Bureau Prehistory
Publications of three early San Francisco area situationist groups
Edited by Ken Knabb
1973. 90 pages
[How To Order]
Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous (1970)
In Honor of the Arrival of the Weathermen (critique of sacrificial militantism)
Billy Graham Presents (re the Chicago 8)
Fragmentary Opposition Is Like the Teeth of a Cogwheel
The Dance of Revolution
Is This Our Fate? (intervention in suburbia)
The End of CPE
You Are Wandering...
Godard in Berkeley (newspaper account of CEM disruption)
Address to Women’s Liberation
Gloria and Monica (pornographic comic)
“Great Moments in the Void” Trading Cards
On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel (pamphlet on tactics)
CEM Additions to On the Poverty of Student Life
1044 (1970)
Do We Need Snyder for Poet-Priest?
In This Theater...
“Hello, Men!” (balloon to paste on sexually manipulative ads)
Riot and Representation: The Significance of the Chicano Riot
(pamphlet falsely signed “by Herbert Marcuse”)
Pamphlet Fake, Marcuse Says (newspaper article)
Ode on the Absence of Real Poetry Here This Afternoon
A Critique of “On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel” by One of Its Authors
What Subversion Really Is
Contradiction (1970-1972)
Bureaucratic Comix (re uprising in Poland)
Open Letter to John Zerzan, Anti-Bureaucrat of the S.F. Social Services Employees Union
According to the Situationists... (statement of general perspectives;
virtually identical to the 1965 SI statement)
Wildcat Comics (re San Francisco cable car strike)
Still Out of Order (comic re telephone strike)
Open Letter to Good Times
Methods for the Communalization of Confusion (critique of “Anti-Mass”)
Critique of the New Left Movement (unpublished drafts):
The Movement in General
Antifascism and the Cybernetic Welfare State
Yippies and Weathermen
Communes and Collectives
Bookchinism
Women’s Liberation
On the Poverty of Hip Life (unpublished draft)
Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous (1970)
Council for the Eruption
of the Marvelous
In Honor of the Arrival of the Weathermen
Billy Graham Presents
Fragmentary Opposition
The Dance of Revolution
Is This Our Fate?
The End of CPE
You are wandering...
Godard Disruption
Address to Women’s Liberation
Gloria and Monica
In Honor of the Arrival
of the Weathermen
[Photo of Che Guevara’s corpse]
The International Liberation School announces its first required course:
REVOLUTIONARY EMBALMING!
Why pay pig morticians who use wood ripped off from the People
of the Third World? A plain pine coffin and People’s Morticians will end
this international banditry. Remember, Death is just around the corner.
* * *
With the advance of the cybernetic welfare state, the alienation of the proletariat is intensified. The reign of guaranteed survival slowly makes the belief in power crumble. In order to save their power, the mediators of the spectacle must keep this survival in doubt. We thus see the constant search for Doom and The Threat. Doom, formerly played by The Bomb, now takes the form of eco-catastrophe. A more difficult role to cast is The Threat, which must be ominous enough so that people are scared, yet boring enough so that they won’t want to join. In the (first) McCarthy Era, The Threat was played by the Communist Party. Now, with the shock value of parliamentary communism exhausted, the Audience needs to see red blood and fighting in the streets to get their patriotic juices flowing. This flow can be carried to climax if the Audience is allowed to become God by sacrificing their sons to the police. The Weatherman, of course, plays Jesus. His role is not complete until carried to its logical conclusion.
[January 1970]
Billy Graham Presents . . .
Billy Graham Presents
Dead in Berkeley
a Benefit Dance for Jesus Christ
and All Other
Political Prisoners
[Painting of crucifixion, with photos of the Chicago
Eight pasted over the heads of Jesus and the saints]
The Left abounds with Christ-figures. Some, like the Weathermen, volunteer for crucifixion. Others, like the Chicago 8, are captured. All acquiesce to the Myth of Sacrifice; all are false gods. Those leaders who “serve the needs of the people” perhaps think the people incapable of serving their own needs. Leaders attempt to embody the Revolution, to become substitutes for the people they purport to lead/represent. These heroic whipping boys are first singled out by the media, then led by the Law to the slaughter. Since we, “the people,” are not such stars of the media spectacle, we allow ourselves to be crucified by proxy. We abdicate to leaders the responsibility of each person to live his/her own life. So, like good liberals, we sacrifice money or time spent in organizing benefits for legal defense. Money is the symbolic turd of vicarious sacrifice; a poisonous gift. Just like in the Christian myth: your leaders will die to redeem you; and if you don’t acquiesce to them, then the “repression,” like the wrath of a paternal god, will fall on you all. To stop the crucifixions, we must destroy sacrifice. We must refuse to abdicate responsibility for revolution to any leaders. This act of refusal marks the end of mystification and the beginning of the revolutionary dance.
[January 1970]
Fragmentary Opposition
“Fragmentary opposition is like the teeth on a cogwheel: they marry one another and make the machine go ’round, the machine of the spectacle, the machine of power.”
—Raoul Vaneigem
[On the Spectacle cogwheel it says “Keep on grindin’.” The little woman poised to smash the machine is saying: “As the Situationists say — ya seen one bureaucrat, ya seen ’em all!” The Spectacle Left cogwheel is saying: “Right on!” “All power to the people!” “Smash the State!” “Free Huey!” “Serve the People!” “Off the Pigs!” The other oppositional cogwheels are responding to the woman: “Ya know, those Situationists are real clever...” “Right on! We oughta have one on our Steering Committee!”]
We seek to supersede the following elements: the organization of appearances as a spectacle where everyone denies himself; the separation on which private life is based, since it is there that the objective separation between proprietor and dispossessed is lived and reflected at every level; and sacrifice. The three are obviously interdependent, as are their opposites: participation, founded on the passion of play; communication, founded on the passion of love; and realization, founded on the passion to create.
The dance of these inseparable projects, floating free, continually changing, founds the revolutionary project. The dance realizes itself in its own supersession, in the sublime movement of subversion where the pirouette returns to itself not as itself but reconceived in a limitless perspective. Subversion devalues each originally individual element as the organization of a new significant whole confers on each element a new meaning. Subversion is the only language, the only gesture, that has within it its own critique; its force is pleasure seeking itself.
[February 1970. Signed “Council for Unlimited Transformation.”]
The dance of revolution
[Pictures of cells and microscopic creatures]
The dance of revolution is a continuous project, floating free, perpetually changing, always focused. The music it moves to is pure energy, weaving three interdependent melodies: participation, founded on the passion of play; communication, founded on the passion of love; and realization, founded on the passion to create. Refusing the value of appearances, the dance makes itself invisible to those who see only appearances; the spectacle of the commodity cannot defend itself. The dance can never be a closed system, it never mystifies itself; rather, it realizes itself in its own supersession, in the sublime movement of subversion, where a pirouette returns to itself not as itself, not as it was born, but changed, reconceived in a limitless perspective. Subversion devalues each fragmented element in the hierarchy of appearances; each isolated commodity — whether it be inanimate objects or objectified human beings selling themselves in the marketplace — is projected into the significance of the WHOLE, all possible connections are made as we dance closer to the totality of our lives. Subversion is the only language, the only gesture, that bears within it its own critique. Its force is pleasure seeking itself. In the language of subversion we begin to sing, our whole lives begin to move in the rhythm of the song: thus we create the dance: thus the revolution becomes our daily life.
[February 1970]
Is This Our Fate?
[Cover: picture of huge traffic jam]
[Inside: picture of hawk flying over forest]
LEAVE PARKTOWN LEAVE LEISURETOWN LEAVE MILTOWN
LEAVE TOWN
leave everything / leave yr wife / yr husband / leave your children in the forest / leave yr pets / leave yr mirrors / leave yr jobs / yr joint checking account / yr second mortgage / yr income tax / yr military budget
leave yr hopes & fears & sense of security & sense of frustration / leave yr grave / yr prisons churches schools / yr belief in appearances & gods / leave yr uppers & downers / yr beer & pretzels / yr packaged food & canned laughter
leave yr car to the junkheap / leave yr house to the termites / leave yr clothes to the moths
leave the country / leave the city / leave yr mind behind
LEAVE THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
you are already free
embrace yr freedom
smash yr clocks / burn yr I.D. / run naked in the woods / make love to a tree
don’t vote / don’t argue / don’t consult the authorities / don’t abdicate responsibility / don’t see yr shrink / don’t establish yr reputation / don’t sacrifice yr life to the machine of boredom
fuck it all. now
return to yr roots give yr Self to yourself
you will be a new animal, a new human being, a human being, at last
[February 1970. Distributed door-to-door in the “Parktown” suburban tract of Milpitas, California, by CEM members dressed in suits and ties.]
The End of CPE
Since the publication of the CPE course catalogue and the opening proposal which addressed itself to student control of the university and the educational process in general, we, its authors, have been involved in an intense and painful period of self-criticism. The line of thought which resulted in the essay “Ideas Are No Man’s Property” has continued to a point which is in some ways a logical extension of our original thinking, yet its conclusions radically differ from our original proposals.
In the interests of developing revolutionary clarity, we would like to share our self-criticism with you. We will present below a fairly systematic critique of our original ideas, followed by a new proposal.
Our introductory presentation of the functions of the university is a description of what happens rather than why it happens. But its accuracy left a gap between what we could see and what we could see to do to change it.
Our conclusion — that the educational process and our roles as students are dehumanizing — leads us to further consider all activity in the capitalist spectacle in the same way. We now see that our life lived as time which is not our own (not consciously directed by our desires) necessarily becomes a network of roles which we assume in order to survive in a way compatible with the positively reinforced structures of the social “order.” The separation and objectification of this time-beyond-our-control owes its structure and origins to alienated labor. This labor is a way of “doing time,” of surviving, while simultaneously perpetuating by our own efforts the system which enslaves us. In order to end our alienation we must refuse to act out roles which further separate authentic human need from appearance.
Thus our conclusion in the catalogue — “The nature of this political process . . . must be developed by us, by students as students” — was insufficient. Though our anger was correctly placed, we did not go far enough. We should refuse to accept the role of student. We should reject our specialized functions completely. We will ourselves be total assholes if we accept the obvious fragmentation of our lives. Our project is not to “encompass the construction of new roles for ourselves” but to destroy the purely subjective categorizations which keep us from transcending the poverty of automatic behavior, of alienated labor, of the voluntary slavery of reformism.
We thus come upon a new (for us) view of social relations which goes beyond our conception of a counter-institution. We have come to see any “new” institution as the creation of another obstacle to unmediated human activity. “Institutions” in their very nature become an artificial collectivity whose importance is independent of individual desire expressed collectively. What is necessary is the destruction of institutions and unnecessary restrictions of human activity, and the substitution of a spontaneous and freely chosen form of social organization whose initial project must be the abolition of class society and therefore of labor. The goal and process of such activity is the continued transformation of daily life. We will accept nothing less and therefore we proclaim AN IMMEDIATE END TO ACADEMIC REFORM. We can then pursue the only real educational reform: THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSITY.
We are leaving the University, and urge our sisters and brothers to do the same. Naturally, we will no longer serve as bureaucratic functionaries for the “alternative” institution (CPE). Our knowledge of bureaucracy leads us to believe that our withdrawal from its key positions will cause it to fall apart. This is our hope.
—Alan Mulman, Diane Sunar
[Mulman and Sunar — whose names were falsely signed to this leaflet — were anarchist founders and functionaries of a “Committee for Participatory Education” at the University of California in Berkeley. This leaflet was distributed at CPE registration, March 1970.]
You are wandering . . .
[Munch’s painting “The Scream”]
You are wandering now, once again (and again) through the endless and boring debate about “What Is To Be Done.” What Is To Be Done is why right now you are doing nothing. Instead, you choose to allow the Steering Committee and their various functionaries to spend hours behind closed doors deciding how you should live your lives, eating their own shit and then serving it up to you — the “People,” the “Masses,” the Great Nobody — in their pseudo-revolutionary clichés. You perpetuate your own powerlessness by accepting their Naked Lunch. These Ideological Cops, these Bureaucrats-In-Training, are nothing more than mediators determining for you your self-determination. In a true revolutionary moment there are no mediators: no cops, no priests, no Academic Senates to be watched on TV, no Steering Committees.
These clowns try to convince you that you can build an effective strike under their auspices even while you remain students. They present to you the false possibility of revolutionary reform within a system that is always, by definition, an insidious and alienating hierarchy. All hierarchies are alienating, no matter what mythical choices they perpetrate. By remaining within the role of students you accept these nonexistent choices. You consider the crisis in Cambodia a crisis immediate to your lives when in fact your lives are devoid of crisis. At least the people of Cambodia and Vietnam are fighting for their physical survival. You instead choose to continually ignore the poverty, powerlessness, and boredom of your everyday existence. Until you realize that life must be a perpetual crisis, the Marvelous and all its possibilities will forever evade you, and even your own desperation will put you to sleep.
[April 1970. Distributed at the University of California in Los Angeles during a period of widespread but passive student protest against the US invasion of Cambodia.]
[During this same period the CEM issued several other anonymous (and no longer extant) leaflets at various UC campuses, including “Chancellor’s Memo” at UC Santa Cruz (as you may have guessed, it wasn’t really from the Chancellor); “Ecology Leaflet” (excerpts from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch signed “Ecology Action” and littered all over the Santa Cruz campus); and “George Winne Memorial” at UC San Diego (Winne was a UCSD student who had just burned himself to death in protest against the war; the CEM leaflet, in sarcastic irony, suggested that other students might appropriately emulate this gesture of self-sacrificial protest).]
[Another no longer extant CEM leaflet-disruption left the following trace.]
GODARD IN BERKELEY
. . . The last sequence [of a Godard film being shown] showed a bloody hand reaching out of the mud. Long live the Revolution. Lights, applause, here’s Godard to answer your questions.
Godard immediately asked that the nearer of the two obnoxious tv lamps focused on him be turned off, and it was. The strangest event of a strange evening took place. A man — I didn’t see him long enough to notice anything but dark hair — threw an explosion of leaflets into the audience and vanished up the aisles. The leaflets contained two messages:
One, in English, called “The Meal” attacked Godard as “a sorry clown,” a “hypocrite,” “the old pederast of the youth revolution,” and attacked the audience for its “contemptible acquiescence.” It concluded by predicting that “you (the audience) and your so-called revolution will remain a childish mimicry of its own possibility.”
The other, printed parallel in French, called “Le Repas” (“The Meal”) seems to be but is not a translation of the English. Here, Godard is “a genius,” “a hero,” “a saint,” “the prophet of the Youth Revolution.” The audience is praised equally fulsome as “a room full of authentic revolutionaries ready to sacrifice themselves for the creation of total rebellion,” and told that “you and your revolution will be the stars of the next Godard movie.”
If the aim of these leaflets was to out-Godard Godard in coyness and perversity of expression, the distributors came close. (Assuming that they are not the work of Godard himself, or simply an inept translation.) Either way, to throw the things up in the air and run was the very acme of chickenshit. Why not just hand them out. Who were they afraid of. . . .
—BERKELEY BARB (1 May 1970)
[The article fails to note that as the leaflets were distributed (by a CEM member in priest’s garb) other CEM members were throwing tomatoes at Godard, who unfortunately succeeded in ducking them.]
Address to Women’s Liberation
I
Woman’s everyday life embodies a critique of human history, including a critique of the traditional revolutionary organization and its so-called New Left alternatives. However, women are obscuring this critique by trying to define themselves in terms of traditional revolutionary theory, which has in general merely tacked an obscured discussion of the role of women onto its periphery. Women have failed to utilize their lived critique of hierarchical society, limiting themselves to the same alienating modes of revolt (Stalinist, for example) to which men have been confined.
The separation which women feel from history offers them an opportunity for critical revolt. This opportunity is obscured by the expressed need to relate women’s liberation to the traditional revolutionary struggles. This identification necessitates a new relationship to men (i.e. to those men who participate in the traditional revolutionary struggles). The ability of women to formulate a revolutionary praxis consistent with their critique of history is restricted not only by the chauvinism of leftist males, but also by the elementary theory and organization of the Left. It is at this point that women’s liberation has offered the possibility of a critique of the Left and of traditional leftist hierarchy. The extreme form of this critique has been separation from “the oppressor” (i.e. men).
The predominant attitude of this separation (whether or not it is realized in a separatist colony) is antagonism, distrust, and hatred. The separatist woman is defined by this attitude: She has a social identity which can only be negative; it becomes merely the negation of the traditional feminine identity. By merely finding a new role in which to relate to men, she perpetuates her subservience to the world of appearances. Rather than relate to women as individuals, she continues to define them through the juxtaposition (to her, antagonism) of the sexes. She expends all her energy in that friction. She is successfully protected from a submissive relationship with men; yet she submits to a fragmented view of the world which is not of her own making.
II
In the moment of total rejection of the given social relationships, all things are possible; instead, most women seek shelter in a structure whose very attractiveness is its smothering and ultimately destructive familiarity. By allying themselves with traditionalist revolutionary struggles — which seek to substitute one form of oppression for another — women fail to utilize the moment of radical rejection. They make alliances with the Left on its terms: in order to be admitted to the exclusive club of authorized movements of the oppressed, they must accept the history of the Left’s failure to bring into being a society without hierarchy. Thus, to the extent that it links itself to the Left, the women’s liberation movement, discussing its goals in traditional socialist terms, fails to note all the critiques of left ideology which have been generated in the last fifty years, and perpetuates the hierarchy they should be revolting against. Women thus support a “radical” movement which suppresses them, whether that suppression takes the obvious form of male chauvinism in the New Left or wage labor in the Soviet Union. At the same time they reinforce the Left’s preoccupation with revolutionary prehistory and its alienated forms of “revolutionary” reconstruction (such as party bureaucracy, and massive thought control and denial of freedom during the “period of transition”).
It is the attempt to relate to traditional revolutionary theory — with its mistaken emphasis on the necessity of state power and a “period of transition” — which leads to the endless debate over job and economic status, caste and class, and sexual identity. Because it is subsumed by a series of traditionalist rationalizations, the analysis of female identity has not been developed into a total critique.
III
Women’s liberation fails to realize that it is rebelling against an image of men which is as superficial as the image of women they have rejected for themselves, and that it is the very nature of the male role to be self-perpetuating because of its characteristic dominance. By limiting the critique of psychological stereotypes to women, the realm of the possible is drastically narrowed: a critique of male and female roles should lead to a general critique of Role, and from there to a critique of all ideal absolutes. In the past, the critique has only constructed another idealized essence — the New Woman — to be revealed in the “post-revolutionary era.” Both the New Man and the New Woman are mystifications; embracing these ideal types merely postpones the necessity of throwing into radical question all that the revolutionary project must encompass.
[Distributed at a May 1970 California women’s conference in Santa Cruz. Later reprinted by 1044.]
Gloria and Monica
[Porn photos of two naked women making love,
with dialogue added underneath]
GLORIA: I just don’t know what’s bothering him, he doesn’t want to do it anymore.
MONICA: My husband’s the same, he’s always “too tired tonight.” Maybe it’s his job, he keeps complaining about how boring it is. I sure couldn’t stand 10 hours a week at that factory.
GLORIA: Maybe so, but when they get home, all they do is drink and watch TV.
MONICA: It could be my fault. I don’t feel too sexy either. Cleaning house is as dull as any factory job; but what choice do we have?
GLORIA: Well, at least I can be honest with you. You don’t want to own me, or make me pretend I’m happy, or make me tell you how strong you are.
MONICA: They don’t even try to understand, they think they make all the sacrifices. They think they’re so virile but instead of taking us to bed they just play poker and talk about imaginary whores.
GLORIA: Yeah, just like on TV where all the “beautiful people” live in a dream world. Sometimes I think Harry would rather live his whole life inside the TV.
MONICA: I’m so tired of pretending everything’s all right, trying to be the Revlon-girl-of-his-dreams. If he wants to suffer all day at the plant and then come home and take it out on me, I’d rather forget the whole thing.
GLORIA: What’s he working for anyway? He just wastes the money on toys to show off to his friends that end up in the closet gathering dust, or else he buys me some junky present and then expects me to forgive him when he comes home a drunken slob.
MONICA: I feel like such a martyr sometimes. Neither of us wants to sacrifice our lives to these boring jobs, but we gotta eat.
GLORIA: Sure, but why can’t we just take what we need? There’s enough for everybody, why pay money we wasted so much time earning?
MONICA: If we stopped buying things and lived like that, they could quit their jobs. Then we’d have time for ourselves. Things could be a lot more exciting that way and the men probably wouldn’t be so “tired” at night.
[June 1970. Intended for distribution on the freeway at rush hour near the Lockheed Aircraft factory in Sunnyvale, California. But the CEM broke up before this was carried out.]
Leaflets issued by the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous (CEM), January-June 1970. Better quality facsimile versions of all the CEM publications are included in the Bureau Prehistory.
No copyright.
