Toward the abolition of an absurd blood feud




WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE THOUGHT?


"To serve history" means... for us, revolutionary workers of a dismal world labouring in the crisis and decay of all forms of the "old" socialist, communist, and anarchist labour movements, to learn from the deeds and from the mistakes of past history the lesson for the future, the ways and means for the realization of the goals of the revolutionary working class.


Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain, Karl Korsch, 1938





WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE SAID?


Since the method, having become abstract and contemplative, now falsifies and does violence to history, it follows that history will gain its revenge and violate the method which has failed to integrate it, tearing it to pieces.

– History and Class Consciousness, Georgy Lukacs, 1923




WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OLD DEAD PEOPLE WANTED
AND TRIED TO ACCOMPLISH AND FAILED?


Surely this general formalism means that human activities and capabilities are being alienated in a multiplicity of ways, heterogeneous and yet drearily monotonous, that while shapes external one to the other and external to living man are being projected, human activities and capabilities are being split apart. It is a general alienation, coming to the surface in the overall structure of society and brought forth by the movement of that structure, but constantly turning back towards and into day-to-day living.

– Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre,  1957


WHY WOULD WE CARE IF WE DIDN´T ALL SUFFER 
THIS BLOODY RAW HOLE IN THE HEART? 





General Introduction


1

In the beginning was the word, and the word was spirit made flesh through the thick fricative beat of tooth on tooth, lip on lip, tongue on palate. And the word was consciousness made flesh through the warm hollow whir of humid air through vocal chords through chest, through throat, through head. And the flesh was made conscious through the roll of waves through vibrant air through cochlea hair through ear canal through brain in skull.


2

Language is the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed through sensuous representations (oral, visual, tactile and gestural signs).


3

History is the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed through deeds.


4

Theory is the objective organisation of human consciousness as expressed through ideas.


5

Ways of speaking, ways of thinking, ways of acting and relating are basic technologies in the service of human beings, which have taken on a life on their own, rebelled against their subordinate role, and put people to work for them instead of them working for people.

6

The pretensions of endurance and duty and the taboos of property and precedence which currently hold back the free transformation of all the material and objective organisations inherited from the past must be swept aside. Escape is never possible, but the changing of all of the conditions of our life certainly is. The possibilities for new types of behavior lie within play. If work is to become play, tools must become toys. The transformation of the former into the latter can itself only be accomplished as a game. "This is a game that can only be conducted with the utmost rigour." (Lettrist International, Potlatch #5, 1954)

7

Although they emerged from different economic conditions, the domination of the automated machine over the human under capitalism, and of the hoe over the peasant and slave under previous modes of accumulation, are both symptoms of a situation in which subjective human consciousness has lost control over its own basic objective organisations. A species which has always been more or less alienated from the ability to make sense of its own basic life experience has continued to produce organisations where everything that is directly lived increasingly tends to recede into a representation.

The reduction of human consciousness to individual thoughts and emotions; the reduction of human subjectivity to an epiphenomenal emanation of biological processes, seperated from the broad life of the cosmos; the reduction of human life from a sensuous, practical activity whose meaning each person defines for themselves along with their companions to the passive contemplation of an incomprehensible spectacle whose autonomous movement imposes its own meaninglessness on everyone; over time human existence as a whole is progressively diminished, its organic unity broken for the sake of its parts – the organisation of labour, social relations, words and ideas – which have seceded and established an independent kingdom set above and against the desires of their own producers.

8

The tendency for all organisations in capitalist society 'to render themselves autonomous, i.e. to alienate themselves from their original aim and to become an end in themselves', which has so dismally sabotaged all working-class attempts at liberation during the course of the past 150 years, can thus be understood as a special variety of a more general tendency operative throughout human existence, just as the tendency in modern civilisation for technology to overwhelm, enslave and destroy its own producers can be understood as a special variety of a more general tendency. If today slavery and technology still form an inseparable unity, as they have throughout history, the specific conditions in which this unity is expressed have changed. If the abolition of contemporary wage-slavery necessarily involves the progressive supersession of capitalist technology and civilisation in its entirety, this process also necessarily involves the complete detournement of all the theoretical and social techniques inherited from the old world – including and especially those adopted by the working-class in their struggles for liberation. As they currently exist, both the techniques of the capitalists and those of the workers are tools fit for nothing more than the abject submission of their users to conditions of poverty and alienation. The history of these struggles is the history of their failure to adapt the material they've adopted in ways appropriate to their ends. Not only is this a failure that continues today, but the protagonists of present struggles scarcely seem aware that it even exists.

9

The following texts, assembled from sources of various vintage, are presented to serve as a documentary history of the last century and a half. They were selected on the basis of their ability to express eloquently the genesis and development of a general process, outlined in this general introduction, through specific examples. It goes without saying that although I may be in fundamental agreement with what is said in these particular texts, this affinity by no means extends to everything else their authors say and do.


10

The intention of such an anthology is to serve as a contribution towards a productive debate on the central problem of our times: the tendency of human desires to adopt means and ends utterly opposed to their own realisation
.




11

The perspective here adopted is that this general tendency, alive in all places and times, was significantly aggravated with the development of class societies, and is today best understood in the context of the specific historic conditions of the present, which for the last century and a half have been defined by the development of capitalism and the social classes on which it is based; the present society can itself best be understood as the perfection of this unfortunate tendency, whose effects have today achieved a truly impressive scope and severity.

12

Under these circumstances, the central problem of our times can best be formulated as follows:

The tendency of all desires under capitalism (including and especially the revolutionary desire which emerged from working-class struggles for liberation) to adopt ends utterly opposed to their realisation, develop means appropriate to these ends, and succeed in realising nothing but their own alienation.

13

As they confronted the contradiction between the poverty of their own everyday lives and the immense wealth produced by their own labour, proletarians naturally came to desire that this production be used for the good of the individual and community. Inspired, agitated, persuaded and recruited by a rising class of professional revolutionary organisers and intellectuals, they came to consider that this desire would best be realized through the triumph of a revolutionary organisation (a de-centralised but closely co-ordinated Movement, a disciplined and centralised Party, one big revolutionary Union – respectively corresponding to Anarchist, Marxist and Syndicalist ideologies) concieved as a separate power standing between themselves and their desires. Having set this end for themselves, they persued it through struggles to organise the organisation – an entirely consistent way of going about things if the logic embodied by these movements is followed to its practical conclusions.

14

This process remains the most extreme example of how the logic of capital – a social relation between persons which presents itself to their decieved gaze as a relation between objects and their prices – generally tends to stand between human desires and their realisation, transforming them into desires for commodities. Just as the desire for love and social communion, a desire for fulfilling intercourse between persons, tends to change into the desire to possess another as one's personal property and a relation between this property and its cost, measured in terms of other property; so the desire to abolish the miserable way people relate to themselves, their world and one another tends to change into the desire to hold shares in a revolutionary organisation, and a relation between this revolutionary organisation and the capitalist organisation it is intended to overthrow.
15

There is no need to list here all the unfortunate results this general tendency mass-produces, at every level of existence, in 'a world rolling darkly towards its ruin'. What seems far more useful – and this is what the documents here assembled do so well – is to detail the concrete circumstances under which the historical and theoretical organisations of the revolutionary working-class, which began as the fundamental negation of the dominant order, turned into nothing more than a special form of accommodation to this same order, serving more to adapt capitalism to the needs of workers and workers to the needs of capitalism than to abolish capitalism and the classes on which it is based.

16

Proletarians do not simply pursue unvarying intentions by confronting the practical miscarriages of those intentions. As well as refining their means, they can both change their understanding of the ends that constitute the realization of their existing desires and change those desires. This might occur not only in response to the failure of workers’ efforts, but rather in response to the impoverished results of the success of those efforts. After a century and a half of struggles to organise organisations, this tedious activity is something proletarians have gotten rather too good at. One purpose of this anthology is to detail the results of this success, as a contribution towards a new understanding of the sort of ends which, when achieved, might finally bring satisfaction rather than its opposite.

17

As is well known, human existence in both its objective and subjective aspects is based on nature, but nature itself has been humanised to the point where almost every aspect of the environment has been built or significantly altered by people. Ultimately, human consciousness is based on material existence, just as society is based on nature; the inter-penetration of opposites operates in much the same way.

Theory and language, just as much as history, are objective realities that exists outside individual consciousness, yet are in no way separate from it. The idea of consciousness as a entirely subjective element, the essence of a pure self-identical ego residing in the head, can at best be left to the speculations of idealist philosophy. 'We are never really sure where actions, decisions or events spring from. But, in all their stark reality, the results are there. What lies hidden within men and women is beyond our grasp; maybe these hidden depths are only an insubstantial mist, and not a profound substance… it may only be a myth. Men and women are beyond us. But the battle, however confused, always has an outcome.' It is necessary to grasp the various aspects of social existence as objective expressions of human consciousness in order to grasp how the necessary and natural reversal of this process produces – in societies dominated by the production of commodities, where human consciousness becomes a subjective expression of completely alien objects and their organisations – the peculiar upside-down outcome with which we are familiar.

18

A better understanding of the relation between existence and consciousness is necessary to confront the fact that, 150 years since communist workers first began to associate under the slogan 'the emancipation of the working-class is the task of workers themselves', proletarians grown more formally enfranchised and educated than ever before seem as far from emancipating themselves today as they did then. The essentially simple job described by Paul Mattick in the following terms seems no closer to accomplishment today than it has ever been: 'The workers’ job is essentially a simple one. It consists in recognising that all previously-existing ruling groups have hindered the development of a truly social production and distribution; in recognising the necessity for doing away with production and distribution as determined by the profit and power needs of special groups in society who control the means of production and the other social power sources. Production has to be shifted so that it can serve the real needs of the people; it has to become a production for consumption. When these things are recognised, the workers have to act upon them to realise their needs and desires. Little philosophy, sociology, economics and political science are needed to recognise those simple things and to act upon the recognition. The actual class struggle is here decisive and determining. But in the practical field of revolutionary and social activities the “conscious” minority is no better informed than the “unconscious” majority. Rather the opposite is true. This has been proven in all actual revolutionary struggles.' A century and a half of agitation on the part of a 'conscious minority' and actual class struggle by an 'unconscious majority' has produced today, in the realm of theory (recognition) and history (deeds), results that are anything but revolutionary.

If different results are to be obtained in the future, there are serious problems of which the 'unconscious majority' must become conscious during the course of their struggle. It is certainly necessary to recognise the fundamental inadequacies of minorities, as Mattick and his comrades ably do. But if the majority have been misled by a minority who have always only ended up a new exploiting class, the reasons why this has been allowed to happen over and over again must be discovered ('The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture, merely through chance, is perhaps the best proof that chance is not the cause of our failure') along with the steps necessary to avoid future repetition. And if the actual class struggle is positively and negatively affected by the consciousness of those who wage it, which itself is affected by language and communication, theory and ideology, these inter-relations must be practically grasped. It is reasonable to expect, considering that the actual class struggle very frequently gets sabotaged by a failure to confront these problems successfully; considering that the actual class war of which every struggle is a part necessarily involves preparation and strategic action; considering the frequently complex concrete details that complicate the completion of the worker's essentially simple job; considering most of all the historic failure of the working class to accomplish this job at any time before, despite significantly stronger material bases which it will never again possess; it is reasonable to expect that the struggles of the present and future might benefit from a conscious, rigorous – even studious – examination of the practical implications for the present to be drawn from the significant failures of the past.

19

The blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick in the veins of their heirs; too thick for their own good. The knights errant of dead movements, with good intentions, thick skulls and thin skins, continue to charge at windmills for the sake of ancient offences; they dance cheek to cheek to forgotten music while the world passes them by, to claw at each others' throats for the sake of ancient outrages now as inconsequential as the decrepit ideologies to which they cling.

The blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick through the machinery of today's misery; it oils the gears of modern slavery and helps them mesh together smoothly; it runs thicker than all the watered-down pseudo-memories with which the ruling spectacle tries to replace history with unanswerable lies.

The blood of dead revolutionaries runs thick and fast from beyond coagulated pools welled at the bottoms of mass graves; it bursts through caked surfaces dried by dirt-filtered light; it breaks through mud-cracked surfaces congealed under layers of cold clay, concealed under pails of cold oblivion, to beat against the eardrums of those who can settle for nothing other than to take up the struggle in which their comrades from the past so honourably fell. Blood is thicker than rock strata: it falls upwards through cold clay; it falls upwards through the vertiginous labyrinth of time; it falls upwards through the showers of the seconds and the years; it calls from beyond the gravest silence to those condemned to an existence of quiet desperation; it calls from beyond the living nightmare of those condemned to watch their precious spirits drain away in senseless cycles of dead time; it spurts through the curdled corneas of the victors; it leaps from the fountain-head of defeat to storm the gates of heaven; it springs from the well at rock bottom from the depths of those whose bodies and souls are not well to thud against the brains and shudder through the chests of them determined to recommence the abandoned adventure of the fallen on a new basis, with new weapons.

20

Part of the raw material for these new arms will be discovered in whatever remains true and can still be recovered from the old movements which the rich blood of our comrades gave life, and which died with them. Historical truth, like love and wisdom, has no home in the house that ideology built. Nothing living can survive there. It is a house that collapsed long ago. Nothing has a home there but ghosts, who wander among the ruins, building castles in the sky with bricks made of hot air. Yet in the face of this complete and final disintegration, all the Marxian horses and all the Anarchist men still haven't managed to put two and two together again. Despite a universal and complete defeat that nearly a century of historical experience has confirmed irreversible, the epigones of the two antagonistic tendencies whose bickering first split the revolutionary proletarian movement 150 years ago continue to compete over the title of sole privileged inheritor of historical truth as if the past century and a half never happened. 

