you along? (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 20 April, 1916)

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Gambra, on Černínská, is a museum of surrealism. It is supposed to be open at weekends during November. On the Saturday on which I visit, it is closed. This seems appropriate. Surrealism itself has long been reduced to rummaging through the vapid effusions of the unconscious, or the physical detritus scattered around the margins of cities, in search of the inconsequential incongruities it considers to be “marvellous.” Surviving Life, the English title of the latest film by Jan Švankmajer, seems to sum up the limits of the movement’s aspirations. A locked building is a fitting epitaph.

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Further down Černínská is the Hotel U Raka. The door was locked. A notice said that visitors must ring the bell. I did so. For some time, nothing happened. Just as I was beginning to suspect the entire street was unoccupied, the door was opened by what seemed to be the sole member of staff on duty. The narrow courtyard beyond was scattered with art works, including a number of wooden birds, and the walls of the café were lined with old items of household equipment. The employee explained, no doubt for the umpteenth time, that the house was perhaps the only surviving timber dwelling in Prague and was decorated with material created or inherited by the proprietor. This deliberately-contrived image of the “romantic” and the “unique” is sold to tourists in search of the uncommon and the sense of distinction that comes with its consumption. It is also an excuse for high prices. Still, its refreshments and open fire did not go amiss on a chilly and somewhat tiresome day.

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Prague is relatively free of surveillance cameras. Their absence makes little difference to the quality of everyday life. The problems lie elsewhere.

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In Prague, if you find yourself being observed from above, it is probably by one of the numerous statues that stand on the facades of the city’s buildings. Almost no-one now knows who these figures are or what they symbolize. They are relics. This society spreads its objects of admiration and desire through media other than stone.

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One place in which statues receive a certain fleeting attention is Charles Bridge. The tourists who cross the bridge know little or nothing about the 30 statues along its length. But they have been told that the bridge is special and somewhere they should visit, so they go. They have also been told that touching the statue of St. John of Nepomuk is part of the experience, so they do. While they are on the bridge, it may all be a bit of a blur, as they are too busy consulting their guides and capturing the experience on camera. Later, however, they and their acquaintances can watch the recordings of what was hardly seen and barely done.

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Stepping into the shopping centre next to Národní třída metro station in search of a toilet, I come across a bustle hardly found elsewhere. I almost said excitement, but that would not be the right word. Some of the shoppers are animatedly chasing the brightly-lit dreams of pleasure and modernity. Others, however, seem devoid of enthusiasm. Ecstasy is hardly on their minds. What propels their harassed and grim accumulation of commodities is, I suspect, an image of normal life and the consolation of ordinariness it promises.

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Glancing around an underground train, I am struck by how familiar everyone’s attire is. Compared to West Yorkshire, there may be more padded jackets and fewer mini-skirts but the differences are insignificant. As elsewhere in Europe and America, everyone converges on the same handful of current styles. It is the same in many other areas of life (architecture, work, etc.). For all its eddies of pseudo-individualism, the main currents in contemporary capitalism foster the crudest forms of uniformity and homogeneity.

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“Immediate contact with the workaday world deprives me – though inwardly I am as detached as I can be – of the possibility of taking a broad view of matters, just as if I were at the bottom of a ravine, with my head bowed down in addition.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 19 January, 1915)

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The old Jewish quarter of Josefov supplies the tourist with a consumable image of a vanished past. After the walls and gates of the old ghetto were removed in the early nineteenth century, wealthy and petit-bourgeois Jews gradually moved to other parts of the city. The remains of the old ghetto were then almost completely erased by a process of redevelopment that between 1896 and 1912 destroyed all but a dozen of the 260 or so stone structures that previously stood in the quarter. The Jewish population of Prague itself was decimated by the Holocaust (only 3274 of the 35,000 pre-war Jewish inhabitants of the city returned from the Nazi concentration camps) and post-war emigration. It now stands at around a thousand. In Josefov, all that remains of the former ghetto are a few physical fragments spared by the redevelopment: six of the nine synagogues that stood in 1895, the Jewish Town Hall and the old Jewish cemetery. These vestiges serve no function outside of tourism, and every glimpse inside must be paid for (even the view of the cemetery from the adjacent public toilets is blocked off). Around them throng streams of bewildered and bored tourists struggling to see what cannot be seen and feel what cannot be felt. The stallholders of U starého hřbitova, vendors of vulgar mementos, await them. Perhaps they know the tourists better than they do themselves.

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The buildings created by the redevelopment of Josefov, with their ornate profusions of cornices, columned windows, caryatides and sculptures, friezes, colours, entablatures, and other rich decorative elements, speak of the confidence of the bourgeoisie of the time. Yet their world was not to last. The sense of history that permeated their culture, their self-image as the refined developers of a civilization rooted in the classical era, has been swept away by the very economy they nurtured. Ironically, the whorehouses, disreputable bars, conmen and sellers of junk that congregated in Josefov after the ghetto dissolved seem somewhat closer to the spirit of our age than the high-minded pedants who later evicted them. The commodification of intoxication, pleasure and delusion for the masses is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. The classics are not. Even when it presents a return to tradition as an antidote to the ills that it has itself created, it is to the images of non-western or peasant practices that it turns. There is no market for togas, it seems.

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The inner ring of nineteenth and early twentieth century apartment houses that surrounds the historic centre is remarkably intact. It is possible to walk for hours within it. To someone from outside central Europe, the distinctive architecture makes a refreshing change. The handsome and ornate buildings also set me pondering about what a systematic modulation of space in the directions of play and liberation might achieve. It all soon wore thin. Merely walking and watching is enervating. And the buildings themselves, which in the end are nothing more than rather monotonously tasteful containers for the terrible poverty of family and commercial life, eventually pall.

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It is easy to see why inter-war functionalist apartment blocks have so few admirers. They reveal too starkly the ugly function they serve. They are too obviously hutches for confined people and diminished lives.

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The most recent buildings in the city provide further evidence of contemporary capitalism’s inability to build anything not deserving of immediate demolition. As the combined horrors of Nový Smíchov, Zlatý Anděl and Anděl City in Smíchov show, when the world of waged servitude, commodity exchange and policing builds for itself, when every aspect of the terrain is designed with those ends in mind, what results is a landscape of unparalleled barrenness: a perfunctorily gilded void.

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In Smíchov, an ugly flyover connecting two sections of the Strahovský traffic tunnel passes above a rotating advertising hoarding and an expanse of weed-infested ground. On nearby Grafická and Holečkova, trams and cars flow incessantly down the canyon formed by the tall apartments on either side. It is something often seen in cities today: the abolition of the street. That such abominations exist condemns this society. That we permit them to do so condemns us.

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There appear to be relatively few birds in Prague, so much so that in the centre of town one finds more jackdaws in the bookshops than in the sky. I saw only one cat in Prague, sitting on a window ledge in Palmovka. I doubt it is responsible.

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After walking down several descending streets in Žižkov to Koněvova, I come across the entrance to a long pedestrian tunnel that runs under Vitkov Hill to Pernerova in Karolin. Echoing footsteps, bands of light: it’s an intriguing place. By varying the sounds, colours, materials and light levels, one might make it something more. But first a life that is capable of properly using such an intensified space, a life that does not settle for the trivia of art and fun, has to be created.

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After leaving the tunnel, I could go left, right or straight ahead. Right is entirely unfamiliar, so I walk in that direction. It’s fairly dreary. A tram passes. I get on. It doesn’t help, and the stops don’t even appear on my map. I get off, take bearings, then, more or less at random, board another tram. This meanders through dark and uninteresting streets. It’s getting late. I get off in what seems the middle of nowhere. Nowhere turns out to Palmovka.

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Open, enthusiastic and candid encounters with strangers are far from common in our fearful and deceptive times. If I had one in Prague, it was perhaps with two delightful and frolicsome border collies I met in the Globe Bookshop. Even they, however, have their roles to play, as their dutiful performance of silly tricks later showed.

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The Vyšehrad Fortress was recreated in the nineteenth century as a tool of Czech nationalist propaganda. As ever with nationalists, the Czech ideologues sought to portray the hierarchical national structure that they themselves proposed to create as an ancient and organic entity. To this end, the old local rulers who had used the hill for their own military purposes from around the 10th century onwards were redefined as Czechs, and the archaeological fragments they had left behind were reconstructed and represented as shrines to national piety. At the same time, the cemetery at Vyšehrad was established. The purpose of this Pantheon of the great and the good was to associate the achievements of the deceased with the nation and encourage a submissive reverence amongst pilgrims. It probably still has its intended effect on the pious nationalists who visit it. Whether it speaks in the same way to the many dog-walkers and weekend picnickers is more doubtful. Certainly its original mystifications go largely unheeded by the dogs and the tourists. The latter are content to consume the general appearance of history and romance, and enjoy the views over the city. For them, the rest is a half-read and soon-forgotten entry in a guide book.

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One of those incarcerated in Vyšehrad Cemetery is the surrealist, Vítĕzslav Nezval. In 1938 he applauded the Moscow show trials; later he wrote poems in praise of Stalin (other Czech surrealists, such as Karel Teige, were not so craven). He deserves to rot in such an ignominious place.

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The Cubist architecture by Josef Chochol in the streets below Vyšehradh Hill is a complete failure. It adds a few superficial prismatic touches to buildings whose basic form and function is unchanged. They remain very ordinary bourgeois homes. A similar poverty afflicts the House of the Black Madonna in Staré Město and the cubist lamp-post on Jungmannovo namesti. If the tourist guides did not point them out, they would not even be noticed.

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And a church […] I forlornly and reluctantly went into, only because of the slight compulsion of duty that a tourist feels, and the heavy compulsion of a man expiring of futility.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 4 November, 1915)

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The interior of the Church of St. Peter and Paul at Vyšehrad is decorated in a somewhat pallid Art Nouveau style that at least has the virtue of leaving no surface uncoloured. The indifference of the Czechs to religion has rendered most of Prague’s churches redundant. What should be done with these relics? In Proposals for Rationally Improving the City of Paris (Potlatch #23, 13 October 1955) Debord, Wolman, Bernstein and Fillon respectively recommended total destruction, stripping them of their religious content, partial demolition, and transformation into houses of horror. Undoubtedly it is a matter of determining whether, in any given case, these potent mechanisms for the mystification and mutilation of the human spirit can be reconstructed to serve better ends. Would the appropriate replacement of overt religious imagery, for example, create within some former churches a beneficial atmosphere of secular calm and meditation? Such questions cannot properly be posed outside of the liberation of society and the reconstruction of individual life by and for ourselves. When we have our lives and the resources of society in our hands, then we can experiment with the churches that remain. The redevelopment of churches (into art centres, homes, etc.) by the existing society merely reallocates them from an old form of alienation to a new one.

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One evening, a few wrong turns take me to a church on Ječná dedicted to Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order. After the defeat of Protestantism in the seventeenth century, 23 medieval houses were demolished to make way for this church and a Jesuit college. Today it testifies more to the decline than the ascendancy of the church. A handful of worshippers, huddled in the half-light, mumble their way through a call and response that appears to be led by a tape-recorded voice. An imaginary communication conducted through an unreal dialogue.

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The passages of Wenceslas Square: tunnels as concentrations of commerce and commercial publicity. An upside-down horse cannot save them.

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Where am I? What’s the name of that street? Which end of the street is this and how do I get to there? Where on earth does that diverted tram run? In the course of too much painstaking navigation, the city recedes behind the map.

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In advanced western countries, the consumption of art is an important part of the ever-expanding commodity economy and the dreams of sophisticated life that appear in its catalogue of the good life. The National Gallery’s collection of modern art is housed in Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace), a seven-story functionalist building from the 1920s that previously hosted trade fairs and the headquarters of various foreign trade companies. When I visited, it was almost empty. The short distance that separates it from the centre of the city discourages tourists.

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Art and artists have failed. Having conceded the creation of everyday life and the wider world that determines it to the economy and the state, too little is left to them: the narrow confinement of school and studio; scanty materials and soon-exhausted forms; long work on objects destined to be glanced at in the margins of life; and perhaps a little of this society’s disgusting prestige. Even the strongest effects of their most powerful works are, to be honest, slight and transient. They rarely survive the ordeal of crossing the busy road outside.

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Some of the works in this gallery might be rescued, and quite literally brought to life, by being construed as blueprints. Egon Schiele’s 1911 painting of Český Krumlov, Mrtvé městoi (Dead Town), was perhaps only intended to convey the rancid petit-bourgeois spirit that drove him from the town. Arguably, however, such an intensified vision of the human environment could usefully be built as a home for heightened life, once the economic tyranny that makes all construction vain has been excised. Similarly, Aleš Veselý’s Enigma sculptures could, perhaps, be approached as proposals for labyrinths, and Jiří Valenta’s Portrait of a Blind Young Man adopted as a design for a new room for a new life. Even Michael Bielicky’s somewhat silly spiral sculpture without a name, which by accident or design gives the impression of oscillating, might be expanded and redeployed in the construction of certain tunnels.

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The gallery contains a number of actual models of buildings. They reflect their times. As a result, they are, without exception, perfectly repellent.

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The organization of the gallery inadvertently illustrates the decomposition of art over the course of the twentieth century. With each succeeding floor, as the work becomes progressively more recent, the proportion of sheer vacuity and imposture increases. By the top, exhaustion, affectation and academicism are the only inhabitants of the ruins.

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One Prague figure who confronted the failure of art was Karel Tiege. In the Poetist Manifesto (1924) he called for an unsustainable “artistic professionalism” to be displaced by “the art of life, the art of being alive and living.” By the time of the Poetism Manifesto of 1928, this had become a programme for liberating all forms of art from utilitarian ends and combining them into a unitary “poetry for the five senses, poetry for all the senses” such as would produce “maximum emotionality.” The narrow scope of this “emotionality”, however, is revealed by Tiege’s examples of the “poetry of physical and spatial senses,” which include such petty pastimes as “sport of every possible kind: motoring, aviatics, tourism, gymnastics, acrobatics.” These and other comments suggest that the new emotions will continue to be confined and consumed within the limited domains of leisure and the aesthetic. Neither work nor the subordination of social production to an independent economy is disputed. On the contrary, Tiege takes the subjective and objective aspects of the existing socio-economic structure entirely for granted, blithely referring to “our mechanical civilization” and the need to adjust art to “the present day” and the “modern nerves and psychic make-up of contemporary people.” In effect, his programme does no more than realign art and recreation with early twentieth century capitalism and its burgeoning consumerism.

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Similar shortcomings can be seen in Tiege’s 1925 article, Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art.’ Tiege quite rightly proclaims “the total collapse of all varieties of so-called art” and calls for “the all-out liquidation of art.” But liquidation in favour of what? For Tiege, “our” civilization is a “civilization of the machine.” The machine is the driving force of progress. Moreover, “its law is minimum effort for maximum effect. This is the law of economy. The law of economy is the law of all work. And work is the only law of the world, its ordering force, which leads organized matter to an unknown destination” (his italics). In this world, “a product is beautiful when it has been created economically and precisely for maximum perfection and utility” and thus “powerful modern beauty exists in every object which is made for a precise and definite purpose and which fulfills exactly the end for which it is intended.” This not a matter for artists: “The machine is the work of specialists, of the engineer, never of the artist.” We also, says Tiege, need specialist “inventors” to “awaken new needs” and move development forward. All this is mystification. Inventors and engineers are servants, not masters. The particular needs that are awoken and satisfied are selected by capitalism and the state, and are confined to those that will sustain their profits and their power. The machinery and methods of production are developed with the same specific powers and ends in view, having being designed at every point so to allow the workforce to be directed, controlled and dispossessed from above. Tiege’s laws of economy and work are no more neutral. If work and the world at large come to be dominated by unknown and unchosen ends, if there is everywhere a relentless imperative to maximize productivity, this is not because of any universal laws. Rather, it arises from the perfectly contingent and reversible fact that an independent economy of commodity production dominates society. Stripped of its deceptive rhetoric, Tiege’s proposal is merely that we replace the artist’s production of small objects of contemplative beauty with the technocrat’s dazzled submission to industrialized alienation. There is nothing of progress or beauty in this. “Her face unmask’t, I saw her corps unclad” (John Harringdon).

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Graffiti is everywhere in Prague. It is no better than the other decorations with which the city is smeared. A stereotyped style is taken from an external youth culture. It is then regurgitated, with a few speciously individual touches, so as to win the approval of a pseudo-community of fellow adherents and make an assertive display to passersby. Nothing of substance is said, nothing of consequence is done. It is mere advertising for the alienated self. In somewhere like Vltavská metro station, its empty semblance of communication perfectly complements the vacant terrain of tatty bus shelters, concrete flyovers and a barely-alive grassy knoll.

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One of the entrances to the Smíchovské nádraží metro station in Smíchov has been made to look like a yellow cave. What were they thinking of?

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Further along Nádražní, at the junction with Na zlíchově, there is a closed factory, one of a number in the area. It has been reclaimed from alienated labour, and made a little interesting, by decay and weeds. Behind the fence, there are two beautiful guard dogs. What are they guarding? On a fence around the corner, there are pictures of animal skulls. Why? Are these memorials to the victims of the dogs? It is easy to create such mysteries from a lack of information. The solution would, no doubt, be perfectly banal.

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Across the footbridge that runs over the lines at Praha-Smíchov railway station to Radlická, amongst a cluster of workshops on Pod brentovou, two models of large birds (cranes or stalks, perhaps) stand on top of a tall chimney. I doubt that any real birds of this size ever visit Prague. There are only representations.

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Like so much else, the steep steps of Santoška promise much but often lead nowhere.

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In Santoška, the wealthier residents appear to have appropriated the heights and views of Malá Strana for themselves. The guard dogs suggest that they fear for their privileges. Do the words “fxxk you” (in English) painted on a wall imply that at least some of their offspring are not so sure that there is anything up here worth fighting for? Have they merely chosen the pseudo-rebellion of Anglo-American youth culture instead?

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At one end of underground line B, in the north-east of the city, is Černý Most, a collection of apartment block developments that is home to around 22,000 people. This is not the lumpen-proletarian nightmare that haunts the imagination of the middle classes in Britain, America and France. There appear to be neither gangs of feral young people in hooded tops nor gun-toting crack dealers on every corner. Gangsta rap does not thud from the windows. It is all very ordinary: working people coming and going; small dogs; cars and car parks; un-decayed blocks in well-maintained parkland; laundry and potted plants on the balconies; a functioning school in good repair; small shops on the estate and branches of Tesco and Ikea in an adjacent shopping centre; a concentric ring of roads. It is somewhere to which one returns, when one is not at work or out on trips, to watch the TV and be with one’s family (or perhaps the other way around); a place of tidy horror where the friends and relatives of suicides always say they do not know what drove them to it.

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“All is imaginary – family, office, friends, the streets, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 21 October, 1921)

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In an attempt to find out something about current events in the city, I buy a copy of the weekly English-language newspaper, The Prague Post. Perhaps it will be possible to find a few facts amongst the misinterpretations and outright lies. According to the lead story, on November 17, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, 2,000 gathered on Wenceslas Square to protest. One protestor is quoted as wishing to “live normally and from time to time go to the mountains or the seaside or be able to afford some culture.” Another is reported as having said: “We are not against entrepreneurs; I earn my living with my hands, but I respect those able to make big money and employ people. But we want greater solidarity. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing.” If this account is accurate, are the sentiments it reports representative of the thoughts and feelings of the protestors? Are these really the limits of their desires and discontent?

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A news item on Prague Radio reports that a poll commissioned by Czech television at the time of the anniversary found that two-thirds of respondents were of the view that politicians today were more corrupt than their pre-1989 predecessors and only a third thought that life is better now than under communism. In response, the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, said: “our task was not to guarantee happiness and wealth for everybody; our task was to change the political, economic and social system from communism to something completely different.” The question for those who have found this imposed system not to be “something completely different” is how to renew, extend and deepen the failed revolution of 1989.

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“You find yourself painfully pushed against the wall, apprehensively lower your eyes to see whose hand it is that pushes you, and, with a new pain in which the old is forgotten, recognize your own contorted hand holding you with a strength it never had for good work.” (The Diaries of Frank Kafka, 3 August, 1914)

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An outdoor photographical exhibition on Namesti republiky called Almost Velvet Revolutions juxtaposes images from the events in Czechoslovakia with formally similar pictures from the Arab Spring. The visual parallels are useless. This is not to say that the two movements have nothing in common. Both, notably, were failures. The masses of ordinary people failed to carry out the process of social transformation themselves. As the old regime crumbled, they stood back and permitted specialists and new elites to take on the task of creating its replacement. From this alienation of their powers, this failure to bring every domain of economic and social life under their direct control, a new alienated society necessarily arose. If we are to understand how these two miscarriages occurred, and how they might be reversed in the present and avoided in the future, we need something more than vague and celebratory pictorial likenesses.

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In the course of a week, what evidence do I myself see of the consequences of the current economic crisis and a struggle against it? None. Is this entirely due to the peculiarly purblind perspective of the tourist?

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I see many forms of alienated labour in the city. The closed factories on Nádražní, and another that lies in ruins on Křesomyslova, suggest that manufacturing may be in decline in Prague; and yet I also come across various factories on Starý Hloubětín and a PVC factory and Pepsi plant on nearby Kolbenova. No doubt the rulers of the city are better pleased by the supposedly more modern alienation represented by the large telecommunications office on Nádraží vysočany, PriceWaterhouseCoopers on Kateřinská, GlaxoSmithKline on Na pankráci, and the various anonymous white collar penitentiaries that can be seen from the number 3 tram as it travels eastwards from Palmovka through parts of the city that have been stripped of all urbanity by lethal accumulations of business and traffic. Of course, there are also, amongst other things, tourism, retail, construction, government, public transport and the many attendants who collect the five-crown charge in public lavatories. What the city seems to lack are concentrated districts of hip production and consumption, such as Berlin’s Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg. Perhaps ordinary consumption has not yet reached the degree of saturation and disappointment that makes markets for avant-garde culture, artisanal goods and ever-receding ‘wellness’ both viable and necessary.

