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Notice to the Civilized Concerning
Generalized Self-Management
“Never sacrifice present good for the good to come. Enjoy the moment. Avoid any
matrimonial or other association that does not satisfy your passions from the very
beginning. Why should you work for the good to come when it will exceed your desires
anyway and you will have in the Combined Order only one displeasure, that of not being
able to double the length of days in order to accommodate the immense range of enjoyments
available to you?”
—Charles Fourier, Notice to the Civilized
Concerning the Next Social Metamorphosis
1
Though it failed to go all the way, the May 1968 occupations movement has given rise to
a confused popular awareness of the necessity of a supersession. The imminence of a total
upheaval, felt by everyone, must now discover its practice: the passage to generalized(1)
self-management through the establishment of workers councils. The point to which the
revolutionary upsurge has brought people’s consciousness is now going to become a
point of departure.
2
History is answering the question Lloyd George posed to the workers, a question which
has since been taken up in chorus by all the servants of the old world: “You want to
destroy our social organization, but what will you put in its place?” We know the
answer thanks to the profusion of little Lloyd Georges who advocate the state dictatorship
of a proletariat of their choice, counting on the working class to organize itself in
councils in order to dissolve the existing dictatorship and elect another.
3
Each time the proletariat takes the risk of changing the world it rediscovers its
historical memory. The project of establishing a society of councils — a project
until now intermingled with the history of its crushing in different periods —
reveals the reality of its past possibilities through the possibility of its immediate
realization. This has been made evident to all the workers since May, when Stalinism and
its Trotskyist residues showed by their aggressive weakness their inability to crush a
council movement if one had appeared, and by their force of inertia their ability still to
impede the emergence of one. Without really manifesting itself, a movement toward councils
was implicitly present in the clash of two contradictory forces: the internal logic of the
occupations and the repressive logic of the parties and labor unions. Those who still open
their Lenin to find out what is to be done are only rummaging in the trashcan of history.
4
Many people intuitively rejected any organization not directly emanating from the
proletariat negating itself as proletariat, and this feeling was inseparable from the
feeling that an everyday life without dead time was finally possible. In this sense the
notion of workers councils is the first principle of generalized self-management.
5
May 1968 marked an essential phase in the long revolution: the individual history of
millions of people, each day seeking an authentic life, linking up with the historical
movement of the proletariat in struggle against the whole system of alienations.
This spontaneous unity of action, which was the passional motive power of the occupations
movement, can only develop its theory and practice unitarily. What was in everyone’s
heart is going to be in everyone’s head. Having felt that they “could no longer
live like before, nor even a little better than before,” many people are inclined to
prolong the memory of this exemplary moment of life and the briefly experienced hope of a
great possibility — to prolong them in a line of force which, to become
revolutionary, lacks only a greater lucidity on generalized self-management, i.e. on the
historical construction of free individual relations.
6
Only the proletariat, by negating itself, gives clear shape to the project of
generalized self-management, because it bears that project within itself objectively and
subjectively. This is why the first specifics will come from the unity of its combat in
everyday life and on the front of history; and from the consciousness that all demands are
realizable right away, but only by the proletariat itself. In this sense the importance of
a revolutionary organization will henceforth be measured by its ability to hasten its own
disappearance in the reality of the society of the councils.
7
Workers councils constitute a new type of social organization, through which the
proletariat puts an end to the proletarianization of everyone. Generalized self-management
is simply the general framework in accordance with which the councils unitarily inaugurate
a style of life based on ongoing individual and collective liberation.
8
It is clear from all these theses that the project of generalized self-management
requires as many specifics as there are desires in each revolutionary, and as many
revolutionaries as there are people dissatisfied with their everyday life. The
spectacle-commodity society produces both the conditions that repress subjectivity and
— contradictorily, through the refusal it provokes — the positivity of
subjectivity; just as the formation of the councils, similarly arising out of the struggle
against overall oppression, produces the conditions for a permanent realization of
subjectivity without any limits but its own impatience to make history. Thus generalized
self-management is linked to the capacity of the councils to realize the imagination
historically.