Other CEM publications:
[“Great Moments in the Void” Trading Cards]
[On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel]
[CEM additions to “On the Poverty of Student Life”]
“Great Moments in the Void”
Trading Cards
VOID CARDS
Collect them all! Trade them with your friends! It’ll give you something to do!
Players
1. Johnny B. Goode, Peace Corps Volunteer
2. Norma Lexistence, Student
3. Tom Banale, Grocery Checker
4. John Dough, Real Estate Salesman
5. Wilma Dough, Housewife-Mother-Cook...
6. Rocky Rhodapple, Sparechange Artist
7. Stew Albert, Politician
8. Harvey Krishna, Krishnafreak
9. Jack Greenback, Hip Merchant
10. Petty Boujoie, Hip Craftswoman
Great Moments in the Void
11. Cleaning the Stove
12. Watching Television
13. The Traffic Jam
14. At the Supermarket
15. In the Classroom
16. The Family Outing
Team Cards
17. The Nuclear Family [no copy available]
18. The Faculty [no copy available]
1. JOHNNY B. GOODE
Volunteer, Peace Corps
Born: 6/12/46 Ht: 6' Wt: 150
Johnny has always tried to do right by his team, no matter what team he was on. After completing four years with the Berkeley High JV’s (where Coach Jack Hustler called him “a real good boy”), Johnny put in four yeoman-like years studying business at San Francisco State. Plagued by guilt and by the feeling that (in his words) “There was nothing else to do,” Johnny joined the Corps. He has served well in Mexico and Guatemala; when his two years are up he plans to join the P.C. staff in its Northeast Brazil office. He is treasured by his superiors: in the words of Corps director Jack Valenti, “Johnny’s a real good boy.”
2. NORMA LEXISTENCE
Student, UC Berkeley
Born: 6/12/42 Ht: 5'6" Wt: 135
Norma has just completed a brilliant career in the schools of Berkeley, working her way from kindergarten through a PhD in twenty-three years. When informed that she had succeeded in achieving her doctorate, Norma said, “Oh, can I go now?”
Norma has decided to get out of school, desiring to test herself in the real world after so many years of preparation. “I’m tired of the student life,” says Norma. “Next year I plan to start teaching.”
3. “TOM” BANALE
Checker, Lucky Store
Born: 6/12/32 Ht: 5'10" Wt: 160
“Tom” is noted for his cheerfulness. He always has a cheerful “Hullohowyadoin” for everyone who comes into the store, and an equally cheerful “Thankyouseeyagin” for everyone who leaves.
Starting his career with Bi-Rite as a bagger, he quickly moved up to checker. After fourteen years with Bi-Rite, Lucky Stores bought the franchise. “Tom” made the move into the larger organization with ease. As “Tom” says, “It’s all the same to me.”
4. JOHN DOUGH
Salesman, Mason-McDuffie
Born: 6/12/29 Ht: average Wt: medium
John is known for his versatility. He is equally comfortable as a businessman, a father, or a car buyer; equally happy during work and leisure hours.
John is into real estate: He sells people land and shelter. “If you can’t own your own house,” John says, “what can you own?”
John made $350,000 for Mason-McDuffie Realtors last year. He wound up with $27,500, which went to make payments on his house, his car, his boat, his insurance, his children’s education, doctor bills, food, vacation, pets, and a few odds and ends. “Life’s a lot of fun,” says John.
5. MRS. JOHN (WILMA) DOUGH
Housewife-Mother-Cook-Housekeeper-Shopper, Dough Family
Born: 6/12/31 Ht: 5'6" Wt: 120
Eva Braun once said, “Behind every great man stands a woman.” Wilma Dough is such a woman. Taking care of John Dough’s “private” life, she deserves a great deal of the credit for what John has accomplished in the business world.
Of all her roles, Wilma likes shopping the best. “Anything to get out of the house,” says Wilma. She developed a close identification with Safeway through twelve years of shopping there. But she had to switch to Lucky when Safeway burned down. “To my surprise,” says Wilma, “I hardly noticed the difference.”
6. ROCKY RHODAPPLE
Sparechange Artist, Telegraph Avenue
Born 6/12/48 Ht: 5'9" Wt: 105
Rocky is a sparechange artist, drifter, and liver of the alternative lifestyle. He operates off “The Avenue,” where he spends 14-16 hours a day.
Rocky is noted for his panhandling techniques, which combine subtlety with daring. He describes one of his “hits” in his own words:
“I was sittin there, y’know, in front of the Mustard Seed, y’know, fucked up on reds, an this cat comes by, y’know, an I says, ‘Got any spare change man?’ an he says ‘Lemme see.’ So he digs into his pocket, y’know, an pulls out three cents, an he gives me the three cents. An I says ‘Thanks man have a good day.’ ”
7. STEW ALBERT
Politician, Berkeley
Born: 6/12/40 Ht: 5'10" Wt: 190
Stew is one of the up-and-coming stars on the Berkeley scene. He made his move early in the 1970 season by running for sheriff of Alameda County on the Smashthestate ticket.
Stew’s strategy has been to study the films of old games and then repeat the moves which brought others success, following Marx’s dictum that all facts and personages occur twice in history: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Following the lead of Jerry Rubin’s 1965 mayoral campaign, Stew made a solid showing against Frank Madigan. He lost, but, in Stew’s words, “It was a great victory for the people.”
8. HARVEY KRISHNA
Krishnafreak, Telegraph Avenue
Born: 6/12/48 Ht: 5'7" Wt: 135
Harvey was brought up in a strict Catholic home. “They made me repeat meaningless catechisms over and over. They made me go to church. It was awful.”
Harvey soon learned to despise religion and the society which spawned it. “Religion,” said Harvey, “is the opiate of the people. Western society, on the verge of collapse, seeks to extend this opiate into every aspect of daily life.”
In a radical break with the society around him, Harvey has sought out the gods of the East. “What is good enough for India,” says Harvey, “is good enough for Telegraph Avenue.” Asked to comment on the social use of Eastern religion, Harvey said, “Harekrishnaharekrishnakrishnakrishna- harehare...”
9. JACK GREENBACK
Hip Merchant, Telegraph Avenue
Born: 6/12/40 Ht: 6'1" Wt: 160
Jack’s trip is providing people (our people) with the things they really need — like incense & roach clips & patchouli oil & posters & records & shades & water pipes & dyed undershirts & stuff like that.
In order to serve the people (our people) better, Jack has opened up a little shop on “The Avenue.” It’s a hang-loose affair, where you can come in and get whatever you want, as long as you pay. All the employees are happy (since they deal with our people), so Jack only has to pay them a dollar an hour. All in all, says Jack, it’s groovy.
10. PETULIA (PETTY) BOUJOIE
Hip Craftswoman, Telegraph Avenue
Born: 6/12/48 Ht: 5'6" Wt: 111
Petty’s thing is selling beads. She sits daily (and weekly) in front of Cody’s bookstore with her wares spread out in front of her. “It beats workin,” she says. “Besides, there’s nothin else ta do.”
She is so good at her craft that a dime store owner recently offered her 50 cents each for them. But Petty rejected his offer. “In the first place,” she explained, “dime stores are too modern; they are part of this technological society which is ruled by machines which is badbadbad. In the second place, I can sell my beads on the street for a dollar each.”
Great Moments in the Void #11
CLEANING THE STOVE
Friday, June 12, 1970, Berkeley, California, 2:30 pm
The time had finally come. The stove was filthy. “The stove is filthy!” said mom (Wilma Dough). She decided to clean the stove. First she tried Tide X-K, using a sponge and steel wool. When that didn’t work, she tried SOS pads. After 30 agonizing minutes, she decided to make a radical break with tradition, and trudged off to the store. Two hours later she returned with a bottle of new E-Z-Off Oven Cleaner. Following the directions, she applied the E-Z-Off, waited, then wiped clean. She took a step back and looked at her clean stove.
Great Moments in the Void #12
WATCHING TELEVISION
June 12, 1970, Berkeley, California, 8:00 pm
After a hard day at work, after arguing over dinner, after reading the evening paper, after walking the dog, dad (John Dough) settled down to watch television.
First he tried Channel 2. They were showing “What’s My Line?” Then he tried Channel 4. They were showing “Truth or Consequences.” Then Channel 5: “Hee Haw.” Then Channel 7: “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.”
Dad thought for awhile and said, “I guess it’ll be Truth or Consequences.”
Great Moments in the Void #13
THE TRAFFIC JAM
June 12, 1970, Nimitz Freeway, 8:25 am
Terrible traffic jam. Report from Lou Hurley in the HurleyBird over KCBS radio: “Traffic backed up for miles on the Nimitz, Dave, from Treasure Island to Gilman Avenue. South to 98th Avenue it’s bumper to bumper.”
8:55 am: Traffic begins to clear up. Thousands of commuters continue on to work.
Hundreds of commuters were questioned on how the traffic jam affected them. Many answered not at all. Others said they found traffic jams to be quite pleasurable. In the words of one motorist, “I like to have a lot of time stuck in between home and work. You know, so I can think.”
Great Moments in the Void #14
AT THE SUPERMARKET
June 12, 1970, Berkeley, California, 11:00 am
Wilma Dough went to the Lucky Store to go shopping. She selected a cart and strolled from aisle to aisle picking up what she needed. She got:
3 lbs hamburger
Oscar Meyer hot dogs, 2 lbs
11 oz jar, Heinz relish
9 oz jar, French’s mustard
paper towels (Viva double roll)
Wonder Bread
Handi Wrap
Coke, two 6-packs
Granny Goose potato chips
Miller High-Life
Cheez-its
Oreos
Cheerios, 14 oz box
She wheeled her cart up to the checkout stand, paid for the groceries, and started home.
Great Moments in the Void #15
IN THE CLASSROOM
May 12, 1970, Berkeley High School, 10:15 am
At 10:15 the bell rang. All of Mr. Schwartz’s students filed into class and sat down. Mr. Schwartz talked for 27 minutes about geography. Then he asked the class, “What is the capital of Vermont?” Thirteen people — about a third of the class — raised their hands. Mr. Schwartz turned sharply to Mary Smith, his prize student. “Yes, Mary...”
“Montpelier?” she ventured, doubtfully.
“Right, Mary!” said Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Schwartz continued to talk about geography. Mary beamed in her seat.
Great Moments in the Void #16
THE FAMILY OUTING
June 13, 1970, Berkeley-Albany, California, 12:00 noon
The Dough family had earned a day off. Dad was worn down from five empty, grinding days at the office. Mom was worn down from five equally boring days at home. The kids were bored with Mom & Dad, but they had to go along. So all of them (Dad, Mom, Dad Jr., Horace, Homer, Cleopatra, and Helen) got into the Ford Ranchwagon and headed for the park.
First stop was McDonald’s Golden Arches (“It’s our kind of place,” quipped Dad), where they had 11 Big Macs, 7 fries, 2 filets-o-fish, 2 choc shakes, 5 cokes, and 5 hot apple pies. Next stop was 31 Flavors. There was a moment of agony for the family as they pondered their choices, but in the end there was ecstasy. They had Jamoca Almond Fudge, Vanilla, German Chocolate Cake, Caramel Cashew, Cream of Mushroom, Licorice, & Turd.
COUNCIL FOR THE ERUPTION OF THE MARVELOUS
June 1970
Created by Dan Hammer. Like baseball cards, each card had a picture on the front and the data on the “player” or “great moment” on the back. Several hundred partial sets were handed out in both hip and straight areas of Berkeley by members of the CEM and 1044.
[Bureau Prehistory]
Other CEM publications:
[Leaflets] [On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel]
On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel
A Critique of “On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel” by One of Its Authors
What Subversion Really Is
On Wielding the
Subversive Scalpel
This pamphlet is not a subversive act: it is an exploration of the theory of subversion. This is an important distinction: No subversive act exists within the covers of a book or pamphlet. But out of critical theory, acts flower.
It is, however, no less an act. We do not agree with those who do not make of writing an act, who support the age-old distinction between mind and body, between thoughts and action. Leave such distinctions to Christians and other fossils of the old order.
We have not attempted — for obvious reasons, reasons that will be even more obvious later — to direct the reader in any way. There are no explicit calls to action; really, no actions are specified at all. Our goal (here) is revolutionary clarity.
* * *
I’m not gonna rock the boat,
rockin the boat’s a drag;
I’m gonna sink the boat.
—Putney Swope
Picture your social world as a large, well-lit closet / a tunnel extending through society from birth to death / a cave of shadows artificially illuminated / a populous boat adrift in a sea beyond meaning. The sea is an image of the world, a whole world; there is a universe beyond the widest reach of human perception. I do not yet know it / do you?
We live well situated within a world of appearances / we are spectators to a parade of humanized objects & objectified humans; the whole cosmetic array of commodities is a veil about the eyes / is the white set of walls bounding our civilized closet / is a mountain of unwitting oppression through which we senseless burrow. How to relate to the meaning / how to go beyond the mountain / blow it up.
All those who see themselves as being beyond the point of no return, all those for whom the choice was between revolution and suicide and chose revolution, all these confronted then a range of activities to pursue. We present here two dominant poles of the range:
organizing..............subversion
The history of organizing (e.g. “Community Organizing”) is the history of revolutionary failure. We find here the whole boring display of oppositional parasites, representational structures, debate & vote, rules of procedure, and the rest. The New Left is a New Bureaucracy; the counterculture is a counter-hierarchy (&, also, paradoxically, counterrevolutionary). Organization on the left has always been a system of leaders & followers, of the active & the passive, of revolutionary martyrs & their legal defense funders. The existing leftist organizations in this country are by & large mere mirrors of the structures they purport to oppose. There are, of course, degrees of differentiation. Some groups obey Robert’s Rules of Order. Others congratulate themselves for having a “leadership vacuum,” which we suppose means that, leaders or no leaders, they still act as followers. Either way, they lose.
As for those who wish to organize romantic guerrilla bands of armed warriors, in some hollowwood vision of Che Guevara, or out of mere desperation, they will soon find themselves dead. They might as well commit suicide.
But in subversion, we leave behind the interminable argument between the good bureaucrats & the bad ones. By subversion we do not mean, as in its common usage, “overthrowing the government” & replacing it with ourselves. We mean undermining the very addiction, the sick, junkie-like need, to govern or be governed at all. In the end / in the beginning, there are no leaders, no followers: there are only actors.
The Scalpel
“Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.”
—Aragon
We live within a society which manifests itself as a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (Marcuse). We live within a society. All choice is effectively subsumed within a closed system of relation, an absence of contradiction.
The process of socialization is a process by which the society automatically disseminates positive feedback to those who conform to its standards. The junkie feeding his need. Like good rats in some laboratory, we are rewarded for the correct response. Each hour we spend at the job rewards us with the “freedom,” the capability, to buy. Our time is transformed into money, its symbol, which only acquires real meaning when the money is spent. The commodities we buy, the washday miracles & phallic cars & color TVs (or, “alternatively,” suede jackets, stereos & dope), are the concrete reward we receive for a job well done, time well spent on the job. They are the positive reinforcement of our desires. And, just like the junkie, just like the lab rat, the more we get, the more we need. We are never fully satisfied. There is always more to consume. Society produces its own standards, the standards of commodity consumption & its perpetual reinforcement, of socialization through POSITIVE FEEDBACK.
Still, the potential for contradiction always remains. But for the contradiction to be effective it must be total, it must present a unitary critique of the entire society; anything less is mere meaningless debate. In a society that suppresses revolt through fragmentation, any opposition to specific issues, i.e. fragments, is easily dealt with, easily re-absorbed into the smooth flow of the whole.
The tool of pure contradiction — the focal point through which the eruption of the marvelous contradiction may take place — is subversion, the active manifestation of pure NEGATIVE FEEDBACK to the whole of the established standards of the society. Subversion attempts to present the whole contradiction to the whole society.
We see subversion as a sort of phenomenological scalpel, cutting through the surface of the spectacle of the commodity & bringing to light all the most subtle presuppositions on which the society is based.
The scalpel seeks penetration / who are you under all that clothing / those cosmetics; who are you before a sick society takes you in / makes you / in its image / what you needn’t be; all your surfaces / your social façades / your religious faith / your university learning / your creature comforts / all your addictions to a spectacle which consumes you as you consume its poison gifts / the parasite & its needy host. All this is subjected to the most scorching light in the hopes that you will see it all. All these are appurtenances / are appearances / are a mediation between you & yourself / between who you are & what society would make of you / the standards it would bend you to.
All these are made to turn against themselves in the subversive act by an agent / an action which comes into existence as both recognizable & impossible, familiar & exotic.
In a society where the range of possibility is bankrupt, we demand the impossible. This is our game.
(As society appears without contradiction so does it remain monosexual; contradiction / subversion re-sexualizes the playing.)
But this is not a dialogue; it is a disruption. Once a subversive act takes place it is over, only the echo remains, it exists then either as success or failure. If successful, it is beyond critical discussion. The function of subversion is not pedantic; it is not a game for gurus; it wishes to impose no ideology or position on you. It is a contradicting rather than a contradiction, an action rather than a statement. It is pure negation, a phantom. It wishes only to leave you naked first of all, at a point from which you may begin again from an originary state as an actor, the creative, no longer the passive spectator, the force-fed consumer, the will-less addict, but free & full of power & energy to use it.
The scalpel of subversion slices through the surface/veil of appearances to make an opening, nothing more — an open space just large enough for revolution to pass through.
Again, this feedback, this negative feed-through, this subversive act, is no mere posing of an alternative solution for possible discussion; it is a fierce destruction / a cutting away & incineration of all forms of mediation / of popes, professors, cosmetics & kings; a total transformation or none at all.
We hear so much yea-saying these days about Creativity, that what we need are “Constructive Answers” to our problems. But our problem is all one / is one of all-or-nothing. The machine of hierarchical society is broken beyond repair. Burn it. Take destruction as part of the process of nature / nature’s scalpel / death as much a part of life as birth / destruction the breath before creation.
In cellular structure, uninhibited creativity, the unrestrained reproduction of cells, is cancer. We live in a cancerous society. We need the death & destruction of its old carcass, of all that is obsolete; we need to burn down the slum and clear the ground so that the forest can grow through:
The Field of Play
Subversion, then, may be seem as a fierce surrealistic disruption of the organization of appearances into an uninterrupted, static, spectacular Reality. We should understand that this organization occurs not only on the macrocosmic level, in social institutions (such as the mass media laying the groundwork for socialization), but also in the individual, in the way one organizes a worldview, an attitude toward the social environment. Hierarchies are found not only in bureaucratic institutions; there are also perceptual hierarchies. The macro- & microcosmic levels of organization are intricately interrelated, they continually feed each other & maintain each other’s existence. We learn, through the process of “growing up,” through education, through all the modes of socialization, to perceive the world according to certain linear patterns of cause & effect / of stimuli & response / “obsessional associational tracks” (William Burroughs). These are the same bureaucratic correct-channels of individuated consciousness down which society “naturally” funnels its positive feedback, its need for conformity. The individual mind learns to believe Madison Avenue; it trusts the mass media. The individual & societal levels of organization reflect each other’s structures, and they will continue to do so until maximal damage is done to their relationship itself. Destroy just one and the other will regenerate it.
The figurative “place” in which this two-fold activity takes place we will call the “field of play.” Yippies, who also attempt to create subversive situations, would call it “theater,” a stage, and it is at this point that we begin to mark their failure. They wish, by their own admission, to create a more attractive Spectacle than has been developed by capitalism. But every spectacle demands spectators — the passive, the alienated, the over-fed, the multitude of mimetic followers. The subversive act, in its purity, allows for no spectators; there are no bleacher seats around this field. Spectators are attacked for being just that: it is the spectacle itself, in any mutation, which must be conclusively undermined.
See the field, on its simplest level, as a sort of loom upon which all fragments are interwoven and revealed in a unitary perspective. All possible/necessary connections are made. Subversion devalues each fragmented element in the hierarchy of appearances; each isolated commodity — whether it be an inanimate object or an objectified human, both of which sell themselves on the marketplace — is projected into the significance of the Whole, the totality, the entire unitary field. This is the level at which theory is created, the level of fundamental critique, and thus it serves as the starting point of the act.
It must be made clear that the diagram of the field which follows operates on a purely HORIZONTAL level, and that all relations within it are thus relations of real equals. This is as opposed to the vertical organization of all hierarchies & bureaucracies. Subversion attempts to cut across the vertical plane of leadership & directive, across the whole mystique of Progress raising man above nature, across the ladder of success. (The problem of directive is one reason why the language of this essay aims to be clear but figurative. The energy necessary for the subversive project always belongs to everyone who can realize his own power. But for us to offer scenarios/programs would be to lapse back into old leadership molds. Like the proponents of community organizing, who do the primary work at the same time that they congratulate their constituencies for being so original. Instead, we would like to remind you, comrade, that the burden remains your own.)
