One day the government was having trouble with the people, so it decided to put the leaders in jail. But the trouble continued, it even got worse. The government, seeing the mistake of having left itself no one to bargain with, decided to return the leaders to the people, hoping to reestablish a normal situation. By that time the people had gotten used to the absence and paid no attention to them anyway. It was the beginning.
“A sedentary gathering of a few hundred youngsters in Washington Square grew into an impromptu march of a few thousand. . . . Afternoon traffic was slowed as the demonstrators chanted ‘the war is over,’ spun noise-makers and banged gaily on cars they stalled as they tramped down the middle of streets or crossed against lights. The tone of the five-hour affair was mainly cheerful. On the way up, the lighthearted demonstrators followed a young man in a brown cape who was carried on the shoulders of another young man. ‘I don’t know why they followed me,’ he said, ‘I guess they wanted leadership.’ ” (Thereby transforming his role of spontaneous leader, of gamester, into a leader with followers.) He was deposed on the way back, however, after he had shown respect for the Establishment’s police arm. He had led a “hip hip hooray” for the police. Then, to the obvious astonishment of the police, he had asked them which route they would prefer the marchers to take on the way back. “After obtaining a 215-pound volunteer to carry him back, the 121-pound leader took off at the head of the parade. But the marchers ignored his request that they follow this route. When last seen he was on foot and alone.” (New York Times, Nov. 26, 1967). That was also a beginning.
The philosophers have only interpreted (justified) the world in different ways; the point is to change it.
1. Nexus of Individual and Organization
Liberation is individual or it is nothing. The individual is the pivotal element for and of liberation. All organization is the negation of the individual first in that it creates something other than the individuals who come then to form its parts. That other, which is the product of common action, acquires life and, as life, endurance which wills itself as permanence. Society — and the organization that precedes it — outlives the individual. This biological detail is of immense social importance.
The problem is how to assure that the organization does not lead to a re-hierarchization of the world, but to its uninterrupted transformation. It can only be the basis for the new community, the new collectivity: it must be in incipient form that which is and prefigures the new relationships between individuals. Those relationships are, in effect, the forms at the level of daily life of the new collectivity.
No individual can be free unless the collectivity is free. And the collectivity can only be free if it is the free association of individuals. Man is a social animal. Individual freedom was always, historically, negated because the collectivity was organized concretely for the struggle against want, a primary fact which preempted the freedom of the individual, and made of it, at best, a paradise of the mind. The removal of forced labor from the realm of man will allow men to rediscover in their non-alienated forms the whole history of man’s past, to rediscover for instance nature or competition, to rediscover work. It is this liberation from the alienations of history which will constitute the end of history.
We must assume that the proliferation of individuals — of men whose consciousness has become conscious existence (and in this sense consciousness is really a minority problem) — will engender, by being the contradiction within the absolute and absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted transformation. The dialectics is not of history — much less of bourgeois history — but of life.
2. The Individual
Classical Liberalism defended the individual against the enveloping, undifferentiated collectivity — a weapon of the state — in the name of individualism, for the benefit of free-enterprise capitalism, where man is wolf to man, and all will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In individualism, freedom is conceived as a right of man not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself. It leads every man to see in other men the impediment, not the realization, of his own freedom. Murder is always incorporated.
The moment the individual, whose consciousness has become conscious existence, gives up his rebellion for the sake of organizational cohesiveness, nurses an unresolved opposition between members, he ceases to be an individual and is recuperated by the wiles of the old world. At root, we wish to break with these men who have forgotten their childhood, as the defenders of the old world have forgotten theirs. Who remember of it only the images that broke it, dominated it — who remember only the history of their adjustment to the enveloping and sterilized adult world.
There is no pleasure without pain. The old banalities return to us, but washed of their inversions. For when the world as it is now organized uses the line, it has in mind the permanence of pain, the endurance of suffering. The old man, leaning at the bridge, puffing eternally at his pipe, while the armies march forever by, the old man is patience, the only consolation. Pleasure appears as a streak, a break, a momentary usurpation that relieves and makes permanent the other. It gives birth to the sustaining visions of paradises lost. But the paradises are all and always of the mind. The lot of man, as you know, is to suffer. To repent. He killed his father, primal though he was. He murdered God. He cut off the king’s head. Visions and acts of liberation become domination. Life is this. People who do not laugh, for they are pensive, distant, contemplating with immeasurable sadness the laughter of their masks. Death, which comes to put an end to a long and productive life, becomes the ultimate injustice, the last straw.
A definition of production could be, that which has no beginning, knows no rest and has no end. For labor to be labor, it must be sustained: when labor retires, it is to die.