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Between 1908 and 1922 Franz Kafka worked as a lawyer at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. According to Gustav Janouch, Kafka said of his work at the institute: “That is not an occupation, it is a form of decomposition. [...] I sit in the office. It is a foul-smelling factory of pain, in which there is no sense of happiness.” (Conversations with Kafka, 1968, page 125). Office work remains fundamentally the same today. The ground floor of the Institute’s former offices at Na Poříčí 7, however, now houses a Turkish takeaway and a women’s clothes shop. There is no progress in this either.

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The final evening. An escalator abruptly projects from the bright mediocrity of the newer parts of the main railway station into the decayed gloom of the old entrance hall. Coffee and Becherovka at Fantova kavárna. Doors banging. A few passengers scurrying by in what seems to be mild alarm. The distant rumble of trains. The endless roar of traffic from the Wilsonova death strip. A policeman and a cleaner commendably skiving in the dark. No doubt it will all be erased by redevelopment sooner or later.

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The road to Ruzyně airport is no better in the daytime. Chilling abominations of steel and glass, of which a car park clad with sloping panes of blue-green glass is perhaps the most revolting. Dusty suburbs of asthmatics bathed in exhaust fumes. A stooped woman hauling herself through what may once have been a village but is now a neglected verge of a dual carriageway. What a way to end a life. Sucked dry and spat out.

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The usual collection of businessmen and executives waiting for the plane, the dejected marionettes of an international capitalism that leaves their minds, their bodies and their language as grey as the suits it forces them to wear.

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In the distance, cast by the setting sun on the tops of clouds, lie volcanic pools of deepest red. The woman to my right yawns and switches on her iPod.

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“Still unborn and already compelled to walk around the streets and talk to people.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 17 March, 1922)

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February, 2012

No Copyright. You may use this text in any way you please.

The author can be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com.

The Season of Kisses and Sighs: Cuts and Protests against Cuts in Britain

2011-03-08T19:21:00.004Z

The stuttering course of the capitalist economy, accompanied as ever by the alternating tales of disaster and reassurance that make it distortedly visible to the spectator, has now, in Britain, reached the stage of cuts in government spending. What choices do we have in the face of this turn of events? We are told there are just two: submit to the cuts in order to restore the health of the economy or fight them so as to preserve existing public services. These are the choices held out to us in newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches, news programmes, management pep talks, advertisements and other pronouncements rained down on us by the dominant society. These are the choices we have taken up in our own thought and conversation. But like all the rest of the choices that are made public by the dominant society, they happen to be false.

The Coalition government and its allies tell us that the cuts are necessary. They promise us that things will eventually get better. They urge us to acquiesce. It has to be said that this is a course of inaction many of us are tempted to take. It is what we have done in previous economic crises and we have not done much to shake off the habit of resignation since. We have also found that submission has its rewards. If the past is any guide to the future, public services will not be completely decimated. Our earnings will not plunge relentlessly downwards. Only a small minority will be made unemployed, and most of those will eventually secure alternative employment, albeit at somewhat lower wages than they received before. Even those who fail to find another job will be kept alive, after a fashion, by the state. In any event, we are hardly suffering at the moment. Our real wages may have fallen back to where they were in 2005, but most of us were not poor in 2005. We may not have as much money as we would like, we may worry about our debts and the prospects of our children and parents, and we may have had to cut back a little here and there. True. Yet we are far removed from anything resembling profound material poverty. We do not need to take to the streets to secure bread, for we do not live on bread alone and such bread as we need we can still afford to buy at the supermarket. Besides, it is so very easy to go on plodding through one’s everyday life in the way one always has. Families, friends, homes, jobs, cars, holidays, nights out, shopping, sport, there is always something clamouring for our attention; always something to swallow up our time and draw us down those all-too-few (and all-too-deep) ruts that define our lives. Our sense that there is nothing we can do to change things only makes this slide into submissive resignation easier. So too does our penchant for easing our isolated bitterness by blaming the whole sorry mess on immigrants, benefit claimants, civil servants, greedy bankers or some other scapegoat we have found dangled in front of us.

Perhaps it is true that, if we give those in power a free hand, most of us will find ourselves in a few years’ time more or less back where we were when the recession started. After all, the doomsayers have always been wrong before. But is that enough? Doesn’t the recession tell us something rather terrible about our condition? Doesn’t it clearly and cruelly demonstrate how very little control we have over our lives? The economy within which we work is no more under our direction when it is growing than when it is contracting. During good times and bad, we are subordinated to its dictates. Of course, we would like to believe that we are not unfree in our work because we exercise some choice as to which jobs we apply for and we have some discretion over what we do while we are at work. But a forced choice between wretched options is not liberty; and trapped as we are between intrusive monitoring by managers, vexing performance targets, a wider organization of work over which we have no say, and a global economy that does our bidding to roughly the same extent as the weather does, our prized autonomy in the workplace seems the most threadbare of illusions. And what does the threat of redundancy tell us about our work? Our position has not suddenly changed. Despite all those friendly chats with management, and the team work and camaraderie, we have all along been disposable tools of our employers. All day and every day, we are nothing more than the means by which they realize their ends. When we can no longer perform that role, we are discarded as surplus to their requirements, which is what “redundant” means. The fact that our bosses may be reluctant to impose redundancies, preferring instead to retain surplus staff or introduce part-time working, takes nothing away from this analysis. We are merely being shown the same concern that a farmer displays for his prize livestock. He will put them down only when he has to.

The economic crisis also reveals unhappy truths about other aspects of our lives. Perhaps we have grown used to a pleasant chat with someone who works at a business or office we frequent. When bankruptcy, restructuring or redundancy strikes, our acquaintance vanishes. We never see or hear of her again. For all the pleasantries that may have passed between us, the only real relation we had was that between a supplier of goods or services and a buyer. When that was gone, precisely nothing was left. We shared no other activity and decided nothing else together. It is the same with the vast majority of our connections with people. They are relations of exchange, mediated by commodities. As we pass through the public world, who do we encounter but strangers hurrying by in separated indifference and the self-effaced, masquerading for wages? How often do we do anything more with those we meet than discuss and pay for commodities?

But perhaps you will say that all that may be true about the wider world, but the real meaning and richness of our lives lies in our private worlds? We know that work is shit. We know that politics, the economy and the environment are all going to the dogs. Nonetheless, you say, we can find some real happiness and fulfilment with our families, our friends and our leisure. Unfortunately, we cannot separate our private existences from the alienated world in this way. Our families, friendships and leisure are not refuges that somehow exist apart from the dispiriting processes of capitalism. On the contrary, they have been created by and for capitalism and share the same alienation that bleeds through every other aspect of the capitalist world. We are creatures of capitalism. Our domestic worlds, our intimate lives and our free time have all been adapted to the needs of capitalism. All have been shrivelled and shrunken down to the desperately narrow dimensions that the system permits. The family, for instance, is merely the domestic unit that happens best to serve a society that isolates individuals from each other, separates them from the management of the society, and requires them to submit to the world order it presents to them. In the soothing name of privacy, the family abandons history to its capitalist masters. In this jealously-defended isolation, we encourage children who have been reduced to dependence falsely to recognize themselves in the roles, the values, the pleasures, the activities and ultimately the jobs the society makes available. We mould them to accept and adhere to imposed and domineering collectives, starting with the family itself. For ourselves, we strive to find our greatest fulfilment within the small web of social relations and the tiny resources to which the family gives rise. None of it goes smoothly, for it is never easy to force the living into shallow graves. But we do our best. We temper our expectations of happiness. We create family occasions over and over again in which the unstated rule is that we profess our mutual love and contentment and convincingly play the happy family. We fiercely embrace a transcendental notion of love that hovers in disembodied abstraction above the resentment, division, abuse, punishment, incomprehension, blackmail, mediocrity and confinement that make up the actual lived experience of family life. In these and so many other ways, we would have ourselves believe that the image of familial contentment we have been given by our society is the defining reality of our lives.

Our friendships and leisure are hardly better. Of course, there are pleasures and adventures in our friendships, but they are much too small. We share so little with our friends. We have too little at our disposal. Through the work that we all do, we create the very world we live in. Everything around us is put there by us. But we do not create it for ourselves. We do not create it with our friends. When we come together, all we have are the paltry time and money left to us by work and the alien world our work has produced. We are reduced to chasing desultory diversions amongst the ruins. Our games are petty. We could build a very world with and for our desires. We end up going on vacation.

In public and private, we are colonized. We live by occupying the ideas of happiness, normality and the cool the commodity society brings to us, haunting its promises like ghosts roaming the corridors of a ruined mansion in search of a long dead love. We deny it, of course. We are our own men and women, we say. We pride ourselves on not believing the stupid claims of the adverts and the politicians, even as we spend each and every day living out the fundamental notion of consumable happiness that each advertisement and each politician conveys. We are sure that we each have our own individual styles, even as those styles uncannily coalesce around a bare handful of models in each era. We are mistaken. We can see this quite clearly when we look back at old photographs of ourselves. We insisted on our irreducible individuality then too. Yet the records show that we were entirely of the time. No matter how absurd the fashions and tastes may have been, our hairstyles, clothes, houses, cars, reading habits, musical tastes, and ideas in general duly reflected them. When this comes to our attention, we laugh, perhaps, and feel a little embarrassed. But we learn nothing and take no action. We blame it all on the follies and gullibility of youth. We waive away the staggering truth that everything about us has been dominated from afar without giving more than a moment’s thought as to how this state of abjection came to be. We retreat into that amnesia and indifference which seems to be necessary if we are to go on as we are. We sift nostalgically through the snapshots of carefully-staged displays of spontaneous contentment we have taken at the many occasions that seem to have no other purpose than to allow such photographs to be taken. We create the ground for the next disaster by forgetting what is essential about the ones that have gone before.

Is this really enough? Is this all that we desire? Are we content to sit tight under the insults of government and economy in the hope that we may one day return to the slightly-more-affluent alienations of yesteryear? Are we too scared, too timid, to take on the society whose very intimidating immobility testifies to how little it is ours and how little we are? If the answer is yes, well so be it. But do not be surprised if you struggle to remember what you have been doing during all these years, as you drift with scant attention behind the disappointing person and disagreeable habits you have become. Do not be surprised if you one day find yourself staring at the exhaust pipe you have fed through the passenger window, wondering where it all went wrong. It always goes wrong, my friends, when it is rotten from the start.

Merely enduring the cuts is not the only option we are given. We are also presented with clamorous calls to defend our jobs and public services against the cuts. We are given to understand that something valuable is being taken from us. We are even sometimes told that the victories of past generations of working people are under threat. All this, I would suggest, is quite preposterous.

The rulers of society and their supporters were once quite candid about the ends they hoped to obtain from good conditions and services. In 1837, Leonard Horner, a factory inspector, said:

“Independently of all higher considerations, and to put the necessity of educating the children of the working classes on its lowest footing, it is loudly called for as a matter of police, to prevent a multitude of immoral and vicious beings, the offspring of ignorance, from growing up and around us, to be a pest and a nuisance to society; it is necessary to render the great body of the working class governable by reason.”

When speaking in the House of Commons on 17 February 1870 in favour of the Elementary Education Bill 1870, W. E. Foster argued that “the speedy provision of elementary education” would allow the state to secure “our industrial prosperity” and remove “that ignorance which we are all aware is pregnant with crime and misery, with misfortune to individuals and danger to the community”. Moreover, “if we are to hold our position among men of our own race or among the nations of the world we must make up the smallness of our numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual.”

A more modern note was struck in Winston Churchill’s explanation of the idea behind the introduction of unemployment insurance (one of the forerunners of modern social security benefits), as reported by the Daily Mail in 1909. In Churchill’s view, the purpose aimed at by the reform was:

“to increase the stability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers a direct interest in maintaining them. […] [This] scheme […] will help to remove the dangerous element of uncertainty from the existence of the industrial worker. It will give him an assurance that his home, got together through long years and with affectionate sacrifice, will not be broken up, sent bit by bit to the pawnshop, just because […] he falls out of work. It will make him a better citizen, a more efficient worker, [and] a happier man.”

The ends aimed at by modern public spending include similar objectives. But since these statements were made, the capitalist economy has grown in size and sophistication. The extension of a relentless consumer culture to the vast majority of the population has also become a key motor of its growth and its sole claim to legitimacy. The roles performed by public services have changed accordingly. New environments, new abilities, new attitudes, and new levels of public health are now created, not just directly to meet the new needs of business and government but also as new incentives and new rewards for our submission. For example, it is no longer enough to give the mass of the population an elementary education that merely instils “order, discipline, cleanliness, deference to authority, and the tolerance of boredom at work” (in the words of one historian). These remain important goals of the education system, but today’s education must go beyond them. It must now manufacture people who have the personalities, skills and willingness to do what is required of them without being told (deceptively referred to as “initiative” and “the ability to work by oneself”) that modern service industries and high value businesses demand. It must now, by means of its organs of “higher” education, produce the specialised workers and the specialist knowledge that allow the dominant society to produce its technological and cultural commodities, to shape its world and the individuals who serve it, and to mystify everything. And, to bring all this about, it must help foster the misunderstanding that the new education and the work to which it leads constitute desirable opportunities for individuals and welcome progress for the society. No more noble purposes are served by contemporary education. Indeed, no very different purpose is served by any of the public services. Without exception, they are mechanisms for reproducing an alienated society. They seek to integrate the majority into a life of alienated labour and abundant consumption and disarm the minority left to a more meagre survival on the margins of society. They are an unrelenting assault on the possibility of authentic and self-controlled life. They always and everywhere damage or destroy us as individuals. There is nothing victorious in this. In the very few instances where a public service or a legal right arose out of our struggles, it represented the defeat and not the victory of those struggles, the moment when the goal we pursued slipped out of our hands and became one more uncontrollable, external process pressing down on us.

This is not to say that public services do not provide us with facilities that are valuable within the context of the existing society. Without doubt, central government, local authorities and the bodies they fund can and do supply services that allow separated individuals who have surrendered their powers of world-creation to persist more easily in that separation and surrender. But I come back to the question of whether this is enough for us. Are we content with libraries that allow us to while away our free time with a novel about a missing swimsuit model or the autobiography of an entertainer (the most commonly borrowed fiction and non-fiction library books)? Do we want know more than an opportunity to grind our way through 16 years of submissive study of falsified knowledge and emerge with a degree and a job in property development, renting, business, research, education, health or social work (the most common graduate employments)? Can we think of nothing better than to have strangers to whom we are inevitably just another job of paid work dress and wash us so that we can spend the rest of the day staring at the television or gossiping about ever less? Would it be cause for jubilation to have a social security system that paid enough to allow its recipients to participate fully in the time-wasting futility of seeking a worthwhile life through commodity consumption? Need I go on?

The call to defend jobs, education and public services is, in effect, propaganda in favour of the existing way of life, one of many eulogies of the dominant society that take the guise of dissent. There is no qualitative difference between life as it was before the cuts and life as it will be afterwards, between public services and private services, or between employment and unemployment, even if one is a slightly more comfortable form of eviscerated life than the other. We are not obliged to confine ourselves to the false choices and tiny distinctions that the dominant society magnifies into fundamental conflicts and real progress. No matter how urgent and profound the crisis for which they claim to be the remedy, pseudo-critiques that take for granted the fundamental features of our alienated world (such as alienated labour, alienated consumption and the state) serve only to dissipate our discontents, refine this society’s depredations, and trap us just where we are. If we are ever to escape our already-insufficient lives, we must, I think, point-blank refuse them.

Those who sincerely participate in the anti-cuts movement out of a genuine disgust at what the government is doing may wish to consider the fate of one of its precursors, the anti-Poll Tax movement. The movement was successful. But what were the practical consequences? The movement itself, having obtained the only objective it had set itself and removed the only misery it had objected to, lost everything that held it together and disintegrated. Its participants returned to the isolation and alienation of a daily life that was very little changed. Everything they won drifted away from them. The Poll Tax was abolished and Margaret Thatcher deposed. But the Poll Tax was merely replaced by the Council Tax, another remote bureaucratic and legal procedure devised by central government, administered by local authorities, enforced by the courts and bailiffs, and completely out of the hands of ordinary people. Margaret Thatcher was also replaced, with John Major becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party. He proved more palatable to voters than the hopelessly unpopular Thatcher and led the party to victory in the General Election of 1992. The Conservatives remained in power until 1997. Capitalism has, alas, persisted for far longer. The fact that one of its governments was forced to develop a fairer and therefore more acceptable form of local taxation has probably only helped it to endure.

How often have we said of late (and how often have we heard others say) that what we need in this country is a revolution like those in Tunisia and Egypt? But they are only words. We avow in easy abstraction the need for revolution yet we do precisely nothing about it. We can barely conceive of an autonomous project on such a scale. Our capacity to think and act by and for ourselves, to step beyond this society’s cowering norms, is undernourished to the point of starvation. Well, we shall just have to create what we need. We might begin by bringing to the practical project of revolution at least as much time, effort and passion as we have been want to lavish on our jobs, families, pastimes and vacations. We might also develop the habit of viewing and treating our enemies as enemies. No part of this society is for our benefit, no part of it serves our best interests. Indeed, everything that this society allows might usefully be taken as a personal attack upon us. Its goods, its services, its visions of the good life, its models of deviance, its cities, its politics, its protests, its moralities, its high culture and cheap thrills, its gaudy fashions for young women and its drab uniforms for middle-aged men, its good jobs and shit work, everything that its media, its politicians, its domesticated critics, its teachers, its researches, its manuals, its managers, its celebrities extol to us, all of it, quite without exception, always and everywhere tends to confine and disfigure us, to make us into the kind of people that the separate economy and the separate power of that state needs in order to survive. So, a parent-teacher meeting, for example, is not an opportunity to help your child develop his or her knowledge, maturity and independence but an invitation to collaborate in the destructive process of implanting the falsified and tamed knowledge, the limited aspirations, and the acceptance of established authority and mores which contemporary capitalism expects of its producers and consumers. Equally, for the teacher, such a meeting is not part of an authentic vocation but is simply a facet of a process of alienation in which all of his or her time, thought and effort as a teacher is sucked into procedures and a curriculum imposed from above. Here and elsewhere across everyday life, the question is: what can we (parent, teacher, child) do to stop this expense of spirit in a waste of shame? Perhaps we can see nothing we can do today. If so, the question renews itself tomorrow and the day after as a fresh challenge to our cunning and ingenuity, our ability to publicize our discontent and seek out potential partners in the dance of revolution. Does this sound like a dreary life of unbroken militancy in the service of a political cause or party? If it does, think again. There is no cause. There is no party. There is only the creative, enriching and entirely practical task of defeating by ourselves our own unhappiness and our own subordination, of overthrowing a social arrangement that is unfit for us as individuals and creating a better one by and for ourselves. We must develop a theory and practice that precisely prevents the emergence of ideas, procedures and leaders that dominate us.

The Coalition’s cuts are shrouded in a lying ideology of liberation. According to David Cameron’s speech at the 2010 Conservative Party conference, his “big society” will bring about a shift “from state power to people power”. This is arrant nonsense. For the past forty years or so, the Right has secured its political power by offering us a mirage of personal transformation, a twisted reflection of our confused desire for freedom and change. In point of fact, the abridgement of the state the Right has brought about is minimal and its neglect of the power held over us by employers and the economy has been total. But even the suggestion of an attack on the state terrifies the Left. We need not be so concerned. The state is not a friend. The problem is not that the state is being attacked but that some part of it will be left standing. The problem is not that the Coalition is too bold but that its project of the emancipation of the individual is a pathetically timid and incomplete farce that fails to embrace the totality of alienated life and is conducted by the very state it purports to savage. Perhaps it is time to talk less about opposing the cuts and more about accelerating and extending them beyond any control but our own. Perhaps now is the moment to wrest the project of individual and social emancipation away from our masters and set it loose for real in our homes and places of work, our schools and universities, our minds and bodies, and all the rest of our public and private worlds. What do we really have to lose? The careering absurdity of our world is not worthy of us; and neither are the lives of loud satisfaction and quiet desperation we lead within it.

Wayne Spencer
March 2011
No copyright. Use as you please.
The author may be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com.

Nothing Burns in Hell: On Delinquents and Respectable Citizens

2010-07-14T16:03:00.005+01:00

In the bottom, sorrow dwells, in the heights anguish

A society as disastrous as the one in which we unfortunately live can hardly avoid talking about its shortcomings. But social problems are only taken up by the institutions and media of this deceptive society in falsified form. All that we see are misrepresented failings and spurious remedies. The prevailing babble about youthful ‘anti-social behaviour’ is no exception. We are typically given to understand that delinquents are rejecting the norms of society, and respectable citizens are being impoverished by a loss of the tranquil enjoyment of ordinary life. This way of viewing matters is perfectly misconceived. The problem is not that young delinquents have gone too far in their defiance of the dominant society, but that they have not gone far enough. The problem is not that the lives of the respectable citizens of this society have become disturbed, but that they have remained frozen. Delinquency does not so much cause the poverty of everyday life as continue it in different guises.

I shall not offer exhaustive definitions of what I call the "delinquent" and the "respectable citizen". Who cares for such tedious exercises in procrustean classification other than the spent souls of academia? Suffice it to say that my delinquents include, amongst others, (a) bored kids who try to draw a line between themselves and the shitty world around them with music, dress, and the frugal use of cool talk; (b) the loose, local groups of friends and acquaintances who come together from time to time to sneer at passers-by and indulge in unlawful kicks and perhaps a little criminal enterprise; (c) other minor street criminals who ply their trade in order to pay for their partying; and (d) the more consistently crimiminal associations sometimes referred to as "gangs". But not everything I say applies to each kind of delinquent equally. As for my respectable citizens, well, I'm sure we all know one when we see one. At bottom, what is important, at least to me, is that you consider whether you recognise some part of your own everyday life in what I have to say. If you do, I am afraid that it is up to you to determine what practical consequences follow from this. One step toward refusing the dominant society consists in breaking the habit of expecting one's thought and practice to be handed down to you.

