WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE THOUGHT?
"To
serve history" means... for us, revolutionary workers of a
dismal world labouring in the crisis and decay of all forms of the
"old" socialist, communist, and anarchist labour movements,
to learn from the deeds and from the mistakes of past history the
lesson for the future, the ways and means for the realization of the
goals of the revolutionary working class.
–
Economics
and Politics in Revolutionary Spain, Karl
Korsch, 1938
WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE SAID?
Since the method, having become abstract and contemplative, now falsifies and does violence to history, it follows that history will gain its revenge and violate the method which has failed to integrate it, tearing it to pieces.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE WANTED
AND TRIED TO ACCOMPLISH AND FAILED?
Surely this general formalism means that human activities and capabilities are being alienated in a multiplicity of ways, heterogeneous and yet drearily monotonous, that while shapes external one to the other and external to living man are being projected, human activities and capabilities are being split apart. It is a general alienation, coming to the surface in the overall structure of society and brought forth by the movement of that structure, but constantly turning back towards and into day-to-day living.
– Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre, 1957
WHY WOULD WE CARE IF WE DIDN´T ALL SUFFER
THIS BLOODY RAW HOLE IN THE HEART?
General Introduction
1
In the
beginning was the word, and the word was spirit made flesh through
the thick fricative beat of tooth on tooth, lip on lip, tongue on
palate. And the word was consciousness made flesh through the warm
hollow whir of humid air through vocal chords through chest, through
throat, through head. And the flesh was made conscious through the
roll of waves through vibrant air through cochlea hair through ear
canal through brain in skull.
2
Language is
the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed
through sensuous representations (oral, visual, tactile and gestural
signs).
3
History is
the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed
through deeds.
4
Theory is
the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed
through ideas.
5
Ways of
speaking, ways of thinking, ways of acting and relating are basic
technologies
in the service of human beings, which have taken on a life on their
own, rebelled against their subordinate role, and put people to work
for them instead of them working for people.
6
The
pretensions of endurance and duty and the taboos of property and
precedence which currently hold back the free transformation of all
the material and objective organisations inherited from the past must
be swept aside. Escape is never possible, but the changing of all of the conditions of our life certainly is. The possibilities for new types of behavior lie within play. If work is to become play, tools must become toys.
The transformation of the former into the latter can itself only be
accomplished as a game. "This is a game that can only be conducted
with the utmost rigour." (Lettrist International, Potlatch #5, 1954)
7
Although
they emerged from different economic conditions, the domination of
the automated machine over the human under capitalism, and of the hoe
over the peasant and slave under previous modes of accumulation, are
both symptoms of a situation in which subjective human consciousness
has lost control over its own basic objective organisations. A
species which has always
been
more or less alienated from the ability to make sense
of its own basic life experience has continued to produce
organisations where everything that is directly lived increasingly
tends to recede into a representation.
The
reduction of human consciousness to individual thoughts
and emotions; the reduction of human subjectivity to an epiphenomenal
emanation of biological processes, seperated from the broad life of
the cosmos; the reduction of human life from a sensuous, practical
activity whose meaning each person defines for themselves along with
their companions to the passive contemplation of an incomprehensible
spectacle whose autonomous movement imposes its own meaninglessness
on everyone; over time human existence as
a whole is
progressively diminished, its organic unity broken for the sake of
its parts – the organisation of labour, social relations, words and
ideas – which have seceded and established an independent kingdom
set above and against the desires of their own producers.
8
The
tendency for all organisations in capitalist society 'to render
themselves autonomous, i.e. to alienate themselves from their
original aim and to become an end in themselves', which has so
dismally sabotaged all working-class attempts at liberation during
the course of the past 150 years, can thus be understood as a special
variety of a more general tendency operative throughout human
existence, just as the tendency in modern civilisation for technology
to overwhelm, enslave and destroy its own producers can be understood
as a special variety of a more general tendency. If today slavery and
technology still form an inseparable unity, as they have
throughout history, the specific conditions in which this unity is
expressed have changed. If the abolition of contemporary wage-slavery
necessarily involves the progressive supersession of capitalist
technology and civilisation in its entirety,
this process also necessarily involves the complete detournement
of all the theoretical and social techniques inherited from the old
world – including and especially those adopted by the working-class
in their struggles for liberation. As they currently exist, both the
techniques of the capitalists and those of the workers are tools fit
for nothing more than the abject submission of their users to
conditions of poverty and alienation. The history of these struggles
is the history of their failure to adapt
the
material they've adopted in ways appropriate to their ends. Not only
is this a failure that continues today, but the protagonists of
present struggles scarcely seem aware that it even exists.
9
The
following texts, assembled from sources of various vintage, are
presented to serve as a documentary history of the last century and a
half. They were selected on the basis of their ability to express
eloquently the genesis and development of a general process, outlined
in this general introduction, through specific examples. It goes
without saying that although I may be in fundamental agreement with
what is said in these particular texts, this affinity by no means
extends to everything else their authors say and do.
10
The
intention of such an anthology is to serve as a contribution towards
a productive debate on the central problem of our times: the tendency
of human desires to adopt means and ends utterly opposed to their own
realisation
.
11
The
perspective here adopted is that this general tendency, alive in all
places and times, was significantly aggravated with the development
of class societies, and is today best understood in the context of
the specific historic conditions of the present, which for the last
century and a half have been defined by the development of capitalism
and the social classes on which it is based; the present society can
itself best be understood as the perfection of this unfortunate
tendency, whose effects have today achieved a truly impressive scope
and severity.
12
Under these
circumstances, the central problem of our times can best be
formulated as follows:
The
tendency of all desires under capitalism (including and especially
the revolutionary desire which emerged from working-class struggles
for liberation) to adopt ends utterly opposed to their realisation,
develop means appropriate to these ends, and succeed in realising
nothing but their own alienation.
13
As they
confronted the contradiction between the poverty of their own
everyday lives and the immense wealth produced by their own labour,
proletarians naturally came to desire that this production be used
for the good of the individual and community. Inspired, agitated,
persuaded and recruited by a rising class of professional
revolutionary organisers and intellectuals, they came to consider
that this desire would best be realized through the triumph of a
revolutionary organisation (a de-centralised but closely co-ordinated
Movement, a disciplined and centralised Party, one big revolutionary
Union – respectively corresponding to Anarchist, Marxist and
Syndicalist ideologies) concieved as a separate power standing
between themselves and their desires. Having set this end for
themselves, they persued it through struggles to
organise the organisation
– an entirely consistent way of going about things if the logic
embodied by these movements is followed to its practical conclusions.
14
This
process remains the most extreme example of how the logic of capital
– a social relation between persons which presents itself to their
decieved gaze as a relation between objects and their prices –
generally tends to stand between human desires and their realisation,
transforming them into desires
for commodities.
Just as the desire for love and social communion, a desire for
fulfilling intercourse between persons, tends to change into the
desire to possess another as one's personal property and a relation
between this property and its cost, measured in terms of other
property; so the desire to abolish the miserable way people relate to
themselves, their world and one another tends to change into the
desire to hold shares in a revolutionary organisation, and a relation
between this revolutionary organisation and the capitalist
organisation it is intended to overthrow.
15
There is no
need to list here all the unfortunate results this general tendency
mass-produces, at every level of existence, in 'a
world rolling darkly towards its ruin'.
What seems far more useful – and this is what the documents here
assembled do so well – is to detail the concrete circumstances
under which the historical and theoretical organisations of the
revolutionary working-class, which began as the fundamental negation
of
the dominant order, turned into nothing more than a special form of
accommodation
to this same order, serving more to adapt capitalism to the needs of
workers and workers to the needs of capitalism than to abolish
capitalism and the classes on which it is based.
16
Proletarians
do not simply pursue unvarying intentions by confronting the
practical miscarriages of those intentions. As well as refining their
means, they can both change their understanding of the ends that
constitute the realization of their existing desires and change those
desires. This might occur not only in response to the failure of
workers’ efforts, but rather in response to the impoverished
results of the success of those efforts. After a century and a half
of struggles to organise organisations, this tedious activity is
something proletarians have gotten rather too good at. One purpose of
this anthology is to detail the results of this success, as a
contribution towards a new understanding of the sort of ends which,
when achieved, might finally bring satisfaction rather than its
opposite.
17
As is well
known, human existence in both its objective and subjective aspects
is based on nature, but nature itself has been humanised to the point
where almost every aspect of the environment has been built or
significantly altered by people. Ultimately, human consciousness is
based on material existence, just as society is based on nature; the
inter-penetration of opposites operates in much the same way.
Theory and
language, just as much as history, are objective realities that
exists outside individual consciousness, yet are in no way separate
from it. The idea of consciousness as a entirely subjective element,
the essence of a pure self-identical ego residing in the head, can at
best be left to the speculations of idealist philosophy. 'We are
never really sure where actions, decisions or events spring from.
But, in all their stark reality, the results are there.
What
lies hidden within men and women is beyond our grasp; maybe these
hidden depths are only an insubstantial mist, and not a profound
substance… it may only be a myth. Men and women are beyond us. But
the battle, however confused, always has an outcome.' It
is necessary to grasp the various aspects of social existence as
objective expressions of
human consciousness
in order to grasp how the necessary
and natural reversal
of this process produces – in societies dominated by the production
of commodities, where human consciousness becomes a subjective
expression of completely
alien objects
and their organisations – the peculiar upside-down outcome with
which we are familiar.
18
A better
understanding of the relation between existence and consciousness is
necessary to confront the fact that, 150 years since communist
workers first began to associate under the slogan 'the emancipation
of the working-class is the task of workers themselves', proletarians
grown more formally enfranchised and educated than ever before seem
as far from emancipating themselves today as they did then. The
essentially simple job described by Paul Mattick in the following
terms seems no closer to accomplishment today than it has ever been:
'The workers’ job is essentially a simple one. It consists in
recognising that all previously-existing ruling groups have hindered
the development of a truly social production and distribution; in
recognising the necessity for doing away with production and
distribution as determined by the profit and power needs of special
groups in society who control the means of production and the other
social power sources. Production has to be shifted so that it can
serve the real needs of the people; it has to become a production for
consumption. When these things are recognised, the workers have to
act upon them to realise their needs and desires. Little philosophy,
sociology, economics and political science are needed to recognise
those simple things and to act upon the recognition. The actual class
struggle is here decisive and determining. But in the practical field
of revolutionary and social activities the “conscious” minority
is no better informed than the “unconscious” majority. Rather the
opposite is true. This has been proven in all actual revolutionary
struggles.' A century and a half of agitation on the part of a
'conscious minority' and actual class struggle by an 'unconscious
majority' has produced today, in the realm of theory (recognition)
and history (deeds), results that are anything but revolutionary.
If
different results are to be obtained in the future, there are serious
problems of which the 'unconscious majority' must become
conscious
during the course of their struggle. It is certainly necessary to
recognise the fundamental inadequacies of minorities, as Mattick and
his comrades ably do. But if the majority have been misled by a
minority who have always only ended up a new exploiting class, the
reasons why this has been allowed to happen over and over again must
be discovered ('The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture,
merely through chance, is perhaps the best proof that chance is not
the cause of our failure') along with the steps necessary to avoid
future repetition. And if the actual class struggle is positively and
negatively affected by the consciousness of those who wage it, which
itself is affected by language and communication, theory and
ideology, these inter-relations must be practically grasped. It is
reasonable to expect, considering that the actual class struggle very
frequently gets sabotaged by a failure to confront these problems
successfully; considering that the actual class war of which every
struggle is a part necessarily involves
preparation
and strategic action; considering the frequently complex concrete
details that complicate the completion of the worker's essentially
simple job; considering most of all the historic failure of the
working class to accomplish this job at any time before, despite
significantly stronger material bases which it will never again
possess; it is reasonable to expect that the struggles of the present
and future might benefit from a conscious,
rigorous – even studious
– examination of the practical implications for the present to be
drawn from the significant failures of the past.
19
The
blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick in the veins of their heirs;
too thick for their own good. The knights errant of dead movements,
with good intentions, thick skulls and thin skins, continue to charge
at windmills for the sake of ancient offences; they dance cheek to
cheek to forgotten music while the world passes them by, to claw at
each others' throats for the sake of ancient outrages now as
inconsequential as the decrepit ideologies to which they cling.
The
blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick through the machinery of
today's misery; it oils the gears of modern slavery and helps them
mesh together smoothly; it runs thicker than all the watered-down
pseudo-memories with which the ruling spectacle tries to replace
history with unanswerable lies.
The
blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick and fast from beyond
coagulated pools welled at the bottoms of mass graves; it bursts
through caked surfaces dried by dirt-filtered light; it breaks
through mud-cracked surfaces congealed under layers of cold clay,
concealed under pails of cold oblivion, to beat against the eardrums
of those who can settle for nothing other than to take up the
struggle in which their comrades from the past so honourably fell.
Blood is thicker than rock strata: it falls upwards through cold
clay; it falls upwards through the vertiginous labyrinth of time; it
falls upwards through the showers of the seconds and the years; it
calls from beyond the gravest silence to those condemned to an
existence of quiet desperation; it calls from beyond the living
nightmare of those condemned to watch their precious spirits drain
away in senseless cycles of dead time; it spurts through the curdled
corneas of the victors; it leaps from the fountain-head of defeat to
storm the gates of heaven; it springs from the well at rock
bottom from the depths of those whose bodies and souls are not well
to thud against the brains and shudder through the chests of
them determined to recommence the abandoned adventure of the
fallen on a new basis, with new weapons.
20
Part
of the raw material for these new arms will be discovered in whatever
remains true and can still be recovered from the old movements which
the rich blood of our comrades gave life, and which died with them.
Historical truth, like love and wisdom, has no home in the house that
ideology built. Nothing living can survive there. It is a house that
collapsed long ago. Nothing has a home there but ghosts, who
wander among the ruins, building castles in the sky with bricks made
of hot air. Yet in the face of this complete and final
disintegration, all the Marxian horses and all the Anarchist men
still haven't managed to put two and two together again. Despite a
universal and complete defeat that nearly a century of historical
experience has confirmed irreversible, the epigones of the two
antagonistic tendencies whose bickering first split the revolutionary
proletarian movement 150 years ago continue to compete over the title
of sole privileged inheritor of historical truth as if the past
century and a half never happened.
Nothing
useful can come of this leftist predilection for historical fiction
-- certainly not a new revolutionary critique adequate to the demands
of the present age. The presentation of basic materials towards the
reconstitution of such a critique is precisely the purpose of what
follows. Only such a critique practically
applied throughout everyday life,
as the situationists noted, stands any chance of precipitating a new
movement wherein the
bad days will end. 'The
classical workers movement must be re-examined without any illusions,
particularly without any illusions regarding its various political
and pseudo-theoretical heirs, because all they have inherited is its
failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its
fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state
bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934
Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and
for the future...We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period
and to re-examine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all
the neglected possibilities, without any longer being impressed by
the fact that some won out over others and dominated the movement;
for we now know that the movement within which they were successful
was an overall failure... All this, of course, not with the aim of
scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to
contribute toward the formation of a new, profoundly different
revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many
premonitory signs over the last few years... We must understand these
signs through the study of the classical revolutionary project, and
vice versa. It is necessary to rediscover the history of the very
movement of history, which has been so thoroughly hidden and
distorted.'
Precisely
because today, as when the above was written, the proliferation of
social dissatisfaction around the world has once again begun to
scrawl the writing on the wall – albeit in an as yet very unsteady
hand in which signs of resignation to basic alienations, extreme
confusion, and timidity in the face of glaring contradiction can all
be seen in abundance – the program for a practical recovery of a
perspective capable of grasping not only the present as a moment of
universal history, but history
itself as an activity made here and now, must
once again be placed on the agenda as a matter of urgency.
