"The Privatisation of Stress", by Mark Fisher from Soundings magazine

Ivor Southwood tells the story of how, at a time when he was living in a condition of underemployment - relying on short-term contracts given to him at the last minute by employment agencies - he one morning made the mistake of going to the supermarket.¹ When he returned home he found that an agency had left him a message offering him work for the day. But when he called the agency he was told that the vacancy was already filled - and upbraided for his slackness. As he comments, `ten minutes is a luxury the day-labourer cannot afford’. Such labourers are expected to be waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning without fail (p72). In such conditions:

daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of `occupation’: all
belong to another historical world (p15).

It is hardly surprising that people who live in such conditions - where their hours and pay can always be increased or decreased, and their terms of employment are extremely tenuous - should experience anxiety, depression and hopelessness. And it may at first seem remarkable that so many workers have been persuaded to accept such deteriorating conditions as `natural’, and to look inward - into their brain chemistry or into their personal history - for the sources of any stress they may be feeling. But in the ideological field that Southwood describes from the inside, this privatisation of stress has become just one more taken-for-granted dimension of a seemingly depoliticised world. `Capitalist realism’ is the term I have used to describe this ideological field; and the privatisation of stress has played a crucial role in its emergence.²

Capitalist realism refers to the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism - though `belief’ is perhaps a misleading term, given that its logic is externalised in the institutional practices of workplaces and the media as well as residing in the heads of individuals. In his discussions of ideology, Althusser cites Pascal’s doctrine: `Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’: psychological beliefs follow from `going through the motions’ of complying with official languages and behaviours. This means that, however much individuals or groups may have disdained or ironised the language of competition, entrepreneurialism and consumerism that has been installed in UK institutions since the 1980s, our widespread ritualistic compliance with this terminology has served to naturalise the dominance of capital and help to neutralise any opposition to it.

We can quickly grasp the form that capitalist realism now takes by reflecting on the shift in the meaning of the famous Thatcher doctrine that `there is no alternative’. When Thatcher initially made this notorious claim, the emphasis was on preference: neoliberal capitalism was the best possible system; the alternatives were undesirable. Now, the claim carries an ontological weight - capitalism is not just the best possible system, it is the only possible system; alternatives are hazy, spectral, barely conceivable. Since 1989, capitalism’s success in routing its opponents has led to it coming close to achieving the ultimate goal of ideology:

invisibility. In the global North at least, capitalism proposes itself as the only possible reality, and therefore it seldom `appears’ as such at all. Atilio Boron argues that capitalism has been shifted to a `discreet position behind the political scene, rendered invisible as the structural foundation of contemporary society’, and cites Bertolt Brecht’s observation that `capitalism is a gentleman who doesn’t like to be called by his name’.³

The depressing realism of New Labour

We would expect the Thatcherite (and post-Thatcherite) right to propagate the idea that there is no alternative to the neoliberal programme. But the victory of capitalist realism was only secured in the UK when the Labour Party capitulated to this view, and accepted, as the price of power, that `business interests, narrowly conceived, would be henceforth be allowed to organise the shape and direction of the entire culture’.⁴ But perhaps it would be more accurate to record that, rather than simply capitulating to Thatcherite capitalist realism, it was the Labour Party itself that first introduced capitalist realism to the UK political mainstream, when James Callaghan gave his notorious 1976 speech to the Labour conference in Blackpool:

For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we [have] postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our economy ... We’ve been living on borrowed time ... The cosy world we were told would go on forever, where full employment could be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor’s pen - that cosy world is gone ...

However it is unlikely that Callaghan foresaw the extent to which the Labour Party would come to engage in the politics of `corporate appeasement’, or the extent to which the cosy world for which he was performing the last rites would be replaced by the generalised insecurity described by Ivor Southwood.

The Labour Party’s acquiescence in capitalist realism cannot of course be construed as a simple error: it was a consequence of the disintegration of the left’s old power base in the face of the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism. The features of this - globalisation; the displacement of manufacturing by computerisation; the casualisation of labour; the intensification of consumer culture - are now so familiar that they, too, have receded into a taken-for-granted background. This is what constitutes the background for the ostensibly post-political and uncontestable `reality’ that capitalist realism relies upon. The warnings made by Stuart Hall and the others writing in Marxism Today at the end of the 1980s turned out to be absolutely correct: the left would face obsolescence if it remained complacently attached to the assumptions of the disappearing Fordist world and failed to hegemonise the new world of post-Fordism.⁵ But the New Labour project, far from being an attempt to achieve this new hegemony, was based precisely on conceding the impossibility of a leftist hegemonisation of post-Fordism: all that could be hoped for was a mitigated version of the neoliberal settlement.

