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The Joy of Revolution
Chapter 3: Climaxes
Causes of social
breakthroughs
Postwar upheavals
Effervescence of radical
situations
Popular self-organization
The situationists in May 1968
Workerism
is obsolete, but workers’ position remains pivotal
Wildcats and sitdowns
Consumer strikes
What could have happened in May
1968
Methods of confusion and cooption
Terrorism reinforces the state
The ultimate showdown
Internationalism
Chapter 3: Climaxes
“As soon as the relations of exploitation and the violence that underlies them
are no longer concealed by the mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a moment of
clarity, the struggle against alienation is suddenly revealed as a ruthless hand-to-hand
fight with naked power, power exposed in its brute force and its weakness, a vulnerable
giant . . . . sublime moment when the complexity of the world becomes
tangible, transparent, within everyone’s grasp.”
—Raoul Vaneigem, Basic Banalities (SI
Anthology, p. 93 [Revised Edition p. 121])
It’s hard to generalize about the immediate causes of radical breakthroughs. There
have always been plenty of good reasons to revolt, and sooner or later instabilities will
arise where something has to give. But why at one moment and not another? Revolts have
often occurred during periods of social improvement, while worse conditions have been
endured with resignation. If some have been provoked by sheer desperation, others have
been touched off by relatively trivial incidents. Grievances that have been patiently
accepted as long as they seemed inevitable may suddenly seem intolerable once it appears
possible to remove them. The meanness of some repressive measure or the asininity of some
bureaucratic blunder may bring home the absurdity of the system more clearly than a steady
accumulation of oppressions.
The system’s power is based on people’s belief in their powerlessness to
oppose it. Normally this belief is well founded (transgress the rules and you are
punished). But when for one reason or another enough people begin to ignore the rules that
they can do so with impunity, the whole illusion collapses. What was thought to be natural
and inevitable is seen to be arbitrary and absurd. “When no one obeys, no one
commands.”
The problem is how to reach this point. If only a few disobey, they can easily be
isolated and repressed. People often fantasize about wonderful things that might be
achieved “if only everyone would agree to do such and such all at once.”
Unfortunately, social movements don’t usually work that way. One person with a
six-gun can hold off a hundred unarmed people because each one knows that the first six to
attack will be killed.
Of course some people may be so infuriated that they attack regardless of risk; and
their apparent determination may even save them by convincing those in power that
it’s wiser to give in peacefully than to be overwhelmed after arousing even more
hatred against themselves. But it is obviously preferable not to depend on acts of
desperation, but to seek forms of struggle that minimize risk until a movement has spread
so far that repression is no longer feasible.
People living under particularly repressive regimes naturally begin by taking advantage
of whatever rallying points already exist. In 1978 the Iranian mosques were the only place
people could get away with criticizing the Shah’s regime. Then the huge
demonstrations called by Khomeini at 40-day intervals began providing the safety of
numbers. Khomeini thus became recognized as a general symbol of opposition, even by those
who were not his followers. But tolerating any leader, even as a mere figurehead, is at
best a temporary measure that should be abandoned as soon as more independent action
becomes possible — as did those Iranian oil workers who by fall 1978 felt they had
enough leverage to strike on days different from those called for by Khomeini.
The Catholic Church in Stalinist Poland played a similarly ambiguous role: the state
used the Church to help control the people, but the people also used the Church to help
them get around the state.
Fanatical orthodoxy is sometimes the first step toward more radical self-expression.
Islamic fundamentalists may be extremely reactionary, but by getting used to taking events
in their own hands they complicate any return to “order” and may even, if
disillusioned, become genuinely radical — as happened with some of the similarly
fanatical Red Guards during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution,” when what was
originally a mere ploy by Mao to lever out some of his bureaucratic rivals eventually led
to uncontrolled insurgency by millions of young people who took his antibureaucratic
rhetoric seriously.(1)
If someone proclaimed: “I am the greatest, strongest, noblest, cleverest, and most
peace-loving person in the world,” he would be considered obnoxious, if not insane.
But if he says precisely the same things about his country he is looked upon as an
admirably patriotic citizen. Patriotism is extremely seductive because it enables even the
most miserable individual to indulge in a vicarious collective narcissism. The natural
nostalgic fondness for one’s home and surroundings is transformed into a mindless
cult of the state. People’s fears and resentments are projected onto foreigners while
their frustrated aspirations for authentic community are mystically projected onto their
own nation, which is seen as somehow essentially wonderful despite all its defects.
(“Yes, America has its problems; but what we are fighting for is the real
America, what America really stands for.”) This mystical herd-consciousness becomes
almost irresistible during war, smothering virtually all radical tendencies.
Yet patriotism has sometimes played a role in triggering radical struggles (e.g.
Hungary 1956). And even wars have sometimes led to revolts in the aftermath. Those who
have borne the greatest share of the military burden, supposedly in the name of freedom
and democracy, may return home to demand a fairer share for themselves. Seeing historic
struggle in action and acquiring the habit of dealing with obstacles by destroying them,
they may be less inclined to believe in a changeless status quo.
The dislocations and disillusionments produced by World War I led to uprisings all over
Europe. If World War II did not do the same, it was because genuine radicalism had since
been destroyed by Stalinism, fascism and reformism; because the victors’ rationales
for the war, though full of lies as always, were more credible than usual (the defeated
enemies were more obvious villains); and because this time the victors had taken care to
work out the postwar reestablishment of order in advance (eastern Europe was handed over
to Stalin in exchange for his guaranteeing the docility of the French and Italian
Communist Parties and his abandonment of the insurgent Greek CP). Nevertheless the global
jolt of the war was sufficient to open the way for an autonomous Stalinist revolution in
China (which Stalin had not wanted, as this threatened his exclusive domination of the
“socialist camp”) and to give a new impetus to the anticolonial movements (which
the European colonial powers naturally did not want, though they were eventually able to
retain the more profitable aspects of their domination through the sort of economic
neocolonialism that the United States was already practicing).
Faced with the prospect of a postwar power vacuum, rulers often collaborate with their
ostensible enemies in order to repress their own people. At the end of the Franco-German
war of 1870-71 the victorious German army helped surround the Paris Commune, enabling the
French rulers to crush it more easily. As Stalin’s army approached Warsaw in 1944 it
called on the people of the city to rise against the Nazi occupiers, then waited outside
the city for several days while the Nazis wiped out the thus-exposed independent elements
which might later have resisted the imposition of Stalinism. We have recently seen a
similar scenario in the de facto Bush-Saddam alliance in the aftermath of the Gulf war,
when, after calling on the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam, the American military
systematically massacred Iraqi conscripts retreating from Kuwait (who, if they had
regained their country, would have been ripe for revolt) while leaving Saddam’s elite
Republican Guards intact and free to crush the immense radical uprisings in northern and
southern Iraq.(2)
In totalitarian societies the grievances are obvious but revolt is difficult. In
“democratic” societies struggles are easier, but the goals are less clear.
Controlled largely by subconscious conditioning or by vast, seemingly incomprehensible
forces (“the state of the economy”) and offered a wide range of apparently free
choices, it’s difficult for us to grasp our situation. Like a flock of sheep,
we’re herded in the desired direction, but allowed enough room for individual
variations to enable us to preserve an illusion of independence.
