��������������������� Anon.
At Daggers
Drawn
with the Existent, its
Defenders
and its False Critics
Anyone
can put an end to tossing about in the slavery of what they don�t know�and
refusing the sop of empty words, come to daggers with life.� ����
�������������������������������������������� C. Michelstaedter.����� ������������������
�����������������������
����������� Life
is no more than a continual search for something to cling to. One gets up in
the morning to find oneself in bed a mere matter of hours later, a sad commuter
between lack of desire and fatigue. Time passes, spurring us less and less.
Social obligations no longer seem to break our backs as we have got used to
spreading the weight. We obey without even taking the trouble to say yes. Death
is expiated by living, wrote the poet from another trench.
����������� We can live without
passion or dreams�that is the great liberty this society offers us. We can talk
endlessly, particularly of things we know nothing about. We can express any
opinion we like, even the most daring, and disappear behind the murmuring. We
can vote for the candidate we prefer, demanding the right to complain in
exchange. We can change channels at any time should we seem to be getting
dogmatic. We can enjoy ourselves at specific moments, traversing sadly
identical environments at increasing speed. We can appear to be young hotheads
before receiving icy bucketfuls of common sense. We can get wed as often as we
like, so sacred is marriage. We can employ ourselves usefully and, if we can�t
write, become journalists. We can do politics in a thousand ways, even talking
about exotic guerrillas. In careers as in love, if we don�t quite make it to
giving orders we can always excel in obeying. Obedience can even make martyrs
of us and in spite of appearances, this society needs heroes.
����������� Our stupidity certainly
won�t seem any worse than anyone else�s. It doesn�t matter if we can�t make up
our minds, we can let others decide for us. Then, we will take a stand, as they say in the jargon of politics and the
spectacle. There is never any lack of justification, especially in the world of
those who aren�t fussy.
����������� In this great fairground
of roles we all have one loyal ally: money. Democratic par excellence, it
respects no one in particular. In its presence no commodity or service can be
denied us. It has the whole of society behind it, no matter who it belongs to.
Of course this ally never gives enough of itself and, moreover, does not give
itself to all. But the hierarchy of money is a special one, uniting what the
conditions of life set against each other. When you have it, you are always
right. When you don�t, you have plenty of extenuating circumstances.
����������� With a bit of practice
we could get through a whole day without one single idea. Daily routine thinks
in place of us. From work to �free time�, everything comes about within the
continuity of survival. We always have something to cling to. The most
stupefying characteristic of today�s society is the ability for �comfort� to
exist a hair�s breadth from catastrophe. The economy and the technological
administration of the existent are advancing with irresponsible recklessness.
One slips from entertainment to large-scale massacre with the disciplined
insensitivity of programmed gestures. Death�s buying and selling extends over
the whole of time and space. Risk and brave effort no longer exist; there
remains only security or disaster, routine or catastrophe. Saved or submerged.
Alive, never.
����������� With a bit of practice
we could walk from home to school, the office to the supermarket or the bank to
the disco, eyes closed. Now we can understand the adage of that old Greek sage:
�The dormant also maintain the world order�.
����������� The time has come to
break away from this we, a reflex of
the only community that now exists, that of authority and commodities.
����������� One part of this society
has every interest in its continuing to rule, the other in everything
collapsing as soon as possible. Deciding which side one is on is the first
step. But resignation, the basis of the agreement between the sides (improvers
of the existent and its false critics) is everywhere, even in our own lives�the
authentic place of the social war�in
our desires and resoluteness as well as in our little daily submissions.
����������� It is necessary to come
to daggers with all that, to finally come to daggers with life.
��
II
��������� It is by doing things that need to be
learned in order to be done, that you learn them.
Aristotle
����������� The secret is to really
begin.
����������� The present social
organisation is not just delaying, it is also preventing and corrupting any
practice of freedom. The only way to learn what freedom is, is to experiment
it, and to do so you must have the necessary time and space.
����������� The fundamental premise
for free action is dialogue. Now, any authentic discourse requires two
conditions: a real interest in the questions brought up to be discussed (the
problem of content) and the free search for possible answers (the problem of
method). These two conditions should occur at
the same time, given that the content determines the method, and vice
versa. One can only talk of freedom in freedom. What is the point of asking
questions if we are not free to answer? What is the point of answering if the
questions are always false? Dialogue only exists when individuals can talk to each
other without mediation, i.e. when they relate reciprocally. If the discourse
is one-way, no communication is possible. If someone has the power to impose
the questions, the content of the latter will be directly functional to this
(and the answers will contain subjection). Subjects can only be asked questions
whose answers confirm their role as such, and from which the bosses will draw
the questions of the future. The slavery lies in continuing to reply.
����������� �In this sense market research is identical to
the elections. The sovereignty of the elector corresponds to the sovereignty of
the consumer, and vice versa. TV passivity is called audience; the legitimation of the power of the State is called sovereign people. In either case
individuals are simply hostages in a mechanism that gives them the right to speak after having deprived
them of the faculty of doing so. What
is the point of dialogue if all you can do is elect one or the other? What is
communication if all your only choice is between identical goods and TV
programmes? The content of the questions is meaningless because the method is
false.
����������� �Nothing resembles a
representative of the bourgeoisie more than a representative of the
proletariat,� Sorel wrote in 1907. What made them identical was the fact that
they were, precisely, representatives.