In Italy autonomists such as Berardi and Negri also recogised the need to face up to the destruction of the world within which the left had been formed, and to adapt to the conditions of post-Fordism, though in rather a different manner. Writing in the 1980s, in a series of letters that were recently published in English, Negri characterises the painful transition from revolutionary hopes to defeat by a triumphalist neoliberalism:

We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected ... The very blood in our veins had been replaced.⁶

We are currently living with the effects of the left’s failure to rise to the challenge that Negri identified. And it doesn’t seem a stretch to conjecture that many elements of the left have succumbed to a collective form of clinical depression, with symptoms of withdrawal, impaired motivation and the inability to act.

One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal: the conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming `realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism.

This depression was not experienced collectively: on the contrary, it precisely took the form of the decomposition of collectivity in new modes of atomisation. Denied the stable forms of employment that they had been trained to expect, deprived of the solidarity formerly provided by trade unions, workers found themselves forced into competition with one another on an ideological terrain in which such competition was naturalised. Some workers never recovered from the traumatic shock of seeing the Fordist-social-democratic world suddenly removed: a fact it’s worth remembering at a time when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is hounding claimants off Incapacity Benefit. Such a move is the culmination of the process of privatising stress that began in the UK in the 1980s.

The stresses of post-Fordism

If the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism had its psychic casualties, then post-Fordism has innovated whole new modes of stress. Instead of the elimination of bureaucratic red tape promised by neoliberal ideologues, the combination of new technology and managerialism has massively increased the administrative stress placed on workers, who are now required to be their own auditors (which by no means frees them of the attentions of external auditors of many kinds). Work, no matter how casual, now routinely entails the performance of meta-work: the completion of log books, the detailing of aims and objectives, the engagement in so-called `continuing professional development’. Writing of academic labour, the blogger `Savonarola’ describes how systems of permanent and ubiquitous measurement engender a constant state of anxiety:

One of the more pervasive phenomena in the current cod-neoliberal academic dispensation is CV inflation: as available jobs dwindle down to Kafkian levels of postponement and implausibility, the miserable Träger of academic capital are obliged not just to overfulfil the plan, but to record ... every single one of their productive acts. The only sins are sins of omission ... In this sense, the passage from ... periodic and measured measurement ... to permanent and ubiquitous measurement cannot but result in a kind of Stakhanovism of immaterial labour, which like its Stalinist forebear exceeds all rationales of instrumentality, and cannot but generate a permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety (since there is no standard, no amount of work will ever make you safe).⁷

It would be naive to imagine that this `permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety’ is an accidental side-effect of the imposition of these self-surveillance mechanisms, which manifestly fail to achieve their official objectives. None other than Philip Blond has argued that `the market solution generates a huge and costly bureaucracy of accountants, examiners, inspectors, assessors and auditors, all concerned with assuring quality and asserting control that hinder innovation and experiment and lock in high cost’.⁸ This acknowledgement is welcome, but it is important to reject the idea that the apparent `failures’ of managerialism are `honest mistakes’ of a system which sincerely aims for greater efficiency. Managerialist initiatives served very well their real if covert aims, which were to further weaken the power of labour and undermine worker autonomy as part of a project to restore wealth and power to the hyper-privileged.

Relentless monitoring is closely linked to precarity. And, as Tobias van Veen argues, precarious work places `an ironic yet devastating’ demand on the labourer. On the one hand work never ends: the worker is always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life. On the other hand the precariat are completely expendable, even when they have sacrificed all autonomy to keep their jobs.<sup>9</sup>
The tendency today is for practically all forms of work to become precarious. As Franco Berardi puts it, `Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers’.¹⁰ Such `packets of time’ are not conceived of as having a connection to a person with rights or demands: they are simply either available or unavailable.

Berardi also notes the effects of digital telecommunications; these produce what he characterises as a diffuse sense of panic, as individuals are subjected to an unmanageable data-blitz:

The acceleration of information exchange ... is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to consciously process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious (p40).

