In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.
– Martin Buber, Between Man and Man
To believe in the reality of your desires is always a struggle. It’s far easier to look upstream while the current carries you down to the abyss than to crash vigorously against the torrent. Every person you know is moved by a double motivation – what they say and think they want, and what they actually want as revealed by their actions.i I am no exception. Because of this, my story might be of relevance.
This world of ulterior-motivation, of separation between thought and action, is the world into which I was born. As a young boy I began to call such separation into question. I began to read of others who had done so in the past, and aspire to be like them. I began to call myself an anarchist.
This world of ulterior-motivation, of separation between thought and action, is the world into which I was born. As a young boy I began to call such separation into question. I began to read of others who had done so in the past, and aspire to be like them. I began to call myself an anarchist.
Although I began an uncertain, mostly instinctual, practical rebellion against the miserable aparthood whose institutions I had declared to be my enemy; my criticism remained mostly on the level of thought and word because I failed to act against my own everyday ulterior-motivations. The separation I so hated continued in my own daily life, as it does today. Everyone is more or less complicit in the maintenance of apartheid – in a world ruled by scum and greased by blood nobody can keep their hands clean – but there is always some degree of unnecessary submission by each person (which tends to increase unless checked) that can be consciously attacked.ii “All roles are cages… but some are cagier than others.” At the time, however, I had a very limited understanding of both my own life, for which I am responsible, as well as the practical choice such responsibility grants to me. My self-identification as an anarchist, as a militant, as a professional rebel, prevented me from even beginning to undertake this personal struggle.
Social revolution is understandably unpopular. Those who identify with such a project have already turned their heads and eyes against the current. Although I may have thought and spoken otherwise; my actions said that I felt content to belong among this rare group and follow the established path set by its celebrity-pioneers. I began to pursue a career. I apprenticed to a local anarchist poet, hoping to become a famous leftist writer. Out of a desire for more immediate results I involved myself in all the usual leftist activity presented to me. I taught classes for refugees, attended marches and meetings in the townships, organised food for the homeless, wrote leftist journalism and academic reports, participated in reading groups and book-fairs, and so on. Mounting dissatisfaction with all these experiences, and later on escalating calamity in my personal life, encouraged me to examine what I was actually doing, and what I wanted to do, much more seriously.
This led to a number of decisions.
I abandoned my career. My desire to hurtle into a totally new life meant that the roles and rewards reserved for intellectual specialists, whether political or cultural, held no attractions for me whatsoever, and consequently I had no intention of playing the game. Artists, like leftist politicians, exploit the image of rebellion – and there is no vital art that does not rebel against this sterile society – in order to further their careers. Although artists like Banksy may really try to rebel within the realm of culture, just as politicians like Julius Malema may rebel within the realm of state politics, they still only present an image of rebellion since culture as a whole, like state politics as a whole, has been safely integrated into the dominant society. They present a false opposition whose result is to disarm the real desire for change felt by their spectators – who must always be satisfied to remain spectators while the professionals get on with the show. Responsibility, practical choice, and personal struggle have no role to play in this charade, and no one is more satisfied, on hearing the wild applause as the curtain drops, than the rulers. Art is the formaldehyde of the masses. It rips off revolt and safely sells it back to people who, when they revolt themselves, are shot and jailed. Yet the failure to risk rebellion does not preserve life, but embalms it.
Soon it became clear that my anarchism, like my art, was part of the problem, even – especially because – I thought it was the solution.
I have used the terms anarchism and anarchist interchangeably throughout this essay. Just as the idea that a person is something other than what he or she does - some essence above, beyond or within the messy world of material existence - has its basis in precisely that mystical bourgeois escapism I have come to identify as a fundamental (personal as well as social) problem; so too the proposition that anarchism is something other than what its adherents collectively do has, so it seems to me, no basis in reality. Capitalism is not essentially racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, or ecologically suicidal. Theoretically it could be otherwise; that it is and always has been these things could (and is by its apologists) be ascribed to exceptional internal imperfections - market failures - or external pressures - communism, lazy subversive proletarians, government regulation, insufficient capital, corruption - everything under the sun. Similarly, there are several marxist apologists that would like to claim that Stalinism, or Bolshevism, or (insert undesirable tendency here) is not really marxism, but an unnatural deviation due to one or other sophisticated tours-de-force of special pleading. And there are anarchists, like Murray Bookchin and the authors of Black Flame, that dedicate much of their time to purifying the fold of The Real Anarchism from ideological heretics. Needless to say, such academic hair-splitting is not only irrelevant to movements in which millions without any revolutionary ideology at all participate, but also highly questionable on its own terms (the critiques of Bookchin's 'social and lifestyle anarchism' by Bob Black provide ample demonstration of this, if any is needed). In short: I am talking about all those who define their identity around the ideological centre of anarchism and act accordingly. The specific local persons and groups I speak of are merely particular examples that happen to be close at hand; they allow me to extrapolate from direct experience. A disinterested examination of the global historical anarchist movement as a whole will reveal the same tendencies detailed here.
Anarchist theory is an attempt to destroy the bourgeois notion of happiness. Every aspect of capitalist society, from its interpersonal relations to its mode of production is deemed degenerate and illegitimate. Yet the lives of most anarchists I know, and the historical development of the movement, has shown not merely a distressing accommodation to bourgeois comforts (and these are by no means merely or even primarily material) but positive hostility (often disguised as ignorance) to any rigorous attack on such accommodation. Like most adherents to a faith, whether religious, cultural or political; the actual practice tends to negate the doctrine, and very rarely is there any interest even in critical discussion of such contradiction, let alone serious attempts to tackle it through a change in behaviour or perspective.
The similarities don’t stop there. When questioned on the details of their own faith most proclaimed adherents of organised religion betray ignorance of the most basic facts. I myself learned less about anarchism when I was an anarchist than I did afterwards! The reasons for this are that the majority are attracted to the sense of belonging conferred by a particular creed, which comes from the general mythological story, collective rituals, and pre-determination of major decisions by an external authority. The niceties of historical context, theoretical elaboration and even basic ethical foundations are generally seen to be academic – and are in fact left to the intellectual authorities.
