Grandma shows the kids how to deal with police. Taksim Square, Turkey, 2013
"Slowly, many have come to realize that there is also the spectacle of opposition which can be easily framed in the generalized spectacle of the prevailing system, that their activity has again become an abstraction from activity, that they can march, then rush home to watch themselves do so on television... And so they stop participating in the spectacle of their own passivity to turn in search of a real opposition."
Judging by their behaviour, most gays do not care about gay rights. The majority of women have displayed an admirable apathy towards women’s liberation. Most workers, at every time and every place, have been entirely indifferent to either defending or advancing worker’s rights. At no point during the campaigns for civil-rights has more than a small minority of black folks been determined to achieve equality with whites, either in South Africa, the United States or elsewhere. Despite the genuinely radical currents which exist(ed) as minority tendencies in each of the above movements, there has always been a common understanding amongst the “common people” – peasants and proletarians[1] of all places – that the abstract rights they are constantly told to desire are in reality worthless, good-sounding nonsense produced by the educated classes to justify their own positions in the social hierarchy.[2] Education itself is bluntly understood as a pragmatic method of acquiring and maintaining power.[3] Unlike the rubbish spouted by activists, journalists, academics and politicians – those professional ideologues whose prattle bears no relation to their actual behaviour – the insights of proletarians have direct consequences on their actions. Most of them don’t partake in the electoral circus, ignoring their “hard-won right” to vote (turnout for the 2011 South African municipal elections was 46,7% according to Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen's Devil in the Data); the rest view elections in a similar light to education – as a means to achieving some practical goal relating to their everyday lives. They rarely protest anything – even here in South Africa, “protest capital of the world”. When they do participate in any collective social action, it is again with the purpose of achieving some immediate, usually petty, practical end.
This picture is accurate for most people’s behaviour most of the time, who tend to accept their situation unquestioningly, taking for granted the existing bases of their miserable condition as unchanging and unchangeable. When they do question those bases however, their critique is carried out in as total and practical a manner as their submission.
Like ostrichess, "the working class bury their heads," as two insightful comrades observed: "that's good, they might see the root of things."
It is these radical situations which both produce and confirm the theses proposed by those called (for want of a better word) “revolutionaries”. Like the majority of the proletariat, their ideas are taken from their experience of life, and have direct consequences for their behaviour. However, this minority draws conclusions diametrically opposed to those of their (temporarily) more conservative comrades. Consequently, they strive to construct through thought, word and deed situations which, like the radical eruptions of the past, reveal something of the rich possibilities buried in the suffocating smog of everyday life. Like the majority of their fellows, they are indifferent to abstract rights, single-issues and special-interests, seeing each as teeth on the cogwheels that mesh together with one another to make the machine go round; they bear even less respect for the “civil society” in which this political spectacle is played out with all the monotonous banality of a soap-opera. Feeling the equally monotonous spectacle of separate culture (with its endless assembly-line of custom-made identities, fashions, pleasures, opinions, scandals, conventions, aspirations, ethics, traditions and taboos – all presented, just like political rights, as compensation for the totalitarian dictatorship of money & work which rule as king & queen over every aspect of life) to be equally oppressive, they re-fuse it; satisfied only with activity that involves the total and immediate liberation of life as a whole from the colonial occupation which currently crushes all its most beautiful and exciting potentials under a mass of decomposing dead-weight. They do not give or attend lectures, look for or become followers, confident that, once moved by the seductive passions of rebellion, their comrades will – as they have done before – join them as fully equal participants in the ultimate adventure: the discovery of a new world and a new life. 
[1] I use the term in the broad sense of “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)” – a definition (taken from the article Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature in Internationale Situationniste #8) which includes the writer and quite likely the reader as well. This sense includes all salaried and wage-workers (i.e. both traditional white- and blue-collar roles), unemployed, youth, pensioners and "homemakers", as well as the lowest fraction of the traditionally termed “petty-bourgeois” such as hawkers, street-stall owners and others forced by necessity to practice some form of “survival entrepreneurship” and who often move into wage-labour whenever possible, "independent contractors" who have been legally rendered "self-employed" by their bosses to get around labour-laws, "volunteers" made to work full-time for peanuts by exploitative NGOs (again to escape labour legislation), et cetera. This is merely reflective of the "recomposition" of the working-class which is continually taking place under capitalism - a process in fact driven by the class-struggle of proletarians themselves. An excellent practical examination of this process (among other things) is documented in an experimental report, Class Struggle in a German Town, written by temp-workers on the construction site of the nuclear power plant in Philippsburg.
[2] Joseph Weber’s Problems of Social Consciousness in Our Time serves as an excellent, in-depth analysis of how this works
[3] For a clear illustration of these perceptions, see David Graeber’s ethnographic studies of modern Madagascar in Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar; his Exploration of the Relation of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity is a concise summary which also deals with similar issues regarding colonial power in South Africa. A more general, very insightful, discussion of this phenomenon can be found in Kenneth Rexroth’s The Reality of Henry Miller