Yet, man is joy. A joy lost now between the hours when sleep is no longer sleep and not quite waking, it is the imaginings of childhood, the fantasies of man awake. It is imagination constructing and dissolving secret worlds, creativity sealed in characters in a book, stone on churchwall, area between the ears. Man as joy is man at play. And yet play, colonized in that it comes out in manners selected, allowed by the world, feeds the continuation of the world as it is. Play is creativity that knows rest, that knows silence and ends — that experiences time as something other than that true image of the assembly line: the endless circularity of the Swiss clock, the non-ending line in the perverted image of a cycle.
What we aim at, beyond want and external compulsion, is the play of life itself, the manifestation of freedom. The problem is individual as consciousness of its need, it is collective for its resolution: the one passes through the other, and lies already imbedded in the other. The aim is also the weapon. The collectivity — be it now community or nation — as suppression of the individual is ideology (mystification) at the service of the prevailing organization of life.
* * *
Many a man senses the poverty of existence, feels the wrong that haunts him, but at no point is the sense grasped, nowhere does it emerge into consciousness as a condition he is subject to. The grasping here is not the intellectual handling of ideas about a condition. Many (nearly all who think within the socialist perspective) are aware of such ideas. But the poverty of existence has not emerged into consciousness as their condition, the wrong is not to them (it is the humanist syndrome: which is always the concern for the other man’s sty). After all, they have fair jobs, or jobs they like, or women they love, or goods for consumption, or all these things. It is for them a general condition, undifferentiated, vague, a problem for the collectivity, which means other men, always. They themselves are free as the blown ashes.
When the unbearable poverty of existence emerges as the poverty of one’s own existence, when the condition ceases to be undifferentiated and becomes personal, consciousness as conscious existence expresses and founds the concretion of the general condition.
Consciousness as conscious existence, in becoming awareness of the poverty of existence — of each individual deprived of the possibility of being a man — becomes the expression of the desire for its transcendence — becomes desire for life — and joins play then not as diversion but as fundamental expression of becoming man.
I seek another, seek from another the recognition which is the verification of my own authenticity. And the recognition is mutual — the recognition I seek I find also in my myself as verification of the other.
The individual is not a static point, a level attained from which there is no departure. He is a process, and in that is a becoming, that only expresses itself in becoming. As people change — and they never fail to change — the conditions for recognition change. Recognition itself is not an abstract relation established between two other abstractions, even if these were called “living individualities.” The struggle is always to transcendence. Being is becoming, is movement.
Our thoughts, words, our actions bring us together and separate us. Communication permits as it were the ongoing recognition necessary between us. The foundation of communication is transparency. Fundamentally, transparency is to say, to express, everything. It becomes crucial when differences — oppositions — between individuals emerge. It is openness practiced, assumed both from oneself and from all others. This, used by a clarified consciousness (no longer mystified), is the most potent weapon against the wiles of the old world, the one confronted at the level of daily life.
But as the individual is not in isolation, neither are the individuals. We live — oppressive mundanity — in a bourgeois environment, every day, even through the hours of our sleep. We are in the atmosphere of the dwindling force of cognition — the progressive inability of the bourgeois world to deal with the truth, which also expresses its desire to actively conceal it. This relation to truth introduces a profound uneasiness, which is the subterranean awareness, the feeling that all is lie and dissimulation. (It finds its artistic expression in all the artists who see a crisis of all communication in the crisis of communication in the bourgeois world.) That crisis is its inability to tell and to face the truth: fundamentally, that it is passing. For the bourgeois world like any other cannot conceive of its passing, which it otherwise knows must be.
Communication among individuals who have become aware of their separation from the enveloping reality becomes complicated in that they are not isolated from its influence. It is not enough for one to recognize another once and for all, for the recognition can be subverted — and nothing subverts like reality, living experience. Transparency as weapon is also the end.
The invisible insurrection of a million minds is not enough: for they must pass to action, they must engage — and be engaged by — the real world. It is at this level — beyond mutual affirmation and as its expression — that the minds, become individuals, must organize.
3. Organization
The organization must create from the start the conditions for its development and its supersession at every phase. Not only one but several — many — organizations can function on this basis: but they are one in reality, that is, beyond appearance (the manner in which things exist).
The dwindling force of cognition — which is materially founded and maintained by the prevailing commodity economy, where men have materially based reasons for being incapable of seeking the truth as well as engage in the active concealment of it — also disappears as an element within the organization. (His position, as ace in the hole, within the bourgeois world does not fail at some point to engage Marcuse (an accomplished dialectician) in the dwindling force of cognition. It is not accidental that he turns at the end of One Dimensional Man to a technological gradualism, an intensification of the prevailing direction of technology over life — a revolution by the technocrats, no doubt? — as the element for the qualitative transformation of the world. It is an extension of the socialist perspective: he also has lost the proletariat; that is, the effective negation of this development. He says somewhere that an analysis which is not predicated on the possibility of its supersession, defines itself in terms of established domination. And so it is with him.)