Despite reading in the pages of this paper sentences that begin “The faith behind our devotion to anarchy stems from our belief in…” one needn’t push the religious analogy beyond the point of usefulness. The intention is merely to highlight the scandalous nature of certain facts which are too often passed over in silence. For example: the producers of this newspaper criticise (in private) both the deference of the Zabalaza members to the unofficial leaders Michael Schmidt and Lucien van de Walt, and the adherence to particular positions demanded by this organisation from all prospective members. This is all to the good. Nobody, from the undergraduate anarchist to the unemployed shack-dweller, will have any chance of breaking the forced passivity of life in capitalist society if they remain content to let others do their thinking for them. Like spectators in the realms of creative and political activity; those who fail to appropriate, develop, and correct ideas by and for themselves will remain forever slaves. Yet at the same time The Incendiary Times collective fails to confront its own unofficial hierarchy! As a disinterested outside observer; it seems to me (judging from the percentage of contributions towards the content – both attributed and unattributed – the style of design, the selections of old texts, among other things) that in the production of this paper Aragorn Eloff (and perhaps Stefanie Noire, his partner – behind the scenes, as women still tend to beiii) has taken the lion’s share of responsibility, in both direction and execution. If we remember that he is also the founder (not that anyone could forget it) of Bolo’bolo and its associated activities, including this paper; we don’t have to work hard to see the pattern of the ‘specialist of freedom’ around whom rotate spectator-comrades whose unchallenged nonparticipation practically places them in a subordinate position. That’s not to say this was ever his intention – far from it – but, considering ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’ in which uncontrolled (because unconscious) authority tends to emerge; it seems better to undertake individual/couple projects explicitly rather than create situations of unacknowledged inequality for the sake of an illusory communal practise where collective organisation is in fact far from egalitarian.
How can you confront ‘ordinary’ proletarians with the confusions between what they say and what they do, between their acts and their thoughts, if you’re not trying, consciously and rigorously, to fight the same split on the terrain where you can be most effective: with your own daily routines and habits, desires, tastes and basic beliefs; with your relations to your friends, comrades and lovers? How can we subvert how people avoid the obvious if we do the same thing so carelessly ourselves? A critique of political economy in relation to the class struggle (of how it divides people off, of how it effects their particular perspective, of how it limits their possibilities) can’t be separated from a critique of how people limit their own possibilities (of how they submit to the poverty of available activities presented to them and compensate for the misery of such submission) which can’t be separated from actively challenging your own submissiveness, compensations and lies.
While some anarchists (like the ‘post-left anarchy’ tendency represented by CrimethInc) acknowledge the relevance of the above critique on paper; none that I know of bother to make use of it in any practically significant way. The salutary critique of traditional leftist activism in the first issue of this paper (‘Walking’), for example, is followed in the next issue with an article (‘Liberals, can we riot yet?’) which betrays the most miserable resignation to this same activism! Moreover, ‘Walking’, whether out of desperation or indifference, gives wholly unwarranted praise to superficially alternative forms of protest such as the Marikana demonstration at the Open Streets festival, which was so sad a spectacle that two passersby remarked at ‘the innovative performance-art’! Since the Marikana comrades were singing, dancing, performing street theatre (complete with a shack as stage setting) and handing around a collections tin for donations – all without a single text clarifying what it was all supposed to be about – it’s no surprise that almost every other spectator also thought the demonstration was just another part of the show. It does nobody any good to make such obviously ineffective action the subject of uncritical commendation merely because it appears different; all too often, however, anarchists and other leftists take the patronising attitude of accepting for others (in ‘exotic’ struggles such as those of Chiapas, Palestine or the townships) what they would object to ‘at home’.
The critique of leftist support for Chavez in the pages of this paper could be aptly applied to some of its own perspectives. Anarchist praise for struggles of which they are spectators only serves to mythologize such struggles, which is actively harmful inasmuch as it provides uncritical support for forms of action and organisation that need to be criticised. The cheerleading of first world activists (both black and white) for the statist independence movements around the world which in were fact highly repressive of those they claimed to liberate - it used to be called 'Third Worldism' - helped to obscure the both repression and popular genuine resistance. We in South Africa who have had 'The Liberation Movement' reduced to Mandela, Tutu and De Klerk (!) should not need reminding of this.
A variation of this uncritical acceptance is the toleration shown by anarchists to almost everyone. This goes so far, in the case of Bolo’bolo, as to provide platforms for the electioneering of idiotic racketeers like Andile Mngxitama. It should not be too surprising that such opportunist demagogues should find a home here, since anarchists themselves are known to traffic in their own brand of populist histrionics. Ian Bone, perhaps the most famous UK anarchist, is, as a comrade from Britain pointed out to me, the UK equivalent of this showmanship – demagogic rhetoric designed not to subvert the speaker’s complicity in turning himself into a spectacle, but rather to reinforce it.
Of course if someone feels strongly about an ‘issue’ there’s nothing wrong with them involving themselves in action relating to it. Abstention based on an abstract notion of revolutionary purity only leads to the kind of self-imposed separation that keeps capitalism going. The problem is that anarchists relate to ‘issues’ in the same self-admittedly ‘demotivating’ way that everybody else does: they ‘tag along’ to alienated forms of action and organisation rather than intervening in them in a way designed to provoke serious reflection, challenge or change on the part of other participants. Even though their ‘consciousness’ separates them from others in any case; adherents of revolutionary ideologies, whether anarchist or otherwise, tend to avoid imposing their supposedly disruptive perspective in appropriately disruptive form. Partly this has to do with a psychological fear of serious confrontation which constrains everyone in this society to maintain an appearance of polite toleration. The preference for an insipid crowd, for a noxious milieu, for an indifferent couple – for anything rather than being alone, is both the basis and the product of this fear. There is also, however, a more insidious ideological fear of appearing separate from the masses, who are supposedly not ready or able to accept radical perspectives, which limits would-be radicals to the repetition of easily digestible platitudes.
This self-separation, one set of values ‘at home’, another for ‘the masses’, has severely limited revolutionary practice for hundreds of years: Babeuf’s ‘conspiracy of equals’, the blatant Jacobinism of Blanqui, Bakunin’s ‘secret dictatorship’, the need for Marx & Engels to advance a watered-down (i.e. capitalist) ‘transitional program’ – all culminating in Lenin’s ‘importation of consciousness’ model whose implications have had such catastrophic effects throughout the whole of the previous century. Any future revolutionary movement must begin with an immediate subversion of this theory and practice, keeping in mind that there can be no definitive repudiation as long as the social conditions which reproduce it remain.
This is not the anarchist way of going about things. Like all other militants, anarchists typically choose to identify themselves with a particular ‘scene’, with its own forms of opposition: the moribund ‘labour movement’ for the Zabalaza types, ‘civil society’ activism for the Bolo’bolo types, ‘community struggles’ for yet other brands of militants, and so on. While marxists frequently try to manipulate struggles for their own ends, anarchists (and ‘libertarian communists’) limit their participation so as to be practically the same as everybody else – which, while not worse than the intrigues of the marxists, is hardly any better. Instead of suppressing conflict through authoritarian practices, anarchists do the same thing through voluntary self-repression – in the name of anti-authoritarianism! Instead of intervening so as to manipulate movements; anarchists abandon any effective intervention whatsoever. On the other hand; many anarchist militants/activists tend to undertake pseudo-subversive/pre-figurative action out of an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness, when in fact it’s better to do nothing at all than delude yourself into thinking you’re doing something that you’re not. Which is not to say that many anarchist actions are not worthwhile for their own sake, but that they tend to masquerade under radical pretences which are often unjustified and thus suppress the necessity for breaking through the limitations of such action.