21
22
This
reconciliation finally did materialise, but not as Dietzgen intended:
today Anarchism and Marxism are both united beyond
the pail:
their particular failures resulting in a general defeat which forced
them both to
kick the bucket and
tumble into the trashcan of history. Consequently, any talk of social
revolution today as something to be guided by the principles of
Anarchism, or to be led under the banner of Marxism (or Syndicalism,
Surrealism, etc), can only be regarded not merely as an absurdity,
but the wishful thinking on the part of adherents to a subcultural
sect that seeks salvation in a supernatural resurrection.
The first text presented below involves the most penetrating critique
yet published of the consequences – in terms of concrete forms of
consciousness, action and relation here and now – this subcultural
sectarianism has for the Anarchist ideology and its adherents. It
takes pride of place precisely because Anarchism, with the collapse
of Soviet state-capitalism and the wholesale free-market
transformation of China at the end of the previous century, has
become the least discredited (and therefore most popular and
widespread) historical form in which revolutionary ideology confronts
the reinvention of revolutionary theory today. Needless to say, what
it so perceptively critiques in the Anarchist subculture is equally
applicable to that of the Feminist, Black Nationalist, Libertarian
Communist, Pro-Situationist, and every other subculture with
revolutionary pretensions.
Nevertheless,
the recovery of what might still be salvaged from the dead movements
of the past – not as ideological fragments elevated to autonomous
authorities representing the totality of revolutionary truth, or
harmless inspiring examples to be held up uncritically as models for
emulation but as historical moments, partial and inadequate –
remains one of the vital revolutionary tasks of our time.
It
was in this spirit that, despite serious objections which would soon
be detailed in a virulent polemic, Engels remarked to Marx on the
publication of anarchist Max Stirner's The
Ego and Its Own that
'what is true in his principle, we, too, must accept. And what is
true is that before we can be active in any cause we must make it our
own, egoistic cause – and that in this sense, quite aside from any
material expectations, we are communists in virtue of our egoism,
that out of egoism we want to be human beings and not merely
individuals' – a principle which anarchists themselves all too
often fail to accept, many of whom do not possess revolutionary ideas
but
are possessed by them
to the point where they accept demands for asceticism, boredom,
useless self-sacrifice, uncritical participation in militant
struggles utterly divorced from of any serious revolutionary
perspective, and silence in the face of glaring contradictions,
merely out of a sense of duty to an externally defined cause whose
validity they possess
neither the imagination, nor the intelligence, nor the courage to
question.
It
was in this spirit that Korsch made his remark in the 1950 text Ten
Theses on Marxism Today that
'Marx
is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and
developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less
important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to
the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as
Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less
important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such
as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism' –
a spirit whose practical implications the situationists effectively
reintroduced into the revolutionary theory and practice their era.
23
This
is the task Korsch set himself to do in Document 2 regarding the
Marxism of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemberg, Engels and
Marx, in which he reached the devastating conclusion that the horrors
of Stalinism were historical developments already contained in the
contradictory practice of the Masters themselves. The lucid urgency
revealed in this historic document was, as with the article on Spain
quoted above, produced at a moment when the last working-class
communes in revolutionary Spain -- and with them the last hopes of
the classical workers movement of which they were the most highly
developed expression -- were being wiped out, not by fascism, but by
the combined forces of Stalinist Marxism-Leninism and capitalist
democracy. While maintaining, in texts published elsewhere, that
aspects of Marxian theory remained valid, and that a future
revolutionary movement would be compelled to assume a Marxist
character in the same way the revolutionary Marxist movement was
compelled to assume a Hegelian one, he concluded that no future
revolutionary movement could ever again emerge under the banner of
Marxism as such. This conclusion remains valid, for Marxism just as
for all the other dead movements.
24
In
Document 3, Zerzan (who wrote at a time when academic stars among the
New Left popularised a variety of reformed Leninism based on
philosophical Stalinists such as the latter-day Lukacs, Gramsci and
Althusser – an operation which equally vacuous intellectual
prostitutes like Zizek and Badiou repeat today) sets out to
accomplish the same task as Korsch, although using a much less
rigorous method applied to a much more intimate aspect of Marx's practice, with much more questionable results. His criticism of Marx's attitude towards the Paris Commune, for example: when Marx suggested, prior to the declaration of the Commune, that such a move was likely to be crushed in isolation as the rest of France remained at that point too conservative, he was in fact proved correct by the course of events; his subsequent unconditional defense of the Communards despite these initial reservations was entirely analogous to Bakunin's initially weary but eventually wholehearted participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849. It is also a bit disingenuous to claim that 'the worker as subject fails to occur in Marx' simply because he observed that imperialist warfare, under particular conditions, on specific occasions, might be likely to spark proletarian revolutions. Zerzan himself knew well that the Commune itself was provoked by the Franco-Prussian war, and that the first world war triggered revolutionary working-class uprisings across Europe and the Near-East, from Russia, Ukraine and Turkey to Italy, Hungary and Germany. To observe that war can be a potential trigger for worker uprisings is not to ignore the fact that, for such uprisings to succeed, proletarians could rely only on their own self-activity. Everything Marx and Engels wrote on the class struggles of France from 1848 until the Commune re-iterated this thesis, and it should be remembered that many of their most influential anarchist opponents enthusiastically took sides in imperialist slaughter, such as anarcho-trenchist Peter Kropotkin, or took up ministerial posts in bourgeois states, such as the leaders of the anarchist movement during the Spanish revolution. Despite some questionable details, however, Zerzan's attempt to grasp the contradictions of Marxism at the root -- and for Marxism the root is Marx -- remains fundamentally sound, and the most important aspects of his criticism are as valid, in their fashion, as those of Korsch. In the same way, Documents 4 and 8 see Bob Black develop the critique of the Anarchist subculture in his own, typically cavalier
manner, which nevertheless includes pithy precisions that connect
the forms of alienation elaborated in Feral Faun's text to the
significant historical consequences they have produced. He also
details the false unity that fabricates an imaginary coherence within
this ideological community – which is the other side of the false
oppositions by which such ideologies distinguish themselves within
the realm of appearances.
In
a related text published elsewhere, Black points out that although
anarchism helped him (as it has many others, myself included) 'to
arrive at an unconditionally anti-statist, anti-capitalist
perspective', he could never accommodate himself to the hidden
hierarchical relations common in most situations colonised by the anti-authoritarian ideology of 'direct-democracy' – relations where
abstract egalitarianism obscures a real practice defined by a mass of
passive spectators whose basic communication (where it exists) is
dominated by a minority of specialists who control not only the means
of communication but also its contents by
setting and enforcing norms for what can be discussed as well as the
permitted style of discussion.
Unwilling
and unable to invent their own projects, define their own interests,
cultivate their own style,
participate fully (therefore competently) in
a community of equals, the rank-and-file of this subculture has
recourse to a phoney participation reduced to the consumption of
ideological commodities produced by specialists (video and audio
broadcasts, periodicals, books, lectures, tame festivals, etc) and
the provision of human resources in the execution of projects
initiated and (by default) managed by these same specialists. In all
cases, they are offered a choice among activities in which the
fundamental decisions are always made by others. In this democracy of
spectators, autonomy is reduced to the self-management of details.
This egalitarian non-participation within a false community united by
an imaginary autonomy
within an actual inactivity
reproduces exactly the same conditions which the members of the
subculture encounter in every other sphere of their everyday life.
This familiarity is precisely what makes these conditions so
comfortable for them in practice, even as the theoretical poverty
inherited from historical movements which died decades ago are
exactly what makes them incapable even of recognising these
conditions for what they are, let alone taking concrete steps to
combat them. It is the sterility of a dead theory which ceased active
development generations before they were born which condemn them to
cling firmly to the poverty of their own practice the moment any
suggestion of concrete changes arises, even while they extol the
untold riches of their revolutionary subjectivity as an abstract
ideal. The obvious contradiction between the inadequacy of their
whole mode of existence and the enormity of the tasks presented by a
new collective assault on the entirety of the old world, even if it
leads to the demise of particular groups or the burnout of particular
individuals, hardly threatens to disturb the comfortable
self-satisfaction of the subculture as a whole, which continues to
tread water independently of the fates and intentions of its members.
The tradition of all dead generations never creates any poverty it is
not able to maintain -- until, caught napping, it is swept aside by
the forces of the living, or utterly wiped out by the forces of
death.
25
The
ideological commodities touted in the contemporary anarchist
subculture are only particular examples of the
commodity of ideology.
This commodity comes in a variety of flavours, the two most important
of which, due to their impact on the shape of modern civilisation and
the radical attempts to overthrow it, were invented by Bakunin and
Marx. The fight between competing ideologies within the revolutionary
movement is itself only a particular example of the battle between
commodities within the capitalist marketplace. “Every given
commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and
attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The
spectacle, then," wrote Debord in his infamous book, "is
the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by
the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men
and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this
blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously
realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which
is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse
of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out
in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute
realization."
All
these characteristics were demonstrated in the development of Marxism
and Anarchism. It is important to admit that this development was not
some aberrant mistake produced by unfortunate deviations of those who
perverted the original teachings of the Masters, but logical
conclusions drawn from what was already present in the original
theory and practice. It was inevitable that the movement for
proletarian revolution, born from the ashes of the bourgeois
revolutions of which it was a direct continuation (quite literally,
as Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals and Winstanley's Diggers attempted
an immediate transformation of the French and English revolutions in
a communist direction) would be in every respect, organisationally,
morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the
old revolutionary movements from whose womb it emerges. Because the
influence of these birthmarks were not consciously confronted and
progressively reduced over time – which was by no means inevitable
but a result of the subjective shortcomings
of revolutionary proletarians – they were unconsciously exploited
by the most conservative and even reactionary elements (which were by
no means necessarily insincere in their intentions, see for example
the Bolsheviks and syndicalists) which progressively increased over
time to the point where they came to dominate the movement
completely, while the most radical elements remained ideologically
bound to bicker among themselves. In the same way that the
revolutionary elements were marginalised and eliminated within the
worker's movement, the mainstream movement itself – worn out and
increasingly counter-revolutionary in the struggle to combat its
radical tendencies – was marginalized increasingly from the class
struggles conducted by masses whose real interests it opposed, even
as it became incorporated into the mainstream of capitalist society
as a false representation of radical struggle.
This
contradiction, and the reaction of autonomous proletarians whose
self-organised struggles against both capital and leftist
representatives reached crisis proportions in the era of the first
world war and its aftermath, made it increasingly useless to
capitalism itself, an expensive tool for manipulation which worked
less and less. In response to this crisis, the capitalist class
embarked a worldwide campaign of political restructuring
which cut out the working-class organisations and replaced them with
totalitarian dictatorships. Fascism and Stalinism, which oversaw the
final defeat of the classic worker's movement with the failure of the
Spanish Revolution, were the solutions of a ruling class which could
no longer rely on the effective help of its loyal opposition. Marxism
and Anarchism, the two tendencies which animated the first wave of
proletarian assault on the old world, died under heavy shelling and
machine-gun fire among the wild thyme and lavender in the valley of
Jarama.
A
new wave of struggles, which emerged after the second world war and
reached crisis proportions worldwide in the 1960s-70s, was defeated
with the assistance of trade unionism, the last leftist movement with
any mass influence among the working-class. The contradictions and
their inevitable consequences were reproduced in a new form. In
response to this crisis, the capitalist class embarked a worldwide
campaign of economic restructuring
which cut out the trade unions and replaced them with cheap labour
from the East, decentralised global production lines, massive
privatisation, casualisation and outsourcing. Trade unions no longer
have a major presence anywhere other than in government jobs, which
themselves continue to shrink yearly. A labour movement which was
already a pathetic shadow of its former self effectively committed
suicide a second time by an unsurprising dedication to commodity
logic.
27
The
seeds for the whole process are illustrated concisely in Document 5.
Here, Marx responds to Bakunin's criticism of his conception of
revolution on a point-by-point basis in an imaginary conversation
conducted in the margins of his great rival's recent book. As the
original English publisher notes: 'One of the most interesting points
in Bakunin’s book is the view that Marxism, if successful, would
result in the rule of a new class of "social scientists".
Bakunin raises the question of the social status of ex-proletarians
who find themselves in governmental positions in a socialist society.
Marx dismisses this point by arguing that a manufacturer who becomes
a member of a municipal council does not thereby change his social
class - he is still a capitalist. This reply is pretty sophistical :
Bakunin’s point was, of course, that membership of a government
gives a person a type of power in the making and enforcing of
decisions which he did not have when he was a worker at the bench.
Moreover, it also carries with it quite definite material
privileges.' The sad story of Marxist state capitalism – which
continues vigorously in the form almost of a self-parody in the
People's Republic of China – is decidedly not on the side of the
Master on this point. On the other hand, Bakunin claims that Holland,
England, and America – which were the most fully capitalist
countries of their epoch and which formed the first capitalist
democracies – produced a new type of civilization, which, while
bourgeois on the economic side, yet in its social tendencies is an
"anti-state" civilization: a claim which was rightly
ridiculed by Marx but has been taken up by far too many who can only
oppose the threat of totalitarian dictatorship with a new repetition
of the democratic lie.
In
fact, the contradictions in both Bakunin and Marx which produced such
absurdities were a result of the separation of the political and
economic sides of a social revolution
which is good for nothing unless it transforms life, both as a whole
and at
every level simultaneously. The
possibility for such a transformation only arises under conditions
when people assemble to constitute themselves as a material
force both
in the workplace and in the streets (which has actually happened
during the highest moments of class struggle) while at the same
time consciously recognizing
themselves for what they have already become -- as the sole
masters of their own destiny,
and communicating
this to all their fellows around the world,
demanding recognition and inviting association as a conspiracy of
equals (which has never been done). In those rare moments of when
proletarians gathered together to confer directly, without
representatives, to decide their own fate, capital and the state
dissolved. Each time, however, they trembled before the enormity of
what they had done, and what they might yet do, and fell back into
the role of spectators. In 1997 the people of revolutionary Albania
did not recognise the mastery they really possessed in themselves,
which they had only to grasp in consciousness in order to possess in
reality. The inevitable reaction unfolded, as it has so many times.
It is their blood, and that of all those who rose and fell before
them, which waters with smoke and thunder the insubordinate forest
whose roots now penetrate the foundations of the world's cities. It
is up to the living to reap the strange fruit of this subterranean
source, or once again let an unimaginable harvest drop untasted into
the sod to rot, its seeds scattered to the wind, its flesh devoured
by scavengers, its juices sunk into the mud.
28
What he
says of Proudhon could be applied just as well to himself. The
behaviour of Marx and Engels towards him, which saw them destroy the
International Workingmen's Association rather than let those
sympathetic to his ideas become the majority tendency within it,
testifies indirectly to the veracity of his words, which it seems
were, far from the bitter caricature of a vitriolic enemy, rather the
dispassionate description of a sympathetic critic. Even after their
vicious break with him, Bakunin continued to praise Marx and Engels
for their contributions to the revolutionary movement, and according
to those among their own disciples who examined his writings 'we
shall look in them in vain for any trace of venom towards Marx'. It
seems clear that Lenin's domination of an authoritarian personality
over the party, of the party over the state, and the state over the
society, all found their initial impetus in certain aspects of Marx's
theory and practice, even if many other aspects of his life
explicitly contradict this.