To say the same of a right or left wing candidate today would be banal. But
politicians do not need to be original (advertising takes care of that), it is
sufficient for them to know how to administer
that banality. The irony is that the media are defined a means of communication and the voting spree is
called elections (which in the true
sense of the word means free, conscious decision).
����������� The
point is that power does not allow for any other kind of management. Even if
the voters wanted it (which would already take us into full �utopia�, to
imitate the language of the realists),
nothing important could be asked of them from the moment that the only free
act�the only authentic election�they could accomplish would be not to vote.
Anyone who votes wants
inconsequential questions, as authentic questions deny passivity and
delegation. We will explain better.
����������� Imagine that the
abolition of capitalism were to be requested through referendum (putting aside
the fact that such a question is impossible
in the context of existing social relations). Most of the electorate would vote
in favour of capitalism simply because, as they tranquilly leave home, the
office or the supermarket, they cannot imagine a world other than one with
commodities and money. But even if they were to vote against it nothing would
change as, to be authentic, such a question would exclude the existence of voters. A whole society cannot be changed
by decree.
����������� The same could be said
for less radical questions. Take the example of the housing estate. What would
happen if the inhabitants were able (once again, we would be in �utopia�) to
express themselves concerning the organisation of their own lives (housing,
streets, squares, etc.)? Let us say right away that such demands would inevitably be limited from the
start,� because housing estates are a
consequence of the displacement and concentration
of the population according to the needs of the economy and social control.
Nevertheless, we could try to imagine some form of social organisation other than such ghettos. One could
safely say that most of the population would have the same ideas as the police
on the subject. Otherwise (that is, if even limited practice of dialogue were to give rise to the desire for a new
environment), this would mean the explosion of the ghetto. How, under the
present social order, do you reconcile the inhabitants� desire to breathe with the interests of the bosses
of the motor industry, ? Free circulation of individuals with the fears of the
luxury boutique owners? Children�s play areas with the cement of the car parks,
banks and shopping centres? The empty houses left in the hands of the
speculators? The blocks of flats that look like army barracks, that look like
schools, that look like hospitals, that look like asylums? To move one wall in
this labyrinth of horrors would mean putting the whole scheme in question. The
further we move away from a police-like view of the environment, the closer we
get to clashing with the police.
����������� How can you think freely
in the shadow of a church? wrote an anonymous hand on the sacred wall of the
Sorbonne during May �68. This impeccable question has wider implications.
Anything that has been designed for economic or religious purposes cannot fail
to impose anything but economic or religious desires. A desecrated church
continues to be the house of God. Commodities continue their chatter in an
abandoned shopping centre. The parade ground of a disused barracks still contains the marching of the
soldiers. That is what he who said that the destruction of the Bastille was an
act of applied social psychology meant. The Bastille could never have been
managed as anything other than a prison, because its walls would have continued
to tell the tale of incarcerated bodies and desires.
����������� Subservience, obligation
and boredom espouse consumerism in endless funereal nuptials. Work reproduces
the social environment which reproduces the resignation to work. One enjoys
evenings in front of the TV because one has spent the day in the office and the
underground. Keeping quiet in the factory makes shouting in the stadia a
promise of happiness. Feelings of inadequacy at school vindicate the insensate irresponsibility of a Saturday night at the
disco. Only eyes emerging from a McDonald�s are capable of lighting up when
they see a Club Med billboard. Et cetera.
����������� You need to know how to
experience freedom in order to be free. You need to free yourself in order to
experience freedom. Within the present social order, time and space prevent
experimentation of freedom because they suffocate the freedom to experiment.
�����������
III
The
tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of�
instruction.�������������������������������������� W.
Blake
����������� Only by upsetting the
imperatives of time and social space will it be possible to imagine new
relations and surroundings. The old philosopher said one can only desire on the
basis of what one knows. Desires can only change if one changes the life that
produces them. Let�s be clear about this: rebellion against the organisation of
time and space by power is a material and psychological necessity.
����������� Bakunin said that
revolutions are three quarters fantasy and a quarter reality. The important
thing is realising where the fantasy that leads to the explosion of generalised
rebellion originates. The unleashing of
all evil passions, as the Russian revolutionary said, is the irresistible
force of transformation. For all that this might make the resigned or the cold
analysts of the historical movements of capital smile, we could say�if we did
not find such jargon� indigestible�that
such an idea of revolution is extremely modern. Passions are evil, in that they are prisoners
suffocated by that gelid monster, normality. But they are also evil because the
will to live rather than shrink under the weight of duty and masks, transforms
itself into quite the opposite. When restricted by daily duties, life denies
itself to reappear in the guise of a servant. Desperately searching for space, it manifests itself as an oneiric
presence, a physical contraction, a nervous tic, idiotic, gregarious violence.
Does not the massive spread of psychotic drugs, one of the latest interventions
of the welfare State, denounce the unbearableness of the present conditions of
life? Power administers captivity everywhere in order to justify one of its own
products: evil. Insurrection takes care of both of them.
����������� If they do not wish to
deceive themselves and others, those struggling for the demolition of the
present social edifice must face the fact that subversion is a game of wild,
barbarous forces. Someone referred to them as Cossacks, someone else hooligans;
in fact they are individuals whose anger has not been quelled by social peace.