Outside of their own groups; the participation of anarchists and those of ‘authoritarian socialists’ in social contestation is often premised on the same ends: to recruit adherents to their own ideological camp. The fact that for marxists this means membership to a particular political racket and for anarchists this means a more vague conversion to a particular political doctrine accounts for their methodological differences. As the previous issue of this paper put it: “I like to think that in the heart of at least some liberals there lives, even if deeply buried under decades of indoctrination, pessimism and apathy, an anarchist waiting to be set free.” In neither case is participation calculated, as I have done with this essay, to confront other participants with the consequences and limitations of their own actions and then – rather than recruitment or conversion – leave the next steps up to them. The qualitative difference in these opposing forms of participation is matched by a quantitative difference: unlike marxists and anarchists who tend to drag out their involvement of habit – without trying to do anything new with each new moment – until pushed by dull routine to the point of burnout; I limit my participation to what is necessary to achieve maximum impact – and then leave. If any are moved by this intervention to contact me for further discussion I welcome it, but I make it clear that I offer no alternative product in competition with anarchism. Those still intent on consumption in the market of ideas will have to look elsewhere.
The first issue of this paper stated that “the real question we should be asking each other is not how your ideal would work, but rather how we can we take power back so we can decide together?” Like the rest of the paper; it’s a nicely expressed truism. Only when the majority of people begin to struggle in a community of dialogue and action – rather than the false communities of ideological collectivities whose poverty reproduces misery and isolation – can there be any basis for revolutionary collective action. Hosting PR events for the racketeers of political parties, however, will not take us one step closer towards any communal dialogue. Unfortunately the facts of the matter in this instance, as in too many others, indicate that such fine phrases in The Incendiary Times are not a moment in the development of a subversive practice but more a matter of style over substance.
Those who participate in failed revolutionary movements tend not to develop practical conclusions from these failures, let alone use such conclusions in future struggles. Anarchists are no exception. Rather, there is a resigned acceptance of the impoverished possibilities presented by triumphant apartheid, the limitation of aspirations within these miserable bounds, and an endless drift from one delusory hope of changed circumstances to another. If repeated failure does not deter people from fantasising that the next attempt at ‘making it’ within capitalism will change things; those intent on living without illusions have nothing to fear from a forthright reckoning with their own past. It’s telling that many who abandon seemingly radical ideologies commonly describe their resignation in terms of ‘disillusionment’: as if illusion were a requirement for – rather than a restraint against – advancing revolutionary perspectives!
Marxists and anarchists complacently (and rightly) declare unionism and parliamentary socialism to be bankrupt due to the historical failures of these movements, but how many would be prepared to do the same with their own ideology after a sober evaluation of past and present facts? How many have ever engaged seriously with the implications of modern revolt, whose most advanced tendencies have been, in theory and practice, anti-ideological (that is, an assault on the pretensions of every revolutionary ideology: for theory is the way we live, and ideology, in divorcing theory from life, sets the seal of approval on the philosophy of escape)?
These are not questions to be dismissed lightly. But that is precisely what anarchists habitually do. In an interview published in the third issue of The Incendiary Times, Anarchist Theoretician Dr. Wayne Price demonstrates precisely how, as in every other ideology, adherence to anarchism demands submission to 'ideas of separate power and the separate power of ideas', to a religious ideal which separates itself from the miserable experience of individuals in order to triumph triumph over reality for all eternity, wrapped in a rapturous Pyrrhic victory. He actually says of socialism, in all seriousness: 'Well, it's like they used to say about Christianity, that you can't say it didn't work because you've never tried'! (The actual phrase, by GK Chesterton, is "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.") In the following thought-experiment I will quote him verbatim, only replacing 'anarchism' and 'Spanish' with 'vanguardism' and 'Russian', to demonstrate clearly the interchangeably incoherent delusion of those duped by their own absurd lack of ideas: 'I don't think vanguardism failed in the Russian revolution. What failed in the Russian revolution was the policies of certain vanguardists, notably the unwillingness to see the need for a revolutionary perspective, the need to take power. Not take power in the sense of forming a state, but to take class power, for workers to take over through worker's councils and committees and eradicate the existing state...' Depending on what suits your dogma, you could equally exchange 'vanguardism' with 'Marxism', 'Stalinism', 'Communism', 'Socialism' or 'Bolshivism'; or if you swap 'Russian' with 'Spanish': 'Syndicalism', with 'Chinese': 'Maoism', with 'South African': 'Nationalism', and so on ad infinitum. Such are the lofty freedoms offered by a libertarian conception of truth. Like The Holy Ghost, anarchism exists outside both history and the actual practice of 'certain' (ie most) anarchists. When transforming history into hagiography, the Doctors of the every church tend to excommunicate all except the tiny minority of true sanctified believers whose 'correct' conduct allows the pristine pedigree of their ideology to remain unsullied by the dirt of everyday life. There were the Friends of Durruti and the Incontrolados, Malatesta and Emma Goldman. There was Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Ruhle, Pannekoek and Gorter. The rest simply don't count. Or rather, their actions can be safely discounted as essentially acceptable because led astray by the erroneous 'policy' of 'certain' representatives. The problem however is that the misled majority never imposed their supposedly radical will on the concrete situation at the critical juncture, forcing the representatives to choose unequivocally which side they were on. Instead, by tolerating the two-faced nature of all intermediaries, they allowed their own position to be determined by their representatives, who always end up placing the represented in the same spot: underfoot. The existence of a revolutionary essence inherent in the body of anarchism as purported by its adherents is, under these circumstances, entirely moot. After re-affirming his allegeance to the doctrine of Justification by Faith, the Doctor goes on: 'in another way, it's true that anarchism has failed... But then again there really isn't anything else that has succeeded any better. Having fully integrated itself into the equality of mediocrity, the consolation of losers, the supremacy of poverty guaranteed as a fundamental right by the old world, anarchism claims as its greatest seduction the same peculiar charm of the bourgeois order identified by Winston Churchill: 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.'
In an interview Doris Lessing speaks of the repugnant tendency to have an anser for everything and, when asked whether her depiction of this in The Golden Notebook was not simply an example of what now passes for 'vulgar Marxism' whose crudeness has been superseded by the likes of Foucault then in fashion, responds along the lines 'No, I'm not interested in such people at all. You're talking as if Marxism were something of an intellectual trend. Just look at what happens whenever Marxism actually gets in power. That's what I mean.' Equally, my concern is with anarchism as a real movement. The ideological critique of Marxism usually advanced by anarchists concerning an abstractly 'authoritarian' socialism produces an ideology of libertarian socialism. By doing so they disable themselves from grasping the anti-ideological critique of all socialism as expressed in the pathetic practice of concrete individuals – a practice whose poverty, delusions of grandeur, banality, self-righteous moralism, implicit and explicit hierarchy, ahistoric individualism, mediocrity, evangelical pity, spectacular tokenism, (sub)cultural pretension, irascibility on insufficient cause, duplicitous censorship, sentimentality, uninhabitable collectivism, politically-correct submission to prevailing idiocy, and manifest failure to challenge the state 'not with windy unread jargon-filled writings,' as Bob Black put it, 'but with the contagious example of another way to relate to other people', must be manifestly apparent to anyone whose vision is not blurred by ideological blinkers. I do not claim that anarchists or anarchism is inherently inadequate, as anarchists assert (falsely) that Marxism is inherently authoritarian (there have always been a significant minority of Marxists among the ranks of the libertarian socialists). I only say from my own experience that the handicaps it places on its adherents far outweigh its practical benefits in the business of transforming the life-activity of the species in a revolutionary direction. Since for me the only question of interest is how we live, such a tool is not merely useless, but altogether counter-productive.