One of the effects of modern communications technology is that there is no outside where one can recuperate. Cyberspace makes the concept of a `workplace’ archaic. Now that one can be expected to respond to an email at practically any time of the day, work cannot be confined to a particular place, or to delimited hours. There’s no escape - and not only because work expands without limits. Such processes have also hacked into libido, so that the `tethering’ imposed by digital telecommunications is by no means always experienced as something that is straightforwardly unpleasant. As Sherry Turkle argues, for example, though many parents are increasingly stressed as they try to keep up with e-mail and messages while continuing to give their children the attention they need, they are also magnetically attracted to their communications technology:

They cannot take a vacation without bringing the office with them; their office is on their cellphone. They complain that their employers rely on them to be continually online but then admit that their devotion to their communications devices exceeds all professional expectations.¹¹

Practices ostensibly undertaken for work, even if they are performed on holiday or late at night, are not experienced simply as unreasonable demands. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it is easy to see why such demands - demands that cannot possibly be met - can be libidinised, since this kind of demand is precisely the form that the psychoanalytic drive assumes. Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by (Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist.¹² The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car. At the risk of a laboured pun, this is a perfect example of death drive, which is defined not by the desire to die, but by being in the grip of a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death. What’s remarkable here is the banal content of the drive. This isn’t the tragedy of something like The Red Shoes, in which the ballerina is killed by the sublime rapture of dance: these are people who are prepared to risk death so that they can open a 140 character message which they know perfectly well is likely to be inane.

Public renewal or private cure?

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. Dan Hind has argued that the focus on serotonin deficiency as a supposed `cause’ of depression obfuscates some of the social roots of unhappiness, such as competitive individualism and income inequality. Though there is a large body of work that shows the links between individual happiness and political participation and extensive social ties (as well as broadly equal incomes), a public response to private distress is rarely considered as a first option.<sup>13</sup> It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised. Meanwhile, as Hind argues, `there is a multitude of entrepreneurs offering happiness now, in just a few simple steps’. These are marketed by people `who are comfortable operating within the culture’s account of what it is to be happy and fulfilled’, and who both corroborate and are corroborated by `the vast ingenuity of commercial persuasion’.

Psychiatry’s pharmacological regime has been central to the privatisation of stress, but it is important that we don’t overlook the perhaps even more insidious role that the ostensibly more holistic practices of psychotherapy have also played in depoliticising distress. The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’.<sup>14</sup> Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’ (p7).

The propagation of magical voluntarism has been crucial to the success of neoliberalism; we might go so far as to say as it constitutes something like the spontaneous ideology of our times. Thus, for example, ideas from self-help therapy have become very influential in popular television shows.¹⁵ The Oprah Winfrey Show is probably the best-known example, but in the UK programmes such as Mary, Queen of Shops and The Fairy Jobmother explicitly promote magical voluntarism’s psychic entrepreneurialism: these programmes assure us that the fetters on our productive potentials lie within us. If we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct ourselves.

The privatisation of stress has been part of a project that has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public - the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organised around the problem of public space. In its break from the old stalinist left, the various new lefts wanted a debureaucratised public space and
worker autonomy: what they got was managerialism and shopping. The current political situation in the UK - with business and its allies gearing up for a destruction of the relics of social democracy - constitutes a kind of infernal inversion of the autonomist dream of workers liberated from the state, bosses and bureaucracy. In a staggeringly perverse twist, workers find themselves working harder, in deteriorating conditions and for what is in effect worse pay, in order to fund a state bail-out of the business elite, while the agents of that elite plot the further destruction of the public services on which workers depend.

At the same time as a discredited neoliberalism plots this intensification of its project, a kind of right-wing autonomism has emerged in Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism and Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labourism. Here the critique of social-democratic and neoliberal bureaucracy goes alongside the call for a restitution of tradition. Neoliberalism’s success depended on its capturing of the desires of workers who wanted to escape the strictures of Fordism (though the miserable individualist consumerism in which we are all now immersed is not the alternative they sought). Blond’s laughable `Big Society’ and Glasman’s disturbingly insular `white working-class’ `communities’ do not represent persuasive or credible responses to this problem. Capital has annihilated the traditions that Blond and Glasman hanker after,
and there is no bringing them back.

But this should not be a cause for lament; far from it. What we need to revive is not social formations that failed (and failed for reasons that progressives should be pleased about), but a political project that never really happened: the achievement of a democratic public sphere. Even in Blond’s work, the lineaments of a hegemonic shift can be discerned - in his startling repudiation of the core concepts of neoliberalism and his attack on managerialism; and in the concession that, contra Thatcher, it turns out that there is such a thing as society after all. Such moves give some indication of the extent to which - after the bank bail-outs - neoliberalism has radically lost credibility.