Rubel
indulges in his own version of the myth-making he denounces by
papering-over the contradictory aspects of the Master's own theory
and practice and locating the source of such problems in his
disciples, beginning with Engels, who are supposed to have distorted
the original, fundamentally unproblematic teachings as handed down in
their pure form (an argument he repeats in the article Marx,
Theoretician of Anarchism)
through the holy texts which apparently only Rubel knew how to
interpret correctly. Actually, the word of Marx, like that of God, is
quite inconsistent. His oeuvre, like the Bible, is large and complex
enough to be all things to all people. Like those who cherr-pick from
the scriptures to support their own dogmas, ignoring everything that
doesn't suit them, it is just as plausible for those using this
procedure to arrive at Marxist-Leninism as to conjure up
Marxist-Anarchism. There is a word for those who delve into the
scriptures to recover the fundamental truth of a doctrine and damn
everyone else's interpretation as false distortions. The word is
'fundamentalist'. The attitude is religious. The results are
ridiculous. One such result is the frequent condemnation as heretical
of those who are in a far better position to judge what orthodoxy
really is; modern day sectarians who denounce the fathers of the
Catholic Church for betraying the Law in favour of pagan deviations
have as much basis in reality as those who accuse Engels of
'revisionism' as regards the teachings of his comrade. It is highly
improbable, to put it mildly, that a man can be better understood by
epigoni engaged in scholastic exercises in remote corners decades
after his death than by his closest companion with whom he developed
his life's work in tandem.
29
Document
7, written on the centenary of the Communist Manifesto's publication
by Jan van Heijenhoort, celebrated mathematician and one-time
bodyguard to Leon Trotsky, contains a statement of the problem both
emphatic and compelling, concluding that 'Marx
and Bolshevism belong henceforth to history no less than Rousseau and
Jacobinism'.
The author makes a formal rejection of the 'two opposed yet
complementary attitudes' provoked by this problem – either to
resign oneself completely before triumphant capitalism or to cling
blindly to the teachings of the Masters like a drowning rat to rotten
driftwood – in favour of a theoretical commitment to search for new
solutions for the future unburdened by the dead weight of old dogmas.
In practice, however, it seems that he actually did adopt the first
attitude, limiting his involvement in the search for new forms of
revolutionary critique to the curation of Trotsky's archives.
Although he did well to abandon the bureaucratic messianism of his
erstwhile comrades, his practically total renunciation of any
revolutionary perspective seems to have been based on an unfortunate
misunderstanding common to such people. The inescapable determinism
discovered by Marx centred on a necessary choice, not a necessary
outcome. It was based on the thesis that capitalist crisis was bound
to place the decision
between 'socialism and barbarism' before the world proletariat. The
hypothesis to be tested involved not so much the ability of the
proletariat to make the right choice as the ability of capitalism to
escape the necessity of such a choice; Marx's determinism rested on
the inevitable movement of capitalist society towards destruction –
its own destruction as well as that of the humans trapped within it
and, possibly, all life on earth itself. It may be true that such an
hypothesis has yet to be tested, but it is also true that unless
proletarians do
make the right choice no one is likely to be around to confirm it,
and it is equally true that all evidence, especially that to be seen
in the social and ecological realms, tends to support the probability
of the thesis. The contrary hypothesis, that capitalism will prove to
be infinitely adaptable, progressing indefinitely towards ever
greater freedom, civilisation and perfection, is just as unproven and
– short of irreversible world revolution or Armageddon – just as
unprovable. Besides the distinct disadvantage of flying in the face
of all available evidence, historical and contemporary, this thesis
also condemns its adherents to accept resignation
to the basic conditions of their own miserable existence, allowing at
most the gradual modification of trivial detail. Contrary to this,
Marx and those like him threw in his lot on the side of a complete
transformation of life at every level, from the bottom up. They could
imagine no guarantees of success attached to this life choice,
fraught with so many unknown variables ('Uncertainty is not without
its charm or interest; it can never last long. It maintains
ambiguity...allowing us to take our pleasure in what Valery called
the whorehouse of possibilities; it can even oscillate between the
comical and the dramatic, but we must choose'), which was to have
such profound consequences for their own lives – at every level and
in an immediate, concrete way – and every guarantee of unrelenting
difficulty, immense isolation, and many-sided repression. Their
decision was, and remains, a
gamble,
a risk on which they literally staked their whole lives as they
proceeded to play from day to day that collective game
with time through
which the content, meaning, and end of life is invented.
Another
remnant of dead ideology Heijenhoort didn't manage to leave behind
was the fetishism of leadership so basic to Marxist-Jacobinism. Quite
possibly he could not commit himself practically to contribute
towards continuing proletarian struggle, despite doing so
theoretically, because he could not conceive of this in any other way
than a new variety of the same old Bolshevism he already recognised
to be utterly bankrupt. In this, as well as in his future absorption
in a scientific career, he shares much with Wilhelm Reich. If the
fallacy that conflates revolutionary leadership with revolutionary
self-organisation
is discarded – if you replace every instance of 'leaders' and
'leadership' in this text with 'means of struggle' and 'methods of
mutual association' in this text – many mistaken aspects of this
document are corrected.
30
The
most eloquent criticism aimed at the tendency for proletarian
organisations to become ends in themselves, to the detriment of all
ability to make revolutionary ideas dangerous,
can be found (as can evidence for that pernicious tendency itself) in
aspects of Marx's own praxis. In Document 10, Engels responds to a
letter from Marx detailing the idiocy of their fellow revolutionists
which concludes 'I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic
isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is
wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of
mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and
the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party
along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.' In his
response he discusses with his partner (based on their personal
involvement in the revolutions of 1848-49 and the aftermath, during
which their fellow survivors wanted to wish away the complete
suppression of the insurrectionary fire by immediately trying to
reconstitute the revolutionary worker's movement on the same basis as
before) those elemental forces of life and death so violently
unleashed in moments of revolution, and the only attitude able, in
the centre of the crucible, to keep the possibility for effective
intervention open while
the iron is hot. Only
in the context of an effort dedicated to the recovery of this ability
to enter
the stage of history as an actor can
any study of our comrades of the past come to grips with its
subject.
31
Members of the ICU Women's Auxilliary
Clearly,
an argument about the total integration/obsolescence/impotence of
historical movements in
the abstract is
neither convincing nor relevant. What matters are the practical
choices
imposed by the conditions of today on the struggles of proletarians
for a full, fruitful life. As things stand, the concrete implications
of the general development outlined in this introduction boil down to
three choices: The ABC of modern social contestation.
A
While
newer and far more militant strategies were being discussed
elsewhere, a group of around fifty women had remained, sitting
quietly some distance away from the beerhall. These women wanted to
speak to Bourquin [head of the South African Bantu Administration
Department] and nobody else. Board member Isaac Zwane [of the Bantu
Administration Board, the municipal government run by black
politicians during apartheid] then set up a table and chair for
himself and started taking complaints from the women. For women, the
time for these rituals had now passed.
–
Cato
Manor, June 1959;
Ian Sinclair
Uncritical support for existing practical and ideological organisations with the belief that they represent the most/only effective means of social transformation.
Such
a course corresponds well to the description 'ideological
colonisation'. On the level of practical organisation, it is an
attitude adopted by the majority of proletarians who join unions and
vote for leftist parties as the 'least bad' choice presented to them,
as well as by the Stalinist-Liberal approach to 'alliance building'.
On the level of ideological organisation, it is an attitude adopted
by most proletarians whose enthusiasm for leftism amounts to the
passive consumption of a commodity which under other conditions –
as well as under the same conditions for other proletarians – could
just as easily take the form of religion, neoliberalism, fascism, and
so on, as well as by intellectuals and militants so colonised by
ready-made ideas that they feel their own brand of ideology
represents a completed system, perfectly suited to the needs of the
present, which at most needs superficial adaptation to one or another
fashion newly produced by capitalist development.
Almost
all genuinely subversive attitudes, relations and actions to be seen
among those who opt for this choice are now expressed outside
and against the
officially-endorsed line. At the beginning of the 20th century,
sabotage and physical force were widely recognised as legitimate
means of class struggle by the leading officials of the most popular
unions and leftist organisations. The female proletarians whose
husbands had joined the Industrial Commercial-worker's Union in South
Africa, for example, organised 'Women's Auxiliaries' which enforced a
boycott of beer-halls in Durban which had been called by striking
dock-workers in 1930. The role of the beer-halls in the imposition of
racist controls were one of the reasons for the boycott. Blacks were
prohibited from drinking ‘white man’s liquor’, and were also
prohibited from producing traditional African beer. Instead,
beerhalls were built and operated by the state. The first beerhall in
Durban was described in this way:
‘The
building is divided by a high wire fence and one portion is set aside
for the sale of native beer, where only male natives may purchase a
ticket for three pence and not more than sixpence worth of beer from
the overseers at the office. He then passes through a turnstile and
presents the ticket to the barman. The native is supplied with the
beer in a tin which he takes to the sitting accommodation. He then
leaves the building through a turnstile. This method prevents natives
from getting more than one drink, and is most effective in preventing
indiscriminate drinking and idling.’
Workers
called this ‘drinking in a cage’. Without certain archaisms (such
as restrictions of quantity available for consumption, as well as
racial and sexual constraints about who can consume it – in other
words without outdated obstacles to free-trade)
this describes accurately the physical set-up of most modern
supermarkets, airports, townships (which have become more and more
like shopping malls) and prisons today. The cages in which workers
were forced to conduct their alienated leisure mirrored the cages in
which they were forced to conduct their alienated labour, as well as
the cells into which they were made to cram their alienated
family/private life. The protests against the new beerhall and
workers' grievances became linked together as one problem. Thus a
meeting of all dockworkers decided that 'all workers must be told to
part company with municipal beer because their wages have become
exhausted through buying beer not knowing what benefit they obtain
from it except to build compounds and barracks which are full of bad
laws and disagreeable control. Because a worker who lives in these
barracks is like a prisoner.'
Traditional
beer, made of maize or millet, was nutritious as well as delicious,
and contained low quantities of alcohol. Illegally brewed and sold by
township women, it also provided an income which supported the
survival of many families. An old Zulu saying 'utshwala buqinisa
umzimba', means 'beer strengthens the body'; another Zulu saying is
that 'beer is the African's bread'. Many complained that municipal
beer ‘burned your insides’ and was ‘doctored by ignorant
whites’; many men squandered their wages getting drunk on this much
more potent beer.
With
these powerful and varied motivations, the boycott began strong, but
continuous raids on the shebeens, illegal taverns where traditional
beer was consumed, cut off not only an alternative drinking source
but practically the only other place besides the beer-halls where
working-class men could socialise. Another possible reason which
drove some men into the beerhalls was explained by a woman from Cato
Manor, a Durban township, who participated in a similar anti-beerhall
struggle 30 years later which left 25 buildings destroyed, 7 damaged,
a number of government vehicles torched and 9 police dead: 'You have
to talk to your sissie (sister) in shebeens. Everyone knows you are
her man...Hey, a lot of men would not do that. They were too scared'.
Like the upper-class patrons of British Gentlemen's clubs, some South
African workers, heirs to pre-colonial patriarchal traditions similar
in many ways to those of the English aristocracy, preferred to take
their leisure in spaces reserved for gentlemen-only.
One
advantage of this sexual exclusivity was the ability of men to blow
their wages on booze, despite unevenly enforced constraints, away
from the eyes of their women who might object to this choice of
expenditure which might otherwise have contributed to an
always-strained household budget. Thus, when the enthusiasm of the
men began to fade, women became the backbone of the movement. Under
the banner of the ICU Women's Auxilliary, they began barge into the
beerhalls, sticks and whips in hand. “Down with beerhalls! The men
have failed – we will show them what we can do!” They did,
despite the fact that they were defined in an auxiliary role (though,
to a much worse degree, the ANC women's league of the era was in the
1960s admitted by one of its own members to be 'little more than a
social club for the wives of ANC leaders’), a precedent which would
have serious consequences for the struggles of later generations.
The
extreme virulence of patriarchal ideology has to this day encouraged
the reproduction of a sexual division of labour within social
struggles which largely relegates females to roles of auxilliary
'support' for male dominated revolt, despite the frequent female
leadership of rebellious actions, effectively preventing the
development of self-mastery and self-management by half the
population. Burdened by such self-limitations, the revolt of an era
is chained to forms of action and relation (generally dominated by physical and intellectual machismo) that tend to exclude females far more often than not.
Nevertheless, the organisational support of the union [3], together with its revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology [4], helped them expand and deepen their struggle in a way that later generations were unable to do.
'Those of you who drink at the beerhalls, the day of your doom is not far away -- you will be blotted out. And those dogs who call themselves Africans and who sell their manhood by working for the police -- your day is at hand!' Although the admirable sentiments and methods of Ma-Dhlamini, a leader of the Women's Auxiliary, were echoed by the women of Cato Manor who resumed the anti-beerhall struggle two generations later; the latter revolt was crushed in isolation whereas six months into the earlier boycott 'the Women’s Auxilliary helped the boycott spread into all the smaller towns of Natal which had beerhalls. There the women were at the forefront of attacks on beerhalls and challenges to authority. In Estcourt, women who called themselves ‘Drink’ and ‘Trouble’ confronted the local magistrate. One of the women said that her name was ‘Hlapekili’ (worried) and her husband’s name was ‘Nagwa Njolo’ (Always drunk). In Ladysmith, Weenen, Dundee, Howick, and Vryheid women marched through the streets to protest against municipal beer and drunken husbands. They also demanded the right to brew beer at home. They were armed with sticks and bottles. Policemen and workers in the local beerhalls were attacked. And when women were arrested, their friends attacked the jails.' (Paul La Hausse, Brewers, beerhalls and boycotts: A history of liquor in South Africa, 1988)
When women fought against drunken husbands and the state which grew rich off them they were engaged in a direct and practical critique of the alienated leisure which is both a necessary requirement and a necessary result of alienated labour. The world of work -- of capitalist production based on wage-slavery -- is experienced by workers as dead-time, life deprived of all that gives it meaning for human beings. Workers are necessarily compelled to seek solace, consolation and compensation for the misery of this experience in the world of leisure -- of capitalist consumption based on magic. It is only magic which can resurrect the life-time which has been irretrievably stolen from workers; nothing less than magic can restore some semblance of life to a mode of existence dominated by dead time, nothing less than magic can save the living souls of those who have been forced to surrender the time of their lives to the forces of death. Strange magic, religions, and gods haunt the terrain of modern-day leisure. They take the form of compulsive rituals and repulsive taboos: addictions and phobias that occupy the everyday lives of men and women like a colonial army, and possess their bodies and souls like malevolent spirits.
There is a social division of leisure that corresponds to the social division of labour imposed by any given society. Men engaged in manual labour have historically tended to be addicted to drink, the ritual of the magic potion that imbues the drinker with superhuman strength and courage, that protects the drinker from the dark satanic mills in which he must toil. But if this is true, it is also true that alcohol addiction also expresses a form of incoherent protest, an unsuccessful refusal of the demands for quiet submission imposed on the working-class by the established order. The popular idiom 'we go together like "drunk" and "disorderly"' captures the pathetic but nevertheless real rebellious content of that habitual intoxication popular among many of the most oppressed individuals, which, while it can result in a wild sort of insubordination directed against bourgeois authorities, much more often simply produces debilitating inter-personal violence among the oppressed themselves.
Today women, who remain everywhere defined primarily in terms of their job in the reproduction of the species, tend to be addicted to rituals that magically enhance their desirability as sexual partners in the eyes of men; they are addicted to shopping if they can afford it, or shoplifting if they can't, and the commodities they target are rarely books or food but clothes and fashion accessories. Women are the overwhelming sufferers of so-called 'eating disorders', which are in fact obsessions or addictions to magical rituals regarding the image of their bodies as seen through the eyes of imaginary men (precisely in the sense by which people referred to 'the establishment' or 'the system' as 'the man'). Women are the overwhelming sufferers of 'love addiction', for the same reasons. At the same time, it is also true that their physical appearance (and for the more affluent, the interiors of their homes) represents one of the only aspects of their material existence which women are permitted (within the limits of their social position and the dominant sexual 'morality' of their surroundings) to creatively transform, and as such expresses the real desire to freely shape the physical elements of their world through self-chosen forms of playful activity.
