Gentlemen:
In the narrow tank which you call 'Thought' the rays of the spirit rot like old straw. In the name of your own logic we say to you: Life stinks, Gentlemen. Look at your faces for a moment, consider your products. Through the sieve of your diplomas is passing a whole generation of gaunt and bewildered youth.
1.
The above sentences, from Antonin Artaud's Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities, were some of the first sentiments communicated to the outside world by those who occupied the Sorbonne in 1968, the first in an awfully anticlimactic movement which saw ten million French men and women occupy their workplaces in the world's first wildcat general strike, only to return to business as usual a few days later. What might have heralded a new era of revolutionary struggle around the world, one which would have corrected the mistakes of the classic worker's movement and clarified the content of the new world to be born from the ruins of the old, as some of the most radical participants hoped for, died the typical death of revolt in modern times: co-optation by unions and self-proclaimed proletarian politicians. Part of the reason participants in this magnificent movement achieved such bathetic results can be found in the fact that they failed to develop a language able to recognise, communicate and extend the revolutionary implications of what they had already started to do. Consequently, what was radically new in their practical critique of the old world, a critique so thorough as to have brought that world to a halt, the still period beneath a quivering question-mark which threw all the presuppositions of the established order into disarray, was passed over in silence; theory had gripped the masses to become a material force, but the masses did not lay hands on this theory to make it their own, and the material forces at play silently trickled off into the appropriate channels well worn by the daily grind of established thoughtlessness: wage negotiations, student and worker unions, political parties, piecemeal demands, the whole edifice of alienation which seemed, momentarily, about to come crashing down. The Artaud text printed by some of them, for example, was first published in the 1920s, and had very little to say about the specific situation they aimed to combat in their own day. When they occupied the Odeon theatre, barging into the office of its director, Jean-Louis Barrault, to find a portrait of their old spokesperson on his desk, one of them exclaimed 'They've stolen Artaud!' In fact, Barrault was the one individual whose professional work was closest in conception to Artaud's ideas; they had planned to collaborate on a production of Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year specifically to give tangible shape to Artaud's ideal of drama as outlined in his essay The Theatre and the Plague, the key chapter of his most influential book, The Theatre And It's Double. It was the rebels, not the director, who had in fact stolen Artaud, and their failure to recognise this by thinking and speaking for themselves blinded them not only to the genuine authenticity of Barrault's artistic project but more importantly to the poverty of the authentic in a world which had turned this quality into one more commodity, and the limitations of their chosen master who never practically broke beyond the boundaries of an art and culture whose critique he had advanced better than any other in his own day -- a break they themselves had begun to make with the occupation of the Odeon, the transformation of the walls of the city into canvasses for spontaneous spray-paint poetry and the streets into a tumultuous drama where nobody was forced into the role of spectator: a really living theatre where the secret magic of the commodity was subverted by the public magic of the rebellious revel in which the objects of human labour were no longer worshiped as fetishes but played with as props and (as the domination of dead labour called capital which normally weighs as a nightmare on the brains of the living was turned on its head) the accumulated material existence of the whole world was toyed with in the lusty game of revolt.
What the revolutionaries of 1968 had begun to do was work out for themselves, in the language of deeds through which the medium of everyday life is expressed, a third way which even their most illustrious forbears failed to do. They had superseded the contradiction which brought about the decisive split in the surrealist movement between the desire for effective action in the real world (which those led by Breton expressed through submission to the Communist Party) and the desire for individual integrity in life as a whole (which Artaud and others expressed through their break with the politically slavish position of the surrealists). After Trotsky and Lenin's crushing of the Kronstadt commune and the numerous reports of earnest revolutionists who had seen first hand what communism (or as Lenin more honestly admitted: state capitalism) really meant, it was clear that, as Otto Ruhle famously said before the proletarians of Kronstadt were massacred by the ruling party which called itself the vanguard of the proletariat, The revolution is not a party affair. Even considered on its own terms, that of politics in the narrow sense, the perspective of Breton and company was altogether bankrupt, and those with some modicum of sense among them saw through it. 'Doesn't Artaud care about the revolution? they asked. I don't care about your revolution, I care about mine, I replied, quitting Surrealism since it too had become a political party'. The criticisms of Artaud and his fellow non-Bolshevik comrades was incisive, but the alternative path they themselves ended up taking -- the culture industry and mental delerium -- was hardly any better. By 1968 it was necessary to aver that neither the ghetto of politics nor the ghetto of culture, separated as they are from one another and the individual experience of everyday life as a whole, can have anything to do with a revolution worth making.