It is often lamented that delinquent youths lack respect for figures of authority. But it should come as no surprise that teachers, the police, parents, etc, do not attract respect, for the very simple reason that these contemptible roles do not deserve it. Why on earth should we treat with deferential regard those who would reduce us to the shrunken lives this society permits? The very notion of deference is merely a demand that we quietly and blindly submit to the external authorities who have placed themselves above us. It is loathsome. The delinquents are to be congratulated for taking steps towards a practical recognition of this. Unfortunately, while they reject some of what the society offers up for respect, they defer to other elements of the alienated life we are asked to lead. What is worse, they have come to admire and desire the very alienations they have failed to contest. For as long as this persists, they will remain stultified.

To dependent youth, the unemployed, the working poor in shit jobs, and the residents of ghettos, it is all too obvious that boredom, subordination and contempt are no small part of their lot. There are several different ways of responding to this insight. One is to grin and bear it in the hope that conformity will eventually be rewarded by higher status and better-paid work. This is perhaps the most common response. Another is to contest the society that produces so much dead time. A third is to pursue alternative sources of prestige and money within this very society. For all too many, delinquency is in essence a search for such illusory alternatives.

Consumer capitalism expropriates the whole of humanity's capacity to create its own world, the whole of its labour power, and subordinates it to the production, circulation and praise of commodities. In return, it offers to the individual a selection of goods, and of images of the good life, to consume within the narrow confines of his or her private life. This is not just a matter of offering a pallid world of subdued, suburban pleasures to the well-behaved middle classes. Far from it. There are only so many washing machines that can be sold. There is only so much grief and disappointment that can be assuaged with replacement furniture, a holiday in a European hill village, or an unending succession of polite men and women on screen and disc. Modern capitalism must offer something different, something more, if it is to survive.

Since the Second World War advanced capitalism, and the quest for contentment through consumption that it fosters, has generated a long series of consumable youth rebellions. This has included the teds, mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, rave culture, and the worlds of hip-hop and rap. Each of these has put forward its own particular array of clothes, music, drugs and cool behaviours as an authentic and ecstatic alternative to the misery of unskilled and semi-skilled work and the ways of life that honest and conforming people pursue. Indeed, where mainstream employment and commerce have more or less completely abandoned an area (as in ghettos of North America), cool culture and cool criminality may appear to be the only realistically available means to avoid poverty and obtain a sense of dignity. But none of these rebellions has marked the slightest departure from the global domination of the commodity and its logic. They have served only to assimilate young people into yet more external models of thought and action, and yet more waves of commodity production and consumption. The delinquents of today remain stuck in this pseudo-rebellious process. Consider, my friends, their sportswear, trainers, caps, and jewellery, the ways in which they walk, talk, fight, fuck and get high, and their view of what makes up the good life. Do these not reveal the extent to which they are seeking to gain status and pleasure by acting out a small local variation on a few global gangster templates the dominant society has shown to them ("It probably had a little to do with the gangster films we saw. Like a gang had a lot of drugs or money. They did drugs, had the coolest cars and chicks, that kind of thing...mostly we got it from films and those kind of things" — Swedish heroin user)? Consider, too, their unbroken, nervous concern for the visible approval of their friends. Does this not show how the individual is subordinated to a domineering collective? For all their defiance, the delinquents essentially live much as others do. Assimilating oneself into an external image of the good life, and submitting to a collectivity, is a perfectly ordinary form of alienated existence in the existing society. The delinquents are mistaken to associate this state of affairs with autonomy, excitement, shrewdness and freedom. They may purchase some fragile self-esteem, kicks and acceptance, they may even secure some precarious means of survival, but they pay for them with the usual currency of self-alienation.

The admiration that delinquents have for what the dominant society says is desirable is not necessarily confined to its pseudo-rebellious products. Delinquents may straightforwardly yearn for some very ordinary consumer goods ("I want nice clothes, to get my hair done, I want nice bags and all the other shit...The right shampoo, the right shoes, the right fucking name on your T-shirt: it's life, it's all there is" — prostitute in the north east of England). They may dream of such widely-admired trappings of success and affluence as widescreen televisions, sports cars and the kinds of gaudy wives and homes preferred by professional footballers ("one of them proper top-notch houses, swimming pool and that...a nice car, top-class bird" - criminal in the north east of England). In the end, they may wish for nothing more than to have the things they read about in tabloid newspapers and see on television ("them massive plasma screen TVs all over the place...a proper mansion and that, big gates and CCTV cameras" — criminal in the north east of England). Aside from their criminal methods and their taste for a few illegal commodities (notably drugs), their submission to the degraded tastes of their era may be total.

The conservatism of many delinquents can equally be seen in their attitudes towards gender roles. The ideology of gender roles, the utterly idiotic notion that each gender has its own distinctive set of attitudes, emotions and behaviours to which individual men and women must adhere on pain of ridicule or violence, has been one of the more destructive prisons of human possibility developed by the dominant society. Its practical repudiation across everyday life has been, and remains, an essential means and end of any real project of human liberation. Yet it is almost entirely absent from the lives of the delinquents. They continue to value toughness, aggression, unintelligence and a lack of emotion outside of sport in men, and submissive domesticity or submissive sexual availability amongst women. Why? These roles were only the alienated means by which working class men and women once adjusted themselves to the needs of harsh manual labour and imperialist warfare. The women maintained the men, and the men maintained the production and profit of the bosses. This division of labour was part of the surrender of a defeated working class. The roles it created may have allowed those who adopted them a small sense of dignity, but it was never anything other than a dignified prostration. There is nothing to admire or emulate in these straightjackets of human behaviour. Those who continue to live within their narrow limits betray a very unfortunate taste for bondage. Of course, it is true that one has to be tough to survive in some of the social environments in which delinquency flourishes. But that need for toughness is in part precisely a product of the predatory violence to which delinquent machismo itself leads. Moreover, the options available to delinquents are not restricted to machismo or a wimpishness that encourages victimization. Becoming a macho idiot is not the only way of not being a "pussy". Merely transposing a few elements from one gender role to another (for example, by adding a dash of violence to the old femininity, or vice versa) does not help: if you mix together two types of shit, you still end up with shit. It is a matter of discovering new types of 'toughness' that reject the old solutions to the problems of surviving in harsh circumstances and supersede both masculinity and femininity. You might start by developing a consistent cruelty to the man and women within you: by treating the gender roles you have picked up along the way as the fatal alien implants they really are.

With some delinquents, the old masculinity has been fused with a callousness towards others characteristic of the most predatory capitalists and managers. These delinquents have the same taste for power and degradation as the managers, the same absence of humanity, and the same willingness to subordinate others to their own narrow self-interests ("Oh, yeah! Its like, ‘That bugger didn’t want to give the keys up for nothing!’, ‘Had to beat him to death’, and all that. We get a buzz off it. I love it. Love the cars and the buzz" — criminal from the south west of Britain). Their craven inability to step beyond the tastes and ideas of their masters, their submissive aping of the worst oppressions visited upon ordinary people, condemns them. Even where violence is indifferently practiced by gangs of criminal entrepreneurs for such utilitarian purposes as enforcing payments from customers, it nonetheless leaves them with all the charm and subversiveness of a firm of unscrupulous bailiffs. They may have stepped outside the law, but they have not gone beyond the alienated social relations of the dominant society.

10.

One social space in which delinquency often flourishes is the school. For those who do not wish to be in school, who are failing to succeed within it, delinquency provides an apparent means of defence against the depredations of schooling, as well as an alternative source of status and satisfaction. Through disobedience of teachers and school rules, vandalism and truancy, delinquents curtail their own education and disrupt individual classes and events. However, their impact on individual schools and the system of mis-education tends to be small and transient. Even where they manage to exercise a widespread terror over their fellow students, and prompt the authorities to introduce ever-greater security measures, it all leads nowhere. They quickly become prematurely satisfied with an inadequate revolt, settling for bad reputations, mistreatment of the more studious, the same old antics, and escape. They do not deepen their refusal when they find that the school has survived what they have so far thrown at it. They do not subvert the majority into joining them (indeed cannot because their bullying of the more compliant students only repels them). They do not forge cooperative links with delinquents in other schools. They do not seek out a shared project of negation with those who suffer different forms of subordination outside of school. Like minor aristocrats in a small country, they blindly pursue in doomed isolation the same clichéd roles, impoverished privileges and debased abuses as their forerunners did. Sooner or later, they leave their schools much as they found them and join the ranks of the working, the unemployed or the incarcerated.

11.

One of the paler variants of delinquency can be found amongst middle-class youth. During the long adolescence through which they must pass on the way to higher educational qualifications, they possess few of the conventional badges of status. Some abjectly submit to the authorities placed over them, content with the prospects before them. Others, however, puff themselves up with the cartoon nihilism of gangster rap (or some other facet of popular culture) and act out a jaded pantomime of bad manners and intoxicated hedonism for the approval of their peers. It does not last long. These accountants-in-waiting quickly grow old, as they graduate and take up other roles more appropriate to their new professional status. Less risible are those who grow disgusted with their education and falter on the path to affluent respectability that has been mapped out for them. However, many dissipate their incipient rebellion by directing it into deviant sub-cultural consumption. To the extent that they content themselves with different clothes, music, argot, drugs and gestures, their dissatisfaction is contained and recuperated. It does not matter how outrageous the content of the sub-culture may be. If it sustains itself by producing and consuming commodities, if it confines itself to the space, time and choices left over by the state and employers, it leaves the dominant society untouched. Regardless of the intentions of its originators, it functions as one more component of advanced capitalism's spectacle of pseudo-opposition.

12.

Contrary to what disapproving conservative commentators like to suggest, delinquents often work for a living. This may involve participation in the legal world of shit work or involvement in less licit professions such as burglary, car theft, street crime, smuggling, fiddles kept from the prying eyes of social security officials, or the sale of stolen goods and illegal drugs. It is all work. It is all activity given over to the exchange of commodities, to the imperial imperatives of a separate economy that is not within our control. It is all alienated. However, delinquents’ practical criticism of work is generally limited. They may well be starkly aware of the vileness of the monotonous, humiliating and poorly-paid work in the service industries to which they are periodically forced to return by circumstances ("You going to the office? How late you working till? No fucking way...I thought they'd abolished slavery" — East London gang member). But their response when doing that work rarely goes beyond transient gestures of defiance and slamming the door behind them when they leave. They have little conception of acting with others to sabotage the operations that have quite rightly nauseated them or of putting an end to the social institution of nauseating work. Their critique of criminal work is more limited still. In some cases, the fact that this particular way of succumbing to the logic and the world imposed by the capitalist economy may not involve a boss or a rigid formal hierarchy is mistaken for a sign of freedom and autonomy. This is rather like those respectable citizens who regard themselves as free because they do exactly what is required of them before anyone tells them too loudly to do so. But much more important than any illusion of relative freedom, the delinquents are timid and defeated. For all their swagger, they cannot envisage a successful attack on the existing society and are persuaded that they themselves, in concert with others, cannot successfully overturn that society. They have settled for adjustment to what exists. They have limited themselves to desiring the goods and the illusions of consumable pleasure that advanced capitalism offers in return for abandoning the creation and control of the world to it. They have failed to recognize that the very tastes and pleasures they seek to indulge are externally imposed impostures. In place of pursuing in theory and practice a carefully-calibrated assault on a society that has excluded and enraged them, they have picked up a false image of revolt from the counters of that same society, from its spectacle of pseudo-opposition.

13.

The delinquents lack a critical relationship to their own practice and to the history of the delinquents of previous decades. Look at the delinquents of ten, twenty or thirty years ago. What they were doing then is very much the same as what today’s delinquents are doing now. Where have they ended up? No small number are dead, prematurely killed by violence, accident or disease. Others are imprisoned, or crushed by illness or addiction. Some are still hustling in the old ways, always hoping for a break into the big time that never comes or never lasts, while a very few have achieved ‘success’ in conventional or criminal terms, allowing them to have a little more of the same rubbish that everyone else does. Most have settled into the narrow mediocrity of family life and run-of-the-mill work. It is not just the broken and becalmed who are failures. They have all failed to create an everyday life that it is really worth living. Yet the current generation of delinquents has learned nothing from this. They persist with the same failed strategies and tactics, the same well-beaten paths down blind alleys, the same signposted roads to surrender.

14.

Failure stalks the present as much as the future. When they are not working, the delinquents try to make something happen that will break the prevailing boredom through fights, harassment, fucking, escapades, partying, etc. The results are invariable paltry. The 'real life' that delinquents like to contrast so favourably with the gullible drudgery of the respectable citizens is a mess of puerile pranks, pointless fracas, mechanical sexual encounters, and thin, fragile, artificial paradises built out of pneumatic beats, desperate dancing, and the chemical impairment of the senses. It is no surprise that at the heart of delinquent life is a conspiracy of exaggeration through which petty events are talked-up and retold afterwards. Nonetheless, boredom returns. The delinquents largely find themselves back where they began, tediously stuck at the bottom of a society over which they exercise no control.

15.

When the delinquents manage physically to intimidate the occupants of an area, their dominance is equally illusory. They may control some of the movements of some of the occupants some of the time, but they are not masters even of their own tiny terrain. Above and beyond them, decisions about public services, infrastructure, redevelopment, education, healthcare, employment, production, etc, continue to be largely made outside of their control. And when the state and capital decide to reclaim their territory, they are simply swept away. For example, no matter how numerous and arrogant the gangs of Chicago may have been, when it was decided that the two-mile stretch of land occupied by the Robert Taylor Holmes and Stateway Gardens housing projects was to be given over to Legends South, a new housing development largely occupied by the middle classes, they were ejected along with all the other residents. In the end, the delinquents are, at best, the temporary caretakers of abandoned ruins.

16.

The alienated character of delinquent life is starkly revealed by the code of respect many live by. This code may serve to deflect the contempt directed at those at the bottom of society; nonetheless, it is an external and arbitrary system that ties an individual to a reputation miserably dependent on the approval or deference of others. One of its most destructive facets is the expectation that any display of disrespect is remedied by violence. Another is the encouragement it gives to newcomers to establish status amongst their peers and competitors by engaging in eye-catching acts of especially ruthless violence. All this has led to a reified contempt for life, disdain for open criticism, staggeringly high rates of injury and death (in Harlem during the mid-1990s, for example, young men were as likely to die violently as soldiers were during the second world war), more and more defensive weapons, and a ubiquitous ambience of threat and fear in the areas where delinquents live. None of this is in the best interests of the delinquents themselves, the worst of which have been reduced to veritable zombies by their relentless treatment of others as objects and the need to suppress all real thought and feeling about their patently loathsome actions. What is supposed to be the delinquents' own code has clearly escaped them. Like an angry god, it consumes those who worship it. More generally, delinquents' activities create blighted lives for themselves as much as for anyone else, but they doggedly persist with this self-immolation. "I dunno, they've got a brand new Merc outside but they're cracked out in some poxy flat with their mum. They can't use the front room in case someone shoots the house up, and they're looking at untold 'bird' if they get nicked. What's that about?" (London gang member). Even when things seem to be going well for criminals who engage in business, all they spread around them are alienated relations with suppliers and customers. Their relations with others are mediated and defined by the goods for which they have become the bearers and the mouthpieces. All they find around them, all they have created around then, are people who wish to buy from them, sell to them, or supplant them — people for whom they are merely buyers, sellers or commercial competitors. They strove to break free of the constraints around them; they ended up as hooded greengrocers of oblivion.

17.

As well as failing to confront their own reliance on alienated images of delinquency, delinquents have done little to disrupt the wider use of images of delinquency by the rulers of society. For decades, the threat supposedly posed by delinquents has been an important element of the state’s justification of its rule over society. In effect, the state has presented itself as a necessary defence for the respectable citizen against what are said to be their common enemies, the delinquents. For their part, the delinquents have rarely even attempted to disabuse respectable citizens of this illusion. Often confined in estates on the outskirts of cities and the poorer parts of town, they have not explored ways of breaking down their isolation and communicating directly with ordinary people who are better off than they are. They have not sought out common ground with ordinary people whose lives are as blighted by affluence as theirs are by deprivation. (Artistic specialists may have offered up depictions and discussions of the life in the margins through rap and music, plays, poetry, etc, but such portrayals and protests, having been framed as cultural products, merely end up being taken within the narrow private lives of the affluent and passively consumed as aesthetic experiences or news.) Worse, some delinquents seem perfectly content to play the part that the state’s spectacle of terror assigns to them, delightedly acting out their gangster role on the streets, the media and youtube videos, or simply dolling out rote discourtesy to passers-by. They are happy to feed the fist that strikes them.

18.

There is no doubt that the actions of delinquents disrupt the everyday lives of respectable citizens. Over the past thirty or so years, the majority of the population has chosen to pursue the rewards of conformity instead of the fruits of revolt. What they have been left with are ugly and stupid lives, ugly and stupid places, and a planet pushed to the very edge of destruction by capitalism's efforts to keep feeding them new promises of consumable happiness. But the thought that one is wasting one's life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They have erected elaborate architectures of lies and self-deceptions in an attempt to persuade themselves and others that their work is not petty nonsense directed by contemptible bosses to idiotic ends, that their families are not desolate bunkers of mutual contempt and shared incarceration, that their leisure and friendships are not collections of inconsequential games and insubstantial interests, that their holidays are not banal tramps through despoliation, that the ways in which they think they avoid the common vulgarity are not entirely spurious, that their pleasures are not dreadfully small. They cling to these illusions with ferocious desperation; but the whole house of lying ghosts and grim parodies is a fragile one, and it is threatened by the depredations of delinquency. To the extent that delinquency prevents respectable citizens from misperceiving themselves as happy and free people who are blessed with rich experiences and continue to grow as individuals, it provokes their fury. It threatens to take away the very little they have, and replace it with nothing. It threatens to bring them face to face with a poverty of everyday life that has been there in one form or another all along.

19.

The rage of respectable citizens is compounded by their impotence. They have no control over their social environment, no ability to do anything other than stand or cower as isolated individuals in the face of the delinquents who harass them. They have given up the power to manage everything outside their front doors to others and accepted random collections of juxtaposed individuals in lieu of communities. Having refused to contest the separation and impotence that the dominance of the state and the commodity economy imposes on everyone, they can only clamour for more police patrols and harsher punitive regimes.

20.

At bottom, delinquency is a product of the absence of revolt, the abeyance of revolution. It is a pathological result of the unwillingness of men and women to act against the conditions of their own alienation. If respectable citizens wish not to be the victims of delinquents, they must precisely become less respectable. If they wish to open a dialogue with delinquents that is capable of superseding their mutual hostility, they must end that sheepish plodding through a lifetime of work and consumption which understandably makes them so contemptible in the eyes of delinquents. They must develop, by and for themselves, an autonomous, self-managed project of practical negation that is directed at the reigning alienation and reproaches the delinquents with doing too little against the dominant society rather than too much. They must invite the delinquents to join them in a richer and more subversive game. If that does not happen, if a process of revolutionary contestation is not created in which both the respectable and the delinquent can participate as equals, the same old nonsense will proliferate, and the same old failed pacifications will be regurgitated by the state. We shall all end up dying before we have even begun living.

21.

Of course, it is necessary to act against recalcitrant delinquents who insist on bringing misery and terror to others. This cannot involve cooperation with the police, local authorities and courts, or demands for more from them. These separate powers are part of the apparatus that dispossess ordinary people of control over their lives and they must always be treated as the enemies that they are. Ordinary people have to find their own solutions. We know that individual confrontations with groups of delinquents can be dangerous, so seek out and act with others who are prepared to stand with you. Propose shared, self-directed confrontation by word and deed to those who share your frustrations. Bring thoughtful strategy and tactics to the matter. Carefully study the activities and operations of the delinquents. Gain as complete a picture as possible of what they do, how they do it, and where they do it. Be clear about what you wish to achieve. Identify the weak points, the times and places where confrontation with individuals (including customers of delinquents engaged in criminal commerce), or destruction of things (for example, stolen goods, drug stashes), will have large effects but carry acceptably small risks. Be imaginative in your tools and methods. Do not feel obliged to confine yourself to what is lawful. Make sensible use of publicity. Paste up criticisms of individuals and groups on the physical walls of the area and on the internet. Through texts, pictures, sound recordings, and videos, make public that which they wish to conceal from the wider world. Be as anonymous and as cautious as you need to be. But in the end, such an approach can only be a complement to a revolutionary strategy that contests the social conditions that breed delinquency as one form of alienation amongst many others. In South Africa, an Islamic group, the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, went so far as to execute some 30 gang leaders in 1996 alone. The gangs still exist.

22.

There is no-one to save you. It is up to you. And me. Courage. So that the night triumphs no more.

Wayne Spencer
14 July 2010

No Copyright. Use as you please.

The author can be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com

What use would an international association of situationist revolutionaries be?

2010-03-30T11:39:00.005Z

The following comes from a reply I sent to a person who expressed interest in the new situationist collaboration that I have proposed.

I think you are right to approach the notion of a new international association of situationist revolutionaries with cautious scepticism. Such an association should only be created if the inter-relations between the individual members that constitute it are likely to serve a useful practical purpose.

My initial thought is that a new association could in principle have two principal functions. The first is to foster the creation of a body of revolutionary theory properly adapted to our times. This it would do by opening channels of communication between theorists such as permit a more systematic and sustained circulation of information, ideas, encouragement, debate, collaboration, and assistance with the practical matters of publication than would otherwise take place. The initial goal would perhaps be to create a wide-ranging critique of the currently-dominant forms of alienation and the factors that have led dissatisfaction with everyday life not to find a revolutionary solution over the past forty years. However, all this presupposes the existence of individuals willing and able to enter into this form of cooperation.

The second function of the association that comes to mind is to serve as a network through which individual members can propose, and subsequently collaborate on, particular interventions in social life. I should stress that, here and elsewhere, I do not envisage the association acting as a separate and superior entity that produces activities for its members. It is merely a means by which its individual members carry out particular projects, with specific collaborators, at their own initiative. Once again, this presupposes the existence of individuals willing and able to enter into this form of cooperation.