Alienation in the world of leisure is thus not merely a necessary result of alienation in the world of labour, but in fact expresses a magical refusal by workers of the poverty imposed on the better part of their conscious existence by the dominant mode of production, an attempt to magically recapture the beauty, variety, excitement, creativity, playfulness, and infinite potentialities so brutally denied to them by the drab reality of their working life. The attractions presented by modern commodity-consumption remain fundamentally magical precisely because in reality the desires which commodities pretend to satisfy cannot be satisfied by a world dominated by commodity-production any more than the art and entertainment, fashion and interior-design presented by this society to its modern slaves can satisfy the human desire to understand and actively intervene in (i.e. 'to know' in the biblical sense of intimate, sensuous intercourse) the basic conditions of one's own existence.
The wages of alienated labour are alienated leisure. Workers are compensated for their work with money which they must use to consume commodities. Leisure, far from being the absence of labour, depends on it: the unemployed are not 'gentlemen of leisure' because in this society there is no leisure for those who can't pay for it. But the nature of alienation in the world of leisure does not stem solely on the fact that access to commodity consumption depends on practical submission to the poverty of working life, but also in the fact that money and the commodities it buys can never adequately compensate for all that workers are deprived on account of it. Hidden beneath the surface of everyday life -- which for most people begins the moment the working day ends -- the spectres which haunt modern leisure -- the addictions, obsessions, neuroses, phobias, depression, stalk the streets, restaurants, bars, apartments, shopping malls, concerts, dinner parties, nightclubs, cinemas, internet cafes and other 'machinery of consumption'; they exhale an odourless toxin that fills all modern cities with an unspoken atmosphere of quiet desperation that simmers beneath the surface, erupting in riots, suicides, drunken brawls, religious cults, military coups, and those masterful emotional tortures inflicted by individuals on themselves and those closest to them so damningly detailed in the best novels and worst tabloids. These demons are nothing other than the real human desires and needs that are frustrated by the world of commodity production and consumption, needs and desires which can't be satisfied by any of the lives and lies presented for consumption by this society, needs and desires which, when failing to find healthy outlets, are transformed into the destructive demons that today possess almost all social relations around the planet. The nature of modern alienation in the realm of consumption thus has to do with the fact that it forms a mostly imaginary compensation for the entirely real alienation of modern production, just as religion offers the mostly imaginary riches of the spiritual life in exchange for and the real misery of worldly existence. One of the reasons dissatisfaction for this state of affairs is so seldom expressed is that whilst mostly imaginary, the compensations of commodity consumption are not entirely absent, and tend to enrich themselves precisely from new expressions of dissatisfaction whose de-fused elements are often incorporated into the most modern commodities; in the same way, religion continues to hold sway so strongly precisely because the compensations it offers are also not entirely limited to an imaginary afterlife, but for many involve a certain sense of stability and guidance in an often violently unpredictable and confusing world, a certain sense of community in a hostile and isolating world, a certain sense of aesthetic beauty and meaningful (and in a sense self-chosen) order in a world dominated by ugliness and meaningless survival-imposed repetition, and so on. [5]
As the dockworkers and women of Durban knew, alienated consumption is not merely a necessary result of alienated production but also a necessary requirement. Just as white capitalists and their state required workers to spend their wages in municipal beerhalls in order to build hostels with which to control those very workers, so too world capital and its respective national states requires workers to spend their wages on useless and destructive commodities in order to build markets with which to accumulate even more capital. Most importantly, working-class acceptance of wage-slavery in exchange for the paltry benefits of the commodity economy has always been the basic requirement for profitable commodity production. The role alcohol played in numbing men to their own oppression, which their wives found so detestable in 1929, was only a particular form of the role all commodity consumption plays in diverting the attention of proletarians from the reality of their own slavery. At its most basic level, this is achieved through the universal deception by which the owners of the world have nobly given wage-slaves the freedom (a freedom which chattel-slaves -- being generously paid in free clothing, food and board -- never required) to buy everything they need to survive using wages obtained from whichever master they freely choose to sell themselves to.
In the revolutionary upheavals that raged across the country throughout the decade following 1976, thousands of young South Africans picked up right where the generation of Ma-Dhlamini left off, but from the start they went much further. Not only did they struggle against drunk parents and the state which grew rich off them, burning almost all the municipal beerhalls in townships around the country, but they went on to shut-down even the shebeens whose owners were at the head of the old anti-beerhall movement, since their real target was the role alcohol-consumption played in the pacification of South African natives (teetotalism was prevalent among the Latin anarchist movement in the decades preceding the Spanish revolution for the same reasons). In '77, when they launched a boycott of Christmas shopping, and on subsequent boycotts organised on numerous occasions throughout the following decade, they explicitly targeted the role of commodity-consumption in general in the pacification of proletarians and the enrichment of their enemies. Finally, the revolutionaries who came to be known as The Children of Soweto did not limit their attacks to government beerhalls, but directed their anger at all material expressions of white domination, from state administration buildings to factories, shops and schools, and by so doing conducted the most thorough practical critique of urban geography anywhere in the world.
Nevertheless, the organisational support of the union [3], together with its revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology [4], helped them expand and deepen their struggle in a way that later generations were unable to do.
'Those of you who drink at the beerhalls, the day of your doom is not far away -- you will be blotted out. And those dogs who call themselves Africans and who sell their manhood by working for the police -- your day is at hand!' Although the admirable sentiments and methods of Ma-Dhlamini, a leader of the Women's Auxiliary, were echoed by the women of Cato Manor who resumed the anti-beerhall struggle two generations later; the latter revolt was crushed in isolation whereas six months into the earlier boycott 'the Women’s Auxilliary helped the boycott spread into all the smaller towns of Natal which had beerhalls. There the women were at the forefront of attacks on beerhalls and challenges to authority. In Estcourt, women who called themselves ‘Drink’ and ‘Trouble’ confronted the local magistrate. One of the women said that her name was ‘Hlapekili’ (worried) and her husband’s name was ‘Nagwa Njolo’ (Always drunk). In Ladysmith, Weenen, Dundee, Howick, and Vryheid women marched through the streets to protest against municipal beer and drunken husbands. They also demanded the right to brew beer at home. They were armed with sticks and bottles. Policemen and workers in the local beerhalls were attacked. And when women were arrested, their friends attacked the jails.' (Paul La Hausse, Brewers, beerhalls and boycotts: A history of liquor in South Africa, 1988)
When women fought against drunken husbands and the state which grew rich off them they were engaged in a direct and practical critique of the alienated leisure which is both a necessary requirement and a necessary result of alienated labour. The world of work -- of capitalist production based on wage-slavery -- is experienced by workers as dead-time, life deprived of all that gives it meaning for human beings. Workers are necessarily compelled to seek solace, consolation and compensation for the misery of this experience in the world of leisure -- of capitalist consumption based on magic. It is only magic which can resurrect the life-time which has been irretrievably stolen from workers; nothing less than magic can restore some semblance of life to a mode of existence dominated by dead time, nothing less than magic can save the living souls of those who have been forced to surrender the time of their lives to the forces of death. Strange magic, religions, and gods haunt the terrain of modern-day leisure. They take the form of compulsive rituals and repulsive taboos: addictions and phobias that occupy the everyday lives of men and women like a colonial army, and possess their bodies and souls like malevolent spirits.
The sun god Ra, in one of his more unusual forms, slays the snake demon Apep, embodiment of darkness and primordial Chaos
There is a social division of leisure that corresponds to the social division of labour imposed by any given society. Men engaged in manual labour have historically tended to be addicted to drink, the ritual of the magic potion that imbues the drinker with superhuman strength and courage, that protects the drinker from the dark satanic mills in which he must toil. But if this is true, it is also true that alcohol addiction also expresses a form of incoherent protest, an unsuccessful refusal of the demands for quiet submission imposed on the working-class by the established order. The popular idiom 'we go together like "drunk" and "disorderly"' captures the pathetic but nevertheless real rebellious content of that habitual intoxication popular among many of the most oppressed individuals, which, while it can result in a wild sort of insubordination directed against bourgeois authorities, much more often simply produces debilitating inter-personal violence among the oppressed themselves.
Today women, who remain everywhere defined primarily in terms of their job in the reproduction of the species, tend to be addicted to rituals that magically enhance their desirability as sexual partners in the eyes of men; they are addicted to shopping if they can afford it, or shoplifting if they can't, and the commodities they target are rarely books or food but clothes and fashion accessories. Women are the overwhelming sufferers of so-called 'eating disorders', which are in fact obsessions or addictions to magical rituals regarding the image of their bodies as seen through the eyes of imaginary men (precisely in the sense by which people referred to 'the establishment' or 'the system' as 'the man'). Women are the overwhelming sufferers of 'love addiction', for the same reasons. At the same time, it is also true that their physical appearance (and for the more affluent, the interiors of their homes) represents one of the only aspects of their material existence which women are permitted (within the limits of their social position and the dominant sexual 'morality' of their surroundings) to creatively transform, and as such expresses the real desire to freely shape the physical elements of their world through self-chosen forms of playful activity.
Alienation in the world of leisure is thus not merely a necessary result of alienation in the world of labour, but in fact expresses a magical refusal by workers of the poverty imposed on the better part of their conscious existence by the dominant mode of production, an attempt to magically recapture the beauty, variety, excitement, creativity, playfulness, and infinite potentialities so brutally denied to them by the drab reality of their working life. The attractions presented by modern commodity-consumption remain fundamentally magical precisely because in reality the desires which commodities pretend to satisfy cannot be satisfied by a world dominated by commodity-production any more than the art and entertainment, fashion and interior-design presented by this society to its modern slaves can satisfy the human desire to understand and actively intervene in (i.e. 'to know' in the biblical sense of intimate, sensuous intercourse) the basic conditions of one's own existence.
The wages of alienated labour are alienated leisure. Workers are compensated for their work with money which they must use to consume commodities. Leisure, far from being the absence of labour, depends on it: the unemployed are not 'gentlemen of leisure' because in this society there is no leisure for those who can't pay for it. But the nature of alienation in the world of leisure does not stem solely on the fact that access to commodity consumption depends on practical submission to the poverty of working life, but also in the fact that money and the commodities it buys can never adequately compensate for all that workers are deprived on account of it. Hidden beneath the surface of everyday life -- which for most people begins the moment the working day ends -- the spectres which haunt modern leisure -- the addictions, obsessions, neuroses, phobias, depression, stalk the streets, restaurants, bars, apartments, shopping malls, concerts, dinner parties, nightclubs, cinemas, internet cafes and other 'machinery of consumption'; they exhale an odourless toxin that fills all modern cities with an unspoken atmosphere of quiet desperation that simmers beneath the surface, erupting in riots, suicides, drunken brawls, religious cults, military coups, and those masterful emotional tortures inflicted by individuals on themselves and those closest to them so damningly detailed in the best novels and worst tabloids. These demons are nothing other than the real human desires and needs that are frustrated by the world of commodity production and consumption, needs and desires which can't be satisfied by any of the lives and lies presented for consumption by this society, needs and desires which, when failing to find healthy outlets, are transformed into the destructive demons that today possess almost all social relations around the planet. The nature of modern alienation in the realm of consumption thus has to do with the fact that it forms a mostly imaginary compensation for the entirely real alienation of modern production, just as religion offers the mostly imaginary riches of the spiritual life in exchange for and the real misery of worldly existence. One of the reasons dissatisfaction for this state of affairs is so seldom expressed is that whilst mostly imaginary, the compensations of commodity consumption are not entirely absent, and tend to enrich themselves precisely from new expressions of dissatisfaction whose de-fused elements are often incorporated into the most modern commodities; in the same way, religion continues to hold sway so strongly precisely because the compensations it offers are also not entirely limited to an imaginary afterlife, but for many involve a certain sense of stability and guidance in an often violently unpredictable and confusing world, a certain sense of community in a hostile and isolating world, a certain sense of aesthetic beauty and meaningful (and in a sense self-chosen) order in a world dominated by ugliness and meaningless survival-imposed repetition, and so on. [5]
As the dockworkers and women of Durban knew, alienated consumption is not merely a necessary result of alienated production but also a necessary requirement. Just as white capitalists and their state required workers to spend their wages in municipal beerhalls in order to build hostels with which to control those very workers, so too world capital and its respective national states requires workers to spend their wages on useless and destructive commodities in order to build markets with which to accumulate even more capital. Most importantly, working-class acceptance of wage-slavery in exchange for the paltry benefits of the commodity economy has always been the basic requirement for profitable commodity production. The role alcohol played in numbing men to their own oppression, which their wives found so detestable in 1929, was only a particular form of the role all commodity consumption plays in diverting the attention of proletarians from the reality of their own slavery. At its most basic level, this is achieved through the universal deception by which the owners of the world have nobly given wage-slaves the freedom (a freedom which chattel-slaves -- being generously paid in free clothing, food and board -- never required) to buy everything they need to survive using wages obtained from whichever master they freely choose to sell themselves to.
In the revolutionary upheavals that raged across the country throughout the decade following 1976, thousands of young South Africans picked up right where the generation of Ma-Dhlamini left off, but from the start they went much further. Not only did they struggle against drunk parents and the state which grew rich off them, burning almost all the municipal beerhalls in townships around the country, but they went on to shut-down even the shebeens whose owners were at the head of the old anti-beerhall movement, since their real target was the role alcohol-consumption played in the pacification of South African natives (teetotalism was prevalent among the Latin anarchist movement in the decades preceding the Spanish revolution for the same reasons). In '77, when they launched a boycott of Christmas shopping, and on subsequent boycotts organised on numerous occasions throughout the following decade, they explicitly targeted the role of commodity-consumption in general in the pacification of proletarians and the enrichment of their enemies. Finally, the revolutionaries who came to be known as The Children of Soweto did not limit their attacks to government beerhalls, but directed their anger at all material expressions of white domination, from state administration buildings to factories, shops and schools, and by so doing conducted the most thorough practical critique of urban geography anywhere in the world.
In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss describes visiting the 'coolie lines' which, much like the 'bachelor's hostels' whose conditions black migrant workers struggled against during the first beerhall boycots, consisted of 'brick troughs with neither light nor flooring, and each occupied by six or eight individuals.' Although increasingly rare, such hostels have not entirely disappeared. At a March 2015 protest in Durban by the inmates of a 'single-women's hostel' against the introduction of children by some among them, an inmate said 'The conditions inside are bad. We are cramped and they are making decisions for us without consulting us. There are three beds per room, there’s no space to even walk inside, the toilets are dirty and they leave the children’s napkins lying around anywhere and their children are always crying'.
By and large, however, one can quite accurately say of South Africa today, as Levi-Strauss said of the India of his time, that 'Social progress is now tending to replace this kind of dwelling by “workers' quarters", prisons in which two or three workers share a cell three metres by four…' These quarters – whether single room shacks made of corrugated iron and wood by squatters in vacant land, or multi-storey high-density apartments of brick and concrete built by the state or commercial property developers in the suburbs, townships and urban centres – are cobbled together in a landscapes which, despite numerous significant differences, all produce the same suffocation, and fulfil the same function. They may sleep one, two or more per room, and cost anything from zero to many thousands per month in rent, but their basic equipment (bed, television and cell-phone/computer) design (that of an individual office cubicle linked to communal ablution and canteen facilities) are identical throughout. They all still correspond well to the worldview that Levi-Strauss discerned in the Indian products of social progress. 'Once, during my first teaching post in the Landes area, I had visited poultry yards specially adapted for the cramming of geese: each bird was confined to a narrow box and reduced to the status of a mere digestive tube. In this Indian setting, the situation was the same, apart from two differences: instead of geese, it was men and women I was looking at, and instead of being fattened up, they were, if anything, being slimmed down. But in both instances, the breeder only allowed his charges one form of activity, which was desirable in the case of the geese, and inevitable in the case of the Indians. The dark and airless cubicles were suited neither for rest, leisure nor love. They were mere points of connection with the communal sewer, and they corresponded to a conception of human life as being reducible to the pure exercise of the excretory functions.'