Nothing useful can come of this leftist predilection for historical fiction -- certainly not a new revolutionary critique adequate to the demands of the present age. The presentation of basic materials towards the reconstitution of such a critique is precisely the purpose of what follows. Only such a critique practically applied throughout everyday life, as the situationists noted, stands any chance of precipitating a new movement wherein the bad days will end. 'The classical workers movement must be re-examined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudo-theoretical heirs, because all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future...We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period and to re-examine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all the neglected possibilities, without any longer being impressed by the fact that some won out over others and dominated the movement; for we now know that the movement within which they were successful was an overall failure... All this, of course, not with the aim of scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to contribute toward the formation of a new, profoundly different revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many premonitory signs over the last few years... We must understand these signs through the study of the classical revolutionary project, and vice versa. It is necessary to rediscover the history of the very movement of history, which has been so thoroughly hidden and distorted.'

Precisely because today, as when the above was written, the proliferation of social dissatisfaction around the world has once again begun to scrawl the writing on the wall – albeit in an as yet very unsteady hand in which signs of resignation to basic alienations, extreme confusion, and timidity in the face of glaring contradiction can all be seen in abundance – the program for a practical recovery of a perspective capable of grasping not only the present as a moment of universal history, but history itself as an activity made here and now, must once again be placed on the agenda as a matter of urgency.

21


One of the hidden and distorted aspects of this history is the thorough interpenetration in reality of what were presented -- and most often presented themselves – as opposites in appearance. What Guy Debord said theoretically and historically concerning the false opposition between Marxism and Anarchism ('each containing a partially true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority' instead of complimenting each other within this unity -- a possibility presented in nascent form by the indigenous US socialism of Lucy and Albert Parsons) echoed what Joseph Dietzgen, during the era of the first International Workingman's Association, cautioned anecdotally and tactically: 'The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them -- for it is dialectic... For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference...While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other...The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time.'

22

This reconciliation finally did materialise, but not as Dietzgen intended: today Anarchism and Marxism are both united beyond the pail: their particular failures resulting in a general defeat which forced them both to kick the bucket and tumble into the trashcan of history. Consequently, any talk of social revolution today as something to be guided by the principles of Anarchism, or to be led under the banner of Marxism (or Syndicalism, Surrealism, etc), can only be regarded not merely as an absurdity, but the wishful thinking on the part of adherents to a subcultural sect that seeks salvation in a supernatural resurrection. The first text presented below involves the most penetrating critique yet published of the consequences – in terms of concrete forms of consciousness, action and relation here and now – this subcultural sectarianism has for the Anarchist ideology and its adherents. It takes pride of place precisely because Anarchism, with the collapse of Soviet state-capitalism and the wholesale free-market transformation of China at the end of the previous century, has become the least discredited (and therefore most popular and widespread) historical form in which revolutionary ideology confronts the reinvention of revolutionary theory today. Needless to say, what it so perceptively critiques in the Anarchist subculture is equally applicable to that of the Feminist, Black Nationalist, Libertarian Communist, Pro-Situationist, and every other subculture with revolutionary pretensions. 

Nevertheless, the recovery of what might still be salvaged from the dead movements of the past – not as ideological fragments elevated to autonomous authorities representing the totality of revolutionary truth, or harmless inspiring examples to be held up uncritically as models for emulation but as historical moments, partial and inadequate – remains one of the vital revolutionary tasks of our time. 

It was in this spirit that, despite serious objections which would soon be detailed in a virulent polemic, Engels remarked to Marx on the publication of anarchist Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own that 'what is true in his principle, we, too, must accept. And what is true is that before we can be active in any cause we must make it our own, egoistic cause – and that in this sense, quite aside from any material expectations, we are communists in virtue of our egoism, that out of egoism we want to be human beings and not merely individuals' – a principle which anarchists themselves all too often fail to accept, many of whom do not possess revolutionary ideas but are possessed by them to the point where they accept demands for asceticism, boredom, useless self-sacrifice, uncritical participation in militant struggles utterly divorced from of any serious revolutionary perspective, and silence in the face of glaring contradictions, merely out of a sense of duty to an externally defined cause whose validity they possess neither the imagination, nor the intelligence, nor the courage to question.

It was in this spirit that Korsch made his remark in the 1950 text Ten Theses on Marxism Today that 'Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism' – a spirit whose practical implications the situationists effectively reintroduced into the revolutionary theory and practice their era.

23


One of the consequences of this salvage job is precisely the replacement of the false absolute oppositions maintained between revolutionary ideologies at the level of appearances with a concrete, nuanced view of the complex interplay between divergent tendencies within the historical revolutionary movement comprehended, at the level of dialectical reality, as a practical whole. Only in this way can the true qualities of each tendency -- viewed both in relation to its differences and similarities regarding all the others as well as in relation to the historical totality, a totality which continues under changed conditions here and now -- even be apprehended accurately. Thus a comparison between the anarchist FAI and the council communist parties [1], or between the anarcho-syndicalists and the bolsheviki [2], can be made unclouded by dogmatic preconceptions handed down as unquestioned truths. 

This is the task Korsch set himself to do in Document 2 regarding the Marxism of Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemberg, Engels and Marx, in which he reached the devastating conclusion that the horrors of Stalinism were historical developments already contained in the contradictory practice of the Masters themselves. The lucid urgency revealed in this historic document was, as with the article on Spain quoted above, produced at a moment when the last working-class communes in revolutionary Spain -- and with them the last hopes of the classical workers movement of which they were the most highly developed expression -- were being wiped out, not by fascism, but by the combined forces of Stalinist Marxism-Leninism and capitalist democracy. While maintaining, in texts published elsewhere, that aspects of Marxian theory remained valid, and that a future revolutionary movement would be compelled to assume a Marxist character in the same way the revolutionary Marxist movement was compelled to assume a Hegelian one, he concluded that no future revolutionary movement could ever again emerge under the banner of Marxism as such. This conclusion remains valid, for Marxism just as for all the other dead movements.  

24

In Document 3, Zerzan (who wrote at a time when academic stars among the New Left popularised a variety of reformed Leninism based on philosophical Stalinists such as the latter-day Lukacs, Gramsci and Althusser – an operation which equally vacuous intellectual prostitutes like Zizek and Badiou repeat today) sets out to accomplish the same task as Korsch, although using a much less rigorous method applied to a much more intimate aspect of Marx's practice, with much more questionable results. His criticism of Marx's attitude towards the Paris Commune, for example: when Marx suggested, prior to the declaration of the Commune, that such a move was likely to be crushed in isolation as the rest of France remained at that point too conservative, he was in fact proved correct by the course of events; his subsequent unconditional defense of the Communards despite these initial reservations was entirely analogous to Bakunin's initially weary but eventually wholehearted participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849. It is also a bit disingenuous to claim that 'the worker as subject fails to occur in Marx' simply because he observed that imperialist warfare, under particular conditions, on specific occasions, might be likely to spark proletarian revolutions. Zerzan himself knew well that the Commune itself was provoked by the Franco-Prussian war, and that the first world war triggered revolutionary working-class uprisings across Europe and the Near-East, from Russia, Ukraine and Turkey to Italy, Hungary and Germany. To observe that war can be a potential trigger for worker uprisings is not to ignore the fact that, for such uprisings to succeed, proletarians could rely only on their own self-activity. Everything Marx and Engels wrote on the class struggles of France from 1848 until the Commune re-iterated this thesis, and it should be remembered that many of their most influential anarchist opponents enthusiastically took sides in imperialist slaughter, such as anarcho-trenchist Peter Kropotkin, or took up ministerial posts in bourgeois states, such as the leaders of the anarchist movement during the Spanish revolution. Despite some questionable details, however, Zerzan's attempt to grasp the contradictions of Marxism at the root -- and for Marxism the root is Marx -- remains fundamentally sound, and the most important aspects of his criticism are as valid, in their fashion, as those of Korsch. In the same way, Documents 4 and 8 see Bob Black develop the critique of the Anarchist subculture in his own, typically cavalier manner, which nevertheless includes pithy precisions that connect the forms of alienation elaborated in Feral Faun's text to the significant historical consequences they have produced. He also details the false unity that fabricates an imaginary coherence within this ideological community – which is the other side of the false oppositions by which such ideologies distinguish themselves within the realm of appearances.

In a related text published elsewhere, Black points out that although anarchism helped him (as it has many others, myself included) 'to arrive at an unconditionally anti-statist, anti-capitalist perspective', he could never accommodate himself to the hidden hierarchical relations common in most situations colonised by the anti-authoritarian ideology of 'direct-democracy' – relations where abstract egalitarianism obscures a real practice defined by a mass of passive spectators whose basic communication (where it exists) is dominated by a minority of specialists who control not only the means of communication but also its contents by setting and enforcing norms for what can be discussed as well as the permitted style of discussion.

Unwilling and unable to invent their own projects, define their own interests, cultivate their own style, participate fully (therefore competently) in a community of equals, the rank-and-file of this subculture has recourse to a phoney participation reduced to the consumption of ideological commodities produced by specialists (video and audio broadcasts, periodicals, books, lectures, tame festivals, etc) and the provision of human resources in the execution of projects initiated and (by default) managed by these same specialists. In all cases, they are offered a choice among activities in which the fundamental decisions are always made by others. In this democracy of spectators, autonomy is reduced to the self-management of details. This egalitarian non-participation within a false community united by an imaginary autonomy within an actual inactivity reproduces exactly the same conditions which the members of the subculture encounter in every other sphere of their everyday life. This familiarity is precisely what makes these conditions so comfortable for them in practice, even as the theoretical poverty inherited from historical movements which died decades ago are exactly what makes them incapable even of recognising these conditions for what they are, let alone taking concrete steps to combat them. It is the sterility of a dead theory which ceased active development generations before they were born which condemn them to cling firmly to the poverty of their own practice the moment any suggestion of concrete changes arises, even while they extol the untold riches of their revolutionary subjectivity as an abstract ideal. The obvious contradiction between the inadequacy of their whole mode of existence and the enormity of the tasks presented by a new collective assault on the entirety of the old world, even if it leads to the demise of particular groups or the burnout of particular individuals, hardly threatens to disturb the comfortable self-satisfaction of the subculture as a whole, which continues to tread water independently of the fates and intentions of its members. The tradition of all dead generations never creates any poverty it is not able to maintain -- until, caught napping, it is swept aside by the forces of the living, or utterly wiped out by the forces of death.


25

The ideological commodities touted in the contemporary anarchist subculture are only particular examples of the commodity of ideology. This commodity comes in a variety of flavours, the two most important of which, due to their impact on the shape of modern civilisation and the radical attempts to overthrow it, were invented by Bakunin and Marx. The fight between competing ideologies within the revolutionary movement is itself only a particular example of the battle between commodities within the capitalist marketplace. “Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then," wrote Debord in his infamous book, "is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization."

All these characteristics were demonstrated in the development of Marxism and Anarchism. It is important to admit that this development was not some aberrant mistake produced by unfortunate deviations of those who perverted the original teachings of the Masters, but logical conclusions drawn from what was already present in the original theory and practice. It was inevitable that the movement for proletarian revolution, born from the ashes of the bourgeois revolutions of which it was a direct continuation (quite literally, as Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals and Winstanley's Diggers attempted an immediate transformation of the French and English revolutions in a communist direction) would be in every respect, organisationally, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old revolutionary movements from whose womb it emerges. Because the influence of these birthmarks were not consciously confronted and progressively reduced over time – which was by no means inevitable but a result of the subjective shortcomings of revolutionary proletarians – they were unconsciously exploited by the most conservative and even reactionary elements (which were by no means necessarily insincere in their intentions, see for example the Bolsheviks and syndicalists) which progressively increased over time to the point where they came to dominate the movement completely, while the most radical elements remained ideologically bound to bicker among themselves. In the same way that the revolutionary elements were marginalised and eliminated within the worker's movement, the mainstream movement itself – worn out and increasingly counter-revolutionary in the struggle to combat its radical tendencies – was marginalized increasingly from the class struggles conducted by masses whose real interests it opposed, even as it became incorporated into the mainstream of capitalist society as a false representation of radical struggle.

26

This contradiction, and the reaction of autonomous proletarians whose self-organised struggles against both capital and leftist representatives reached crisis proportions in the era of the first world war and its aftermath, made it increasingly useless to capitalism itself, an expensive tool for manipulation which worked less and less. In response to this crisis, the capitalist class embarked a worldwide campaign of political restructuring which cut out the working-class organisations and replaced them with totalitarian dictatorships. Fascism and Stalinism, which oversaw the final defeat of the classic worker's movement with the failure of the Spanish Revolution, were the solutions of a ruling class which could no longer rely on the effective help of its loyal opposition. Marxism and Anarchism, the two tendencies which animated the first wave of proletarian assault on the old world, died under heavy shelling and machine-gun fire among the wild thyme and lavender in the valley of Jarama.