If a new association is in due course length created, I suspect that it will tend to concentrate on the first of these functions for the time being. In the case of interventions that go beyond the production and dissemination of theory, the scope of what can usefully be done at any given time and place will depend on such factors as the degree of discontent and the array of repressive forces to be found locally, and the availability, material resources, and willingness to take risks on the part of the members of the association. Unfortunately, it seems to me that, at present, the notion of contesting the processes whereby individuals' lives become alien to them is in general fairly far removed from the proletarians' sense of what is possible and desirable, with the result that practical actions directed against those processes by members of the association are unlikely to be taken up or even understood by the wider population. Repression amidst indifference is all too likely to be the only outcome. Of course, where conditions are more favourable, the members of the association should do whatever they can to disrupt the alienation of their own everyday lives, and thereby encourage others to do the same in their own lives. But a masochistic or vainglorious indulgence in foreseeable failure appears to me to possess no merit. The same goes for the reformist measures that are always seductively at hand. Where the only available actions consist of inconsequent kamikaze missions or some species of pseudo-oppositional protest that takes the continuance of the fundamental processes of the existing society for granted, the revolutionary course of action, I would suggest, is precisely to express practical contempt for both options by refusing to take up either.

Why Break the Seals of Mute Despair Unbidden, and Wail Life's Discords into Careless Ears? A Reply to Bill Not Bored

2010-03-25T12:34:00.005Z

In his text Form a new Situationist International? Let's not and say we did, Bill Not Bored criticises my proposal for the creation of a new international association of situationist revolutionaries. This is my reply.

According to Not Bored, the defining quality of proletarian life is not a craven acceptance of the separate commodity economy and the state as unchangeable givens but “a constant struggle to make a living in an unliveable world”. It is not clear to me what he means by this. How does “a constant struggle to make a living in an unliveable world” differ from the practical capitulation to an unending cycle of alienated work and alienated consumption that I would suggest constitutes the reality of the everyday lives of the vast majority of ordinary people in the advanced capitalist countries? A clue perhaps comes from Not Brown’s contention that: “Spencer’s attention is on ideology, not socio-economic conditions”. Is he suggesting that proletarians are merely grimly working away trying to provide for their basic, utilitarian needs, while the spectacle’s claims about specific products and wider forms of life pass unheeded above their heads? If he is, I think he has failed properly to take into account the rather large amount of discretionary spending that the large majority of people engage in, and the uses to which they put it. More importantly, it ignores the fact that even basic needs are now saturated in ideology. A suburban house or a hip pad in an inner city redevelopment is not just a roof over a family’s head. A car is not just a means to convey people and objects from A to B. A meal at MacDonalds or a macrobiotic restaurant is not just (or even) a means of absorbing essential nutrients and calories into the body. This year’s array of fashions is not just a collection of rags to protect the body from inclement weather. These and many other things are also parts of spectacular ideologies of pleasure, happiness, normal life, etc, that people absorb and pursue in their daily lives. But I do not propose to settle this point of contention here. I would merely appeal to readers to keep their eyes and ears open at work, in shops of all kinds, in the houses of friends and family, on holiday, during leisure time, and in all the other domains of everyday life. What are people discussing, and what are they doing? What do they wish for and what do they aspire to? Where does all this thought, action and desire have its origins? If dissatisfaction is expressed, what practical action is directed against its causes? Readers might also care to direct the same scrutiny at their own lives.

If Not Bored is to be believed, I place myself outside all of this: “with respect to the proletariat -- he places himself outside of it, as a nay-sayer to its ‘craven’ acceptance, not inside, as an inmate in the same prison”. But Not Bored should not be believed. In the very first paragraph of my proposal I wrote: “This practical submission […] is equally ubiquitous […] in your life and mine, amongst many others”. In paragraph 8 I added that the proposed new association “would not consist of individuals who claim to possess unusual abilities or see themselves as having already transcended the sordid, stupid and miserable lives that everybody else leads. Rather, its members would be, and would see themselves as being, perfectly ordinary proletarians”. Not Bored might also have given some thought to why I chose to begin my text with this quotation from Rimbaud: “Perhaps he has secrets for changing life? No, he’s just looking for some, I told myself”.

Not Bored next contends that discontent is not buried but “front-page news”. He mentions in particular “the student occupations movement in America; the on-going rioting and social strife in Greece; the popular demonstrations against the government in Iceland; the social movements in France against detention centers and expulsions”, etc. Leaving aside my doubts about the more or less openly-avowed reformist intentions of some of these activities, I would suggest that the frequency with which contestation appears in the media is rather less important than its prevalence as an ongoing practical project amongst ordinary people. If we assume that the four movements Not Bored mentions in particular have involved around 100,000 people, this would represent 0.0073% of the total population of Europe, Scandinavia and North America. That is, those movements have failed to involve 99.9927% of the population. Of course, this calculation includes the owners and managers of the dominant society, and no doubt Not Bored would wish to add in a few more tens of thousands of participants to the ranks of the rebels. However, there is no escaping the fact that the overwhelming majority of the proletariat is not, at present, translating its profound but buried discontent with work and consumption into practical refusal. When the rioting in Greece was reported to the European proletariat by the media, the vast majority did precisely nothing.

We could also approach this question by considering some evidence from opinion polls. One typical example is contained in the recently-published Eurobarometer report on Social Climate. This asked a sample of the European population whether, on the whole, they are satisfied with the life they lead. If ordinary people were admitting their discontent to themselves, and acting on it, it seems reasonable to expect them to take the minimal step of expressing dissatisfaction with life to an opinion pollster. However, the poll found that 80% of respondents professed to be very satisfied or fairly satisfied with their lives. Only 4% of respondents were very dissatisfied. We could go on to discuss many more polls about self-reported happiness and even some polls that somewhat surprisingly asked large samples whether they considered revolutionary change necessary; but we won’t. Suffice it to say that much the same picture emerges.

As Not Bored claims that “Spencer speaks of a world that was destroyed more than 40 years ago”, it may be useful to consider a study of 123 industrial conflicts in France conducted in 1971 by Claude Durand and Pierre Dubois. This found that “significant illegalities”, such as occupations of premises or physical violence against employers, cadres, supervisors or police, had occurred in half of all disputes. I invite Not Bored to identify a single American town or city (or indeed a town or city elsewhere in the advanced capitalist economies) in which a similar state of affairs existed last year. If he cannot do this, perhaps he can explain how the process of practical contestation of the dominant society can properly be regarded proceeding quite satisfactorily over the past 40 years when in the vital field of work it has not even maintained the levels of resistance with which it began?

Not Bored claims that “Spencer speaks as if revolutionary theory stopped cold in 1972”. He also cites various theoretical and practical developments he considers have occurred since then. However, my proposal refers to “the twenty five or so years since the development of the situationist project was largely abandoned” (paragraph 4). “Largely” does not mean “completely”. Moreover, if Not Bored had subtracted 25 from 2010 he would have arrived at an approximate date of 1985 not 1972. This date was selected partly because it was roughly the point at which the last of the comrades once linked by the Declaration Concerning the Center for Research on the Social Question and the Notice Concerning the Reigning Society and Those Who Contest It largely abandoned their development of theory largely abandoned their development of theory, and partly because it could be stretched to include the best parts of Debord’s ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’ of 1988. My text also expressly recognized that “here and there one can find small fragments of insight that can be put to good use when torn out of their original context and reintegrated into a new critique” (paragraph 4). The existence of some useful work within and without a situationist framework is not, therefore, logically inconsistent with what I wrote.

I am very doubtful that the ideas and actions mentioned by Not Bored adequately adapt the theory and practice of revolutionary contestation to the exigencies of our times. But the reasons for my scepticism need not detain us. I once said that an up-to-date revolutionary theory might include (but not be restricted to) 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.

If Not Bored is right about the adequacy of the developments he cites, he should be able to provide at least a partial list of the work that has already done what I have said is still to be done. I should certainly be grateful to him for this service.

Not Bored rightly regards the appearance of my proposal in English only as unsatisfactory. I am not in a position to translate the text into other languages. Rather than simply sit on my hands, however, I decided I would start with English readers and hope that the proposal eventually reaches individuals who have no interest in a petit-bourgeois display of satisfaction with their language skills and are prepared instead take upon themselves the task of translating and disseminating the text in other languages.

In relation to the SI, Not Bored argues that I have failed to take into account that the theory of the SI changed several times between 1957 and 1972 and failed to outline its basic principles. However, the particular association I propose would be a collaboration between individuals who are already persuaded that the thought of the SI provides an unsurpassed theoretical resource for revolutionaries and who are capable of participating as equals in the practical tasks of applying and developing that resource. I do not think that such individuals would require a theoretical history of the SI (and certainly not a history as poor and unhelpful to revolutionaries as the one that Not Bored offers). Moreover, situationist theory is nothing more than a practical weapon to be directed against dominant society, a means by which dissatisfaction with alienation comes to conceive and execute an evolving practical negation of the social organization of alienation that confronts it. I did not consider that individuals who approached situationist theory as a toolkit for revolutionary contestation would need to be told about the theories and practices that the SI itself long ago rightly discarded as obviously inadequate to a revolutionary transformation of society. I also did not consider it appropriate to attempt a comprehensive summary of the components of situationist theory that remain useful to the practical struggle against capitalism, not least because other revolutionaries with different experiences and another set of specific targets in mind might well be able to supplement or correct any inventory that might occur to me. To the extent that a shared understanding of some basic principles is required, its elaboration was left to the process of discussion that will precede the formation of any new association.

Not Bored also alleges that: “His text is anti-situationist when it comes to matters of organization: the SI never allowed its members the abilities to carry out ‘theoretical and other practical actions […] in the individual names of those who produce them, and on their responsibility alone’ and/or ‘carry out projects outside the framework of the international and to form other associations to do so’ (thesis #7)”. In fact, article 5 of the Provisional Statutes of the SI adopted at the 8th SI Conference says: “It goes without saying that personally undertaken projects or theoretical hypotheses cannot be limited by the section, nor by the SI as a whole — except in cases where they are manifestly hostile to the SI’s very bases”. Far more important, the one and only relevant consideration is whether preventing the members of the association from undertaking any revolutionary thought and action outside of the association is necessary in order to advance revolutionary contestation or to retard its recuperation. For my part, I cannot see any good reason for taking that step. Of course, a facility must exist to expel members who enter into avoidable compromises with the dominant society that are incompatible with the association’s purposes. But no useful end would be served by making the association into a jealous entity claiming exclusive rights over the thought and actions of those who enter it. The association is a means by which individuals unite so as to carry out certain practical goals that they themselves hold, not a collectivity that members submit to and serve.

Not Bored does not appear to have recognized that the organizational principles I have proposed have their roots in a situationist critique of the failures of the SI as an organization (an organizational failure manifested in, amongst other things, its ability to foster the growth of the satisfied inactivity that eventually produced the crisis and dissolution of the SI). This critique appears not to be well-represented on the Web. But it can be found in such texts as Daniel Denevert’s Suggestions for the Legitimate Eulogy of the SI and of all Revolutionary Activity in Order to Arrive at a Merciless Critique of Our Enemies (1976). One of the insights informing this critique was expressed in Denevert’s text in these terms:

“Everything is said about the spectacle except what it always and fundamentally is: the colonization of the point of view of the individual by the point of view of the collectivity”.

The distance between Not Bored and this perspective is plainly revealed by the latter’s concluding set of criticisms. This includes a perfectly reasonable question about who would decide whether or not any individual was to be excluded from the founding conference of any new association. The answer is the participants in the conference as a whole. There are various ways in which this could be done. However, even if I drew up a provisional list of participants who should be invited myself, I would circulate a list of the excluded individuals, and copies of all relevant documents, in advance of the conference convening and ask the invited individuals to ratify or revoke the exclusion of each person concerned. If a majority took the view that they would wish to associate with an excluded person, he or she would be invited to participate in the forthcoming conference.

Unfortunately, Not Bored’s comments are not restricted to a commendable concern with democratic procedure. In his view, my proposal is a “monologue” that descends into “a sterile dialogue with himself”. If Not Bored really believes that I am merely talking to myself, it is not obvious why he has wasted time responding to me; unless, of course, he is taking an opportunity to publicly display his supposedly superior grasp of situationist matters for the benefit of the admirers who consume his work on that basis. It is equally unclear why a text that addresses a foreseeable and reasonable objection to itself should be equated with a sterile dialogue with oneself. No grounds are given for this characterization. I fear it may have more to do with rhetorical display than reasoned critique.

Yet this is not all, for Not Bored points out that my proposal is made by a person who “is not a member of any organization, no matter how small, but an isolated individual”. Yes, I am just an ordinary individual, known to a few friends, neighbours, associates, family members and work colleagues. I am not even a famous isolated individual, like Raoul Veneigem, whose post-SI work Not Bored deigns to publish and translate. In fact, I could be just any person in the street, the factory or the office. Who would seriously entertain a suggestion from such a source? Not Bill Not Bored, it seems. Not for him the rabble who speak only for themselves. Not for him any notion of autonomous individuals coming together for specific ends. Before he is prepared to consider a proposal, it must have already been approved by others. Before he is prepared to act, there evidently must be a collectivity into which he can assimilate himself. It looks rather like he walks only where reputation and collective approval has cleared the way. His is a timid soul, it seems.

No doubt Not Bored can be assured that he is not speaking to himself. He presents his work at galleries. He lectures at subsidized cultural events. He speaks to the press and appears in documentary films. He leads walks. He stages plays and displays placards before passers-by and surveillance camera workers. He complains that his civil liberties are not upheld. He translates and comments. But after 25 or so years of presenting tepid social critique to spectators who have evinced no practical dissatisfaction and passively view his activities with no practical revolutionary purpose in view, nothing in the way of revolutionary contestation has been achieved. His efforts do not disrupt the processes by which his own life becomes foreign to him, however briefly. Nor do they attack the processes by which his audiences’ lives become foreign to them. Yet he continues untroubled by the compatibility of what he does with the persistence of the society of alienation and takes no steps to turn against his palpably inadequate praxis. Indeed, he seems quite content with the cultural and pseudo-oppositional niche he has found within that society. For him, it seems, revolution is a process that is satisfactorily unfolding at some distance from his own everyday life and will one day deliver salvation to his door. All this is very different from the views that prompted my proposal for a new international association of situationist revolutionaries. It is no surprise that Not Bored views that proposal with contempt.

Wayne Spencer
23 March 2010

Towards a New Situationist International

2010-03-05T11:29:00.005Z

"Perhaps he has secrets for changing life? No, he’s just looking for some, I told myself.”
(Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 1873)

It is a brutal fact that the defining quality of proletarian life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the foundation on which the everyday thought and action of ordinary people rests, is a craven acceptance of the separate commodity economy and the state as unchangeable givens. This practical submission exists everywhere in the advanced capitalist countries. It is not just a matter of the unthinking obedience of the many good children (of all ages) who have nearly always confined their thoughts, actions and desires to the obviously submissive conventions of their times. It is equally ubiquitous in the endless impotent complaints about fragments of social life, in the many varieties of contemporary cynicism that sneer as they obey, in the swaggering search for status and money of the urban gang member or the petty criminal, in the myriad campaigns for the reform of this or that unseemly fragment of everyday life, in the search for the cool, the spiritual or the perfect state of wasted oblivion; and in your life and mine, amongst many others.

However, as well as submission, there is also a profound but buried discontent with the petty and idiotic lives that a world subordinated to the production and consumption of commodities obliges us to lead. This misery that dares not speak its name, this festering sense that we are utterly wasting our limited time on earth, may be evaded, repressed, or concealed behind a mask of happiness. It may be treated with therapies, religions, permitted holidays or forbidden drugs, a new family or a new job, or one of a multitude of other changes in our consumption of goods and ideologies. And yet, after everything, it remains. Indeed, a history of the changing means by which our sense of the profound inadequacy of life has been confusedly expressed, avoided and recuperated would be a history of much of the individual and social life of our epoch. As a corollary, the revival of revolutionary contestation precisely depends on the degree to which contemporary dissatisfaction can extricate itself from the consumerist, reformist and escapist forms into which it has been diverted and seduced over the last 30 or more years. In place of revolution, discontent with everyday life has attempted to find remedies in the new forms of work and consumption held out by a rejuvenated and increasingly sophisticated capitalism. The practical negation of this misadventure is the road to social revolution in our times.

As one response to this desperate state of affairs, I propose the formation of an international association of situationist revolutionaries, a new situationist international. Such an association would in the first instance seek to catalyze the efforts of its presently scattered and isolated members by bringing them into intensive collaboration and discussion with each other. The efforts of revolutionaries to understand and contest the impoverishment of everyday life under contemporary capitalism (and first and foremost the impoverishment of their own everyday lives) have proved palpably inadequate. Notably, over the past several decades, revolutionary theory has almost completely failed to keep abreast of developments within advanced capitalism. In particular, it has failed to engage with the devastatingly stultifying notions of consumable happiness and human possibility with which the spectacle has come to secure an uneasy acquiescence amongst much of the working class. The new international would seek to intensify and deepen the theory and practice of its members; and to give them a cumulative breadth and power. At the same time, it would aim to catalyze dissatisfaction outside its ranks by providing inspiration to dissent, disquiet to obedience, and the beginnings of a practical theory to individuals who are moving towards the conclusion that social revolution is the only remedy for the poverty of their lives.

The emphasis on a situationist international is a reflection of the simple fact that the thought of the first situationist international provides an unsurpassed theoretical resource for revolutionaries seeking to engage with capitalism under conditions of commodity abundance. In the twenty five or so years since the development of the situationist project was largely abandoned, other theoretical lineages have had free reign to develop a more acute successor to it. Their efforts have only served to demonstrate the startling bankruptcy of Marxism, anarchism, academia, the new social movements, and the arts. Of course, here and there one can find small fragments of insight that can be put to good use when torn out of their original context and reintegrated into a new critique. In general, however, the legacy of self-styled revolutionary thought in the last quarter of a century is one of anachronism, obscurantism and timid reformism. It has not advanced the revolutionary critique of the capitalism that actually exists but fled from it.

In 1964 the Situationist International said of the term ‘situationist’: “For the moment, however ridiculous a label may be, ours has the merit of drawing a sharp line between the previous incoherence and a new level of rigour” (Questionnaire, Internationale Situationniste #9, 1964). One can hardly say the same today. As situationist thought has been abandoned by individuals with revolutionary intent, it has been taken up in traduced form by legions of students, academics, architects, artists and commentators. Its critique of alienated everyday life has been discarded, attenuated or rendered devoid of subversive consequences for the everyday lives of those who handle it. As a result, far from being a badge of rigour, the adjective ‘situationist’ is now typically to be found attached to specialised tools of toothless analysis or justifications for inane artistic or leisure activities. This may seem to make it an unpropitious moment to take up again the situationist label. However, revolutionary theory cannot simply ignore or lament its recuperation by the dominant society; rather, it must confront it. One virtue of a revival of an avowedly situationist revolutionary movement is precisely that it will bring these two hostile forces into open conflict with each other. In this way, the sophisticated critique of modern conditions can be cleansed of the repellent taint of academicism and returned to the streets, where it belongs. At the same time, a revivified situationist theoretico-practice must engage with the proliferating reformist ideologies that address the distinctively modern maladies of everyday life without indulging in any overt reference to situationist theory. As the more obvious costs and miseries of the expanded consumer society of the past thirty years become flagrant, pseudo-critiques of (and pseudo-remedies for) ‘consumerism’, ‘affluenza’ and stubbornly static levels of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ increasingly clamour for the attention of the spectator and the policy-maker. In response, those who believe that the poverties of everyday life are matters of correctable excesses within the world of alienated work and alienated consumption must find themselves opposed by the proponents of a revolutionary solution for the interconnected misery of everything that exists. Those who would reform social, political and economic life so as to prevent our uniquely modern discontents from running out of control must be met as enemies by those who would have such discontents develop a conscious, coherent and practical expression.

There can be no question of simply reviving the Situationist International that was dissolved in 1972. It would be absurd to think of the practices, organizational form and theoretical propositions of the situationists as providing a fixed set of prescriptions that need only be dusted down and put back into use. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that revolutionary theory and practice stands at present in a state of perfectly scandalous dereliction. For example, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2009 American children aged 8-18 spend an average of 7.38 hours a day, seven days a week, using the various media the society of the spectacle makes available. The corresponding statistics for adults are hardly more encouraging. Where can one find radical critiques of the particular ideas of contentment and excitement, or the general forms of desirable life, that this torrent of alienated representation endlessly parades before its spectators? Where might the satisfied spectator or the burgeoning malcontent encounter a revolutionary theory that is sympathetically alive to what contemporary spectacles promise (and to some degree deliver) and yet is uncompromising in its critique of the lived realities? Where might workers weary of their unhappy dance to an unchosen dirge find a critique of work that extends as far as the well-paid and secure employment that remains preponderant in the advanced western economies? It would not be very much of an exaggeration to answer: nowhere. Inaugurating a modernized contestation of the advanced, affluent capitalism of our era will be at the heart of what the new international seeks to do. Everything must be reconsidered and brought up to date so as to ensure we have the theoretical and practical tools that are required today. The lessons of the past (including those of the failure of the Situationist International) must be learned. The real social changes that have occurred since the heyday of the Situationist International (and their consequences for revolutionary theory and practice) must be recognized.

The new situationist international cannot be a collectivity that serves as a cause for the militant, a shelter for the passive, a source of vicarious status or activity for its members generally, or a self-perpetuating mechanism for organizing the organization. As an association of individuals, it would serve to bring together the particular persons who happen to be its members at any given time for the particular purposes of producing theory (both individually or in concert with one or more other members) and carrying out actions (both individually and in concert with other members). Theoretical statements and other practical actions would be carried out in the individual names of those who produce them, and on their responsibility alone. Every member would be expected to participate in the life of the association by using it for one or more of the purposes for which it was created. Every decision that concerns the association should be taken by the members as a whole, either directly or by way of mandated delegates, and in general the association should be egalitarian in nature. Members would be free to carry out projects outside the framework of the international and to form other associations to do so.