Impulses toward vandalism or violent confrontation can often be seen as attempts to
break through this frustrating abstractness and come to grips with something concrete.
Just as the first organization of the classical proletariat was preceded, during the
end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, by a period of isolated
“criminal” acts aimed at destroying the machines of production that were
depriving people of their work, we are presently witnessing the first appearance of a wave
of vandalism against the machines of consumption that are just as certainly
depriving us of our life. In both cases the significance obviously does not lie in the
destruction itself, but in the rebelliousness which could potentially develop into a
positive project going to the point of reconverting the machines in a way that increases
people’s real power over their lives. (SI Anthology, p. 82
[Revised Edition p. 108] [The Bad Days Will End].)
(Note that last sentence, incidentally: To point out a symptom of social crisis, or
even to defend it as an understandable reaction, does not necessary imply recommending it
as a tactic.)
Many other triggers of radical situations could be enumerated. A strike may spread
(Russia 1905); popular resistance to some reactionary threat may overflow official bounds
(Spain 1936); people may take advantage of token liberalization in order to push further
(Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968); exemplary small group actions may catalyze a mass
movement (the early civil rights sit-ins, May 1968); a particular outrage may be seen as
the last straw (Watts 1965, Los Angeles 1992); the sudden collapse of a regime may leave a
power vacuum (Portugal 1974); some special occasion may bring people together in such
numbers that it’s impossible to prevent them from expressing their grievances and
aspirations (Tiananmen Square 1976 and 1989); etc.
But social crises involve so many imponderables that it is rarely possible to predict
them, much less provoke them. In general it seems best to pursue projects we are
personally most drawn to, while trying to remain aware enough to quickly recognize
significant new developments (dangers, urgent tasks, favorable opportunities) that call
for new tactics.
Meanwhile, we can move on to examine some of the crucial stages in radical situations
once they do get started.
A radical situation is a collective awakening. At one extreme it may involve a few
dozen people in a neighborhood or workplace; at the other it shades into a full-fledged
revolutionary situation involving millions of people. It’s not a matter of numbers,
but of open-ended public dialogue and participation. The incident at the beginning of
the1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM) is a classic and particularly beautiful example. As
police were about to take away an arrested civil rights activist on the university campus
in Berkeley, a few students sat down in front of the police car; within a few minutes
hundreds of others spontaneously followed their example, surrounding the car so it could
not move. For the next 32 hours the car roof was turned into a platform for freewheeling
debate. The May 1968 occupation of the Sorbonne created an even more radical situation by
drawing in much of the nonstudent Parisian population; the workers’ occupation of
factories throughout France then turned it into a revolutionary situation.
In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to
question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. Every day some
people go through experiences that lead them to question the meaning of their lives; but
during a radical situation practically everyone does so all at once. When the machine
grinds to a halt, the cogs themselves begin wondering about their function.
Bosses are ridiculed. Orders are ignored. Separations are broken down. Personal
problems are transformed into public issues; public issues that seemed distant and
abstract become immediate practical matters. The old order is analyzed, criticized,
satirized. People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic
“social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” Long repressed
experiences are revived.(3) Everything seems
possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they
used to put up with in “the old days.” Even if the outcome is uncertain, the
experience is often seen as worthwhile for its own sake. “If we only have enough
time . . .” wrote one May 1968 graffitist; to which a couple others
responded: “In any case, no regrets!” and “Already ten days of
happiness.”
As work comes to a halt, rat-race commuting is replaced by leisurely circulation,
passive consumption by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on
street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those
who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are
usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others
start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn
into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. (A beautiful example from May
1968: The director of the national Odéon Theater was at first dismayed at its being taken
over by the radical crowds; but after taking in the situation for a few minutes, he came
forward and exclaimed: “Yes! Now that you have it, keep it, never give it up —
burn it rather than do that!”)
Of course, not everyone is immediately won over. Some people simply lay low,
anticipating the time when the movement will subside and they can recover their
possessions or their positions, and take their revenge. Others waver, torn between desire
for change and fear of change. An opening of a few days may not be enough to break a
lifetime of hierarchical conditioning. The disruption of habits and routines can be
disorienting as well as liberating. Everything happens so fast it’s easy to panic.
Even if you manage to keep calm, it’s not easy to grasp all the factors in play
quickly enough to determine the best thing to do, which may appear obvious in hindsight.
One of the main purposes of the present text is to point out certain typical recurring
patterns so that people can be prepared to recognize and exploit such opportunities before
it’s too late.
Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes
possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are;
they make our “normal” life seem like sleepwalking. Yet of the vast number of
books that have been written about revolutions, few have much to say about such moments.
Those dealing with the most radical modern revolts are usually merely descriptive, perhaps
giving a hint of what such experiences feel like but seldom providing any useful tactical
insights. Studies of bourgeois and bureaucratic revolutions are generally even less
relevant. In such revolutions, where the “masses” played only a temporary
supporting role for one leadership or another, their behavior could to a large degree be
analyzed like the motions of physical masses, in terms of the familiar metaphors of rising
and ebbing tides, pendulum swings from radicality to reaction, etc. But an
antihierarchical revolution requires people to cease being homogenous, manipulable masses,
to get beyond the subservience and unconsciousness that make them subject to this sort of
mechanistic predictability.
During the sixties it was widely felt that the best way to foster such demassification
was to form “affinity groups”: small associations of close friends with
compatible lifestyles and perspectives. Such groups do have many obvious advantages. They
can decide on a project and immediately carry it out; they are difficult to infiltrate;
and when necessary they can link up with others. But even leaving aside the various
pitfalls to which most of the sixties affinity groups soon succumbed, there’s no
getting around the fact that some matters require large-scale organization. And large
groups will soon revert to accepting some sort of hierarchy unless they manage to organize
themselves in a manner that renders leaders unnecessary.
One of the simplest ways for a large gathering to begin organizing itself is
for those who have something to say to line up or sign up, with each person allowed a
certain time within which they can talk about anything they want. (The Sorbonne assembly
and the FSM gathering around the police car each established a three-minute limit,
occasionally extended by popular acclaim.) Some of the speakers will propose specific
projects that will precipitate smaller, more workable groups. (“I and some others
intend to do such and such; anyone who wants to take part can join us at such and such
time and place.”) Others will raise issues involving the general aims or ongoing
functioning of the assembly itself. (Whom does it include? When will it meet again? How
will urgent new developments be dealt with in the interim? Who will be delegated to deal
with specific tasks? With what degree of accountability?) In this process the participants
will soon see what works and what doesn’t — how strictly delegates need to be
mandated, whether a chairperson is needed to facilitate discussion so that everyone
isn’t talking at once, etc. Many modes of organization are possible; what is
essential is that things remain open, democratic and participatory, that any tendency
toward hierarchy or manipulation is immediately exposed and rejected.
Despite its naïveté and confusions and lack of rigorous delegate accountability, the
FSM is a good example of the spontaneous tendencies toward practical self-organization
that arise in a radical situation. Some two dozen “centrals” were formed to
coordinate printing, press releases, legal assistance, to rustle up food, speaker systems
and other necessary supplies, or to locate volunteers who had indicated their skills and
availability for different tasks. Phone trees made it possible to contact over twenty
thousand students on short notice.