The recent upsurge in militancy in the UK, particularly amongst the young, suggests that the privatisation of stress is breaking down: in place of a medicated individual depression, we are now seeing explosions of public anger. Here, and in the largely untapped but massively widespread discontent with the managerialist regulation of work, lie some of the materials out of which a new leftist modernism can be built. Only this leftist modernism is capable of constructing a public sphere which can cure the numerous pathologies with which communicative capitalism afflicts us.

This article is from issue 48 of the journal Soundings and is exclusively available online at NLP.

Mark Fisher writes regularly for frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths,  University Of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org).

Notes
1. Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia, Zer0 2010.
2. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 2009.
3. Atilio Boron, `The Truth About Capitalist Democracy’, Socialist Register 2006, p32.
4. As argued by Jeremy Gilbert in, `Elitism, Philistinism and Populism: the Sorry State of British Higher Education Policy’, 2010, opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom.
5. See Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, Lawrence & Wishart 1989.
6. Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, Polity 2010, p10.
7. Savonarola, `Curriculum mortis’, conjunctural.blogspot.com/2008/08/curriculum-mortis.html, 2008.
8. Phillip Blond, The Ownership State: Restoring Excellence, Innovation and Ethos to Public Services, ResPublica/Nesta 2009, p10.
9. Tobias van Veen, `Business Ontology (or why Xmas Gets You Fired)’, 2010, fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/2009/12/business-ontology/.
10. Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, Minor Compositions 2009, p32.
11. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other¸ Basic 2011, p264.
12. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Polity 2010.
13. See Dan Hind, The Return of the Public, Verso 2010, p146.
14. David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress, PCCS 2009, p11.
15. See Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity 2007.

To Everyone Feeling Screwed Over by the Economy! Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Population, Society, Village Development — by Kyle Chamberlain

To everyone feeling screwed over by the economy,

We are told that our problem is that there aren’t enough jobs. This message is everywhere. The media gauges our plight with regularly updated unemployment statistics. Politicians debate theatrically over who can create more work. People everywhere clamor for scarce positions at factories and corporations.

I’d like to point out the great irony of this situation — people hate their jobs. How many people do you know who love their job? The truth is, most of us who have ordinary jobs can barely tolerate them. All else being equal, we’d rather not do them.

Work ethic is something this society takes pride in. But, if we are honest, we will confess that we call ourselves ‘hard working’ primarily to rationalize the daily abuses, deprivations, and indignities of the workplace. Work ethic is the only ethic most of us satisfy at our jobs. I think we can agree that most of our jobs aren’t making the world a better place.

So here we are, bickering and begging to fill roles we hate.

We should remember, that ‘employed’ is just another word for ‘used’. Just as you might employ a hammer and nails, your employer employs, or uses, you. The term ‘used’ very aptly describes our relationship with our employers. Like prostitutes, we resign ourselves to fake relationships for an empty cash return. In a healthy relationship, our devotions are reciprocated in kind. But in a relationship of use and abuse, the best you can expect is a cash settlement.

It should not surprise us, then, that politicians and other powerful people will laud our enthusiasm for employment and champion that cause. To the elite, unemployment is a crises because it means that the population is insufficiently used. An unused population is unprofitable, and potentially unruly. So, when the wealthy come to our rescue, they do it with jobs. As the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation slogan goes, "We believe that all people deserve the chance to lead healthy productive lives." (emphasis mine)

Employment has become almost inseparable from other values like responsibility and human welfare. In our culture, promoting employment has become synonymous with supporting families, communities, and countries. At a time when we are so utterly reliant on employment and the economy for our survival, being anti-job is like being anti-life. Who but the laziest and most unrealistic sort of hippie would oppose jobs?

But let us not forget; people were not always so dependent on employment or the economy for survival. In fact, we’ve been hunter/gatherers for most of our existence. Money, the economy, and even farming are relatively recent contrivances. We made them up. And, until very recent history, jobs were merely part of a mixed strategy used by families to make a living. Hunting, gathering, gardening, crafting, gifting, cooperation, trade, and self-employment, are all perfectly viable ways to make a living. Our grandparents recognized that money wasn’t always the most effective way to meet a need. Living by paycheck alone was a thing for the urban wealthy.

At periods in history, it’s been possible for some people to use currency to maintain an affluence disproportionate to the real value of their work. We may be nearing the close of such a period. Unfortunately, alternatives to employment are growing scarce.

