"The capitalist organization of society is in conflict with itself in the strict sense that a neurotic individual is: it has to pursue its objectives by methods which constantly defeat these same objectives."
- Cornelius Castoriadis, The Revolutionary Movement Under Modern Capitalism
You aim to create situations which change the way people experience the world, which in turn changes the way they act in the world, which in turn leads them to create situations which change the way people experience the world, et cetera. This is the basis of situationist revolution. It is irrelevant who or what starts the chain re-action. The purpose of subversion in fact is to render itself redundant – to trigger the transformation of the field of play towards a higher level independent of the original players and their conditions. In the jargon of complexity science: Subversion is a self-organising system wherein revolution is an emergent phenomenon.
It is necessary to distinguish between social revolution and social service. Subversion rarely has anything to do with starting a prison-solidarity group that distributes literature to jails. Most of these activities, worthy as they may be, are eventually taken over by the state after being started by necessity amongst proletarians as acts of survival. Conservative rather than progressive, these practices are actually the avant-garde of the capitalist state, teaching it what valves need to be tweaked to release a little pressure and so prevent the entire machine from exploding (which is why, once initiated, these state provided social-services are almost never entirely discarded, regardless of economic conditions).
Even if it is assumed that the act itself has some subversive potential, the impact of a single group distributing revolutionary literature amongst a prison population of hundreds of thousands is obviously bound to be minimal. That is not to say such a venture is not worthwhile (“one does what one can” as charity workers, teachers and social workers around the world tell themselves) simply that it cannot effectively realise whatever potential it may have. If, however, such a solidarity group were to inspire the aquaintances and relatives of prisoners to begin their own solidarity groups (or some other similarly subversive activity) by which they might begin to question the very existence of prisons and the society that needs them, which in turn spark yet other projects and other questionings, the potential for revolution is in the air.
If such responses to would-be radical interventions are extremely rare, the fault lies as much in the content of the interventions as in their form. If radical theory is ineffective in practice, it must be considered radically ineffective as theory. If an idea is good, people will not fail to take it up. If they don’t, it’s not a good enough idea. If a good idea is presented in a bad way, it becomes a bad idea. There is always a practical unity between form and content.
Dangerous ideas are seductive ideas. They inspire a lust for making them real. They are alluring. They invite others to adventure. They are rowdy, randy, and prolific. They fuck, fight, and have lots of children. Subversive action is born of subversive ideas, and gives birth to more subversive ideas. Revolution too involves the turning wheel of birth and rebirth in which all organisms take part. To return, then, to the example of the prison group: promiscuity is the measure of subversion. Its success as a revolutionary venture will be measured by the amount of prisoners or non-prisoners it inspires to similar (but not identical – children are not clones) activity. How could it do this? Unfortunately, idle reader, there are no magic formulas.
The only thing that is certain is that revolution begins and ends with individual autonomy. In the space between these two poles, collective-thought and collective-act perform their intimate dance. While there are no blueprints, there is a rich history whose brightest moments present strong lessons for those who care to learn. One such moment took place in 1902, when lawyer Clarence Darrow spoke to the prisoners of Chicago jail explaining why they were inside whilst the real crooks were sitting on the boards of the most profitable businesses. Another occurred during the state of emergency declared by the apartheid state in the 1980s, when funerals were the only legal public gatherings. At these funerals, regardless of whether the official cause of death was a police bullet to the back or diarrhoea, the speeches made affirmed again and again that the true cause of death was the same as the cause of misery for those present – the state of things imposed by apartheid capitalism and its state.
These experiences would seem to suggest the possible fruitful combination of prison “outreach” and the general project of making public the misery which the spectacle of happiness serves to privatise at every level. The failure of ghetto kids at schools, the failure of their parents to advance in workplace hierarchies, the failure of their peers to stay out of jail, have common sources in the necessities of capitalist production, and are commonly asserted to emanate from inadequacies of proletarians (laziness, stupidity, “bad attitude”, etc). Any attack on the material sources of misery will necessarily involve an attack on the false assertions whose aim is to maintain the present state of things. This would seem to suggest that the impotence of prison solidarity groups can only be overcome by their integration into a unitary struggle against all the forms of false-consciousness that support the reigning system of melancholy. Most of those in prison are in and out repeatedly. They face the same problems each time they get out, and those are the same problems faced by their siblings and parents struggling in school and work. If those outside are drawn into a revolutionary project they are likely to want to involve those on the inside, and vice versa. This mutually supportive relationship is in fact exactly what formed between the Black Panthers and the convicts grouped around George Jackson, James Carr et al (although the Panthers had their own problems which fucked-up those relations in some ways). In any case, the most obvious general conclusion to be drawn from this seems to be that fragmentary-opposition is fundamentally ineffective-opposition – if not flat-out false-opposition – both in practice and in theory. Those truly interested in curing their practical impotence will have to work out the implications of this conclusion for themselves.