The question continues to be posed – in continually more complicated terms. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, describing those born into the Christian religion, pointed out that the answer distinguishes those with a living relation to the ideas they espouse from those who speak with a corpse in their mouths: 'They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do that they think laudable. But anyone who reminded them that the maxims require an infinity of things which they never even think of doing, would gain nothing but to be classed among those very unpopular characters who affect to be better than other people.' I have been dismissed by threatened believers on these exact grounds often enough to know the truth of his description. Doubtless most anarchists who read this will do the same thing. So be it. Yet this dismissive attitude to serious criticism on the part of its believers is precisely what guarantees that, to them, anarchism will remain an inert faith with as little to do with their everyday life as any religion. Any future revolutionary upheaval will need to reckon with the advances and limits of the whole inheritance of past rebellion – a succession of, in the adroit words of a comrade, ‘significant failures’. In this task anarchist theory (like those developed by the situationist, marxist, syndicalist, black-consciousness, and other dead movements) will have its part to play, but its ideology – as the practice of aparthood by members of a collectivity – will have to be mercilessly attacked.
For their part, anarchists have never bothered to put up any defence. The situationists and the epoch of revolt greeted by them posed the most coherent critique of leftist ideology to date, yet anarchists have rarely engaged with situationist theory beyond the superficial borrowing of a few fashionable phrases, just as they have never engaged with the rebellions of the last 60 years beyond superficial leftist cheerleading. This should not be surprising. This essay uses the term leftist often enough to merit a brief definition: leftism is to politics what the avant-garde is to art: not so much a challenge to the existing order as a highly specialized form of accommodation to it. Anarchism is a variety of leftism: a specialisation of a specialisation. It is evident that leftists have, whether consciously or not, inherited a relation to their own theory derived from that of religion. In On Liberty, the same work from which the previous quote was extracted, J.S. Mill summarised this ancient idealism (of which his own work was a modern bourgeois variant) in terms of its conception of truth: “The real advantage which truth has consists in this: that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.”
The attempts to claim for anarchism various historical movements, from Taoism to Christian heresies, is no more a product of this tendency than the opposing attempts by purists of the Bookchin/Black Flame type to purge anarchism of such aberrations in favour of an equally mythical Pure Proletarian Pedigree. Both express a practise based on the repeated assertion of an abstract truth. In fact, the eruptions celebrated by leftists as 'the return of the repressed in history' were stifled precisely because their actors only managed to return to and modify, rather than escape from and abolish, an horrific history whose products continue to enslave the living. They have changed the world, but 'everywhere the result was very different from what had been desired.'
For those who, though interested only in living, are condemned to wander half-dead under the illustrious rubble of half-made revolutions; there is nothing to celebrate. There are no favourable circumstances in which to expect the long-suppressed, long hoped-for dream will be realised. Such people can only usefully relate to theory as to a step, a moment in an ongoing movement towards practical truth: a tool in the daily assault against history: a compass for accurate reconnaissance, a weapon for effective battle.
You will say that anarchist theory is precisely such a tool. I say look around you. Exactly where, and how, is this in fact true? The revolutionary theory of the past becomes the ruling ideology of the present. Not only the old answers but even the old questions must be discarded again and again as the basis of such questions changes; everything demands to be remade from scratch. The old theories, designed to agitate, now sedate. The aesthetic has become the anaesthetic. The theory of dead revolutionaries is no Arianne’s thread, now obscured by the ebbs of the class struggle, now thrust forward in vivid relief with the tides of renewed rebellion, able always to guide the oppressed out of the labyrinth of social alienation. With the return of prominent social contestation around the world from the 1990s onwards – many of whose forms (now that the collapse of state socialism has discredited its historic competitor) and attitudes express anarchist affinities – anarchism has also returned to prominence. Nowhere has this renewed publicity done any good. It is 88 years since Malatesta laid down what Zabalaza still takes for its strategy: “I believe that anarchists must remain within those organisations as they are, to work within them and seek to push them forward to the best of their ability, ready to avail themselves, in critical moments of history, of the influence they may have gained, and to transform them swiftly from modest weapons of defence to powerful tools of attack.” We are still as deep in the morass as ever; and there are no signs that even a thousand-fold multiplication in the readership of The Incendiary Times or the membership of Zabalaza would take us one step closer to an astonishing encounter with a new life.
From now on, all those consumed by a passion to share in the pleasures of such an encounter are forced to relate to revolutionary theory on the basis of antagonism rather than repetition. They can expect nothing of anything they themselves have not altered: the entire inheritance of the dead generations, from ideas to forms of behaviour and association, will remain in the service of the past unless remade (by being subjected to ruthless critique) and used here and now in the struggle to transform everyday life. The situationist Guy Debord, in explaining how the time for situationists is over, expressed in the film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni sentiments which those inspired by anarchist theory could put to good use – if they dare. Speaking of the project he once shared with his own comrades, he noted how “theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used if they are on hand when they’re needed. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with a game, or a conflict, or a journey.”
Only in the solitude of ever-renewed personal confrontation can the constraints and possibilities of the present be met with appropriate adventures – from which might arise, at the very least, fruitful failures.