It’s not something taught in history class, but our reliance on employment stems ultimately from the destruction and monopolization of our environment. People once relied exclusively on free natural resources. The trend toward universal employment has followed in lock step with the destruction of those resources. When the things we need are no longer freely available in nature, we’re forced to labor at ever more complicated and dubious methods of resource extraction. The story of our culture’s relationship with American Indians and other indigenous cultures, illustrates the common pattern.

My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams. You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair? — Smohala, Wanapum spiritual leader, 1851

Time and time again, indigenous resistance to work, as we know it, only broke when traditional resources failed.

My people did not farm and had no use for crops until the salmon runs began to disappear from the streams and rivers. White activities causing pollution, and commercial fishing projects were the cause of this. Every year, the Colville found fewer salmon to take, not enough to live on, and so began to farm to stay alive. Finally, dams were built on the Columbia and the salmon were stopped altogether from coming above Grand Coulee. The salmon were gone, and high powered rifles are doing about the same to our game animals. By the time we saw the need to farm, the younger generations realized their ancestors had let the whites have the richest and most fertile bottomland. And it was too late to get it back. — Mourning Dove, Colville author, 1888-1936

The indigenous haven’t been the only people forced to deal with resource destruction and monopolization. Corporations and governments are actively marginalizing our access to clean water, healthy food, safe shelter, and social support. All of these things, once provided freely by our environment, are now increasingly expensive.

It’s not just our physical environment that is being destroyed. Our social and psychological environments are also under attack. Economic pressures, advertising, and propaganda have undermined the self-reliance of families and communities. Perhaps the ultimate victory of consumerism is that many people have lost their ability to find meaning outside of work. Many people will tell you they simply wouldn’t know how to spend their time without a job. Can they really see no higher value in their lives? Without respect for ourselves, and the support of others, there’s no climbing out of this abusive system.

The influence of the world’s powerful minority should not be underestimated. But those of us in privileged countries need to understand that this economic ‘crisis’ is largely due to the world, and perhaps mother nature herself, finally calling our bluff. The fact that our economic prosperity can falter so rapidly is proof that our wealth is not based on the real value of our work, but our success in a deceptive and exploitative game. We owe our declining wealth to mountains of debt and our lucky political position, and we’ve milked them for all they’re worth. We’ve been cheating people out of real value, for novelties and speculation, since the fur trade era. And now, bubbles are bursting.

Our way of life has also depended on finite fossil energy resources. This is not to mention threatened soils, waters, and forests. And the world is getting more crowded. It might be time to figure out what it actually looks like to live within our means.

But let’s be clear. We don’t need more jobs. We need access to the basics of survival. We don’t need more money. We need to heal our environment. We don’t need employers to keep us busy. We need time to make our communities into healthy habitats for people again.

The less we participate in this abusive economy, the better. 10% unemployment is deplorable. We need 90% unemployment. If we really resent this system, let’s earn less, buy less, and own less. Let’s invest our time, energy, and resources in things that can’t be taxed or parisitized by corporations. Let’s deal not in dollars, but in energy, nutrients, materials, local currencies, and relationships. Let’s not expand, let’s stabilize. Let’s enjoy art, culture, and leisure. Perhaps we can topple the pyramid by shrinking the bottom.

Our work is this: We’ve got to make clean water available wherever rain falls. We’ve got to make food grow so rampantly that you can’t give it away. We need to build affordable and debt free housing. We need to start creating opportunities where we live so we don’t have to drive. We need to wrest control of land and resources away from powerful minorities. We need integrative, sustainable methods for managing land. We need to ranch in a way that makes game more abundant. We need to farm in a way that makes forests grow. We need to use energy in a way that generates peace and stability. We need to strengthen our social bonds.

If you still have a job, get everything in order, and quit. Do it as soon as you can, because we’ve never had a more important work to do. 

article source: http://permaculture.org.au/2012/02/10/to-everyone-feeling-screwed-over-by-the-economy 

Editor’s Note: If you enjoy the article below, and you missed Kyle’s past 3-part series, amongst others, be sure to check them out! (Part I, Part II, and Part III.)

The Minimum Definition of Intelligence (Theses on the Construction of One’s Own Self-theory) by For Ourselves

This booklet is for people who are dissatisfied with their lives. If you are happy with your present existence, we have no argument with you. However, if you are tired of waiting for your life to change...

Tired of waiting for authentic community, love and adventure...
Tired of waiting for the end of money and forced work...
Tired of looking for new pastimes to pass the time...
Tired of waiting for a lush, rich existence... Tired of waiting for a situation in which you can realise all your desires...
Tired of waiting for the end of all authorities, alienations, ideologies and moralities...
...then we think you’ll find what follows to be quite handy.