We can thus see, taking shape before our very eyes, an Africa characterised by worker's dwellings and cheap blocks of flats. This Africa of the future, which rejects all forms of exoticism, may link up again, after an eclipse of five thousand years, with that dreary yet efficient mode of existence which the Africans (in the city of Memphis), Mesapotamians (in the city Erech) and Indians (in the city of Harappa) seem to have invented simultaneously around 3000 BC, and subsequently migrated west across the earth's surface, making a temporary halt in the New World, so that is typically thought of as something specifically American. Yet the 'Valley of the Artisans' in Deir el-Medina ('Due to its location, the village is not thought to have provided a pleasant environment'), housing migrant workers who 'left their children and women, who worked in the wheat and barley fields, at home' to build the famous Valley of the Kings three and a half thousand years ago, contains the same sort of quarters which might house people in the same position in any major city in the world today. 'In the valley of the Indus,' Levi-Strauss describes how 'these settlements present a disconcerting spectacle. The streets are perfectly straight and intersect each other at right-angles; there are workers' districts, in which all the dwellings are identical, industrial workshops for the grinding of grain, the casting and engraving of metals and the manufacture of clay goblets... public baths, water pipes and sewers... solid but unattractive residential districts... No monuments or large pieces of sculpture, but flimsy trinkets and precious jewels, indicative of an art devoid of mystery and uninspired by any deep faith, intended merely to satisfy the ostentatiousness and sensuality of the rich. The complex as a whole reminds the visitor of the advantages and defects of a large modern city'.
The contrast between this urban geography and the architecture of the indigenous Bororo of Brazil which he describes earlier in the narrative couldn't be more glaring: 'the houses were majestic in size in spite of their fragility, and were the result of the utilisation of materials and techniques which we in the West are acquainted with in small-scale forms: they were not so much built as knotted together, plaited, woven, embroidered and mellowed by use; instead of crushing the occupants under an indifferent mass of stones, they adapted to their presence and their movements; they were the opposite of our houses in that they remained always subordinate to man. The village rose round its occupants like a light, flexible suit of armour, closer to Western women's hats than Western towns; it was a monumental adornment retaining something of the living bowers and foliage whose natural gracefulness the builders had skilfully reconciled with the rigorous demands of their plan... It was as if an entire civilization were conspiring in a single, passionate affection for the shapes, substances and colours of life and, in order to preserve its richest essence around the human body, were appealing to those of its manifestations which are either the most lasting or the most fleeting...' There is an almost unquestioned consensus which correlates the emergence of cities with certain features characteristic of civilisation; it is facilely associated with the dissolution of parochialism, liberation from 'the idiocy of rural life' and the dull repetition of pastoral existence, emancipation from blind submission to alien forces of nature, clearer awareness of the social nature of human life and labour and hence a better ability to organise both the present and the future. Murray Bookchin, the Dean of Democratic Confederalism, even went so far to associate cities with 'the unfolding of Reason in History'. Such sanguine hopes arose from the observation that villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Unfortunately the triumph of urbanism around the world has simply transposed these conditions onto a 'global village' whose assorted fragments sprawl across the surface of the planet. As a matter of fact the only phenomenon with which cities have consistently been concomitant is the creation of empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical pattern of development observed from Egypt to China, at the time when cities first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment or civilisation. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of urban architecture than the optimistic account referred to above. My hypothesis, if it is correct, would oblige us to recognise the fact that the primary function of urban geography is to facilitate slavery. The use of urban planning for humanitarian purposes, or as a source of sensuous and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it is actually turned into a means of strengthening, justifying and concealing the main objective.
In South Africa, the practical critique of alienated leisure and urbanism (and the destruction of the separation between work and play, and between town and country which such a critique implies) has never been placed on the agenda in a more coherent way than during the revolutionary decade 1976-1986. The coherent connection between workplace, community and personal struggles so explosively embodied by by the women of Mkhubane and the children of Soweto expressed a unitary critique of modern slavery that began to attack alienation – at work, at leisure (culture) and at home (family/personal/sexual relations) – as it is actually experienced in everyday life: that is, as a totality. Although the radical content of these movements always originated in the spontaneous struggles of ordinary proletarians against the conditions in which they found themselves, the struggles of 20s-30s were indeed supported in certain limited but material ways by the existing revolutionary organisations of the time (the ICU and the early Communist Party) whereas the even more radical proletarian struggles of the 70s-80s were in fact crippled by rivalry between competing rackets (IFP, AZAPO, UDF, SACP-ANC, etc) and their ideologies, and ultimately defeated because they supported the power of existing revolutionary organisations (notably the unions and the SACP-ANC) at their own expense.
The
same historical trajectory outlined above regarding South Africa can be
observed internationally.
The
British and French unions were among the earliest advocates of
sabotage,
while workers affiliated to the Industrial Workers of the World and
the Communist Party in America were among the most efficient
practitioners. All of this has disappeared, a long time ago. It has not returned. It
will not return.
When the sons and daughters of Ma-Dhlamini go on strike in the mines (2009-2014), post offices (2013-2014) and factories (2014) in their hundreds of thousands (largely outside any union control in the first two cases), strengthening their action with the most extensive levels of sabotage and organised force seen in decades, not only were they denounced by the South African Communist Party and all their own unions, but they were not supported in any way by those who call themselves revolutionary Marxists or Anarchists, despite the silent and useless presence of such people in the unions and elsewhere. In South Africa, as everywhere else, every existing ideological and practical organisation with any significant influence is openly on the side of law and order, and when forced in the heat of struggle to make a decision will always support the rulers against the oppressed. Whoever allies themselves to such organisations will have to be prepared to account for all the implications of this position.
When the sons and daughters of Ma-Dhlamini go on strike in the mines (2009-2014), post offices (2013-2014) and factories (2014) in their hundreds of thousands (largely outside any union control in the first two cases), strengthening their action with the most extensive levels of sabotage and organised force seen in decades, not only were they denounced by the South African Communist Party and all their own unions, but they were not supported in any way by those who call themselves revolutionary Marxists or Anarchists, despite the silent and useless presence of such people in the unions and elsewhere. In South Africa, as everywhere else, every existing ideological and practical organisation with any significant influence is openly on the side of law and order, and when forced in the heat of struggle to make a decision will always support the rulers against the oppressed. Whoever allies themselves to such organisations will have to be prepared to account for all the implications of this position.
B
Mkhumbane
Women's Leaguers developed a new slogan: 'Ibuya Makhosikazi, ibuya!'
(Come back women, come back!)… Gladys Manzi, then a leading Cato
Manor Women's Leaguer, explained its significance:
'You
lose. Every time. It's the men. It's Bokweni [municipal beerhall
liquor]. It's the law. The women needed to be told 'Come back!' We
were going backwards, you see. We needed to get back to that place
where we were. We were not Bokweni's girls and we did not want our
men. That is what we said, we are the warriros! [laughter]… We told
those troublesome people that we are fighting for our rights. Women
should be given rights to do what they liked. We could not remain
traditional because times were changing…'
–
Cato
Manor, June 1959;
Ian Sinclair
Critical
support for existing practical and ideological organisations, for the
same reasons as above, but this time with the hope that one's
agitation will produce a gradual transformation of these
organisations and/or ideologies for the better.
The
criticism can either be internal (in which case it would conform to
the 'democratic centralism' of Leninist discipline) or public (in
which case the support offered by the critic is not likely to be
accepted) but either way is bound to remain purely abstract,
as the actions of the 'critical' supporter would be practically the
same as that of the 'uncritical' one. This choice corresponds well to
the description 'false opposition'. On the level of practical
organisation, it is an attitude adopted by rank-and-file members of
the ruling-party
who
criticise its policies or particular leaders (promoting Jacob
Zuma
against Thabo
Mbeki
or Julius
Malema
against Zuma, advocating within
the ruling party against
policies
of
privatisation or trade liberalisation, and so on), or members of the
National
Union
of Metalworkers
of South
Africa
who pushed the union officials to break away from the ruling-party
dominated
alliance with the
Congress
of South
African
Trade
Unions
while keeping these same officials and the structures which allowed
them to maintain this alliance for so long unchanged – as well as
by Anarchists (such as the Zabalaza collective in South Africa) and
Trotskyists who join unions and other groups with the attempt to
'radicalise' or 'democratise' them. On the level of ideological
organisation, it is the attitude adopted by reformed Marxists such
who try, every decade or so, to invent 'Stalinism with a
humanist/existentialist/post-modernist face', those who cling to the
idea of a 'Living Marxism', and those 'post-leftist' anarchists who
try to reform a 19th century ideology whose present decrepitude they
themselves eloquently denounce.
While
there are doubtless intelligent and sincere individuals who persist
in making this choice, they are a tiny minority fighting a battle
destined to fail. Almost everything worthwhile they accomplish is
done despite their
compromised position, while their potential to accomplish better
things is hampered by it. Rather than breaking away unequivocally
and publicly,
they remain ambivalent, isolated on the margins of a corpse which
remains impervious to their efforts at revival, and so
unintentionally and unnecessarily make the task of finding
one-another – under conditions which already do everything to
maintain a reign of generalised isolation and non-communication –
that much more difficult.
They
turn reality upside down by refusing to recognise that, far from the
most/only effective means of social transformation, the dead-weight
to which they cling is in fact the
biggest obstacle to
the change they desire. They repeat stale arguments about the need
for unity, the rejection of sectarianism, the necessity to work for
change from within the best alternative available to them, forgetting
that by this logic people justified participation in the elections
during Apartheid, or in the Stalino-Democrat government during the
Spanish Revolution. They forget that real practical struggle
is nothing if not the rejection of the false
choices
presented by the old world; that revolution is purely abstract
if
it does not involve inventing
our own alternatives.
Although
they have revealed the most lucid grasp of the movements from which
they came, the anarchist critics of anarchism and marxist critics of
marxism have always been received with near-total incomprehension or
flippant dismissal by those who should be most equipped to make use
of their insights.
Considering,
that
their justified contempt for almost all existing radical
organizations – which, whether presenting themselves as a
leadership to be followed or as an example of an ameliorated style of
life to be imitated, give rise to illusions of the possibility of
fundamental change without the complete
overthrow of all existing conditions,
the negation of the commodity economy and of the state –
necessarily raises the question of radically
new forms of collective action and relation
based on a critical
theory of organisation;
that
if they are to be realized in practice, theoretical tendencies or
differences must be translated into organisational problems;
that,
as
has often been pointed out, the working class is not weak because it
is divided, but on the contrary, is divided because it is weak;
that
the reason why the proletariat must seek new ways is that the enemy
has strengthened to such a degree that the old methods are as
redundant as the retrenched proletarians who once used them;
that
the working class will not invent these ways by magic, but through
rigorous effort, playful experiment, deep reflection, the clash of
divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas;
that
it is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is
the raison d’etre of the internal differences and conflicts;
that
it is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is
indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions;
Considering,
that
the struggle of the proletariat to
supersede itself as
a petty, poverty-striken, miserable, pathological, enslaved,
alienated and deluded class is inseparable from the struggle of
individual proletarians to overcome
themselves
as petty, poverty-striken, miserable, pathological, enslaved,
alienated and deluded persons;
that
the elaboration of critical theory remains abstract
as long as it is not also the elaboration of critical self-theory
– the
evolving crystalisation of proletarian self-consciousness in relation
to the evolving historical process of which it is a part;
that
the theoretical
separation
between 'the ruthless critique of all that exists' and the practical
critique of oneself
inevitably leads to alienation between theory and practice – the
separation of self-consciousness from the concrete, transitory
historical moment to which it must relate;
that
complacency in the face of such separation, alienation and
abstraction remain dominant throughout the revolutionary movement
precisely because it demands no break with the hierarchical
comportment inherited from dominant social relations, a break
necessarily involving considerable audacity and playful self-activity
as well as personal discomfort and practical risk;
that
in the absence of such a concrete break revolutionaries will continue
to become without embarrassment politicians, cop-collaborators and
celebrities;
that
the practical critique of all existing organisations is inseparable
from the critique by individuals of their own rôles in such
organisations;
that
one of the biggest obstacles to individuals confronting their own
past and present poverty is the absence of any public tendency
sympathetic to such a confrontation;
that
whatever other activity such a tendency might involve, its
participants would decide to collaborate first of all in order
to organise the practice of their own critical-self theory
together with other people, simply because this task is made more
fruitful through the sympathetic collaboration of autonomous
individuals;
that
when not based on relations of sympathetic mutual criticism,
collaboration tends to be based on conformity to established norms
and mutual toleration;
It
seems clear
that
those who disparage
disparateness by choosing
to inhabit this half-way house only trap themselves in a den of dire
discombobulation.
C
Result of a police raid on an illegal shebeen in Cato Manor: one dead pig
Result of a police raid on an illegal shebeen in Cato Manor: one dead pig
'Some
women just wanted an end to it all. It must all do away [sic], you
see , “Just like this!”. Then you say, “but that is difficult.
How can you do this?” This is what made women very angry. If you
say there is something you cannot do you must say why.'
–
Interviewee
quoted in
Cato
Manor, June 1959;
Ian Sinclair
Practical critique, necessarily involving a fundamental advance beyond all existing ideological and practical organisations.
Participation
in this case would not necessarily be abandoned. One might work with
members of an anarchist solidarity network in order to learn
precisely what might be salvaged and what discarded from this form of
action; one might make use of particular perspectives developed by
marxist, anarchist or situationist praxis; in all cases, however,
awareness of the fundamentally limited basis of these ideas and
practices – i.e. their supersession by the movement of history –
will remain, and the necessity to swallow these limitations whole
avoided. Participation would be disinterested, in
the same sense in which the conductors of scientific experiments are
supposed to be disinterested, meaning the potential consequences
of their experimentation, necessarily based on a ruthlessly critical
perspective, would not be an obstacle to one's conduct.
You
would be able to do what you feel you have to do without concern one
way or another whether this necessitates a break in relations with
persons or groups; you would be able to say what you feel needs
saying without concern one way or another whether your words agree
with the correct marxist, anarchist, situationist, or surrealist
line. This, it seems to me, is the absolute minimum condition for all
those who want to reinvent revolution today.
Many
would dispute my statement that every existing ideological and
practical organisation with
any influence today is
openly on the side of law and order, pointing to this or that
exception. As a matter of fact the one partial-exception to this
statement in South Africa, the shack-dweller's organisation (see
my Abahlali
baseMjondolo Anthology)
based in Durban, is an example that both clarifies what I mean by
practical
critique
as well as demonstrates, as an exception which confirms the rule,
the truth of the statement.
At
least some members of this organisation are communist (See
Living
Communism
in the above-mentioned anthology),
although neither Marxist nor Anarchist. This in fact only confirms my
thesis that no previously
or currently existing group
or ideology is or can be adequate to today's tasks of revolutionary
organisation: Abahlali had to invent their own forms of action and
relation, and discover their own ideas by and for themselves. Just
the same, the severe problems with leadership which have destroyed
the Cape Town section and crippled the Durban section, the struggles
over control of the right to use the (one might say brand-) name of
the group, the recent the reversion to party-politics, and, most of
all, the fact that not only are the vast majority of shack-dweller's
struggles conducted independently of this group, but that even those
affiliated to it (as in the case with Marikana and Sweet Home in Cape
Town) frequently benefit from the association no more than if they
had nothing to do with it, all demonstrate how far even the most
advanced attempts at radical renewal currently are from an adequate
confrontation of the question of revolutionary organisation in light
of the tendencies outlined above.