But beyond mere questions of practical efficiency, and even beyond the ostensible
political issues, the insurgents were breaking through the whole spectacular façade and
getting a taste of real life, real community. One participant estimated that within a few
months he had come to know, at least as a nodding acquaintance, two or three thousand
people — this at a university that was notorious for “turning people into
numbers.” Another movingly wrote: “Confronting an institution apparently and
frustratingly designed to depersonalize and block communication, neither humane nor
graceful nor responsive, we found flowering in ourselves the presence whose absence we
were at heart protesting.”(4)
A radical situation must spread or fail. In exceptional cases a particular location may
serve as a more or less permanent base, a focus for coordination and a refuge from outside
repression. (Sanrizuka, a rural region near Tokyo that was occupied by local farmers
during the 1970s in an effort to block the construction of a new airport, was so
stubbornly and successfully defended for so many years that it came to be used as a
headquarters for diverse struggles all over Japan.) But a fixed location facilitates
manipulation, surveillance and repression, and being stuck with defending it inhibits
people’s freedom to move around. Radical situations are always characterized by a lot
of circulation: while some people converge to key locations to see what’s happening,
others fan out to spread the contestation to other areas.
A simple but essential step in any radical action is for people to communicate what
they are actually doing and why. Even if what they have done is very limited, such
communication is in itself exemplary: besides spreading the game to a wider field and
inciting others to join in, it cuts through the usual reliance on rumors, news media and
self-appointed spokespeople.
It’s also a crucial step in self-clarification. A proposal to issue a collective
communiqué presents concrete alternatives: Who do we want to communicate with? For what
purpose? Who is interested in this project? Who agrees with this statement? Who disagrees?
With which points? This may lead to a polarization as people see the different
possibilities of the situation, sort out their own views, and regroup with like-minded
persons to pursue diverse projects.
Such polarization clarifies matters for everyone. Each tendency remains free to express
itself and to test its ideas in practice, and the results can be discerned more clearly
than if contradictory strategies were mixed together in some lowest-common-denominator
compromise. When people see a practical need for coordination, they will coordinate; in
the mean time, the proliferation of autonomous individuals is far more fruitful than the
superficial, top-down “unity” for which bureaucrats are always appealing.
Large crowds sometimes enable people to do things that would be imprudent if undertaken
by isolated individuals; and certain collective actions, such as strikes or boycotts,
require people to act in concert, or at least not to go against a majority decision. But
many other matters can be dealt with directly by individuals or small groups. Better to
strike while the iron is hot than to waste time trying to argue away the objections of
masses of spectators who are still under the sway of manipulators.
Small groups have every right to choose their own collaborators: specific projects may
require specific abilities or close accord among the participants. A radical situation
opens up broader possibilities among a broader range of people. By simplifying basic
issues and cutting through habitual separations, it renders masses of ordinary people
capable of carrying out tasks they could not even have imagined the week before. In any
case, the self-organized masses are the only ones who can carry out those tasks — no
one else can do it on their behalf.
What is the role of individual radicals in such a situation? It is clear that they must
not claim to represent or lead the people. On the other hand, it is absurd to declare, in
the name of avoiding hierarchy, that they should immediately “dissolve into the
masses” and cease putting forward their own views or initiating their own projects.
They should hardly do less than the ordinary “mass” individuals, who have to
express their views and initiate their projects or nothing at all would
happen. In practice those radicals who claim to be afraid of “telling people what to
do” or of “acting in place of the workers” generally end up either doing
nothing or disguising their endless reiterations of their ideology as “reports of
discussions among some workers.”
The situationists and Enragés had a considerably more lucid and forthright practice
during May 1968. During the first three or four days of the Sorbonne occupation (14-17
May) they openly expressed their views on the tasks of the assembly and of the general
movement. On the basis of those views one of the Enragés, René Riesel, was elected to
the first Sorbonne Occupation Committee, and he and his fellow delegates were reelected
the following day.
Riesel and one other delegate (the rest apparently slipped away without fulfilling any
of their responsibilities) endeavored to carry out the two policies he had advocated:
maintaining total democracy in the Sorbonne and disseminating the most widespread appeals
for occupying the factories and forming workers councils. But when the assembly repeatedly
allowed its Occupation Committee to be overridden by various unelected leftist
bureaucracies and failed to affirm the call for workers councils (thereby denying the
workers the encouragement to do what the assembly itself was doing in the Sorbonne), the
Enragés and situationists left the assembly and continued their agitation independently.
There was nothing undemocratic about this departure: the Sorbonne assembly remained
free to do whatever it wanted. But when it failed to respond to the urgent tasks of the
situation and even contradicted its own pretensions of democracy, the situationists felt
that it had no further claim to be considered a focal point of the most radical
possibilities of the movement. Their diagnosis was confirmed by the subsequent collapse of
any pretense of participatory democracy at the Sorbonne: after their departure the
assembly had no more elections and reverted to the typical leftist form of self-appointed
bureaucrats running things over the heads of passive masses.
While this was going on among a few thousand people in the Sorbonne, millions of
workers were occupying their factories throughout the country. (Hence the absurdity of
characterizing May 1968 as a “student movement.”) The situationists, the
Enragés and a few dozen other councilist revolutionaries formed the Council for
Maintaining the Occupations (CMDO) with the aim of encouraging those workers to bypass the
union bureaucrats and directly link up with each other in order to realize the radical
possibilities their action had already opened up.(5)
“Virtuous indignation is a powerful stimulant, but a dangerous diet. Keep in
mind the old proverb: anger is a bad counsellor. . . . Whenever your
sympathies are strongly stirred on behalf of some cruelly ill used person or persons of
whom you know nothing except that they are ill used, your generous indignation attributes
all sorts of virtues to them, and all sorts of vices to those who oppress them. But the
blunt truth is that ill used people are worse than well used people.”
—George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent
Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
“We shall abolish slaves because we can’t stand the sight of
them.”
—Nietzsche
Fighting for liberation does not imply applauding the traits of the oppressed. The
ultimate injustice of social oppression is that it is more likely to debase the victims
than to ennoble them.
A lot of traditional leftist rhetoric stemmed from obsolete work-ethic notions: the
bourgeois were bad because they didn’t do productive work, whereas the worthy
proletarians deserved the fruits of their labor, etc. As labor has become increasingly
unnecessary and directed to increasingly absurd ends, this perspective has lost whatever
sense it may once have had. The point is not to praise the proletariat, but to abolish it.
Class domination hasn’t gone away just because a century of leftist demagogy has
made some of the old radical terminology sound pretty corny. While phasing out certain
kinds of traditional blue-collar labor and throwing whole sectors of the population into
permanent unemployment, modern capitalism has proletarianized almost everyone else.
White-collar workers, technicians, and even middle-class professionals who formerly prided
themselves on their independence (doctors, scientists, scholars) are increasingly subject
to the crassest commercialization and even to virtually assembly-line style regimentation.
Less than 1% of the global population owns 80% of the world’s land. Even in the
supposedly more egalitarian United States, economic disparity is extreme and constantly
growing more extreme. Twenty years ago the average CEO salary was 35 times that of the
average production worker; today it’s 120 times as much. Twenty years ago the richest
half-percent of the American population owned 14% of the total private wealth; they now
own 30% of it. But such figures do not convey the full extent of this elite’s power.