TRUST IN | DISTRUST IN | DISTRUST
APPEARANCES | APPEARANCES | IN TRUST
| |
\ | |
\| |
THE |\ THE ACT |
SPECTACLE _ _| _\_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
OF THE | / \ | nihilism
COMMODITY |/ | |
/| <-/ |
/ | reflexion; |
| Opening |
<--positive feedback negative feed-through-->
We take the area to the left of the dotted line as the status quo, the place to which positive feedback directs us, the given world constituted by an uninterrupted absence of full contradiction. Subversion acts as a corrosive agent on this line, this veil of appearances. It lets the light through in such a way that everyone gravitates to the light; it attempts to create an energy/force which will hurl each individual past Trust in the spectacular arrangement of appearances.
There is a great danger here, if the act is truly powerful, and that is that it could well destroy not only the cosmetic appearances, but the skin as well; then the act has gone too far, surpassing even trust in trust itself. This is the ultimate “paranoid flash,” where all trust is dissolved, and subversive energy loses itself in the stasis of nihilism. And stasis is death.
But instead, like in a game of “Chicken,” the subject/object of the act hurtles across the playing field, propelled by the force of the act, toward certain annihilation/nihilism, & then, at the last possible moment before flying out of the playing field altogether, turns. Turning enables one to see oneself within the process of the act, to see what in truth has just happened. This is a delicate moment, this reflexive turning, and it is upon it that everything else hinges; it is in reflexion without mediation by appearances that the act seeks its relationship to the individual. Here, at this juncture, the open space is created, and the subjects/objects pass through, each to reinhabit his/her own responsibility for & active involvement in the subversive act. We must never be left with the feeling that we were merely acted upon.
In truth, however, none of the lines in the diagram really exist, they are all mere figurative referents, for there are no boundaries to subversion, or, rather, the boundaries are forever in flux, forever changing. We must never be given the chance to fix a final, static Frame (i.e. standard of reference) around the subversive act and call it, say, Art. All frames separate that which is within them from that which is outside of them, as Art is distinct from everyday life. Subversion has nothing to do with Art, but it is quite capable, when necessary, of making use of art. You cannot pin the act down within such a frame; try to do so & we will destroy the frame itself, all the stages & pedestals upon which you try to place it. The field of play must fuse with everyday life. The subversive act is never a thing-in-itself, it is never per se an object of the understanding. Subversion is more like a heat, an invisible force always seeking to create the Opening & being itself the opening it creates.
Let us make clear that in designating a field, an act, we do not mean to imply that these acts are necessarily isolated, individual acts. Incredible damage can & must be done to the smooth flow of the Spectacle by using sequential activity in which subversion should attempt to disrupt the progression of associations and appearances by inserting nonlinear, seemingly random elements into the linear flow. Beneath a guise of logic, do what is most illogical. Expectations & trust in the ordered flow will crumble.
Neither is the field of play ever a closed system, formulaic & conclusive. Subversion does not mystify or immortalize itself. Rather, subversion is the activity of an agent or group which realizes itself in its own supersession. Subversion returns to itself not as itself, not as it was born, but changing, reconceived in a limitless perspective. The field of play is constituted such that even the subversive agents themselves cannot be immune from the cutting edge of the act: subversion subverts even its makers. It is the only language, the only gesture, which is so volatile that it always bears within itself its own critique. Its force is this: pleasure seeking itself.
The Identity of the Players
“Personality is a persona, a mask. The world is a stage, the self a theatrical creation . . . Personality is not innate, but acquired. Like a mask, it is a thing, a fetish, a fetishistic object or commodity.”
—N. O. Brown
Personality is not innate, but acquired. In modern society, however, individuals inevitably make the mistake of confusing the mask with the life it masks; personality becomes a sort of psychological body, one we believe to be naturalistically determined. But personality is in truth only the presentation of appearances to the social world, a presentation which is itself a re-presentation, in psychological form, of the socializing process.
“Who reduces the life of a man to such a pitiful chain of clichés? A journalist, a policeman, a popular novelist? Not in the least. It is the man himself who decomposes his day into a chain of poses more or less consciously chosen from the dominant stereotypes. Consciousness lost in a seduction of successive images, he turns away authentic pleasures to gain, by a passionately unjustifiable asceticism, an adulterated joy, too demonstrative not to be a façade. The roles assumed one after the other procure for him a titillation of satisfaction when he succeeds in modeling them loyally on the stereotypes. He draws the satisfaction of a role well fulfilled from his vehemence to become estranged from himself, to sacrifice himself.” (Raoul Vaneigem)
The set of relationships between personality & society can be pictured as a gyre of escalating alienation from authenticity. At its early stages, the development of social identity is a process in history, with a realized past & a realizable future. The personality of the individual is in flux proportionate to the flux of the society at large. The child & the adolescent imagine, &, to a degree, act out a series of roles, all of which in some way symbolize their assimilation of positive feedback. Even the adolescent’s role of “rebel” — unless the rebellion is total, stemming from a unitary critique — is by & large a mere stage of social development that will end on the sacrificial altar of alienated labor.
Marx informed us that capitalism reproduces itself on all levels of organization, both bureaucratically & in the individual consciousness. It is in this sense that he understood neurosis as the product of social disintegration. In a society whose driving force embodies, in part, alienation from authenticity, the chief means of protecting oneself is to accept such alienation as the “natural” state of things. Besides, it is easy to accept an alienation so comfortable, so full of nice things, as ours. Personality is the manifestation of this acceptance, it is the form of alienation; personality/identity can here be seen as an organism’s defense against a hostile environment: “the oyster’s identity is his shell” (Burroughs).
But when these identities are made conscious & articulated by, say, the mass media in a situation comedy or a commercial, then they become stereotypes. The series of roles becomes the absolute Role. The spectacle takes roles that are, in the first place, abstractions, and reifies them even further. The situation loses even a sense of historical change: “In the degree that the role conforms to a stereotype, it tends to fix itself, to take on the static character of its model. It has no present, no past, no future because it is a time of pose and, so to speak, a pause in time...” (Vaneigem). The individual, in embodying the stereotype, embodies his own abstraction; he wills himself, through his mask, to recapitulate his own alienation. This two-fold relationship between role & stereotype feeds itself, back & forth, gyrates out of control.
In short, personality is role. Once this is understood, we need no longer be trapped by our own identities, we need no longer confuse personality with authentic self, and we are thereby free to use identity as a tool in the subversive act. Let us take, as a metaphoric model for the subversive agent/actor, the mythological character of Proteus, “first man,” the prophetic old man of the sea who is remembered chiefly for his ability to assume new roles at will, to create viable disguises, to use appearance against the organization of appearances, which allows the agent/actor to move freely within the world of the Spectacle.
It is not only the field of play which resists being placed within a Frame: a distinguishing feature of the subversive act is that the actors themselves remain operationally invisible. They must assume countless disguises so as to avoid being caught, both physically (as by the police) and by an understanding which still has its roots in the standards of the Spectacle, i.e. which consigns the actors & their acts to the rigid finality of an absolute definition which is, in effect, irrelevant. It should be of no concern to the subjects/objects of the act who its agents are; their concern should be with their own lives. For the identity of the players can never be distinguished from the act itself, or from the field on which it takes place. The agents/actors/players must have a crystal-clear understanding of their roles, the specific identities they assume in the subversive act. They must always make explicit to themselves an exacting understanding of all their identities, because if once they become lost in their roles & forget them as roles, then the Spectacle has reclaimed them.
When the Yippies were called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, they appeared in a variety of disguises, or to be more accurate, costumes: Vietcong soldier, Latin American guerilla, Santa Claus, & so on. Through their costumed identities, they were able to turn the hearings into a comedy, a farce of themselves. In other words, they created a mini-spectacle. That is the way in which their act was recuperated; that is the frame which was put around it. If they had wanted to do real subversive damage, they might have gone as CIA agents, dressed in suits & ties, with forged official documents proving that they were, in fact, government operatives. (This is, of course, a gross example, but we refuse to be more specific.)
The subversive agent/actor has no wish to create theater, guerrilla or otherwise. The costumes of the Yippies are not viable disguises, & they know it, whereas a suit & tie & short hair are. Necessary invisibility can only be achieved when the roles assumed are so transparent that they never appear to be roles at all, but rather, identities as “real” as anyone else’s. Anything less than transparency, and the subversive act is reduced to absurdity. The Spectacle, quite simply, must not know nor be able to find out who its enemies are. In refuting the value of restrictive appearances, the actors/agents move to make themselves invisible to those who can see only appearances; the Spectacle cannot defend itself against them.
Modern man realizes himself largely through identifying himself with his possessions, and, furthermore, through identifying himself by his possessions. A man’s wealth is measured by the impoverished objects he accumulates into his life. He dresses himself in various uniforms, surrounds himself with a house, & fills the house to overflowing with commodities, all of which are meant to speak to the world for him. Commodities define & mediate for him his roles in the Spectacle. His possessions, in effect, possess him, he cannot escape them, because they constitute his mask, and he cannot distinguish the mask from the self.
Zen monks & others, in refusing to be owned by possessions, have for centuries taken vows of poverty, so that they could effectively remain free of the world of appearances, “maya,” the illusory Spectacle. The subversive agents/actors, however, do not wish merely to remain ascetically free from the Spectacle: they believe they can never be free until the Spectacle itself is crushed, so they continually intercede between men & their possessions, they persistently cut the bonds that chain a man to things & make of him, thus, a Thing.
We have said before that the force of subversion is the force of pleasure seeking itself. This is the playful energy that moves us away from slavery to things & thingness, away from slavery to appearances & their spectacular arrangement, away from all forms of alienation, and toward a society so constituted by change that we can continually realize our authentic natures. We find the energy to create the subversive act in the passion of play, such as disguises becoming a means of playing with identity. The quality of the act is in the pleasure it brings: if you make a social revolution, do it for fun. Subversion is a two-edged scalpel, a dialectical tool of a revolution that grows from our revolutionizing our daily lives. It is both the weapon of a pure negativity seeking to destroy the Spectacle through the game, and a mode of positive being which, by totally refusing the Spectacle, projects itself into a new order.
COUNCIL FOR THE ERUPTION OF THE MARVELOUS
May 1970
The original edition of On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel, which was published anonymously in an edition of 1800 copies, was partly set in poetic lines with no capitals and rather minimal punctuation. In order to make it easier to follow, I have reset it as prose text and restored ordinary capitalization and punctuation.
A Critique of
“On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel”
by One of Its Authors
“Thus the spectacle would be caused by the fact that modern man is too much of a spectator. Boorstin does not understand that the proliferation of the prefabricated ‘pseudo-events’ which he denounces flows from the simple fact that, in the massive reality of present social life, men do not themselves live events. It is because history itself haunts modern society like a specter that one finds pseudo-history constructed at every level of consumption of life, to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the present frozen time. . . . The critical theory of the spectacle can only be true by uniting with the practical current of negation in society; and this negation, the resumption of the revolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the spectacle which is the theory of its real conditions.”
—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, theses 200 and 203
I have hesitated for some time to write a critique of On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel not because its mistakes do not warrant such a project but because the pamphlet was an expression of all the incoherence of an “organization” of which I was a participant and whose mystifications and delusions I wish to expose in their fullness. I was reluctant, then, to tear this bit of pseudo-situationism from its history, the organizational confusion of the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous. However, the increasing number of enthusiastic responses and the reprinting of part of the pamphlet in an issue of It Ain’t Me Babe has made a critical supersession necessary. I don’t want to feel responsible for those who attack the spectacle with a dull knife.
The numerous incoherencies of this pamphlet, its anti-nihilist nihilism (“propelled by the force of the act, toward certain annihilation/nihilism”), its numerous vague references to an unnamed collectivity, its spectacular literary style of “daring” imagery (“a populous boat adrift in a sea beyond meaning”), its Burroughsian conception of personality as stimulus and response (“We learn . . . to perceive the world according to certain linear patterns of cause and effect / stimuli and response”), its anti-art protestations which never suggest the possibility for the realization of generalized creativity, are all the inevitable consequence of a method which is lacking nothing but dialectic, an understanding of past and future and of the production of the material world. The history of class struggle, of the attempts of the proletariat to negate its own alienation, is nowhere acknowledged in a pamphlet which claims to deal with social revolution. Once the “analysis” removes itself from the development of history, from the world of conflicting social forces, its task can only be that of justifying and ameliorating its lonely position outside of social practice.
The nihilism of the “subversive” method is the necessary consequence for those actors who imagine the other as “passive, well-fed” spectators of the parade of commodities. For in throwing out the producers the pamphlet must also throw out production. Alienation is described as “the commodities we buy, the washday miracles and phallic cars and color TVs, are the concrete reward we receive for a job well done, time well spent on the job.” The reproduction of daily life, the unconscious self-enslavement of the proletariat, is reduced to a response to the reward of the commodity. The production and consumption of the commodity are separable conceptually and tactically, but their unification as the passivity of participatory nonparticipation is the essential lie whose negation is necessary for the end of class society, the only revolutionary project, a possibility which the pamphlet never considers.
On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel rejects “scenarios/programs” as hierarchical and then, while pretending to be above organizing, substitutes its own manipulative practice, the awakening of the “mimetic followers” to the possibility of transforming their own daily lives. To anyone living in the real world this limited experiment is only the prelude to the real beginning of creative activity and worldwide experimentation. The real possibility of the supersession by the workers of their passive creativity is confused with the needs of the authors for a more interesting form of “nonhierarchical” activity. The project of nihilism becomes the project of everyone, if only by the omission of a discussion of revolutionary organization. Thus “this subversive act is no mere posing of an alternative solution for possible discussion: it is a fierce destruction / a cutting away and incineration of all forms of mediation / of popes, professors, cosmetics and kings; a total transformation or none at all.” Or “the machine of hierarchical power is broken beyond repair. Burn it. . . . We need to burn down the slum and clear the ground so that the forest can grow through.” But the new world is not like the forest, it does not grow without the conscious negation of class society by the practice of a social organization which is at once the active negation and the supersession of hierarchical power. This organization can only come from those who produce the material conditions which enchain them, the only class which can end class society, the proletariat.*
*The necessity for the total destruction of hierarchical power and the commodity economy remains with us. The traditional revolutionary workers’ movement failed to bring about this transformation of the world. At its most advanced moments (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956), however, it did outline the form that the revolution to come will take: the absolute power of workers councils. This antihierarchical form of organization begins from the direct democracy of the popular assembly and federates internationally by means of strictly mandated, immediately revocable delegates. In this way it avoids the possibility of the emergence of a new ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists.
ISAAC CRONIN
What Subversion
Really Is
“The dictatorship of the fragmentary makes détournement the only technique serving the totality. As a revolutionary gesture, détournement is the most coherent, the most popular, and the best adapted to revolutionary praxis. Following a sort of natural evolution — the passion of the game — it leads to the most radical action possible.”
—Raoul Vaneigem, Treatise on Living
What is talked about here as “subversion” is in French détournement subversif (subversive diversion or deflection). The initial conception of détournement derived from Lautréamont’s continual deflection of individual elements into new perspectives in Maldoror. It was but a step from this to pick up where Dada left off and take cultural fragments (by definition separate from the totality of social life) and divert them into the perspective of that social totality. For example, a Rembrandt painting could be made to say, “Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.” This is entirely different from “revolutionary art,” which uses separate, manipulative forms to propagate ideas of separate power, of an “alternative” manipulative social form. The movement attempts to create or take over — it struggles for — positions of dominance, instead of using them (if at all) to destroy themselves.
The Strasbourg scandal in France, 1966, was an exemplary subversive action. Some individuals, due to general student apathy, got themselves elected to the student union on no program. They then used university funds to run off ten thousand copies of the Situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life, which they distributed on orientation day. They also announced that their only “program” was the dissolution of the irrelevant, bureaucratic student union. Nothing more.
Thus, the original anti-cultural range of activity could be extended into “politics.” But the point is not to devalue anything just because it is ontologically “fragmentary,” but specifically this: The capitalist system creates a specific kind of hierarchy of fragments whose existence is determined by their position in that hierarchy. Human beings, as well as the wealth they create, are reduced to the quantitative, the cash nexus, reducing the individual’s “life” to a collection of banal gestures, a sum of roles. The Spectacle (analogous to religion in the feudal period) presents a false worldview: that happiness is measured by the number of impoverished objects possessed, for example; “everything has its proper place.” Subversive détournement does not seek to throw confusion into the Spectacle or into the consciousnesses of the alienated persons who produce and consume it. If a pretty woman on an advertising poster is altered so that “she” talks about her manipulative raison-d’être in the commodity system, the purpose is to make things clear. The fragment is made to expose itself in the perspective of the real possibility to change the system totally through the conscious, nonhierarchical action of the proletariat.
It should finally be mentioned that the importance of détournement is partly due to the fact that the traditional revolutionary movement’s failure showed the need for new tactics. Reformism and pseudo-revolutionary Leninism have demonstrated that entering the arena of power results in integration into the hierarchical system. The trade unions and mass parties contain revolt and actually consolidate the system by presenting the illusion of opposition to it. Subversive détournement, consequently, does not enter the system to change it. It playfully turns it against itself; at the same time that revolutionary organizations in relation to the proletariat begin to pose and solve the positive questions of supersession, and to solve them always in antagonism to the dominant system.
FREDERICK ENGELS
The two texts by Isaac Cronin and “Frederick Engels” (i.e. Ken Knabb) were issued together November 1970.
No copyright.
[Bureau Prehistory]
Other CEM publications:
[Leaflets] [“Great Moments in the Void” Trading Cards]
CEM Additions to
“On the Poverty of Student Life”
[ADDITIONS TO CHAPTER TWO]
. . . The “crisis of youth” — the refusal to become socialized to an alien world — is nearly universal. The variations are, as we have seen, only in the form: delinquent, mental patient, revolutionary. Even the recuperated youth — social worker, “Peace” Corps volunteer, peace marcher — seeks, in his guilt-ridden way, to rebuild the world.
We have seen in the 60s the rise of the “committed generation,” hailed by the dictators of power as the hope of the world. Youth everywhere is venting its dissatisfaction with society through more or less respectable political means. Often the refusal is expressed in pure form; at such times it is met with brutal repression. More often, however, we have seen youth be fooled into the “politics of the possible,” which only serves to legitimize the process which they oppose. “Fragmentary opposition is like the teeth on a cogwheel; they marry one another and make the machine go ’round, the machine of the spectacle, the machine of power” (Vaneigem).
We see this fragmentary opposition characterized by the French National Student Union (UNEF), which — as the training ground for future “Communist” parliamentarians — is nothing but the travesty of a travesty, the parody of a party which is the parody of itself. We saw it in England, and then in France and the U.S., with the rise and fall of the peace movement. The recent anti-imperialist marches lack the vigor of the early, naïve British marches, even though the politics have “escalated.” Pleading gets to be a bore after a while. Aimed primarily at television, the marches should be shown on the Late Show with the other old movies.
We see recuperation being purposefully perfected in America. The Peace Corps cherubs trudge off to exorcise their guilt; they return more guilty than when they left. When they return to the States they spend their summers in the South or in northern ghettoes killing the poor with kindness. (When this fails — as in the Watts celebration — power has other means at its disposal.) Then, since their devastating altruism knows no bounds, these children will walk a picket line in a trade union strike, mouthing incoherencies about restructuring the world through economism.
But what about Berkeley? Doesn’t the Free Speech Movement transcend this naïve reformism? American society needs its students; and by revolting against their studies they call that society into question. From the start they have seen their revolt against the university hierarchy as a revolt against the whole hierarchical system, the dictatorship of the economy and the State. (See, in particular, Mario Savio’s eloquent statement about the machine of power.) Their refusal to become an integrated part of the commodity economy is a revolutionary gesture. It puts in doubt the whole system of production which alienates activity and its products from their creators. For all its confusion and hesitancy, the FSM has discovered one truth of the new refusal: that a coherent revolutionary alternative can and must be found within the “affluent society.” There is an element of self-determination in their chaotic organization, but what they lack is genuine subversive content. Without it they continue to fall into dangerous contradictions. They may be hostile to the traditional politics of the old parties; but the hostility is futile, and will be recuperated, so long as it remains ignorant of the political system and deluded about the world situation. Abstract opposition to their own society produces facile sympathy with its apparent enemies, the so-called Socialist bureaucracies of China and Cuba. Brandishing little red books, quoting the monstrous logic of Chairman Mao (“The enemy’s enemy is your friend” is like saying “If you hate Coca-Cola, you’ll love Pepsi”), many American students can in the same breath condemn the State and praise the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” that pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times.*
*[Note to 1970 edition: We have seen, in the four years since the first publication of this pamphlet, the decay of the American New Left in the reduction to absurdity of two tendencies which had plagued it from the beginning: economism and blind worship of the Third World. The first tendency was manifest in the torturous strike at San Francisco State, where hundreds of students were injured and jailed while fighting for membership in the bureaucracy which repressed them. The second tendency is clearly seen in the amusing faction fights within SDS, where each faction claims a Third World bureaucrat/martyr as its guiding light in the fight for bureaucratic power within the organization.