A new wave of struggles, which emerged after the second world war and reached crisis proportions worldwide in the 1960s-70s, was defeated with the assistance of trade unionism, the last leftist movement with any mass influence among the working-class. The contradictions and their inevitable consequences were reproduced in a new form. In response to this crisis, the capitalist class embarked a worldwide campaign of economic restructuring which cut out the trade unions and replaced them with cheap labour from the East, decentralised global production lines, massive privatisation, casualisation and outsourcing. Trade unions no longer have a major presence anywhere other than in government jobs, which themselves continue to shrink yearly. A labour movement which was already a pathetic shadow of its former self effectively committed suicide a second time by an unsurprising dedication to commodity logic.

27

The seeds for the whole process are illustrated concisely in Document 5. Here, Marx responds to Bakunin's criticism of his conception of revolution on a point-by-point basis in an imaginary conversation conducted in the margins of his great rival's recent book. As the original English publisher notes: 'One of the most interesting points in Bakunin’s book is the view that Marxism, if successful, would result in the rule of a new class of "social scientists". Bakunin raises the question of the social status of ex-proletarians who find themselves in governmental positions in a socialist society. Marx dismisses this point by arguing that a manufacturer who becomes a member of a municipal council does not thereby change his social class - he is still a capitalist. This reply is pretty sophistical : Bakunin’s point was, of course, that membership of a government gives a person a type of power in the making and enforcing of decisions which he did not have when he was a worker at the bench. Moreover, it also carries with it quite definite material privileges.' The sad story of Marxist state capitalism – which continues vigorously in the form almost of a self-parody in the People's Republic of China – is decidedly not on the side of the Master on this point. On the other hand, Bakunin claims that Holland, England, and America – which were the most fully capitalist countries of their epoch and which formed the first capitalist democracies – produced a new type of civilization, which, while bourgeois on the economic side, yet in its social tendencies is an "anti-state" civilization: a claim which was rightly ridiculed by Marx but has been taken up by far too many who can only oppose the threat of totalitarian dictatorship with a new repetition of the democratic lie. 

In fact, the contradictions in both Bakunin and Marx which produced such absurdities were a result of the separation of the political and economic sides of a social revolution which is good for nothing unless it transforms life, both as a whole and at every level simultaneously. The possibility for such a transformation only arises under conditions when people assemble to constitute themselves as a material force both in the workplace and in the streets (which has actually happened during the highest moments of class struggle) while at the same time consciously recognizing themselves for what they have already become -- as the sole masters of their own destiny, and communicating this to all their fellows around the world, demanding recognition and inviting association as a conspiracy of equals (which has never been done). In those rare moments of when proletarians gathered together to confer directly, without representatives, to decide their own fate, capital and the state dissolved. Each time, however, they trembled before the enormity of what they had done, and what they might yet do, and fell back into the role of spectators. In 1997 the people of revolutionary Albania did not recognise the mastery they really possessed in themselves, which they had only to grasp in consciousness in order to possess in reality. The inevitable reaction unfolded, as it has so many times. It is their blood, and that of all those who rose and fell before them, which waters with smoke and thunder the insubordinate forest whose roots now penetrate the foundations of the world's cities. It is up to the living to reap the strange fruit of this subterranean source, or once again let an unimaginable harvest drop untasted into the sod to rot, its seeds scattered to the wind, its flesh devoured by scavengers, its juices sunk into the mud. 

28



Another source for the transformation of revolutionary organisation into its opposite is outlined in Document 6, where Maximilien Rubel describes the ways in which Marx's first disciple helped initiate the cult which continues its triumphant self-immolation under the name of Marxism today. To be fair, it should be mentioned that a significant source for the ideological, mythological tendency described here can be found in Marx's own megalomania. Bakunin, who had close occasion to observe the subject of his discussion, noted 'Marx has two odious faults: he is vain and jealous. He detested Proudhon, simply because Proudhon's great name and well-deserved reputation were prejudicial to him. There is no term of abuse that Marx has failed to apply to Proudhon. Marx is egotistical to the pitch of insanity. He talks of “my ideas,” and cannot understand that ideas belong to no one in particular, but that, if we look carefully, we shall always find that the best and greatest ideas are the product of the instinctive labour of all...Marx, who was already constitutionally inclined towards self-glorification, was definitely corrupted by the idolization of his disciples, who have made a sort of doctrinaire pope out of him. Nothing can be more disastrous to the mental and moral health of a man, even though he be extremely intelligent, than to be idolized and regarded as infallible. All this has made Marx even more egotistical, so that he is beginning to loathe every one who will not bow the neck before him.'

What he says of Proudhon could be applied just as well to himself. The behaviour of Marx and Engels towards him, which saw them destroy the International Workingmen's Association rather than let those sympathetic to his ideas become the majority tendency within it, testifies indirectly to the veracity of his words, which it seems were, far from the bitter caricature of a vitriolic enemy, rather the dispassionate description of a sympathetic critic. Even after their vicious break with him, Bakunin continued to praise Marx and Engels for their contributions to the revolutionary movement, and according to those among their own disciples who examined his writings 'we shall look in them in vain for any trace of venom towards Marx'. It seems clear that Lenin's domination of an authoritarian personality over the party, of the party over the state, and the state over the society, all found their initial impetus in certain aspects of Marx's theory and practice, even if many other aspects of his life explicitly contradict this.

Rubel indulges in his own version of the myth-making he denounces by papering-over the contradictory aspects of the Master's own theory and practice and locating the source of such problems in his disciples, beginning with Engels, who are supposed to have distorted the original, fundamentally unproblematic teachings as handed down in their pure form (an argument he repeats in the article Marx, Theoretician of Anarchism) through the holy texts which apparently only Rubel knew how to interpret correctly. Actually, the word of Marx, like that of God, is quite inconsistent. His oeuvre, like the Bible, is large and complex enough to be all things to all people. Like those who cherr-pick from the scriptures to support their own dogmas, ignoring everything that doesn't suit them, it is just as plausible for those using this procedure to arrive at Marxist-Leninism as to conjure up Marxist-Anarchism. There is a word for those who delve into the scriptures to recover the fundamental truth of a doctrine and damn everyone else's interpretation as false distortions. The word is 'fundamentalist'. The attitude is religious. The results are ridiculous. One such result is the frequent condemnation as heretical of those who are in a far better position to judge what orthodoxy really is; modern day sectarians who denounce the fathers of the Catholic Church for betraying the Law in favour of pagan deviations have as much basis in reality as those who accuse Engels of 'revisionism' as regards the teachings of his comrade. It is highly improbable, to put it mildly, that a man can be better understood by epigoni engaged in scholastic exercises in remote corners decades after his death than by his closest companion with whom he developed his life's work in tandem.

29

Document 7, written on the centenary of the Communist Manifesto's publication by Jan van Heijenhoort, celebrated mathematician and one-time bodyguard to Leon Trotsky, contains a statement of the problem both emphatic and compelling, concluding that 'Marx and Bolshevism belong henceforth to history no less than Rousseau and Jacobinism'. The author makes a formal rejection of the 'two opposed yet complementary attitudes' provoked by this problem – either to resign oneself completely before triumphant capitalism or to cling blindly to the teachings of the Masters like a drowning rat to rotten driftwood – in favour of a theoretical commitment to search for new solutions for the future unburdened by the dead weight of old dogmas. In practice, however, it seems that he actually did adopt the first attitude, limiting his involvement in the search for new forms of revolutionary critique to the curation of Trotsky's archives. Although he did well to abandon the bureaucratic messianism of his erstwhile comrades, his practically total renunciation of any revolutionary perspective seems to have been based on an unfortunate misunderstanding common to such people. The inescapable determinism discovered by Marx centred on a necessary choice, not a necessary outcome. It was based on the thesis that capitalist crisis was bound to place the decision between 'socialism and barbarism' before the world proletariat. The hypothesis to be tested involved not so much the ability of the proletariat to make the right choice as the ability of capitalism to escape the necessity of such a choice; Marx's determinism rested on the inevitable movement of capitalist society towards destruction – its own destruction as well as that of the humans trapped within it and, possibly, all life on earth itself. It may be true that such an hypothesis has yet to be tested, but it is also true that unless proletarians do make the right choice no one is likely to be around to confirm it, and it is equally true that all evidence, especially that to be seen in the social and ecological realms, tends to support the probability of the thesis. The contrary hypothesis, that capitalism will prove to be infinitely adaptable, progressing indefinitely towards ever greater freedom, civilisation and perfection, is just as unproven and – short of irreversible world revolution or Armageddon – just as unprovable. Besides the distinct disadvantage of flying in the face of all available evidence, historical and contemporary, this thesis also condemns its adherents to accept resignation to the basic conditions of their own miserable existence, allowing at most the gradual modification of trivial detail. Contrary to this, Marx and those like him threw in his lot on the side of a complete transformation of life at every level, from the bottom up. They could imagine no guarantees of success attached to this life choice, fraught with so many unknown variables ('Uncertainty is not without its charm or interest; it can never last long. It maintains ambiguity...allowing us to take our pleasure in what Valery called the whorehouse of possibilities; it can even oscillate between the comical and the dramatic, but we must choose'), which was to have such profound consequences for their own lives – at every level and in an immediate, concrete way – and every guarantee of unrelenting difficulty, immense isolation, and many-sided repression. Their decision was, and remains, a gamble, a risk on which they literally staked their whole lives as they proceeded to play from day to day that collective game with time through which the content, meaning, and end of life is invented.

Another remnant of dead ideology Heijenhoort didn't manage to leave behind was the fetishism of leadership so basic to Marxist-Jacobinism. Quite possibly he could not commit himself practically to contribute towards continuing proletarian struggle, despite doing so theoretically, because he could not conceive of this in any other way than a new variety of the same old Bolshevism he already recognised to be utterly bankrupt. In this, as well as in his future absorption in a scientific career, he shares much with Wilhelm Reich. If the fallacy that conflates revolutionary leadership with revolutionary self-organisation is discarded – if you replace every instance of 'leaders' and 'leadership' in this text with 'means of struggle' and 'methods of mutual association' in this text – many mistaken aspects of this document are corrected.

30

The most eloquent criticism aimed at the tendency for proletarian organisations to become ends in themselves, to the detriment of all ability to make revolutionary ideas dangerous, can be found (as can evidence for that pernicious tendency itself) in aspects of Marx's own praxis. In Document 10, Engels responds to a letter from Marx detailing the idiocy of their fellow revolutionists which concludes 'I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.' In his response he discusses with his partner (based on their personal involvement in the revolutions of 1848-49 and the aftermath, during which their fellow survivors wanted to wish away the complete suppression of the insurrectionary fire by immediately trying to reconstitute the revolutionary worker's movement on the same basis as before) those elemental forces of life and death so violently unleashed in moments of revolution, and the only attitude able, in the centre of the crucible, to keep the possibility for effective intervention open while the iron is hot. Only in the context of an effort dedicated to the recovery of this ability to enter the stage of history as an actor can any study of our comrades of the past come to grips with its subject.


31


Members of the ICU Women's Auxilliary


Clearly, an argument about the total integration/obsolescence/impotence of historical movements in the abstract is neither convincing nor relevant. What matters are the practical choices imposed by the conditions of today on the struggles of proletarians for a full, fruitful life. As things stand, the concrete implications of the general development outlined in this introduction boil down to three choices: The ABC of modern social contestation.


A


While newer and far more militant strategies were being discussed elsewhere, a group of around fifty women had remained, sitting quietly some distance away from the beerhall. These women wanted to speak to Bourquin [head of the South African Bantu Administration Department] and nobody else. Board member Isaac Zwane [of the Bantu Administration Board, the municipal government run by black politicians during apartheid] then set up a table and chair for himself and started taking complaints from the women. For women, the time for these rituals had now passed.
Cato Manor, June 1959; Ian Sinclair