Another
partial exception in the world arena is the Kurdish movement of
'Democratic Confederalism' initiated by the Turkish PKK and its
offshoots in Syria under their ideological master Abdullah
Ocalan, a movement which 'no matter how confused and inadequate...
has given rise', according to a comrade whose considered judgement I have learned to respect, 'to an express and practical
discussion of the ways and means of abolishing capitalism, the state
and patriarchy that in terms of its size and sophistication is
probably without parallel in our time.' Like the Zapatista group in
Mexico and Abahlali in South Africa, the PKK ideology is neither
Marxist nor Anarchist, deriving in large part from the Communalist
ideas of Murray Bookchin. As with these groups, the real potential of
the activity & perspectives the PKK has provoked rests in the
possibility that these will eventually lead its members, supporters &
sympathisers to a practical confrontation with the PKK’s own
inconsistencies. As they currently exist, all these groups and the
ideologies on which they are based stand in the way of a subversive
current able to take up 'the ruthless critique of everything that
exists'. Just as their initial activity may have been essential to
creating the concrete conditions for such a critique to develop as a
real possibility; so their supersession
has
become an essential precondition to the practical advance of such a
critique. 'The real question is where the genie that the PKK and its
allies are letting out of the bottle will subsequently go. Hundreds
of thousands of people (perhaps millions) are being encouraged to
take up the project of the abolition of capitalism and the state in
their everyday lives. Whether the individuals brought into this
project will confront its contradictions and overcome the limitations
its originators envisage remains to be seen.'
Another comrade made a very good point on this count. 'The Rojava supporters are fond of their Spain 1936 comparisons; perhaps they should consider that many local rural communes and villages organised on libertarian principles existed for considerable periods even as the central Republican state structure became increasingly Stalinised and sharpened as a counter-revolutionary instrument – with the support and participation of many ‘libertarians’ in the name of anti-fascism. And arguably this could happen because too many of the libertarians and wider working class failed to see the necessity to confront the state power – but instead, increasingly defaulted to the state, rather than their collective selves, as the essential unifying social force. The unifying force at a local level of the collectives arguably left unchallenged the ultimate power in the continued existence of the state. There are no easy solutions to dealing with this but it’s an essential question of organisation and strategy and not one to be glossed over by simply implying that independent self-organisation is itself an act of withering the state.'
As far as the abolition of class society goes, it has been convincingly argued that since 'both class relations and the interactions with regional state and global imperialist powers is mediated by tribalist structures in Kurdish (and not only) society, then the class or social question for revolutionaries becomes the question of how to undermine and eventually overcome tribalism.' This argument is, by the way, analogous to the one which states that, since class relations remain mediated by racist relations in South African society (understood broadly to include what is commonly described in this country as 'xenophobia'), the class or social question for revolutionaries becomes the question of how to undermine and eventually overcome racism. The basis of this argument bears repeating. It starts by comparing of the dominant bedtime-story of liberal ideology -- that 'the development of a capitalist economy will bring in its wake the social winds of capitalist modernity that will automatically sweep away "backwards" social forms like tribalism' -- with the ugly reality. In Martin van Bruinessen's 2002 paper Kurds, States and Tribes, this assumption is taken apart: 'The past two decades of great social upheaval have not led to the extinction of the tribes, however. The apparently pre-modern phenomenon of the tribe has shown remarkable resilience and adaptability, and in several respects tribes and tribalism are even more pervasive in Kurdish society now than twenty, thirty years ago... Moreover, it appeared that tribal organisation had a distinct survival value in periods of insecurity and political strife, and was quite appropriate to various modern types of enterprise'. Significantly, tribalism has managed to occupy the most strategic economic and political enterprises throughout the region. Already back in the 1970s when he conducted field research for his book Agha, Sheikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan, van Bruinessen pointed out how the tribal aghas had moved smoothly into occupying all the elected posts in the secular Kemalist (Turkish), Baathist (Iraqi and Syrian) and Persian (Iranian) states. Tribal authorities have subsequently kept control over social relations of the region, both in Kurdistan and surrounding areas. In February 2014, for example, the non-government of Rojava signed an agreement with the Syrian state and an Arab tribe to re-open a border-crossing with Iraq and allow the return of oil industry to the area. 'The agreement signed by the parties entails that the PYD and Shammar tribe receive 15% each, while the remaining 70% was specified as returns to the regime'. In the same way, despite the political and economic modernisation which has taken place in South Africa (the transition from archaic Afrikaaner nationalism to modern bourgeois democracy and the integration of a previously insular national product into the global neo-liberal economy) racism is here to stay in the everyday life of the majority, and in particular ways has significantly intensified. This intensification can be felt most especially in relation to black Africans born outside the borders of the modern nation-state [6], and in the increasing relative poverty which has progressed so far for those at the sharp end of Freedom and Democracy (practically the only sort of progress most people have experienced) as to award South Africa the privileged position of most unequal society in the world -- an inequality inevitably expressed in racial terms. As the placard of a worker at the South African post office stated during a bitter struggle that saw the end of long-term casual labour at the institution:
15 years as casuals
Black managers
How can you
Be happy!!
The comrade who advanced this argument regarding the structures that mediate class relations in Rojava noted the need to identify 'the functional roles that allow tribalism to reproduce itself' throughout shifting historical and material conditions as a preliminary step to undermining such roles. In other words, it is necessary to understand what are the real human needs which tribal social relations manage to satisfy (albeit through the mediation of alienated means) in order to understand what practical steps might be able to undermine such relations by satisfying these needs directly. Such a task clearly demands intensive as well as inclusive self-study and practical discussion by the ordinary members of the society themselves, and it seems clear that such research and discussion is indeed ongoing throughout every level of the Rojavan community, particularly with regard to the patriarchal structures on which tribal relations rest. The experimental transformation of everyday social relations that are recorded by participants and visitors reflect the extensive as well as intensive practical translation of such discussions into the realm of action.
The emphasis on collective grass-roots participatory structures (communes, co-operatives, peace and conciliation committees, neighbourhood assemblies and worker's councils) where disputes can be settled, problems can be set and solved, and resources can be allocated, thus corresponds to a need which has hitherto been successfully addressed by tribal organisations alone: the need to resolve conflicts, secure and redistribute resources, and organise self-defence in the face of a corrupt, predatory, and racist neo-colonial state. By making obsolete one of the primary strategies through which tribal authorities have traditionally addressed these needs -- control of and collaboration with the representative structures of the state -- the power of the tribes themselves loses much of its social basis. On the other hand, the authoritarian patriarchal social-relations which continue to produce brutal intra- and inter- tribal violence (blood feuds, honour killings etc) are undermined by ensuring that the new forms of social organisation that have emerged in opposition to both tribes and states are kept open to the direct control of all who are affected by them; that forced marriage and the traditionally-sanctioned subjugation of women is formally and practically abolished; that wealth, property and the means of production hitherto monopolised by tribes and states are put under the control of all community members; and that the monopoly of violence by which state and tribal authorities maintain their power is broken by arming all non-tribal and female members of society.
The immense break with millenia-old normality which these steps have already accomplished only emphasises the growing contradiction between this revolutionary social movement at the level of everyday life, and its representation at the level of political-territorial organisation which
i) claims the power to press-gang/conscript individuals into its own army (punishing draft-dodgers and deserters with prison-sentences and ideological 're-education'),
ii) serves its class of professional bureaucrats and politicians from President on down,
iii) possesses its own courts (although petty infractions are handled by popular committees based on consensus and restorative justice, 'The remaining levels of Rojava’s justice system are much like those in other states'), its own police (although officials claim they will abolish the police as soon as every citizen has taken a six-month policing course, much like Marxist vanguards claimed they would abolish the state as soon as every proletarian has obtained the correct level of revolutionary class consciousness) and its own prisons which enforce its own laws in the service of private property (‘with the beginning of the revolution … it was even forbidden to break open a cash box’) and the authority of the ruling party ('The 107-page report, “Under Kurdish Rule: Abuses in PYD-Run Enclaves of Syria”, documents arbitrary arrests of the PYD’s political opponents, abuse in detention, and unsolved abductions and murders...'[7]), and
iv) negotiates and closely co-operates with imperial powers.
According to some sympathetic English-speaking visitors to the area, Rojavans are well aware of the contradiction between the admirable array of radical social experiments and practical discussions taking place at the local level, which have to some degree appropriated the means of coercion (some security forces are apparently directly accountable to local councils rather than the new state apparatus), and this new semi-autonomous government which, as admitted by these same visitors, possesses 'all the form and trappings of a state'.
Awareness of the contradictory relation between the political parties which control this state, but nevertheless claim to be ideologically opposed to its existence, appears far less in evidence: hence the political idolatry by which The Respected and Beloved Brother-Leader of The Kurdish People continues to be unquestioningly worshipped. This sort of insularity ('References beyond the Kurdish movement were strikingly absent from the symbols we saw') was a major factor in the isolation of the Zapatistas, both the historical and contemporary versions, from the social upheavals unfolding all around them. As has been pointed out, the struggles centered around Subcommandante Marcos and his affiliated organisation can be considered the one historical president closest in historical and social context to those unfolding in Rojava today. Just at the rampant religiosity of the original Zapatistas, together with their fundamentally parochial perspective, presented a gulf between them and the proletarians of central and northern Mexico during the revolution, so too the Kurdish revolutionaries' quasi-religious veneration of Ocalan and his organisation, together with their fundamentally national perspective, presents a gulf between themselves and the proletarians of Syria and Turkey. This is all the more dire since these two countries have been heavily involved in the international popular revolts which swept through the region since 2011, a situation far more favourable to the prospect of world revolution than the one from which the modern-day Zapatistas emerged. Although, on the one hand, the revolutionaries of Kurdistan claim to present themselves as a model applicable to all Syria, and even beyond -- going so far as saying to comrades from the West 'We have the one thing no one can ever give you. We have our freedom. You don’t. We only wish there was some way we could give that to you' -- their actual relations with the world outside Kurdistan demonstrate an agenda entirely antagonistic towards making such a project a practical reality. Rather than throwing in their lot with the rebellion of ordinary proletarians who rose up alongside them against the ruling misery enforced by the states of Syria and Turkey, conducting their own revolution in a way that would encourage their fellows to recognise in it a common interest, a common project, and a common enemy (the project of world revolution against all bosses and their states) they choose instead to conduct it in a way that will encourage the bosses of neighbouring states and world powers to recognise in it a common interest, a common project, and a common enemy (the project of 'anti-fascist popular front' against the Islamic State). It is true that, on the one hand, the long history racism directed against Kurds by a still powerful Turkish/Arab nationalism continues to pose a formidable obstacle, and, on the other, a desperate struggle for survival in vicious wartime conditions imposes very real practical constraints for which there are no easy answers to be found. There is no pure theory which can somehow contain 'correct' solutions unsullied by the messy exigencies of the real world. Nevertheless, the very real existence of such a struggle for survival under such conditions, although it may resort to measures which have been termed alternately 'disaster communism' or 'war communism', need not blind us to the equally real preconditions for a world revolution which will be carried out not in the name of survival but precisely against the domination of basically animal survival (based on artificial scarcity) over a fully human life: a domination which everywhere imposes its planned poverty and misery on us all. The realpolitik which leads people to develop such friendly relations with the bosses of the world that they name their children after them (as was the case with many newborn babies in Kobane who have been named in honour of Obama) is perfectly understandable in the case of people who rely on such bosses in order to hold onto their own territory in the face of maniacs with guns. But when such people proclaim their lead in a social revolution whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those of all bosses -- whose global scope is opposed to the recognition of all national borders, whose practical existence makes impossible the peaceful possession of any territory by anyone -- then such friendly relations can only incite rather rigorous questioning...
Without going into the relations of production, the state of alienated labour, or any other narrowly 'economic' questions, it is fair to say that the narrowly 'political' reasons by which one could determine whether the struggles centred around Lenin and his organisation resulted in real revolution or one more capitalist state involve not only the fact that they involved a dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat, brutally suppressing all radical criticism or revolutionary opposition, but also the fact that they produced a social organisation which acted in the interests of a territorially defined entity at the expense of ordinary proletarians unfortunate enough to fall outside that territory, a society which acted as one nation among others, recognised the sovereignty of other states in order to be recognised itself, and stove to create political conditions favourable to capital accumulation. Significantly, according to Loren Goldner the earliest concrete evidence for this state-capitalist 'socialism in one country' can be found in the relation between the Bolsheviks and very regimes which not only brutally suppressed working-class revolution in their time but also initiated the modern-day oppression of the Kurdish population: the Persian regime of Reza Khan (founder of the Pahlevi regime), the new nationalist government of Turkey’s Kemal Pasha (Attatürk) and the other nation-states born from the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
In “Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925, Goldner begins with an extract from a secret memo sent in 1920 by Trotsky to the executive of the Russian Communist Party: 'All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present time…Until the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the West…a potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational work…and at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.'
One wonders what secret memos are being passed around concerning meetings between non-officials of the Rojava self-government with American and European diplomats. Goldner also mentions 'Kenneth Rexroth’s quip (in his Autobiographical Novel) that Leninism had a genius for coining terms such as “critical support”, “democratic centralism”, or “revolutionary trade unionism” whereby the noun always won out over the adjective.' One can only suspect, considering the Leninist origins of both Bookchin and Ocalan, that the same thing will happen to the 'democratic confederalism', 'libertarian municipalism' and 'social ecology' which has been declared the official ideology of the revolutionary government in Rojava, unless ordinary Rojavans themselves take up in earnest the struggle against all existing revolutionary ideologies and organisations (even and especially their own local councils in their present state, which by no means supersedes the 'miserable sort of existence' that Karl Korsch long ago identified with the ignominious defeat of the German revolution in his important 1921 text Evolution of the Problem of the Political Worker's Councils in Germany -- one of the earliest and most cogent critiques of councilist ideology to appear in the literature of the revolutionary movement) more rigorously than has been managed by even the most inspiring revolutionary upheavals of the past.
Considering the conditions dominant today, which, as outlined in the present text, continually and inevitably tend to alienate rebels from the organisation of their own power, a constant, consistent, conscious, critical confrontation of precisely these contradictions seems an essential precondition for preventing the reproduction of precisely the sort of unconsciously and involuntarily, (but, nevertheless, thoroughly reactionary) forms of social relation and organisation which drowned the dreams of the Spanish revolutionaries in blood and fire.
Inmates of a revolutionary prison run by the self-government of Syrian Kurdistan. Presumably the plan of the non-wardens is to encourage the beneficiaries of such correctional facilities to self-manage their own detention, complete with benevolent ideological re-education.
What
is true of these particular organisations and struggles is also true
of Marxism and Anarchism, as well as all other practical and
ideological forms of struggle and organisation involved in 'the real
movement that abolishes existing conditions'. While it's true that
proletarians can and, to a significant extent, must come
to recognise and overcome the limitations of their immediate
struggles by themselves, it is also true that they can only do this
through widespread and intensive dialogue with their fellows – in
neighbouring homes, workplaces, cities and countries. We who want to
contribute towards the development of this dialogue must of course
try to make explicit the implications of what our fellows are already
doing, including the significance of the exemplary steps they have
already taken. But there is also much truth in the fact that this
significance remains implicit
unless measured against the immensity of the task still to be
accomplished. In other words, any attempt to explicitly draw out this
significance must necessarily be negative.
Just as the end and content of
working-class revolution involves the abolition of workers, classes,
and work itself, so too its means and form involves
a series of increasingly deepening and widening proletarian struggles
struggling not merely against capital but against
themselves as
they exist in their partial, poverty-striken, woefully inadequate
forms.
At
its heart, working-class struggle against capital involves a struggle
against the reproduction of capitalist forms of action and relation
within the working-class and within its struggle against capital.
Since this reproduction is inevitable as
long as capital and workers continue to exist, every particular
struggle is always (in the sense of what it necessary
implies in
terms of concrete
strategy rather
than the ideological sophistry popular among leftists that wishfully
projects some
abstract revolutionary motive on every expression of dissatisfaction,
fancying that shoplifting is always a fundamental negation of the
commodity, hatred of one's boss is always a desire for total
self-management, popular disgust for all politics always means masses
are anarchists without knowing it, etc) at
the same time a
struggle against
itself qua fragmentary
opposition, and a struggle for the
universal abolition of workers and capital.