It will be useful to outline briefly the implications of this affirmation for today's struggles.
The apparent monopoly on revolutionary theory held by academics and intellectuals has left our generation a legacy of boundless pretension, brainless activism, bloodless prattle, and a general miasma of profound confusion. A clearer understanding of the relationship between revolution and the academic role can be obtained by answering a question posed by Michael Albert in a recent article, Venezuela: Shunned by the left? In it, he speaks of leftists who dismiss the Bolivarian Revolution as populist posturing by demagogues who wish to decorate their version of welfare-capitalism with radical window-dressing to secure the passive support of the poor. "They seem to think that if there is some valid criticism of Venezuela and I suspect few of them have as many criticisms as I do then their dismissive stance is warranted. Yet that is obviously ridiculous. Criticisms don t warrant dismissal, but evaluation. So, for me, the question becomes how do folks come to adopt a dismissive stance? On what basis?"
Now, inasmuch as it fulfills within the society of the spectacle the duties of the professional magician, the modern academic role is to be attacked with the rigour so formidable an enforcer of submission deserves. As Albert says, this involves the opposite of dismissal: detailed critique. As Krishna reveals to Arjuna on the battlefield, the religious moral has no place in the struggle against the enemy. Deep knowledge and thorough investigation in any aspect of the class struggle clearly does not imply endorsement: 'Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer'. To neglect serious study of any tendency within the class-war merely because one does not approve of it is a suicidal strategy. The enemy does not regard our preferences or our scruples, it will use dirty tactics and we must know them to counteract them effectively. The catholic church recognised this by permitting its officials to study heretical texts banned to laypersons: they needed to know what they were up against. Albert is right that Venezuela should be studied, but lacking any subversive practice based on the confrontation of contradiction, cannot grasp that everything permitted by the old world: all individual roles, as well as all collectivities thereof like democratic states (an integrated pantheon of atomised alienation composed of politicians and voters, cops and judges, intellectuals and students, union bosses and workers, artists and doctors, and so on), are deadly enemies of the revolutionary movement and as such, all positive claims made on their behalf demand to be dismissed. Such dismissal provides the basis for further analysis in the form of a negation of this glittering galaxy of sickening spectacles, which tend to constitute nothing more than the most modern mechanisms of recuperation. 'All really modern nonrevolutionary ventures must now be recognized and treated as our number-one enemy. They are going to reinforce all existing controls.'