����������� But how do you create a
new community starting from anger? Let us put a stop to the conjuring tricks of
dialectics. The exploited are not carriers of any positive project, be it even
the classless society (which all too closely resembles the productive set up).
Capital is their only community. They can only escape by destroying everything
that makes them exploited: wages, commodities, roles and hierarchies.
Capitalism has not created the conditions of its overcoming in communism�the
famous bourgeoisie forging the arms of its own extinction�but of a world of
horrors.
����������� The exploited have
nothing to self-manage but their own negation as such. That is the only way
that their bosses, leaders and apologists in various guises will disappear
along with them. In this �immense task of urgent demolition� we must find joy,
immediately.����� ����������� �
����������� For the Greeks the word
�barbarian� did not only refer to the stranger, but also to the �stammerer�, he
who did not speak the language of the polis correctly. Language and territory
are inseparable. The law fixes the borders enforced by the order of Names.
Every power structure has its barbarians, every democratic discourse its
stammerers. The society of commodities wants to banish their obstinate
presence�with expulsion and silence�as though they were nothing. It is on this
nothing that rebellion has founded its cause. No ideology of dialogue and
participation will ever be able to mask exclusion and internal colonies
completely. When the daily violence of the State and the economy causes the
evil part to explode, there is no point in being surprised if someone puts
their feet on the table and refuses to�
accept discussion. Only then will passions get rid of a world of death.
The Barbarians are just around the corner.
IV
We must abandon all models,
and study our �� ��������� possibilities.
E.A. Poe
����������� The necessity of
insurrection. Not in the sense of inevitability (an event that must take place sooner or later), but in
the sense of a concrete condition of possibility. The necessity of the
possible. Money is necessary in this society. Yet a life without money is
possible. To experience this possibility it is necessary to destroy this
society. Today one only experiences what is socially necessary.
����������� Curiously, those who
consider insurrection to be a tragic error (or an unrealistic romantic dream)
talk a lot about social action and areas of freedom for experimentation. One
only has to squeeze such arguments a little, however, for all the juice to come
out of them. As we said, in order to act freely it is necessary to be able to
talk to each other without mediation. And about what, how much, and where can
one engage in dialogue at the present time?
����������� In order to discuss
freely one must snatch time and space from social obligations. After all,
dialogue is inseparable from struggle. It is inseparable materially (in order
to talk to each other it is necessary for us to take time and seize the
necessary space) and psychologically (individuals like talking about what they
do because that is how words transform reality).
����������� We forget we are all
living in a ghetto, even if we don�t pay rent and every day is a Sunday. If we
are not capable of destroying this ghetto, the freedom to experiment will be a
poor thing indeed.
����������� Many libertarians
believe that social change can and must come about gradually, without any
sudden rupture. For this reason, they talk of �areas free of the State� in
which to elaborate new ideas and practices. Leaving aside the decidedly comical
aspects of the question (where does
the State not exist? how do you put
it in parentheses?), you can see that the point of reference for such questions
remains the self-managed federalist methods experimented by subversives at
particular times in history (the Paris Commune, revolutionary Spain, the
Budapest Commune, etc.). What one omits to say, however, is that the
possibility of talking to one another and changing reality was taken by the
rebels with arms. In short, a small detail is left out: insurrection. You
cannot remove a method (neighbourhood meetings, direct decision-making,
horizontal linking up, et cetera) from the context that made it possible, or
even draw it up against the latter (e.g. �there is no point in attacking the
State; we must self-organise, make utopia concrete�). Before thinking about
what the proletarian councils signified for example�and what they could signify
today�it is necessary to consider the conditions under which they existed (1905
in Russia, 1918-21 in Germany and Italy, et cetera). These were insurrectional
times. Will someone please explain how it would be possible for the exploited
to decide in first person on questions of any importance today without breaking
social normality by force? Only then will you be able to talk about
self-management or federalism. Before discussing what self-managing the present
productive structures �after the revolution� means, it is necessary to be aware
of one simple thing: neither the bosses or the police would agree to it. You
cannot discuss a possibility while omitting the conditions required to make it
concrete. Any idea of freedom� implies a
break with the present society.
����������� Let us see one last
example. Direct democracy is also talked about in libertarian circles. One
could retort that the anarchist utopia opposes itself to the method of majority
decision. Right. But the point is that no one talks about direct democracy in real terms. Leaving aside those who
pass it off as quite the opposite, i.e. the constitution of civic lists and
participation in the municipal elections, let us consider those who imagine
real citizens� assemblies where people talk to each other without mediation.
What would the so-called citizens be able to express? How could they reply
differently, without changing the questions? How make a distinction between
so-called political freedom and the present economic, social and technological
conditions? No matter how you twist things, you cannot escape the problem of
destruction, unless you think that a technologically centralised society could
at the same time become federalist, or that generalised self-management could
exist in the true prisons that the cities of the present day have become. To
say that all the changes that are necessary could be done gradually merely
confuses the issue. Change cannot even begin
to take place without widespread revolt. Insurrection is the whole of social relations opening up to
the adventure of freedom once the mask of capitalist specialisation has been
torn off. Insurrection does not come up with the answers on its own, that is
true. It only starts asking questions. So the point is not whether to act
gradually or adventuristically. The point is whether to act or merely dream of
acting.
����������� The critique of direct
democracy (to stick to the same example) must be concrete. Only then is it
possible to go beyond and think that
the social foundations of individual autonomy really exist. Only then is it
possible for this going beyond to
become a method of struggle, here and now. Subversives need to criticise other
people�s ideas and define them more precisely than those who swear by them.