The “wealth” of the lower and middle classes is almost entirely devoted to
covering their day-to-day expenses, leaving little or nothing for investment at any
significant, socially empowering level. A magnate who owns as little as five or ten
percent of a corporation will usually be able to control it (due to the apathy of
the unorganized mass of small stockholders), thus wielding as much power as if he owned
the whole thing. And it only takes a few major corporations (whose directorates are
closely interlinked with each other and with upper government bureaucracies) to buy out,
wipe out or marginalize smaller independent competitors and effectively control the key
politicians and media.
The omnipresent spectacle of middle-class prosperity has concealed this reality,
especially in the United States where, because of its particular history (and despite the
violence of many of its past class conflicts), people are more naïvely oblivious to class
divisions than anywhere else in the world. The wide variety of ethnicities and the
multitude of complex intermediate gradations has buffered and blurred the fundamental
distinction between top and bottom. Americans own so many commodities that they fail to
notice that someone else owns the whole society. Except for those at the very bottom, who
can’t help knowing better, they generally assume that poverty is the fault of the
poor, that any enterprising person has plenty of opportunity, that if you can’t make
a satisfactory living in one place you can always make a fresh start somewhere else. A
century ago, when people could just pick up and head further west, this belief had some
foundation; the persistence of nostalgic frontier spectacles obscures the fact that
present conditions are quite different and that we no longer have anywhere else to go.
The situationists sometimes used the term proletariat (or more precisely, the
new proletariat) in a broadened sense, to refer to “all those who have no power
over their own lives and know it.” This usage may be rather loose, but it has the
merit of stressing the fact that society is still divided into classes, and that the
fundamental division is still between the few who own and control everything and the rest
who have little or nothing to exchange but their own labor power. In some contexts it may
be preferable to use other terms, such as “the people”; but not when this
amounts to indiscriminately lumping exploiters with exploited.
The point is not to romanticize wage laborers, who, not surprisingly, considering that
the spectacle is designed above all to keep them deluded, are often among the most
ignorant and reactionary sectors of society. Nor is it a matter of scoring points to see
who is most oppressed. All forms of oppression must be contested, and everyone can
contribute to this contestation — women, youth, unemployed, minorities, lumpens,
bohemians, peasants, middle classes, even renegades from the ruling elite. But none of
these groups can achieve a definitive liberation without abolishing the material
foundation of all these oppressions: the system of commodity production and wage labor.
And this abolition can be achieved only through the collective self-abolition of
wage laborers. They alone have the leverage not only to directly bring the whole system to
a stop, but to start things up again in a fundamentally different way.(6)
Nor is it a matter of giving anyone special privileges. Workers in essential sectors
(food, transportation, communications, etc.) who have rejected their capitalist and union
bosses and begun to self-manage their own activities will obviously have no interest in
holding on to the “privilege” of doing all the work and every interest in
inviting everyone else, whether nonworkers or workers from obsolete sectors (law,
military, sales, advertising, etc.), to join them in the project of reducing and
transforming it. Everyone who takes part will share in the decisionmaking; the only ones
left out will be those who remain on the sidelines claiming special privileges.
Traditional syndicalism and councilism have tended to take the existing division of
labor too much for granted, as if people’s lives in a postrevolutionary society would
continue to center around fixed jobs and workplaces. Even within the present society such
a perspective is becoming increasingly obsolete: as most people work at absurd and
frequently only temporary jobs without in any way identifying with them, while many others
don’t work on the wage market at all, work-related issues become merely one aspect of
a more general struggle.
At the beginning of a movement it may be appropriate for workers to identify themselves
as such. (“We, the workers of such and such company, have occupied our workplace with
such and such aims; we urge workers in other sectors to do likewise.”) The ultimate
goal, however, is not the self-management of existing enterprises. For, say, media workers
to have control over the media just because they happen to work there would be almost as
arbitrary as the present control by whoever happens to own them. Workers’ management
of the particular conditions of their work will need to be combined with community
management of matters of general concern. Housewives and others working in relatively
separated conditions will need to develop their own forms of organization to enable them
to express their own particular interests. But potential conflicts of interest between
“producers” and “consumers” will be quickly superseded when everyone
becomes directly involved in both aspects; when workers councils interlink with
neighborhood and community councils; and when fixed work positions fade through the
obsoleting of most jobs and the reorganization and rotation of those that remain
(including housework and child care).
The situationists were certainly right to strive for the formation of workers councils
during the May 1968 factory occupations. But it should be noted that those occupations
were triggered by actions of largely nonworker youth. The post-1968 situationists tended
to fall into a sort of workerism (though a resolutely anti-work-ethic one), seeing the
proliferation of wildcat strikes as the major indicator of revolutionary possibilities
while paying less attention to developments on other terrains. Actually, blatant union
sellouts often force into wildcat struggles workers who are in other respects not
particularly radical; and on the other hand, people can resist the system in many other
ways besides strikes (including avoiding wage labor as much as possible in the first
place). The situationists rightly recognized collective self-management and individual
“radical subjectivity” as complementary and equally essential aspects of the
revolutionary project, but without quite succeeding in bringing them together (though they
certainly came closer than did the surrealists, who tried to link cultural and political
revolt simply by declaring their fervent adhesion to one or another version of Bolshevik
ideology).(7)
Wildcat strikes do present interesting possibilities, especially if the strikers occupy
their workplace. Not only does this make their position more secure (it prevents lockouts
and scabbing, and the machines and products serve as hostages against repression), it
brings everyone together, virtually guaranteeing collective self-management of the
struggle and hinting at the idea of self-managing the whole society.
Once the usual operation has been stopped, everything takes on a different ambience. A
drab workplace may be transfigured into an almost sacred space that is jealously guarded
against the profane intrusion of bosses or police. An observer of the 1937 sitdown strike
in Flint, Michigan, described the strikers as “children playing at a new and
fascinating game. They had made a palace out of what had been their prison.” (Quoted
in Sidney Fine’s Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937.) Though
the aim of the strike was simply to win the right to unionize, its organization was
virtually councilist. During the six weeks that they lived in their factory (using car
seats for beds and cars for closets) a general assembly of all 1200 workers met twice
daily to determine policies regarding food, sanitation, information, education,
complaints, communication, security, defense, sports and recreation, and to elect
accountable and frequently rotated committees to implement them. There was even a Rumor
Committee, whose purpose was to counteract disinformation by tracking down the source and
checking the validity of every rumor. Outside the factory, strikers’ wives took care
of rounding up food and organizing pickets, publicity, and liaison with workers in other
cities. Some of the bolder ones organized a Women’s Emergency Brigade which had a
contingency plan to form a buffer zone in case of a police attack on the factories.
“If the police want to fire then they’ll just have to fire into us.”
Unfortunately, although workers retain a pivotal position in some crucial areas
(utilities, communication, transportation), workers in many other sectors have less
leverage than they used to. Multinational companies usually have large reserves and can
wait it out or shift operations to other countries, while workers have a hard time holding
out without wages coming in. Far from threatening anything essential, many present-day
strikes are mere appeals to postpone shutting down obsolete industries that are losing
money. Thus, while the strike remains the most basic worker tactic, workers must also
devise other forms of on-the-job struggle and find ways to link up with struggles on other
terrains.