The organization achieves a relation to all things which is determined purely by content: in accordance with its particular layout it already combats formalism and schematism and insists on the equal rights of all available means of expression. Talent calls talent.
Free expression of opinion replaces the “internal” discussions (all differences are brought outside and publicly clarified: all elements of differences between individuals are made accessible to all concerned) and replaces also the voting bound up with factions, the bureaucratic wangling, maneuvering, frauds and disciplinary proceedings. The sole compulsion derives from the conscience of the individual who is prepared to stand up for his views and actions — and change his mind, or change the minds of those around him — but who no longer knows the ridiculous fear of loss of prestige associated with concern for the maintenance of his position, his role, his mask.
The organization does away with all barriers between it and the environment and shapes with complete transparency for every man both its relations to society and its internal mechanism. Such a transparency, real, factual, immediately entering into consciousness, of all relations is only possible where commodity economy has ceased to exist with equal reality, factualness, immediacy.
The elimination of the universally enslaving commodity economy is a strategic goal of humanity — the organization accordingly enters everywhere into the generally desired dissolution of the existing conditions and is a day-to-day example of the transformation of society as a whole.
The organization which desires to alter conditions that have become unbearable cannot take a single practical step with revolutionizing the ruling conceptions that have also become unbearable, without, that is, disclosing the dependence of the intellectual on the material misery.
To accomplish its task, the organization needs the expression and elaboration of theory. In order to prevent that the expression coming from the organization become the property of the organization, it is necessary that the theory maintain the character of pure utility and that the writers not hesitate to destroy the relations of property between one another or between themselves and other writers (in the past or present) by incorporating thoughts, expressions, no matter how long, without hesitating to change their meaning in current texts, and fail to give proper “credits” (acknowledge property rights). In other words, that it practice the anticopyright with all writing — with all means of expression. Plagiarism — which is to steal the products of another individual’s spirit, imagination — establishes within man the permanence of the prevailing property relations.
The organization that dissolves the commodity economy within itself reintroduces in daily life that which in the bourgeois world (for daily life is bourgeois dominated) has an equivalent for all values, all quality — money. There is a quantity of it that will buy health, art, love, a quantity for friendship, and one that will make friends of enemies. Money is the supreme quantifier of all relationships after all relations have been reduced to relations between commodities.
The need for money is the real need created by the economic system, and the only need it creates (it is only through money that other needs become real). Money, which has the appearance of a means, is the real power and unique end. It is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has therefore deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him. The more you have, the less you are.
Neither the individual nor the organization can escape into relations that are not at some point penetrated by the mediatory powers of money. Its concrete elimination lies in the relation one establishes consciously with it in order to explode its content.
There must be absolutely no attempt at accumulation in order to put money to work making money. Money must always be at the service of the expression of the play of the individuals at grips with the old world, who make of play the center from which they activate and are activated.
* * *
It is commonly felt — and thought — that under capitalist conditions the masses are excluded from theoretical understanding and that therefore it can only be grasped by them or penetrate their consciousness as a practical movement. As the struggle takes shape more clearly, we will only have to observe what is happening and make ourselves vehicles of its expression.
But we must recognize that the differences in natural talents between individuals are in reality much less than we believe. About such differences, Adam Smith says that they are not so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor. To which Marx added concretely that in principle there is less difference between a sailor and a philosopher than between a watchdog and a greyhound. It is the need for individualization and quality production that will end mass life.
The intellectual tends to mystify understanding, as being simply the handling of notional relations, abstractly. Perceiving a need for “understanding” by, say, workers or students, he thinks they cannot understand as he does (a fair assumption), therefore he must reduce, simplify, come to the level of their ability to perceive in his manner. No such massification must take place. The intellectual also is subject to the practical movement that has to penetrate his consciousness in order for him to grasp — and be grasped by — the reality he has only been trying to explain.
Within the practical movement necessary, conceived here as quality that transforms consciousness, lies concealed the quantity of experience — of activity — that allows this or that individual to make the qualitative leap that transforms any level of understanding into cohesive perception and consciousness as conscious existence. Consciousness is a minority problem: it is fundamentally an individual problem arising out of the interaction between the general (say, generally, social conditions) and the particular (each individual).