����������� The better to sharpen
their daggers.
V
�� It is an axiomatic, self-evident truth that
the revolution cannot be made until there are sufficient forces to do so. But
it is an historical truth that the forces that determine evolution and social
revolutions cannot be� calculated with
the census lists.
�Malatesta
����������� It is out of fashion to
believe that social transformation is still possible. The �masses�, it is said,
are in a deep trance and fully integrated within the social norms. At least two
conclusions can be drawn from such a remark. That rebellion is impossible or
that it is only possible in small numbers. This either becomes an openly
institutional discourse (the need for elections, legal conquests, etc.) or one in favour of social reform (union
self-organisation, struggle for collective rights, etc.). The second conclusion
can become the basis of the classical vanguardist discourse or of an
anti-authoritarian one in favour of permanent agitation.
����������� Here it can be said that
throughout history ideas that were apparently in opposition to each other
actually share the same roots.
����������� Take social democracy
and bolshevism for example: they clearly both came from the supposition that
the masses do not have any revolutionary consciousness, so need to be led.
Social democrats and Bolsheviks differed only in the methods used�reformist
party or revolutionary party, parliamentary strategy or violent conquest of
power�in the identical programme of bringing consciousness to the exploited
from outside.
����������� Let us take the
hypothesis of a �minoritarian� subversive practice that refuses the Leninist
model. In a libertarian perspective one either abandons all insurrectional discourse (in favour of a declaredly solitary
revolt), or sooner or later it becomes necessary to face the problem of the
social implications of one�s ideas and practices. If we don�t want to resolve
the question in the ambit of linguistic miracles (for example by saying that
the theses we support are already in
the heads of the exploited, or that one�s rebellion is already part of a wider condition) one fact remains: we are
isolated, which is not the same as saying we are few.
����������� Not only does acting in
small numbers not constitute a limit, it represents a totally different way of
seeing social transformation. Libertarians are the only people to envisage a
dimension of collective life that is not subordinated to central direction.
Authentic federalism makes agreements between free unions of individuals
possible. Relations of affinity do not exist on the basis of ideology or
quantity, but start off from reciprocal knowledge, from feeling and sharing
projectual passions. But projectual affinity and autonomous individual action
are dead letters if they cannot spread without being sacrificed in the name of
some claimed higher necessity. It is the horizontal link that concretises the
practice of liberation: an informal link, of
fact, without representation. A centralised society cannot exist without
police control and a deadly technological apparatus. For this reason, anyone
who is incapable of imagining a community without State authority is devoid of
instruments with which to criticise the economy that is destroying the planet.
Anyone who is incapable of imagining a community of unique individuals has nothing to put in the place of political mediation.
On the contrary, the idea of free experimentation in a coming together of
like-minded people, with affinity as the basis for new relations, makes
complete social upheaval possible. Only by abandoning the idea of centre (the conquest of the Winter
Palace or, to bring things up to date, State television) does it become
possible to build a life without imposition or money. In such a direction, the
method of spreading attacks is a form of struggle that carries a different
world within it. To act when everyone advises waiting, when it is not possible
to count on great followings, when you do not know beforehand whether you will
get results or not, means one is already affirming what one is fighting for: a
society without measure. This, then,
is how action in small groups of people with affinity contains the most
important of qualities�it is not mere tactical contrivance, but already
contains the realisation of one�s goal. Liquidating the lie of the transitional period (dictatorship before
communism, power before freedom, wages before taking the lot, certainty of the
results before taking action, requests for financing before expropriation,
�ethical banks� before anarchy, etc.) means making the revolt itself a
different way of conceiving relations. Attacking the technological hydra right
away means imagining a life without white-coated policemen (i.e. without the
economic or scientific organisation that makes them necessary); attacking the
instruments of domestication by the media now means creating relations that are
free from images (i.e. free from the
passivity that fabricates them). Anyone who starts screaming that it is no
longer�or not yet�time for rebellion, is revealing the kind of society they
want in advance. On the other hand, to stress the need for social insurrection
now�an uncontainable movement that breaks with historical time to allow the
emergence of the possible�simply means: we want no leaders. Today the only real
federalism is generalised rebellion.
����������� If we refuse
centralisation we must go beyond the quantitative idea of rallying the
exploited for a frontal clash with power. It is necessary to think of another
concept of strength�burn the census lists and change reality.
�� �Main rule: do not act en masse. Carry out actions in three or four at
the most. There should be as many small groups as possible and each of them
must learn to attack and disappear quickly. The police attempt to crush a crowd
of thousands with one single group of a hundred cossacks.
It is
easier to defeat a hundred men than one alone, especially if they strike
suddenly and disappear mysteriously. The police and army will be powerless if
Moscow is covered in these small�
unseizable detachments[..] Do not occupy strongholds. The troops will
always be able to take them or simply destroy them with their artillery. Our
fortresses will be internal courtyards or any place that it is easy to strike
from and leave easily. If they were to take them they would never find anyone
and would lose many men. It would be�
impossible for them to take them all because they to do this they would
have to fill every house with�
cossacks.�
�� �� Warning
to the Insurgents, Moscow, December 11
1905.
VI
...poesy,
... is referred to the Imagination, which may at pleasure make unlawful matches
and divorces of things.