Uncritical support for existing practical and ideological organisations with the belief that they represent the most/only effective means of social transformation.
Such a course corresponds well to the description 'ideological colonisation'. On the level of practical organisation, it is an attitude adopted by the majority of proletarians who join unions and vote for leftist parties as the 'least bad' choice presented to them, as well as by the Stalinist-Liberal approach to 'alliance building'. On the level of ideological organisation, it is an attitude adopted by most proletarians whose enthusiasm for leftism amounts to the passive consumption of a commodity which under other conditions – as well as under the same conditions for other proletarians – could just as easily take the form of religion, neoliberalism, fascism, and so on, as well as by intellectuals and militants so colonised by ready-made ideas that they feel their own brand of ideology represents a completed system, perfectly suited to the needs of the present, which at most needs superficial adaptation to one or another fashion newly produced by capitalist development.
Almost all genuinely subversive attitudes, relations and actions to be seen among those who opt for this choice are now expressed outside and against the officially-endorsed line. At the beginning of the 20th century, sabotage and physical force were widely recognised as legitimate means of class struggle by the leading officials of the most popular unions and leftist organisations. The female proletarians whose husbands had joined the Industrial Commercial-worker's Union in South Africa, for example, organised 'Women's Auxiliaries' which enforced a boycott of beer-halls in Durban which had been called by striking dock-workers in 1930. The role of the beer-halls in the imposition of racist controls were one of the reasons for the boycott. Blacks were prohibited from drinking ‘white man’s liquor’, and were also prohibited from producing traditional African beer. Instead, beerhalls were built and operated by the state. The first beerhall in Durban was described in this way:  
The building is divided by a high wire fence and one portion is set aside for the sale of native beer, where only male natives may purchase a ticket for three pence and not more than sixpence worth of beer from the overseers at the office. He then passes through a turnstile and presents the ticket to the barman. The native is supplied with the beer in a tin which he takes to the sitting accommodation. He then leaves the building through a turnstile. This method prevents natives from getting more than one drink, and is most effective in preventing indiscriminate drinking and idling.’
Workers called this ‘drinking in a cage’. Without certain archaisms (such as restrictions of quantity available for consumption, as well as racial and sexual constraints about who can consume it – in other words without outdated obstacles to free-trade) this describes accurately the physical set-up of most modern supermarkets, airports, townships (which have become more and more like shopping malls) and prisons today. The cages in which workers were forced to conduct their alienated leisure mirrored the cages in which they were forced to conduct their alienated labour, as well as the cells into which they were made to cram their alienated family/private life. The protests against the new beerhall and workers' grievances became linked together as one problem. Thus a meeting of all dockworkers decided that 'all workers must be told to part company with municipal beer because their wages have become exhausted through buying beer not knowing what benefit they obtain from it except to build compounds and barracks which are full of bad laws and disagreeable control. Because a worker who lives in these barracks is like a prisoner.'
Traditional beer, made of maize or millet, was nutritious as well as delicious, and contained low quantities of alcohol. Illegally brewed and sold by township women, it also provided an income which supported the survival of many families. An old Zulu saying 'utshwala buqinisa umzimba', means 'beer strengthens the body'; another Zulu saying is that 'beer is the African's bread'. Many complained that municipal beer ‘burned your insides’ and was ‘doctored by ignorant whites’; many men squandered their wages getting drunk on this much more potent beer.
With these powerful and varied motivations, the boycott began strong, but continuous raids on the shebeens, illegal taverns where traditional beer was consumed, cut off not only an alternative drinking source but practically the only other place besides the beer-halls where working-class men could socialise. Another possible reason which drove some men into the beerhalls was explained by a woman from Cato Manor, a Durban township, who participated in a similar anti-beerhall struggle 30 years later which left 25 buildings destroyed, 7 damaged, a number of government vehicles torched and 9 police dead: 'You have to talk to your sissie (sister) in shebeens. Everyone knows you are her man...Hey, a lot of men would not do that. They were too scared'. Like the upper-class patrons of British Gentlemen's clubs, some South African workers, heirs to pre-colonial patriarchal traditions similar in many ways to those of the English aristocracy, preferred to take their leisure in spaces reserved for gentlemen-only.
One advantage of this sexual exclusivity was the ability of men to blow their wages on booze, despite unevenly enforced constraints, away from the eyes of their women who might object to this choice of expenditure which might otherwise have contributed to an always-strained household budget. Thus, when the enthusiasm of the men began to fade, women became the backbone of the movement. Under the banner of the ICU Women's Auxilliary, they began barge into the beerhalls, sticks and whips in hand. “Down with beerhalls! The men have failed – we will show them what we can do!” They did, despite the fact that they were defined in an auxiliary role (though, to a much worse degree, the ANC women's league of the era was in the 1960s admitted by one of its own members to be 'little more than a social club for the wives of ANC leaders’), a precedent which would have serious consequences for the struggles of later generations.
The extreme virulence of patriarchal ideology has to this day encouraged the reproduction of a sexual division of labour within social struggles which largely relegates females to roles of auxilliary 'support' for male dominated revolt, despite the frequent female leadership of rebellious actions, effectively preventing the development of self-mastery and self-management by half the population. Burdened by such self-limitations, the revolt of an era is chained to forms of action and relation (generally dominated by physical and intellectual machismo) that tend to exclude females far more often than not.

Nevertheless, the organisational support of the union [3], together with its revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology [4], helped them expand and deepen their struggle in a way that later generations were unable to do.

'Those of you who drink at the beerhalls, the day of your doom is not far away -- you will be blotted out. And those dogs who call themselves Africans and who sell their manhood by working for the police -- your day is at hand!' Although the admirable sentiments and methods of Ma-Dhlamini, a leader of the Women's Auxiliary, were echoed by the women of Cato Manor who resumed the anti-beerhall struggle two generations later; the latter revolt was crushed in isolation whereas six months into the earlier boycott 'the Women’s Auxilliary helped the boycott spread into all the smaller towns of Natal which had beerhalls. There the women were at the forefront of attacks on beerhalls and challenges to authority. In Estcourt, women who called themselves ‘Drink’ and ‘Trouble’ confronted the local magistrate. One of the women said that her name was ‘Hlapekili’ (worried) and her husband’s name was ‘Nagwa Njolo’ (Always drunk). In Ladysmith, Weenen, Dundee, Howick, and Vryheid women marched through the streets to protest against municipal beer and drunken husbands. They also demanded the right to brew beer at home. They were armed with sticks and bottles. Policemen and workers in the local beerhalls were attacked. And when women were arrested, their friends attacked the jails.' (Paul La Hausse, Brewers, beerhalls and boycotts: A history of liquor in South Africa, 1988)

When women fought against drunken husbands and the state which grew rich off them they were engaged in a direct and practical critique of the alienated leisure which is both a necessary requirement and a necessary result of alienated labour. The world of work -- of capitalist production based on wage-slavery -- is experienced by workers as dead-time, life deprived of all that gives it meaning for human beings. Workers are necessarily compelled to seek solace, consolation and compensation for the misery of this experience in the world of leisure -- of capitalist consumption based on magic. It is only magic which can resurrect the life-time which has been irretrievably stolen from workers; nothing less than magic can restore some semblance of life to a mode of existence dominated by dead time, nothing less than magic can save the living souls of those who have been forced to surrender the time of their lives to the forces of death. Strange magic, religions, and gods haunt the terrain of modern-day leisure. They take the form of compulsive rituals and repulsive taboos: addictions and phobias that occupy the everyday lives of men and women like a colonial army, and possess their bodies and souls like malevolent spirits.


The sun god Ra, in one of his more unusual forms, slays the snake demon Apep, embodiment of darkness and primordial Chaos

There is a social division of leisure that corresponds to the social division of labour imposed by any given society. Men engaged in manual labour have historically tended to be addicted to drink, the ritual of the magic potion that imbues the drinker with superhuman strength and courage, that protects the drinker from the dark satanic mills in which he must toil. But if this is true, it is also true that alcohol addiction also expresses a form of incoherent protest, an unsuccessful refusal of the demands for quiet submission imposed on the working-class by the established order. The popular idiom 'we go together like "drunk" and "disorderly"' captures the pathetic but nevertheless real rebellious content of that habitual intoxication popular among many of the most oppressed individuals, which, while it can result in a wild sort of insubordination directed against bourgeois authorities, much more often simply produces debilitating inter-personal violence among the oppressed themselves.

Today women, who remain everywhere defined primarily in terms of their job in the reproduction of the species, tend to be addicted to rituals that magically enhance their desirability as sexual partners in the eyes of men; they are addicted to shopping if they can afford it, or shoplifting if they can't, and the commodities they target are rarely books or food but clothes and fashion accessories. Women are the overwhelming sufferers of so-called 'eating disorders', which are in fact obsessions or addictions to magical rituals regarding the image of their bodies as seen through the eyes of imaginary men (precisely in the sense by which people referred to 'the establishment' or 'the system' as 'the man'). Women are the overwhelming sufferers of 'love addiction', for the same reasons. At the same time, it is also true that their physical appearance (and for the more affluent, the interiors of their homes) represents one of the only aspects of their material existence which women are permitted (within the limits of their social position and the dominant sexual 'morality' of their surroundings) to creatively transform, and as such expresses the real desire to freely shape the physical elements of their world through self-chosen forms of playful activity.

Alienation in the world of leisure is thus not merely a necessary result of alienation in the world of labour, but in fact expresses a magical refusal by workers of the poverty imposed on the better part of their conscious existence by the dominant mode of production, an attempt to magically recapture the beauty, variety, excitement, creativity, playfulness, and infinite potentialities so brutally denied to them by the drab reality of their working life. The attractions presented by modern commodity-consumption remain fundamentally magical precisely because in reality the desires which commodities pretend to satisfy cannot be satisfied by a world dominated by commodity-production any more than the art and entertainment, fashion and interior-design presented by this society to its modern slaves can satisfy the human desire to understand and actively intervene in (i.e. 'to know' in the biblical sense of intimate, sensuous intercourse) the basic conditions of one's own existence.

The wages of alienated labour are alienated leisure. Workers are compensated for their work with money which they must use to consume commodities. Leisure, far from being the absence of labour, depends on it: the unemployed are not 'gentlemen of leisure' because in this society there is no leisure for those who can't pay for it. But the nature of alienation in the world of leisure does not stem solely on the fact that access to commodity consumption depends on practical submission to the poverty of working life, but also in the fact that money and the commodities it buys can never adequately compensate for all that workers are deprived on account of it. Hidden beneath the surface of everyday life -- which for most people begins the moment the working day ends -- the spectres which haunt modern leisure -- the addictions, obsessions, neuroses, phobias, depression, stalk the streets, restaurants, bars, apartments, shopping malls, concerts, dinner parties, nightclubs, cinemas, internet cafes and other 'machinery of consumption'; they exhale an odourless toxin that fills all modern cities with an unspoken atmosphere of quiet desperation that simmers beneath the surface, erupting in riots, suicides, drunken brawls, religious cults, military coups, and those masterful emotional tortures inflicted by individuals on themselves and those closest to them so damningly detailed in the best novels and worst tabloids. These demons are nothing other than the real human desires and needs that are frustrated by the world of commodity production and consumption, needs and desires which can't be satisfied by any of the lives and lies presented for consumption by this society, needs and desires which, when failing to find healthy outlets, are transformed into the destructive demons that today possess almost all social relations around the planet. The nature of modern alienation in the realm of consumption thus has to do with the fact that it forms a mostly imaginary compensation for the entirely real alienation of modern production, just as religion offers the mostly imaginary riches of the spiritual life in exchange for and the real misery of worldly existence. One of the reasons dissatisfaction for this state of affairs is so seldom expressed is that whilst mostly imaginary, the compensations of commodity consumption are not entirely absent, and tend to enrich themselves precisely from new expressions of dissatisfaction whose de-fused elements are often incorporated into the most modern commodities; in the same way, religion continues to hold sway so strongly precisely because the compensations it offers are also not entirely limited to an imaginary afterlife, but for many involve a certain sense of stability and guidance in an often violently unpredictable and confusing world, a certain sense of community in a hostile and isolating world, a certain sense of aesthetic beauty and meaningful (and in a sense self-chosen) order in a world dominated by ugliness and meaningless survival-imposed repetition, and so on. [5]

As the dockworkers and women of Durban knew, alienated consumption is not merely a necessary result of alienated production but also a necessary requirement. Just as white capitalists and their state required workers to spend their wages in municipal beerhalls in order to build hostels with which to control those very workers, so too world capital and its respective national states requires workers to spend their wages on useless and destructive commodities in order to build markets with which to accumulate even more capital. Most importantly, working-class acceptance of wage-slavery in exchange for the paltry benefits of the commodity economy has always been the basic requirement for profitable commodity production. The role alcohol played in numbing men to their own oppression, which their wives found so detestable in 1929, was only a particular form of the role all commodity consumption plays in diverting the attention of proletarians from the reality of their own slavery. At its most basic level, this is achieved through the universal deception by which the owners of the world have nobly given wage-slaves the freedom (a freedom which chattel-slaves -- being generously paid in free clothing, food and board -- never required) to buy everything they need to survive using wages obtained from whichever master they freely choose to sell themselves to.



In the revolutionary upheavals that raged across the country throughout the decade following 1976, thousands of young South Africans picked up right where the generation of Ma-Dhlamini left off, but from the start they went much further. Not only did they struggle against drunk parents and the state which grew rich off them, burning almost all the municipal beerhalls in townships around the country, but they went on to shut-down even the shebeens whose owners were at the head of the old anti-beerhall movement, since their real target was the role alcohol-consumption played in the pacification of South African natives (teetotalism was prevalent among the Latin anarchist movement in the decades preceding the Spanish revolution for the same reasons). In '77, when they launched a boycott of Christmas shopping, and on subsequent boycotts organised on numerous occasions throughout the following decade, they explicitly targeted the role of commodity-consumption in general in the pacification of proletarians and the enrichment of their enemies. Finally, the revolutionaries who came to be known as The Children of Soweto did not limit their attacks to government beerhalls, but directed their anger at all material expressions of white domination, from state administration buildings to factories, shops and schools, and by so doing conducted the most thorough practical critique of urban geography anywhere in the world. 

In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss describes visiting the 'coolie lines' which, much like the 'bachelor's hostels' whose conditions black migrant workers struggled against during the first beerhall boycots, consisted of 'brick troughs with neither light nor flooring, and each occupied by six or eight individuals.' Although increasingly rare, such hostels have not entirely disappeared. At a March 2015 protest in Durban by the inmates of a 'single-women's hostel' against the introduction of children by some among them, an inmate said 'The conditions inside are bad. We are cramped and they are making decisions for us without consulting us. There are three beds per room, there’s no space to even walk inside, the toilets are dirty and they leave the children’s napkins lying around anywhere and their children are always crying'.