The failures of anarchists will yield nothing useful unless they have the courage to move beyond the bounds of their faith. I do not regret my past, but I have no desire to stay there. Anarchism was a necessary (though inadequate) moment in my own personal history, just as it could be said to be a necessary moment in the history of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. But the moment has past: the movement must move. Just as anarchists recognise the futility of any reformism within state-ridden society, there seems to me no reformist redress for the debilitating constraints imposed on those shackled to the anarchist corpse. As a living reality capable of totally reinventing social-relations and remaking the world, it died a long time ago, and has no chance of reviving. Libertarian socialists, like their brothers and sisters in rival leftist churches, remain religious at least inasmuch as they refuse to confront with anything but fables the irreversible finality of death which stares each person full in the face until, as ice sweeps through their veins and shivers shake their skeleton, they laugh into the grinning teeth and blank eye-sockets of the naked skull or avert their face in terror. But the sheer humour of the never-to-be-repeated is only accessible to those who do not flinch at the terrible void which surrounds it on all sides. As Guy Debord maintained, regarding 'what is most important': 'It is only necessary to know how to love.' He who cannot laugh at the life and death of an irreducible individual, be it an historic moment in the passage of time or the passing gesture of a friend, cannot love this individual. To love another is to know them as they consume themselves in the Heraclitean fire, 'for love longs/ to know the beloved, and a light goes with it/ into the dark mineshafts of feeling', as Denise Levertov sang. 'Love is not consolation; it is light', said the Christian philosopher Simone Weil. Light love may be, but not in her Platonic sense. There is no essence of love, of which light is a determinate quality. When there are no more lovers – and every indication is that they are a near-extinct species, outcompeted by those whose instrumentality in matters of the heart have everything to do with compensation for services rendered – there will be no more love. Its luminescence derives from the empirical observation, first advanced by the non-dualist eastern religions, of 'dependent origination' in a cosmos composed not of atoms but of mutually-conditioned relations. 'Light is always light in darkness,' wrote Norman O. Brown, scholar of Islam, to round out my complement of scripture quotations. Ideology – what he associated with idolatry of the word, the idea, the image, the icon, the thingification of the breath of life – this is consolation. 'Iconoclasm, the word like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces', inasmuch as it demands that its wielders abandon the comforts of collective commiseration and celebration, is a work of desertion. The bright vision of anarchism must shudder under the tremor of utter dissolution to be reborn on the other side of death. There is no coming insurrection able to raise the putrefying body and reverse its rot; there is no coming messiah able to reknit the febrile labyrinth of grey-matter ruthlessly uncoiled by the fattening maggot. At most its ghost, like that of the Holy Spirit, lingers on: 'primarily in its force as an inspiring idea, an activating vision': The meek shall inherit the earth. This was the conclusion of George Woodcock (who deserted the ideology of his youth to 'answer to no whip and accept no label') in his famous textbook Anarchism, which no-one has yet managed to refute. As the meek well know after more than two millenia of waiting for their inheritance, an inspiring idea divorced from the means necessary for its realisation is altogether useless. Those who – and there are many – concern themselves with what Feral Faun rightly called 'the anarchist subculture' while ignoring the possibilities and practicalities of revolution here and now do anarchism a disservice. The few who seriously concern themselves with revolution but evade the necessary desertion from the cold womb of their subculture do themselves a disservice. Of those content to cling to the crutches that keep them crippled, the drugs that keep them addled, the fences that keep them separatediv; one can only say: 'They are all that they’ll ever be, and they aren’t much.' Subversion, like solidarity, begins at home. As for myself, it has become possible and necessary for me to acknowledge – as the great poet Laura Riding did, before abandoning poetry herself – that in the quest to abolish alienation anarchism, like art, is not enough.
Siddiq Khan
2013
lobesey@gmail.com
The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front can be contacted at zabalaza.net
The Incendiary Times can be contacted at bolobolo.co.za/it.html
It was extremely difficult for commoners to be seen to be opposing the chief, even among Xhosa-speakers. In light of this, every attempt was made to achieve consensus, the illusion of unanimity. In particular, there was no concept of an institutionalised opposition, charged with the responsibility of acting as a watch-dog against mis-government. Perhaps this was unnecessary as, although these societies were changing, the pace of change was slow and the issues before the people were not fundamental, in the senser no differing philosophies of 'good government', nor any idea of the necessity of planned change. The political system was uncritically accepted as given, as being in the nature of things: the governmental system was good; only particular chiefs were bad. (David Hammond-Tooke, The Roots of Black South Africa)
It remains extremely difficult for commoners to be seen to be opposing the chief, even among revolutionists. In personal conversations, the chief member of the Bolo-bolo collective described how his former partner resented the ubiquitous deferrence to the leadership (one of whose official party lines, that female-only groups must be barred in the interest of 'unity', directly reproduced the archaic patriarchal leftism which precipitated second-wave feminism 60-odd years ago) among the Zabalaza anarchist collective, in which she formerly participated. In the same way, two individuals described how they quit the Bolo-bolo collective because they could not conform to the party line established by this very same chief. The point here is not arbitrarily to choose sides in such conflicts. It is unecessary, and undesirable, to accept uncritically the denunciations of both 'dictatorial' as well as of 'divisive' behaviour. The problem remains that such conflicts continue to be supressed by both parties. The dissidents typically fail to draw any practical conclusions from them which translate into new forms of revolutionary practice; they evade criticism of their old forms of organisation precisely to the degree that this would necessarily involve self-criticism of their own roles, attitudes and activities within them.
Often, this suppression simply leads them to abandon any attempt at radical activity at all: hence the ubiquitous 'burnout' so rampant among jaded radicals of a certain age whose perfectly valid disgust at all hitherto existing forms of radical-activity/revolutiony-organisation produces a perfectly pathetic self-satisfaction at the complete non-existence of their own conscious self-organisation and -activity (both of which are abandoned to the unconscious and reactionary tyranny of habit, chance and circumstance). By clothing it in blatant cynicism, they are able to indulge in precisely that tendency toward complacent passivity which they found so contemptible when dressed up in radical rhetoric. Such people, whose logic is embodied at its purist in the person of the nihilist, even derive a certain pleasure from their own resignation; they fancy the 'honesty' of their own naked submission as somehow superior to the 'hypocracy' and 'delusion' of those radicals who fail share their enlightened attitude.
It remains extremely difficult for commoners to be seen to be opposing the chief, even among revolutionists. In personal conversations, the chief member of the Bolo-bolo collective described how his former partner resented the ubiquitous deferrence to the leadership (one of whose official party lines, that female-only groups must be barred in the interest of 'unity', directly reproduced the archaic patriarchal leftism which precipitated second-wave feminism 60-odd years ago) among the Zabalaza anarchist collective, in which she formerly participated. In the same way, two individuals described how they quit the Bolo-bolo collective because they could not conform to the party line established by this very same chief. The point here is not arbitrarily to choose sides in such conflicts. It is unecessary, and undesirable, to accept uncritically the denunciations of both 'dictatorial' as well as of 'divisive' behaviour. The problem remains that such conflicts continue to be supressed by both parties. The dissidents typically fail to draw any practical conclusions from them which translate into new forms of revolutionary practice; they evade criticism of their old forms of organisation precisely to the degree that this would necessarily involve self-criticism of their own roles, attitudes and activities within them.
Often, this suppression simply leads them to abandon any attempt at radical activity at all: hence the ubiquitous 'burnout' so rampant among jaded radicals of a certain age whose perfectly valid disgust at all hitherto existing forms of radical-activity/revolutiony-organisation produces a perfectly pathetic self-satisfaction at the complete non-existence of their own conscious self-organisation and -activity (both of which are abandoned to the unconscious and reactionary tyranny of habit, chance and circumstance). By clothing it in blatant cynicism, they are able to indulge in precisely that tendency toward complacent passivity which they found so contemptible when dressed up in radical rhetoric. Such people, whose logic is embodied at its purist in the person of the nihilist, even derive a certain pleasure from their own resignation; they fancy the 'honesty' of their own naked submission as somehow superior to the 'hypocracy' and 'delusion' of those radicals who fail share their enlightened attitude.