����������� F. Bacon
����������� Think of another concept
of strength. Perhaps this is the new poetry. Basically, what is social revolt
if not a generalised game of illegal matching and divorcing of things.
����������� Revolutionary strength
is not a strength that is equal to and against that of power. If that were the
case we would be defeated before we start, because any change would be the
eternal return of constriction. Everything would be reduced to military
conflict, a danse macabre of
standards. Real movements escape the quantitative glance.
����������� The State and capital
possess the most sophisticated systems of control and repression. How can we
oppose this Moloch? The secret lies in the art of breaking apart and putting
together again. The movement of intelligence is a continual game of breaking up
and establishing correspondences. The same goes for subversive practice.
Criticising technology, for instance, means considering its general framework,
seeing it not simply as an assemblage of machinery, but as a social relation, a
system; it means understanding that a
technological instrument reflects the society that produces it and that its
introduction changes relations between individuals. Criticising technology
means refusing to subordinate human activity to profit. Otherwise we would be
deceiving ourselves as to the implications of technology, its claims to
neutrality, the reversibility of its consequences. It then becomes necessary to
break it up into its thousand ramifications, the concrete realisations that are
increasingly mutilating us. We need to understand that the spreading of
production and control that the new technologies allow makes sabotage easier.
It would be impossible to attack them otherwise. The same goes for schools,
barracks, and offices. Although they are inseparable from the whole of
hierarchical and mercantile relations, they still concretise themselves in
specific people and places.
����������� How�when we are so
few�can we make ourselves visible to
students, workers, unemployed? If one thinks in terms of consensus and image
(making oneself visible, to be precise), the reply can be taken for granted:
unions and cunning politicians are far stronger than we are. Once again what is
lacking is the capacity to put together and break apart. Reformism acts on detail,
quantitatively: it mobilises vast
numbers of people in order to change a few isolated aspects of power. A global
critique of society on the other hand allows a qualitative vision of action to emerge. Precisely because there are
no centres or revolutionary subjects to subordinate one�s projects to, each
aspect of social reality relates back to the whole of which it is a part. No
matter whether it is a question of pollution, prison or urban planning, any
really subversive discourse ends up putting everything
in question. Today more than ever a quantitative project (of assembling
students, workers or unemployed in permanent organisations with a specific
programme) can only act on detail, emptying actions of the strength of putting
questions that cannot be reduced to a separation into categories (students,
workers, immigrants, homosexuals, etc.). All the more so as reformism is less
and less capable of reforming anything (think of unemployment and the way it is
falsely presented as a resolvable breakdown in economic rationality). Someone
said that even the request for nontoxic food has become a revolutionary
project, because any attempt to satisfy it would involve changing the whole of
social relations. Any demand that is addressed to a precise interlocutor carries
its own defeat within it, if for no other reason than that no authority would
be capable of resolving a problem of general significance even if it wanted to.
To whom does one turn to oppose air
pollution?
����������� The workers who, during
a wildcat strike, carried a banner saying, �We
are not asking for anything� understood that the defeat is in the claim
itself (�the claim against the enemy is eternal�). There is no alternative but
to take everything. As Stirner said: �No matter how much you give them, they will
always ask for more, because what they want is no less than the end of every
concession�.
����������� And then? Then, even
though you are few you can think of acting without doing so in isolation, in
the knowledge that in explosive situations a few good contacts are more useful
than large numbers. Sadly, it often happens that rights-claiming social
struggles develop more interesting methods than they do objectives (for
example, a group of unemployed asking for work ends up burning down a dole
office). Of course one could remain aloof, saying that work should not be asked
for, but destroyed. Or one could try to link a critique of the whole economy to
that so passionately burned office, or a critique of the unions to an act of
sabotage. Each individual objective in the struggle contains the violence of
the whole of social relations ready to explode. The banality of their immediate
cause, as we know, is the calling card of revolts throughout history.
����������� �What can a group of resolute comrades do in
such situations? Not much, unless they have already thought (for example) about
how to give out a leaflet or at what points of the city to widen a protest;
and, what is more, if a gay and lawless intelligence makes them forget numbers
and great organisational structures.
����������� Without wanting to
revive the myth that the general strike is the unshackling of insurrection, it
is clear enough that the interruption of all social activity is still decisive.
Subversive action must tend towards the paralysis of normality, no matter what
originally caused the clash. If students continue to study, workers�those who
remain of them�and office employees to work, the unemployed to worry about
employment, then no change will be possible. Revolutionary practice will always
be above people. Any organisation
that is separate from social struggles can neither unleash revolt nor extend
and defend it. If it is true that the exploited tend to line up behind those
who are able to guarantee economic improvements during the course of the
struggle�if it is true, in other words, that any struggle to demand better
conditions is necessarily of a reformist character�libertarians could push
through methods (individual autonomy, direct action, permanent conflictuality)
that go beyond making demands to denying all social identities (teacher, clerk,
worker, et cetera). An established libertarian organisation making claims would
merely flank the struggles (only a
few of the exploited would choose to belong to it), or would lose its
libertarian characteristics (the trades unions are the best qualified in the
field of syndicalist struggles). An organisational structure formed by
revolutionaries and exploited is only really in conflict if it is in tune with
the temporary nature of one specific struggle, has a clear aim and is in the
perspective of attack. In a word, if it is a critique in act of the union and
its collaboration with the bosses.