The participation of the organization in practical activity, its presence in the world, is also its presence in the minds of men. They can witness its theory and practice. It is each man therefore who decides to enter into a dialogue — at the level of an exchange of views — with a number of individuals already in the organization. It is the result of this dialogue which shows him and those already within the organization if the consciousness is shared. This is the problem and the act of recognition. Once this recognition has been established, it must be maintained with transparency (the foundation of communication among individuals). If differences appear — and the course of reality will see that differences do appear — they are either:
1) simple error, misunderstandings, which the ongoing transparency of relations will quickly correct; or
2) antagonisms that reveal real opposition and therefore the need for a new transcendence on both sides. For one or several individuals of the organization to be cast into the void by exclusion, for recognition to cease, in effect, is really to cast the whole organization into the void over an unresolved opposition — opposition merely suppressed by suppressing the individual or individuals that bring it about.
Whoever wills to maintain an opposition, on the other hand, chooses to close off communication, to end the transparency of relations, and so eliminates the condition for his continued association with the organization. Since all differences emerge into the open (the public), this separation would be self-evident.
The organization is the weapon for the effective negation of class-society; the combined action of individuals. It has no formal power over the individual.
* * *
It has been suggested that a truly “democratic” organization would allow the masses to enter at any time and take over the organization: determine its practical as well as its theoretical content. However, the mass penetrating as mass (as undifferentiated individuals) subverts because it brings to the organization a false consciousness, which is consciousness mystified (dominated by the old world). In the name of democracy — rule by the mass, one of the most powerful illusions of the modern world — one would allow the practical directions and the theoretical content of the organization to be returned to the old world, and appropriated.
This penetration by the mass was felt to be another safeguard against the hierarchical party structure, as well as the condition for its removal. Many revolutionaries of the past 70 years or so saw the revolutionary aims of parties subverted by their hierarchical structures, and the anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic unions subverted by an absence (if not a specific renunciation) of revolutionary aims. And then, there were certain examples, certain Workers Councils that — with the union structure — had been involved in the best revolutionary moments of the past century. (It should be noted that a dissolutive element present at the very beginning of some of these was that political parties were represented as other unions. Represented at the level of individual representatives of labor were political weapons (parties), representing the attempt to appropriate the political power of the individual representatives.) The problem arose out of thought over the problem of the administration of things.
The Seattle General Strike is informative. Briefly, the union bureaucrats were all off to Chicago (to debate another General Strike that never came off). There had been no general strike before, there were no concrete organizational (managerial) lines laid out to follow. This was — despite ideas about general strikes that were in the air of the time — uninitiated experience. The unions (craft unions, this was the AFL, mostly) elected three representatives each, who then formed the General Strike Committee (an Assembly, or if you will, a Workers Council). They immediately discovered the syndrome of large bodies — impediment to swift action — and made subcommittees. Here then were the uninitiated, the age-old dumb workers: in a few days they were confronted with and solved the problems of the administration of the city. The strike merely lasted a week: but the time involved here is not what matters, similar structures elsewhere and under more arduous conditions lasted much longer. The problem is not to continue administration, but to initiate it effectively. They initiated, and without waste. It was essentially the same union-based structure that made the anarchists function throughout the civil war in Spain. Here, then — in degrees varying from a nonrevolutionary week in time of peace, to the duration of the war in Spain — were the dumb, anti-hierarchical, anti-bureaucratic workers dismantling the myth of all the bureaucracies: that effective management is not only the kingdom of the bureaucrat, the functionary, but it takes the bureaucrat to even think up and solve the problems of management, the problems of administration. This problem — of the administration of things — is a false problem: it is not a problem.
The real problem for us who have the trade union movement experience (revolutionary or not) as history, as knowledge, is the problem of individuation: the conditions for the emergence of each man as free subjectivity.
The safeguard against subversion by the masses as masses is the mutual recognition of individuals, it is selection that is self-selection. But the growth of the organization — in confrontation with the old world, in the mundane everyday — the conditions for the “mass” taking over would be found again in the increasing moments of change that lead to the qualitative leap we commonly call the revolutionary moment: but the mass would penetrate as individuals and it would be high time for them to take over what then would really have become a common struggle.
We know that the proliferation of individuals — of men whose consciousness has become conscious existence — will engender, by being the contradiction within the absolute and absolutely old world, a qualitative leap into its uninterrupted transformation.
* * *
We apprehend the future through the distorting-mirror of what is to be destroyed in the present. Every projection into the future is in a sense a prolongation of the past. Every Utopia less a construction of the future than an elimination of the evils of the present as mere negation, prolonged in time, and thereby fixed: reified. Everything must be destroyed which is construed as impediment, whether an old building, an old city or an old work of art, not to speak of an old civilization. There is no destruction which does not also construct: but what elicits the construction is the destruction itself. The supersession of a condition is not the apprehension of its need in thought. It is only the conscious action of men upon the world which ultimately transforms it.
ROBERT CHASSE
April 1968