A neo-Marxist economism has been adopted by the students through their curious relations with the trade unions: They lend support to wage strikes in an effort to “radicalize” the workers; yet by this very support the students actually reinforce union hierarchy. They go so far as to mimic trade-union style in their own “struggles” in an effort to “be like the workers.” The second tendency — worship of the Third World — has its roots in bourgeois guilt (“white skin privilege”) and nihilism.]
Many youths have expressed their anomie in an a-politicality which rejects both the Huntley-Brinkley World of Affairs and its New Left antagonists. These non-political people often offer a more profound critique of the spectacle society than does any political opposition. They understand that their lives are impoverished and that no political party, right or left, offers a way back from alienation. So they drop out and try to establish alternative lifestyles. Their refusal is limited, however, by their inability to sustain their lifestyles in the face of either political repression, or economic exploitation by record companies, dope-pushers, and hip clothiers. Country communes fail to support themselves, city communes are busted for possession of narcotics, tribes degenerate into random accumulations of fragmented individuals, drop-out communities become slums rife with VD and hepatitis. The counterculture is a mere alternative spectacle promoting consumption of alternative commodities: rock stars instead of politicians and football players, bellbottoms instead of pin-striped suits, dope instead of beer.
Still, we find people insisting on the viability of an a-political way of life. Traditionally, so-called revolutionaries have attacked the drop-out or deviant as “useless.” But now, in a society so capable of recuperating disparate elements, being useless is a radical act. However, the drop-outs have elevated their uselessness to the status of a religion, complete with initiation rites (the Acid Test), priests (Leary and the rock bands), dogma (cheap pantheistic love, comic-book astrology, bastardized Zen), and the rest. The drop-outs themselves become missionaries, True Believers proselytizing other youths to their Way. Their critique rigidifies into Holy Writ; it undergoes a closure such that only those who have seen the light can offer criticism of the new religions, and these initiates don’t. You simply can’t talk to them; either you understand and are with them, or you don’t understand and are dismissed as a heathen. This closure becomes the very means of their self-delusion and is the source of false hope. They call their counterculture revolutionary; in the mean time, the spectacle society packages their symbols and sells them back to these revolutionaries in psychedelic wrappings.
The decay of the socialization process and of bourgeois values has forced many to grab onto new ideologies no more viable than the old religions. We have what historians call an ethical vacuum, similar to that which existed before the rise of Christianity. In an escapist revolt against modern reality, many accept their politics as a profession of faith.
This attitude is evident in those Europeans and Americans who follow Fidel and Mao like gods. Their refusal to confront the realities of advanced capitalist society is no less escapist than the mystic’s. Tortured by guilt for living in imperialist countries, reveling in the scum of their own inadequacy, they desire only complete self-destruction. They thrill to the prophecies of their own annihilation: Believing the racist alarums about advancing yellow hordes, they run to prostrate themselves at the feet of the attacking conquerors. Their guilt is surpassed only by their impotence.
Countering this are the somewhat healthy impulses of the anarchists, which unfortunately do not find coherent expression. Like the anti-politician, the self-proclaimed anarchists reject the arena of power, distrusting all ideologies and leaders. Their downfall is their purity, which is manifest in their blind faith in the label of Anarchy. Thus while rejecting ideology they reject all critical theory; while rejecting leaders and hierarchies they think that the way to eliminate them is for everyone to be a leaderless follower. They become helpless waifs, quivering meat for the grinder of power, distinguishable from the beats only by the nagging feeling that maybe they should do something. Only their adamant refusal to study the world prevents them from discovering what to do.
We have outlined some of the roots of anomie and some of its fragmentary expressions. While embracing the “anti-social” sentiments of our contemporaries, we reject their manifestations when they serve to extend the sphere of power. We seek to destroy the hierarchical organization of power. Therefore we need to be unflinching in our critique, even of those closest to us. For unless the impulses of alienation from the spectacle can be converted into a coherent social critique, the revolutionary project is impossible. . . .
* * *
[CODA]
Time: a nonsensual dissection of memory and sensation into predictable clockwork segments. Objectified Time is an opiate which releases us from what we believe to be the horror of unexpected reflective pauses in the life-flow. Within these reflective pauses, we see that our temporal illusions make us sacrifice vision and integrity for mundane expediency. Objectified Time gives us the “advantage” of judging the value of the present from an approximation of the time mortally left to us. This sense of the past present future of life implants in us “expectation,” an evil which obliterates the everpresent for the promise of the future. Objective time, as such, is an artificial barrier, an excuse for less than passion in the same way that immortality is. Subjective time — our own unfixed time of random scales and rhythms — is an immense volume without fixed points of deadline or schedule, in which, therefore, all things are possible.
freed:
we go beyond our own stumbling shadows
beyond fear, beyond the gray penumbra
into consciousness
into the poetry of integrity
within (r)each
beyond the historical mirrors
in whose distorted reflections we lived
in whose refraction of desires we sought pleasure and guilt inseparable
beyond:
we abandon our oaths to lies and less than passion.
revolution:
something other than a point fixed in time, an explosive moment designating a beginning, delayed and yet to be born.
revolution: as continual birth and rebirth, the unearthing of a common playfulness, arrival out of the void.
revolution: a word for the extended moment
constant watchfulness
intrepid integrity and uninterrupted transformation
we proceed into
Ideology is inimical to uninterrupted transformation because to succeed with specific goals, the format of action must always adhere to the ideology. Ideology cannot be superseded by the information of the experience, and, in this way, does not allow for a chance collision/encounter with arbitrary realities, or for a point of departure. If such information threatens to transport consciousness beyond the edicts of the ideology, the latter is either sustained by enforced stasis or it culminates in its own suicide. The revolutionary process follows indeterminate labyrinthine possibilities: unforeseeable and uncontainable within the limitations of an ideology plotted from beginning to end.
theory, as opposed to ideology, has no stake in immortality and fluctuates/expands with the information of the daily and chance experience. the theory is inseparable from daily activity yet with words it symbolizes the present aspect, suspended for a moment of analysis or for reasons of communication. theory tells of victories: its exposition recapitulates its evolution.
we proceed into a council: no more than each member with each other member and all together; never a separate entity, a consensus. always the council journeys toward the coming closer and simultaneous becoming of revolutionary consciousness. this occurs in the eye of transformation, most rapidly when cohesion stems from the common goal of coherency (i.e., the fusion of oneself with one’s image of oneself, one’s behavior with one’s image of one’s behavior, the council’s theory-oriented image of itself with its daily activities). employing criticism as a merciless incision into the deep-pocketed banalities and contradictions which impair our transformation; uprooting false needs and pleasures and seeking the needs and pleasures of a life integrated with Life; following the answers to the seed of new questions, seeking inexhaustibly:
finding that continuity is change,
that the continuity of the council
is its ongoing metamorphosis.
From the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous’s rather freely adapted edition (May 1970, 3000 copies) of the 1966 situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life. While making only a few minor changes in chapters 1 and 3, they replaced most of chapter 2 (re the Provos, East European dissidents, Zengakuren, etc.) with a more detailed critique of subsequent developments in the American scene and added the coda after chapter 3. There was also an introduction (not reproduced here), which summed up a few basic points about the Strasbourg scandal and the May 1968 revolt.
No copyright.
1044 (1970)
Disruption of a Gary Snyder poetry reading (Berkeley, 4 May 1970). The disruption is described in How I Became a Situationist.
Reprinted from Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
[Buddhist Anarchism (essay by Gary Snyder)]
IN THIS THEATER, where the image of life substitutes for its realization, the only choice appears to be from among the variety of roles available. Separation — whether between the various roles in an individual actor’s repertoire (e.g. at work and at leisure) or in the “communication” between one performer and another — reigns everywhere.
As if by unspoken agreement, everyone consents to the inevitability of this farce. Discontent confines itself to demanding a new director and more equitable casting. Some, dissatisfied with this form of “change,” improvise more palatable characters, more amusing lines: alternatives within the range of roles allowed to them. In this way they rejuvenate a stale plot, and the Show goes on.
The least credible parts of the drama are reinforced by ideological sideshows. Thus, the entire genre is never questioned, postponing the day when we’ll really bring the house down.
* * *
In a game where each alternative is a form of self-denial, the only real choice is the refusal to play.
* * *
IN THE REVERSAL OF PERSPECTIVE, each individual element of the drama is viewed in relation to the entire real possibilities: projected into the Whole. Constraint, mediation, and role are resisted and transcended by their opposites, by these three inseparable projects: participation, founded on the passion of play; communication, founded on the passion of love; and realization, founded on the passion to create.
By its own lights, the Show seems to go on undisturbed; founded on separation, on the fragmentary, it cannot conceive of the unity of these projects as: a transparency of human relations favoring the real participation of everyone in the realization of each individual.
Thus, the Show confidently observes its performers continuing to speak their lines, unaware that certain “reversals” are being introduced which cannot be “dramatically” resolved — except through its own destruction.
* * *
By taking our dreams and desires as the base of our activity, and by playing this game totally and coherently, we make ourselves a contradiction to everything which contradicts our fundamental project:
the free construction
of daily life
Mini-pamphlet issued August 1970 by the group “1044.” Reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (which has the same Alice in Wonderland illustrations on the cover).
No copyright.
September 1970. Comic balloon printed on stickum paper. Designed to be cut out and pasted onto ad posters of the sort where a beautiful woman is juxtaposed with a masculine-oriented product.
No copyright.
[Bureau Prehistory]
Riot and Representation, by “Herbert Marcuse”
Pamphlet Fake, Says Marcuse
Riot and Representation
by Herbert Marcuse
____
The Significance of the Chicano Riot
In the wake of the riot of Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970 (with an encore on September 16), the various mouthpieces of the “left” have as usual raised their tiresome duststorm of protest, which never fails to bury the real significance of events. Hidden by shows of outrage at the police, by pleas that power better give the Chicano his share of the pie or else things might get out of hand again, by the martyrdom of a newspaper reporter who ducked into one too many bars, is the real event, the burning and looting, the riot. The noise of the left, and the media in general, serves to direct attention away from, reduce to insignificance, or apologize for the attack on bourgeois property rights. The left is so concerned with defending its right to arrange demonstrations and speeches, as boring to the participants as they are inconsequential to power, that it fails to celebrate the spontaneous activity of the people and to reveal its theoretical content.
The riot covered a three-square-mile area. Windows were smashed in virtually every store along a twelve block area and people felt free to loot and burn: one hundred seventy-eight businesses were hit, seven extensively damaged by fire. Police radio cars were burned and a bus of police reinforcements was attacked. Let the mystifyers talk about the “issue” of violence. A riot is a practical critique of the system, while a demonstration can serve to perpetuate what it seems to oppose. This riot interrupted a “Chicano moratorium” demonstration “against the war” which a coalition of Mexican-American groups had organized. Here the shared opposition of an ethnic group whose human potentialities are especially denied is falsified by being directed into demands for a more equitable share in the hierarchical system which dominates life generally. The demonstration was represented by its official organizers as a bid for fewer Chicano boys in Vietnam and more Chicano capitalists in East Los Angeles. The people were handled as constituents, brought together over particular issues. This false unity channels dissent into fragmentary opposition as it dissimulates the possibility of transforming the world totally. The so-called issue, whether it be the ratio of Chicanos in Vietnam, or the war itself, or United States foreign policy, serves to direct consciousness away from the totality and the possibility of liberating every aspect of daily life. Issue consciousness perpetuates hierarchical perception, concentrating on one aspect of the social conditions without revealing the whole. Demonstrations perpetuate hierarchical relationships. Twenty thousand bodies showed up to march and then to submit themselves to the boredom of listening to leaders speak about the designated issues which were to give the gathering its apparent unity.
But after the march, as the speakers were to begin, a crowd of thirsty demonstrators filled a nearby liquor store and began to help themselves to soft drinks and beer. The owner quickly locked the front door and when sheriff’s deputies arrived, “they let everyone out of the store one by one only after they had paid for their refreshments. Because of the anger of the crowd the deputies at the door were the first to be hit by rocks, the witness said” (Los Angeles Times).
Here the cops appear in their familiar and essential role as watchdogs of the commodity.(1) Poised in readiness, they attack to protect the chastity of the commodity, to disallow its rules being violated by some who, on this occasion, in the spirit of celebration, would not submit to its rationality. Acts which challenge bourgeois property rights have a clarity which could not be imagined by those who, thinking of themselves as representatives of the people, organize the passivity of the people by arranging monitored demonstrations for them. These representatives really serve the masters. In fact, the parade officials, true to their intentions to preserve hierarchical order, revealed their own collusion with the watchdogs. “Rosalio Munoz, chairman of the committee that organized the parade, said Sunday that deputies could have prevented much of the violence had they contacted parade officials before attempting to disperse the crowd. He said he and other parade organizers had been working closely with the Sheriff’s Department before the parade and that a plan had been developed to prevent trouble.” The plan was not put into effect, said a Lt. Wallace, because “there was not time to contact Munoz or other parade officials.”
Too late. The potlatch of destruction had begun. Bands of demonstrators ran up Whittier Boulevard smashing windows. A witness said: “It looked like wholesale looting. Whole families would pull up in front of appliance stores and go in and pick out a television set and drive away with it” (UPI). A fire station was attacked and the state and national flags were torn down. Pedestrians on both sides of Whittier Boulevard played target practice with patrol cars, having to aim their rocks just ahead of the cars as they sped by — sometimes missing the cars and hitting those on the other side of the street. It was a game and the commodity played its part, receiving its criticism in the streets; TV and stereo consoles were rolled out from the stores and combined with bus stop benches and logs in the construction of barricades for slowing down the targets. Here the goods which encourage passivity are turned against the forces of pacification. They acquire a new use in the hands of those who would not submit themselves to their logic, but who find a superior logic in the game of subversion.
The looter takes the “affluent” society at its word. He accepts the abundance, only doesn’t submit himself to the suffering that the society inflicts on those who sacrifice themselves for what it encourages them to want. He wants to possess the commodities shown to him everywhere, in the shop windows, in the media, while rejecting the rules of exchange and the sacrifice they entail. He rejects the commodity form which encloses goods in its grip and moulds them according to the motives of profit, according to the false needs created by Madison Avenue.
Once the commodity is not paid for, it is open to practical criticism; it becomes a toy, the principle of play takes over. Stealing as opposition to the organization of society is the negation of the rationality of the commodity. The goods can be put to the service of a radical subjectivity free from the sacrifices that perpetuate commodity production and consumption and they find themselves on a new field, the field of play. The commodity is freed to be used in the destruction of the bourgeois world and ipso facto in its own destruction. Only when the means of production become toys for the manipulation of the proletariat, the class which ends class society, will life be freed from hierarchical subordination to commodity values.
The Chicanos of East Los Angeles — as the Blacks and the students — realize themselves as the new proletariat as they recognize that they have no control over the use of their lives. This recognition is penetrating ever more sections of a society which can count only on numbing it by feeding it a spectacle of dissent so that the recognition, caught in contemplation, may fail to translate itself into the coherent practical activity which will destroy the spectacle itself: a panoply of images which everyone is encouraged to contemplate so as to ignore the poverty of his own everyday life.
The commodity is the heart of the spectacle. In itself a TV or a refrigerator is a passive, insensible thing in submission to the first comer to make use of it. In the spectacle, its image parades, ever suggestively, for the admiration of a passive consumer who submits himself more and more to his own passivity. Having no real power over material abundance, he is reduced to choosing from among the false alternatives offered to him: Ford or Chevy, Tide or Cheer, Humphrey or Nixon. The spectacle invades his life, emptying it of self-activity. The people of East Los Angeles show by their actions the desire to cease to be mere consumers; in their gaiety they betray a desire for life over and above the “fair share” in abundance which their integration into the American hierarchy would assure them. The prosperity they might share is not a static sphere, but rather a ladder without end. Whatever buying power an individual may attain, he will still not have power over his own life. Life remains subordinated to commodity values, most clearly for minority groups because they suffer the humiliation of having their human riches especially despised. The question is the control of material abundance, whether it is to be dished out in ever fairer amounts according to the rationality of the commodity form, or whether it is to come under the power of collective imagination, into the field of play. The protest of the rioter is not Chicano protest or Black protest or student protest, it is the protest of the real single individual unmediated, sacrificing himself to no ideal absolute, whether party, nationality or community. A riot is an explosion of radical subjectivity in which the identity of the claims of the individual and of the collective begins to show itself practically. To the old world it is insanity. “Everyone was crazy, just crazy,” said the owner of an appliance store in Wilmongton, a town near LA where a riot broke out the next day. “Somebody would throw a brick through a window and everyone would laugh and clap.” It is a superior logic which will destroy the old world.
Let the capitalists grieve over the one million dollars in damage. By destroying commodities, by burning the palaces of commodity consumption, the rioters assert their human superiority over the dead things which dominate life.
* * *
The project of the subversion of the commodity and the transformation of the world which it dominates is beginning again in earnest. It flames up in a riot. As repression contains it, the sense of a riot may be lost even to the participants. The spontaneity of the riot is replaced by the representation of it by the left; the memory of it is reified, contained ideologically, catapulted into the spectacle as a special and specialized phenomenon, “the Chicano riot,” with its own particular issues trailing it like tails. In the spectacle it is just another riot to titillate the need for excitement, here consumed passively. An exciting life is what remains to be constructed by the revolutionary proletariat. Where authentic revolt does not recognize itself for what it is, the routine of daily life reasserts itself and revolt fails to continue.
The proletarian project will be realized as people who recognize their own powerlessness begin to take power over their own lives. The proletariat has begun to sketch its solution to the problem of the social organization of its power in the historical experience of Workers Councils (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, Hungary 1956), direct and total democracy in control of the means of production and all aspects of life.
As the new revolutionary movement (marked for example by Hungary 1956, Watts 1965,(2) and France 1968, and as distinguished from the traditional revolutionary proletarian movement) gains momentum, it cannot fail to gain consciousness of itself as an international movement in opposition to a universally dominant system. A local outburst adds its significance to a sequence of events which aims toward the transformation of a world totally dominated by the rationality of the commodity, by private or state capitalism, by bosses, by bureaucrats.
The terrain of struggle is no longer limited to work. As the rationality of the commodity-spectacle reaches out into every aspect of daily life, so does the struggle against it, its motive being nothing other than the will to live. Caught in the vortex of consumption, many do not yet realize that the activities which fill up both work and leisure destroy life as surely as poison. Those who imagine that any particular or quantitative changes can ultimately satisfy the will to live in a world of material abundance surely underestimate the power of human spontaneity and its hunger to take hold of all things.
HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL
THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH
THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST
[NOTES]
1. A commodity is a good which is bought and sold; its value is determined not by its usefulness but by its power to bring the capitalist profit.
2. For the best analysis of the Watts riot, see the pamphlet The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. I have drawn heavily on it. —H.M.
Pamphlet published October 1970. Signed “by Herbert Marcuse.” Actually by the Berkeley situationist group “1044.” 700 copies were circulated, some in Los Angeles and San Diego.
No copyright.
Pamphlet Fake, Marcuse Says
Editor:
A pamphlet entitled “Riot and Representation, by Herbert Marcuse” (the significance of the Chicano riots) is being distributed on campus. This pamphlet is an outright forgery. I neither wrote it nor contributed to its writing, nor do I know who is responsible.
—Herbert Marcuse
When interviewed by the TRITON TIMES, Professor Marcuse, who is now retired from the Philosophy Department but has been continuing voluntarily to assist in graduate teaching, stated that he would not comment further because “there is nothing further to say.”
The pamphlet, eight pages long, appeared to be typed on an IBM “Selectric” typewriter and offset-printed. It argued that rioting “is the protest of the real single individual unmediated, sacrificing himself to no ideal absolute,” using the recent disturbances in East Los Angeles to illustrate its claims.
At the end of the pamphlet, hand-printed, are the words, “HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST” — an apparent take-off on a remark often incorrectly attributed to Voltaire: “Humanity will not be free until the last monarch is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.”
While Marcuse has consistently refused to advocate violence, the pamphlet took the opposite viewpoint. In one place it stated, “those who imagine that any particular or quantitative changes can ultimately satisfy the will to live in a world of material abundance surely underestimate the power of human spontaneity and its hunger to take hold of all things.” Upon examination, the pamphlet appeared to have a strong undertone of right-wing, rather than left-wing ideology. It quoted consistently from police accounts of the Los Angeles disturbances and began with the statement, “the various mouthpieces of the ‘left’ have as usual raised their tiresome duststorm of protest, which never fails to bury the significance of events.”
Professor Avrum Stroll, Chairman of the Philosophy Department told the TRITON TIMES that Marcuse “would never disavow anything he’s written. It seems quite apparent to me that he has not writtern it (the pamphlet) and knows nothing about it. I find it quite outrageous that where Herbert has volunteered to help work with the education of graduate students, that some people should take advantage of him in that way.” Stroll added that the pamphlet was “obviously intended to embarrass Herbert.”