Like worker strikes, consumer strikes (boycotts) depend on both the leverage they can
exert and the support they can enlist. There are so many boycotts in favor of so many
causes that, except for a few based on some glaringly clear moral issue, most of them
fail. As is so often the case in social struggles, the most fruitful consumer strikes are
those in which people are fighting directly for themselves, such as the early civil rights
boycotts in the South or the “self-reduction” movements in Italy and elsewhere
in which whole communities have decided to pay only a certain percentage of utility bills
or mass transit fares. A rent strike is a particularly simple and powerful action, but
it’s difficult to achieve the degree of unity necessary to get one started except
among those who have nothing to lose; which is why the most exemplary challenges to the
fetish of private property are being made by homeless squatters.
In what might be called reverse boycotts, people sometimes join in supporting
some popular institution that is threatened. Raising money for a local school or library
or alternative institution is usually fairly banal, but such movements occasionally
generate a salutary public debate. In 1974 striking reporters took over a major South
Korean newspaper and began publishing exposés of government lies and repression. In an
effort to bankrupt the paper without having to openly suppress it, the government
pressured all the advertisers to remove their ads from the paper. The public responded by
buying thousands of individual ads, using their space for personal statements, poems,
quotations from Tom Paine, etc. The “Freedom of Speech Support Column” soon
filled several pages of each issue and circulation increased significantly before the
paper was finally suppressed.
But consumer struggles are limited by the fact that consumers are at the receiving end
of the economic cycle: they may exert a certain amount of pressure through protests or
boycotts or riots, but they don’t control the mechanisms of production. In the
above-mentioned Korean incident, for example, the public participation was only made
possible by the workers’ takeover of the paper.
A particularly interesting and exemplary form of worker struggle is what is sometimes
called a “social strike” or “giveaway strike,” in which people carry
on with their jobs but in ways that prefigure a free social order: workers giving away
goods they have produced, clerks undercharging customers, transportation workers letting
everyone ride free. In February 1981 11,000 telephone workers occupied exchanges
throughout British Columbia and carried on all phone services without charge for six days
before being maneuvered out by their union. Besides winning many of their demands, they
seem to have had a delightful time.(8) One can
imagine ways of going further and becoming more selective, such as blocking business and
government calls while letting personal calls go through free. Postal workers could do
likewise with mail; transportation workers could continue to ship necessary goods while
refusing to transport police or troops. . . .
But this type of strike would make no sense for that large majority of workers whose
jobs serve no sensible purpose. (The best thing that such workers can do is to publicly
denounce the absurdity of their own work, as some ad designers nicely did during May
1968.) Moreover, even useful work is often so parcelized that isolated groups of workers
can implement few changes on their own. And even the small minority who happen to produce
finished and salable products (as did the workers who in 1973 took over the bankrupt Lip
watch factory in Besançon, France, and started running it for themselves) usually remain
dependent on commercial financing and distribution networks. In the exceptional case where
such workers make a go of it on their own, they simply become one more capitalist company;
more often, their self-management innovations merely end up rationalizing the operation
for the benefit of the owners. A “Strasbourg of the factories” might occur if
workers finding themselves in a Lip-type situation use the facilities and publicity it
gives them to go farther than the Lip workers (who were struggling simply to save their
jobs) by calling on others to join them in superseding the whole system of commodity
production and wage labor. But this is unlikely to happen until there is a sufficiently
widespread movement to enlarge people’s perspectives and offset the risks — as
in May 1968, when most of the factories of France were occupied:
If, in a single large factory, between 16 May and 30 May, a general assembly had
constituted itself as a council holding all powers of decision and execution,
expelling the bureaucrats, organizing its self-defense and calling on the strikers of all
the enterprises to link up with it, this qualitative step could have immediately brought
the movement to the ultimate showdown. . . . A very large number
of enterprises would have followed the course thus discovered. This factory could
immediately have taken the place of the dubious and in every sense eccentric Sorbonne of
the first days and have become the real center of the occupations movement: genuine delegates
from the numerous councils that already virtually existed in some of the occupied
buildings, and from all the councils that could have imposed themselves in all the
branches of industry, would have rallied around this base. Such an assembly could then
have proclaimed the expropriation of all capital, including state capital;
announced that all the country’s means of production were henceforth the collective
property of the proletariat organized in direct democracy; and appealed directly (by
finally seizing some of the telecommunications facilities, for example) to the workers of the
entire world to support this revolution. Some people will say that such a hypothesis is
utopian. We answer: It is precisely because the occupations movement was objectively at
several moments only an hour away from such a result that it spread such terror,
visible to everyone at the time in the impotence of the state and the panic of the
so-called Communist Party, and since then in the conspiracy of silence concerning its
gravity. [SI Anthology, pp. 234-235 [Revised Edition pp. 299-300] (Beginning of an
Era).]
What prevented this from happening was above all the labor unions, in particular the
largest one in the country: the Communist Party-dominated CGT. Inspired by the rebellious
youth who had fought the police in the streets and taken over the Sorbonne and other
public buildings, ten million workers ignored their unions and occupied virtually all the
factories and many of the offices in the country, launching the first wildcat general
strike in history. But most of these workers were unclear enough as to what to do next
that they allowed the union bureaucracy to insinuate itself into the movement it had tried
to prevent. The bureaucrats did everything they could to brake and fragment the movement:
calling brief token strikes; setting up phony “rank-and-file” organizations
composed of loyal Party members; seizing control of the loudspeaker systems; rigging
elections in favor of returning to work; and most crucially, locking the factory gates in
order to keep workers isolated from each other and from the other insurgents (on the
pretext of “guarding against outside provocateurs”). The unions then proceeded
to negotiate with the employers and the government a package of wage and vacation bonuses.
This bribe was emphatically rejected by a large majority of the workers, who had the
sense, however confused, that some more radical change was on the agenda. In early June,
de Gaulle’s presenting the carrot/stick alternative of new elections or civil war
finally intimidated many workers into returning to work. There were still numerous
holdouts, but their isolation from each other enabled the unions to tell each group that
all the others had resumed work, so that they would believe they were alone and give up.
As in May 1968, when the more developed countries are threatened with a radical
situation, they usually rely on confusion, concessions, curfews, distractions,
disinformation, fragmentation, preemption, postponement and other methods of diverting,
dividing and coopting the opposition, reserving overt physical repression as a last
resort. These methods, which range from the subtle to the ludicrous,(9) are so numerous that it would be impossible
here to mention more than a few.
A common method of confusing the issues is to distort the apparent alignment of forces
by projecting diverse positions onto a linear, left-versus-right schema, implying that if
you are opposed to one side you must be in favor of the other. The
communism-versus-capitalism spectacle served this purpose for over half a century. Since
the recent collapse of that farce, the tendency has been to declare a centrist pragmatic
global consensus, with any opposition being lumped with lunatic-fringe
“extremisms” (fascism and religious fanaticism on the right, terrorism and
“anarchy” on the left).