����������� We cannot say that
subversives have a great capacity to launch social struggles (anti-militarist,
against environmental toxicity, et cetera) at the moment. There remains (for
all those who do not maintain that �people are accomplice and resigned�) the
hypothesis of autonomous intervention in struggles�or in the fairly extensive
acts of rebellion�that arise spontaneously. If we are looking for a clear
expression of the kind of society the exploited are fighting for (as one subtle
theoretician claimed in the face of a recent wave of strikes), we might as well
stay at home. If we simply limit ourselves�which is not very different�to
�critical support�, we are merely adding our red and black flags to those of
the parties and unions. Once again critique of detail espouses the quantitative
model. If we think that when the unemployed talk about the right to work we
should be doing the same (making the obvious distinction between wages and
�socially useful activity�), then the only place
for action seems to be streets full of demonstrators. As old Aristotle was
aware, representation is only
possible where there is unity of time and place.
����������� But who said it is not
possible to talk to the unemployed of sabotage, the abolition of rights, or the
refusal to pay rent (whilst practising it at the same time)? Who said that when
workers come out into the streets on strike, the economy cannot be criticised elsewhere? To say what the enemy does
not expect and be where they are not waiting for us. That is the new poetry.
VII
We are too young, we cannot
wait any longer.
A wall in Paris
����������� The force of an
insurrection is social, not military. Generalised rebellion is not measured by
the armed clash but by the extent to which the economy is paralysed, the places
of production and distribution taken over, the free giving that burns all
calculation and the desertion of obligations and social roles. In a word, it is
the upsetting of life. No guerrilla group, no matter how effective, can take
the place of this grandiose movement of destruction and transformation.
Insurrection is the light emergence of a banality coming to the surface: no
power can support itself without the voluntary servitude of those it dominates.
Revolt reveals better than anything else that it is the exploited themselves
who make the murderous machinery of exploitation function. The wild, spreading
interruption of social activity suddenly tears away the blanket of ideology,
revealing the real balance of strength. The State then shows itself in its true
colours�the political organisation of passivity. Ideology on one side, fantasy
on the other, expose their material weight. The exploited simply discover the
strength they have always had, putting an end to the illusion that society
reproduces itself alone�or that some mole is clawing away in their place. They
rise up against their past obedience�their
past State�and habits established in defence of the old world. The
conspiracy of insurgents is the only instance when �collectivity� is not the
darkness that gives away the flight of the fireflies to the police, or the lie
that makes �common good� of individual ill-being. It is what gives differences
the strength of complicity. Capital is above all a community of informers,
union that weakens individuals, unity that keeps us divided. Social conscience
is an inner voice that repeats �Others accept�. In this way the real strength
of the exploited acts against them. Insurrection is the process that unleashes
this strength, and along with it autonomy and the pleasure of living; it is the
moment when we think reciprocally that the best thing we can do for others is
to free ourselves. In this sense it is �a collective movement of individual
realisation�.
����������� The normality of work
and �time off�, the family and consumerism, kills every evil passion for
freedom. (As we write these words we are forcibly separated from our own kind,
and this separation relieves the State from the burden of prohibiting us from
writing). No change is possible without a violent break with habit. But revolt
is always the work of a minority. The masses are at hand, ready to become
instruments of power (for the slave who rebels, �power� is both the bosses�
orders and the obedience of the other slaves) or to accept the changes taking
place out of inertia. The greatest general wildcat strike in history�May
�68�involved only a fifth of the population of a State. It does not follow from
this that the only objective can be to take over power so as to direct the
masses, or that it is necessary to present oneself as the consciousness of the
proletariat. There can be no immediate leap from the present society to
freedom. The servile, passive attitude is not something that can resolve itself
in a few days or months. But the opposite of this attitude must carve out a
space for itself and take its own time.
The social upheaval is merely the necessary condition for it to start.
����������� Contempt for the
�masses� is not qualitative, but ideological, that is, it is subordinated to
the dominant representation. The �people� of capital exist, certainly, but they
do not have any precise form.
����������� It is still from the
anonymous mass that the unknown with the will to live arise in mutiny. To say
we are the only rebels in a sea of submission is reassuring because it puts an
end to the game in advance. We are simply saying that we do not know who our
accomplices are and that we need a social
tempest to discover them. Today each of us decides to what extent others cannot
decide (it is the abdication of one�s capacity to choose that makes the world
of automaton function). During the insurrection choice elbows its way in,
armed, and it is with arms that it must be defended because it is on the corpse
of the insurrection that reaction is born. Although minoritarian (but in
respect to what unit of measure?) in its active forces, the insurrectional
phenomenon can take on extremely wide dimensions, and in this respect reveals
its social nature. The more extensive and enthusiastic the rebellion, the less
it can be measured in the military clash. As the armed self-organisation of the
exploited extends, revealing the fragility of the social order, one sees that
revolt, just like hierarchical and mercantile relations, is everywhere. On the contrary, anyone who
sees the revolution as a coup d��tat has a militaristic view of the clash. An
organisation that sets itself up as vanguard of the exploited tends to conceal
the fact that domination is a social relation, not simply a general
headquarters to be conquered; otherwise how could it justify its role?
����������� The most useful thing
one can do with arms is to render them useless as quickly as possible. But the
problem of arms remains abstract until it is linked to the relationship between
revolutionary and exploited, between organisation and real movement.