9
Outside generalized self-management, workers councils lose their sense. Anyone who
speaks of the councils as separate economic or social organisms, anyone who does not place
them at the center of the revolution of everyday life with the practice this entails, must
be treated as a future bureaucrat and thus as a present enemy.
10
One of Fourier’s great merits is to have shown the necessity of creating
immediately — and for us this means from the inception of generalized insurrection
— the objective conditions for individual liberation. For everyone the beginning of
the revolutionary moment must mark an immediate rise in the pleasure of living
— a consciously experienced entry into the totality.
11
The accelerating rate at which reformism, with its tricontinental bellyache, is leaving
behind ridiculous leftist droppings — all those little Maoist, Trotskyist and
Guevaraist dungpiles — proves by its smell what the Right, and especially the socialists
and Stalinists, have long sensed: partial demands are fundamentally contrary to a total
change. But trying to cut off the hydra heads of reformism one by one is futile. Better to
overthrow the old ruse of history once and for all: this would seem to be the final
solution to the problem of coopters. This implies a strategy that sparks the general
conflagration by means of increasingly frequent insurrectional moments; and a tactic of
qualitative progression in which inevitably partial actions each entail, as their
necessary and sufficient condition, the liquidation of the world of the commodity. It’s
time to begin the positive sabotage of spectacle-commodity society. As long as
our mass tactics stick to the law of immediate pleasure there will be no need to worry
about the outcome.
12
It is easy to mention here, merely as suggestive examples, a few possibilities which
will quickly be surpassed by the practice of liberated workers: On every occasion —
openly during strikes, more or less clandestinely during work — initiate the
reign of freeness by giving away factory and warehouse goods to friends and
revolutionaries, by making gift objects (radio transmitters, toys, weapons, clothes,
ornaments, machines for various purposes) and by organizing “giveaway” strikes
in department stores; break the laws of exchange and begin the end of wage labor
by collectively appropriating products of work and collectively using machines for
personal and revolutionary purposes; depreciate the function of money by
spreading payment strikes (rent, taxes, installment payments, transportation fares, etc.);
encourage everyone’s creativity by starting up provisioning and production
sectors exclusively under workers’ control, even if this can only be done
intermittently, while regarding this experimentation as necessarily groping and subject to
improvement; wipe out hierarchies and the spirit of sacrifice by treating bosses
and union bureaucrats as they deserve and by rejecting militantism; act unitarily
everywhere against all separations; draw theory from every type of practice and vice versa
by composing leaflets, posters, songs, etc.
13
The proletariat has already shown that it knows how to respond to the oppressive
complexity of capitalist and “socialist” states by the simplicity of
organization carried out directly by and for everyone. In our time questions of
survival are posed only on the condition that they never be solved; in contrast, the
problems of the history to be lived are clearly posed through the project of the workers
councils — positively in that the councils are the basis of a unitary passional and
industrial society, negatively in that they imply total opposition to the state.
14
Because they exercise no power separate from the decisions of their members, the
councils tolerate no power other than their own. Encouraging antistate actions everywhere
should thus not be understood to imply a premature creation of councils which would lack
absolute power over their own areas, would be separated from generalized self-management,
and would be inevitably emptied of content and susceptible to every kind of ideology. The
only lucid forces that can presently respond to the history that has been made
with the history to be made will be the revolutionary organizations that are
developing, in the project of the councils, an equal awareness of the adversary to be
combatted and the allies to be supported. An important aspect of such a struggle is
manifesting itself before our eyes with the appearance of a dual power. In
factories, offices, streets, houses, barracks and schools a new reality is taking shape:
contempt for bosses, regardless of their labels or their rhetoric. From now on this
contempt must be pushed to its logical conclusion by demonstrating, through the concerted
action of workers, that the bosses are not only contemptible but also useless, and that
even from their own utilitarian point of view they can be eliminated with impunity.