One of the classic divide-and-rule methods has been discussed earlier: encouraging the
exploited to fragment into a multitude of narrow group identities, which can be
manipulated into directing their energies into squabbling with each other. Conversely,
opposed classes can be lumped together by patriotic hysteria and other means. Popular
fronts, united fronts and similar coalitions serve to obscure fundamental conflicts of
interest in the name of joint opposition to a common enemy (bourgeoisie + proletariat
versus a reactionary regime; military-bureaucratic strata + peasantry versus foreign
domination). In such coalitions the upper group generally has the material and ideological
resources to maintain its control over the lower group, which is tricked into postponing
self-organized action on its own behalf until it’s too late. By the time victory has
been attained over the common enemy, the upper group has had time to consolidate its power
(often in a new alliance with elements of the defeated enemy) in order to crush the
radical elements of the lower group.
Any vestige of hierarchy within a radical movement will be used to divide and undermine
it. If there are no cooptable leaders, a few will be created by intensive media exposure.
Leaders can be privately bargained with and held responsible for their followers; once
they are coopted, they can establish similar chains of command beneath them, enabling a
large mass of people to be brought under control without the rulers having to deal with
all of them openly and simultaneously.
Cooption of leaders serves not only to separate them from the people, but also divides
the people among themselves — some seeing the cooption as a victory, others
denouncing it, others hesitating. As attention shifts from participatory actions to the
spectacle of distant leader-celebrities debating distant issues, most people become bored
and disillusioned. Feeling that matters are out of their hands (perhaps even secretly
relieved that somebody else is taking care of them), they return to their previous
passivity.
Another method of discouraging popular participation is to emphasize problems
that seem to require specialized expertise. A classic instance was the ploy of
certain German military leaders in 1918, at the moment when the workers and
soldiers councils that emerged in the wake of the German collapse at the end of
World War I potentially had the country in their hands:
On the evening of November 10, when the Supreme Command
was still at Spa, a group of seven enlisted men presented themselves at headquarters. They
were the ‘Executive Committee’ of the Supreme Headquarters Soldiers’
Council. Their demands were somewhat unclear, but obviously they expected to play a role
in the command of the Army during its retreat. At the very least they wanted the right to
countersign the Supreme Command’s orders and to insure that the field army was not
used for any counterrevolutionary purpose. The seven soldiers were courteously received by
a Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm von Faupel, who had been carefully rehearsed for the
occasion. . . . Faupel led the delegates into the Supreme Command’s map
room. Everything was laid out on a gigantic map which occupied one wall: the huge complex
of roads, railway lines, bridges, switching points, pipelines, command posts and supply
dumps — the whole an intricate lace of red, green, blue and black lines converging
into narrow bottlenecks at the crucial Rhine bridges. . . . Faupel then turned
to them. The Supreme Command had no objection to the soldiers’ councils, he said, but
did his hearers feel competent to direct the general evacuation of the German Army along
these lines of communication? . . . The disconcerted soldiers stared uneasily at the
immense map. One of them allowed that this was not what they had really had in mind —
‘This work can well be left to the officers.’ In the end, the seven soldiers
willingly gave the officers their support. More than this, they practically begged the
officers to retain command. . . . Whenever a soldiers’ council delegation
appeared at Supreme Headquarters, Colonel Faupel was trotted out to repeat his earlier
performance; it always worked. [Richard Watt, The Kings Depart: Versailles and
the German Revolution.]
Terrorism has often served to break the momentum of radical situations. It stuns
people, turns them back into spectators anxiously following the latest news and
speculations. Far from weakening the state, terrorism seems to confirm the need to
strengthen it. If terrorist spectacles fail to spontaneously arise when it needs them, the
state itself may produce them by means of provocateurs. (See Sanguinetti’s On
Terrorism and the State and the last half of Debord’s Preface to the Fourth
Italian Edition of “The Society of the Spectacle.”)
A popular movement can hardly prevent individuals from carrying out terrorist or other
thoughtless actions, actions that may sidetrack and destroy it as surely as if they were
the work of a provocateur. The only solution is to create a movement with such
consistently forthright and nonmanipulative tactics that everyone will recognize
individual stupidities or police provocations for what they are.
An antihierarchical revolution can only be an “open conspiracy.” Obviously
some things require secrecy, especially under the more repressive regimes. But even in
such cases the means should not be inconsistent with the ultimate goal: the supersession
of all separate power through the conscious participation of everyone. Secrecy often has
the absurd result that the police are the only ones who know what is happening,
and are thus able to infiltrate and manipulate a radical group without anyone else being
aware of it. The best defense against infiltration is to make sure there’s nothing of
any importance to infiltrate, i.e. that no radical organization wields any separate power.
The best safety is in numbers: once thousands of people are openly involved, it hardly
matters if a few spies are among them.
Even in small group actions safety often lies in maximum publicity. When some of the
Strasbourg scandal participants started to get cold feet and suggested toning things down,
Mustapha Khayati (the SI delegate who was the main author of the Student Poverty
pamphlet) pointed out that the safest course would not be to avoid offending the
authorities too much — as if they would be grateful for being only moderately and
hesitantly insulted! — but to perpetrate such a widely publicized scandal that they
wouldn’t dare retaliate.
To get back to the May 1968 factory occupations, suppose that the French workers had
rejected the bureaucratic maneuvers and established a councilist network throughout the
country. What then?
In such an eventuality, civil war would naturally have been inevitable. . . .
Armed counterrevolution would certainly have been launched immediately. But it would not
have been certain of winning. Some of the troops would obviously have mutinied;
the
workers would have figured out how to get weapons, and they certainly would not have built
any more barricades — a good form of political expression at the beginning of the
movement, but obviously ridiculous strategically. . . . Foreign
intervention would have inevitably followed . . . probably beginning with NATO
forces, but with the direct or indirect support of the Warsaw Pact. But then everything
would once again have hinged on the European proletariat: double or nothing. [SI
Anthology, p. 235 [Revised Edition pp. 300-301] (Beginning of an Era).]
Roughly speaking, the significance of armed struggle varies inversely with the degree
of economic development. In the most underdeveloped countries social struggles tend to be
reduced to military struggles, because without arms there is little that the impoverished
masses can do that will not hurt them more than the rulers, especially when their
traditional self-sufficiency has been destroyed by a one-crop economy geared for export.
(But even if they win militarily, they can usually be overpowered by foreign intervention
or pressured into compliance with the global economy, unless parallel revolutions
elsewhere open up new fronts.)
In more developed countries armed force has relatively less significance, though it
can, of course, still be an important factor at certain critical junctures. It is
possible, though not very efficient, to force people to do simple manual labor at
gunpoint. It is not possible to do this with people who work with paper or computers
within a complex industrial society — there are too many opportunities for
troublesome yet untraceable “mistakes.” Modern capitalism requires a certain
amount of cooperation and even semicreative participation from its workers. No large
enterprise could function for a day without its workers’ spontaneous
self-organization, reacting to unforeseen problems, compensating for managers’
mistakes, etc. If workers engage in a “work-to-rule” strike in which they do
nothing more than strictly follow all the official regulations, the whole operation will
be slowed down or even brought to a complete halt (forcing the managers, who are unable to
openly condemn such strictness, into the amusingly awkward position of having to hint to
the workers that they should get on with their work without being quite so rigorous). The
system survives only because most workers are relatively apathetic and, in order not to
cause trouble for themselves, cooperate enough to keep things going.