����������� Too often
revolutionaries have claimed to be the exploited�s consciousness and to
represent their level of subversive maturity. The �social movement� thus
becomes the justification for the party (which in the Leninist version becomes
an elite of professionals of the revolution). The vicious circle is that the
more one separates oneself from the exploited, the more one needs to represent an inexistent relationship.
Subversion is reduced to one�s own practices, and representation becomes the
organisation of an ideological racket�the bureaucratic version of capitalist
appropriation. The revolutionary movement then identifies with its �most
advanced� expression, which realises
its concept. The Hegelian dialectic of totality offers a perfect system for
this construction.
����������� But there is also a
critique of separation and representation that justifies waiting and accepts
the role of the critic. With the pretext of not separating oneself from the
�social movement�, one ends up denouncing any practice of attack as a �flight
forward� or mere �armed propaganda�. Once again revolutionaries are called to
�unmask� the real conditions of the exploited, this time by their very inaction.
No revolt is consequently possible other than in a visible social movement. So
anyone who acts must necessarily want to take the place of the proletariat. The
only patrimony to defend becomes �radical critique�, �revolutionary lucidity�.
Life is miserable, so one cannot do anything but theorise misery. Truth before
anything else. In this way the separation between subversive and exploited is
not eliminated, only displaced. We are no longer exploited alongside the
exploited; our desires,� rage and weaknesses
are no longer part of the class struggle. It�s not as if we can act when we
feel like it: we have a mission�even if it doesn�t call itself that�to
accomplish. There are those who sacrifice themselves to the proletariat through
action and those who do so through passivity.
����������� This world is poisoning
us and forcing us to carry out useless noxious activity; it imposes the need
for money on us and deprives us of impassioned relationships. We are growing
old among men and women without dreams, strangers in a reality which leaves no
room for outbursts of generosity. We are not partisans of abnegation. It�s just
that the best this society can offer
us (a career, fame, a sudden win, �love�) simply doesn�t interest us. Giving
orders disgusts us just as much as obedience. We are exploited like everyone
else and want to put an end to exploitation right away. For us, revolt needs no
other justification.
����������� Our lives are escaping
us, and any class discourse that fails to start from this is simply a lie. We
do not want to direct or support social movements, but rather to participate in
those that already exist, to the extent to which we recognise common needs in
them. In an excessive perspective of
liberation there are no such things as superior forms of struggle. Revolt needs
everything: papers and books, arms and explosives, reflection and swearing,
poison, daggers and arson. The only interesting question is how to combine them.
VIII
It is easy to hit a bird
flying in a straight line.
�B. Gracian
����������� Not only do we desire to
change our lives immediately, it is the criterion by which we are seeking our
accomplices. The same goes for what one might call a need for coherency. The will to live one�s ideas and create theory
starting from one�s own life is not a search for the exemplary or the hierarchical, paternalistic side of the same coin.
It is the refusal of all ideology, including that of pleasure. We set ourselves
apart from those who content themselves with areas they manage to carve out�and
safeguard�for themselves in this
society even before we begin to think, by the very way we palpate our
existence. But we feel just as far removed from those who would like to desert
daily normality and put their faith in the mythology of clandestinity and
combat organisations, locking themselves up in other cages. No role, no matter
how much it puts one at risk in terms of the law, can take the place of the
real changing of relations. There is no short-cut, no immediate leap into the
elsewhere. The revolution is not a war.
����������� In the past the
inauspicious ideology of arms transformed�
the need for coherence of the few into the gregariousness of the many.
May arms finally turn themselves against ideology!
����������� An individual with a
passion for social upheaval and a �personal� vision of the class clash wants to
do something immediately. If� he or she
analyses the transformation of capital and the State it is in order to attack
them, certainly not so as to be able to go to sleep with clearer ideas. If they
have not introjected the prohibitions and distinctions of the prevailing law
and morals, they draw up the rules of their own game, using every instrument
possible. Contrary to the writer or the soldier for whom these are professional
affairs so have a mercantile identity, the pen and the revolver are equally
arms for them. The subversive remains subversive even without pen or gun, so
long as he possesses the weapon that contains all the others: his own
resoluteness.
����������� �Armed struggle� is a
strategy that could be put at the service of any project. The guerrilla is still used today by organisations
whose programmes are substantially social democratic; they simply support their
demands with military practice. Politics can also be done with arms. In any
negotiation with power�that is, any relationship that maintains the latter as
interlocutor, be it even as adversary�the negotiators must present themselves
as a representative force. From this perspective, representing a social reality
means reducing it to one�s own organisation. The armed clash must not spread
spontaneously but be linked to the various phases of negotiation. The
organisation will manage the results. Relations among members of the
organisation and between the latter and the rest of the world reflect what an
authoritarian programme is: they take hierarchy and obedience seriously.
����������� The problem is not all
that different for those aiming for the violent conquest of political power. It
is a question of propagandising one�s strength as a vanguard capable of
directing the revolutionary movement. �Armed struggle� is presented as the
superior form of social struggle. Whoever is more militarily
representative�thanks to the spectacular success of the actions�constitutes the
authentic armed party. The staged trials and people�s tribunals that result are
acts of those who want to put themselves in place of the State.