The new international must recognize that there are no currents within the intelligentsia or amongst artists from which an ‘avant-garde’ might be formed. That is all dead and gone; art and the academy are now wholly integrated within the dominant society. In any event, every last vestige of the unmitigatedly disastrous notion of the vanguard party must now be repudiated. The new international would not be “a general staff”, not even one “that does not want troops” (The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries, Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963). It would not be a separate grouping of intellectuals whose thought and instructions the proletariat need only absorb and act on. It would not consist of individuals who claim to possess unusual abilities or see themselves as having already transcended the sordid, stupid and miserable lives that everybody else leads. Rather, its members would be, and would see themselves as being, perfectly ordinary proletarians. Their arrival at the view that social revolution is necessary, desirable and possible in advance of others is of no more significance than the lumps that sometimes appear when a sauce is first stirred; they may be early but they are not special. As can be seen from the long history of failed revolutions (a history that has repeatedly seen revolutionary workers fatally abandon the making of decisions to specialised bodies who claim to represent them), social revolution depends on proletarians acting and thinking at all stages by and for themselves. For this reason, although the new situationist international will publish its theory, it must do so solely in order to encourage other proletarians who wish to understand and suppress their misery to pursue an autonomous contestation of their own alienation. In the revolutionary army without officers, drills or uniforms, there must only be foot-soldiers.

It might be objected that a proposal such as this one can avoid an abhorrent abstraction only to the extent that it is an immediately realizable suggestion for a collaboration between known individuals. It might also be objected that it is not obvious whether and where associates in a new international can at present be found. If I fail to heed these weighty objections, it is because I hope that the public appearance of the notion of a new international will, over time, help to crystallize from the currents of history the forces it needs for its realization.

10.

In the event that individuals prepared to create and work actively within a twenty-first century situationist international do come forward, I would suggest that the next step should be a conference between the interested parties. This should preferably be a face-to-face meeting; but if that proves impracticable, it could be conducted by post or e-mail. Each participant should be required to present beforehand his or her written views on (a) the minimum definition of ‘situationist’ for the purposes of the association; (b) the best organizational structure and procedures to be adopted; (c) the practical purposes to which the association should be put; (d) the contribution (theoretical, practical or financial) that he or she personally proposes to make to the association in its initial stages; and (e) any other questions that he or she wishes to have discussed at the conference. Individuals who are unable or unwilling to do this, or cannot specify any concrete steps which they themselves would take within the proposed association, should be excluded from the conference. We might save ourselves a little time by excluding from the outset anyone who holds an academic position or is a public practitioner of art. Such assiduous prostration before the dominant forms of diminished thought and action is necessarily inconsistent with participation in an association whose only goal is the revolutionary transformation of the totality of everyday life. At the same time, it may well be necessary to defend the incipient association from being overwhelmed by that widespread credulousness that seems prepared to believe almost anything, as long as it places capitalism or the state in an unfavourable light. As a convenient rule of thumb, the new international might reject anyone who believes that the attacks of 11th September, 2001 were orchestrated by the American state. Nothing but confusion can be expected from an individual whose standards of acceptable evidence and argument are this low.

11.

If an accord can at length be reached as to the terms and form of a new international, its inauguration should be made contingent on the successful production of a first issue of a journal. A journal is, of course, not an end in itself. On the contrary, it is merely one of the means by which its writers and readers seek to develop firstly a practical understanding of the constituent elements of contemporary alienation and the forces of repression, mystification, seduction and pseudo-critique that it brings to bear against dissatisfaction and revolt, and secondly a practical communication with other radically disaffected individuals and groups. Yet, an association that cannot even produce a single issue of a journal is unlikely to achieve anything else of substance. It would be better if it never was born.

12.

If serious discussions about the creation of a new situationist international are entered into, everything written above will be open to debate and alteration.

Wayne Spencer

March 2010
No copyright.
Use as you please

Translations encouraged

Note: Bill Not Bored has published a critique of this text. My reply can be found here.

Discussion of Failure with Frére Dupont

2009-07-13T19:54:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-13T19:30:00.004+01:00

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"

2009-05-07T18:18:00.003Z

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

2009-04-26T18:01:00.003Z

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”

2008-12-07T09:13:00.003Z

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

2008-02-03T15:26:00.000Z

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

2008-02-03T15:12:00.003Z

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.]

Two all too insubstantial fragments on revolutionary theory

2007-06-22T20:32:00.000Z

In my view, revolutionary theory is an articulation and explanation of those strains of dissatisfaction with the everyday life of contemporary capitalism that cannot be resolved outside of a social revolution and a critique of the subjective and objective obstacles that fetter the advance of such dissatisfaction towards its revolutionary remedy in the specific social circumstances that are now at hand. It can be of immediate interest and meaning only to individuals whose disillusion with everyday life has produced the particular depth of dissatisfaction to which revolutionary theory speaks. It does not follow that revolutionary theory is somehow permanently alien to the currently satisfied; it is just that satisfaction must undermine itself first. This is a matter less of the persuasive power of revolutionaries than it is of the contradictions and deficiencies of capitalism and the everyday life it sustains. Advanced capitalism increasingly justifies itself to the proletariat on the basis of its purported ability to deliver a richly rewarding everyday life, a life made up of various combinations of autonomy, excitement, glamour, sexual satisfaction, ecstasy, communication, community, enlightenment, delectable depravity, etc. Yet the trivialization, separation and subordination of an everyday life that is constrained to the production, circulation, glorification and consumption of commodities yields meagre rewards for even the most abject of spectators, and what little can be grasped is soon exhausted by experience or swept into obsolescence and ridicule by the next turn of the consumer's society's wheel. The task of the dominant society is to adroitly manage the change of illusions so as not to produce any insight into the illusion of change and to shrivel people's information, intelligence, desires, initiative and expectations of life down to the narrow dimensions that sustain some degree of satisfaction with, or resignation to, the society of the spectacle. Success is not certain for capitalism. Refusals of various sizes have erupted in the past. Moreover, the times in which we live hardly evidence a smooth absorption of the proletariat into spectacular life. Mental illness and depression appear rife. Even the well-adjusted and the pseudo-rebellious seem to have about their lives a desperation that speaks more of fragility and a grim clutching at consoling illusions that threaten to slip out of reach than of a stable and unthinking embrace of commodified existence. One would have to have a remarkable faith in capitalism to see in this state of affairs a definitive and permanent banishment of dialectics.

One task for revolutionaries and other proletarians is precisely to examine their own thoughts and feelings so as identify and confront the ideas and desires that are directly derived from the spectacle or that tend to sustain it within you and you within it. There is no algorithm for doing this and the process is inevitably fallible. It is, I would suggest, in the first instance a matter of tracing as far as possible the origins, natures, correlates and practical consequences of what we think and feel and ascertaining whether and how these serve to reproduce the system of alienation, on the one hand, or point beyond it, on the other. Needless to say, even if one is in a position to overcome particular alienated thoughts and practices to some degree in advance of revolutionary change, the exigencies and consequences of living within the society of the spectacle will either foster relapses into old ways or reconstitute alienation in new configurations in the changed circumstances in which one finds oneself. The process continues therefore until the individual acts with others to overthrow capitalism or subsides into one variety or other of resignation.

On Lice and Fleas: Observations Starting from the Conflict Between Iran and the USA

2007-06-13T16:05:00.002Z

By Wayne Spencer

“Johnson, for sport perhaps, or from the spirit of contradiction, eagerly maintained that Derrick had merit as a writer. Mr. Morgan argued with him directly, in vain. At length he had recourse to this device. ‘Pray, Sir, (said he,) whether do you reckon Derrick or Smart the best poet?’ Johnson at once felt himself rouzed; and answered, ‘Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea’.” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791)

Within the catalogue of absurd actions, values, goods, entertainments, aspirations, emotions and ideas that the society of the spectacle ubiquitously parades before us as a summation of all that has been said and done, and all that can be said and done, the dispute between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran has of late obtained a certain intermittent prominence.

The possibility of an armed conflict between the United States and Iran is perhaps a fairly remote one. If and when an attack occurs, however, it will do so because that ever-shifting admixture of blind self-interest, shrewd strategic insight and deluded ideological delirium that characterizes the thought of the Bush administration and its global allies has come to conclude that the political and economic interests of the national and international capitalist systems they oversee would best be served by such a course of action. The ends pursued by such an attack would doubtless include the preservation of American and Israeli military hegemony within the region; the curtailment of an Iranian regional influence that has only been enhanced by the elimination of the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein and its replacement by a Shi’ite dominated government sympathetic to Iran; the opening-up of the vast Iranian oil reserves to less fettered use by the West; and the intimidation of present and potential opponents worldwide and those local governing regimes who have to date been dilatory in their submission to the dictates of the Western powers.

America and its allies have so far grounded their measures against Iran on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and any approach towards war is likely to continue using the treaty as justification. The treaty undoubtedly lends itself to such use. In practice, it has always served to hinder new powers who are objectionable to the existing powers from acquiring weapons of mass destruction while doing nothing to require the globally dominant national powers to renounce their existing arsenals, or even to refrain from introducing new and modernized weapons systems. In this way, it perpetuates the military dominance of the states that possessed nuclear weapons in 1968 (when the treaty was first ratified) over those who came later. However, it is not just the hypocrisy of the treaty and the one-sidedness with which it is implemented that renders it contemptible. The fundamental function of the treaty is to ensure that the conflicts of interest that continually erupt between current or aspiring hierarchical powers competing with each for dominance over populations and resources do not escalate into a global catastrophe that would destroy the system as a whole. Thus, while it reduces the possibility of contending powers wreaking terrible destruction across the planet, it does so only as part of the institutional and regulatory framework of global capitalism and in order to ensure that humanity remains available to be subordinated by someone or other to the state and the economy. We are permitted to go on living, required indeed to keep ourselves alive, purely in order that the economy and its deceptions, the autonomous movement of the non-living, can continue to exercise its sway and pursue its blind passage to nowhere.

On the other side of the line of conflict that has been drawn for us, Iran cites its sovereignty as a nation and the needs of an economy worryingly reliant on oil in defence of what it claims is its entirely non-military nuclear programme. However, the sovereignty that Iran’s ruling elite insists upon in relation to other states is equally and necessarily asserted against the ordinary people of Iran. Moreover, the economy about which the state is so concerned is nothing more than the mechanism whereby the labour power of the Iranian proletariat is extracted from it, often with the crudest brutality, and then circulated locally and globally in the form of alienated commodities. The history of Iran since the 1978 revolution demonstrates beyond doubt that the practical reality of the clerical “rule of the just” at the heart of the self-definition of the Islamic Republic is the systematic subjection of society to the separate power of an external ideology and the social strata of clerics, cronies, traders and capitalists that rule in its name or flourish under its control of everyday life. It is the standing refutation of the false promises of all the pseudo-revolutionaries of radical Islamism. Of course, many Islamists belong to branches of Islam other than Shi’ism. But it is not the theological differences between Shi’ism and the other strands of Islam that have been responsible for the creation of a new tyranny within Iran since the revolution. Rather, it is the fact that the revolution permitted to come to power a regime that was separate from the proletariat and sought to impose upon it the dictates of a separate ideology. Liberation descending from above inevitably crushes those waiting below.

Even before any armed hostilities break out, sections of the ruling classes in the United States and Iran have sought to utilize the tattered but still functioning ideology of nationalism - with its core doctrine that the individual must assimilate into and defend whatever arbitrarily-defined hierarchical collectivity is said to be the nation - in order to claim that there is a threat to people like “us” that requires a rallying behind the state. The cynicism bred by the long line of all-too-obvious lies the Bush government and the rulers of Iran have trotted out over the years perhaps renders this crude manipulation of public sentiment of limited efficacy. However, the spectacle also uses the prospect of war between the two countries to secure obedience to the interests of the state and the economy in more subtle ways, especially in the liberal and affluent West.

In the advanced capitalist countries, submission to the logic of the commodity and the state is secured less by militarism than by the false pleasures, false choices and false oppositions the spectacle provides in abundance. The spectator is continuously presented with choices and issues that make no qualitative difference to everyday life. He or she is urged to support or participate in an endless succession of campaigns that may ameliorate some aspect of contemporary alienation but leave the fundamental bases of the society unchanged. We are already seeing the death in old age of individuals who have spent an entire lifetime battling inequalities and injustices, opposing wars, striving to increase citizen’s rights, exposing unsafe goods and practices, challenging the stupidities and deceptions of politicians and bureaucrats, etc, sometimes indeed with a reasonable degree of success. In doing so, they have not weakened the subordination of the totality of society to the commodity economy and its state in the slightest. Capitalist society is now openly reformist at almost every level, permitting, even encouraging, suggestions and demands for change within the confines of the system. For example, the UK Parliament alone (not counting the legislatures in Wales and Scotland) brings into force over 3,500 new statutory instruments (regulations, etc) each year, many representing attempts to modify some aspect of life. The total body of reformist activity is much vaster, as many administrative and other changes within government, industry, etc, do not require changes in the law. Far from weakening the dominant society, the vast tide of complaints, analyses and proposals for the amelioration of isolated symptoms of the reigning alienation generated by the many thousands of campaigning groups operating in every advanced country in effect serves as an invaluable source of hypotheses and data for the refinement of alienation, helping the system to identify ideological and practical improvements that have escaped the inevitably blinkered notice of politicians, industrialists and bureaucrats. Not everything is acted upon, and certainly not straightaway; nonetheless, small but real changes are introduced at the surface of social life over time and the observable consequences of the endless but intermittently rewarded process of pursuing such changes are to adjust capitalism to the beginnings of dissatisfaction and the beginnings of dissatisfaction to capitalism.

The spectre of war in Iran offers yet another opportunity for the spectator to spend time thinking and acting in ways that will leave his or her alienation just where it stands and just where it has always stood. The merits of the cases for and against an attack on Iran, as judged by one or another liberal, conservative or pseudo-revolutionary perspective within capitalism, are endlessly discussed by specialists and then mulled over by spectators. Means for a peaceful resolution are advanced and considered and protests are discussed and carried on. In all this, nothing of importance is challenged and nothing of importance changes. Even the narrow interests of American and European capital can be safeguarded without recourse to a military strike on Iran, as the existence of dissenting voices within the military, political and cultural establishments amply testifies. More importantly, whether or not America or its allies pursue an attack, the system in which we sacrifice the whole of our lives to the autonomous process of the capitalist economy, and the empty roles and pleasures it offers, will persist. Whether or not the hawkish voices for war within global neo-conservatism have their way in this instance, the everyday lives of the individual will remain imprisoned within the system of alienation that ensnares us. Mere opposition to war in Iran, like tourism, will take us nowhere worth going.

In Iran, the Islamic regime’s attempts to impose an ideological monopoly leave less room for proponents of reform or pseudo-revolution than in the West, but false opposition exists there too. The economic liberalization initiated by President Rafsanjani in the early 1990s and the growth of higher education in the country have increased the size of the bourgeoisie, the middle class and the student population. Some members of these groups have done relatively well in economic terms, while others, such as the students unable to find professional work commensurate with their qualifications, have seen their aspirations frustrated. Both hope that more radical socio-economic shifts in the direction of liberal capitalism will increase the benefits they receive from an economy that continues to be constrained by the economic isolation of Iran and the control of much of the economy by the state and the giant para-state Islamic charitable institutions (bonyads). Equally, this milieu expects that a civil society less bound by the moral archaisms of the current regime will allow it to indulge more freely those tastes for commodified pleasure and display that it derives from the global spectacle of consumable life and through which it likes to pretend that it is independent, sophisticated and superior to both the vulgar workers and the philistine clergy. The result is an ideology that loudly proclaims the importance of human rights and bourgeois democracy and remains silent about almost everything else. In recent years, the collapse of the organised reform movement in the face of the intransigence of the regime has left the middle classes without a vehicle for social change. Nonetheless, its capitalist ideology (with its retinue of photogenic human rights advocates, film-makers, musicians, fashionable young people and other enthusiastic proponents of consumer conformity to dramatize it) continues to serve as both a false model of radical social change within Iran and a resource for proponents of military action against Iran in the West.

The potential for radical opposition to the regime in Iran is to be found amongst the proletariat. In January 2004, the majority of workers who had constructed a copper-smelting plant in Khatonabad on the promise that they would be offered jobs in the works were dismissed. The workers and their families responded by strikes and blockades of the plant, demanding that the agreement be honoured and outstanding wages paid. After eight days of conflict, helicopters sent by the local Security Council fired on the protestors, killing between 4 and 15 and wounding up to 300. Around 80 workers were also arrested, with some later being tortured. This exercise in state violence did not, however, extinguish the dispute, for clashes between workers and the security forces persisted for several days afterwards. Moreover, the spreading news about the massacre served to stimulate rather than intimidate proletarian resistance in Iran. A growing wave of class struggle has now emerged, with teachers, bus drivers and workers in the car, petrochemical and textile industries, amongst others, taking up their own grievances against their employers.

10.

As yet, the proletarian movement in Iran has not stepped beyond demands (such as those for better working conditions, the payment of arrears of pay and improved wages) that continue to recognize the existence of capitalism. However, there are also signs that sections of the workers are seeking a revolutionary position. One such is the formation of the Komiteye Hamahangi (“Coordinating Committee to Form Workers’ Organization”), an anti-capitalist grouping that has avoided the Stalinism that has long afflicted revolutionary thought in Iran and whose founding declaration attracted the signatures of over 3,000 Iranian proletarians. Unfortunately, the Komiteye’s present orientation appears to contain fundamental weaknesses that seem likely to hamper the class struggle. The objectives of the Komiteye are to foster the emergence of activists from the underground; to help create, link and coordinate workers’ organizations; to encourage workers to be open to organization; and ultimately to establish the founding committee of a national anti-capitalist working class organization in Iran. The purpose of the association between the members of the Komiteye is thus not to develop for themselves the theory of their own practice and the practice of their own theory; nor is to aid other proletarians to do so. The organization exists largely to build itself and other organizations and the individual is expected simply to aid this construction of collectivies. The internal structure of the Komiteye seems consistent with this mediated and submissive view of the individual’s role in class struggle and its inattention to the nature of social relations that result. The individual is required to attend the monthly ordinary meetings of the Komiteye but no attempt beyond this is made to require or ensure egalitarian and active relationships between the members. No concern about the possibility of hierarchy and passivity is evinced and no mechanisms to militate against these abnegations of autonomy have been instituted. Also, the role of the ordinary meeting is limited. It sets policies and the constitution and it elects both sub-committees and an executive committee; however, its control over these committees is evidently limited. The executive committee may be dissolved on a vote of an emergency committee but there is no requirement that it periodically report to the members and have the steps it has taken to carry out its mandate approved. There is also the question of the fundamental relationship of the individual toward his or her own activity in the organization. Who decides what practical steps are to be taken by the members? Is the individual’s initiative as a member subject to prior orders or subsequent approval by the executive or ordinary committee? The Komiteye’s constitution says nothing on this matter expressly, suggesting a complete indifference to the matter of whether the individual retains autonomy or surrenders it to the group he or she has joined. To the extent it is possible to tell from outside, it would seem that it is down to the executive committee to initiate the activity of the Komiteye’s members and perhaps appraise it afterwards. If that is so, the relationship between individual members and the Komiteye only replicates the alienated relationships between order-givers and order-takers, and between separate bodies and their subordinate members, that are found in the capitalist world. The individual members serve the organization; the organization does not serve the individual. Moreover, an analogous relationship appears to be contemplated between the Komiteye (and the national organization it aims at) and the wider proletariat, with the role of the proletariat being to open itself up to being organized from outside and approve the “influential and well-trusted worker activists” who will carry this organisation out on their behalf. Across the board, the Komiteye fails to take into account the long and sad history of proletarian revolution and revolutionary activities being subverted by the presence or emergence within them of alienated social relations; it fails failed fully to learn the historical lesson that alienation cannot be combated with alienated means.

11.

In an interview with Against the Wage in 2005, Mohsen Hakimi, a founder member of Komiteye Hamahangi, suggested that the current wave of disputes over terms and conditions of employment in Iran “calls into question the bosses and the government” and “by its very nature, is anti-capitalist”. It can hardly be doubted that the concrete experience of the crude exploitation by which the Iranian ruling classes enrich themselves, an exploitation that often includes wages below the official poverty line for a family, dangerous conditions, and militarized workplaces, opens up the possibility of revolutionary praxis within the Iranian proletariat. However, the course of revolution depends fundamentally on the proletariat consciously and practically repudiating all the alienated thoughts and actions that arise out of and sustain capitalism, and doing so by and for itself. In the same way that the Komiteye fails radically to engage with everyday social relations within itself, so it fails in theory and practice to contest social relations in wider everyday life. For example, the Komiteye proposes to foster a propensity to organization in workers by means that include “cultural, artistic and athletic organizations of the workers”. These measures betray a taking for granted of separate thought, separate creativity and separate play in an epoch when culture, art and sport are not just lucrative fields of commodity production and consumption but also vital ideological bulwarks of the rule of the commodity and its economy worldwide, not least because of the ways in which they corral human creativity and play into specialized domains separate from everyday life as a whole and divorced from an unmediated use and control of the means of modern production. If the Iranian proletariat is to supersede a clamouring for better wages and more humane conditions of labour and embark on a social revolution, it can do so only by way of a comprehensive practical critique of everyday life. Such a critique must attack poverty and oppression at the hands of the ruling classes and everything else in the everyday life that makes individuals the agents, hand-maidens and mouthpieces of the commodity and prevents them from taking possession of the whole of social life. Such a critique should undoubtedly include, yet can hardly be restricted to, a practical critique of the alienations, constraints and miseries of ordinary family life, gender roles, nationalism, sport in particular and leisure in general, art, the organization of town and city, and the consumption of drugs, fashion and other forms of commodified oblivion.

12.