As an outline of these mechanisms under the rule of the Boligarchy, Octavio Alberola's short text Chomsky as Chavez's Clown, critiquing the willfully delusional attitude Albert shares with his famous friend, is much to the point, and moreover freely available online. The central question it poses however, on the strange cohabitation of the sharpest intelligence and the most obtuse credulity in the same human spirit remains entirely mysterious because Alberola retains an altogether tasteless deferential respect for the cream of western intellectuals: the Sartres and other great philosophers, historians, sociologists, journalists or first rate university people despite the willful blindess they share with Professor Chomsky. Once the sacred veil that separates abstract intelligence from its use is torn away, the mystery vanishes, as the situationists remarked: '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. Stop talking to us about unused intelligence and you'll make us happy.' The very notion that the contradictions of leftist Professors should be mysterious contributes to the essentialist myth of an eternally progressive (but at times temporarily wayward) Leftism which, if only certain famous leftists and their followers mended their mysteriously misguided ways, would lead the hopelessly disorganised masses to revolutionary self-organisation. As Charles Reeve noted in an interview with two Venezuelan anarchists: 'It is banal to remark on the role of the majority of leftist groups in this [Bolivargeois] project, and more original to look at the new Chavista nomenklatura and individuals such as Barreto, the (locally) well-known professor who is currently mayor of Caracas. This is a man who invited Negri to Caracas, speaks of biopolitics, claims the tradition of Foucault and who has developed unusual post-modern theories. He uses post-leftist rhetoric to carry out the same old bureaucratic measures.'*
Meanwhile, from under the veil, Albert swears that the idea that progressives have 'seriously considered the situation and come to the conclusion that in the rich and varied complications of the Venezuelan project there are no lessons worth finding and discussing is just impossible for me to take seriously.' What he discounts is the possibility that there is more to a free life than is dreamed of in his philosophy. The rich and varied complications of slavery, with masters freeing and marrying slaves, slaves freed but voluntarily returning to their masters, awe-inspiring activities performed for masters by slaves, progressive masters lobbying for recognition of slave rights and rebels organising revolt, does not prevent us from dismissing outright any and all slavery and denouncing every collectivity in which it is practiced. On this basis the radical posturing that dominates both Venezuela and the various 'critical' professional & academic disciplines can rightly be dismissed: only then can the potentially radical aspects within them, broken out of their self-imposed ghettos, rightly be recognised.
Unlike in the catholic church, the expert recognition of official representatives is never a decisive factor in the outcome of working class struggle; the collective consciousness of the class as a whole, as expressed in the practice of millions, determines the advance or regression of a project that can be perused only by being mastered by each individual. This is the only revolutionary meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the destruction of all power separate from the free association of individuals in permanent revolt. Therefore, as essential as it may be for theory to become revolutionary, this can only happen as and when revolutionaries (and the only real revolutionaries are the masses who make up 'the real movement that supercedes existing conditions') become theoretical. Without this dialectical practice, the actual danger posed to society by both proletarians and their theory remains merely potential.
'Wherever practical revolutionary conditions exist, no theory is too difficult. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a witness to the Paris Commune, noted, “For the first time one can hear the workers exchanging their opinions about problems that until now have been considered only by philosophers.” The realization of philosophy, the critique and reconstruction of all the values and behaviours imposed by alienated life — this is the maximum program of generalized self-management. The leftist militants of the bureaucratic groups tell us that these theses are correct but that the time has not yet come when one can tell the masses everything. Those who argue in such a perspective never see this time as having come, and in fact they contribute toward making sure that it never does come.' (Situationist International, The Class Struggle In Algeria)
'Wherever practical revolutionary conditions exist, no theory is too difficult. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a witness to the Paris Commune, noted, “For the first time one can hear the workers exchanging their opinions about problems that until now have been considered only by philosophers.” The realization of philosophy, the critique and reconstruction of all the values and behaviours imposed by alienated life — this is the maximum program of generalized self-management. The leftist militants of the bureaucratic groups tell us that these theses are correct but that the time has not yet come when one can tell the masses everything. Those who argue in such a perspective never see this time as having come, and in fact they contribute toward making sure that it never does come.' (Situationist International, The Class Struggle In Algeria)