15
Recent history will soon come to be seen, by rulers as well as revolutionaries, in
terms of an alternative that concerns them both: generalized self-management or
insurrectional chaos; new society of abundance or social disintegration, pillage,
terrorism and repression. The struggle within dual power is already inseparable from such
a choice. Our coherence requires that the paralysis and destruction of all forms of
government not be distinct from the construction of councils. If our adversary has even
the slightest prudence it should realize that only an organization of new everyday
relationships can prevent the spread of what an American police specialist has already
called “our nightmare”: small insurgent commandos bursting out of subway
entrances, shooting from rooftops, taking advantage of the mobility and limitless
resources of urban guerrilla warfare to fell the police, liquidate the servants of
authority, stir up riots and destroy the economy. But we don’t have to save the
rulers in spite of themselves. It will be enough to prepare the councils and ensure their
self-defense by every means. In one of Lope de Vega’s plays some villagers, driven
beyond endurance by the exactions of a royal functionary, put him to death. When they are
brought before the magistrate and charged to name the guilty party, all respond with the
name of their village, “Fuenteovejuna.” This tactic, used by many Asturian
miners against pro-company engineers, has the drawback of smacking too much of terrorism
and the watrinage tradition.(2) Generalized self-management will be our
“Fuenteovejuna.” It is no longer enough for collective action to discourage
repression (imagine the powerlessness of the forces of order if during an occupations
movement bank employees seized the funds); it must at the same time encourage progression
toward a greater revolutionary coherence. The councils represent order in the face of the
decomposition of the state, whose form is being contested by the rise of regional
nationalisms and whose basic principle is being contested by social demands. To the
pseudoproblems they see posed by this decomposition, the police can respond only by
estimating the number of deaths. Only the councils offer a definitive solution. What
prevents looting? The organization of distribution and the end of the commodity system.
What prevents sabotage of production? The appropriation of the machines by collective
creativity. What prevents explosions of anger and violence? The end of the proletariat
through the collective construction of everyday life. There is no other justification for
our struggle than the immediate satisfaction of this project — than what satisfies us
immediately.
16
Generalized self-management has only one basis, one motive force: the exhilaration of
universal freedom. This is quite enough to enable us right now to infer the rigor that
will be necessary for its elaboration. Such rigor must henceforth characterize
revolutionary councilist organizations; conversely, their practice will already contain
the experience of direct democracy. This will enable us to concretize certain formulas
more rigorously. A principle like “All power to the general assembly,” for
example, also implies that whatever escapes the direct control of the autonomous assembly
will recreate, in mediated forms, all the autonomous varieties of oppression. Through its
representatives, the whole assembly with all its tendencies must be present at the moment
of decision. Even though the destruction of the state rules out a repetition of the
“Supreme Soviet” farce, it is still necessary to take care that organization is
simple enough to preclude the possibility of any neobureaucracy arising. But the abundance
of telecommunications technologies — which might at first sight appear as a pretext for
the continuation or return of specialists — is precisely what makes possible the
constant control of delegates by the base, the immediate confirmation, correction or
repudiation of their decisions at all levels. Telex, computers, television, etc., are thus
the inalienable possession of the primary assemblies, making it possible for those
assemblies to be aware of and affect events everywhere. In the composition of a council
(there will no doubt be neighborhood, city, regional and international councils) it will
be a good idea for the assembly to elect and control: an equipping section for
the purpose of collecting requests for supplies, determining the possibilities of
production, and coordinating these two sectors; an information section charged
with keeping in constant touch with the experiences of other councils; a coordination
section whose task it will be (to the extent permitted by the necessities of the
struggle) to enrichen personal relationships, to radicalize the Fourierist project, to
take care of requirements of passional satisfaction, to equip individual desires, to
furnish whatever is necessary for experiments and adventures, to harmonize playful
possibilities of organizing necessary tasks (cleaning, babysitting, education, cooking
contests, etc.); and a self-defense section. Each section is responsible to the
full assembly; delegates regularly meet and report on their activities and are revocable
and subject to vertical and horizontal rotation.(3)
17
The logic of the commodity system, sustained by alienated practice, must be answered
with the practice immediately implied by the social logic of desires. The first
revolutionary measures will necessarily relate to reducing labor time and to the greatest
possible reduction of forced labor. The councils will naturally distinguish between priority
sectors (food, transportation, telecommunications, metallurgy, construction,
clothing, electronics, printing, armament, health care, comfort, and in general whatever
material equipment is necessary for the permanent transformation of historical
conditions); reconversion sectors, whose workers consider that they can detourn
them to revolutionary uses; and parasitical sectors, whose assemblies decide
purely and simply to suppress them. The workers of the eliminated sectors (administration,
bureaucratic agencies, spectacle production, purely commercial industries) will obviously
prefer to put in three or four hours a week at some work they have freely chosen from
among the priority sectors rather than eight hours a day at their old workplace. The
councils will experiment with attractive forms of carrying out necessary tasks, not in
order to hide their unpleasant aspects, but in order to compensate for such unpleasantness
with a playful organization of it, and as far as possible to eliminate such tasks in favor
of creativity (in accordance with the principle: “Work no, pleasure yes”). As
the transformation of the world comes to be identical with the construction of life,
necessary labor will disappear in the pleasure of history for itself.