From the Triton Times (student newspaper of the University of California at San Diego),
13 November 1970.
[Bureau Prehistory]
Ode on the
Absence of Real Poetry
Here This Afternoon
— A Poem in Dialectical Prose —
Poetry, as poets are fond of relating, originated from religious or magical incantations. The respect for the bard was due to the fact that his words mattered. Supposedly, the precise phrases and refrains were necessary to keep the crops growing, etc.
Literary poetry has lost this significance, and its most advanced creators know it. Rimbaud is the archetypal example of the attempt to recover the magical. He failed. And this failure was and is inevitable. The poem form precludes the possibility of the realization of poetry, that is, of the effective realization of the imagination in the world. The institution of poetry is itself a social relationship inimical to that project. It inherits the specialization of creativity, of authentic utterance, from its origin with the priestly classes, and it returns there. Even such a one as Rimbaud, for all his passion for freedom and the marvelous, ends by developing the conception of the poet as a new priest or shaman, a new mediator of communication. But the realization of poetry entails the direct creative activity of everyone, and hence cannot tolerate such mediation. “The problem is to really possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented in poetico-artistic works” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle).
* * *
“Divide and rule” may be said to be the essential tactic of the social system that dominates us, but only if it is understood that this applies not only to separation between individuals, but equally to the division between various aspects of daily life. This enforced separation has attained its realization in the spectacle, the incarnation of the seemingly lived. The spectacle takes the truth of this society, namely its falseness and separation, and presents it as real, as reality, life to be contemplated by passive spectators who have no real life of their own. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images” (Debord). But in spite of all the images of satisfaction it presents, modern capitalism cannot hide the fact that it does not allow the fulfillment of real human desires. As the poverty of passive consumership (of commodities or culture) becomes more obvious, the spectacle provides a whole range of cultural activities which offer the illusion of “participation”: Happenings, encounter groups, open readings, the World Game, be-ins, mixed-media festivals — anything that will take the passionate radicality, the ever-more-widespread poetry of revolt, and channel it into “constructive solutions” or fragmentary opposition, both of which equally reinforce the system they think they are overcoming. “The last hope of the rulers is to make everyone the organizer of their own passivity” (Raoul Vaneigem, Treatise on Living).
As with the spectacle in general, the communication of a poem is unilateral. The passive spectator or reader is presented with an image of what was lived by the poet. An open reading only apparently overcomes this criticism; it democratizes the role of poet, it shares access to the top of a hierarchical relation. It does not overcome that relation.
Of course, a certain degree of communication does take place, but it is communication in isolation, it is not directly tied to the real daily activities of the men and women involved. Since our daily activities are, in general, constrained and alienated, it is natural that poetic creativity (if it is not conscious of the project that supersedes separation, and hence literary poetry) in its own defense tends to retreat from daily life. It accepts an isolated realm where its partial game can play itself with a consoling illusion of wholeness. “Poetry rarely becomes a poem. Most works of art betray poetry. . . . At best, the creativity of the artist imprisons itself, it cloisters itself, waiting its hour, in a work which has not said its last word; but however much the author expects of this last word — the word preceding perfect communication — it will never be spoken until the revolt of creativity has taken art to its realization” (Vaneigem).
Poetry that is conscious of its own fulfillment in its own supersession never leaves daily life, for it is itself the project of the uninterrupted transformation of daily life.
* * *
The necessity for the total destruction of hierarchical power and the commodity economy remains with us. The traditional revolutionary workers movement failed to bring about this transformation of the world. At its most advanced moments (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956), however, it did outline the form that the revolution to come will take: the absolute power of workers councils. This antihierarchical form of organization begins from the direct democracy of the popular assembly and federates internationally by means of strictly mandated, immediately revocable delegates. In this way it avoids the possibility of the emergence of a new ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists.
The Leninist-type “vanguard party,” so widely acclaimed at present, was one of the major reasons for the defeat of the classical workers movement. Consciously or not, by setting itself up as a separate, independent force, it prepares the way for its own “revolutionary” power over the people, as in the state-capitalist regimes of Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Any organization aiming to bring about the destruction of class society must begin by refusing to emulate this example of revolutionary “success.” A revolutionary organization must abolish commodity relations and hierarchy within itself. It must effect the direct fusion of critical theory and practical activity, precluding any possibility of petrification into ideology. Just as the councils will control and transform all aspects of liberated life, the revolutionary organization must embody a critique of all aspects of presently alienated life. At the revolutionary moment of the dissolution of social separation, it must dissolve itself as a separate power.
The last revolution in human prehistory will realize the unity of the rational and the passionate; the unity of work and play in the free construction of daily life; the game of the fulfillment of the desires of everyone: what Lautréamont called “poetry made by all, not just by one.”
Read by Ken Knabb at an open poetry reading in Berkeley, 27 October 1970. Reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
A Critique of
“On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel”
by One of Its Authors
“Thus the spectacle would be caused by the fact that modern man is too much of a spectator. Boorstin does not understand that the proliferation of the prefabricated ‘pseudo-events’ which he denounces flows from the simple fact that, in the massive reality of present social life, men do not themselves live events. It is because history itself haunts modern society like a specter that one finds pseudo-history constructed at every level of consumption of life, to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the present frozen time. . . . The critical theory of the spectacle can only be true by uniting with the practical current of negation in society; and this negation, the resumption of the revolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the spectacle which is the theory of its real conditions.”
—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, theses 200 and 203
I have hesitated for some time to write a critique of On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel not because its mistakes do not warrant such a project but because the pamphlet was an expression of all the incoherence of an “organization” of which I was a participant and whose mystifications and delusions I wish to expose in their fullness. I was reluctant, then, to tear this bit of pseudo-situationism from its history, the organizational confusion of the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous. However, the increasing number of enthusiastic responses and the reprinting of part of the pamphlet in an issue of It Ain’t Me Babe has made a critical supersession necessary. I don’t want to feel responsible for those who attack the spectacle with a dull knife.
The numerous incoherencies of this pamphlet, its anti-nihilist nihilism (“propelled by the force of the act, toward certain annihilation/nihilism”), its numerous vague references to an unnamed collectivity, its spectacular literary style of “daring” imagery (“a populous boat adrift in a sea beyond meaning”), its Burroughsian conception of personality as stimulus and response (“We learn . . . to perceive the world according to certain linear patterns of cause and effect / stimuli and response”), its anti-art protestations which never suggest the possibility for the realization of generalized creativity, are all the inevitable consequence of a method which is lacking nothing but dialectic, an understanding of past and future and of the production of the material world. The history of class struggle, of the attempts of the proletariat to negate its own alienation, is nowhere acknowledged in a pamphlet which claims to deal with social revolution. Once the “analysis” removes itself from the development of history, from the world of conflicting social forces, its task can only be that of justifying and ameliorating its lonely position outside of social practice.
The nihilism of the “subversive” method is the necessary consequence for those actors who imagine the other as “passive, well-fed” spectators of the parade of commodities. For in throwing out the producers the pamphlet must also throw out production. Alienation is described as “the commodities we buy, the washday miracles and phallic cars and color TVs, are the concrete reward we receive for a job well done, time well spent on the job.” The reproduction of daily life, the unconscious self-enslavement of the proletariat, is reduced to a response to the reward of the commodity. The production and consumption of the commodity are separable conceptually and tactically, but their unification as the passivity of participatory nonparticipation is the essential lie whose negation is necessary for the end of class society, the only revolutionary project, a possibility which the pamphlet never considers.
On Wielding the Subversive Scalpel rejects “scenarios/programs” as hierarchical and then, while pretending to be above organizing, substitutes its own manipulative practice, the awakening of the “mimetic followers” to the possibility of transforming their own daily lives. To anyone living in the real world this limited experiment is only the prelude to the real beginning of creative activity and worldwide experimentation. The real possibility of the supersession by the workers of their passive creativity is confused with the needs of the authors for a more interesting form of “nonhierarchical” activity. The project of nihilism becomes the project of everyone, if only by the omission of a discussion of revolutionary organization. Thus “this subversive act is no mere posing of an alternative solution for possible discussion: it is a fierce destruction / a cutting away and incineration of all forms of mediation / of popes, professors, cosmetics and kings; a total transformation or none at all.” Or “the machine of hierarchical power is broken beyond repair. Burn it. . . . We need to burn down the slum and clear the ground so that the forest can grow through.” But the new world is not like the forest, it does not grow without the conscious negation of class society by the practice of a social organization which is at once the active negation and the supersession of hierarchical power. This organization can only come from those who produce the material conditions which enchain them, the only class which can end class society, the proletariat.*
*The necessity for the total destruction of hierarchical power and the commodity economy remains with us. The traditional revolutionary workers’ movement failed to bring about this transformation of the world. At its most advanced moments (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956), however, it did outline the form that the revolution to come will take: the absolute power of workers councils. This antihierarchical form of organization begins from the direct democracy of the popular assembly and federates internationally by means of strictly mandated, immediately revocable delegates. In this way it avoids the possibility of the emergence of a new ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists.
ISAAC CRONIN
What Subversion
Really Is
“The dictatorship of the fragmentary makes détournement the only technique serving the totality. As a revolutionary gesture, détournement is the most coherent, the most popular, and the best adapted to revolutionary praxis. Following a sort of natural evolution — the passion of the game — it leads to the most radical action possible.”
—Raoul Vaneigem, Treatise on Living
What is talked about here as “subversion” is in French détournement subversif (subversive diversion or deflection). The initial conception of détournement derived from Lautréamont’s continual deflection of individual elements into new perspectives in Maldoror. It was but a step from this to pick up where Dada left off and take cultural fragments (by definition separate from the totality of social life) and divert them into the perspective of that social totality. For example, a Rembrandt painting could be made to say, “Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.” This is entirely different from “revolutionary art,” which uses separate, manipulative forms to propagate ideas of separate power, of an “alternative” manipulative social form. The movement attempts to create or take over — it struggles for — positions of dominance, instead of using them (if at all) to destroy themselves.
The Strasbourg scandal in France, 1966, was an exemplary subversive action. Some individuals, due to general student apathy, got themselves elected to the student union on no program. They then used university funds to run off ten thousand copies of the Situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life, which they distributed on orientation day. They also announced that their only “program” was the dissolution of the irrelevant, bureaucratic student union. Nothing more.
Thus, the original anti-cultural range of activity could be extended into “politics.” But the point is not to devalue anything just because it is ontologically “fragmentary,” but specifically this: The capitalist system creates a specific kind of hierarchy of fragments whose existence is determined by their position in that hierarchy. Human beings, as well as the wealth they create, are reduced to the quantitative, the cash nexus, reducing the individual’s “life” to a collection of banal gestures, a sum of roles. The Spectacle (analogous to religion in the feudal period) presents a false worldview: that happiness is measured by the number of impoverished objects possessed, for example; “everything has its proper place.” Subversive détournement does not seek to throw confusion into the Spectacle or into the consciousnesses of the alienated persons who produce and consume it. If a pretty woman on an advertising poster is altered so that “she” talks about her manipulative raison-d’être in the commodity system, the purpose is to make things clear. The fragment is made to expose itself in the perspective of the real possibility to change the system totally through the conscious, nonhierarchical action of the proletariat.
It should finally be mentioned that the importance of détournement is partly due to the fact that the traditional revolutionary movement’s failure showed the need for new tactics. Reformism and pseudo-revolutionary Leninism have demonstrated that entering the arena of power results in integration into the hierarchical system. The trade unions and mass parties contain revolt and actually consolidate the system by presenting the illusion of opposition to it. Subversive détournement, consequently, does not enter the system to change it. It playfully turns it against itself; at the same time that revolutionary organizations in relation to the proletariat begin to pose and solve the positive questions of supersession, and to solve them always in antagonism to the dominant system.
FREDERICK ENGELS
The two texts by Isaac Cronin and “Frederick Engels” (i.e. Ken Knabb) were issued together November 1970.
No copyright.
Contradiction (1970-1972)
January 1970. Poster issued following the December-January worker revolt in Poland. Reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
The text, which I don’t know how to make more legible without making the image prohibitively large, reads as follows:
BUREAUCRATIC COMIX
Box: The uprising in Poland is only the most recent gesture in the developing struggle against modern capitalism. But like other revolutionary moments, from Hungary 1956 to France 1968, it exposes the ideological falsifications of those who claim to speak for that movement, from the pseudo-socialist East to the bureaucrats of the Spectacle of Opposition. . . .
Child: It often happens that the “excesses” of a revolt are precisely its most revealing moments — when everything becomes transparent, tangible, within everybody’s grasp. But it is also precisely these theoretico-practical advances which are obscured by the ideologues of the “Left.”
Newspaper clipping: “Then things began to move rapidly. The windows of the Communist party building were smashed. A group of youngsters climbed up the walls and into the building and began to throw out furniture, paper and other things, while people down in the street clapped their hands. When a very expensive table in jacaranda wood was thrown out of the window, everybody shouted with joy.”
Tom Hayden: The people wouldn’t have had to go so far if the rulers hadn’t been such pigs. Otherwise, we could have continued our nice manipulative “opposition.” (Don’t forget to vote for “community control of alienation”!)
Box: What a pity. Precisely because the insurgents in Poland, as in Watts, temporarily avoided such false-consciousness, they manifested a critique in acts of the commodity itself, demystifying that famous fetishism described by Marx over a century ago.
Child: The looting of furs and champagne by the Polish celebrants is no more an example of their “attraction to the Western way of life” or “bourgeois revisionist degeneracy” than the looting of Watts was proof of the essential integration of blacks into the American system.
Another child: These actions should instead be considered as positive signs of the new social order now possible: “To each according to his own desires” — in this case, still the false desires and “needs” produced by the commodity system.*
Footnote: *On the game in Watts, see the pamphlet The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy by the Situationist International.
Box: “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. . . . A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing . . . because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor.” (MARX)
Side box: MEANWHILE . . .
Gangster 1: Christ! Another spontaneous struggle where the people are acting on their own and for themselves. Where does that leave us Movement leaders?
Gangster 2: You can see why we have to push sacrificial militantism: armies of activists ready to sacrifice themselves to our ideology (= dogma). Any ideas for a good slogan?
Gangster 3: I like “Forget your life, serve the people!”
Gangster 4: How about “Revolutionary suicide!”?
Box: “REVOLUTION CEASES TO BE AS SOON AS IT DEMANDS SELF-SACRIFICE” (France, May 1968).
Box: Picture of Mao above a huge crowd, labeled “PORTRAIT OF ALIENATION” and followed by this quote: “Their lives are so squalid that the majority can only live as a caricature of the Master. . . . To the sacrifice of the dispossessed, who through his work exchanges his real life for an apparent one, the proprietor replies by appearing to sacrifice his nature as proprietor and exploiter; he excludes himself mythically, he puts himself at the service of everyone and of myth. . . . Renouncing common life, he is the poor man amidst illusory wealth, he who sacrifices himself for everyone while other people only sacrifice themselves for their own sake, for the sake of their survival. The more powerful he is, the more spectacular his sacrifice. He becomes the living reference point of the whole of illusory life.” (Raoul Vaneigem, The Totality for Kids [= Basic Banalities #8])
Child: A critique of the commodity in a state-capitalist society becomes directly a critique of bureaucratic class rule itself. The official truth of the bureaucracy — that it does not exist as a separate class — is exposed as a lie by the events themselves. The rulers and their Movement counterparts attempt to divert the radical critique of all hierarchical power into false choices between “good” and “bad” bureaucrats. . . .
Newspaper clipping: “The local Communist party leadership hung a white flag from a window of the top floor and left the building with their hands up. The house was set on fire and party officials were seized by about 3,000 shipyard workers who had marched in from the harbor.”
Eldridge Cleaver: Poland is a pig state, unlike North Korea, etc., where the rulers (whose ranks we aspire to join) are so kind as to serve the (survival) needs of the people they exploit.
Jerry Rubin: Like Bernardine [Dohrn] says,* there are good leaders and bad ones. Good ones are defined as those who are able to manipulate people into “freely” following them. Me? Shucks, I’m a “non-leader”!
Footnote: *See the Tribe, December 18-25.
Side box: The more far-seeing regimes attempt to recuperate (take under their wing, deflect into partial solutions) the struggle for proletarian power. . . .
Castro: Under our tactful rule (as similarly in Yugoslavia and Algeria) the people are free to make all the decisions that — change nothing. The factory and farm councils are allowed to participate — within the state-controlled framework of alienated labor. Viva self-management!
Child: Stinking pig of a bureaucrat!
Another child: Proletarian revolution must recognize its tactics as self-management at every level of the struggle; and its goal as the management of all aspects of life by the workers councils!
Child: In the development of the proletarian critique of bureaucratic state-capitalism, the greatest danger will be to stop half-way. Thus, Kuron and Modzelewski’s important Open Letter to Polish Communist Party Members, as with recent anti-bureaucratic formulations in China,* attempts to reconcile the power of workers councils with a return to “true Leninism.”
Footnote: *Not to be confused with the “Cultural Revolution,” that spectacular pseudo-revolt produced by courtesy of the Chinese ruling class.
Lenin: The Stalinist class societies are only a natural (if excessive) development from the original Bolshevik seizure of totalitarian state power in 1917. My famous “vanguard party” theory of organization led to the greatest single defeat of the classical revolutionary movement: the power of the party over the masses, ruling in the name of the proletariat.
Trotsky: The real truth of Leninism was revealed when we slaughtered the Kronstadt soviet and the anarcho-communist peasants of the Ukraine in 1921. Yet fifty years later our faithful followers continue the alienating hierarchy within their organizations, and the corresponding manipulative practice “leading” the masses. They only reinforce (by presenting a false form of opposition) the capitalist system which still reigns everywhere.
Child: So far, the movements in the Third World have only tried to emulate the Bolshevik coup; and the Movement in the U.S. can only worship these underdeveloped imitations of revolutionary failure.
Voice off: Ho lives!
Box: One “anti-imperialist” star:
Ho Chi Minh: Yes, kids, here’s ol’ Uncle Ho back from the grave! And you can be sure I’d support the Polish regime’s actions just like I did the Russian interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. I’m not exactly a stranger to crushing autonomous popular revolts myself, you know. (Cf. the 1945 Saigon insurrection and the peasant uprising in 1956.) But you’ve got to support me anyway, sucker: I’m Third World, remember?
Pogo: The real struggle is still for “All power to the soviets (workers councils)” — but this time without the Bolshevik afterthoughts. This power (outlined in Spain 1936 and Hungary 1956) must not be mediated by anyone representing the people; the councils will federate with each other by means of strictly mandated, immediately revocable delegates. The total democracy of the councils (whose first project will be the abolition of work) will be the effective end of all hierarchical power.
Lady worm: . . . and of the commodity economy, too!
Child: In the end, it is only through the refusal of ideology, of sacrifice, of representation — all the rotten leftovers from the old world — that we will be able to annihilate everything that stands in the way of our desires, and live without dead time!
Mother: Practice must seek its theory!
Box: For the Power of the Councils, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, 94704
[MORE COMICS]
Open Letter to John Zerzan,
anti-bureaucrat of the
San Francisco Social Services Employees Union
We were encouraged by the critique of “revolutionaries” which you sent us, but the argument which we had with you last week reminded us that no dialogue is possible with an organizer of the proletariat, so we walked out on you. But you continue to plague us with letters. In one you accuse us of elitism, and in the next call ours “the only political outlook worth talking to,” while asking for our poster.
Revolutionary theory in your hands is only pornography for the titillation of a jaded voyeur. While consuming the theory of revolution, you make it your practice to enlist creative energy in pleadings about bureaucratic inefficiency, which encourage power to reform itself. You willfully contribute to the streamlining of capitalism into a self-adjusting, self-perpetuating mechanism, the cybernetic welfare state.
Your social worker mentality defines the possible, for those who listen, by the charity with which the here and now doles out grievance issues. Your organization is a hierarchy in which benevolent leaders furnish workers with advice and material means for the unlimited protraction, in the form of debate and compromise, of class conflict. Qualitative transformation remains always beyond the horizon. Your game, Zerzan, is to have everyone participate in his own alienation.
The autonomous practice of those who would be masters without slaves strikes you, and every other humanizer of the old world, as elitist. Beyond your bureaucratic worldview, though, is the revolutionary proletarian project, the autonomous struggle of workers for direct power. It is the supersession both of the elitist project, the realization of the select despite the many, and of the Leninist, the seizure of power by a party in the name of the proletariat. And it demands the end of the commodity and of wage-labor.
The workers council has been the highest organizational form of direct democracy created by the proletariat for the expression of its power. That power has been outlined in the proletarian revolutions of this century — Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, Hungary 1956. It is power without mediators.
_____
Note: Zerzan confuses us with the Situationist International (P.O. Box 491, NYC). We are an autonomous group in accord with the principle theses of the SI. (Inquiries to: P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA.) With the distribution of this leaflet, our Bureaucratic Comix is being affixed to the union hall wall.