To restate the obvious: we can only judge people by their actions, not their words. Those content to claim that their ideas (the so called anti-authoritarian left) are opposed to the reigning society, without themselves undertaking rigorous practical steps towards making an effective use of these ideas – such people talk with a corpse in their mouths. Long ago, in the pages of Internationale Situationniste #9, my insolent comrades lucidly summed up what is at stake: “The revolutionary critique of all existing conditions does not, to be sure, have a monopoly on intelligence; it only has a monopoly on its use. In the present cultural and social crisis, those who do not know how to use their intelligence have in fact no discernable intelligence of any kind.” Reading the collected works of Emma Goldman, throwing a brick through the window of a bank, quoting Fanon or Debord, making “radical art” or providing dialectical analyses of historical crises - none of these by themselves is likely to lead people to make any more revolutionary impact in the world than volunteers at a church a soup kitchen. Most often, people who do all these things have less practical effect than those pious volunteers!
Like the tin-man and the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, "progressive" activists (those who specialise in action without consequence) and intellectuals (those who specialise in thought without consequence), are seldom any more effective when working together than they are when working alone,
although each supposedly possesses what the other lacks.
In practice such people are analagous to capitalists, whose dedication to “social responsibility” involves the unrestrained pumping of poison into the environment together with the highly publicised sponsorship of an anti-litter campaign: they walk and talk in the pristine countryside of pure ideology. To do otherwise involves the adoption of a self-consciously experimental attitude to a continually renewed revolutionary activity, rather than the adoption of a self-proclaimed “radical” identity which ends up as merely one more commodity in the market-place of custom-made ideologies whose impotent parade continually refurbishes the dazzling décor of the spectacle. As well as being more coherent, I can testify that such an experimental attitude is far more interesting than the brainless repetitions carefully programmed into the monotonous ruins of pseudo-progressive politics. When the palace of boredom has been shattered into chunks scattered across the landscape, true adventure involves the discovery of a completely new kingdom. The only alternative is to loiter among the debris of the old, sulkily scratching one’s name into the crumbling stone.
*
The perfection of this approach among the revolutionary movement is represented most clearly by the tendency clustered around Letters Journal. Although as a distinct leftist tendency theirs is an undoubtedly modern phenomenon, their basic positions were all outlined in an article written by council-communist Sam Moss in the 1930s. It was called “The Impotence of the Revolutionary Group”, and its contemporary disciples, like good orthodox modernists, have taken all its insights to absurd extremes. [1] Like a situationist prank, they reveal the truth by putting it in the mouths of those who are incapable of uttering it. They point out, rightly enough, that the majority has no interest in the concerns of revolutionary activists, and no amount of persuasion will change their minds. Since the masses ignore activists now, and they are likely to ignore them equally in the event of an uprising, the pranksters conclude that the only thing for activists to do is literally sip tea, stoically meditate on their own incompetence, and (for what it’s worth) populate the marketplace with their own particular brand of ideology.
I am not sure whether these inactivists are really serious or not. It’s certainly difficult to believe that they are not joking when they say things like “…what we are discovering may have no current application or any relevance ever. We are concerned with producing internally coherent objects, that is all.” But it doesn’t really matter either way. Their resignation to impotence is only humorous because it is conscious; they deservedly mock their rivals for failing to admit it, but the resignation remains the same for both, and the practical outcome – a minority sipping tea or attending boring, pointless protests – have an equally insignificant impact on reality. "Powerless laziness, which goes so far as to reject the pseudoactivities offered within production without being able to reinvent human activity on other bases," has, as Daniel Denvert described in his Report on the New Conditions of Revolutionary Theory, "emerged everywhere as the normal subjective attitude in the face of the new state of social reality." Personally, I find the inactive jokers more congenial, since they at least don’t adopt a painfully self-righteous attitude to others whose submission is in fact no more or less whole-hearted than their own. The activists, of course, do not find their satirists very congenial. One group of "libertarians" (libcom.org), enraged at being confronted with such an explicit imgage of their own absurd impotence, of have gone so far as to (temporarily) ban them [*]. As the perfection of ideology within the movement to suppress ideology, as self-proclaimed spectators attacking the spectacle of pseudo-opposition, as revolutionaries who deny themselves the possibility of revolutionary action[2] (they call themselves “pro-revolutionaries”), our comrades the inactivists represent the highest development of a society which has turned itself into an upside-down spectacle.
[1] They were not, however, the first to turn the impotence analysed in this article into a fetish. “Post-marxist” luminaries such as Theodor Adorno managed to traffic quite profitably in a particularly turgid variety of gloominess from the 1930s onwards. This sort of thing, lacking both the lucidity of Moss and the wit of the inactivists, has always been fashionable among academics. In a general sense, the nihilism of inactivist and activist alike is as old as capitalism itself; the two were born in each other’s arms.
[*] The official reason for the banning of Letters Journal was that it violated the rules by behaving like a "troll". The best thing to come out of the discussion around this was: "A troll sows discord for its own sake, for their own entertainment or simply to destroy a conversation. If LJ tries to turn everything into the same conversation it's because he sees this conversation as relevant to what is under discussion, not to take things off-topic for its own sake. By your account Socrates was a troll."