A central threat confronting the project of proletarian liberation in Iran is to be found in the efforts within and without Iran to foster the growth and recognition of trade unions in the country. The hierarchical relations between officials and grassroots members, which can already be seen coalescing in the Tehran bus workers syndicate and other organisations in Iran, sooner or later take the theory and practice of struggles out of the hands and minds of proletarians themselves, assigning strategy, tactics, the correction of errors, and a wider comprehension of struggles to a specialized bureaucratic elite and reducing ordinary members to spectators and order-takers in their own struggles. Moreover, in relation to Iran, the unions are a counterpart to the spectacle of overseas consumer happiness carried by the popular culture, advertising and other commodified thought emanating from the West. At the same time that consumer publicity fosters a demand for the products of advanced capitalism, trade unionism seeks to promote a local economic organisation that will supply such consumption across a wider section the population. Here as elsewhere, trade unions seek to limit the ruling classes’ ability to extract profits on the basis of low wages and poor working conditions and thereby oblige the existing rulers or their successors to engage in an economic modernization that will increase the productivity of workers and provide the means to combine higher wages and continued profitability. The price of this strategy is every moment of every proletarian’s life, for the simple reason that life remains subordinated at every stage and every point to the alienated production of commodities and their alienated consumption. The same can be said for the array of ‘non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) within Iran, a body of reformists of everyday life that may be content to see all or part of the existing regime replaced but envisages in its place nothing more than a new alienation refurbished in accordance with one or other brand of capitalist liberalism. At bottom, the civil society so beloved by NGOs and human rights advocates is conceptually positioned in its ideology between the state and the economy precisely because it takes these twin pillars of contemporary alienation entirely for granted as essential components of all conceivable life.

13.

The progress of revolution in Iran turns in part on the extent to which proletarians rediscover, refine and put again into practice the historical experience of the Shuras. From the second half of 1978 onwards, Iranian workers became an increasingly prominent and effective component of opposition to the Shah’s regime, as the country’s economy was crippled by huge strikes in the oil fields, copper mines, banks, railways, civil service, ports, factories, shipyards, transport network, etc. With the insurrection of 14 February 1979 that destroyed the Shah’s regime, factory owners fled the country in considerable numbers. The Shuras arose as organs of workers’ control over these and other enterprises. However, they were at length eliminated by the new clerical regime. From the outset, the Shuras failed to understand themselves and act as the means by which proletarians exercise unmediated control over the totality of social life. They tempered but did not eliminate the control of management, foremen and other agents of power over the workers. They did not oppose the state but instead sought to bargain with it. They did not uniformly adopt a direct democracy that placed all decisions in the hands of the workers and their strictly mandated delegates but instead often allowed power within the Shura to be alienated from the workers in favour of representatives placed above them. They did not extend their reach by confederating both with each other and with local councils bringing together the elements of the population (such as the retired, the disabled and those housewives who worked only at home) that were excluded from workplaces. They did not communicate with workers abroad to spread their revolution, leaving it isolated within an extant global capitalist economy. The next time around, Iranian workers must know that nothing can be left outside the power of individuals organised in workers councils and must act quickly and consistently to that end.

14.

The progress of revolution in Iran will also centrally turn on the extent to which it can foster proletarian revolution across the globe, and especially in the economically dominant advanced countries. The destruction of the state capitalist system in Eastern Europe in 1989, which was observed passively by the proletariat in Western Europe, America, Japan and Australasia, illustrates how social change that does not put into question the affluent alienation of the advanced countries, that restricts itself to demanding the miserable wealth and miserable freedoms that the proletariat already possess in those countries, is all too likely to remain unanswered and alone. The revolution in Iran must strike at the heart of capitalist society, at the alienated submission of life and labour to the commodity, if it is to find sympathetic echoes abroad. Nothing less will do.

June 2007

No copyright. Use and reproduce freely.

No Work is Good

2007-04-08T18:10:00.000Z

On 1 December 2006, the Council of the European Union endorsed the European Commission’s proposals to promote "decent work". Amongst other things, the Council's conclusions assert that:

"in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the EU in a socially sustainable way, it is important to improve productivity by promoting decent work and the quality of working life, including health and safety at work, combining flexibility and security, life-long learning, good working relations as well as better reconciliation of work and private life".

Of course, here and elsewhere, the Conclusions are suffused with ideology. However, the ideological dimension is not the underlying proposition that such work is possible within the confines of contemporary capitalism, but rather the presupposition that there is anything desirable or satisfactory about work that possesses these characteristics. All too many millions already labour under just these humane conditions; and yet we suffer still. Whatever the conditions of labour may be, the fact remains that all workers spend each moment of every day serving their employer and the global economy that ultimately dictates and absorbs our every working gesture. However safe and considerate work may be, it nonetheless appropriates the total production of the person performing it. What arises from this alienated labour across society remains a world of alienation, a world of eternally external powers and processes, with all the barely suppressed boredom, depression, frustration, anguish and separation that follows from it. And any improvement in productivity is merely an intensification of submission.

The Fraud of Happiness

2007-03-26T09:44:00.000Z

In February 2007, the European Commission published European Social Reality, a report of the results of a survey of 26,755 people living in 27 European countries (the European Union member states plus Bulgaria and Romania). One of the questions asked in the survey was: "taking all things together would you say you are…very happy, quite happy, not very happy or not at all happy?". In the 25 European Union states, 89% of respondents described themselves as very or quite happy. This is propaganda directed at one's self. In an era in which the revolutionary transformation of society has largely ceased to be regarded as a practical and imperative project for individuals, the inevitable deficiency of an everyday life relentlessly subjected to the dictatorship of the economy places the individual in a quandary. How does one respond to the poverty, stupidity and inanity that afflict an everyday life crushed beneath economic, social and political systems that are constructed out of the powers and work expropriated from individuals but are nowhere under individuals' control? One could admit that one's life is wretched and try yet another electronic toy, therapy, drug, guru, sport, self-help regime, cultural event, holiday, style, job, crime, etc; and, indeed, these measures for refurbishing life without changing any of the basic conditions that made it lamentable in the first place remain popular. But it would seem that there are few of us who are prepared to threaten our shaky self-esteem by admitting to too great a disappointment with the life we lead. Hence the ubiquity of professed happiness. We may from time to time become horrifically aware of the emptiness and degrading narrowness of the domains of family life, friendship, entertainment, study, work, travel, etc, in which we are condemned to pretend to live, but we are surely happy. We may feel tired, bored, sick in mind and body because of the humiliating garbage we are required to think, say and do every day, but we are surely happy. We may rummage with mounting desperation through the commodified joy, fun and ecstasy offered by a Bacchanalian consumer capitalism, but we are surely happy. These are the lies we tell to keep us from cutting our throats.

Gasping from out the Shallows

2007-03-19T09:19:00.000Z

Reflections on revolution in the early twenty-first century

By Wayne Spencer

Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not intended […] What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years pass and we haven’t changed anything.
(Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, 1959)

We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible itineraries. We get used to it, it seems.
(Guy Debord, Critique of Separation, 1961)

If it seems somewhat absurd to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more absurd, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or another. (Internationale Situationniste #6, 1961)

Many people are sceptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying themselves with some category separate from the workers, such as artists (in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody). (Internationale Situationniste #7, 1962)

The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air,
breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows. (George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, 1868)

INTRODUCTION

“In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that the society allots to them (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion)” (Situationist International, Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature, Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963)

The first movement of the revolutionary proletariat against the alienation of capitalism, a movement exemplified by the great waves of workers’ struggles and revolutions that convulsed the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was destroyed by the machinations, mystifications and munitions of social democracy, fascism and Bolshevism. With the defeat in the mid-1930s of the attempts by the revolutionary workers and peasants of Spain to establish a self-managed society, the century chimed midnight. In the course of the 1950s, a second movement of proletarian contestation began to grow restless under the new conditions of alienation erected out of the partial successes and ultimate failure of the earlier expressions of proletarian dissatisfaction. This contestation affected both poles of the apparently divided but actually united system of global capitalism: the state capitalism of the societies expropriated by Bolshevism and the affluent consumer capitalism of the West. In the Soviet bloc, the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953, Poznan in Poland in 1956 and across Hungary in 1956, along with innumerable other acts of defiance both large and small, expressed the proletariat’s rejection of the pseudo-communist bureaucracies that reigned in the proletariat’s name yet subjected every aspect of society to an authoritarian domination for its own interests as a ruling class. In the West, wildcat strikes defied the unions, and sabotage, absenteeism, shoddy work and an avowed contempt for work revealed that sections of the proletariat were dissatisfied with the well-paid alienated labour on which the post-war consumer societies were based; so too there was a more sporadic and confused refusal of the machinery of permitted consumption. In May 1968 in France and during the 1969 ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy, proletarian discontent coalesced into vast movements and refused quietly to subside afterwards; so much so that these two countries were singled out as objects of particular horror by an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development meeting of employment experts convened in 1971 out of fearful apprehension that “the industrial countries…are undergoing a revolution” whose first principle is the “challenge to authority”. According to this collection of specialists in workers submission, the perspective of a society “without classes, hierarchy, authority and regulations” was abroad in “industrial France”, while in Italy “the effects of industrial conflicts and social malaise are constantly combined” and “minor details of technical progress in workplaces…provoke conflicts whose violence is out of all proportion to their causes”. They were right to be alarmed. In their study of 123 industrial conflicts in France in 1971, for example, Claude Durand and Pierre Dubois found that “significant illegalities”, such as occupations of premises or physical violence against employers, cadres, supervisors or police, had occurred in half of all disputes. And high levels of conflict persisted in many other regions of the advanced capitalist societies. However, by the end of the following decade, the second upsurge of the proletariat had been defeated. The state capitalist societies of Eastern Europe had all been overthrown, but they were succeeded not by the management by proletarians themselves of all aspects of their individual and collective lives, but rather by the forms of representative democracy, alienated production and commodified everyday life characteristic of western liberal capitalism. In the west itself, the society of the abundant commodity continued to dominate every aspect of social life.

In the following sections of this document, I shall offer some tentative, incomplete and doubtless all too fallible views as to how and why the challenges to the dominant society in the second half of the twentieth century failed. To this end, I shall consider the four most developed movements to suppress the global commodity economy identified by Chris Shutes in his pamphlet On the Poverty of Berkeley Life and the Marginal Status of American Society in General (Berkeley, 1983), namely those to be found in Italy, Britain, Poland and South Africa. The goal in doing so is not to advance abstract historical understanding, nor to lambast and lament those who failed to overcome all the obstacles to revolution before them in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, nor to flatter the sense of superiority or the cynical submissiveness of those who come after them. An understanding of the failure of those revolutionary efforts is important only as part of a practical project to renew and intensify the revolutionary assault on contemporary alienation by going beyond what was said and done before.

ITALY

The emergence of modernized class conflict in Italy was signalled by a series of unusually intense struggles in the factories in the central and northern regions of the country during 1968. Typically led by skilled workers angry at the deterioration of their relatively privileged terms and conditions, these struggles soon led to even less restrained assaults on the miseries of work by semi-skilled workers, often immigrants from the south, who regarded with equal contempt the authoritarian world of work to be found in the north and the local traditions of fearful deference that sustained it. In the course of 1969, some 5,000 strikes involving nearly 8 million workers broke out, with many escaping union control and being conducted directly by proletarians themselves. The methods used in the most radical of these conflicts included novel developments such as the ‘chess-board’ strike (a scacchiera), in which an unpredictable rolling sequence of short strikes by groups of workers in different parts of the production process would cripple a factory at minimal cost to the workers as a whole, as well as go-slows, factory occupations, sabotage of goods and machinery, and physical assaults on supervisory, personnel and management personnel. At their peak, the struggles began to approach a total rejection of both alienated labour and the notion of rendering alienation more comfortable by reforms in productive practices and quantitative increases in wages and holidays; as workers from Mirafiori and several other Turin factories put it in a demonstration on 3 July 1969: “What do we want? Everything!”. In other instances, however, proletarians expressed their dissatisfactions, with some success, in terms of demands for fixed-sum or other wage increases, generalized upgrading, control over speed of work or other superficial changes to work.

The ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 did not destroy capitalism. What confronted the proletariat after its conclusion was the new pattern of accommodation with capitalism that its own struggles, its own successes, had produced. It was imperative to create the consciousness and practices to overcome this new alienated equilibrium. Several obstacles stood in the way of the necessary advance in understanding and action. These included the legal action taken against thousands of workers whose actions has infringed the law and the terrorist attacks staged by elements of the state and their far-right supporters but attributed to the opponents of the state as part of a ‘strategy of tension’. Perhaps more important, however, as dangers to the deepening of the thought and praxis of the discontented proletariat were other factors that threatened to draw the proletariat back towards the goals and methods of trade unionism, starting with the unions.

The trade unions themselves, having initially been surprised and outmanoeuvred by workers’ militancy, launched strong efforts to contain that dissatisfaction within methods and objectives consistent with the existence of the commodity economy. Workers’ rejection of hierarchy and division had confusedly been expressed through egalitarian wage demands. These demands, which tacitly accepted the institution of work, were taken up by the unions as part of new negotiating packages. In the same vein, the unions recuperated the emerging critique of the alienation of the totality of proletarians’ labour, as expressed by the attacks on the ruinously high line speeds and crude authoritarianism that were the most obvious manifestations of a work extracted from them in the service of the commodity, converting this into a demand for an extension of the involvement of workers’ representatives in the regulation and reform of shop floor procedures. The unions also introduced organizational changes that improved their capacity to recuperate and divert struggles. The 1970 Workers Charter had extended the recognition of unions and allowed for the deduction of union dues from wage packets. This was a first step toward making unions more available to workers and tying workers more closely to the unions. Other organizational and procedural changes went further down this road. For example, the unions took greater steps to consult members over the demands to be included in the negotiations over national contract and opened the way for individual militants to be co-opted into the running of union-led struggles. The unions emerged in a better financial position and in a better position to exercise control over workers’ dissatisfaction and struggles. One important development was the absorption into the union structure of the system of factory delegates and councils. Developed, it would seem, by union militants and reformists from the Manifesto group and the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, the system of electing delegates to councils was understood as a means of replacing the unmediated associations between proletarians that had spontaneously emerged in the course of struggles with a permanent and separate structure to represent workers’ interests as alienated producers within a capitalism that was taken for granted. This made it not just the natural territory of trade unions, whose very raison d’être is to mediate the humane and affluent incorporation of the proletariat into capitalism, but a highly attractive one at a time when the unions found themselves out of touch with their constituency. Accordingly, the metalworking unions and the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) adopted the delegates and the councils as constituent elements of their grassroots structure in 1970, followed in 1972 by the new federation between the CGIL, the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori and the Unione Italiana del Lavoro. By 1973 there were 97,161 delegates grouped into 9,813 councils. These proved instrumental in negotiating the 3,225 plant-level agreements in force by that year and in many instances had involved themselves in the day-to-day negotiation or regulation of work-rates, work-loads, breaks, etc. Every action taken by the delegates in the name of the workers struck at the autonomy of the proletariat and confined it within the logic of capitalism. Over time, the unions increased the powers possessed by the council secretariats and executives so as largely to eliminate delegates’ control over the councils. However, this did not change the essence of the councils. They remained what they had always been: separate bodies for the incorporation of the proletariat into the separate economy and a bulwark for the dominant society.

The onset of economic difficulties and rising inflation in Italy, phenomena that were in part the result of proletarians’ success in reducing productivity and increasing wages, soon gave rise to a spectacle of economic crisis. This did not merely counsel acquiescence and sacrifice on the part of workers but in its pseudo-oppositional variants encouraged an increasingly exclusive focus on the active defence of the superficial ameliorations to work already won and the endless pursuit of further wage increases to offset the depredations of inflation. In this way, the spectacle once again discovered urgent privations, supposedly basic needs, and outrageous injustices within abundance whose resolution justified the postponement of profound social transformation and the persistence of alienated production and consumption. In this way, the results of proletarians’ initial efforts to escape the commodity economy returned to them in alienated form to urge the abandonment of any intensification of those efforts.

Alongside the clamorous talk of crisis, the ordinary spectacle of the pleasures and compensations of consumption – as conveyed by advertising, entertainment, journalism, high culture, education, etc – continued to saturate society with propaganda in favour of an everyday life confined to the consumption of the products of alienated labour and the ideologies that give them false meaning. At every turn, proletarians were confronted with seductive visions of a life of consumption that would gratify desires and realize dreams without the need for revolution.

In the event, although vast struggles continue to harry Italian capitalism over the next several years, the proletariat failed to discover the means to overcome the obstacles before it. The trade unions succeeding in drawing huge additional numbers of workers within the orbit of their ideology of perpetual negotiated surrender to the alienation of labour, as membership grew from some 4.5 million in 1968 to over 6 million in 1973. Even where wildcat struggles escaped union control, they repeatedly settled for extending the margins of the bounded and false autonomy the individual possesses within the terms of the capitalist system. Wages typically increased, and in some workplaces the workers may have put themselves in a position to exercise a degree of choice as to how and when work was carried out; nonetheless, 100% of their labour power remained expropriated from them and the total alienated space-time constructed out of that fundamental alienation continued to dominate society without abatement. In effect, although proletarians from time to time went beyond trade unionist organization, they did not overcome the underlying trade unionist ideology that regards work as a necessary evil that is justified by the domestic life and commodity consumption it makes possible.

The faltering of proletarian struggle was in part attributable to a failure to confront the whole of the daily life that advanced capitalism provides. Outside of work, the everyday life of consumable roles and pleasures was the subject of very little critique, and workers who carved out greater free time by absenteeism or reduced hours tended to adopt conventional ways of life once beyond the factory gates. This is not to say that there was no criticism of how life was lived, for especially in the northern areas where the scale of immigration from the south had exceeded the capacity of corrupt administrations and private business to provide the banal facilities of everyday life in advanced capitalism, furious struggles for adequate accommodation and other goods were conducted. These struggles over a myriad of details of daily life gave the contestation in those areas a breadth that might have opened the way to a comprehensive critique of everyday life. But its focus on deficiencies in supply, on the ways in which the available facilities fell short of the ordinary expectations of the modern consumer, exposed it to recuperation into reformist campaigns for the provision of a properly modern alienation, inevitably led by specialists in each separate domain of consumption that was in issue, or to degeneration into a host of individual scrambles to use the increased wages that had been secured in order to purchase private solutions. Indeed, the extra money that became available as a by-product of factory struggles placed within proletarians’ reach a greater range of consumable needs and pleasures generally, calling for an awareness and practical critique of the poverties of the domain of separate consumption increasingly opening to it. Such a refusal did not develop. Apart from some promising but narrow critiques by feminists, domestic life and commodity consumption was accepted without reflection. This blindness to the nature and poverties of important aspects of capitalist daily life crippled the proletarian movement. It left untouched the pseudo-pleasures that the spectacle offers as compensation for work and that encourage those disgusted with what they do at work to seek reforms of working time, or simply to persist with gritted teeth, for the sake of what their work enables them to buy and do. The refuge of private life continued to beckon to workers exhausted by endless partial struggles. More importantly, the thought that there is something better, something worthwhile, to do in the everyday life outside of work powerfully contributed to the failure of proletarian consciousness to develop to the point where the prospect of leaving the means of producing individual and collective life in the hands of capitalism is regarded as utterly intolerable.

In this impasse, the proletariat received no assistance from the ‘workerist’ left (or its ‘autonomist’ successor). The grand theory of workerist intellectuals was notable for its hermetic obscurity and uselessness. Starting with a handful of fetishized abstractions derived from classical Marxism or newly coined, a series of largely a priori deductions would follow, resulting in nothing more than the conclusions the ideology had presupposed at the outset. Worse, perhaps, these pseudo-analyses all too frequently sought not to transcend bourgeois political economy but simply to practice it better than the people the corporations and the state paid. The point of view adopted was that of the narrowest and most pessimistic economic specialist; inevitably, almost nothing could be seen by means of this self-imposed myopia except the reified movements of a few economic variables and the shadows of a disembodied and idealized proletariat. The results were risible. Beyond these rarefied games of tenured revolutionaries, the workerists never escaped the Leninism that had destroyed the Russian Revolution and created an authoritarian state capitalism to support its rule in the name of an excluded and subjugated proletariat. For the workerist, proletarian autonomy was entirely consistent with the hierarchical subordination of the proletariat to a hierarchical vanguard organization, while revolutionary struggle in practice consisted of the vigorous and inflexible pursuit without end of trade unionist improvements to wages and conditions. The revolutionary transformation of the individual or the society was always and everywhere postponed for a swiftly receding millenarian tomorrow.

The second half of the 1970s brought a seemingly radical wing of the proletarian movement into increasing prominence: the autonomia. Bringing together, amongst others, students disappointed by their education in the newly-expanded universities and apprehensive at their prospects in economically difficult times, young people chafing at the persistence of archaic family and social controls or condemned by recession to unemployment or mundane work, and young workers who rejected the caution and conservatism of the generation of 1968/9, the autonomia movement eschewed the Leninism of the workerists in favour of smaller and more informal groups with an expressly egalitarian orientation. It also rejected the conservative cultures to be found in society at large and its workerist opponents, embracing more playful mores and counter-cultural styles (e.g. the Metropolitan Indians, a loose confederation that intermittently adopted pseudo-Native American dress and argot derived from westerns). The actions pursued by the various segments of the autonomia included wildcat strikes and factory occupations; the creation of social centres, typically in squatted buildings, that provided living quarters and a base for autonomous activities; “autoriduzione” (refusing to pay all or part of the cost of goods or services), often for leisure and cultural events; patrols against drug-pushers and attacks on fascists; protest marches; disruption of musical and other events; and a collective ‘hanging-out’ together. In 1977 the conflict between the autonomia and the state rapidly escalated, starting on February. At the beginning of the month a demonstration to protest an armed invasion of Rome University by fascists that had led to two people being shot was itself fired on by the police. A number of universities were occupied the next day and demonstrations followed. On 17th February when Metropolitan Indians and other autonomists attended a speech being given by Luciano Lama, the CGIL secretary and an exponent of economic austerity, at the University of Rome. The university was occupied by students and others and Lama urged that the occupation be broken. Equipped with a dummy in a cart bearing the message “Nessuno Lama” (“Nobody loves him”), the autonomists responded by chanting slogans such as “more work, less pay” and pelting Lama and his CGIL minders with water and paint bombs. After Lama’s speech, the CGIL minders attacked the protesters. This provoked a counter-attack that expelled the minders from the campus, which in turn led to an invasion by the police. Over the course of the next few months, skirmishes at protest marches led to the death by gunshots of two protesters and a policeman, riotous responses by the autonomia, and a programme of state repression that saw movement radio stations closed, the occupation of the University of Rome broken by armoured cars, and thousands of militants arrested and held for long periods for trial in special courts. In 1978 elements of the autonomia turned decisively to armed struggle, joining or supplementing the existing leftist terrorist factions underground. During the two years 1978–1979, the armed groups carried out 49 killings and 1,863 armed actions that did not result in fatalities; in 1980–1981 the numbers were 40 and 359, respectively. Each of these actions only oiled the wheels of state repression and helped the state to drive an ideological wedge between the proletariat and a revolutionary project represented as the obscure and murderous property of separate gangs. The larger movement of the autonomia soon disappeared.