When this suppression does not produce 'burnout', future attempts by those dissafected with thier past suffer from the return of the old repressed conflicts in new forms. The reproduction of the Zabalaza-style relations within Bolobolo is a case in point, as are similar forms of repetition which mark almost every present form of proletarian organisation today, from the rise of populist political parties like the EFF in South Africa, Podemos in Spain, Syzia in Greece and the Latin American parties under Chavez, Morales and Lula, to the rise of new trade unions like AMCU in response to the degeneration of the NUM among South African miners and the 'reformation' of old trade unions like NUMSA in response to the 'betrayal' of worker's interest by COSATU among South Africal industrial workers.
The old illusion of unanimity reappears within each of these new attempts. In particular, there remains no practical organisation of a critical self-conscsiousness, charged with the responsibility of acting as a watch-dog against the reproduction of self-alienation. In the absence of such organisation, inseparable from a confrontation with history and the misery inherited from it in the present throughout everyday life, the challenge these new projects represents to the dominant social relations between people were can never be fundamental.
The consciousness of history necessary to grasp the real movement of self and society as they traverse the irreversible passage of time remains supressed in the sense that no differing conceptions of 'revolutionary organisation', nor any idea of the necessity of planned change are allowed to develop. The development of ideas can only occur when conceptions are tested in practice; the reduction of radical activity to an endless repetition of past mistakes (guaranteed by an endless refusal to confront past conflicts and failures consciously in terms of new practical consequences) prevents such a development. The problem is not that radical projects fail, or contain serious contradictions and problems, but that they fail to confront these contradictions, continue to reproduce the same sterile contradictions, and disable themselves from ever moving on to more interesting mistakes, more productive problems.
The essential evasions by which individuals guarantee the reproduction of the same old alienation in the organisation of their everyday activities -- however radical these may be in form and content -- is uncritically accepted as given, as being in the nature of things: the domination of unconsciousness is considered good; only particular projects, products and persons are bad. Thus voters will decry the corruption of this or that particular party or politician, and anarchists will admit the validity of my critique as applicable to 'certain particular anarchists' while evading the question of the conscious production of fundamentally new forms of (necessary) alienation, based on new forms of action and relation, which is never allowed to be posed in practice.
Endnotes
i Of course, the development of consequences contrary to our intentions also confronts us at every turn. The point is that the lack of practical clarity regarding our intentions contributes more than any other factor towards such tragic consequences, both on the individual and the social level.
ii “If it seems contradictory to say that coercion is consensual, the contradiction is in the world, not in the expression, and can’t adequately be rendered except by dialectical discourse. One-dimensional syllogistics can’t do justice to a world largely lacking in virtue. If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable. The scholastic “A = A” logic created by the Catholic Church which the libertarians [both right and left, as evidenced by the sterile language used by almost all leftists, libertarian socialists included – S.K.] inherited, unquestioned, from the Randites is just as constrictively conservative as the Newspeak of 1984.” – Bob Black, The Libertarian as Conservative
iii That is: if Stefanie is indeed responsible for much of the behind-the-scenes aspects of production for the paper (which we don't know, as the productive relations are deliberately obscured in order to convey an impression of a 'collective project' in which individual efforts are merged into those of the group: there is more information on the different fonts used to print the paper than there is on the what particular individuals in the collective were responsible for what particular tasks!) then this would be a typical historical role for a woman to play, and it is apparent that even today in supposedly progressive milieus that the cliché 'behind every great man there is a great woman' still all too often applies. In radical circles the sexual division of labour with the male 'theorist' and the female 'practical organiser' certainly still seems prevalent.
iv In 1971 the South African poet Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali was content to write about how bourgeois Man (homo economicus) built a moat around his heart; I want to destroy it. As fellow-poet André Breton put it, speaking on behalf of the surrealists (a role he took no pains to break out of, it should be noted): "Marx said, Transform the world'; Rimbaud said, 'Change life'; these two mottoes are for us one and the same."
Appendix on an 'anonymous' response to Why I am not an anarchist
There have so far been a total of two comments on this essay worthy of reply. The first was written by a member of the Bolo'bolo collective, though signed as '*fap fap fap fa...' I know this because it refers to information which only a collective member would know, in a style only a Bolo'bolo member would use. The same rather obvious clues which lead me to conclude The Incendiary Times 'collective' = Aragorn bring me to the same conclusions regarding my mysterious ventriloquist, who has titled his comment Why I am not an anarchist, short version.
'I am not an anarchist because whenever I try interact with the local anarchists, who I don't know as well as my narcissism leads me to believe and whose character, writing and projects I self-indulgently misrepresent (almost as much as I misrepresent my own participation) in order to reproduce the critical discourse of my own tiny echo chamber, they tend to fall asleep on me.
Goddamn you, anarchists, why won't you read my irrelevant, absurdly long-winded and tangential ramblings peppered with thumb-sucked critiques, romantic hyperbole and Situ-101 copy and paste? Can't you see the evil power dynamics of the South African anarchist milieu? Can't you see that they're just crypto-Stalinists, hosting book launches for evil men in red berets who write books with their friends about irrelevant topics like dialogue across race lines in the post-apartheid terrain? Don't you know that Lucien, Michael and Aragorn secretly control the entire network of underground anarchist militants and civil society infoshop baristas? And what of poor Stefanie, crushed under the iron boot of the post-left patriarchy? For how much longer must she remain shackled to the bolo'bolo kitchen sink, albeit with chains that stretch across two continents?
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a 70 000 word denunciation of a Facebook comment to write.'
To which I responded:
From the evidence one suspects this comment is an inside job. But if anything is misrepresented here it would have to be demonstrated concretely rather than baselessly asserted, which neither the author of this comment, nor any of the bolobolo comrades have managed to do. As a matter of fact I interact quite well with the local anarchists on the level at which they are comfortable, which is generally social, superficial, and without consequence. The problem is that I am not satisfied with such interactions, but any proposals for a more coherent -- and necesarilly disturbing -- practice involving anything more than what they have already done is met with evasions. Those who are satisfied with what exists will not find much of interest in attempts to do any activity other than that certain to maintain the comfortable poverty and self-satisfied illusions of this miserable existence.
The rhetorical questions in your second paragraph are thus quite off the mark. I know very well why they have nothing to say: BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO. The absence of any signs of life on their part means that I don't know whether they tend to fall asleep on me or not. According to their own official, quite certainly duplicitous response, this is due to 'lack of time'. A more important question is: other than the level at which they are content to operate (which one can't call an echo-chamber, because that would imply it involves something to say, an original voice stemming from an original perspective that is subsequently echoed) were they -- are they -- awake to begin with?
Appendix on Anarcho-situationism
The following is an extract from the journal Implications, published in 1975 by Isaac Cronin and Chris Shutes. It is taken from the article Raoul Vaneigem and the Everyday Life of the Revolution. This journal is not yet available online, although I hope to rectify this shortly, as copies are almost impossible to come by. As a whole it seems to me that its authors, while tending to provide rather poor examples in substantiation for their particular arguments, offer one of the most thorough historical critiques of a tendency more prevalent among civilization and its discontents today than when it was first published.