CONTRADICTION
April 1971
150 copies. Distributed at a meeting of the SSEU, a would-be “participatory” labor union of which John Zerzan was one of the leaders. (Later, in a typical reactive flip from one simplistic ideology to another, Zerzan became an ardent anarcho-primitivist ideologue.)
No copyright.
[John Zerzan’s review of Public Secrets]
[Knabb’s reply to Zerzan]
[Bureau Prehistory]
In Short
(Two Summaries of Situationist Perspectives)
I
Internationale Situationniste is the journal of a group of theorists who over the last few years have undertaken a radical critique of modern society — a critique of what it really is and of all its aspects.
As the situationists see it, a universally dominant system, tending toward totalitarian self-regulation, is only apparently being combated by false forms of opposition — illusory forms which remain trapped on the system’s own terrain and thus only serve to reinforce it. Bureaucratic pseudosocialism is only the most grandiose of these disguises of the old world of hierarchy and alienated labor. The developing concentration of capitalism and the diversification of its global operation have given rise, on one hand, to the forced consumption of commodities produced in abundance, and on the other, to the control of the economy (and all of life) by bureaucrats who own the state; as well as to direct and indirect colonialism. But this system is far from having found a permanent solution to the incessant revolutionary crises of the historical epoch that began two centuries ago, for a new critical phase has opened: in Berkeley and Warsaw, in the Asturias and the Kivu, the system is being refuted and combated.
The situationists consider that this opposition implicitly requires the real abolition of all class societies, of commodity production and of wage labor; the supersession of art and all cultural accomplishments by their reentry into play through free creation in everyday life — and thus their true fulfillment; and the direct fusion of revolutionary theory and practice in an experimental activity that precludes any petrification into “ideologies,” which express the authority of experts and which always serve authoritarian expertise.
The factors at issue in this historical problem are the rapid extension and modernization of the fundamental contradictions within the present system and between that system and human desires. The social force that has an interest in resolving these contradictions — and the only force that is capable of resolving them — is the mass of workers who are powerless over the use of their own lives, deprived of any control over the fantastic accumulation of material possibilities that they produce. Such a resolution has already been sketched out in the emergence of democratic workers councils that make all decisions for themselves. The only intelligent venture within the present imbecilized world is for this new proletariat to carry out this project by forming itself into a class unmediated by any leadership.
The situationists declare that they have no interest outside the whole of this movement. They lay down no particular principles on which to base a movement which is real, a movement which is being born before our very eyes. Faced with the struggles that are beginning in various countries over various issues, the situationists see their task as putting forward the whole of the problem, elucidating its coherence, its theoretical and therefore practical unity. In short, within the various phases of the overall struggle they constantly represent the interest of the whole movement.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1965
II
The only reason the situationists do not call themselves “communists” is so as not to be confused with the cadres of pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese antiworker bureaucracies, leftovers from the great revolutionary failure that ultimately extended the universal dictatorship of the economy and the state.
The situationists do not constitute a particular party in competition with other self-styled “working-class” parties.
The situationists refuse to reproduce internally the hierarchical conditions of the dominant world. They denounce everywhere the specialized politics of the bosses of hierarchical groups and parties, who base the oppressive force of their delusory future class power on the organized passivity of their militants.
The situationists do not put forward any ideological principles on which to model and thus direct the movement of proletarians. They consider that up to now revolutionary ideology has only changed hands; the point is to dissolve it by opposing it with revolutionary theory.
The situationists are the most radical current of the proletarian movement in many countries, the current that constantly pushes forward. Seeking to clarify and coordinate the scattered struggles of revolutionary proletarians, they help to draw out the implications of their actions. Striving to maintain the highest degree of international revolutionary consciousness, with the new theoretical critique they have been able to predict everywhere the return of the modern revolution. They are feared not for the power they hold, but for the use they make of it.
The situationists have no interests separate from the interests of the proletariat as a whole. They expect everything and have nothing to fear from so-called “excesses,” which reflect the critical profundity of the new era and the positive richness of the liberated everyday life that is emerging.
In all the present struggles the situationists constantly bring to the forefront the project of abolishing “everything that exists separately from individuals” as the decisive issue for the movement working to negate the existing society.
The situationists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their only interest and only goal is a social revolution going to the point where all powers are concentrated in an international federation of workers councils, the power of everyone over all aspects of everyday life — over all aspects of the economy, of the society, and of history. The point is therefore not to modify private or state property, but to abolish it; not to mitigate class differences, but to abolish classes; not to “improve” the present society, but to create a new society; not to achieve some partial success that would give rise to a new division, but to thoroughly reject every new disguise of the old world.
The situationists have no doubt that the only possible program of modern revolution necessarily entails the formation of councils of all the workers, who by developing a clear awareness of all their enemies will become the sole power.
Revolutionaries are now turning their attention especially to Italy, because Italy is on the eve of a general uprising toward social revolution.
ITALIAN SECTION OF THE
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1969
The first text was appended to the first edition of The Class Struggles in Algeria (a poster distributed clandestinely in Algeria). On two or three later occasions it was separately reprinted (with slight variations) by the SI. Since I have never been able to locate a copy of the French original, I have simply made a few stylistic modifications to an earlier English translation.
The second text appeared as an appendix to the pamphlet Avviso al proletariato italiano sulle possibilità presenti della rivoluzione sociale (1969). The above version incorporates a few lines that were added in a reprinting the following year.
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the versions in the Situationist International Anthology).
No copyright.
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Still Out of Order
Open Letter to “Good Times”
Still Out of Order
Issued July 1971 by the groups Contradiction and Point-Blank (the latter of which had just previously put out a comic called “Out of Order”). 1000 copies were distributed to telephone workers during their brief national wildcat strike.
No copyright.
The text, which is too small to reproduce well online, reads:
Shit! First a wildcat, then sabotage, now another wildcat and workers refusing to go back to work. Where does that leave the CWA [Communication Workers of America]?
Comrades! The telephone workers have extended their game — let’s extend ours and up the ante!
All they lack is the consciousness of what they’ve already done!
Later...
Despite all the crap in the papers about union demands, we’ve made apparent what was already obvious — that everybody is bored shitless with work and will seize any chance to show it!
Joe Beirne and all those other union bureaucrats don’t fool us.
The battle against capitalism and the battle against the union are one and the same: anyone who tries to represent us is our enemy.
It’d be easy to take advantage of our strategic location within the system to destroy unilateral communication and open a real dialogue with our fellow workers who went back to work.
In a wildcat the creativity of isolated sabotage which goes on daily with little effect can be organized collectively.
We can open up the lines for free calls while cutting off business and government calls. We must communicate directly with Philadelphia, Tucson and New York to coordinate and spread our actions.
And to workers in other industries as well!
The Spanish revolution of 1936 was the most advanced foreshadowing of proletarian power. The armed workers of Barcelona occupied their factories — including the telephone exchange — defending their revolution against the Stalinists as well as fascists.
Our goal is nothing short of the suppression of wage-labor and the commodity-economy through the international power of workers’ councils — democratic assemblies of the base who elect immediately revocable, strictly mandated delegates.
A wildcat is the first step on the road of “excess,” the game of discovering the organization of the new world in the pleasures of destroying the old.
As usual, PL, the Spartacists, International Socialists and other recuperators of the bureaucratic New Left seek to replace the union bureaucracy with a “revolutionary” one under the guise of support for the wildcat.
Humanity won’t be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist.
Open Letter to “Good Times”
Faced with the long overdue collapse of the so-called Movement, the underground press is beginning a desperate search for new copy to cover up the discrediting of all the rotten ideologies it pushes and to stave off its decline in readership. Thus, on the one hand, we see the widespread dissemination of apparent total critiques such as the Anti-Mass Methods of Organization for Collectives, that pseudo-critique of the Movement which is actually an attempt to salvage it by grafting on a dosage of “situationism.” (See our critique of the Anti-Mass pamphlet, available from us.) On the other hand, the underground attempts to integrate into its eclectic show carefully fragmented scraps of real theoretical and agitational practice. However, even this falsification of revolutionary critique is not without danger to the bureaucrats of the underground press, since any truly revolutionary critique carries within itself an explicit critique of the spectacle, which (in both its “straight” and “underground” sectors) monopolizes communication between people around their unilateral reception of images of their alienated activity.
The July 23rd issue of Good Times reprinted two frames from our comic “Out of Order” as illustrations for an article on the telephone strike. In doing this, you removed the two frames from the context of our two groups’ agitational practice during the strike. Worst of all, you placed these frames in the midst of a banal interview with two telephone workers. Our leaflet, which explicitly attacks all unions as such, was turned into graphics for complaints that “the union is often not there when you need it.”
We therefore demand that our revised leaflet, “Still Out of Order,” be reprinted in its entirety (including our addresses) with this letter.
POINT-BLANK, P.O. Box 446, Palo Alto, CA 94302
CONTRADICTION, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701
Printed in the San Francisco Good Times (6 August 1971).
[MORE COMICS]
Methods for the
Communalization
of Confusion
A Critique of “Anti-Mass”
The Anti-Mass pamphlet Methods of Organization for Collectives marks a new phase of the decomposition of the movement and of the spectacle of that decomposition. The widespread consumption and reprinting of the pamphlet is one sign of an increasingly generalized (though partial) critique of the movement. The grosser manifestations of “vanguard party” Leninism, reformism, sacrificial militantism, and martyr worship are now called into question, and those who haven’t already succumbed to one of the various forms of total cretinization (PL, harikrishna, heroin) naturally respond to whatever appears to confirm their own critique. But those who are beginning to question the fundamental nature of the false opposition will find in Methods a confirmation less of their own radicality than of their remaining confusions. The movement — torn apart by internal contradictions and by the contradictions between its false consciousness and the actually developing class struggle — is now an endangered species attempting to survive by producing mutations of itself. Anti-Mass is one such hybrid: a mouldy soup of McLuhanism, anarchism, William Burroughs, Maoism, and “situationism.”
Methods correctly observes that “the ‘movement’ itself behaves as a mass and its organizers reproduce the hierarchy of the mass.” But since its social “analysis” is purely structural — a naïve physics of revolution — its solutions are voluntaristic creations of a purely structural nature (e.g. “you make the revolution by actually changing social relations”). Abstracted from social praxis, their “class” alternative to “mass” is a sheer phantom; and, by a not so subtle sleight-of-hand, becomes identified — in a Hegelian glorification of that which is — with the collective. Anti-Mass even admits its own imposture when it vaguely wonders “how collectives can become part of history — how they can become a social force.”
The social force which is alone capable of transforming all existing conditions by becoming conscious of itself as a class is the proletariat. It is this particular class which, in order to negate the specific conditions of its dispossession (a poverty of lived experience in the midst of fantastic material possibilities), must organize itself nonhierarchically, destroying all separate power. And the proletariat has, in its past struggles, sketched a particular organizational form of direct democracy for the expression of its own power — workers councils. But Anti-Mass can ignore history just as it can fail to develop a real critique of wage-labor — of the production as well as the consumption of commodities and spectacles — because its real purpose is only to give movement activists a new ideology and a method for maintaining their stale illusions. When Methods speaks of alienated labor it speaks of it as a fragment — “the issue of how to transform work into self-activity” — and offers a solution in the form of a counterrevolutionary pep talk on “correcting anti-work attitudes.”
Anti-Mass’s conception of “the collective” is necessarily ambiguous. On the one hand, the collective is an existing movement form; on the other, it is quite simply declared to be “the organizational nucleus of a classless society,” negating “all forms of hierarchy.” Collectives are criticized only for not realizing themselves. But the miserable practice of movement collectives — impotent externally and reproducing old world social relationships internally — is not merely the failure of particular experiments, but is the direct result of the basic confusion of communalism with a non-alienating revolutionary form. The false content and false unity produced by the collectivization of the problems of survival and by the neo-familial relations are no substitute for the precisions demanded by a coherent revolutionary practice based on rigorous theoretical and practical accord, or for the concrete mutual recognition which comes from passionate engagement in common projects. The collective is only an amelioration of isolation, and its dissimulation.
The truth of the practice of Anti-Mass itself is revealed (in accordance with its own maxim) in the form it takes. All its verbiage about “communicating with individuals” notwithstanding, Methods takes a firm, principled position within the spectacle, titillating jaded movement post-graduates with neo-Maoist homilies and Madison Avenue salemanship. Like the hippy who thinks to overcome alienation by moving to the country, Anti-Mass offers a pathetic arithmetic of organization in which bureaucracy is fought quantitatively by limiting the number of members of a collective and encouraging face-to-face contact. It is truly ludicrous how these new ideologists of incoherence — lacking any conception of the mandated, revocable delegate — squirm when they try to imagine how any more than five people could ever coordinate their practice (turn to page five, paragraph three, and laugh). They can get away with this only because they have nothing to coordinate but luke-warm imitations of revolutionary practice, such as their Burroughsian distortion of the subversive détournement of advertisements, and their calls for global analysis.
Their own global “analysis” swallows the movement’s “anti-imperialism” ideology:
In fact the “provinces” are moving ahead of the centers in political consciousness and motivation. From Minnesota to the Mekong Delta the revolt is gaining in coherence.
At the same time, they remain oblivious to the real global movement against all alienations: What’s so “provincial” about Watts, Paris, Prague, Cleveland, or Gdansk? Moreover, the revolt in the less developed countries — which in any case can only play a largely peripheral role — gains in coherence only insofar as it supersedes false struggles in the service of indigenous ruling classes (as, for example, in the 1956 peasant revolt against the North Vietnamese bureaucracy, or the workers councils of Algeria before they were liquidated in 1965 by the Algerian State).
Anti-Mass’s lack of a fundamental critique of modern capitalism is identically their lack of a critique of its global pseudo-negation and real support: the various forms of false opposition. The so-called “movement” in the United States is nothing more than a spectacularization, a mutilation, and a containment of the real movement for generalized and total self-management. The point is not to pick up the pieces and patch it up, but to criticize it theoretically and practically. (For our own contribution towards this long-overdue project see our forthcoming journal, due out this Fall.)
Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and knows it.
CONTRADICTION
August 1971
Mini-pamphlet. 700 copies. The announced Contradiction journal did not materialize (see Remarks on Contradiction and Its Failure). For selections from the movement critique drafts, see Critique of the New Left Movement.
No copyright.
[Bureau Prehistory]
Critique of the
New Left Movement
The Movement in General
Antifascism and the Cybernetic Welfare State
Yippies and Weathermen
Communes and Collectives
Bookchinism
Women’s Liberation
The Movement in General
Of all aspects of American society few are as rotten and degraded as the “movement” that claims to oppose it. This fact may be recognized with varying degrees of satisfaction or indifference by those watching its last spectacular gasps, or bemoaned with equal passivity and incomprehension by its own activists and “spokesmen,” but everyone knows that this decade-long spectacle of opposition has had its day.
What is considerably less understood is the real nature of the movement, the role it has played vis-à-vis the dominant society, and the reasons for its effective demise. Up until now, almost all the commentaries on the movement have represented a fundamental unity, masked by the apparent incompatibility of their versions: politicians, sociologists, newsmen, and leftists have all begun from the proposition that the movement is what it claims to be — the opposition to this society. In fact, the movement in the United States has never been a revolutionary opposition to the dominant order, but on the contrary has functioned effectively as a support for that order and a containment of all authentic revolutionary opposition.
The movement certainly contains different and even antagonistic tendencies. However, there is a fairly general agreement among the activists of black liberation, women’s liberation, anti-war action, ecology, etc., that “it’s all part of the same struggle”; and there is a considerable degree of common “participation,” mutual support, and alliances. But even when their differences seem fundamental or irreconcilable, the groups and individuals of the movement can be justifiably considered as a unity on the basis of the illusions that they all share.
We use the phrase “the movement” here in the commonly understood sense. This usage has a certain ambiguity. The real revolutionary movement for generalized self-management, expressing itself in the direct action of individuals against all forms of alienation, has little in common with “the movement” but the name. This real movement, in struggling for consciousness of itself, must first of all combat what passes for it: its various ideological distortions, its bureaucratic representations, and its spectacularization. The society of the spectacle paints it own picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. It erects for itself a more or less unified pseudo-opposition that reinforces power society by the apparent all-inclusiveness of its false options. To the extent that truly radical acts escape destruction at the hands of the dominant order, the false opposition hastens to take them under its own wing: “the true becomes a moment of the false.”
Consider, for example, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 and the Watts riot of 1965. In the spectacle these events are securely situated as classic moments of the “New Left.” Their uniqueness, their “excesses,” their real significances are neutralized by being placed in this context. Watts is fit — if somewhat uneasily — into that oppositional category known as “black liberation,” where it consequently assumes an equal importance with Stokely Carmichael, the march on Selma, and the formation of the Black Panther Party. It is the “fault” of a racist establishment that didn’t move fast enough to ameliorate the condition of blacks in America; the police violence unleashed on the rioters is one more “proof” of the imminence of fascism. In an assault on the spectacle-commodity society that needed to become conscious of itself, the movement leaders can only see a battle with police that was too stupid to fight effectively. Gestures against the reign of survival are turned into an episode of the “struggle for survival.” The Situationist International was effectively alone in noting and defending the festive nature of the insurrection (in their pamphlet The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy). All of the reformist and leftist ideologists scrambled all over themselves apologizing for the looting and vandalism. Five years later the riot and all it laid bare had become so smothered in ideology that Huey Newton was able to get away with saying that Jonathan Jackson’s “revolutionary suicide” was “more revolutionary than Watts.” Evidently the blacks of Los Angeles hadn’t yet attained the “consciousness” to sacrifice their rage and their desires to the cause of “the people” (presumably under the guidance of their “Supreme Servant”).
The first significant signs of dissidence among youth in modern American society were not “political” at all. The juvenile delinquents of the 1950s were manifestations of crises in the major mechanisms of socialization — family, school, urbanism —, of the disintegration of all values, and their vandalism, theft and games of violence already expressed a crude revolt against the boredom of everyday existence, against the dead life that is the essential product of modern capitalism. All the priests of the old order — journalists, psychologists, sociologists, educators — worked overtime trying to fragment and “understand” these “rebels without a cause.” It was in fact this lack of a “cause” — the refusal of ideology — and the directness of their violence that constituted the most positive features of the delinquents’ rebellion. But their isolation, both from society as a whole and among themselves (in the hierarchy and battles of the street gangs), gave them no chance to escape the system of which they maintained an intentional ignorance. They typically returned, in their late teens, to the world of work, family, and patriotism — often preceded by a voluntary stretch in the army.
The early movement to a certain extent represented a complementary critique of modern society — its pacifism and vaguely libertarian tendencies beginning to pose questions of hierarchy and domination — but its humanism prevented it from seeing the more violent youth as allies, from affirming and extending the latter’s crude attempts at really making a party in the middle of the society of spectacular non-life. Each of these two movements of youth accepted the spectacular version of the other, and adopted the official opinions about them: the humanist-leftists dissociating themselves from the disorderliness and criminality of the delinquents (cf. the early civil rights and peace marches, in which everyone was supposed to be suited and beardless in order to make a good impression on public opinion), and the hoods ignorantly resentful of the intellectual “pinko creeps.” When, some years later, Allen Ginsberg turned the Hell’s Angels on to acid (thus averting their threatened disruption of an anti-war march) and the Yippies proclaimed the merger of the hippies and the politicos, this unity was achieved not by each side appropriating the radical tendencies of the other, but by a mutual reduction to their lowest common denominator — the passive consumption of culture and ideology: drugs, rock music, and the spectacle of community and revolution.
The specific form of the earlier rebellion of the delinquents will not reappear, being as it was the product of the dominant society’s relative poverty of mechanisms of recuperation. This vacuum has since been filled superabundantly: The teenager who exploded because he had “nothing to do” (spectacularized, for example, in the figure of James Dean) is now beckoned from all sides with things to occupy his idle hands and imagination — rock festivals, crafts, encounter groups, astrology, militant “revolution,” community service, country communes, etc. Where the official forces were not imaginative or avant-garde enough, the “opposition” manufactured its own substitutes, all the more credible for their “underground” origin: The same people who laugh at the imposture of the Peace Corps consume with respect the heroic saga of the Venceremos Brigade. The new youth will discover that their revolt is first of all against what now colonizes their lives in their own name — their “own” culture and their own “revolution.”
The movement is usually considered to have originated in certain more or less spontaneous struggles of dissident youth in the late fifties and early sixties. These youth — mainly students — developed tactics that were fairly effective in furthering the predominantly reformist aims which they set for themselves — strengthening bourgeois civil liberties, integration of blacks into the dominant society, and elimination of other admittedly archaic excesses on the fringes of that society. These struggles found a false unity and an ideological expression as the “New Left.” Its ideologists presented the New Left as distinct from the old left, which was recognized, but for the wrong reasons, as an anachronism in modern society. As an alternative to the manipulation, bureaucratization, and boredom of the old politics, the new watchwords were decentralization, “participatory democracy,” and “control over the decisions that affect our lives.”