By and large, however, one can quite accurately say of South Africa today, as Levi-Strauss said of the India of his time, that 'Social progress is now tending to replace this kind of dwelling by “workers' quarters", prisons in which two or three workers share a cell three metres by four…' These quarters – whether single room shacks made of corrugated iron and wood by squatters in vacant land, or multi-storey high-density apartments of brick and concrete built by the state or commercial property developers in the suburbs, townships and urban centres – are cobbled together in a landscapes which, despite numerous significant differences, all produce the same suffocation, and fulfil the same function. They may sleep one, two or more per room, and cost anything from zero to many thousands per month in rent, but their basic equipment (bed, television and cell-phone/computer) design (that of an individual office cubicle linked to communal ablution and canteen facilities) are identical throughout. They all still correspond well to the worldview that Levi-Strauss discerned in the Indian products of social progress. 'Once, during my first teaching post in the Landes area, I had visited poultry yards specially adapted for the cramming of geese: each bird was confined to a narrow box and reduced to the status of a mere digestive tube. In this Indian setting, the situation was the same, apart from two differences: instead of geese, it was men and women I was looking at, and instead of being fattened up, they were, if anything, being slimmed down. But in both instances, the breeder only allowed his charges one form of activity, which was desirable in the case of the geese, and inevitable in the case of the Indians. The dark and airless cubicles were suited neither for rest, leisure nor love. They were mere points of connection with the communal sewer, and they corresponded to a conception of human life as being reducible to the pure exercise of the excretory functions.

We can thus see, taking shape before our very eyes, an Africa characterised by worker's dwellings and cheap blocks of flats. This Africa of the future, which rejects all forms of exoticism, may link up again, after an eclipse of five thousand years, with that dreary yet efficient mode of existence which the Africans (in the city of Memphis), Mesapotamians (in the city Erech) and Indians (in the city of Harappa) seem to have invented simultaneously around 3000 BC, and subsequently migrated west across the earth's surface, making a temporary halt in the New World, so that is typically thought of as something specifically American. Yet the 'Valley of the Artisans' in Deir el-Medina ('Due to its location, the village is not thought to have provided a pleasant environment')housing migrant workers who 'left their children and women, who worked in the wheat and barley fields, at home' to build the famous Valley of the Kings three and a half thousand years ago, contains the same sort of quarters which might house people in the same position in any major city in the world today. 'In the valley of the Indus,' Levi-Strauss describes how 'these settlements present a disconcerting spectacle. The streets are perfectly straight and intersect each other at right-angles; there are workers' districts, in which all the dwellings are identical, industrial workshops for the grinding of grain, the casting and engraving of metals and the manufacture of clay goblets... public baths, water pipes and sewers... solid but unattractive residential districts... No monuments or large pieces of sculpture, but flimsy trinkets and precious jewels, indicative of an art devoid of mystery and uninspired by any deep faith, intended merely to satisfy the ostentatiousness and sensuality of the rich. The complex as a whole reminds the visitor of the advantages and defects of a large modern city'. 

The contrast between this urban geography and the architecture of the indigenous Bororo of Brazil which he describes earlier in the narrative couldn't be more glaring: 'the houses were majestic in size in spite of their fragility, and were the result of the utilisation of materials and techniques which we in the West are acquainted with in small-scale forms: they were not so much built as knotted together, plaited, woven, embroidered and mellowed by use; instead of crushing the occupants under an indifferent mass of stones, they adapted to their presence and their movements; they were the opposite of our houses in that they remained always subordinate to man. The village rose round its occupants like a light, flexible suit of armour, closer to Western women's hats than Western towns; it was a monumental adornment retaining something of the living bowers and foliage whose natural gracefulness the builders had skilfully reconciled with the rigorous demands of their plan... It was as if an entire civilization were conspiring in a single, passionate affection for the shapes, substances and colours of life and, in order to preserve its richest essence around the human body, were appealing to those of its manifestations which are either the most lasting or the most fleeting...' There is an almost unquestioned consensus which correlates the emergence of cities with certain features characteristic of civilisation; it is facilely associated with the dissolution of parochialism, liberation from 'the idiocy of rural life' and the dull repetition of pastoral existence, emancipation from blind submission to alien forces of nature, clearer awareness of the social nature of human life and labour and hence a better ability to organise both the present and the future. Murray Bookchin, the Dean of Democratic Confederalism, even went so far to associate cities with 'the unfolding of Reason in History'. Such sanguine hopes arose from the observation that villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Unfortunately the triumph of urbanism around the world has simply transposed these conditions onto a 'global village' whose assorted fragments sprawl across the surface of the planet. As a matter of fact the only phenomenon with which cities have consistently been concomitant is the creation of empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical pattern of development observed from Egypt to China, at the time when cities first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment or civilisation. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of urban architecture than the optimistic account referred to above. My hypothesis, if it is correct, would oblige us to recognise the fact that the primary function of urban geography is to facilitate slavery. The use of urban planning for humanitarian purposes, or as a source of sensuous and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it is actually turned into a means of strengthening, justifying and concealing the main objective. 

In South Africa, the practical critique of alienated leisure and urbanism (and the destruction of the separation between work and play, and between town and country which such a critique implies) has never been placed on the agenda in a more coherent way than during the revolutionary decade 1976-1986The coherent connection between workplace, community and personal struggles so explosively embodied by by the women of Mkhubane and the children of Soweto expressed a unitary critique of modern slavery that began to attack alienation – at work, at leisure (culture) and at home (family/personal/sexual relations) – as it is actually experienced in everyday life: that is, as a totality. Although the radical content of these movements always originated in the spontaneous struggles of ordinary proletarians against the conditions in which they found themselves, the struggles of 20s-30s were indeed supported in certain limited but material ways by the existing revolutionary organisations of the time (the ICU and the early Communist Party) whereas the even more radical proletarian struggles of the 70s-80s were in fact crippled by rivalry between competing rackets (IFP, AZAPO, UDF, SACP-ANC, etc) and their ideologies, and ultimately defeated because they supported the power of existing revolutionary organisations (notably the unions and the SACP-ANC) at their own expense.

The same historical trajectory outlined above regarding South Africa can be observed internationally. The British and French unions were among the earliest advocates of sabotage, while workers affiliated to the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party in America were among the most efficient practitionersAll of this has disappeared, a long time ago. It has not returned. It will not return. 

When the sons and daughters of Ma-Dhlamini go on strike in the mines (2009-2014), post offices (2013-2014) and factories (2014) in their hundreds of thousands (largely outside any union control in the first two cases), strengthening their action with the most extensive levels of sabotage and organised force seen in decades, not only were they denounced by the South African Communist Party and all their own unions, but they were not supported in any way by those who call themselves revolutionary Marxists or Anarchists, despite the silent and useless presence of such people in the unions and elsewhere. In South Africa, as everywhere else, every existing ideological and practical organisation with any significant influence is openly on the side of law and order, and when forced in the heat of struggle to make a decision will always support the rulers against the oppressed. Whoever allies themselves to such organisations will have to be prepared to account for all the implications of this position.

B




Mkhumbane Women's Leaguers developed a new slogan: 'Ibuya Makhosikazi, ibuya!' (Come back women, come back!)… Gladys Manzi, then a leading Cato Manor Women's Leaguer, explained its significance:
'You lose. Every time. It's the men. It's Bokweni [municipal beerhall liquor]. It's the law. The women needed to be told 'Come back!' We were going backwards, you see. We needed to get back to that place where we were. We were not Bokweni's girls and we did not want our men. That is what we said, we are the warriros! [laughter]… We told those troublesome people that we are fighting for our rights. Women should be given rights to do what they liked. We could not remain traditional because times were changing…'
Cato Manor, June 1959; Ian Sinclair


Critical support for existing practical and ideological organisations, for the same reasons as above, but this time with the hope that one's agitation will produce a gradual transformation of these organisations and/or ideologies for the better.

The criticism can either be internal (in which case it would conform to the 'democratic centralism' of Leninist discipline) or public (in which case the support offered by the critic is not likely to be accepted) but either way is bound to remain purely abstract, as the actions of the 'critical' supporter would be practically the same as that of the 'uncritical' one. This choice corresponds well to the description 'false opposition'. On the level of practical organisation, it is an attitude adopted by rank-and-file members of the ruling-party who criticise its policies or particular leaders (promoting Jacob Zuma against Thabo Mbeki or Julius Malema against Zuma, advocating within the ruling party against policies of privatisation or trade liberalisation, and so on), or members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa who pushed the union officials to break away from the ruling-party dominated alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions while keeping these same officials and the structures which allowed them to maintain this alliance for so long unchanged – as well as by Anarchists (such as the Zabalaza collective in South Africa) and Trotskyists who join unions and other groups with the attempt to 'radicalise' or 'democratise' them. On the level of ideological organisation, it is the attitude adopted by reformed Marxists such who try, every decade or so, to invent 'Stalinism with a humanist/existentialist/post-modernist face', those who cling to the idea of a 'Living Marxism', and those 'post-leftist' anarchists who try to reform a 19th century ideology whose present decrepitude they themselves eloquently denounce.

While there are doubtless intelligent and sincere individuals who persist in making this choice, they are a tiny minority fighting a battle destined to fail. Almost everything worthwhile they accomplish is done despite their compromised position, while their potential to accomplish better things is hampered by it. Rather than breaking away unequivocally and publicly, they remain ambivalent, isolated on the margins of a corpse which remains impervious to their efforts at revival, and so unintentionally and unnecessarily make the task of finding one-another – under conditions which already do everything to maintain a reign of generalised isolation and non-communication – that much more difficult.

They turn reality upside down by refusing to recognise that, far from the most/only effective means of social transformation, the dead-weight to which they cling is in fact the biggest obstacle to the change they desire. They repeat stale arguments about the need for unity, the rejection of sectarianism, the necessity to work for change from within the best alternative available to them, forgetting that by this logic people justified participation in the elections during Apartheid, or in the Stalino-Democrat government during the Spanish Revolution. They forget that real practical struggle is nothing if not the rejection of the false choices presented by the old world; that revolution is purely abstract if it does not involve inventing our own alternatives.

Although they have revealed the most lucid grasp of the movements from which they came, the anarchist critics of anarchism and marxist critics of marxism have always been received with near-total incomprehension or flippant dismissal by those who should be most equipped to make use of their insights.

Considering,

that their justified contempt for almost all existing radical organizations – which, whether presenting themselves as a leadership to be followed or as an example of an ameliorated style of life to be imitated, give rise to illusions of the possibility of fundamental change without the complete overthrow of all existing conditions, the negation of the commodity economy and of the state – necessarily raises the question of radically new forms of collective action and relation based on a critical theory of organisation;

that if they are to be realized in practice, theoretical tendencies or differences must be translated into organisational problems;

that, as has often been pointed out, the working class is not weak because it is divided, but on the contrary, is divided because it is weak;

that the reason why the proletariat must seek new ways is that the enemy has strengthened to such a degree that the old methods are as redundant as the retrenched proletarians who once used them;

that the working class will not invent these ways by magic, but through rigorous effort, playful experiment, deep reflection, the clash of divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas;

that it is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is the raison d’etre of the internal differences and conflicts;

that it is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions;

Considering,

that the struggle of the proletariat to supersede itself as a petty, poverty-striken, miserable, pathological, enslaved, alienated and deluded class is inseparable from the struggle of individual proletarians to overcome themselves as petty, poverty-striken, miserable, pathological, enslaved, alienated and deluded persons;

that the elaboration of critical theory remains abstract as long as it is not also the elaboration of critical self-theory – the evolving crystalisation of proletarian self-consciousness in relation to the evolving historical process of which it is a part;

that the theoretical separation between 'the ruthless critique of all that exists' and the practical critique of oneself inevitably leads to alienation between theory and practice – the separation of self-consciousness from the concrete, transitory historical moment to which it must relate;

that complacency in the face of such separation, alienation and abstraction remain dominant throughout the revolutionary movement precisely because it demands no break with the hierarchical comportment inherited from dominant social relations, a break necessarily involving considerable audacity and playful self-activity as well as personal discomfort and practical risk;

that in the absence of such a concrete break revolutionaries will continue to become without embarrassment politicians, cop-collaborators and celebrities;

that the practical critique of all existing organisations is inseparable from the critique by individuals of their own rôles in such organisations;

that one of the biggest obstacles to individuals confronting their own past and present poverty is the absence of any public tendency sympathetic to such a confrontation;

that whatever other activity such a tendency might involve, its participants would decide to collaborate first of all in order to organise the practice of their own critical-self theory together with other people, simply because this task is made more fruitful through the sympathetic collaboration of autonomous individuals;

that when not based on relations of sympathetic mutual criticism, collaboration tends to be based on conformity to established norms and mutual toleration;

It seems clear

that those who disparage disparateness by choosing to inhabit this half-way house only trap themselves in a den of dire discombobulation.


C



Result of a police raid on an illegal shebeen in Cato Manor: one dead pig


'Some women just wanted an end to it all. It must all do away [sic], you see , “Just like this!”. Then you say, “but that is difficult. How can you do this?” This is what made women very angry. If you say there is something you cannot do you must say why.'

Interviewee quoted in Cato Manor, June 1959; Ian Sinclair


Practical critique, necessarily involving a fundamental advance beyond all existing ideological and practical organisations.

Participation in this case would not necessarily be abandoned. One might work with members of an anarchist solidarity network in order to learn precisely what might be salvaged and what discarded from this form of action; one might make use of particular perspectives developed by marxist, anarchist or situationist praxis; in all cases, however, awareness of the fundamentally limited basis of these ideas and practices – i.e. their supersession by the movement of history – will remain, and the necessity to swallow these limitations whole avoided. Participation would be disinterested, in the same sense in which the conductors of scientific experiments are supposed to be disinterested, meaning the potential consequences of their experimentation, necessarily based on a ruthlessly critical perspective, would not be an obstacle to one's conduct.