18
To state that the councilist organization of distribution and production prevents
looting and the destruction of machinery and goods is still to remain within a purely
negative, antistate perspective. The councils, as organization of the new society, will
eliminate the element of separation still present in this negativity by means of a
collective politics of desires. Wage labor can be ended the moment the councils are set up, the
moment the “equipment and provisions” section of each council organizes
production and distribution in accordance with the desires of the plenary assembly. At
that point, in tribute to the best Bolshevik prediction, urinals can be made out of gold
and sterling silver, and dubbed “lenins.”(4)
19
Generalized self-management implies the extension of the councils. At first, work areas
will be taken over by the workers concerned, grouped in councils. In order to rid these
first councils of their corporative, guildlike aspect, the workers will as soon as
possible open them to their friends, to people living in the same neighborhood, and to
volunteers coming in from the parasitical sectors, so that they rapidly take the form of
local councils — which might themselves be grouped together in “Communes”
of more or less equal size (perhaps 8000 to 10,000 people?).
20
The internal extension of the councils must be matched by their geographical extension.
It will be necessary to vigilantly maintain the most complete radicality of the liberated
zones, without Fourier’s illusion as to the contageousness of the first communes, but
also without underestimating the seductiveness of any authentic experience of liberation
once the intervening veils of falsification have been swept aside. The councils’
self-defense thus illustrates the formula: “Armed truth is revolutionary.”
21
Generalized self-management will soon have its own code of possibilities,
designed to liquidate repressive legislation and its millennial domination. Perhaps it
will appear during a period of dual power, before the judicial machinery and the penal
system scum have been annihilated. The new “rights of man” —
everyone’s right to live as they please, to build their own house, to participate in
all assemblies, to arm themselves, to live as nomads, to publish what they think (to each
his or her own wall-newspaper), to love without restraints; the right to meet, the right to the
material equipment necessary for the realization of desires, the right to creativity, the
right to the conquest of nature, the end of commodity time, the end of history in itself,
the realization of art and the imagination, etc. — await their antilegislators.
RAOUL VANEIGEM
September 1969
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. generalized: The sense is total, unlimited
self-management: not the self-management of this or that sector of the existing
system, but self-management extended to every region and every aspect of life.
2. Watrinage: the practice of assassinating an
unpopular boss (from an engineer named Watrin who was killed by
striking French miners at the end of the nineteenth century).
On terrorism, see
Guy Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle; the last half of
Debord’s Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of “The Society of the
Spectacle”; and Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s On Terrorism and the State.
3. For a more extensive discussion of these issues by Vaneigem, see Total Self-Management.
4. “When we are victorious on a global scale I think we will
use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of
the largest cities. This would be the most ‘just’ and most educational way of
utilizing gold” (Lenin, “The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete
Victory of Socialism,” on the occasion of Russia’s return to the gold standard
in 1921).
“Avis aux civilisés relativement
à l’autogestion généralisée”
originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #12 (Paris,
September 1969). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the
Situationist
International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.
[Other Situationist Texts]
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