Isolated revolts may be repressed one at a time; but if a movement spreads fast enough,
as in May 1968, a few hundred thousand soldiers and police can hardly do anything in the
face of ten million striking workers. Such a movement can be destroyed only from the
inside. If the people don’t know what they need to do, arms can scarcely help them;
if they do know, arms can scarcely stop them.
Only at certain moments are people “together” enough to revolt successfully.
The more lucid rulers know that they are safe if they can only disperse such threats
before they develop too much momentum and self-awareness, whether by direct physical
repression or by the various sorts of diversion mentioned above. It hardly matters if the
people later find out that they were tricked, that they had victory in their hands if they
had only known it: once the opportunity has passed, it’s too late.
Ordinary situations are full of confusions, but matters are generally not so urgent. In
a radical situation things are both simplified and speeded up: the issues become clearer,
but there is less time to resolve them.
The extreme case is dramatized in a famous scene in Eisenstein’s Potemkin.
Mutinous sailors, heads covered by a tarp, have been lined up to be shot. Guards aim their
rifles and are given the order to fire. One of the sailors cries out: “Brothers! Do
you realize who you are shooting?” The guards waver. The order is given again. After
a suspenseful hesitation the guards lower their weapons. They help the sailors to raid the
armory, together they turn against the officers, and the battle is soon won.
Note that even in this violent showdown the outcome is more a matter of consciousness
than of brute power: once the guards come over to the sailors, the fight is effectively
over. (The remainder of Eisenstein’s scene — a drawn-out struggle between an
officer villain and a martyrized revolutionary hero — is mere melodrama.) In contrast
to war, in which two distinct sides consciously oppose each other, “class struggle is
not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie; it is equally the
struggle of the proletariat against itself: against the devastating and degrading
effects of the capitalist system on its class consciousness” (Lukács, History
and Class Consciousness). Modern revolution has the peculiar quality that the
exploited majority automatically wins as soon as it becomes collectively aware of the game
it is playing. The proletariat’s opponent is ultimately nothing but the product of
its own alienated activity, whether in the economic form of capital, the political form of
party and union bureaucracies, or the psychological form of spectacular conditioning. The
rulers are such a tiny minority that they would be immediately overwhelmed if they had not
managed to bamboozle a large portion of the population into identifying with them, or at
least into taking their system for granted; and especially into becoming divided against
each other.
The tarp, which dehumanizes the mutineers, making it easier for the guards to shoot
them, symbolizes this divide-and-rule tactic. The “Brothers!” shout represents
the countertactic of fraternization.
While fraternization refutes lies about what is happening elsewhere, its greatest power
probably stems from the emotional effect of direct human encounter, which reminds soldiers
that the insurgents are people not essentially different from themselves. The state
naturally tries to prevent such contact by bringing in troops from other regions who are
unfamiliar with what has taken place and who, if possible, don’t even speak the same
language; and by quickly replacing them if they nevertheless become too contaminated by
rebellious ideas. (Some of the Russian troops sent in to crush the 1956 Hungarian
revolution were told that they were in Germany and that the people confronting them in the
streets were resurgent Nazis!)
In order to expose and eliminate the most radical elements, a government sometimes
deliberately provokes a situation that will lead to an excuse for violent repression. This
is a dangerous game, however, because, as in the Potemkin incident, forcing the
issue may provoke the armed forces to come over to the people. From the rulers’
standpoint, the optimum strategy is to brandish just enough of a threat that there is no
need to risk the ultimate showdown. This worked in Poland in 1980-81. The Russian
bureaucrats knew that to invade Poland might bring about their own downfall; but the
constantly hinted threat of such an invasion successfully intimidated the radical Polish
workers, who could easily have overthrown the state, into tolerating the persistence of
military-bureaucratic forces within Poland. The latter were eventually able to repress the
movement without having to call in the Russians.
“Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.” A
revolutionary movement cannot attain some local victory and then expect to peacefully
coexist with the system until it’s ready to try for a little more. All existing
powers will put aside their differences in order to destroy any truly radical popular
movement before it spreads. If they can’t crush it militarily, they’ll strangle
it economically (national economies are now so globally interdependent that no country
would be immune from such pressure). The only way to defend a revolution is to extend
it, both qualitatively and geographically. The only guarantee against internal reaction is
the most radical liberation of every aspect of life. The only guarantee against external
intervention is the most rapid internationalization of the struggle.
The most profound expression of internationalist solidarity is, of course, to make a
parallel revolution in one’s own country (1848, 1917-1920, 1968). Short of this, the
most urgent task is at least to prevent counterrevolutionary intervention from
one’s own country, as when British workers pressured their government not to support
the slave states during the American Civil War (even though this meant greater
unemployment due to lack of cotton imports); or when Western workers struck and mutinied
against their governments’ attempts to support the reactionary forces during the
civil war following the Russian revolution; or when people in Europe and America opposed
their countries’ repression of anticolonial revolts.
Unfortunately, even such minimal defensive efforts are few and far between. Positive
internationalist support is even more difficult. As long as the rulers remain in control
of the most powerful countries, direct personal reinforcement is complicated and limited.
Arms and other supplies may be intercepted. Even communications sometimes don’t get
through until it’s too late.
One thing that does get through is an announcement that one group is relinquishing its
power or claims over another. The 1936 fascist revolt in Spain, for example, had one of
its main bases in Spanish Morocco. Many of Franco’s troops were Moroccan and the
antifascist forces could have exploited this fact by declaring Morocco independent,
thereby encouraging a revolt at Franco’s rear and dividing his forces. The probable
spread of such a revolt to other Arab countries would at the same time have diverted
Mussolini’s forces, which were supporting Franco, to defend Italy’s North
African possessions. But the leaders of the Spanish Popular Front government rejected this
idea for fear that such an encouragement of anticolonialism would alarm France and
England, from whom they were hoping for aid. Needless to say this aid never came anyway.(10)
Similarly, if, before the Khomeiniists had been able to consolidate their power, the
insurgent Iranians in 1979 had supported total autonomy for the Kurds, Baluchis and
Azerbaijans, this would have won them as firm allies of the most radical Iranian
tendencies and might have spread the revolution to the adjacent countries where
overlapping portions of those peoples live, while simultaneously undermining the
Khomeiniist reactionaries in Iran.
Encouraging others’ autonomy does not imply supporting any organization or regime
that might take advantage of it. It’s simply a matter of leaving the Moroccans, the
Kurds, or whomever to work out their own affairs. The hope is that the example of an
antihierarchical revolution in one country will inspire others to contest their own
hierarchies.
It’s our only hope, but not an entirely unrealistic one. The contagion of a
genuinely liberated movement should never be underestimated.
[FOOTNOTES]
1. On the Cultural Revolution, see SI Anthology, pp.
185-194 [Revised Edition pp. 240-251] [The Explosion Point of Ideology in China], and
Simon Leys’s The Chairman’s New Clothes.
2. “As Shiites and Kurds battle the regime of Saddam Hussein
and Iraqi opposition parties try to patch together a democratic future, the United States
finds itself in the awkward position of, in effect, supporting continuing one-party rule
in Iraq. US government statements, including those of President Bush, have stressed the
desire to see Saddam Hussein overthrown, but not to see Iraq broken apart by civil strife.