The failure of the autonomia cannot simply be regarded as a product of external repression; it also had to do with factors within the movement that limited the extent to which it broadened and deepened its attack upon the dominant society. The movement was in part a product of the unevenness of development of Italian capitalism, an unevenness that pitched modern ideologies of capitalist life against more archaic conceptions of submission and excluded a section of the younger generations from work during a period of economic restructuring. For this reason, the autonomia incorporated within itself not just a dissatisfaction that reached to the very roots of contemporary capitalism but also a relatively superficial disappointment at the lack of means and opportunities to indulge the proclivities the spectacle had created. The result was ambivalence or even outright enthusiasm within autonomia for certain of the leading edges of commodity consumption, and especially the domain of youth culture. From the 1950s onwards, popular youth culture has been a central part of the development of advanced capitalism, producing vast new markets for clothes, films, music and other commodities and an associated spectacle of unrestrained, hedonistic consumption that has increasingly become a key exemplar of what desirable life consists of in contemporary times. The rock and roll spectacle’s catalogue of sensationalist thrills, fun and ecstasy produced by cacophony, speed, stereotyped bodily movement, abundant mechanistic sex, stylish dress, drink, drugs and the collective ideologies that allow these sensations to be construed as enjoyable has naturally horrified the bearers of moralist attitudes fashioned in more austere periods of capitalist development (e.g. many of the members of the Italian Communist Party); but the clash between the old and new means of adaptation to life dominated by the commodity, a clash that has undoubtedly sharpened the desirability and the apparent subversiveness of the latter, is only one more false division in the spectacle. By failing to repudiate youth culture in its entirety, autonomia fell into the contradictory position of proclaiming its rejection of the dominant society while simultaneously embracing an important dimension of the everyday life that the self-same society held out. It may from time to time have disrupted popular culture events, as in 1977 when the Metropolitan Indians stormed a jazz concert in Umbria, and denounced musical spectacles, yet dreams of producing or consuming popular culture permeated the movement without effective challenge, as can be seen for example in the music played on movement radio stations and at social centres, the autoriduzione that sought to reduce ticket prices for rock concerts and films, and the fashions in casual clothing marketed to the young that were taken up almost ubiquitously by movement members. Even the eventual slide into a destructive use of hard drugs by parts of the movement can be understood as more than the product of despair at the worsening conditions brought about by state repression. It was also another instance of the movement seeking the pleasures and consolations of the hedonistic spectacle.

Another aspect of the dominant society reproduced within autonomia was the domination of the individual by the collective. The organisations created within autonomia lacked the overt hierarchy of the leftist vanguards-in-waiting but in practice organisations existed as entities greater than the individual and not just associations formed by individuals to accomplish specific and agreed-upon objectives together. One consequence of this was that the organisation and revolution itself took on the air of an external, abstract cause to be served by individuals, encouraging either grim dedication, sacrificial militantism and a lack of internal and self-critique on the one hand, or an ecumenical ‘tolerance’ that equally restricted the free play of criticism on the other. The most obvious instance of militantism within the movement was its militaristic wing, both before and after its slide into counter-revolutionary terrorism. However, it was also present elsewhere, for example in the collective style of the Metropolitan Indians, a style that in any event was sometimes indistinguishable in essence from the disarmed puerility and superficial mockery of the more obvious components of the dominant society with which the cynical spectator lubricates his submission to that same society’s fundamental alienations. The absence of a thoroughgoing culture of continuous critical evaluation of self and others could be seen in the survival within the movement of the attitudes and practices of the most degraded masculinity and the evasive and defensive reactions offered to the justified criticism of those survivals by feminists and others within the movement. Rhetorical exchanges between groups on the basis of inflexible positions were common; careful and relentless re-examination of presuppositions, organizational practices, and programmatic statements within groups rather less so.

The limitations of autonomia’s critique of the dominant society no doubt contributed to its failure to draw in the mass of the proletariat and its consequent death in isolation. The emphasis within the movement on particular commodity enthusiasms as part of its practical self-definition could serve only to separate it from those who merely happened to have different consumer tastes. Along with its collectivism and its tendency to glorify marginal survival techniques in the name of a “revolt against work”, it also prevented the movement from offering a total and coherent theoretico-practical critique of the dominant alienation in which others could find an illumination of their own miseries and a practical project for assailing shared miseries together. In general, the movement failed to articulate a critique of alienation in terms that persuasively revealed what its own members’ confinement to a marginal survival, and the inflation-protected and relatively secure and affluent survival of the bulk of the proletariat, had in common. The distance between the autonomia and all too many other proletarians can be seen in the comments of a Fiat Worker in Bologna about his fellow workers’ response to a large autonomia demonstration in Rome a few days before: “There is the feeling that something big is happening. But Sunday’s news from Rome (the demo) didn’t succeed in stopping the usual talk about Sunday’s football matches” (Italy 1978-8: Living with an Earthquake, Red Notes, 1978; page 64). The tragedy and death knell of autonomia was that nothing it had said or done, and certainly not the ritualistic demonstrations and violent trashings that changed nothing but the headlines in the media, had prompted workers such as these to critically engage its own enthusiasms for the sporting and other spectacles that bound them to the commodity society, let alone discover a common cause with it.

BRITAIN

In Britain during the 1960s, around 95% of strikes were unofficial initiatives by the workers themselves. In the 1970s, large union-led disputes became more common, to the point that in 1971 and 1972 the number of days lost to official strikes exceeded those lost to unofficial strikes. But the large majority of strikes continued to be launched without union sanction or control. Also common was a palpable contempt for work, expressed in conversation, absenteeism, sabotage, non-cooperation, low productivity and poor quality work. This “British Disease” persisted throughout the 1970s, reaching its peak with the waves of industrial disputes that made up the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-9 that shattered the Labour Government’s latest attempt to restrict wage increases. However, three months after the Winter of Discontent began to fade in the wake of an agreement between the government and the Trade Union Council in February 1979, the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher was elected. Over the course of the ensuing decades, the incidence of strikes and other forms of proletarian resistance decreased. In 1998 the number of strikes was the lowest since records began to be collected in 1891.

Thatcher’s approach to industrial relations was in part organized around the notion of “returning the unions to their members”. The underlying assumption was that the rank-and-file were more moderate than the leadership of the unions. As Ian Macleod, a Conservative Minister of Labour in the 1950s, once observed, “this is not my experience, nor is it the experience of any Minister of Labour”; and, no doubt, it was equally untrue in 1979. Nonetheless, despite her ideological delirium, Thatcher had stumbled upon two central weaknesses of the British proletariat, namely the profound underdevelopment of its understanding of its own actions and dissatisfactions and its failure to develop a practical critique of commodity society that was fully autonomous of the unions and other separate powers. It was these and other weaknesses that Thatcher wielded against the proletariat.

It might reasonably be said that what Thatcher did was call the proletariat’s bluff. The spectacle of crisis and looming disaster had been prominent throughout the 1970s. From every corner, ecological, economic, terrorist or other catastrophes loomed. These permitted the spectacle to yet again reinvent its tawdry fabricated consumer needs and state ‘protections’ as urgent necessities and encourage the spectator to abandon fundamental social change in favour of supposedly imperative reforms, wage demands or a cynical private hedonism. At the end of the decade, the ideology of Thatcherism added to these apprehensions of collapse a stark demonstration that the manner in which state, industry, work and trade were organised could no longer sustain economic growth and widespread consumption, and that radical and painful change was necessary in order to secure the continuance of consumer society. This ideological attack was able to exploit several fault lines in proletarian thought and feeling. Although disputes in the workplace had been sharp and numerous, they stayed at the level of contesting the details of how the expropriation of the proletariat’s labour was to be organised and remunerated. What underpinned disputes with employers remained a notion of fair treatment and equitable rewards, together with a presupposition that large employers must somewhere possess the resources to meet their demands without difficulty. Both ideas accepted the legitimacy of the alienation of labour and were vulnerable to arguments of practicability within the terms of the capitalism they took for granted. A notable cause of the frozen and underdeveloped state of proletarian thought and practice was the shop steward system. Stewards were officials of a trade union but they were directly elected by relatively small groups of workers and it was not unusual for them to work side-by-side with the workers they represented. Their position close to the workers led to them being perceived as distinct from regional and national union officers of the union and the invidious compromises with which those more remote figures were associated. It also permitted them quickly to take up workers’ grievances or wildcat refusals, removing them from workers’ own hands and ensuring that they were understood and pursued as negotiable demands for the amelioration of particular features of alienated labour. Where disputes did escalate, they often resulted in walkouts, which only served to disperse the workers whom shared resentments had brought together, scattering them back into their individual daily lives as passive and separated individuals. In these ways, the forms of struggle adopted tended to make proletarians spectators of their own struggles and failed to create the practical conditions of control and decision in which consciousness could develop. They equally meant that disputes generally concerned individual workplaces or sectors of employment, with little effort being made to communicate with other proletarians, an omission that over time prevented the development of a wider movement and fostered a chasm of incomprehension between the workers who were frequently involved in strikes and other disputes and those, perhaps the majority, who rarely took action and for whom the actions of other workers were little more than a cause of irritating nuisances in everyday life and the inflation that constantly threatened their real income. Moreover, the proletarians who vigorously attacked their conditions of work did not extend that contestation to the rest of everyday life, tending indeed to seek refuge from the horrors of alienated work in the equally alienated consumption of the goods, spectacles and ideas that such work produced. Proletarian thought and desire continued to be captivated by the vast array of things, pleasures, tales and ideologies that advanced capitalism was producing in abundance and the spectacle everywhere offered to the gaze. Rather than practical questions of the revolutionary abolition of everything that exists separate from individuals, they were dominated at every turn by spectacular fantasies about domestic life, gardening, sport, royalty, crime, sex, drink, music, films, clothes, hairstyles, etc. The result was that proletarians’ theoretical understanding of capitalism and their own struggles against it was rudimentary throughout the decades down to the rise of Thatcherism. When finally confronted by the forceful Thatcherite argument that in order to continue enjoying the consumption it craved there was no alternative but to submit to economic restructuring, it had little practical answer to offer. It was all too obvious that its long-standing strategy of simply maximizing wages and minimizing work was a failure as a means of advancing individuals’ alienated interests within capitalism. Thatcherism was clearly onto something here. Yet it had developed neither the consciousness nor the unalienated forms of association from which a new strategy of resistance could develop and a rejection of capitalism and its economic logic emerge. What ensued for all too many was confusion, collapse or acquiescence, a surrender to Thatcher’s project or a retreat into nihilism, narrow self-interest, madness or despair.

However, Thatcherism cannot properly be understood merely as a grim demand for unconditional proletarian surrender. Amongst other things, it was also an ideology of liberation. As pseudo-revolutionary ideology, it attacked both the state (or at least those parts engaged in economic management) and the unions as separate hierarchical powers controlling the individual. It identified freedom with the unfettered making of choices within the market and the ownership of property, and equated adventure with the unsupported individual pursuit of market risk. It promised as the reward for initial sacrifice new, modern employment and a massive expansion of the universe of consumable desires with which the proletariat remained entranced. The proletariat was not beyond its seductions, perhaps especially as individuals and corporations unconstrained by the petit-bourgeois and patrician moralities of the Conservatives widened the opportunities within the world of work for the exercise of a degraded pseudo-autonomy and began to produce for consumption the elements of an expanded commodified hedonism, a hedonism that could even proclaim itself in opposition to Thatcherism. The resumption of increases in real wages for many, and the growing availability of credit, also served as temptations to the proletariat to seek happiness in the refurbished and expanded world of the commodity.

Needless to say, far from all proletarians succumbed to Thatcherite arguments. But proletarian resistance was hampered at every stage by its fatal entanglement with trade unionism. The Conservatives undertook a long series of reforms to industrial relations law, introducing measures that required pre-strike ballots restricted secondary picketing, etc. They and the employers they influenced also substantially reduced the extent of the collective bargaining in which unions played a prominent part. These measures, together with the loss of a sympathetic Labour government, produced timidity and malaise amongst trade unions and provided incentives for workers to pursue struggles autonomously. For example, the various industrial relations restrictions that were enacted were expressly restricted to trade unions and did not hamper wildcat actions. What the unions could not do under the industrial relations legislation, the workers acting themselves could. However, the distance between the unions and the proletariat was not sufficiently wide so as to allow workers to discard the unions with ease. The British proletariat has typically not waited for union approval before taking action, but it has relied on unions to a large extent to undertake negotiations on its behalf, translate its gains into agreements, offer it protection from reprisals, organize relations between workplaces, handle many mundane day-to-day matters, and even to bring it together as an acting collective in the first place. For all its dissatisfaction with unions, it has never wholly repudiated them in theory or practice. The notion that unions were an infuriatingly defective but nonetheless essential basis of workers’ struggles against employers weighed heavily on the proletariat throughout the 1980s and beyond, with the result that it repeatedly failed to take up the opportunities to cast aside the increasingly ineffective unions and pursue autonomous action. Instead, the inactivity and pessimism that had afflicted the unions was transmitted on to workers who remained stuck within them or found themselves unable to conceive practical means to proceed without them.

What did erupt in Britain was a series of riots. Beginning in the St. Pauls district of Bristol in April 1980, rioting later broke out in Brixton in April 1981 and then a growing number of town and cities in July 1981, including Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Leicester. Often in response to police actions, rioting continued to recur in isolated outbreaks or larger waves throughout the following decade. Police were attacked, shops were looted, and cars and buildings destroyed. However, a riot suspends habitual behaviour and social relations only briefly. The important question is: what happens next? In the case of the British riots of the 1980s and early 1990s, the answer in practice was that there was a retreat to a wholly untransformed everyday life. The goods that were looted in defiance of the usual rules of the commodity economy, for example, were taken back into the separate and limited space that the commodity economy has granted to everyday life and then used in ways in complete conformity with the models of life the spectacle proclaims. The territory seized was returned to its owners and the state, who sooner or later reconstructed it in accordance with the needs of the commodity economy. Even when riots broke out later in the same or another place, there was no advance in the theory or practice of the rioters. The same things happened once again, with the same limited results.

There could be no advance in the rioters’ contestation of society outside of a critical understanding of what they had done and wished: without a continuous conscious refinement of their thoughts and actions. In the event, the rioters refused any encounter with revolutionary theory, with the thought that would allow them to explain to themselves what they were doing and then to take it further. This is not to say that they did not think at all about what they had done; it is just that that reflection was conducted almost entirely with the categories, desiderata, information and logic derived from the ruling spectacle. For all the practical lucidity the rioters may have shown in relation to some aspects of the dominant society, they remained satisfied or blind consumers of other elements of that society. They may have despised the police, schools, leftists and a few other prominent institutions of capitalist society, but they remained mired in the pseudo-rebellious seductions of the spectacle. Despite the economic difficulties of the times that had reduced the scale or number of mainstream businesses to the point where many young people could not secure employment, the spectacle continued to be everywhere in their lives. In particular, the spectacle of decomposition - the specialized spectacle that converts the failings of the system into consumable images, objects, modes of behaviour and justifications for cynical acceptance of the degraded world as inescapable – successfully held out its abundant seductions to marginal youth. What bound those youths who had gone beyond a respect for the law and the state to the dominant society were the models of happy pseudo-alternative life that the spectacle of decomposition offered. These models include codes of honour, gender roles, hierarchies, vocabularies of slang, pantheons of sub-cultural heroes, tastes for abstract intoxication and violent stimuli, constantly shifting lists of acceptably hip clothes and hairstyles, and associated criminal or other employments in which to work. They also contain various ideologies that claim that a submission to such external ways of thinking and acting, that a joyful embrace of marginal strategies of survival within capitalism, constitutes a living to the full qualitatively superior to the daily grind that everyone else engages in. The rioters wholly failed to critique their involvement in these non-mainstream modes of subjection. Indeed, as time passed, it seemed they grew only more and more caught up in them.

The riots had always been used by some as a platform on which to seek the approval of other members of subcultures who value the display of violent machismo; but increasingly the limited confrontations acted out by rioters seemed to serve little other purpose than flattering the pseudo-rebellious pretensions of hierarchical youth cultures and helping individuals create or maintain credentials within them. At their worst, as for example in the case of some of the riots that took place in various housing estates in the north of England during 1991, these violent encounters resembled less a conflict between the proletariat and the state than an internecine squabble between competing hierarchical powers equally intent in dominating the disputed territory and population for their own separate ends. In other instances, riots appear to have primarily arisen from a frustrated desire for the more turbulent forms of spectacular entertainment. Over time, the British economy has grown increasingly able to provide for the consumable preferences these rioters held on to. Former industrial towns, and other urban locations, have been converted into loci of a new night-time economy of consumable hedonism and mandatory intoxication. In vast corporate bars and the neon-lit streets around them, the taste for wild entertainment whose frustration by the underdevelopment of the economy once led it to seek its satisfaction in the explosions of Molotov cocktails and the other paraphernalia of directionless riots consumed as stimuli now finds realization in pneumatic music, brain-numbing binge drinking, barely-conscious sex, ritualistic violence against other proletarians, and the putative pleasures of vomiting cheap drink and bad food onto the pavement. There is also the expanded market for illegal drugs or the cheap thrills and gratifying displays of joyriding on offer. The latter has the air of defiance about it but it changes nothing in the reproduction of the commodity-spectacle society. It even serves as a useful means of re-associating car-driving with liberation, freedom and irresistible desire at a time when its reputation has been tarnished by the realities of Britain’s hopelessly overcrowded roads. Moreover, it helps inject new demand into both the saturated market for cars and the market for anti-theft devices and the police. The spectacle of threatening crime has for decades been an invaluable tool for worrying people into support for the state. Joy-riders dutifully act out the part of predatory nihilists in this law-and-order parable.

The rioters’ failure to develop a theoretical understanding of their actions affected their ability to communicate their dissatisfaction to other proletarians and find common ground with them. By saying nothing for themselves, they allowed their struggles to be presented to others by the spectacle. What could be seen in the spectacle was enough to encourage a few of those in an analogous social position to follow their example, hence the spread of the riots. However, the transformation of the society in which the rioters found themselves depended not just on other marginal youth but on the wider proletariat whose alienated labour produces the society. The proletariat in general appears to have regarded the rioters with disdain or indifference. They could see nothing in the riots that spoke to their own conditions and the rioters took no steps to illuminate them. By remaining silent, by refusing to engage in the production and communication of their own theory, the rioters thus ensured that their struggles would not spread beyond the strata of the proletariat in which they erupted and would not broadly challenge the dominant society. They thereby helped create the conditions of their own failure.

Another notable reaction to Thatcherism in the 1980s was the miners’ strike of 1984-5. A proposal to close 20 pits, with the loss of 20,000 jobs, vividly revealed the imperialist autonomy of the economy and offered the miners the opportunity to develop in response a conscious theoretico-practical refusal of the subjection of individuals to the economy such as might have brought together all of the proletarian dissatisfaction with alienation coursing beneath the surface of British society. However, this unification could not be brought about on the basis of a campaign for jobs or by way of the notion that the fate threatening the miners would soon afflict everyone else. By 1983, real earnings (i.e. earnings net of inflation) were again increasing and so too was the consumption of consumer durables and other commodities. Equally, the large majority of proletarians saw no reason to fear the loss of their own particular jobs (for example, in a national survey in 1986, 80% of workers said there was “no chance” that they would lose their job and another 5% considered such an eventuality to be very or quite unlikely). A critique that rejected unemployment and work, poverty and affluence, as equally repugnant expressions of the total domination of society by the economy was perhaps the only means by which the miners could speak to other workers and serve as a rallying point for all the fundamental disgust that capitalism produces and proletarians choke back. But this did not develop. Throughout a year-long strike marked by mass and sometimes violent pickets against a government and coal board that was determined to defeat them and was prepared to use vast financial and police resources to do so, the miners failed to disengage themselves from trade unionist ideology or even the National Union of Mineworkers that was handling the dispute with considerable pusillanimity and ineptitude. Aided by geographical isolation and the considerable dangers of the industry, mining communities continued to be characterised by a working class culture that had largely evaporated elsewhere in Britain in consequence of the mobility and multiple consumer identities fostered by advanced capitalism and its spectacle of what is possible and pleasurable. This old culture was a product of the defeat of the first revolutionary workers’ movements and promoted a wary, defensive but profound collective resignation to the inevitability of capitalism through an enveloping ethos of trade unionist solidarity and petty-bourgeois mores. In the 1984 strike, the road out of trade unionism lay through the contestation and supersession of this culture of proud abjection, of all of the ways of thinking and living of which it consisted. Although the long strike produced strains within mining communities, resentments toward the union, and some innovations, such as the greater involvement of women partners in the support of the strike, the miners did not initiate a root-and-branch assault on the culture that bound them to the union, and (aside for the scabs who sank below even trade unionism) they stayed largely loyal to it. The unions and its intellectual apologists spoke for the miners and did so in social democratic terms that had ceased to be credible years before, helping to ensure limited solidarity and comprehension on the part of other proletarians. Thus, for example, by the time the strike ended, 92% of respondents to a Gallup Poll were prepared to express disapproval of the miners’ methods and only 4% were in favour. Practical expressions of support beyond charitable donations were also limited. It would appear that proletarians took pity on the miners but were ultimately prepared to accept that the sacrifice of miners’ livelihoods and communities was inevitable, or even was one of the prices that had to be paid in order to secure an affluence that the miners had not called into question. They did not see the miners’ struggle as going to the heart of their own concerns. By remaining behind the union and staying within the constraints of the culture of which it was the centre, the miners ensured that they did not fashion a theoretical perspective or means of communication that could shake the indifference around them and link them to other workers and their miseries, leaving it only a matter of time before the government’s greater resources would prevail over their withdrawal of a labour that capital had decided to live without.