The
road to supersession is fraught with hurdles to be surmounted,
barricades to be demolished, treacherous passes to be navigated, and
while many of these dangers are thrown up by external repression and
infiltration, the most crucial are presented by
shortcomings within the
struggle itself. Revolutionary organisation is in conflict with
itself in the strict sense that a neurotic individual is: it has to
pursue its objectives by methods which constantly defeat these same
objectives. If capital is a moving contradiction, so too is the
anti-capitalist movement. From one moment to the next the role of
each element in a struggle changes in relation to the totality;
shop-stewards attuned to the feeling of the rank-and-file might help
unify resolve at the beginning of an industrial dispute, and sabotage
the interests of the workers for the sake of union control as the
dispute advances (cf. the
controversy between Solidarity and Big Flame regarding the 1972
Fisher Bendix occupation);
dedication to consensus and open access during mass assemblies might
encourage a flurry of popular participation and enthusiasm at the
start of an occupation, and stifle it through boredom and sectarian
manipulation later on (as many reports on the 2011 Occupy movement,
such as that
by Michael Albert, stated).
Each struggle, as it moves forward, must destroy certain elements
that were previously essential to itself (just as it must destroy
certain elements that were previously neutral, or were always
detrimental but hitherto were not yet rendered potentially deadly –
in every case the demand is imposed by unique circumstances of the
present moment) and it is this 'work of the negative' that theory is
tasked to elucidate, moment to moment.
Whereas
previously the two were largely intermingled in the practical mass
movements of the past (an interpenetration which contributed toward
both the strengths and the ultimate undoing of these movements);
today revolutionary ideology stands directly opposed to revolutionary
theory, whose development can only advance to the degree that the
limitations of ideology are consciously confronted and overcome.
Besides the examples sketched in the above introduction and
elaborated in the following texts, two further obstacles to the
elaboration of a practically
critical
theory should be pointed out.
Anarchists
(and many 'autonomist Marxists') tend to focus too narrowly on the
form
of particular struggles, leading on the one hand to a fetish for
anything resembling their ideal of decentralised democratic
structures, regardless of how
these structures relate to the actual negation of the
spectacle-commodity economy (hence the enthusiasm for labelling all
such forms, from the Zapatistas and Occupy movement to the Kurdish
experiment and the economic-summit-hopping protests as 'anarchist')
and on the other hand to a neglect of those prosaic struggles of
ordinary proletarians against everyday misery which tend not to
produce dramatic confrontations or fail to immediately overcome
'reformist' demands and hierarchical structures, despite the fact
that such struggles have often formed the basis for more radical
steps in the past. Marxists (and many 'class-struggle Anarchists')
tend to focus too narrowly on the content
of
particular struggles, leading on the one hand to a fetish for
anyhting resembling their ideal of proletarian self-activity at the
point of production ('workerism'), and on the other hand to a neglect
(or a repetitive dismissal unable to recognise what is specific –
and therefore potentially valuable – in each new struggle) of those
confused movements which fail to reveal an implicit communist
content, directly subvert capitalist production, advance a
class-conscious program, or overcome an abstract protest against the
isolation and poverty of everday life, despite the fact that such
protests at the same time embody a
concrete subversion
of this isolation and poverty in the attempt by ordinary proletarians
to invent new ways of living and relating together, to discuss
practically their desires and the means of realising them without the
mediation of specialists and their organisations, and to refuse the
role of supplicants and the seductions of small concessions by
presenting no demands to those in power. A theory able to appreciate
both the many-sided potentials and the contradictions of
revolutionary struggle today (which is the only sort of theory with
any
use-value)
will clearly have to do better than this.
Lastly,
for those who complain that my assessment of the revolutionary
tendencies presented here is 'unfairly one-sided, not presenting the
whole picture', I can only say that while there may be justice to
such objections, they are quite beside the point, and more
importantly, are all too easily deployed to evade the problem
altogether. Others have said it before and I'll say it again:
'Critical
theory does not present a fixed, “objective” truth. It is an
assault, a formulation abstracted, simplified and pushed to the
extreme. The principle is, “If the shoe fits, wear it”: people
are compelled to ask themselves to what extent the critique rings
true and what they are going to do about it.'
32
The
struggle of
the working-class for
self-supersession
has to do with the struggle against individual
self-alienation
precisely to the degree that human consciousness and its objective
organisations remain split into two opposing camps.
33
Given
that,
on the one hand, in capitalist society unitary
(disalienated)
consciousness constitutes an individual (minority) problem and
excludes the existence of a “public mind” in whatever way
distinguished from the consciousness of this minority, in the sense
that even if
the
Public/Masses/People
had an organ to speak with, their mind/opinion/consciousness would be
nothing else than the sum total of the multicolored multitude of
individuals who actually can
speak; and that,
on
the other
hand,
the organisations of human consciousness derive their objective
quality precisely from their social
character; it follows that the split in human consciousness between
its subjective and objective elements and the division in society
between antagonistic classes constitute aspects of a single problem,
historically
comprehended by the term class-consciousness.
34
For
the individual consciousness divided against itself, as for the
class
society
troubled by ever more destructive strife,
the question of resolution
continues
to be
posed in practice as
a
two-fold
struggle based on 'the discreteness yet inclusiveness of the
individual and the social.' In his Forward to the Second Edition of
Critique
of Everyday Life Volume 1,
Henri Lefebvre claims that 'This unity is the foundation of all
society: a society is made up of individuals, and the individual is a
social being, in and by the content of his life and the form of his
consciousness. From the direct and physical rituals of primitive
societies to the lived abstraction of self-consciousness (private
consciousness)
this unity has only expressed itself in mutilated, fragmented,
singular ways… According to the moment and the angle from which we
percieve him, the individual is at one and the same time what is most
highly concrete and most remotely abstract. He is what is most
changing historically and what is most stable, what is most
independent from the social structure, and most dependent upon it…
For each individual, the unity of his consciousness and unity with
his consciousness is his reality, and the rest is mere destiny,
externality, necessity. However, from the point of view of its
foundation and social content, the very unity of the most intimate
individual consciousness is determined from the outside. Thus what is
most internal is also what is most external (private
consciousness
for
example) – and conversely, what is most external is most internal
(the sense of a 'value', for example)… As soon as the unity between
the individual and the social begins a process of renewal, alienation
takes the form of an antagonism between the private consciousness and
the social consciousness.'
What
remains to be said is that, firstly,
this antagonism – insofar as a social consciousness which, under
existing conditions, has
itself
become
an
expression of alienation,
continues to colonise the point of view of the individual – is
itself
a
necessary
stage in the process of disalienation;
secondly,
private consciousness begins to overcome this
antagonism as it struggles to make
public the
secret alienation and colonisation of existing conditions, including
the social relations and consciousness dominant
both
within
the established order
as
well as throughout the
existing
forms
of organisation established to overthrow it;
and finally,
this struggle – inasmuch as it necessarily involves a collective
effort at the organisation
of
such publicity, an ongoing practical activity that has
to
do with the invention of new
forms of social relations
(and new forms of consciousness which emerge therefrom) no longer
standing as a colonial force antagonistic to the autonomy of the
individual but rather as a collective expression and essential
precondition
for
this autonomy – contains the beginning of the end for the very
antagonism from which it sprang.
In
her struggle against the collective reproduction of alienated social
relations – including
and especially within all existing forms of revolutionary
organisation – the
individual at the same
time struggles
against her own condition as a 'lived abstraction', by adopting the
dialectical
standpoint of the
totality (the whole
of self and society seen as a process):
the concrete is that which is comprehended in the fullness of its
determinations, as opposed to the abstract, which is sundered from
them.
35
The
long era of revolution initated by the rise of the dead workers'
movements developed in tandem with the self-managed production of
history – the self-creating activity that is no longer content
to seek the arbitrary modification of existing conditions, but which
actively strives to comprehend the 'dissolution of everything
that exists' implied by its own historic appearance on the world
stage. But the development of this self-activity and its
self-consciousness was arrested in the womb. It was eventually
aborted altogether when the movement which bore it fatally failed to
nourish its embryo, and the parent itself died from the complications
of a messy still-birth.
It
is this project, and the historical method by which it was
elaborated, that must be resumed if the noble quest begun a century
and a half ago by our comrades from the past is to discover a happy
ending, though the ancient protagonists and their archaic equipment
may be salvaged only through the transfer of particular unrusted
parts, and the transplant of judiciously selected still-throbing
organs. The struggle of the masses against the classes, of the
working-class for a full life, progresses through an unitary
praxis that dissolves all the 'internal' and 'external'
divisions, apartheids, fragmentations, abstractions, separations and
alienations that both produce and are produced by schitzophrenic
people madly flailing in a world at war with itself. Only in this
sense can one talk, as Lefebvre likes to do, of 'Man's
unity with himself, in particular the unity of the individual and the
social'.
36
At the beginning of the era of proletarian subversion, Alexander Herzen outlined the future course of events with remarkable accuracy: 'Socialism will be developed in all its phases, even to its uttermost consequences, the absurd. Then, once again, there will come forth the cry of negation from the titantic breast of the revolutionary minority. Once more, the mortal struggle will recommence. But in the struggle Socialism will take the place of the present Conservatism, to be conquered in its turn by a revolution unknown to us. The eternal game of life, cruel as death, inevitable as birth, constitutes the flux and reflux of history, "perpetuum mobile" of life.' The myriad absurdities which have confirmed the first part of his thesis compel us to pose his question of supercession here and now in ever more concrete terms. Conditions for 'the cry of negation' to put an end to this abominable era and the ideologies chained to it are not merely ripe: they're rotten. The
practical conclusions today implied by this necessary process
of self-supercession for the shamefully sclerotic theoretical and historical
organisations inherited by the working-class must increasingly be made more explicit and more public (as well as more publicly explicit and more explicitly public) throughout the struggles of the present if they
are ever to bear anything but bitter fruit for the many who are
increasingly sick and tired of being sick and tired. Only in this way
will our time emancipate itself from the objective organisation of a
revolutionary consciousness turned against itself.
Siddiq
Khan
Cape
Town
2015
*
[1]
Victor Serge, himself a former member of the FAI, noted in his 1937
book From
Lenin to Stalin that
despite its anti-political ideology this organisation in fact
fulfilled the role of a revolutionary political party. The
situationists would later make the same point in more detail: 'If
only to make them cry, let us remind the retarded devotees of the
anarchist-Marxist feud that the CNT-FAI — with its dead weight of
anarchist ideology, but also with its greater practice of liberatory
imagination — was akin to the Marxist KAPD-AAUD in its
organizational arrangements. In the same way as the German Communist
Workers Party, the Iberian Anarchist Federation saw itself as the
political organization of the conscious Spanish workers, while its
AAUD, the CNT, was supposed to take charge of the management of the
future society.' (Preliminaries
on Councils and Councilist Organization,
Rene Reisel, 1969)
[2]
Victor Serge, a close comrade and personal friend of the Bolshevik
leaders from the earliest days of the revolution, related in the same
book quoted above how the socialist delegates of the soviets
(Bolshevik, Menshevik, Narodnik) had the opportunity to completely
liquidate the bourgeois state -- whose top ministers literally handed
themselves over for arrest at the start of the revolution -- but
refused to do so, returning power into the hands of the capitalist
Constituent Assembly! Korsch, in the same article used as epigraph
for this introduction, draws the connection: 'There is no use arguing
(as many people have done) that during the many phases of the
revolutionary development of the last seven years there has evolved
more than once-in October, 1934, and, again, in July, 1936, and in
May, 1937-an "objective situation" in which the united
revolutionary workers of Spain might have seized the power of the
state but did not do so either on account of theoretical scruples or
by reason of an internal weakness of their revolutionary attitude...
As against those people who today, twenty years after the event,
extol the revolutionary consistency of the Bolshevik leadership of
1917, to the detriment of the "chaotic irresolution"
displayed by the dissensions and waverings of the Spanish
syndicalists and anarchists of 1936-38, it is quite appropriate here
to recall the fact that in those black days of July, 1917, three
months before the victory of the Red October in Soviet Russia, Lenin
and his Bolshevik party also were unable to prevent or to turn into
victory a situation which was described at the time in the following
manner: "The so-called masses, principally soldiers and a number
of hooligans, loafed aimlessly about the streets for two days, firing
at each other, often out of sheer fright, melting away at the
slightest alarm or fresh rumour, and without the slightest idea of
what it was all about."'
[3] The support supplied by formal radical organisations, it should be noted, trailed behind the self-activity of ordinary proletarians, as was the case during the Spanish Revolution. As La Hausse said in his History of Liquor: 'The anger of workers took the ICU leaders by surprise. At first Champion was opposed to a beer boycott. The leaders were used to taking workers' grievances to the courts. But then at a mass meeting attended by ovrer 600 workers in June 1929 Champion said: "they say that this trouble was started by the ICU... but from today the ICU is taking up the burden of the workers...Down with beer!" Soon the violence began to spread.' An account of spontaneous self-organisation which resembles that of Frank Mintz in Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain: 'None of the leaders of the leftist or trade union organisations called for the revolution: the collectivisations were the spontaneous remarkable response of legions of anonymous labourers to the practical issue of getting production on the land and in the factories up and running again. Certainly many thousands of these workers were immersed in revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist ideas. But perhaps most remarkable of all was that there were collectives organised by labourers who we might label "spontaneous anarchists", who had no idea that they were organising along anarchist lines. This was most evident in rural Castile and Extremadura, where the anarchist tradition was weaker and where the dominant agrarian unions were mainly socialist in inspiration. This is all testimony to the profound autonomy of Spanish workers who embarked on a collective experiment that developed independently of the leaders of the union organisations. Reflecting the importance of workers’ economic organisations over political parties, the collectivisations were, for the most part, impelled by grassroots anarchist and socialist trade unionists. But this was a genuinely popular revolution that drew in many non-affiliated workers. We must also recognise the important contribution of members of the dissident, anti-Stalinist communist party, the POUM, and, in some cases, of rank-and-file activists from the Stalinist PCE, even though its leaders were formally hostile to the revolution. In short, this was a revolution that occurred beyond the control of the leadership of the Spanish workers’ and left-wing organisations, including those of anarchist tradition'. It could well be that the exemplary intensity, accuracy and rigour of the women's movement was a development for the most part independent of all organisations. The ICU drafted a new constitution (see below) the year before the beer-hall boycotts began, but according to Baruch Hirson in #10 of the journal Searchlight South Africa, 'its days were already numbered when the constitution was drafted.' A simultaneous movement in Nigeria, known as the 1929 Women's War, involved no radical institutions or ideologies whatsoever yet constituted an anti-tax insurrection 'carried out on a scale that the colonial state had never witnessed in any part of Africa'. This revolt, which drew 25000 women from across the entire Eastern area of Nigeria into conflict with all colonial power, from the local chiefs who exercised indirect rule on the part of Britain to the institutions of capital and its state, united women from across six ethnic groups for two months of bitter struggle, during which ten native courts were destroyed, four others were damaged, government buildings and the houses of native court personnel were attacked, European factories at Imo River, Aba, Mbawsi, and Amata were looted, European owned stores and Barclays Bank were assaulted, prisons were stormed, their inmates released, and chiefs hounded down, verbally badgered and often forced to resign. Despite police reinforcements and additional troops being called in, the Women’s War could not be stopped. Only after 100 women were shot, killing 50, and entire villages burnt, was the resistance finally crushed. Even so, the planned taxation was abandoned and women regained much of their traditional social position at the expense of chiefs who had grown oppressive with the support of the colonial state. In Searchlight South Africa #11 Hirson, speaking of 'strikes of African workers on the Witwatersrand between 1918 and 1920', observed the absence of any existing formal organisations yet stated that 'most industrial action appeared to be spontaneous, was disciplined and was well led.'