����������� For
its part, the State has every interest in reducing the revolutionary threat to
a few combatant organisations in order to transform subversion into a clash
between two armies: the institutions on the one hand, the armed party on the
other. What power fears most is anonymous, generalised rebellion. The media
image of the �terrorist� works hand in hand with the police in the defence of
social peace. No matter whether the citizen applauds or is scared he is still a
citizen, i.e., a spectator.
����������� The reformist
embellishment of the existent feeds�
armed mythology, producing the false alternative between legal and
clandestine politics. It suffices to note how many left democrats are sincerely
moved by the figure of the guerrilla in Mexico and Latin America. Passivity
requires advisors and specialists. When it is disappointed by the traditional
ones it lines up behind the new.
����������� An armed
organisation�with a programme and a�
monogram�specific to revolutionaries, can certainly have libertarian
characteristics, just as the social revolution desired by many anarchists is
undoubtedly also an �armed struggle�. But is that enough?
����������� If we recognise the need
to organise the armed deed during the
insurrectional clash, if we support the possibility of attacking the structures
and men of power from this minute on, and consider the horizontal linking of
affinity groups in practices of revolt to be decisive, we are criticising the
perspective of those who see armed action as the transcendence of the limits of
social struggles, attributing a superior role to one form of struggle. Moreover, by the use of monograms and
programmes we see the creation of an identity that separates revolutionaries
from the rest of the exploited, making them visible to power and putting them
in a condition that lends itself to representation.
In this way the armed attack is no longer just one of the many instruments of
one�s liberation, but is charged with a symbolic value and tends to appropriate
anonymous rebellion to its own ends. The informal organisation as a fact linked to the temporary aspect of
struggles becomes a permanent and formalised decision-making structure. In this
way what was an occasion for meeting
in one�s projects becomes a veritable project in itself. The organisation
begins to desire to reproduce itself, exactly like the quantitative reformist
structures do. Inevitably the sad trousseau of communiques and documents
appear, where one raises one�s voice and finds oneself chasing an identity that
exists only because it has been declared. Actions of attack that are quite
similar to other simply anonymous
ones come to represent who knows what qualitative leap in revolutionary
practice. The schema of politics reappears as one starts flying in a straight
line.
����������� Of course, the need to
organise is something that can always
accompany subversives� practice beyond the temporary requirements of a
struggle. But in order to organise oneself there is a need for living, concrete
agreements, not an image in search of spotlights.
����������� The secret of the
subversive game is the capacity to smash deforming mirrors and find oneself
face to face with one�s own nakedness. Organisation is the whole of the
projects that make this game come alive. All the rest is political prosthesis
and nothing else.
����������� Insurrection is far more
than �armed struggle�, because during it the generalised clash is at one with
the upsetting of the social order. The old world is upturned to the extent to
which the insurgent exploited are all
armed. Only then are arms not the separate expression of some vanguard, the
monopoly of the bosses and bureaucrats of the future, but the concrete
condition of the revolutionary feast: the collective possibility of widening
and defending the transformation of social relations. Subversive practice is
even less �armed struggle� in the absence of the insurrectional rupture, unless
one wants to restrict the immensity of one�s passions to no more than a few
instruments. It is a question of contenting oneself with preestablished roles,
or seeking coherency in the most remote point, life.
����������� Then, in the spreading
revolt we will really be able to perceive a marvellous conspiracy of egos aimed at creating a society without bosses or
dormant. A society of free and unique individuals.
IX
Don�t
ask for the formula for opening up worlds to you in some syllable like a bent
dry branch. Today, we can only tell you what we are not, what we don�t
want.�� �
������������������������������������������������� ��E. Montale
����������� Life cannot simply be
something to cling to. This thought skims through everyone at least once. We
have a possibility that makes us freer than the gods: we can quit. This is an
idea to be savoured to the end. Nothing and no one is obliging us to live. Not
even death. For that reason our life is a tabula
rasa, a slate on which nothing has been written, so contains all the words
possible. With such freedom, we cannot live as slaves. Slavery is for those who
are condemned to live, those constrained
to eternity, not for us. For us there is the unknown�the unknown of spheres to
be ventured into, unexplored thoughts, guarantees that explode, strangers to
whom to offer a gift of life. The unknown of a world where one might finally be
able to give away one�s excess self love. Risk too. The risk of brutality and
fear. The risk of finally staring mal de
vivre in the face. All this is encountered by anyone who decides to put an
end to the job of existing.
����������� Our contemporaries seem
to live by jobbing, desperately juggling with a thousand obligations including
the saddest of all of them�enjoying themselves. They cover up the incapacity to
determine their own lives with detailed frenetic activity, the speed that
accompanies increasingly passive ways of behaving. They are unaware of the
lightness of the negative.
����������� We can choose not to
live. That is the most beautiful reason for opening oneself up to life with
joy. �There is always time to put an end to things; one might as well rebel and
play��is how the materialism of joy talks.
����������� We can choose not to
act, and that is the most beautiful reason for acting. We bear within ourselves
the potency of all the acts we are capable of, and no boss will ever be able to
deprive us of the possibility of saying no. What we are and what we want begins
with a no. From it is born the only
reason for getting up in the morning. From it is born the only reason for going
armed to the assault of an order that is suffocating us.
����������� On the one hand there is the existent, with its habits and certainties.
And of certainty, that social poison, one can die.
����������� On the other hand there
is insurrection, the unknown bursting
into the life of all. The possible beginning of an exaggerated practice of
freedom.