It has been seldom noted that with all too few exceptions the “democracy” of the New Left was a myth. It would suffice of itself to demolish that myth to simply ask at what points, and for how long, there was any kind of democracy operating in the organizations and struggles of the New Left. As for a participatory democracy that would break down the separation between decision and execution, this was present only among a few small groups (for example, some of the earliest agitational experiments in the South) and, very briefly, in such massive actions as the spontaneous surrounding of the police car during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Usually whatever democracy there was lasted just long enough to elect a steering committee. Even during the FSM, the most democratic of the student strikes, the “leaders” of the various negotiating committees were not strictly mandated, but merely maintained a loose consulting relationship with the base of dissident students, reserving for themselves the possibility of “calling for the resumption of the strike” if the negotiations did not proceed satisfactorily.
Such democracy as did exist in the New Left organizations cannot be separated from its lack of subversive content. The early SDS maintained a democratized marketplace of ideas which were only the ideas of a democratized marketplace.
This plethora of fragmentary issues finds its echo in the desire for decentralization and leaderlessness (which is less the absence of leaders than the creation of the conditions for leaders to take over) within SDS chapters. . . . Many . . . militants have seen in the relative autonomy of SDS chapters not the early forms of another hierarchical organization — which it is — but a healthy rejection of hierarchies, cell bosses, party chairmen, secretaries. [Robert Chasse, The Power of Negative Thinking, or Robin Hood Rides Again]
Chasse’s critique, published April 1968, could hardly have been more definitively confirmed than by the subsequent history of SDS. That the New Left organization devolved into the control of three factions disputing the precise combination of Stalinist bureaucrats to worship has been liberally bemoaned by those who had proclaimed its essentially libertarian character; but they have never been capable of seeing the origins of this “degeneration” in the incoherence of the New Left. They have either maintained a discreet silence on this subject or impotently and tautologically referred to a “bureaucratization” which unaccountably grew out of this “healthy rejection of hierarchies.”
“Participatory democracy” was almost always an ideology in the service of New Left bureaucrats who originally prided themselves on their “rejection of ideologies.” The logic of their theoryless (if often originally honest) activism leads these veterans of pragmatic struggles to the position of specialists in participatory democracy — “community organizers,” benevolent knights who go to the people to “involve” them, to prove to them, by a patronizing arrangement of protests and local issues, that they “have no power over the decisions that control their lives.”
* * *
The early years of increased participation in the war in Vietnam provoked mass resistance. From draft card burnings and refusal of induction to the stopping of troop trains in Berkeley and of buses outside several induction centers, American youth refused as individuals to participate in a war they totally opposed. The slogan “Hell no, we won’t go” embodied the spirit of their refusal which, even if it was isolated and confused, took on the nature of a rebellion, both because it was directly opposed to a major policy of the government and because it was so widely practiced. Their resistance was not a symbolic mass protest but a direct attempt to halt the war. It was only later when opposition to the war became institutionalized in the demonstrations of the Peace Movement that it acquired the decency and good conscience which became the trademark of the anti-war movement.
The absence of a revolutionary movement in the US reduced the left to a mass of spectators swooning each time the exploited in the colonized countries took up arms against the masters. They could not help but see in the wars of national liberation the destruction of world capitalism. The New Left facilely identified itself with the Third World bureaucracies because it believed that they were fighting a common enemy — the American state — and because their internal policies seemed humane compared to the United States. Following the dictum that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, it imagined that any force which fought US imperialism was necessarily revolutionary.
Expecting the sum total of burning issues of the super-exploited to inspire an American revolutionary movement is the domestic counterpart to the movement’s contemplative reliance on the Third World to precipitate a global revolution.
* * *
With an ideology of “serving the people” the movement organizer justifies his reformist programs; for him they take on revolutionary significance. What is wrong with reformism is not the desire to ameliorate the immediate conditions of a number of people, but rather that these reforms are sought in order to transform these people into a constituency. In the movie The Troublemakers, made in 1965, Tom Hayden convinces some angry Newark blacks that what they need is a traffic light. In order to “educate them” he leads them through the proper bureaucratic channels. Here the individual is important only as another body to be used as leverage in bargaining with power.
The movement falsifies what lies at the center of all acts of radical refusal, the desire for a totally new life. When the organizer moves in, the totality is drowned in a sea of particulars; qualitative refusal is parcelized into particular defined needs. The organizers encourage the proliferation of a host of pseudoclasses: youth, blacks, women, gays, Chicanos... Separated according to their special interests, individuals are more easily manipulated.
Formerly the movement organizer (especially in the black and peace movements) relied heavily on guilt in order to motivate passive participation. Later he appealed to the “self-interest” of various groups — staying behind in order to coordinate their tactical alliance. As the movement decomposed, the old self-interest issues lost their recruiting power and new, more specific ones were improvised: gay vets for equal rights in the military, Asian women for separatist health care... Each hybrid made the frantic search for constituencies more absurd. Movement bureaucrats rushed in to fill every possible need, and collectives developed issue-specialization in order to justify their existence. As one women’s collective put it: “We’re filling a need that wasn’t being met before.”
At the same time, attempts were being made to join all these partial struggles together negatively, against a common enemy. Once the base had been “radicalized,” divided up by the movement bureaucrats, it was reunited in a pseudototality of solidarity. Connections which the very process of “radicalizing” had made seem obscure were demonstrated. We were told: “It’s all the same struggle.” This “radical” pluralism stands on the same ground as liberal pluralism in conceiving of social change as a particular remedy for every particular dissatisfaction, and thus in conceiving of history as a series of frozen, quantitatively equivalent moments evolving toward an abstract goal; the radicals can only distinguish themselves from the liberals by calling the final goal “socialism.”
The most recent manifestation of this pluralism, the New American Movement, makes workers into one of its proposed constituencies, and lumps workers’ control with all the classical movement issues, and some new ones, in an attempt to link all possible constituencies in a broader mass base. Having discovered that “bureaucracies alienate people,” the NAM proposes that “autonomous local groups administer the decisions of the national governing committee” (paraphrased) in order to ensure participation. They use the image of a decentralized democratic practice to modernize what is still in reality the old central committee/ignorant masses routine.
Antifascism and the
Cybernetic Welfare State
The Movement adopted for itself an appropriate opponent in fascism. This convenient straw man enabled the Left to avoid defining itself positively; it provided a cover for the fact that the Movement failed to embody a radical critique of the system itself — of commodity production, wage labor, hierarchy. The daily misery produced everywhere by capitalism was made to seem normal — if not progressive — in the light of the barbaric excesses paraded before our eyes. Is the revolution ebbing? That new escalation of the war will give it some life. Or police atrocities, a repressive law, a new martyr, scandal in high places... The people will get so pissed off (“radicalized”) they’ll be ready for anything different. In the same way that war is the health of the State, atrocities are the health of a parasitic movement.
In the film Z, held up by Bobby Seale for the emulation of the United Front Against Fascism audience, the entire plot consists of the struggle to get the goods on the military dictatorship, to prove they broke the law. The role of the proletariat in this drama is evidently to have such shocking outrages revealed to them, after which radicalization they accordingly vote in (with ballots or bullets) the progressive heroes.
Fascism is an extreme development of capitalism, but it is also a retrograde one. It revives and relies upon outmoded institutions which the revolutionary bourgeoisie was originally obliged to attack: myth, family, the Leader, overly crude nationalism and racism. Its existence is precarious enough in Greece or Spain. Fascism can at best be only a temporary, stop-gap measure in the defense of capitalism, because it interferes with the system’s full development, its modernization and rationalization.
The actual movement of modern capitalism is not towards fascism, but towards a qualitatively new mode of social domination: the Cybernetic Welfare State. In marked contrast to fascism, this new form, at the same time that it strengthens and extends the capitalist system, is also that system’s natural development and rationalization. With the advance of the Cybernetic Welfare State, the various previous modes of domination become reduced to a consistent, smoothly running, all-pervading abstract control.
The Movement, since it does not make a radical critique of the existing system, is even more incapable of understanding the development of that system in the direction of greater subtlety. And so it happens that while it busies itself with things it can understand — super-exploitation, the cop’s club — it unknowingly enters into the service of the emerging cybernetic organization of life. Precisely because the Movement’s is only a surface critique, its struggles for “participatory democracy,” “quality of life,” and “the end of alienation” remain within the old world as agitation for its humanized modification. The “vanguard” movement joins with the advance guard of bourgeois society in an unconscious Alliance for Progress for the rationalization of the system. Bureaucratic capitalism does not always see the reforms necessary for its survival. In their search for constituencies, for issues to suck on, the Movement bureaucrats sniff out the incipient crises and, in their concern to appear as practical servants of the people, come up with reformist schemes with revolutionary ideology tacked on. Already the new volunteer social workers are administering medical and food programs, sketching out forms for new welfare and service institutions.
The agitation for Community Control of Police well exemplifies the role of fragmentary opposition in reinforcing the system’s control of the community. Is there a trouble spot the rulers haven’t properly diagnosed? White cops aren’t working out well in the ghetto? Why, the unconscious trouble-shooters are already at work, formulating the “problem” and suggesting a “workable solution.” A little oppositional initiative greases the wheels, and the commodity-spectacle grinds on, this time with humanist watchdogs.
The function of opposition as a feedback mechanism here still operates rather crudely; the vanguard scouts get paid bullets for their services. With the advance of the system towards totalitarian self-regulation the role of participatory feedback becomes extended qualitatively.
When participation is on a low level, we should expect people to be more apt to feel that the regulations are imposed upon them from above and that they are being pushed around by “them” — the bosses, the bureaucrats, and the oligarchies in the organizations, and by the strange and distant forces in Wall Street and Washington. This might breed feelings of resentment, and will anyhow frustrate people’s feelings of solidarity and identification with the purposes of the regulations. [Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State]
The bureaucrats themselves wish to “overcome bureaucracy” (i.e. its dangerous visibility and obsolete inefficiencies). The “decision-making” (within the dominant framework of social separation) must be “democratized.” Self-regulatory institutions must be developed which allow — if not encourage — the active participation of the masses in running their own alienation. Such mechanisms serve to adjust the system to danger spots with a minimum of friction. “Political democracy, by incorporating larger and larger numbers in social decision-making, facilitates feedback. And it is precisely this feedback that is essential to control” (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock).
Yippies and Weathermen
The rejection at its base of the Movement’s degeneration into fragmentary opposition necessitated alternatives to left politics which would recapture the feeling of unity embodied in the early New Left’s “total commitment.” The most profound attempt was the Yippies, whose emergence expressed the widespread recognition that the Movement’s neglect of the cultural revolt among its constituency was dangerous as well as artificial. The Yippies took their ideas on fun from bohemia, their communalism from the Diggers, and their moralism from the more romantic Third World bureaucrats. This fusion begat monsters: making a revolution for fun became doing it for the joy of surviving in the face of a capitalism made hostile by taunts. Reacting in images to the image of rightist reaction, Hoffman and Rubin tried to ride the wave of false consciousness in an effort to devalue it. Entering the spectacle as clowns to make it ridiculous, they created diversions which, far from promoting the refusal of the spectacle, merely made passivity more interesting by offering a spectacle of refusal. Actions such as the invasion of the Stock Exchange or the presidential candidacy of a pig were meant to advertise the decomposition of bourgeois values, while promoting (through, e.g., the “Festival of Life”) their replacement with the less obviously recuperative aspects of the counterculture. The Yippies’ practice was centered around creating chaos through good-natured terrorism, and creating myths to fill the void thus opened up. This myth-making made them conscious partners of the spectacle: foregoing the Movement’s ambivalence toward the media, the Yippies’ practical significance was seen by themselves as equal to the spectacle they could create through these media. (“If you don’t like the news, go out and make your own news.”) The complement of this farcical frontal attack was an ideology of subversive survival inherited from the Motherfuckers and the Diggers, where the mere generalization of theft adds up to revolution. In the end the Yippies displayed all the positivity and negativity of populist criminals, whose method of forging a life underground is helpful in its practical suggestions for survival, but retards the growth of proletarian opposition through its primitive dualism and its opportunities for partial or vicarious participation. The Yippies further retarded themselves through the continued acceptance of false antinomies of the counterculture (hip/straight, the generations, Eastern and Western consciousness at all levels of mystification), and by their symbiotic relationship with the Left, which offered them a questionable stage in return for their questionable support. All these contradictions reached their dismal conclusion in Abbie Hoffman, who is reduced to collecting old shoplifting tricks and debating with Charles Reich.
Coming out of the student movement rather than the hip underground, Weatherman attacked the Yippies as not serious (sacrificial) enough, and appropriated only the signs but not the psychology of the hippies. Whereas the Yippies were an expression of what was nebulously there, the SDS bureaucrats who built the WeatherMachine forged a place for themselves at the vanguard of an increasingly passive and dwindling Left. Relating alternately to the images of the peasant guerrilla, the party bureaucrat, and the urban terrorist (in proportions varying with each militant’s standing within the Weather hierarchy), Weatherman attempted to create a myth of powerful bravado which would force the hand of the entire “class” of white youth, the only group it deemed capable of assisting its project of flying kamikaze for the world war on America. Their strategy was based on the shock value of exemplary (suicidal) militancy. They succeeded in inheriting the mantle of the fading Panthers, who had held the Left spellbound for two years with the mere rhetoric of Acts. With Weatherman, this myth of concreteness was escalated to the concreteness of myth as Weatherman acted out the Panther slogans (“Take the initiative,” “Off the pig,” etc.). One of their songs says, “We used to talk but now we do it.” The very concreteness of actually blowing a hole in the wall of a bank or courthouse placed Weatherman at the pinnacle of the spectacle of opposition. It was this “really doing something” — no matter how inane — that made them the focal point of all leftist discussions for over a year, against which each leftist measured his own inactivity. Particularly susceptible to such pressure were the students and intellectuals, dimly aware of their own impotence. In this religious division of labor, the leftist hero emerges from an ordeal of action to win the adherence of those who in their passivity are mystified by it. But interest in this kind of Passion Play, however intense, is always fleeting; by the time the cops closed down the show most of the audience had left. Weatherman first chose to return this spite by refusing to include anyone in their definition of the revolutionary motor. When even that failed to disturb America’s conscience, they decided to include everyone, and dissolved into the hip underground.
The desire for total opposition was expressed in the attempts of both the Yippies and Weatherman for a revolution in daily life, attempts mediated and frustrated by ideology. While the Yippies created an illusory radical subjectivity based on romantic individualism and the thrill of watching themselves piss in public, Weatherman sought to smash all subjectivity in order to build a WeatherMachine in which all resistance to bureaucratic authority was deemed bourgeois. Thus the former built a politics based on its lifestyle and the latter tried to build a militarized lifestyle based on its politics. The recognition that the revolution must be made in living was dissimulated through the ritualization of living the revolution.
Communes and Collectives
The early urban communes were a product of a widespread rejection of bourgeois roles and values — particularly of work, school, and the nuclear family. They were designed to protect those who rejected these values, to foster experimentation in new ways to live, and to enable their members to survive. They were to some degree (though not nearly so much as imagined) a free space in which the qualitative questions that bourgeois daily life represses were at least posed. But they were never answered — as the communes’ rejection of the old world failed to take up the project of its supersession, the communes began to fall apart. While utopian communalists dreamed of a mass movement of changing heads, the communes failed even to survive, as their tolerance and passivity left them open to underworld and police harassment, internal manipulation, endless crashers, disease, mental breakdowns and rip-offs. They failed because they accepted the false choice offered by the spectacle: to accept the world as it is or to abandon it; their advances and their failure were due to their “separation” from the dominant society.
With guilt as its lever, the Left put the finishing touches on the decomposition of the original commune movement. Radical militants criticized the communalists for their naïve isolationism, and introduced them to the joys of the bureaucratic reality principle. Seeking to attract the counterculture as a constituency in order to revitalize the faltering Left, Movement bureaucrats endorsed the form of the commune as they rejected its content. The result of this enlargement of the scope of reformist activity was a widespread mechanistic synthesis of daily life and politics institutionalized in a commune form usually referred to as “collectives.”
The commune movement’s preoccupation with “lifestyle,” though mystified and quite rigid, was at least a rudimentary critique of the capitalist daily life of augmented survival. In the collectives, on the other hand, there was a decided shift in emphasis from spontaneous social experimentation toward a total absorption in the politics of marginal survival. The collective, like the nuclear family it replaces, organizes the individual’s personal subsistence in return for his allegiance to the collectivity. The communalization of economic poverty is accompanied by a communalization of intellectual poverty. Most collectives have a few informal hierarchs who get their power by synthesizing from amongst the garbage heap of leftist ideologies the particular form of eclecticism of that particular collective. Thus there are anarcho-nihilist collectives, Stalino-surrealist groups, Third World suicide terrorist cells, and social service units. The leaders establish their positions by mastering the mysteries of this melange and consolidate it through the management of political tactics (alliances, “actions,” etc.) and of the reified experiments in daily life promoted by collectivist ideology. The struggle sessions against informal hierarchy are endless since there are neither rigorous criteria for membership in the collective nor exclusion of those who attempt to dominate or fail to participate autonomously.
Like the communalists, the collectivists base their strategy on reproducing themselves until the dominant society is “outnumbered” (i.e. at least until the ideological force of collectivism surpasses that of the bourgeoisie); thus the mere quantitative enlargement of a necessarily marginal phenomenon is seen to be the crux of social change. Through the panacea of reproduction, collectives hope to avoid facing their inability to enlarge the qualitative scope of their practice, a growth stunted by a reified ideology which forces each collective to start from scratch and defines the outer limits of its development.
The heart of collectivist ideology is “survival is revolutionary.” Everything the collective does is revolutionary because the collective does it in the face of pig repression. The collectives’ hope for victory lies in the strategy of out-surviving the society of survival. And the deus ex machina is supposed to be the police, who will promote the growth of collectives through repression. Thus we see the tired old story of utopian reformism and its dual revolution: one which is “lived” (pantomimed), the other which is idealized and postponed indefinitely.
Bookchinism
Murray Bookchin arrives at the scene of decay with the history of anarchism in his carpetbag, determined to heal the split between self and organization just as he would cure the “disease” of class society — by a rational triumph of the will. “The very mode of anarchist organization transcends the traditional split between the psyche and the social world.” Bookchin’s version of this timeless mode is the affinity group, which he models after the Spanish FAI, the Parisian sections, and the Athenian ecclesia in direct proportion to their age and inverse proportion to their proletarian content. (The Spanish model is evoked by Bookchin more for the structure of the revolutionary organization, while the ecclesia and sections dominate his vision of post-revolutionary society; but the distinctions are always hazy.) It is of course not these forms themselves which are counterrevolutionary, but their utopian evocation separated from their own content as well as from the present. Bookchin uses the past to idealize the future and appreciate the present (i.e contemporary oppositional movements). Notably, he found the Spanish affinity group in the hero-worshipping, mystified activism of the Motherfuckers, and in the contentless democracy of Anarchos. Rather than shoot a sitting duck by attacking his sense of practice (which has virtually evaporated anyhow), we will mercifully turn to a critique of his theory of revolution.
Bookchin defines the affinity group in a moral critique of Stalinism which appeals to the counterculture by praising its lack of rigidity. In the process he only winds up celebrating its lack of rigor, which lack allowed it to be used by the Left in the first place. The abstention from domination is the only goal articulated for the affinity group; it is the revolutionary institutionalization of doing one’s own thing. Bookchin would have this revolutionary group “marked always by simplicity and clarity, always thousands of unprepared people can enter and direct it, always it remains transparent to and controlled by all.” (This confusion of the “revolutionary group” — which he previously modeled after the tightly-knit, coherent, ephemeral grupo de afinidad — with the general assembly must be expected from an anarchist, who constantly tries to force together the present and the future (i.e. the revolutionary process) by slips of the tongue and magic tricks.) To fill the void created by this “clarity,” he fetishizes the encounter within a vaguely praised general assembly and criticizes workers’ councils for their lack of constant face-to-face encounter.
Bookchin’s vision is in the great tradition of the petty bourgeois utopians: His vision of the future, dominated by the past, is completely unconnected with an endless present entitled “living the revolution.” Bookchin sees mankind, with consciousness raised by ecological disasters and political repression, merely deciding one fine day to reorganize society along rational grounds. His ecological determinism, rather than merely being an attempt to be stylish, is based on his variation of Engels’s mistaken attempt to construct a dialectics of nature: instead of trying to make nature fit into the materialist revolutionary dialectic, Bookchin tries to reduce revolution to a science of social ecology. This organic theory of revolution finds itself bewildered before proletarian self-activity, whose form Bookchin always celebrates without a clue to its content. The most profound praise he can find for the great proletarian uprisings is that they all surprised and surpassed the leftist bureaucrats. His praise of spontaneity never mentions organizational advances or shortcomings (the content of spontaneity). The revolutionary activity of the “masses” is defined only negatively against the hierarchy of the masters and deceivers; it becomes a series of battles connected only by the spirit and heroism of the oppressed. Thus the anarchist learns nothing from revolutionary failures except that the masses were deceived or had illusions, and he joins himself to the mass movement as either an uncritical participant or a professorial advisor.