[4] The preamble to the 1925 ICU constitution ran: 'Whereas the interest of the workers and those of the employers are opposed to each other, the former living by selling their labour, receiving for it only part of the wealth they produce; and the latter living by exploiting the labour of the workers; depriving the workers of a part of the product of their labour in the form of profit, no peace can be between the two classes, a struggle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour, until the workers through their industrial organisations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all, instead of for the profit of a few.' In 1927 the union organised agitation against a new Natives Administration Bill that, according to Hirson, 'contained measures that could cripple all black organization at the behest of the Minister of Native Affairs.' Frank Glass, a speaker at one of the mass meetings organised by the union, was stopped by police after he 'got the audience to their feet' with the following address, as later reported in the newspapers: 'If you will do what the Russian workers have done and what the Chinese workers are doing now you – all the workers of this country, black and white – will be able to secure freedom. We don’t know at the moment how far the Government is going in its attempt to restrict the freedom of the Native workers; but this we do know, that all capitalist governments in their dealings with the workers act precisely alike. Therefore we have got to be prepared, not merely with demonstrations, but also – if it proves to be necessary – with far more drastic action.' A year later, the introduction to the Draft Economic and Political Program, probably penned by the same speaker, ran: 'Opponents of the ICU have frequently asserted that the Organization is not a trade union in the sense that the term is generally understood in South Africa, but that it is a kind of pseudo-political body ... The new constitution ... definitely establishes the ICU as a trade union, albeit one of native workers ... at the same time it must be clearly understood that we have no intention of copying the stupid and futile "non-political" attitude of our white contemporaries. As Karl Marx said, every economic question is, in the last analysis, a political question also, and we must recognise that in neglecting to concern ourselves with current politics, in leaving the political machine to the unchallenged control of our class enemies, we are rendering a disservice to those tens of thousands of our members who are groaning under oppressive laws ... At the present stage of our development it is inevitable that our activities should be almost of an agitational character, for we are not recognised as citizens in our own country, being almost entirely disfranchised and debarred from exercising a say in [that] state affairs closely affecting our lives and welfare.'
[5] A dramatic illustration of religion as a magical solution to real problems, and magic as a real sabotage of existing conditions, can be found in the conclusion to Michael Rogge's text Javanese Mystical Movements: 'Spiritual fervour - going into a trance - is a rather common phenomenon in Indonesia, particularly among factory workers. All over the Indonesian archipelago there are reports of schoolchildren, young women and factory workers going into mass trances or speaking in tongues... Religion, education and development have done little to halt widespread acceptance of the supernatural in Indonesia. In Indonesia, trance is tied up with culture, explained Lidia Laksana Hidajat, from the psychology faculty of Jakarta's Atma Jaya University... one of the requirements of a trance to happen - it's usually quiet and when they are engaged in monotonous activity... Eko Susanto Marsoeki, the director of Malang's Lawang Psychiatric Hospital, said overwork was closely linked to mass trance incidents in factories. Often it is a form of protest that will not be dealt with too harshly, he said. When more than 30 students at Kalimantan's Pahandut Palangka Raya High School fell into a trance in November, they blamed a spirit in a nearby tree. During the morning flag-raising ceremony, one of the girls started screaming and couldn't move. Soon her friends joined in until more than 30 of them were screaming and fainting, the deputy principal, Friskila said. Some of the girls woke from the trance after a student played a Muslim prayer ring tone on her mobile phone. Others were taken by their parents to local witchdoctors. Friskila, however, favours a less superstitious explanation. They are bored, tired and then this happened, she said. They all got a day off school.'
[6] The latest bout of mass pogroms perpetrated against our fellow Africans followed statements by the Zulu king, who is married to an immigrant from Swaziland himself, to the effect that such persons were lice and fleas that need to be purged for the sake of national health; the current president ousted the Xhosa intellectual Thabo Mbeki, whose pet project of an 'African Renaissance' owed much to Pan-Africanist ideology, under the slogan '100% Zulu-boy', with a campaign that involved much singing and dancing dressed up in leopard-skin costumes. This same president did not hesitate to authorise immigration raids and mass deportations carried out by the army in response to the pogroms, nor did he fail to emphasise that a Mozambiquan who was photographed being stabbed to death by South Africans was an illegal immigrant. His son, not one to be left outside the band-wagon, applauded the Zulu king's comments, though he himself is an immigrant born in Swaziland.
[7] According to this report 'At least nine political opponents of the PYD have been killed or disappeared over the past two and half years in areas the party partially or fully controlled. The PYD has denied responsibility for these incidents but has apparently failed to conduct genuine investigations. By contrast, the party-run security forces have carried out rapid mass arrests after most bomb attacks, presumably carried out by extremist Islamist militant groups...The PYD and local administration officials say that the local judiciary and newly established “People’s Courts” are independent, but lawyers and human rights activists described political interference in investigations and trials. In some cases, judges have apparently convicted people based only on their confessions, and disregarded complaints of abuse during interrogation... Human Rights Watch also investigated the violent incidents in Amuda (Amûdê) on June 27, 2013, when YPG forces used excessive force against [unarmed] anti-PYD demonstrators, shooting [dozens] and killing three men [despite having the opportunity to retreat safely from the situation]. The security forces killed two more men that night in unclear circumstances, and a third the next day. On the night of June 27, YPG arbitrarily detained around 50 members or supporters of the opposition Yekiti Party in Amuda, and beat them at a military base.' The reliability of this account is limited by the scope of the investigation (few people other than prisoners and officials, two categories which each have vested interests in projecting an image of the situation favourable to themselves, seem to have been consulted; of the two, however, the official truth related by jailers and spokesmen has always been the most reliable source of disinformation), the brevity of its duration (a few days in February 2014), its geographic confinement (only two prisons in one of three cantons controlled by forces loyal to the PYD), and the bourgeois liberal ideology of its authors. Nevertheless, the supporters of the PYD who produced reports from their own visits to the region were confronted with similar constraints, and their observations were shaped by their own ideologies which arguably predispose them to see a rosy picture considerably more than those of the liberals predispose them to vilify the authorities of the non-state.
[3] The support supplied by formal radical organisations, it should be noted, trailed behind the self-activity of ordinary proletarians, as was the case during the Spanish Revolution. As La Hausse said in his History of Liquor: 'The anger of workers took the ICU leaders by surprise. At first Champion was opposed to a beer boycott. The leaders were used to taking workers' grievances to the courts. But then at a mass meeting attended by ovrer 600 workers in June 1929 Champion said: "they say that this trouble was started by the ICU... but from today the ICU is taking up the burden of the workers...Down with beer!" Soon the violence began to spread.' An account of spontaneous self-organisation which resembles that of Frank Mintz in Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain: 'None of the leaders of the leftist or trade union organisations called for the revolution: the collectivisations were the spontaneous remarkable response of legions of anonymous labourers to the practical issue of getting production on the land and in the factories up and running again. Certainly many thousands of these workers were immersed in revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist ideas. But perhaps most remarkable of all was that there were collectives organised by labourers who we might label "spontaneous anarchists", who had no idea that they were organising along anarchist lines. This was most evident in rural Castile and Extremadura, where the anarchist tradition was weaker and where the dominant agrarian unions were mainly socialist in inspiration. This is all testimony to the profound autonomy of Spanish workers who embarked on a collective experiment that developed independently of the leaders of the union organisations. Reflecting the importance of workers’ economic organisations over political parties, the collectivisations were, for the most part, impelled by grassroots anarchist and socialist trade unionists. But this was a genuinely popular revolution that drew in many non-affiliated workers. We must also recognise the important contribution of members of the dissident, anti-Stalinist communist party, the POUM, and, in some cases, of rank-and-file activists from the Stalinist PCE, even though its leaders were formally hostile to the revolution. In short, this was a revolution that occurred beyond the control of the leadership of the Spanish workers’ and left-wing organisations, including those of anarchist tradition'. It could well be that the exemplary intensity, accuracy and rigour of the women's movement was a development for the most part independent of all organisations. The ICU drafted a new constitution (see below) the year before the beer-hall boycotts began, but according to Baruch Hirson in #10 of the journal Searchlight South Africa, 'its days were already numbered when the constitution was drafted.' A simultaneous movement in Nigeria, known as the 1929 Women's War, involved no radical institutions or ideologies whatsoever yet constituted an anti-tax insurrection 'carried out on a scale that the colonial state had never witnessed in any part of Africa'. This revolt, which drew 25000 women from across the entire Eastern area of Nigeria into conflict with all colonial power, from the local chiefs who exercised indirect rule on the part of Britain to the institutions of capital and its state, united women from across six ethnic groups for two months of bitter struggle, during which ten native courts were destroyed, four others were damaged, government buildings and the houses of native court personnel were attacked, European factories at Imo River, Aba, Mbawsi, and Amata were looted, European owned stores and Barclays Bank were assaulted, prisons were stormed, their inmates released, and chiefs hounded down, verbally badgered and often forced to resign. Despite police reinforcements and additional troops being called in, the Women’s War could not be stopped. Only after 100 women were shot, killing 50, and entire villages burnt, was the resistance finally crushed. Even so, the planned taxation was abandoned and women regained much of their traditional social position at the expense of chiefs who had grown oppressive with the support of the colonial state. In Searchlight South Africa #11 Hirson, speaking of 'strikes of African workers on the Witwatersrand between 1918 and 1920', observed the absence of any existing formal organisations yet stated that 'most industrial action appeared to be spontaneous, was disciplined and was well led.'
[4] The preamble to the 1925 ICU constitution ran: 'Whereas the interest of the workers and those of the employers are opposed to each other, the former living by selling their labour, receiving for it only part of the wealth they produce; and the latter living by exploiting the labour of the workers; depriving the workers of a part of the product of their labour in the form of profit, no peace can be between the two classes, a struggle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour, until the workers through their industrial organisations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all, instead of for the profit of a few.' In 1927 the union organised agitation against a new Natives Administration Bill that, according to Hirson, 'contained measures that could cripple all black organization at the behest of the Minister of Native Affairs.' Frank Glass, a speaker at one of the mass meetings organised by the union, was stopped by police after he 'got the audience to their feet' with the following address, as later reported in the newspapers: 'If you will do what the Russian workers have done and what the Chinese workers are doing now you – all the workers of this country, black and white – will be able to secure freedom. We don’t know at the moment how far the Government is going in its attempt to restrict the freedom of the Native workers; but this we do know, that all capitalist governments in their dealings with the workers act precisely alike. Therefore we have got to be prepared, not merely with demonstrations, but also – if it proves to be necessary – with far more drastic action.' A year later, the introduction to the Draft Economic and Political Program, probably penned by the same speaker, ran: 'Opponents of the ICU have frequently asserted that the Organization is not a trade union in the sense that the term is generally understood in South Africa, but that it is a kind of pseudo-political body ... The new constitution ... definitely establishes the ICU as a trade union, albeit one of native workers ... at the same time it must be clearly understood that we have no intention of copying the stupid and futile "non-political" attitude of our white contemporaries. As Karl Marx said, every economic question is, in the last analysis, a political question also, and we must recognise that in neglecting to concern ourselves with current politics, in leaving the political machine to the unchallenged control of our class enemies, we are rendering a disservice to those tens of thousands of our members who are groaning under oppressive laws ... At the present stage of our development it is inevitable that our activities should be almost of an agitational character, for we are not recognised as citizens in our own country, being almost entirely disfranchised and debarred from exercising a say in [that] state affairs closely affecting our lives and welfare.'
[5] A dramatic illustration of religion as a magical solution to real problems, and magic as a real sabotage of existing conditions, can be found in the conclusion to Michael Rogge's text Javanese Mystical Movements: 'Spiritual fervour - going into a trance - is a rather common phenomenon in Indonesia, particularly among factory workers. All over the Indonesian archipelago there are reports of schoolchildren, young women and factory workers going into mass trances or speaking in tongues... Religion, education and development have done little to halt widespread acceptance of the supernatural in Indonesia. In Indonesia, trance is tied up with culture, explained Lidia Laksana Hidajat, from the psychology faculty of Jakarta's Atma Jaya University... one of the requirements of a trance to happen - it's usually quiet and when they are engaged in monotonous activity... Eko Susanto Marsoeki, the director of Malang's Lawang Psychiatric Hospital, said overwork was closely linked to mass trance incidents in factories. Often it is a form of protest that will not be dealt with too harshly, he said. When more than 30 students at Kalimantan's Pahandut Palangka Raya High School fell into a trance in November, they blamed a spirit in a nearby tree. During the morning flag-raising ceremony, one of the girls started screaming and couldn't move. Soon her friends joined in until more than 30 of them were screaming and fainting, the deputy principal, Friskila said. Some of the girls woke from the trance after a student played a Muslim prayer ring tone on her mobile phone. Others were taken by their parents to local witchdoctors. Friskila, however, favours a less superstitious explanation. They are bored, tired and then this happened, she said. They all got a day off school.'
[6] The latest bout of mass pogroms perpetrated against our fellow Africans followed statements by the Zulu king, who is married to an immigrant from Swaziland himself, to the effect that such persons were lice and fleas that need to be purged for the sake of national health; the current president ousted the Xhosa intellectual Thabo Mbeki, whose pet project of an 'African Renaissance' owed much to Pan-Africanist ideology, under the slogan '100% Zulu-boy', with a campaign that involved much singing and dancing dressed up in leopard-skin costumes. This same president did not hesitate to authorise immigration raids and mass deportations carried out by the army in response to the pogroms, nor did he fail to emphasise that a Mozambiquan who was photographed being stabbed to death by South Africans was an illegal immigrant. His son, not one to be left outside the band-wagon, applauded the Zulu king's comments, though he himself is an immigrant born in Swaziland.
[7] According to this report 'At least nine political opponents of the PYD have been killed or disappeared over the past two and half years in areas the party partially or fully controlled. The PYD has denied responsibility for these incidents but has apparently failed to conduct genuine investigations. By contrast, the party-run security forces have carried out rapid mass arrests after most bomb attacks, presumably carried out by extremist Islamist militant groups...The PYD and local administration officials say that the local judiciary and newly established “People’s Courts” are independent, but lawyers and human rights activists described political interference in investigations and trials. In some cases, judges have apparently convicted people based only on their confessions, and disregarded complaints of abuse during interrogation... Human Rights Watch also investigated the violent incidents in Amuda (Amûdê) on June 27, 2013, when YPG forces used excessive force against [unarmed] anti-PYD demonstrators, shooting [dozens] and killing three men [despite having the opportunity to retreat safely from the situation]. The security forces killed two more men that night in unclear circumstances, and a third the next day. On the night of June 27, YPG arbitrarily detained around 50 members or supporters of the opposition Yekiti Party in Amuda, and beat them at a military base.' The reliability of this account is limited by the scope of the investigation (few people other than prisoners and officials, two categories which each have vested interests in projecting an image of the situation favourable to themselves, seem to have been consulted; of the two, however, the official truth related by jailers and spokesmen has always been the most reliable source of disinformation), the brevity of its duration (a few days in February 2014), its geographic confinement (only two prisons in one of three cantons controlled by forces loyal to the PYD), and the bourgeois liberal ideology of its authors. Nevertheless, the supporters of the PYD who produced reports from their own visits to the region were confronted with similar constraints, and their observations were shaped by their own ideologies which arguably predispose them to see a rosy picture considerably more than those of the liberals predispose them to vilify the authorities of the non-state.
*
Document
1
Feral
Faun
1990
Document
2
Karl
Korsch
1938
Document
3
John
Zerzan
1979
Document
4
Bob
Black
1994
Document
5
Karl
Marx
1875
Document
6
Maximilien
Rubel
1971
Document
7
Jan
van Heijenhoort
1948
Document
8
Friedrich
Engels
13
February 1851
The enraged jellyfish congregate in the moat of the Emperor's castle, having reconciled their ancestral feud, for a single common purpose: to storm the palace gates, slit the soverign's throat and raze that monument in praise of eternal worldly misery to the ground...