The popularity among all strata of the proletariat in my generation -- from ghetto youth to yuppie suburbanites -- of the same digital pseudo-social media, the same pseudo-gangster rap, the same outrageous sex-kitten celebrities, the same aspirational dreams of self-realisation in the ranks of the corporate/state/civil-society bureaucracy or the arts and sciences, the same demands for 'quality' education and commodities, for recreation 'opportunities' centered on vapid drug-fueled sexual rituals that are often (semi)officially sanctioned and always mediated by copious consumption of cultural commodities, together with the prominence of its spectacular opposite: the modern subcultures of punk/hardcore, 'underground' hip-hop, drum n' bass/techno/rave, Burning Man festivals, the organic/vegan/raw/slow/paleo food scene, free-improvisation, avant-garde films & leftist documentaries, info-shops, summit-hopping protests, guerrilla gardening, individualist/insurrectionist /post-left anarchism, with nothing in-between but the archaic leftism of trade-union/academy/civil-society/libertarian-communism all indicate that the tendencies so desperately in need of critical perspective in 1974 remain as blinkered, repressed and self-censored regarding the implications of their own practice four decades later. The fact that the work of Shutes, Cronin and their comrades remains useful today as a start signifies not so much the brilliance of their theory as dismal renunciation of all critical theory whatsoever of their descendants. It is included here not merely as an accusation hurled at others but because, despite my own efforts to free myself from the cobwebs of my past, of which this essay is one necessary but insufficient moment, I still remain far too susceptible to the weaknesses of subjectivist ideology in general, and of its anarcho-vaneigemist variant in particular. One of the chief contributions of the Situationists to the revolutionary project was their insistance that critical theory, however sophisticated its content, remained merely ideology so long as its partisans related to it as something external to themselves, so long as they repressed the necessity to be cruel with their past and every aspect of their everyday practice that keeps them stuck there. Unsurprisingly, considering that in existing conditions such evasion stands flatly on the side of Power, this necessity is precisely what their modern would-be descendants tend most enthusiastically to repress themselves. For me this is, first and foremost, an essay in exorcism.
*
'Anarchism could offer a semblance of
viability as a modern revolutionary ideology as long as the Left
remained credible as a practical force. For modern anarchists, the
old anarchist conception that revolution is always an immediate
possibility was rediscovered in
an obsessive need to denounce Leninism – which latter was posited
as the essential, if
not the only, obstacle
standing between bourgeois society and revolution. But – gasp –
the stalinists are on the decline and – still no revolution! In
fact, it has become abundantly clear that stalinism, at least in
America, plays only a small role in the daily counter-revolution.
In the
face of the Left's decline, anarchism per se
can no longer stand on its own, and there is scarcely an anarchist
going who hasnt implicitly recognised this fact by bolstering his
tired critique with situationism. Up till now, few anarchists have
explicitly superseded and publicly criticised anarchism – most
prefer to try to combine
situationism with anarchism without missing a step. The
most common conception circulating among anarchist circles is that
the situationists are really anarchists with a few additional
interesting ideas: what unites them all is the common enemy of
stalinism. Vaneigem's frequent emphasis on the pitfalls of leftism,
and the anarchist's superficial reading of the Treatise
which notes only its positive
mentions of anarchists
(Ravachol, Makhno, Durruti, etc.), combined with the declasse
base of anarchism today, lend
the anarchist to the Treatise much
more readily than any other S.I. texts (it's tough for an anarchist
to accept the Society of the Spectacle or
On the Poverty of Student Life as
a whole – not to mention The Real Split in the
Interational – not only
because of the essentially negative emphases regarding anarchism in
these works, but also because both go farther in undercutting the
material bases of modern anarchist ideology than the Treatise).
The
anarchist turned partially vaneigemist takes his previous critique of
the Left and extends it to society as a whole. For him, the whole
society is essentially stalinist: the
revolution is still an immediate question (Vaneigem's emphasis on the
present helps support this
illusion); the spectacle is conscious of this immediacy and
consciously tries to
keep this suppressed fact suppressed. All the anarcho-vaneigemist
needs to know is that modern society is christian, sacrificial,
hierarchical, dogmatic, and against workers' councils. His entire
strategy consists in publicising this, confident that when it is
known, the revolution will surely be upon us.'
Western Cape farmworker's strike, 2012
Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Leftism and its Discontents
The following is taken from the journal Willful Disobedience Volume 2, number 10, published by Wolfi Landstreicher in 2001. It is titled A Few Words: against binomial thinking. It illustrates the value of the most sophisticated form of modern anarchism, but also the limitations: as concrete as its criticisms of more archaic anarchist ideology may be, the conception of revolutionary practice and organisation advanced remains abstract to the highest degree. What precisely is the 'passional sphere'? In what concrete ways might one think and live in a 'projectual manner'? 'The revolt of indomitable individuals who refuse to compromise themselves, coming together to destroy all domination' has today precisely as much practical value as 'Workers of the world, unite!' -- and, with its talk of uncompromised souls, a great deal more moralistic purism.
Post-leftist anarchists like Landstreicher (and the leader of the Bolobolo collective explicitly defined himself as such) generally do tend to conform too well to the perceptive critiques of anarcho-situationism published 30 years ago in the above appendix. In recent correspondence, Jason Mquinn, another leading theorists of the post-leftist tendency, communicated to me his preference for Vaneigem over the other situationists: one might ennumerate many more continuities between the post-leftist of today and the 'anarchist turned partially vaneigemist' of the 1970s. In Bob Black's Playing Ducks and Drakes, for example, one of their own number offered an ironic observation regarding one of his comrades which Shutes and Cronin made regarding this tendency in general: 'If anything is predictable about the vaneigemist's public practice, it is that he will never speak concretely about his own daily life and his struggles in it; in his effort to be exemplary, he keeps out his own "lived experience" except as it conforms to his image of radically subjective behaviour (in which case he might as well leave it out anyway, since it offers nothing essentially new, only a different aspect of the same old thing). This glaring absence can be justified under the rubric that subjective life is "difficult to talk about" (Vaneigem). While in practice, the vaneiegemist constantly descends from the general to the particular, in theory he takes the particular for granted and sticks with generalities stripped of content.' (Chris Shutes & Isaac Cronin, Implications)
In a recent text on Critical Self-Theory, Mquinn wrote 'those who act as if [capital, corporations, money, and the economy] really exist and take action based upon those delusions [i.e. 99.99% of human beings] ... constantly work hard to make their lives and my life as miserable as possible in order to serve their economic and corporate masters'. What he produces here is simply a crude cariacature of the dumb multitude that only the most supercilious misanthrope could accept. It is simply not true that most 'people attempt to reproduce this domination' -- they do so despite themselves and their conscious will. Clearly, this miserable situation in which we all find ourselves is the opposite of most people's intentions. What I find most useful about theory is its ability to make sensible precisely how people produce results contrary to their desires, or how they adopt goals in the pursuit of their desires whose successful accomplishment can only frustrate their own intentions. With the Towards the abolition of an absurd blood feud anthology I have tried to outline the workings of this process, inasmuch as it has to do with the revolutionary movement of the last 150 years, relating it to the more general tendency at work in all our lives. As the above caricature demonstrates, it is all too easy for critical self-theory, when separated from any attempt to confront this such a task, to devolve from an implement for positive critique into a facile entirely negative pseudo-criticism. Which is not to say that Mcquinn avoids this task, which would be impossible as it is implied by the very basis of their critique, but he does often fail to make this implication explicit in any coherent way, and some of what he has to say suffers as a result.