Bookchin seeks to repeat the Yippies’ synthesis of left politics and hip culture on a higher level by having control of both political and cultural factors. He thus gently prods dozing mystics into nodding agreement with his nightmares, and attacks fading Stalinist bureaucrats in an effort to anarchize their constituents. He is slightly more abreast of reality than they are — thus he hopes that his anarchism will be the avant-garde of a reconstituted Movement.
Women’s Liberation
Women’s Liberation, originating in opposition to the “male movement,” never really escaped the latter’s mystifications but only reproduced them in new forms. For the straw man of fascism it substituted male chauvinism. In attempting to overcome the overt hierarchy of the movement it created informal hierarchies. Criticizing the movement for defining itself only in terms of the oppression of others, it merely replaced the penitent militant purging himself before the image of Third World Revolution with the sister surrendering herself to abstract womanhood.
Within the movement the position of women has often been compared to that of blacks and other “super-oppressed” groups. But the “woman question” was essentially different in that it could never be considered as a question of “survival.” The factors that constitute the particular alienation of women tend to be central, advanced: the family, sexual roles, the banality and boredom of housework, consumer ideology.
In the early discussion groups there was the beginning of a critique of daily life and especially of roles. But this critique underwent a closure and rigidified around the problems of women; it only considered women qua women. The individual found herself in a therapy session or encounter group where she was to “become sensitive to her oppression as a woman” — and wallow in it, going over each detail until her “sensitivity” became resentment and her critique a moral one. A politics of resentment toward the oppressor, men, and abstract solidarity with all women replaced any critical sense she may have had at the beginning of her “consciousness raising.” Now the sister demanded not something so complex as a system to transform, but rather a living adversary to attack. Her rage to overcome her condition excited her aggression against men and her resentment materialized in the production of spectacles to haunt their guilty consciences. She had rejected passive sacrifice to the desires of men, but only to sacrifice herself to the “needs of women.” Pursuing the reflection of her abandoned self, she now goes to organize other women with whom she shares only a catharsis in a common misery.
Sharing this melodrama was that lesser known antihero of female liberation — the sister’s boyfriend. His dragged-out and slightly terrified look attested to his weary struggle to free himself from his oppression of his girlfriend. If he was at first hostile to her jeremiads, he soon recognized that his own alienation was insignificant compared to that of women. For this St. Anthony, besieged by the ghosts of his crimes against women, Women’s Liberation came just in time to replace his impotent activity in the collapsing movement.
Women’s Liberation rejected the hierarchy of the “male movement” but was never able to overcome hierarchy within its own groups. Since their organizational practice was based on an abstract democracy in which all women were admitted, the groups were forced to increasingly confine their internal practice to combating informal hierarchy and specialization, using quantitative means: the small group, lots, automatic rotation of tasks, quantitative criteria for exclusion. But all these methods only concealed the maintenance of separations and inequalities absorbed initially. The contradiction between the antihierarchical position of the women’s movement and its abstract solidarity with all women set the stage for the split of the antisexists and anti-imperialists at the Vancouver Conference (April 1971), where the antisexists of the Fourth World Manifesto exposed the anti-imperialists’ manipulative appeal to sisterhood in order to preserve a Stalinist united front while in the same breath embracing a group of “sisters” sent to the conference as a public-relations corps by the North Vietnamese state.
The role of Women’s Liberation has been to incite the dominant society to realize the abstract equality of total proletarianization. With demands for more jobs and a transference of housework into the public sector, the women’s movement has worked, in effect, for the integration of women into a more rationalized system of alienation. The varieties of women’s liberationists all have in common a reformist program, although some try to dissimulate this by claiming that women per se are a revolutionary class. They see not men and women in servitude to the commodity, but the commodity in the service of male chauvinism, which they facilely identify with power.
Women’s Liberation never left enemy terrain because they had failed to identify the enemy. The terrain was the spectacle of opposition. Women’s Liberation began by castigating male militants for hogging the stage, then set up a parallel spectacle. Eventually this departure from an anti-hierarchical perspective was attacked by those who again wanted more democratic access to the spectacle (see especially “The Dialectics of the Celebrity”).
Women’s Liberation clears away the exhausted images of the passive woman only to replace them with the image of the liberated woman. The openly reformist NOW image committee consults with advertising agencies in order “to convince them to use a pro-lib approach. . . . We tell them women are changing and they better show it because it’s good not only for us but for them.” The shattered myth of female inferiority is replaced by the stereotypes of female liberation. The self-proclaimed bitch, the witch, the radical lesbian and the struggling feminist enter the who’s who of the spectacle with the careerist, the Cosmopolitan cover girl and the housewife. The old and new types battle, support and modify one another. Jane Fonda sheds her devalued cosmetics and transforms herself from a sex goddess into a star radical.
CONTRADICTION
(unpublished drafts, April 1972)
Excerpts from these drafts were reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb. Some critical comments on them can be found in Remarks on Contradiction.
No copyright.
[Bureau Prehistory]
On the Poverty
of Hip Life
The values which formerly braced the organization of appearances have lost their power; morality, family, patriotism and all the rest fall away like so much dead weight. No longer can the old roles and mystifications compensate for the sacrifice of authentic experience which they demand. Businessman, professor, honest worker, playboy, housewife — who can take them seriously anymore? The dominant heroes and idols become laughable. All falsification is in crisis.
This disintegration of values opens up a positive void in which free experimentation is possible. But if experimentation does not consciously oppose itself to all the mechanisms of power, then at the critical moment, when all values are sucked into the vortex, new illusions fill the void; power abhors a vacuum.
The hippie’s dissatisfaction, his dissociation from the old stereotypes, has resulted in his fabrication and adoption of new ones. Hip life creates and consumes new roles — guru, craftsman, rock star; new abstract values — universal love, naturalness, openness; and new mystifications for consolation — pacifism, Buddhism, astrology, the cultural debris of the past put back on the counter for consumption. The fragmentary innovations that the hippie did make — and lived as if they were total — have only given new life to the spectacle. Instead of fighting for a real life, the hippie takes on an abstract representation, an image of life, and advertises his change of appearance as real change. The moral seriousness which he attaches to his lifestyle measures his dependence on the new image. Since the proliferation of lifestyles develops parallel to the decay of values, valuation in turn decomposes in the direction of choosing an entire pseudolife from among the styles on the market.
Records, posters, bellbottoms: a few commodities make you hip. When “hip capitalism” is blamed for “ripping off our culture” it is forgotten that the early cultural heroes (Leary, Ginsberg, Watts, etc.) promoted the new lifestyle in the emporium of cultural consumption. These advertising men for a new style, by combining their own cultural fetishism with the false promise of an authentic life, engendered a quasi-messianic attachment to the cause. They “turned on” youth simultaneously to a new family of values and a corresponding family of goods. “Turning on” meant at the same time consuming drugs and also uncritically buying a whole Weltanschauung. The difference between the “real” and the “plastic” hippie is that the former has deeper illusions; he acquired his mystifications in their pure, organic form, while the latter buys them packaged: astrology in a poster, natural freedom in his bellbottoms, Taoism from the Beatles. While the real hippie may have read and helped develop hip ideology, the plastic hippie buys commodities that embody that ideology. Identified with objects in the upside-down reality of the spectacle, human qualities (spontaneity, self-realization, community) become ideals for consumption precisely because they are what is lacking in reality; and because the illusion of authenticity becomes necessary for inauthentic life. Just as the religious horizon was the outlived framework which the millenarians failed to supersede in creating their lifestyle, so the hip lifestyle reproduces the consumerism it imagines it opposes.
The so-called revolution in the recording industry from the 1950s to the 1960s was precisely the victory of that industry over a discontented segment of the population through autochthonous celebrities and symbols, a sort of “national liberation” of youth which left it, like Third World countries, with indigenous masters and illusions of freedom. The rock festivals were nothing but the celebration of the triumph of a neo-imperialist assault on the cultural consumption of youth trying desperately to appear as the success of the “revolt of youth.” Rock music — that central reference point for the “nation” of youth — expresses in its lyrics the ideologies of the revolt of youth. Transcending class and national boundaries, it binds a global brigade of young consumer militants in fervent service to their star commodities. At the rock festivals sexual passion is transformed into contemplative ecstasy; children of pure spectacle sway in orgiastic yearning before the totalitarian presence of the rock celebrity. It is fundamentally the magnetism of the commodity which ensures the cohesion of this reified community. Those who make Woodstock and Altamont into a false dichotomy conceal their intrinsic identity. At each pseudo-festival band follows band, and the audience displays its willingness to endure discomfort for days in order to realize its wildest dreams of consumption. But the cohesion of the audience can at any time disintegrate and reveal its basic truth — spectacular separation — in its disintegration.
People responded to the counterculture because its content was largely a partial critique of the old world and its values (notably, for example, early Ginsberg and Dylan). In late capitalism all art and poetry that isn’t just junk on the highbrow cultural market or a sop to so-called popular taste must be critical, if incoherently or nihilistically, of spectacular nonlife. But as culture such a critique only serves to preserve its object. The counterculture, since it fails to negate culture itself, can only substitute a new oppositional culture, a new content for the unchanging commodity-form. Cultural innovation is the reason for the hippie’s false optimism: “See, things are changing.” — Yes, but only things. What seems to have been rejected and destroyed is recreated in the piecemeal reconstitution of the world of culture. Lyrics, as well as other artistic forms, can become revolutionary weapons, but only if they go beyond the artistic by being part of an agitational praxis which aims explicitly at the destruction of the commodity and of culture as a separate sphere.
The project initiated by the Diggers in the Haight-Ashbury — the construction of a “free city” within the city, sustaining itself off the waste of its host and distributing its own survival freely — exposed the fact of material abundance and the possibility of a new world based on the principle of gift. But without directly challenging the social practice of capitalism, it remained merely a gesture, a militant avant-garde welfare program. Despite the Diggers’ expectations, the state was not about to collapse around this self-management of garbage pickings.
Initially the Diggers’ practice had been an appropriate response to the needs of the moment in the context of insurrectionary activity. They first organized to distribute food after the San Francisco ghetto riot (1966) and an ensuing curfew made it difficult to obtain. But they continued this project in a nonrevolutionary context, propped it up with an ideology of primitive communism, fetishized the idea of free distribution and became something of an antibureaucratic institution. In the end they were doing the welfare workers’ job better than the welfare workers could, decompressing the radical critique of the family being lived by the runaways by advising them to go home “in the language of the street.”
In the Haight there were attempts at directly challenging the urbanism of isolation and the authority which enforces it (it is noteworthy that the local Safeway supermarket had to close down because of shoplifting), and often with a strong sense of play (notably the early attempts to take over the street). But because pacifist and humanist ideology dominated its practice, the Haight became a morality play, a crusade more than a rebellion. Critical acts were lost in the utopian hope that society like a bad child would follow a good example. What is utopian is not the idea of a society based on the principle of gift but the belief that such a dream can be realized without suppressing the reality which contains it. Outside critical activity there are only ideals to be followed; the principle of gift becomes the “giving attitude” of humanistic psychology. Compare the good vibes of the hippies to the assault made on the commodity economy by the practical dialecticians of the ghetto rebellions, in which which they realized for a short time another principle of the new world: “To each according to his desires.”
Like the sociologists who thought that the ghetto riots were an unfortunate consequence of the blacks’ attitude toward existing conditions, the hippie thinks that alienation is merely a matter of perception (“it’s all in your head”). He believes that the fetters on social life are ultimately the prevailing ideas and attitudes, that it is consciousness — abstracted from social practice — that needs to be transformed. Thus, in effect, he reinterprets reality so as to accept it by means of his interpretation. He “mellows out,” pacifies himself so as to be “in tune” with the (capitalist-dominated) environment. All negative feelings are a head problem solved by turning on the “good vibes.” Frustration and misery are attributed to “bad karma.” “Bum trips” are a consequence of not “flowing with things.” Psycho-moralizing about “ego trips” and “power trips,” he holds them responsible for the present social poverty and harbors millenarian expectations based on the abstract determination of everybody to “love one another.” Everything continues as it is factually while, by a dialectical deceit, he supplies a secret interpretation: that existing conditions will go away as soon as everyone acts as if they didn’t exist. This quasi-Christian elevation above the world exactly measures how far the hippie is beneath life and “destined” to be kept there by virtue of this interpretation. He accepts his fate in the spirit of holiness, of confident superiority (“don’t let things bring you down”). Like adolescents at a junior prom, everyone is encouraged to dance and have a good time. “Be free! Be natural!” A sneak preview of the psycho-humanist police force of the new order.
Emerging from the desperate isolation of advanced capitalism, the hippies reacted by simply grasping on to each other for support. Their rejection of isolation quickly lost itself in illusions of community. All the talk of dancing in the streets and all the pseudo-festivals only kept hidden the real separation and misery. Measuring his own life by the criteria of style, the hippie naturally judges others likewise. Smiling at another long-hair gives the illusion of a mutual recognition; the community of style becomes an ersatz communication. Everywhere — from the commune to the street scene, from the switchboards to the free clinics, from the rap centers to the hip businesses — the counterculture erects a new network of false bonds. Everyone becomes the chamber of commerce for a so-called hip community based on false oppositions, esoteric commodities and spectacles.
It was the promise of authentic community which attracted so many people to the hip milieu. For a while, in fact, in the Haight-Ashbury the boundaries between isolated individuals, living quarters and home and street began to give way. But what was to be a new life devolved into a glorified survival. The common desire to live outside the dominant society, since it could only be realized partially by living on the margins of that society, economically and otherwise, resulted in the reintroduction of survival as the basis for collective cohesion. All the domestic banalities are fetishized and social relations are marked by mutual toleration and active dissimulation of real separations. A motto of one commune is “I’ll tolerate you if you tolerate me.”
In the rural communes, a false community of neoprimitives — who share only the mutuality of their retreat — assembles over the false crisis of a self-imposed natural alienation. This natural reserve is for them the sacred space in which they will return to the erotic bond of primitive communism and mystical union with nature. But in fact these zones for communitarian experimentation, which serve as shock-absorbers for the society at large, only reproduce the hierarchical patterns of former societies, from a rediscovered natural division of labor and shamanism to modified forms of frontier patriarchy. While the magic and ritual which the communalist practices, first playfully, then seriously, had a material basis when technology was primitive, and constituted, on a primitive level, a game with nature, his application of them is only a ludicrous substitute for what is now materially possible: a real game with nature without the religious mediation.
The hippie’s romanticization of nature and the primitive is not a unique response to a disintegrating social order. At the collapse of feudal society primitivism appeared as a surrogate for seizing the social possibilities exposed by such decay. But now it returns thoroughly spectacularized. In answering his alienation from nature with an ideology of naturalness, the hippie transforms, if not his reality at least his appearance; he gets as close to nature as long hair, bare feet, no bra and plenty of camping trips can take him. Once constructed, this image returns in an endless photographic and filmic display of flower-children dancing nude and their dearest recording stars romping through the woods in slow motion.
The counterculture ideologues justified their religious and mystical eclecticism as research in the methods of “spiritual liberation,” which some of them claimed was a necessary prerequisite for social revolution. In their hands revolution became, not the chance for subjectivity to transform reality, but the technical problem of “changing your head,” “turning on.” The hippie became an avid and full-time consumer of the oldest and latest techniques of induced passivity: meditation, light shows, multi-media, drugs, psychedelic posters. Using every technical means to simulate excitement — to convince himself that he is still alive — the hippie creates stimulating totalitarian environments and manipulates himself into euphoric passivity. His sensualism is merely a matter of heightened consciousness, a pseudo-enrichment of any content no matter how impoverished. Leaving one titillation, he is soon enough lost in another. It is the spontaneity of the commodity: you smoke a joint, put on the strobe light, listen to quadraphonic sound, and “let things happen.”
The hippie’s fascination with drugs and the occult, despite its liberatory pretensions, is really a fascination with a more internalized enslavement. Compulsively trying to feel good within and in spite of the dominant conditions, he ends up defending himself from “feelings of alienation” by trying to make them go away, or at least diminishing them so as to make them tolerable. Like the bored retiree who takes up hobbies, the hippie deals with his malaise by “getting his head into something.” He rejects both the work and the leisure of his parents, but only to return to both in his own way. He works in “meaningful” jobs, for “hip companies” in which the employees constitute a “family,” and does subsistence farming and temporary work. Imagining himself a primitive craftsman, he develops this role, idealizing the Craft. The ideology he attaches to his pseudoprimitive (or pseudofeudal) occupation dissimulates its petit-bourgeois character. His interests, such as organic food, spawn thriving businesses. But the owners don’t think of themselves as ordinary businessmen because they “believe in their product.” It’s good vibes all the way to the bank.
The hippie’s domestic leisure is just as pedestrian. Imagining he is rejecting the student role, he becomes a lifelong student. The free universities are smorgasbords where the most metaphysical as well as the most banal dishes are served up. Within its ideological boundaries the hippie’s appetite is limitless. He reads the I Ching. He learns to meditate. He gardens. He picks up a new instrument. He paints, makes candles, bakes. His energy is insatiable, but it is all dissipated. Each thing he does is in itself irreproachable because trivial; what is ludicrous is the illusions he builds up around his activities. For him, the more banal the activity, the more it is divine. In reality, what he busies himself with, whether in the city or the country, adds up to an immense diversion of creativity, a busy passivity which begins to solve for the advanced spectacle the problem of colonizing the “free time” it makes available.
Abstractly breaking with his past, the hippie lives a shallow version of an eternal present. Dissociated from both past and future, the succession of moments in his life is a disconnected series of diversions (“trips”). Travel is his mode of change, a drifting consumption of false adventures. He crosses the country continually in search of that “beautiful scene” which always evades him. His is a boredom always on the move. He hungrily devours every experience on sale in order to keep his head in the same good place. Wherever the hippie gathers with his fellows it is a space of unresolved tensions, of uncharged particles meandering around some spectacular nucleus or other. Hip urbanism — always trying to carve out a homey space where its false community could flourish — never failed to create for itself one more reservation where the natives stare blankly at each other because they’re also the tourists. The Haight-Ashbury, the rock festival, the hip pad were supposed to be free spaces where separations broke down; but hip space became the space of passivity, of leisure consumption — of separations at another level. The rock concert in Oregon organized by the state to divert people from a demonstration — where the state gave out free grass and inspected the psychedelics before they were dispensed — is only the limiting case of the general tendency: space organized benevolently for tourists of dead time.
Hip life did have a more active content at its origins. The spectacular term “hippie” denotes far from homogenous phenomena and the subculture, and the individuals involved, passed through various stages. Some of the earliest of the subculture did have a conception of the new world as something to be built consciously, not as something that would just happen by turning on and coming together. But the spectacular culture which is the legacy of their activity, their “success,” is really the sign of their failure. When, in 1967, some staged a symbolic funeral of the hippie for the press, they only showed by their theatrical expression of failure that they never left the spectacle which produced them and never understood the spectacle they produced. The hip movement was the sign of growing discontent with a daily life colonized more and more by the spectacle. But in failing to oppose itself radically to the dominant system, it constructed merely a counter-spectacle.
Not that such opposition should have been political in the ordinary sense. If the hippie knew anything, he knew that the revolutionary vision of the politicos didn’t go far enough. Although the hip lifestyle was really only a reform movement of daily life, from his own vantage point the hippie could see that the politico had no practical critique of daily life (that he was “straight”). If the early hippie rejected “political” activity partly for the wrong reasons (his positivity, utopianism, etc.), he also had a partial critique of it, of its boredom, its ideological nature and its rigidity. Ken Kesey was correct in perceiving that the politicos were only engaging the old world on its own terms. But by failing to offer anything besides this, except LSD, he and others like him abdicated, in effect, to the politicos. Their pure and simple apoliticality left them open in the end, first to partial support for, and then to absorption into the political movement. Even those who had a somewhat critical political perspective had a similar fate. For example, Gary Snyder, who had Gandhiist-anarchist sympathies, blames, in an early essay, the failure of the classical proletarian movement on “a state of mind” and “Western Tradition,” but winds up later supporting, if vaguely, the Panthers.
If the pre-political hippies fell for all the illusions and utopian “solutions,” if their critique of everyday life never recognized its historical basis and the material forces which could make it socially effective, still the emergence of the hippie revealed the extent of dissatisfaction, the impossibility for so many of continuing along the straight and narrow paths of social integration. Yet at the same time that the counterculture announced, if incoherently, the possibility of a new world, it constructed some of the most advanced paths of reintegration into the old one. The despair of “dropping out” gave way to the constructiveness of the counterculture; its positivity substituted utopian anticipation for critical activity. On all fronts the counterculture was an avant-garde of recuperation; it canalized real discontent with the generalized isolation into false alternatives; it served power with the necessary experimental research for the encirclement of potential opposition.
CONTRADICTION
(unpublished draft, April 1972)
Excerpts from this draft were reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
[Spanish translation of this text]
[Bureau Prehistory]