At the same time, Bush administration officials have insisted that democracy is not
currently a viable alternative for Iraq. . . . This may account for the fact
that thus far, the administration has refused to meet with Iraqi opposition leaders in
exile . . . . ‘The Arabs and the US have the same agenda,’ says a
coalition diplomat. ‘We want Iraq in the same borders and Saddam to disappear. But we
will accept Saddam in Baghdad in order to have Iraq as one state.’ ” (Christian
Science Monitor, 20 March 1991.)
3. “I am flabbergasted at the memory people retain of their own
revolutionary past. Present events have shaken that memory. Dates never learned at school,
songs never sung openly, are recalled in their totality. . . . The noise, the
noise, the noise is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the
slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after
forty-eight years of repression. In that single day everything was replaced in
perspective. Nothing was god-given, all was man-made. People could see their misery and
their problems in a historical setting. . . . A week has passed, although it
already feels like many months. Every hour has been lived to the full. It is already
difficult to remember what the papers looked like before, or what people had then said.
Hadn’t there always been a revolution?” (Phil Mailer, Portugal: The
Impossible Revolution?)
4. One of the most powerful moments was when the sitdowners around
the police car averted a potentially violent confrontation with a mob of fraternity
hecklers by remaining totally silent for half an hour. With the wind taken out of
their sails, the hecklers became bored and embarrassed, and eventually dispersed. Such
collective silence has the advantage of dissolving compulsive reactions on both sides; yet
because it is nonspecific it does this without the dubious content of many slogans and
songs. (Singing “We Shall Overcome” has also served to calm people in difficult
situations, but at the cost of sentimentalizing reality.)
The best account of the FSM is David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement
(Ten Speed Press, 1993).
5. On May 1968 see SI Anthology, pp. 225-256, 343-352
[Revised Edition pp. 288-325, 435-457] [The Beginning of an Era and May
1968 Documents], and René Viénet’s Enragés and Situationists in the
Occupation Movement. Also recommended is Roger Grégoire and Fredy Perlman’s Worker-Student
Action Committees, France May ’68 (Black and Red, 1969).
6. “Labor will not only SHUT DOWN the industries, but Labor
will REOPEN, under the management of the appropriate trades, such activities as are needed
to preserve public health and public peace. If the strike continues, Labor may feel led to
avoid public suffering by reopening more and more activities. UNDER ITS OWN MANAGEMENT.
And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads — NO ONE KNOWS
WHERE!” (Announcement on the eve of the 1919 Seattle general strike.) See Jeremy
Brecher’s Strike! (South End, 1972), pp. 101-114. More extensive accounts
are included in Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements and in
Harvey O’Connor’s Revolution in Seattle, both currently out of print.
7. Raoul Vaneigem (who incidentally wrote a good brief critical
history of surrealism) represented the clearest expression of both aspects. His little
book De la grève sauvage à l’autogestion
généralisée (literally “From Wildcat Strike to Generalized
Self-Management,” but partially translated as Contributions to the Revolutionary
Struggle) usefully recapitulates a number of basic tactics during wildcat strikes and
other radical situations as well as various possibilities of postrevolutionary social
organization. Unfortunately it is also padded with the inflated verbiage characteristic of
Vaneigem’s post-SI writings, attributing to worker struggles a Vaneigemist content
that is neither justified nor necessary. The radical-subjectivity aspect was rigidified
into a tediously repeated ideology of hedonism in Vaneigem’s later books (The
Book of Pleasures, etc.), which read like cotton-candy parodies of the ideas he dealt
with so trenchantly in his earlier works.
8. “One day into this thing, and I’m tired, but compared
to the positive sensations that are passing through this place, fatigue doesn’t stand
a chance. . . . Who will ever forget the look on management’s faces when we
tell them we are now in control, and their services are obviously no longer needed.
. . . Everything as normal, except we don’t collect phone bills.
. . . We’re also making friends from other departments. Guys from
downstairs are coming up to help out and learn our jobs. . . . We’re all
flying. . . . Sailing on pure adrenalin. It’s like we own the bloody thing.
. . . The signs on the front door say, CO-OP TEL: UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT — NO
MANAGEMENT ALLOWED.” (Rosa Collette, “Operators Dial Direct Action,” Open
Road, Vancouver, Spring 1981.)
9. “A South African company is selling an anti-riot vehicle
that plays disco music through a loudspeaker to soothe the nerves of would-be
troublemakers. The vehicle, already bought by one black nation, which the company did not
identify, also carries a water cannon and tear gas.” (AP, 23 September 1979.)
10. If this question had been openly posed to the Spanish workers
(who had already bypassed the vacillating Popular Front government by seizing arms and
resisting the fascist coup by themselves, and in the process launched the revolution) they
would probably have agreed to grant Moroccan independence. But once they were swayed by
political leaders — including even many anarchist leaders — into tolerating that
government in the name of antifascist unity, they were kept unaware of such issues.
The Spanish revolution remains the single richest
revolutionary experience in history, though it was complicated and obscured by the
simultaneous civil war against Franco and by the sharp contradictions within the
antifascist camp — which, besides two or three million anarchists and
anarchosyndicalists and a considerably smaller contingent of revolutionary Marxists (the
POUM), included bourgeois republicans, ethnic autonomists, socialists and Stalinists, with
the latter in particular doing everything in their power to repress the revolution. The
best comprehensive histories are Pierre Broué and Emile Témime’s Revolution and
the War in Spain and Burnett Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution (the
latter is also substantially incorporated in Bolloten’s monumental final work, The
Spanish Civil War). Some good first-hand accounts are George Orwell’s Homage
to Catalonia, Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, and Mary Low and
Juan Breá’s Red Spanish Notebook. Other books worth reading include Vernon
Richards’s Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, Murray Bookchin’s To
Remember Spain, Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth, Sam
Dolgoff’s The Anarchist Collectives, Abel Paz’s Durruti: The People
Armed, and Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz’s Spanish Marxism versus Soviet
Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M.
End of Chapter 3 of “The Joy of Revolution,” from Public Secrets:
Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (1997).
- Chapter 1: Some Facts of Life
- Utopia or bust. Stalinist “communism” and reformist “socialism” are
merely variants of capitalism. Representative democracy versus delegate democracy.
Irrationalities of capitalism. Some exemplary modern revolts. Some common objections.
Increasing dominance of the spectacle.
-
- Chapter 2: Foreplay
- Personal breakthroughs. Critical interventions. Theory versus ideology. Avoiding false
choices and elucidating real ones. The insurrectionary style. Radical film. Oppressionism
versus playfulness. The Strasbourg scandal. The poverty of electoral politics. Reforms and
alternative institutions. Political correctness, or equal opportunity alienation.
Drawbacks of moralism and simplistic extremism. Advantages of boldness. Advantages and
limits of nonviolence.
-
- Chapter 4: Rebirth
- Utopians fail to envision postrevolutionary diversity. Decentralization
and coordination. Safeguards against abuses. Consensus, majority rule and unavoidable
hierarchies. Eliminating the roots of war and crime. Abolishing money. Absurdity of most
present-day labor. Transforming work into play. Technophobic objections. Ecological
issues. The blossoming of free communities. More interesting problems.
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