You would be able to do what you feel you have to do without concern one way or another whether this necessitates a break in relations with persons or groups; you would be able to say what you feel needs saying without concern one way or another whether your words agree with the correct marxist, anarchist, situationist, or surrealist line. This, it seems to me, is the absolute minimum condition for all those who want to reinvent revolution today.

Many would dispute my statement that every existing ideological and practical organisation with any influence today is openly on the side of law and order, pointing to this or that exception. As a matter of fact the one partial-exception to this statement in South Africa, the shack-dweller's organisation (see my Abahlali baseMjondolo Anthology) based in Durban, is an example that both clarifies what I mean by practical critique as well as demonstrates, as an exception which confirms the rule, the truth of the statement.

At least some members of this organisation are communist (See Living Communism in the above-mentioned anthology), although neither Marxist nor Anarchist. This in fact only confirms my thesis that no previously or currently existing group or ideology is or can be adequate to today's tasks of revolutionary organisation: Abahlali had to invent their own forms of action and relation, and discover their own ideas by and for themselves. Just the same, the severe problems with leadership which have destroyed the Cape Town section and crippled the Durban section, the struggles over control of the right to use the (one might say brand-) name of the group, the recent the reversion to party-politics, and, most of all, the fact that not only are the vast majority of shack-dweller's struggles conducted independently of this group, but that even those affiliated to it (as in the case with Marikana and Sweet Home in Cape Town) frequently benefit from the association no more than if they had nothing to do with it, all demonstrate how far even the most advanced attempts at radical renewal currently are from an adequate confrontation of the question of revolutionary organisation in light of the tendencies outlined above.

Another partial exception in the world arena is the Kurdish movement of 'Democratic Confederalism' initiated by the Turkish PKK and its offshoots in Syria under their ideological master Abdullah Ocalan, a movement which 'no matter how confused and inadequate... has given rise', according to a comrade whose considered judgement I have learned to respect, 'to an express and practical discussion of the ways and means of abolishing capitalism, the state and patriarchy that in terms of its size and sophistication is probably without parallel in our time.' Like the Zapatista group in Mexico and Abahlali in South Africa, the PKK ideology is neither Marxist nor Anarchist, deriving in large part from the Communalist ideas of Murray Bookchin. As with these groups, the real potential of the activity & perspectives the PKK has provoked rests in the possibility that these will eventually lead its members, supporters & sympathisers to a practical confrontation with the PKK’s own inconsistencies. As they currently exist, all these groups and the ideologies on which they are based stand in the way of a subversive current able to take up 'the ruthless critique of everything that exists'. Just as their initial activity may have been essential to creating the concrete conditions for such a critique to develop as a real possibility; so their supersession has become an essential precondition to the practical advance of such a critique. 'The real question is where the genie that the PKK and its allies are letting out of the bottle will subsequently go. Hundreds of thousands of people (perhaps millions) are being encouraged to take up the project of the abolition of capitalism and the state in their everyday lives. Whether the individuals brought into this project will confront its contradictions and overcome the limitations its originators envisage remains to be seen.' 

Another comrade made a very good point on this count. 'The Rojava supporters are fond of their Spain 1936 comparisons; perhaps they should consider that many local rural communes and villages organised on libertarian principles existed for considerable periods even as the central Republican state structure became increasingly Stalinised and sharpened as a counter-revolutionary instrument – with the support and participation of many ‘libertarians’ in the name of anti-fascism. And arguably this could happen because too many of the libertarians and wider working class failed to see the necessity to confront the state power – but instead, increasingly defaulted to the state, rather than their collective selves, as the essential unifying social force. The unifying force at a local level of the collectives arguably left unchallenged the ultimate power in the continued existence of the state. There are no easy solutions to dealing with this but it’s an essential question of organisation and strategy and not one to be glossed over by simply implying that independent self-organisation is itself an act of withering the state.'

As far as the abolition of class society goes, it has been convincingly argued that since 'both class relations and the interactions with regional state and global imperialist powers is mediated by tribalist structures in Kurdish (and not only) society, then the class or social question for revolutionaries becomes the question of how to undermine and eventually overcome tribalism.' This argument is, by the way, analogous to the one which states that, since class relations remain mediated by racist relations in South African society (understood broadly to include what is commonly described in this country as 'xenophobia'), the class or social question for revolutionaries becomes the question of how to undermine and eventually overcome racism. The basis of this argument bears repeating. It starts by comparing of the dominant bedtime-story of liberal ideology -- that 'the development of a capitalist economy will bring in its wake the social winds of capitalist modernity that will automatically sweep away "backwards" social forms like tribalism' -- with the ugly reality. In Martin van Bruinessen's 2002 paper Kurds, States and Tribes, this assumption is taken apart: 'The past two decades of great social upheaval have not led to the extinction of the tribes, however. The apparently pre-modern phenomenon of the tribe has shown remarkable resilience and adaptability, and in several respects tribes and tribalism are even more pervasive in Kurdish society now than twenty, thirty years ago... Moreover, it appeared that tribal organisation had a distinct survival value in periods of insecurity and political strife, and was quite appropriate to various modern types of enterprise'. Significantly, tribalism has managed to occupy the most strategic economic and political enterprises throughout the region. Already back in the 1970s when he conducted field research for his book Agha, Sheikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan, van Bruinessen pointed out how the tribal aghas had moved smoothly into occupying all the elected posts in the secular Kemalist (Turkish), Baathist (Iraqi and Syrian) and Persian (Iranian) states. Tribal authorities have subsequently kept control over social relations of the region, both in Kurdistan and surrounding areas. In February 2014, for example, the non-government of Rojava signed an agreement with the Syrian state and an Arab tribe to re-open a border-crossing with Iraq and allow the return of oil industry to the area. 'The agreement signed by the parties entails that the PYD and Shammar tribe receive 15% each, while the remaining 70% was specified as returns to the regime'. In the same way, despite the political and economic modernisation which has taken place in South Africa (the transition from archaic Afrikaaner nationalism to modern bourgeois democracy and the integration of a previously insular national product into the global neo-liberal economy) racism is here to stay in the everyday life of the majority, and in particular ways has significantly intensified. This intensification can be felt most especially in relation to black Africans born outside the borders of the modern nation-state [6], and in the increasing relative poverty which has progressed so far for those at the sharp end of Freedom and Democracy (practically the only sort of progress most people have experienced) as to award South Africa the privileged position of most unequal society in the world -- an inequality inevitably expressed in racial terms. As the placard of a worker at the South African post office stated during a bitter struggle that saw the end of long-term casual labour at the institution:

15 years as casuals
Black managers
How can you 
Be happy!!



The comrade who advanced this argument regarding the structures that mediate class relations in Rojava noted the need to identify 'the functional roles that allow tribalism to reproduce itself' throughout shifting historical and material conditions as a preliminary step to undermining such roles. In other words, it is necessary to understand what are the real human needs which tribal social relations manage to satisfy (albeit through the mediation of alienated means) in order to understand what practical steps might be able to undermine such relations by satisfying these needs directly. Such a task clearly demands intensive as well as inclusive self-study and practical discussion by the ordinary members of the society themselves, and it seems clear that such research and discussion is indeed ongoing throughout every level of the Rojavan community, particularly with regard to the patriarchal structures on which tribal relations rest. The experimental transformation of everyday social relations that are recorded by participants and visitors reflect the extensive as well as intensive practical translation of such discussions into the realm of action.


The emphasis on collective grass-roots participatory structures (communes, co-operatives, peace and conciliation committees, neighbourhood assemblies and worker's councils) where disputes can be settled, problems can be set and solved, and resources can be allocated, thus corresponds to a need which has hitherto been successfully addressed by tribal organisations alone: the need to resolve conflicts, secure and redistribute resources, and organise self-defence in the face of a corrupt, predatory, and racist neo-colonial state. By making obsolete one of the primary strategies through which tribal authorities have traditionally addressed these needs -- control of and collaboration with the representative structures of the state -- the power of the tribes themselves loses much of its social basis. On the other hand, the authoritarian patriarchal social-relations which continue to produce brutal intra- and inter- tribal violence (blood feuds, honour killings etc) are undermined by ensuring that the new forms of social organisation that have emerged in opposition to both tribes and states are kept open to the direct control of all who are affected by them; that forced marriage and the traditionally-sanctioned subjugation of women is formally and practically abolished; that wealth, property and the means of production hitherto monopolised by tribes and states are put under the control of all community members; and that the monopoly of violence by which state and tribal authorities maintain their power is broken by arming all non-tribal and female members of society.

The immense break with millenia-old normality which these steps have already accomplished only emphasises the growing contradiction between this revolutionary social movement at the level of everyday life, and its representation at the level of political-territorial organisation which

i) claims the power to press-gang/conscript individuals into its own army (punishing draft-dodgers and deserters with prison-sentences and ideological 're-education'),

ii) serves its class of professional bureaucrats and politicians from President on down,

iii) possesses its own courts (although petty infractions are handled by popular committees based on consensus and restorative justice, 'The remaining levels of Rojava’s justice system are much like those in other states'), its own police (although officials claim they will abolish the police as soon as every citizen has taken a six-month policing course, much like Marxist vanguards claimed they would abolish the state as soon as every proletarian has obtained the correct level of revolutionary class consciousness) and its own prisons which enforce its own laws in the service of private property (‘with the beginning of the revolution … it was even forbidden to break open a cash box’) and the authority of the ruling party ('The 107-page report, “Under Kurdish Rule: Abuses in PYD-Run Enclaves of Syria”, documents arbitrary arrests of the PYD’s political opponents, abuse in detention, and unsolved abductions and murders...'[7]), and

iv) negotiates and closely co-operates with imperial powers.

According to some sympathetic English-speaking visitors to the area, Rojavans are well aware of the contradiction between the admirable array of radical social experiments and practical discussions taking place at the local level, which have to some degree appropriated the means of coercion (some security forces are apparently directly accountable to local councils rather than the new state apparatus), and this new semi-autonomous government which, as admitted by these same visitors, possesses 'all the form and trappings of a state'.

Awareness of the contradictory relation between the political parties which control this state, but nevertheless claim to be ideologically opposed to its existence, appears far less in evidence: hence the political idolatry by which The Respected and Beloved Brother-Leader of The Kurdish People continues to be unquestioningly worshipped. This sort of insularity ('References beyond the Kurdish movement were strikingly absent from the symbols we saw') was a major factor in the isolation of the Zapatistas, both the historical and contemporary versions, from the social upheavals unfolding all around them. As has been pointed out, the struggles centered around Subcommandante Marcos and his affiliated organisation can be considered the one historical president closest in historical and social context to those unfolding in Rojava today. Just at the rampant religiosity of the original Zapatistas, together with their fundamentally parochial perspective, presented a gulf between them and the proletarians of central and northern Mexico during the revolution, so too the Kurdish revolutionaries' quasi-religious veneration of Ocalan and his organisation, together with their fundamentally national perspective, presents a gulf between themselves and the proletarians of Syria and Turkey. This is all the more dire since these two countries have been heavily involved in the international popular revolts which swept through the region since 2011, a situation far more favourable to the prospect of world revolution than the one from which the modern-day Zapatistas emerged. Although, on the one hand, the revolutionaries of Kurdistan claim to present themselves as a model applicable to all Syria, and even beyond -- going so far as saying to comrades from the West 'We have the one thing no one can ever give you. We have our freedom. You don’t. We only wish there was some way we could give that to you' -- their actual relations with the world outside Kurdistan demonstrate an agenda entirely antagonistic towards making such a project a practical reality. Rather than throwing in their lot with the rebellion of ordinary proletarians who rose up alongside them against the ruling misery enforced by the states of Syria and Turkey, conducting their own revolution in a way that would encourage their fellows to recognise in it a common interest, a common project, and a common enemy (the project of world revolution against all bosses and their states) they choose instead to conduct it in a way that will encourage the bosses of neighbouring states and world powers to recognise in it a common interest, a common project, and a common enemy (the project of 'anti-fascist popular front' against the Islamic State).  It is true that, on the one hand, the long history racism directed against Kurds by a still powerful Turkish/Arab nationalism continues to pose a formidable obstacle, and, on the other, a desperate struggle for survival in vicious wartime conditions imposes very real practical constraints for which there are no easy answers to be found. There is no pure theory which can somehow contain 'correct' solutions unsullied by the messy exigencies of the real world. Nevertheless, the very real existence of such a struggle for survival under such conditions, although it may resort to measures which have been termed alternately 'disaster communism' or 'war communism', need not blind us to the equally real preconditions for a world revolution which will be carried out not in the name of survival but precisely against the domination of basically animal survival (based on artificial scarcity) over a fully human life: a domination which everywhere imposes its planned poverty and misery on us all. The realpolitik which leads people to develop such friendly relations with the bosses of the world that they name their children after them (as was the case with many newborn babies in Kobane who have been named in honour of Obama) is perfectly understandable in the case of people who rely on such bosses in order to hold onto their own territory in the face of maniacs with guns. But when such people proclaim their lead in a social revolution whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those of all bosses -- whose global scope is opposed to the recognition of all national borders, whose practical existence makes impossible the peaceful possession of any territory by anyone -- then such friendly relations can only incite rather rigorous questioning...