The theory of proletarian revolution is not something simply written down in books. There is no such thing as radical literature, only a radical use of literature. As weapons, all books share the same structural limitations. As soon discovered by youths who look in their pages for the answers to the burning questions of their lives, the powers of these objects are very limited indeed. In the spectacle, the basic human urge to grapple with the material of one's life finds its expression in a two-fold ruse. First, commodities produced by the culture industry are surrounded with a mythical aura through which it appears the producers, specialists in certain cultural techniques, are specialists also in tackling the significant questions of life; the production of cultural artefacts are portrayed as the means through which they grapple with these profundities. The second ruse presents itself as a seductive proposition in which the spectator may partake of this profound struggle simply by consuming the oeuvre of a Shakespeare or an Artaud, a Marx or a Debord. The canon of great masters taught by the academy and sold by the market tends to establish a dominant hierarchy in which all subsequent producers are subordinated to established geniuses until official recognition is conferred to a new generation - a situation reproduced within marginal subcultures with their own underground celebrities even as, externally, the marginal is subordinated to the mainstream. Hierarchical relations between producers within milieux, or between marginal and mainstream milieux, are frequently challenged -- this is simply part of the routine process in which the technical innovation that underlies all modern production is recuperated. The profits raked in by the old school are never enough to ensure continued economic growth; the new school must be made marketable. In all cases, however, the everyday experience and self-activity of the spectator is subordinated to the image of the masterpiece. This is one hierarchical relation that is never permitted to be challenged. From a utilitarian perspective, the entirety of the old world can be pillaged for revolutionary purposes; in the construction of revolutionary theory it is possible to make use of whatever rubbish is at hand - an old song, an academic treatise on plant physiognomy, a bank advertisement, an issue of Internationale Situationniste, a newspaper article. There is no qualitative difference between these texts. Das Kapital is not inherently any more revolutionary than the Bible. What difference exists depends on what you make of it; when used for radical purposes, there is a quantitative difference. To use an exaggerated but fairly accurate example: a single page from websites like Revolt Against An Age Of Plenty , Dialectical Delinquents , The Annals of Significant Failure , The Bureau of Public Secrets , or Faridabad Majdoor Samchar contains more that might be straightforwardly put to radical use than the complete works of the entire faculty of Harvard university. But that is all. By clarifying precisely its own limitations, leaving open how it may be used but explicitly dispelling illusions about what it can and cannot do, communication which contains its own critique renders itself more useful than all those forms of criticism, creativity, and inquiry that traffic in the pretensions of mythical auras. The reason for this is that spectacular falsification is not merely the basis for all modern intellectual production; it is the basis for society as a whole.
The separation accepted and enforced by the specialists in 'radical' governments and professions contributes towards disarming the proletarian threat precisely by placing barriers to a unified revolutionary critique in the way of ordinary rebels. Those who produce supposedly radical criticism of politics, the economy, sexuality, race-relations, ecology, psychology, art, 'the media', and so on as independent fields separate from each other and everyday life, in which they out of personal preference simply happened to specialise, set up so many hurdles for those who will have to execute a practical critique of the totality of modern slavery during the course of their rebellion. The collective expressions of revolutionary subjectivity so necessary for overthrowing the objective constraints of the old world surge out from the whole person, and must find forms suitable to the unity of their content. Because the false criticism of experts has seized the whole of life and shattered it into fragments in which they rule supreme as enlightened little tyrants (the spectacle has realised Plato's totalitarian dream of a world ruled by philosopher-kings) rebels who lack education or personal predilection in this or that field are prevented from effectively attacking this or that expression of alienation. In a society whose unified reign of poverty is maintained through a coherent (though decentralised) network of repression (the original world-wide-web) reproduced at every level of experience, any revolt that remains constrained by such civilised inhibitions is doomed to failure. As Cato the Elder might repeatedly exhort today, were he alive and kicking against the pricks of human self-alienation:
School must be destroyed.
Siddiq Khan
March 2014
The perspectives of Mike Albert & Noam Chomsky can be approached via Z Communications (zcomm.org)
*Such persons are not all that new. Aime Cesaire, a schoolteacher who was one of the first to lecture on Rimbaud and Ducasse in classrooms, was elected Mayor of Fort-de-France as early as 1945 after pioneering a brand of stalino-surrealism, replete with an eloquent Discourse on Colonialism, endorsed by his mentor Breton (although, like many others, he finally broke with the Communist Party after they crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956). His friend Leopold Segnor, another famous socialist scholar-poet, was elected the first president of Senegal in 1960.