He defines 'modern slaves', for example, in terms of their beliefs (as 'those who actually believe that they are their slave roles), and so reproduces a deception that imposes a false separation between the rich subjectivity of emancipated rebels and the poverty-striken unconsciousness of the sheeple. But modern slavery, though it may in one sense rest on voluntary servitude, is not consciously considered voluntary by the majority of slaves. And in fact it isn't. Proletarians really are wage-slaves, even though their very objective slavery would be impossible if they did not submit to it as individuals and as a class. This is a contradiction that doesn't only exist in the head of the individual, but in a material existence whose reality remains external to (but not 'separate' from) individuals as well. The sort of deception his definition leads to was ably criticised by the producers of Modern Teleology in their text Life Choice:
'This idealization of a sort of poetic journey across existence only looks to Debord’s actual life so long as he can hide that the deep unsatisfaction of our time is also in his life, that he also has to share the misery of the poor; and by misery of the poor, I mean the submissions, the defeats, the humiliations, the stupor, the lack of insight, the inability to manage the anxious balance between life and its possible. By swashbuckling and boasting, Debord has constantly concealed the failures and the insufficiencies of his own life, as if the excellence of an individual could, for itself, abolish them, and as if he, who was yet so notoriously defeated in his historical project, could be such an example.
Debord’s lifestylism deserves such a long mention because he is one of the archetypes of lifestylism, an ideology that has generalized in the middleclass society. A generously lived life, in fact, has become everyone’s goal, both among declared enemies of this society like Debord, and simply among frenetic enthusiasts of some of the commodities that this society produces or of the activities it tolerates.'
The pervasiveness of the (self)deception is such that Chris Shutes and Isaac Cronin in the text quoted above label it (partially due to their own bias in favour of Debord, partially because at the time they wrote the image of Debord had not yet developed to the point at which it now stands) Vaneigemism!
'As our desire to create our lives as we see fit, to realize ourselves to the fullest extent, to reappropriate the conditions of our existence, develops into a real project of revolt against all domination and oppression, we begin to encounter the world with a more penetrating eye. Our ideas sharpen as they become tools in a life and in relationships aimed at the destruction of the social order and the opening of unknown possibilities for exploring the infinity of singular beings. With a clear aim, a resolute project of revolt, it is much easier to throw off the methods of thought imposed by this society: by school, religion, television, the media, advertising, elections, the internet — all the educational, informational and communications tools through which the ruling order expresses itself. One who has a life project, a project of revolt that motivates her activities to their depths, based on his desires and passions, not on an ideology or cause, will thus express her ideas analyses and critiques with the assurance of one who is speaking from life, from the depths of his own being.
But where a projectual practice of revolt is lacking (and, let’s be clear, I am not talking about having a bunch of random “radical” projects like an infoshop, a pirate radio station, a “Food not Bombs”, etc, but of creating one’s life and relationships in active revolt against the current existence in its totality), people continue to encounter the world in ways that they were taught, using the methods of thinking imposed by the current social order — this tolerant order of democratic discussion where there are two sides to every question; where we all have a choice... among the limited options offered in the marketplace of goods and of opinions, that is; where the “ideas” offered have all been separated from life, drained of all except the most instrumental passions and desires, drained of joy and sorrow and rage; where every desire is drained of its singularity and immediate content and conformed to the needs of whatever ideology and of the marketplace. There is no place here for the strong and passionate critique that springs from our desire for the fullness of life, from our awareness of the complexity of the world we face and the world we want to create, because here all ideas have been flattened in to opinions and every opinion is equal — and equally empty.
And so without a project of revolt that springs from the fullness of our being and our relationships, even we anarchists find our thinking permeated with the methodology of opinion. Thus, the binomialism of the public poll penetrates into the expression of so-called anarchist ideas: are you a communist or are you an individualist? do you sacrifice yourself and your desires to a moralistic “green anarchist” vision of a distant future where what is left of humanity reverts to the supposed edenic conditions of prehistoric foragers or to an equally distant “red anarchist” vision of the self-managed industrial workers’ paradise? do you adhere to feminism or do you uphold male domination? The list could go on, but the point is that such binomial thinking is a clear sign that one’s revolt is still in the realm of morals and ideals external to oneself and thus in the realm of opinion.
To imagine a communism developed precisely to expand individual freedom and to see such freedom as flourishing in the context of that equality of access to all the tools necessary for determining the conditions of one’s existence that is true communism — this is a bit complex for the world of opinion. To conceive of a critique of civilization that originates in one’s desire for the fullness of being that civilization cannot offer, because its expansion can only be based on a homogenization that diminishes existence in the name of monolithic control, and to therefore envision and act to realize not a model of an ideal world, but that revolutionary rupture that opens myriads of unknown possibilities from which a new decivilized existence could develop based on our desires and dreams — this is nothing but pure egoism from the standpoint of ideology and morality. To criticize the poverty of the practice of feminism and the emptiness of so many of its theoretical constructs which have left it incapable of truly confronting and moving beyond gender because one imagines a liberation from the constraints of gender that is not homogenization into a universal androgyny but rather the opening up of the full spectrum of singular expressions of one’s being in the sexual and passional spheres and every other sphere that gender has affected — this is pure arrogance particularly if one happens to be a man. No, it is better to keep one’s thought within the constraints of offered choices, to flatten one’s ideas into opinions, to not only tolerate blatant stupidity, but to blind oneself to it even among those who are supposedly our comrades, to avoid living and thinking in a projectual manner. Otherwise, one risks meeting life face-to-face and truly having to grapple with existence.
But for some of us revolt is not a hobby, anarchy is not a word we use to make ourselves feel more radical. These are our life’s project, the way of being we are striving to create. The ideas we develop are not mere opinions, but the outgrowth of the passionate reason of our project, based in our lives, our desires and our dreams as they encounter the world. They are as fluid as lived desires and dreams, but this fluidity is strong, assured and determined. And if, as some have said, this makes us dogmatic and arrogant, then we need more dogmatic and arrogant anarchists. Because it is not the ceaseless negotiation of opinions, of democratic discourse, that will bring down the ruling order, but the revolt of indomitable individuals who refuse to compromise themselves, coming together to destroy all domination.'
De Doorns Farmworkers' strike, 2012