Without going into the relations of production, the state of alienated labour, or any other narrowly 'economic' questions, it is fair to say that the narrowly 'political' reasons by which one could determine whether the struggles centred around Lenin and his organisation resulted in real revolution or one more capitalist state involve not only the fact that they involved a dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat, brutally suppressing all radical criticism or revolutionary opposition, but also the fact that they produced a social organisation which acted in the interests of a territorially defined entity at the expense of ordinary proletarians unfortunate enough to fall outside that territory, a society which acted as one nation among others, recognised the sovereignty of other states in order to be recognised itself, and stove to create political conditions favourable to capital accumulation. Significantly, according to Loren Goldner the earliest concrete evidence for this state-capitalist 'socialism in one country' can be found in the relation between the Bolsheviks and very regimes which not only brutally suppressed working-class revolution in their time but also initiated the modern-day oppression of the Kurdish population:  the Persian regime of Reza Khan (founder of the Pahlevi regime), the new nationalist government of Turkey’s Kemal Pasha (Attatürk) and the other nation-states born from the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

In “Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti-Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917-1925, Goldner begins with an extract from a secret memo sent in 1920 by Trotsky to the executive of the Russian Communist Party: 'All information on the situation in Khiva, in Persia, in Bukhara and in Afghanistan confirm the fact that a Soviet revolution in these countries is going to cause us major difficulties at the present time…Until the situation in the West is stabilized and until our industries and transport systems have improved, a Soviet expansion in the east could prove to be no less dangerous than a war in the West…a potential Soviet revolution in the east is today to our advantage principally as an important element in diplomatic relations with England. From this I conclude that: 1) in the east we should devote ourselves to political and educational work…and at the same time advise all possible caution in actions calculated to require our military support, or which might require it; 2) we have to continue by all possible channels at our disposal to arrive at an understanding with England about the east.'

One wonders what secret memos are being passed around concerning meetings between non-officials of the Rojava self-government with American and European diplomats. Goldner also mentions 'Kenneth Rexroth’s quip (in his Autobiographical Novel) that Leninism had a genius for coining terms such as “critical support”, “democratic centralism”, or “revolutionary trade unionism” whereby the noun always won out over the adjective.' One can only suspect, considering the Leninist origins of both Bookchin and Ocalan, that the same thing will happen to the 'democratic confederalism', 'libertarian municipalism' and 'social ecology' which has been declared the official ideology of the revolutionary government in Rojava, unless ordinary Rojavans themselves take up in earnest the struggle against all existing revolutionary ideologies and organisations (even and especially their own local councils in their present state, which by no means supersedes the 'miserable sort of existence' that Karl Korsch long ago identified with the ignominious defeat of the German revolution in his important 1921 text Evolution of the Problem of the Political Worker's Councils in Germany -- one of the earliest and most cogent critiques of councilist ideology to appear in the literature of the revolutionary movement) more rigorously than has been managed by even the most inspiring revolutionary upheavals of the past.

Considering the conditions dominant today, which, as outlined in the present text, continually and inevitably tend to alienate rebels from the organisation of their own power, a constant, consistent, conscious, critical confrontation of precisely these contradictions seems an essential precondition for preventing the reproduction of precisely the sort of unconsciously and involuntarily, (but, nevertheless, thoroughly reactionary) forms of social relation and organisation which drowned the dreams of the Spanish revolutionaries in blood and fire.


Inmates of a revolutionary prison run by the self-government of Syrian Kurdistan. Presumably the plan of the non-wardens is to encourage the beneficiaries of such correctional facilities to self-manage their own detention, complete with benevolent ideological re-education.


What is true of these particular organisations and struggles is also true of Marxism and Anarchism, as well as all other practical and ideological forms of struggle and organisation involved in 'the real movement that abolishes existing conditions'. While it's true that proletarians can and, to a significant extent, must come to recognise and overcome the limitations of their immediate struggles by themselves, it is also true that they can only do this through widespread and intensive dialogue with their fellows – in neighbouring homes, workplaces, cities and countries. We who want to contribute towards the development of this dialogue must of course try to make explicit the implications of what our fellows are already doing, including the significance of the exemplary steps they have already taken. But there is also much truth in the fact that this significance remains implicit unless measured against the immensity of the task still to be accomplished. In other words, any attempt to explicitly draw out this significance must necessarily be negative. Just as the end and content of working-class revolution involves the abolition of workers, classes, and work itself, so too its means and form involves a series of increasingly deepening and widening proletarian struggles struggling not merely against capital but against themselves as they exist in their partial, poverty-striken, woefully inadequate forms.

At its heart, working-class struggle against capital involves a struggle against the reproduction of capitalist forms of action and relation within the working-class and within its struggle against capital. Since this reproduction is inevitable as long as capital and workers continue to exist, every particular struggle is always (in the sense of what it necessary implies in terms of concrete strategy rather than the ideological sophistry popular among leftists that wishfully projects some abstract revolutionary motive on every expression of dissatisfaction, fancying that shoplifting is always a fundamental negation of the commodity, hatred of one's boss is always a desire for total self-management, popular disgust for all politics always means masses are anarchists without knowing it, etc) at the same time a struggle against itself qua fragmentary opposition, and a struggle for the universal abolition of workers and capital.

The road to supersession is fraught with hurdles to be surmounted, barricades to be demolished, treacherous passes to be navigated, and while many of these dangers are thrown up by external repression and infiltration, the most crucial are presented by shortcomings within the struggle itself. Revolutionary organisation is in conflict with itself in the strict sense that a neurotic individual is: it has to pursue its objectives by methods which constantly defeat these same objectives. If capital is a moving contradiction, so too is the anti-capitalist movement. From one moment to the next the role of each element in a struggle changes in relation to the totality; shop-stewards attuned to the feeling of the rank-and-file might help unify resolve at the beginning of an industrial dispute, and sabotage the interests of the workers for the sake of union control as the dispute advances (cf. the controversy between Solidarity and Big Flame regarding the 1972 Fisher Bendix occupation); dedication to consensus and open access during mass assemblies might encourage a flurry of popular participation and enthusiasm at the start of an occupation, and stifle it through boredom and sectarian manipulation later on (as many reports on the 2011 Occupy movement, such as that by Michael Albert, stated). Each struggle, as it moves forward, must destroy certain elements that were previously essential to itself (just as it must destroy certain elements that were previously neutral, or were always detrimental but hitherto were not yet rendered potentially deadly – in every case the demand is imposed by unique circumstances of the present moment) and it is this 'work of the negative' that theory is tasked to elucidate, moment to moment.

Whereas previously the two were largely intermingled in the practical mass movements of the past (an interpenetration which contributed toward both the strengths and the ultimate undoing of these movements); today revolutionary ideology stands directly opposed to revolutionary theory, whose development can only advance to the degree that the limitations of ideology are consciously confronted and overcome. Besides the examples sketched in the above introduction and elaborated in the following texts, two further obstacles to the elaboration of a practically critical theory should be pointed out.

Anarchists (and many 'autonomist Marxists') tend to focus too narrowly on the form of particular struggles, leading on the one hand to a fetish for anything resembling their ideal of decentralised democratic structures, regardless of how these structures relate to the actual negation of the spectacle-commodity economy (hence the enthusiasm for labelling all such forms, from the Zapatistas and Occupy movement to the Kurdish experiment and the economic-summit-hopping protests as 'anarchist') and on the other hand to a neglect of those prosaic struggles of ordinary proletarians against everyday misery which tend not to produce dramatic confrontations or fail to immediately overcome 'reformist' demands and hierarchical structures, despite the fact that such struggles have often formed the basis for more radical steps in the past. Marxists (and many 'class-struggle Anarchists') tend to focus too narrowly on the content of particular struggles, leading on the one hand to a fetish for anyhting resembling their ideal of proletarian self-activity at the point of production ('workerism'), and on the other hand to a neglect (or a repetitive dismissal unable to recognise what is specific – and therefore potentially valuable – in each new struggle) of those confused movements which fail to reveal an implicit communist content, directly subvert capitalist production, advance a class-conscious program, or overcome an abstract protest against the isolation and poverty of everday life, despite the fact that such protests at the same time embody a concrete subversion of this isolation and poverty in the attempt by ordinary proletarians to invent new ways of living and relating together, to discuss practically their desires and the means of realising them without the mediation of specialists and their organisations, and to refuse the role of supplicants and the seductions of small concessions by presenting no demands to those in power. A theory able to appreciate both the many-sided potentials and the contradictions of revolutionary struggle today (which is the only sort of theory with any use-value) will clearly have to do better than this.

Lastly, for those who complain that my assessment of the revolutionary tendencies presented here is 'unfairly one-sided, not presenting the whole picture', I can only say that while there may be justice to such objections, they are quite beside the point, and more importantly, are all too easily deployed to evade the problem altogether. Others have said it before and I'll say it again: 'Critical theory does not present a fixed, “objective” truth. It is an assault, a formulation abstracted, simplified and pushed to the extreme. The principle is, “If the shoe fits, wear it”: people are compelled to ask themselves to what extent the critique rings true and what they are going to do about it.'

32


The struggle of the working-class for self-supersession has to do with the struggle against individual self-alienation precisely to the degree that human consciousness and its objective organisations remain split into two opposing camps.

33

Given that, on the one hand, in capitalist society unitary (disalienated) consciousness constitutes an individual (minority) problem and excludes the existence of a “public mind” in whatever way distinguished from the consciousness of this minority, in the sense that even if the Public/Masses/People had an organ to speak with, their mind/opinion/consciousness would be nothing else than the sum total of the multicolored multitude of individuals who actually can speak; and that, on the other hand, the organisations of human consciousness derive their objective quality precisely from their social character; it follows that the split in human consciousness between its subjective and objective elements and the division in society between antagonistic classes constitute aspects of a single problem, historically comprehended by the term class-consciousness.


34

For the individual consciousness divided against itself, as for the class society troubled by ever more destructive strife, the question of resolution continues to be posed in practice as a two-fold struggle based on 'the discreteness yet inclusiveness of the individual and the social.' In his Forward to the Second Edition of Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1, Henri Lefebvre claims that 'This unity is the foundation of all society: a society is made up of individuals, and the individual is a social being, in and by the content of his life and the form of his consciousness. From the direct and physical rituals of primitive societies to the lived abstraction of self-consciousness (private consciousness) this unity has only expressed itself in mutilated, fragmented, singular ways… According to the moment and the angle from which we percieve him, the individual is at one and the same time what is most highly concrete and most remotely abstract. He is what is most changing historically and what is most stable, what is most independent from the social structure, and most dependent upon it… For each individual, the unity of his consciousness and unity with his consciousness is his reality, and the rest is mere destiny, externality, necessity. However, from the point of view of its foundation and social content, the very unity of the most intimate individual consciousness is determined from the outside. Thus what is most internal is also what is most external (private consciousness for example) – and conversely, what is most external is most internal (the sense of a 'value', for example)… As soon as the unity between the individual and the social begins a process of renewal, alienation takes the form of an antagonism between the private consciousness and the social consciousness.'

What remains to be said is that, firstly, this antagonism – insofar as a social consciousness which, under existing conditions, has itself become an expression of alienation, continues to colonise the point of view of the individual – is itself a necessary stage in the process of disalienation; secondly, private consciousness begins to overcome this antagonism as it struggles to make public the secret alienation and colonisation of existing conditions, including the social relations and consciousness dominant both within the established order as well as throughout the existing forms of organisation established to overthrow it; and finally, this struggle – inasmuch as it necessarily involves a collective effort at the organisation of such publicity, an ongoing practical activity that has to do with the invention of new forms of social relations (and new forms of consciousness which emerge therefrom) no longer standing as a colonial force antagonistic to the autonomy of the individual but rather as a collective expression and essential precondition for this autonomy – contains the beginning of the end for the very antagonism from which it sprang.

In her struggle against the collective reproduction of alienated social relations – including and especially within all existing forms of revolutionary organisation – the individual at the same time struggles against her own condition as a 'lived abstraction', by adopting the dialectical standpoint of the totality (the whole of self and society seen as a process): the concrete is that which is comprehended in the fullness of its determinations, as opposed to the abstract, which is sundered from them.

35

The long era of revolution initated by the rise of the dead workers' movements developed in tandem with the self-managed production of history – the self-creating activity that is no longer content to seek the arbitrary modification of existing conditions, but which actively strives to comprehend the 'dissolution of everything that exists' implied by its own historic appearance on the world stage. But the development of this self-activity and its self-consciousness was arrested in the womb. It was eventually aborted altogether when the movement which bore it fatally failed to nourish its embryo, and the parent itself died from the complications of a messy still-birth.

It is this project, and the historical method by which it was elaborated, that must be resumed if the noble quest begun a century and a half ago by our comrades from the past is to discover a happy ending, though the ancient protagonists and their archaic equipment may be salvaged only through the transfer of particular unrusted parts, and the transplant of judiciously selected still-throbing organs. The struggle of the masses against the classes, of the working-class for a full life, progresses through an unitary praxis that dissolves all the 'internal' and 'external' divisions, apartheids, fragmentations, abstractions, separations and alienations that both produce and are produced by schitzophrenic people madly flailing in a world at war with itself. Only in this sense can one talk, as Lefebvre likes to do, of 'Man's unity with himself, in particular the unity of the individual and the social'.