POLAND

From late 1945 until 1947, strikes in Polish factories were common, with the autumn of 1946 in particular seeing a huge mobilization in most of the major centres of industry. In the following years, the crude police terrorism and anti-worker laws of a state capitalist regime seeking to expropriate the totality of labour and social life for its own benefit managed from time to time to secure the disgruntled acquiescence of proletarians; but eruptions of discord and dissent repeatedly returned. In the mid-1950s, wildcat strikes continuously disrupted Polish industry. In June 1956, workers in Poznan went further. Reacting to a refusal by party officials to address their economic concerns, some 75,000 marched on the city centre. Party, police and security buildings were attacked, prisoners were released and police dossiers destroyed, and barricades thrown up. Nearly three days of fighting with the security police and army followed. The party managed to suppress the Poznan uprising and to overcome a large wave of strikes in 1957; yet social peace eluded it. In December 1970, a wave of violent conflicts with striking workers erupted, as thousands of workers around the country attacked party headquarter buildings and fought government troops; scores of workers were killed. This new peak of resistance, however, also produced developments that were to have disastrous consequences in the following decade. For the first time, factory occupations and inter-factory committees to exchange information and co-ordinate struggles came into being. In both cases, the organizational structures erected were not subject to the total control of the striking proletarians. An element of mediation and hierarchy emerged as a group of elected or self-appointed specialists began to carry out important aspects of struggles as separate leaders. These specialists in the organization of the proletariat came to conceive and pursue the project of creating a trade union. Matters came to a head in August 1980. Price increases and the dismissal of Anna Waletynowicz, an admired veteran of the 1970 protests, provoked strikes in Gdansk and Szczecin, which soon came to engulf almost the whole of each city, as well as spreading elsewhere on the Baltic coast. Lech Walesa and the other bureaucratic specialists who exercised control over the inter-factory committees entered into negotiations with the government for the legal right to form a trade union. A moment of choice had arrived for the proletariat: either take the management of its struggles back into its own hands and deepen its attack on the separate power of the state and economy or surrender to an organization that would negotiate in its name in the hope of improving the terms on which the economy and the state dominated it. In the event, the proletariat failed to act for itself and Solidarno?? (Solidarity) was born.

Solidarnosc accepted the legitimacy of both the state and the separate economy, aiming only to create a mediated voice for workers within production and a measure of independence within a banal daily life confined between the state and the economy. Its limited objectives inevitably brought it into conflict with a party whose logic required it to dominate every aspect of society. But the tendency of both its philosophy and its hierarchical structure of governing local and national committees was to reduce the proletariat to order-takers and spectators in any conflicts that might ensue with the state. It also discouraged the development of a critique that ranged over ever aspect of alienated life, whether economic, political or domestic. The road to self-managed revolution led directly out of the union. It was not taken. In the months that followed the foundation of Solidarnosc, Walesa’s attempts to secure control over the organization and moderate local struggles that threatened to go beyond what he felt the communist party would tolerate created conflicts and dissent within the union. However, these remained within the structures of the union and were often dominated by bureaucratic factions. Solidarno?? continued to be trusted by the large majority of the proletariat and it soon had ten million members.

On 13th December 1981, the Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared Martial Law and the leadership of the national Solidarnosc movement was soon detained. This decapitation of the union provided an opportunity for autonomous organization and struggle by the proletariat, especially as the imposition of martial law left Solidarnosc’s strategy of collaboration with the state in ruins. However, although workers resisted the militarization of workplaces by sit-ins, occupations and physical force, and the period of martial law was marked by numerous protest and clashes with the authorities, these typically remained under the control and co-ordination of local Solidarno?? organisations or other equally hierarchical bodies. The habit of submission persisted after Martial Law was lifted in July 1983. In 1984 the Party ended the suspension of independent trade union activity that had been imposed at the outset of martial law and granted a legal right to strike. Solidarno?? itself remained proscribed but some union activists proposed to take advantage of the new conditions to form local unions and even a new national union. The leadership of Solidarno?? discouraged both this union-building work and industrial action generally. It equally opposed local activists’ efforts to register local Solidarno?? unions after a general amnesty was granted in 1986 and the possibility of legal recognition of Solidarno?? was re-opened. Instead, the national leadership created first a Provisional Council and later a National Executive Commission, and adopted an increasingly free-market ideology. The union was preparing for a capitalist solution to Poland’s economic problems that would centrally turn on subjecting workers to freer market forces. It was interested in workers’ struggles only insofar as they could be used as bargaining chips to advance its separate interests. More than this, as the state capitalist regime began to disintegrate after the communists’ disastrous showing in a round of free elections that had permitted in June 1989 in the characteristically delusional expectation that they the ruling party emerge triumphant, the Solidarnosc leadership was in effect preparing to assume power and commence the construction of a system of liberal capitalism. Strikes continue to break out in these last days of state capitalism, but the proletariat failed to look beyond its immediate conditions. The question of who was to dominate society in the post-communist era was now at large but only Solidarnosc and other advocates of the continuance of capitalism in another form were thinking at this level of theory and practice. The proletariat was crippled by its long years of alienated thought and action within hierarchical unions and committees, an alienation that left it bereft of the desire, the organization means, and the consciousness necessary to seize control of the society that was collapsing around it and was to be rebuilt outside and against it. It continued to share Solidarnosc’s fundamental acceptance of a separate economy, a separate state and an everyday life shaped by both. As new foundations for a different society were proposed and constructed, it lacked the theoretical consciousness and means of association necessary to contest the fundamentals of the new alienation. It was unable to begin a struggle against separation and for a self-managed society at the moment when the implosion of the dominant society opened history to its grasp. It was accordingly swept aside and left to quibble over the compensation to be offered for its continued exclusion from the conscious control of the socio-economic mechanisms for the making of history.

SOUTH AFRICA

The Soweto uprising in 1976 marked an intensification of the struggle against the apartheid regime. At its most radical edge, the new movement of black resistance widely contested the various aspects of the white domination of society, rejected reformism and collaboration, and refused the mediation of the myriad bureaucratic parties in search of power, raising hopes that it would form one basis of a global revolution for self-management. Within a decade, however, it had been overtaken by reformist currents that it had failed adequately to critique and resist. One of the enemies it omitted systematically to confront was the array of civic associations, street and area committees, youth groups, churches, women’s organisations, religious groups, sports clubs, etc, to be found in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and beyond. These served as institutions and service providers for the black population that were separate from both the existing state and the people themselves. Through their insinuation throughout everyday life, they began to produce on a daily basis both the ordinary social relations of and practices of liberal bourgeois society and the ideology that justifies such dutiful submission to alienation as freedom. This anticipatory habituation to the thought and actions of submissive citizens of representative democracy did not, however, encourage acquiescence to the authoritarianism of apartheid, and perhaps for this reason appears to have eluded the opposition that it merited on the part of the radical wings of the South African revolutionary struggle. What was nothing more than training in how to confine oneself to the narrow and mediocre life that liberal capitalism permits was left unchallenged. The same blindness extended to another important current that served to contain and limit revolutionary struggle in that country, namely the trade union movement. Black South Africans were granted the right to join trade unions in 1979 and in 1985 the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) was formed, bringing together unions representing 500,000 members into a single federation. A series of huge strike waves, including general strikes in 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1989 that involved millions of workers, gripped the country. These crippled industry and shook the confidence of the ruling circles of apartheid society, but they were largely conducted at the instance and under the control of the union leaderships. Workers remained the followers of the thought and plans of separate powers. They developed neither an autonomous practice nor an independent practice, and there was little theoretical critique from the township radicals encouraging them to do so. More generally, although boycotts, rent strikes, and other forms of resistance to apartheid were sometimes pursued outside of the control or mediation of reformist organization and individuals, they confined themselves to applying pressure for a social change that it was left to others to carry out. Even the most radical currents were hampered by an exclusive focus on the racialization of power that deprived them of a coherent theoretical and practical opposition to separate power and alienation generally. When the South African regime began the process of moving the country towards a multi-racial capitalist democracy in 1990, proletarians were disarmed theoretically and passive in practice, doing nothing to interrupt or subvert a change that eliminated some of the vilest impositions of state racism but left untouched the fundamental domination exercised over everyday life by hierarchical power and the separate economy of the non-racial commodity. Having failed to notice the refurbished alienation in gestation everywhere around it, the proletariat was mystified, outmanoeuvred and subjugated when that alienation stepped forward to succeed apartheid and bring South Africa closer to the forms of liberal capitalist society dominant in the West.

TODAY, TOMORROW AND A DAY OR TWO AFTER THAT

The commodity-spectacle society has not ceased to extend its domination both intensively and extensively. As the productive power of capitalism grows, the spectacle uses the increasing technological, organizational and other resources available to it to banish from consciousness any conception of a society not dominated by the state and the economy. It everywhere equates all desirable or even possible human life with life in the society of the spectacle.

From the earliest moments of life, the myriad processes of parenting, entertainment, education, training, advertising, fashion, art, therapy, social work, etc, inculcate with ever-growing intensity the thoughts and feelings that take for granted separate power and the separate economy as inescapable givens of human existence. A growing mass of media pundits and academic experts from diverse fields urge or compel the spectators to dedicate more and more of his or her time to developing or assiduously maintaining the skills, looks and other attributes necessary for success in the reigning society. The spectacular images of mainstream or pseudo-alternative achievement do the same, but more subtly and without the disagreeable didacticism. In these ways, human beings are relentlessly shaped from infancy so that they possess the emotional and intellectual apparatus, the minds and bodies, necessary to serve the modern commodity and the state. Every other stated goal is a lie or a delusion.

In the world of work, employers increasingly seek to intensify the subordination of proletarians to work and the economy. This is not necessarily or mainly a matter of imposing crude authoritarian domination by management over every gesture of the worker, although in sections of the economy where that seems possible, as in some call centres, management may try to do so. It is also not necessarily a matter of simply speeding up the pace of work, although managements do seek to eliminate non-productive time as far as possible and to accelerate any activities characterized by relatively simple repetitive actions. It is more a case of reducing the subjective distance between proletarians and their work and demanding a closer attention to, and perhaps identification with, work process than hitherto. At a relatively coarse level, corporations typically promulgate ideological ‘visions’ of their own activity that they expect their workers to embrace and parrot. These have some success with the gullible, the desperate and the ambitious, but they are perhaps normally too obviously ludicrous and deceptive to be taken seriously by the average employee. Other processes are more important. In general, work has become in some respects more complex and faster changing, if only because of the reliance on new technologies. This not only requires greater thought and engagement with a given task but obliges the worker to acquire, update and display the technical skills required to carry out the job. Alongside this, the granting of a limited degree of autonomy to workers in some fields, which permits or requires them to take actions without prior direction by binding codes or direct management instruction, expropriates more of their imaginations and reasoning power from them and seeks to foster illusions of self-control. The ideology of ‘accountability’ that often accompanies this mirage of autonomy makes things still worse, promoting the assiduous documentation of work done and its craven display for the approval of superiors and in the hope of securing performance-related pay additions or avoiding sanctions. That said, the dominant society recognizes that these and other attempts by employers to ensnare the senses and souls of those whose work they expropriate are far from infallible. Thus the spectacle continues to circulate the ideology that work is wasted time and that relief, freedom or self-realization is to be found in the consumption of the delusive commodities capitalism produces and circulates. The drink, dance, drugs, etc, consumed in desperate abundance each evening or weekend suggests that there are many who still seek to persuade themselves of the truth of this proposition.

Another aspect of the spectacle’s escalating project to absorb the whole of the available space and time is the relentless and massive refashioning of the human and natural environment to accord with the interests of the commodity. Cities and countryside have been, and continue to be, variously reconstructed as homogeneous wastelands given over to industrial agriculture, suburban life, financial services, industry or the circulation of vehicles; as playgrounds for commodified desire and the display and consumption of cultural commodities; or as spectacular parodies or representations of elements of the past. Those who imagine or seek authenticity and community in these sometimes dour and sometimes gaudy wastelands burned over by the commodity merely betray a superstitious belief in ghosts.

The spectacle’s claim to the totality has even affected the world of the celebrity. The transcendental star still exists as an object of distant admiration. However, the spectacle’s stars have tended recently to descend from the skies. In reality-television programmes and the pages of celebrity gossip, the new celebrities are reassuringly familiar to the spectator. They perform their function of consolation in a manner different from the classical star: by demonstrating that even amongst those who are rich, famous, powerful, talented, influential, beautiful or just noticed, life is fundamentally the same as it is everywhere else. The celebrity has much the same mediocre thoughts, feelings, values, goals, neuroses, etc, as the spectator. There can be no escape. There is nothing else and can be nothing else. The miserable life of the spectator is confirmed as valid, even celebrated, by its ubiquitous reflection amongst the once-golden people. But stars can move from the mundane to the transcendental, and back again, as the needs of spectacular non-life require. The death of a star, for example, may be taken up as an opportunity for a ritualised indulgence in collective lamentation for a supposedly extraordinary person.

Central to the spectacle’s colonization of the society is the vast and diverse array of commodities that an expanded and more sophisticated production and distribution of commodities has made available (the American food industry alone launched 11,500 new products in 1992). The burden of inspecting, evaluating, discussing, purchasing and maintaining the mass of goods and ideas that individual spectacular ideologies put forward as constituting all or part of the good life serves to support the system by the simple device of occupying a considerable part of the spectator’s free time. But the importance of the sheer scale of consumption for the spectacle does not stop here. The spectacle rarely calls for craven surrender; it rather speaks of freedom and individuality. The world of consumption is the cornerstone of this lie. In the spectacle, it is the process of choosing amongst the competing commodities and commodified thoughts that constitutes the essence of liberty and self-determination, and the spectator is encouraged to take this rummaging amongst the dead for the free and authentic expression of his or her subjectivity.

The need to generate demand for a wider range of commodities, and recuperate the aspiration for life beyond the mundane, has seen the spectacle supplement the still-available models of adherence to tradition or duty with an increasing emphasis on fun and hedonism, on the equally dutiful pursuit of those thrills, pleasures, sensualities, derangements and ecstasies that can be contained within the separate domain of everyday life and mediated by commodities. Pleasure is not always revolutionary. It is now one of the central defences of the commodity-spectacle society.

The past 40 years have also seen a progressive expansion of the spectacle of decomposition, to the point where its litany of cruelties, humiliations, deaths, accidents, disasters, wars, illnesses, disabilities, peccadilloes, frauds, lies and other transgressions transfixes the appalled or delighted gaze of growing numbers of spectators. In general, this spectacle encourages the ordinary cynicism of the contemporary spectator who agrees that more or less everything is shit yet continues to find consolations in the life he professes to disdain and reasons to work and consume. It also provides heightened stimuli for the spectator who has grown weary of more ordinary varieties of nonsense.

The spectacle’s reign may be unchallenged but that does not mean that opposition is absent within it. The spectacle displays numerous false means and objects of struggle for the conscientious. Of course, the pseudo-opposition between liberal capitalism and state capitalism has now ceased to be the central organising divide of the spectacle of false political choices; however, innumerable hierarchical organizations proposing greater or lesser ameliorations of the dominant system beckon to those who seek to improve the world other than by destroying everything that exists separate from individuals. Capitalism is now systematically reformist, and all aspects of collective life are more or less constantly under investigation by experts or amateurs with a view to their renovation and improvement as parts of the system of alienation. This does not mean that all reformists expressly accept capitalism, even if many do. The World Social Forum and the rest of the anti-globalization movement, for example, bring together various groups and projects that combine sometimes virulent expressions of opposition to the dominant society with programmes that leave the fundamental separations of that society untouched. One way or another, the spectacle never fails to have at hand an unending stream of urgent matters that appear to be sufficiently pressing to justify collaboration with elements of the dominant society and a deferment of fundamental change that by a quirk of history always turns out to be perpetual. The war in Iraq is an example. The calls for demonstrations (or other equally alienated forms of protest) are endless. The spectator is encouraged by leftists to join a shuffling column of passive, separated individuals that has been organized by others to shout idiotic clichés at leaders for the benefit of leaders who have decided in advance not to listen (and of course the mass media). The purpose of the protests is typically to bring an end to a war that the dominant society would happily live without and perhaps challenge a “neo-liberalism” whose crime, here as elsewhere, is to pursue the interests of the hegemonic economy without the benefit of humanistic means for the pacification of the population and mechanisms to redistribute some of the worthless wealth of a society of alienation to the poor. The fundamental alienations of a society that makes life barely worth living at home, and that would equally ensure that the lives of Iraqis preserved by peace would pass away in mediocre separation from history, are not attacked. They only grow stronger from the inattention.

In recent years social science has taken an increased interest in questions of the “quality of life” or “happiness”. This branch of scientific inquiry may be understood as studying the factors that are associated with people’s propensity to deceive themselves or others into thinking that they are content with their lives. Typically it is found that some 80-95% of respondents in the advanced industrial countries profess themselves happy and satisfied. These results, which resemble the plebiscites in authoritarian regimes that inevitably deliver huge proportions in favour of whoever happens to be in charge at the time, perhaps illustrate the desperate attempts that people make to associate their lives with the mirages of contentment that the spectacle spreads across society. But neither everyday experience nor dialectics should be forgotten. As successful as the commodity-spectacle society has been in preserving itself to date, the mediocre existences that its superabundant goods and ideologies inevitably deliver continue to exist as a source of dissatisfaction. There is also the fundamental and stark contradiction between what the dominant society can do and the possibilities that the state of knowledge and technology in principle make available to humankind. Even some social scientists have begun to talk of “affluenza” or other mysterious syndromes of faltering contentment amongst well-off consumers. And entrepreneurs of goods and ideas have for some years promoted “down-sizing”, spiritual practices, alternative tourism, green products, and other consumable means of expelling whatever epiphenomena of alienation the ideologue at hand claims to be evils of consumption. Some contemporary dissatisfaction with consumerism remains superficial, as yet expressing nothing more than a wish for a reform of alienated work and consumption to make it less authoritarian, ecologically damaging, time consuming, etc. Other elements have, or may come to have, a more profound discontentment as their basis.

One imperative for revolutionary theory in the early twenty-first century, an objective to be pursued as much in relation to the theorist’s own life as for wider social phenomena, is to resume the task of identifying the dissatisfactions that strike at the roots of contemporary alienation, criticizing the points at which the individuals concerned are entangled with alienated goals and means, and generally encouraging a more conscious, consistent and effective expression of autonomous revolutionary contestation. Nothing, however, can be gained by indulging in wholly archaic leftist fantasies about the economic failings of capitalism and the revolutionary potential of struggles to defend or improve the wages and working conditions of workers. For example, during the 2006 struggles over the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE or First Employment Contract) in France, a group of strikers from Saint-Nazaire issued a leaflet that claimed that, “we are fighting against a law aimed at totally destroying the rights of working people […], a ‘modernization’ designed to take us back to the conditions of near slavery suffered by workers and unemployed people in the nineteenth century” (To People in Other Countries, 3 April 2006; an English translation by Ken Knabb is included in his online Documents from the Anti-CPE Uprising in France). These notions, which were also propounded by others, constitute empty rhetoric that detaches the authors from the realities of contemporary labour for the majority of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist nations. The British example may be instructive in this connection. The first Thatcher government introduced a law that exempted people who had worked for less than two years from protection against unfair dismal, a measure quite similar to the proposed CPE. There was no return to nineteenth century conditions in Britain in the following years. In fact, real wages increased (the total wage and non-wage costs paid by employers less inflation increased in the British private sector by 53.3% between 1975 and 2002). More pertinently, permanent jobs (mostly full-time) remain the dominant form of employment decades later, with only 5.5% of all employees being in temporary work. As regards average hours of work, these levelled off at the start of the 1980s after a long period of steady reduction, but have not increased since (and may even have decreased once again in recent years). Of course, the intensity of work has increased but hardly to the levels experienced in Victorian times. To assert otherwise is to betray a profound ignorance of Victorian working conditions. Finally, it is not without interest to note that the neo-liberal Blair government actually reversed the Thatcher two-year rule. This should not come as a surprise. Unfair dismissal rules serve a useful purpose for capitalism. In the words of a textbook on British employment law: ”Some important elements of modern employment law were introduced originally in order to help reduce the need for strikes to occur. The major example is unfair dismissal law which originally dates from 1971 when the government was especially concerned with the negative impact on productivity caused by localised, ‘wild-cat’ strikes precipitated by the apparently unjust dismissal of colleagues” (Stephen Taylor and Astra Emir, Employment Law: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2006; page 13). Given this conservative function, which is not restricted to Britain, is it any surprise that the bulk of the protesters abandoned their actions when the CPE was preserved and declined to mount an assault on capitalism?

Precarious employment and poor wages undoubtedly exist within advanced capitalist economies; but they are minority conditions, and even those who suffer from them are relentlessly exposed to the dominant spectacle and its ideas of life, happiness and escape. In general, the functioning of advanced capitalism typically depends on relatively stable employment, high wages and extensive consumption. One conclusion to which the experience of the last 40 years points, I would suggest, is that any theoretical and practical critique that fails centrally and totally to repudiate the well-remunerated labour and massive consumption on which the advanced economies rest, that confines itself to pursuing increased wages and more bearable work, pushes out of sight and mind the actual poverties of everyday life and leads back to the alienation of life and labour from whose practical acceptance it has never escaped. Of course, the smallest of daily insults, humiliations or hypocrisies can open a person’s mind to the nature of contemporary society and serve as a point of departure from the illusions and satisfactions of the spectacle. However, a point of departure must precisely be departed from, and quickly, if the individuals concerned are not to find their thought and practise imprisoned within the endless disputes and debates whereby the society regulates its functioning and determines the distribution of the resources it expropriates. There can be no revolution except the modern. The predicament of the proletariat is not that capitalism is proposing to take away its highly-paid jobs and the commodities that these buy but rather that it proposes perpetually to force it to accept these substitutes for real life and nothing else. The sense that the best that global capitalism can in principle offer would never be enough lies at the beginning and not the end of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary struggle.

March 2007

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