36

At the beginning of the era of proletarian subversion, Alexander Herzen outlined the future course of events with remarkable accuracy: 'Socialism will be developed in all its phases, even to its uttermost consequences, the absurd. Then, once again, there will come forth the cry of negation from the titantic breast of the revolutionary minority. Once more, the mortal struggle will recommence. But in the struggle Socialism will take the place of the present Conservatism, to be conquered in its turn by a revolution unknown to us. The eternal game of life, cruel as death, inevitable as birth, constitutes the flux and reflux of history, "perpetuum mobile" of life.' The myriad absurdities which have confirmed the first part of his thesis compel us to pose his question of supercession here and now in ever more concrete terms. Conditions for 'the cry of negation' to put an end to this abominable era and the ideologies chained to it are not merely ripe: they're rotten. The practical conclusions today implied by this necessary process of self-supercession for the shamefully sclerotic theoretical and historical organisations inherited by the working-class must increasingly be made more explicit and more public (as well as more publicly explicit and more explicitly public) throughout the struggles of the present if they are ever to bear anything but bitter fruit for the many who are increasingly sick and tired of being sick and tired. Only in this way will our time emancipate itself from the objective organisation of a revolutionary consciousness turned against itself.  

Siddiq Khan
Cape Town
2015


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[1] Victor Serge, himself a former member of the FAI, noted in his 1937 book From Lenin to Stalin that despite its anti-political ideology this organisation in fact fulfilled the role of a revolutionary political party. The situationists would later make the same point in more detail: 'If only to make them cry, let us remind the retarded devotees of the anarchist-Marxist feud that the CNT-FAI — with its dead weight of anarchist ideology, but also with its greater practice of liberatory imagination — was akin to the Marxist KAPD-AAUD in its organizational arrangements. In the same way as the German Communist Workers Party, the Iberian Anarchist Federation saw itself as the political organization of the conscious Spanish workers, while its AAUD, the CNT, was supposed to take charge of the management of the future society.' (Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization, Rene Reisel, 1969)

[2] Victor Serge, a close comrade and personal friend of the Bolshevik leaders from the earliest days of the revolution, related in the same book quoted above how the socialist delegates of the soviets (Bolshevik, Menshevik, Narodnik) had the opportunity to completely liquidate the bourgeois state -- whose top ministers literally handed themselves over for arrest at the start of the revolution -- but refused to do so, returning power into the hands of the capitalist Constituent Assembly! Korsch, in the same article used as epigraph for this introduction, draws the connection: 'There is no use arguing (as many people have done) that during the many phases of the revolutionary development of the last seven years there has evolved more than once-in October, 1934, and, again, in July, 1936, and in May, 1937-an "objective situation" in which the united revolutionary workers of Spain might have seized the power of the state but did not do so either on account of theoretical scruples or by reason of an internal weakness of their revolutionary attitude... As against those people who today, twenty years after the event, extol the revolutionary consistency of the Bolshevik leadership of 1917, to the detriment of the "chaotic irresolution" displayed by the dissensions and waverings of the Spanish syndicalists and anarchists of 1936-38, it is quite appropriate here to recall the fact that in those black days of July, 1917, three months before the victory of the Red October in Soviet Russia, Lenin and his Bolshevik party also were unable to prevent or to turn into victory a situation which was described at the time in the following manner: "The so-called masses, principally soldiers and a number of hooligans, loafed aimlessly about the streets for two days, firing at each other, often out of sheer fright, melting away at the slightest alarm or fresh rumour, and without the slightest idea of what it was all about."'

[3] The support supplied by formal radical organisations, it should be noted, trailed behind the self-activity of ordinary proletarians, as was the case during the Spanish Revolution. As La Hausse said in his History of Liquor: 'The anger of workers took the ICU leaders by surprise. At first Champion was opposed to a beer boycott. The leaders were used to taking workers' grievances to the courts. But then at a mass meeting attended by ovrer 600 workers in June 1929 Champion said: "they say that this trouble was started by the ICU... but from today the ICU is taking up the burden of the workers...Down with beer!" Soon the violence began to spread.' An account of spontaneous self-organisation which resembles that of Frank Mintz in Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain: 'None of the leaders of the leftist or trade union organisations called for the revolution: the collectivisations were the spontaneous remarkable response of legions of anonymous labourers to the practical issue of getting production on the land and in the factories up and running again. Certainly many thousands of these workers were immersed in revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist ideas. But perhaps most remarkable of all was that there were collectives organised by labourers who we might label "spontaneous anarchists", who had no idea that they were organising along anarchist lines. This was most evident in rural Castile and Extremadura, where the anarchist tradition was weaker and where the dominant agrarian unions were mainly socialist in inspiration. This is all testimony to the profound autonomy of Spanish workers who embarked on a collective experiment that developed independently of the leaders of the union organisations. Reflecting the importance of workers’ economic organisations over political parties, the collectivisations were, for the most part, impelled by grassroots anarchist and socialist trade unionists. But this was a genuinely popular revolution that drew in many non-affiliated workers. We must also recognise the important contribution of members of the dissident, anti-Stalinist communist party, the POUM, and, in some cases, of rank-and-file activists from the Stalinist PCE, even though its leaders were formally hostile to the revolution. In short, this was a revolution that occurred beyond the control of the leadership of the Spanish workers’ and left-wing organisations, including those of anarchist tradition'. It could well be that the exemplary intensity, accuracy and rigour of the women's movement was a development for the most part independent of all organisations. The ICU drafted a new constitution (see below) the year before the beer-hall boycotts began, but according to Baruch Hirson in #10 of the journal Searchlight South Africa, 'its days were already numbered when the constitution was drafted.' A simultaneous movement in Nigeria, known as the 1929 Women's War, involved no radical institutions or ideologies whatsoever yet constituted an anti-tax insurrection 'carried out on a scale that the colonial state had never witnessed in any part of Africa'. This revolt, which drew 25000 women from across the entire Eastern area of Nigeria into conflict with all colonial power, from the local chiefs who exercised indirect rule on the part of Britain to the institutions of capital and its state, united women from across six ethnic groups for two months of bitter struggle, during which ten native courts were destroyed, four others were damaged, government buildings and the houses of native court personnel were attacked, European factories at Imo River, Aba, Mbawsi, and Amata were looted, European owned stores and Barclays Bank were assaulted, prisons were stormed, their inmates released, and chiefs hounded down, verbally badgered and often forced to resign.  Despite police reinforcements and additional troops being called in, the Women’s War could not be stopped. Only after 100 women were shot, killing 50, and entire villages burnt, was the resistance finally crushed. Even so, the planned taxation was abandoned and women regained much of their traditional social position at the expense of chiefs who had grown oppressive with the support of the colonial state. In Searchlight South Africa #11 Hirson, speaking of 'strikes of African workers on the Witwatersrand between 1918 and 1920', observed the absence of any existing formal organisations yet stated that 'most industrial action appeared to be spontaneous, was disciplined and was well led.'


[4] The preamble to the 1925 ICU constitution ran: 'Whereas the interest of the workers and those of the employers are opposed to each other, the former living by selling their labour, receiving for it only part of the wealth they produce; and the latter living by exploiting the labour of the workers; depriving the workers of a part of the product of their labour in the form of profit, no peace can be between the two classes, a struggle must always obtain about the division of the products of human labour, until the workers through their industrial organisations take from the capitalist class the means of production, to be owned and controlled by the workers for the benefit of all, instead of for the profit of a few.' In 1927 the union organised agitation against a new Natives Administration Bill that, according to Hirson, 'contained measures that could cripple all black organization at the behest of the Minister of Native Affairs.' Frank Glass, a speaker at one of the mass meetings organised by the union, was stopped by police after he 'got the audience to their feet' with the following address, as later reported in the newspapers: 'If you will do what the Russian workers have done and what the Chinese workers are doing now you – all the workers of this country, black and white – will be able to secure freedom. We don’t know at the moment how far the Government is going in its attempt to restrict the freedom of the Native workers; but this we do know, that all capitalist governments in their dealings with the workers act precisely alike. Therefore we have got to be prepared, not merely with demonstrations, but also – if it proves to be necessary – with far more drastic action.' A year later, the introduction to the Draft Economic and Political Program, probably penned by the same speaker, ran: 'Opponents of the ICU have frequently asserted that the Organization is not a trade union in the sense that the term is generally understood in South Africa, but that it is a kind of pseudo-political body ... The new constitution ... definitely establishes the ICU as a trade union, albeit one of native workers ... at the same time it must be clearly understood that we have no intention of copying the stupid and futile "non-political" attitude of our white contemporaries. As Karl Marx said, every economic question is, in the last analysis, a political question also, and we must recognise that in neglecting to concern ourselves with current politics, in leaving the political machine to the unchallenged control of our class enemies, we are rendering a disservice to those tens of thousands of our members who are groaning under oppressive laws ... At the present stage of our development it is inevitable that our activities should be almost of an agitational character, for we are not recognised as citizens in our own country, being almost entirely disfranchised and debarred from exercising a say in [that] state affairs closely affecting our lives and welfare.'

[5] A dramatic illustration of religion as a magical solution to real problems, and magic as a real sabotage of existing conditions, can be found in the conclusion to  Michael Rogge's text Javanese Mystical Movements: 'Spiritual fervour - going into a trance - is a rather common phenomenon in Indonesia, particularly among factory workers. All over the Indonesian archipelago there are reports of schoolchildren, young women and factory workers going into mass trances or speaking in tongues... Religion, education and development have done little to halt widespread acceptance of the supernatural in Indonesia. In Indonesia, trance is tied up with culture, explained Lidia Laksana Hidajat, from the psychology faculty of Jakarta's Atma Jaya University... one of the requirements of a trance to happen - it's usually quiet and when they are engaged in monotonous activity... Eko Susanto Marsoeki, the director of Malang's Lawang Psychiatric Hospital, said overwork was closely linked to mass trance incidents in factories. Often it is a form of protest that will not be dealt with too harshly, he said. When more than 30 students at Kalimantan's Pahandut Palangka Raya High School fell into a trance in November, they blamed a spirit in a nearby tree. During the morning flag-raising ceremony, one of the girls started screaming and couldn't move. Soon her friends joined in until more than 30 of them were screaming and fainting, the deputy principal, Friskila said. Some of the girls woke from the trance after a student played a Muslim prayer ring tone on her mobile phone. Others were taken by their parents to local witchdoctors. Friskila, however, favours a less superstitious explanation. They are bored, tired and then this happened, she said. They all got a day off school.'

[6] The latest bout of mass pogroms perpetrated against our fellow Africans followed statements by the Zulu king, who is married to an immigrant from Swaziland himself, to the effect that such persons were lice and fleas that need to be purged for the sake of national health; the current president ousted the Xhosa intellectual Thabo Mbeki, whose pet project of an 'African Renaissance' owed much to Pan-Africanist ideology, under the slogan '100% Zulu-boy', with a campaign that involved much singing and dancing dressed up in leopard-skin costumes. This same president did not hesitate to authorise immigration raids and mass deportations carried out by the army in response to the pogroms, nor did he fail to emphasise that a Mozambiquan who was photographed being stabbed to death by South Africans was an illegal immigrant. His son, not one to be left outside the band-wagon, applauded the Zulu king's comments, though he himself is an immigrant born in Swaziland.

[7] According to this report 'At least nine political opponents of the PYD have been killed or disappeared over the past two and half years in areas the party partially or fully controlled. The PYD has denied responsibility for these incidents but has apparently failed to conduct genuine investigations. By contrast, the party-run security forces have carried out rapid mass arrests after most bomb attacks, presumably carried out by extremist Islamist militant groups...The PYD and local administration officials say that the local judiciary and newly established “People’s Courts” are independent, but lawyers and human rights activists described political interference in investigations and trials. In some cases, judges have apparently convicted people based only on their confessions, and disregarded complaints of abuse during interrogation... Human Rights Watch also investigated the violent incidents in Amuda (Amûdê) on June 27, 2013, when YPG forces used excessive force against [unarmed] anti-PYD demonstrators, shooting [dozens] and killing three men [despite having the opportunity to retreat safely from the situation]. The security forces killed two more men that night in unclear circumstances, and a third the next day. On the night of June 27, YPG arbitrarily detained around 50 members or supporters of the opposition Yekiti Party in Amuda, and beat them at a military base.' The reliability of this account is limited by the scope of the investigation (few people other than prisoners and officials, two categories which each have vested interests in projecting an image of the situation favourable to themselves, seem to have been consulted; of the two, however, the official truth related by jailers and spokesmen has always been the most reliable source of disinformation), the brevity of its duration (a few days in February 2014), its geographic confinement (only two prisons in one of three cantons controlled by forces loyal to the PYD), and the bourgeois liberal ideology of its authors. Nevertheless, the supporters of the PYD who produced reports from their own visits to the region were confronted with similar constraints, and their observations were shaped by their own ideologies which arguably predispose them to see a rosy picture considerably more than those of the liberals predispose them to vilify the authorities of the non-state.





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Document 1

Feral Faun
1990

Document 2

Karl Korsch
1938

Document 3

John Zerzan
1979

Document 4

Bob Black
1994

Document 5

Karl Marx
1875

Document 6

Maximilien Rubel
1971

Document 7

Jan van Heijenhoort
1948

Document 8

Friedrich Engels
13 February 1851


The enraged jellyfish congregate in the moat of the Emperor's castle, having reconciled their ancestral feud, for a single common purpose: to storm the palace gates, slit the soverign's throat and raze that monument in praise of eternal worldly misery to the ground...