I

One of the great secrets of our miserable yet potentially marvellous time is that thinking can be a pleasure. This is a manual for constructing your own self-theory. Constructing your self-theory is a revelutionary pleasure, the pleasure of constructing your self-theory of revolution.

Building your self-theory is a destructive/constructive pleasure, because you are building a theory-of-practice for the destructive/constructive transformation of this society.

Self-theory is a theory of adventure. It is as erotic and humorous as an authentic revolution.

The alienation felt as a result of having had your thinking done for you by the ideologies of our day, can lead to the search for the pleasurable negation of that alienation: thinking for yourself. It is the pleasure of making your mind your own.

Self-theory is the body of critical thought you construct for your own use. You construct it and use it when you make an analysis of why your life is the way it is, why the world is the way it is. (And ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ are inseparable, since thought comes from subjective, emotive experience.) You build your self-theory when you develop a theory of practice — a theory of how to get what you desire for your life.

Theory will be either a practical theory — a theory of revolutionary practice — or it will be nothing... nothing but an aquarium of ideas, a contemplative interpretation of the world. The realm of ideals is the eternal waiting-room of unrealised desire.

Those who assume (usually unconsciously) the impossibility of realising their life’s desires, and of thus fighting for themselves, usually end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead (i.e., the illusion of selfactivity or self-practice). Those who know that this is the acceptance of alienation will now know that all ideals and causes are ideologies.

II

Whenever a system of ideas is structured with an abstraction at the centre — assigning a role or duties to you for its sake — this system is an ideology. An ideology is a system of false consciousness in which you no longer function as the subject in your relation to the world.

The various forms of ideology are all structured around different abstractions, yet they all serve the interests of a dominant (or aspiring dominant) class by giving you a sense of purpose in your sacrifice, suffering and submission.

Religious ideology is the oldest example, the fantastic projection called ‘God’ is the Supreme Subject of the cosmos, acting on every human being as ‘His’ subject.

In the ‘scientific’ and ‘democratic’ ideologies of bourgeois enterprise, capital investment is the ‘productive’ subject directing world history — the ‘invisible hand’ guiding human development. The bourgeoisie had to attack and weaken the power that religious ideology once held. It exposed the mystification of the religious world in its technological investigation, expanding the realm of things and methods out of which it could make a profit.

The various brands of Leninism are ‘revolutionary’ ideologies in which their Party is the rightful subject to dictate world history, by leading its object — the proletariat — to the goal of replacing the bourgeois apparatus with a Leninist one.

The many other forms of the dominant ideologies can be seen daily. The rise of the new religiomsyticisms serve the dominant structure of social relations in a round about way. They provide a neat form in which the emptiness of daily life may be obscured, and like drugs, make it easier to live with. Volunteerism (shoulder to the wheel) and determinism (it’ll all work out) prevent us from recognising our real place in the functioning of the world. In avant-garde ideology, novelty in (and of) itself is what’s important. In survivalism, subjectivity is preempted by fear through the invocation of the image of an impending world catastrophe.

In accepting ideologies we accept an inversion of subject and object; things take on a human power and will, while human beings have their place as things. Ideology is upside-down theory. We further accept the separation between the narrow reality of our daily life, and the image of a world totality that’s out of our grasp. Ideology offers us only a voyeur’s relationship with the totality.

In this separation, and this acceptance of sacrifice for the cause, every ideology serves to protect the dominant social order. Authorities whose power depends on separation must deny us our subjectivity in order to survive themselves. Such denial comes in the form of demanding sacrifices for ‘the common good’, ‘the national interest’, ‘the war effort’, ‘the revolution’....

III

We get rid of the blinders of ideology by constantly asking ourselves... How do I feel?

Am I enjoying myself?
How’s my life?
Am I getting what I want?
Why not?
What’s keeping me from getting what I want?

This is having consciousnessof the commonplace, awareness of one’s everyday routine. That Everyday Life — real life — exists, is a public secret that gets less secret every day, as the poverty of daily life gets more and more visible.

IV

The construction of self-theory is based on thinking for yourself, being fully conscious of desires and their validity. It is the construction of radical subjectivity. 

Authentic ‘consciousness raising’ can only be the ‘raising’ of people’s thinking to the level’ of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness: developing their basic subjectivity, free of ideology and imposed morality in all its forms.

The essence of what many leftists, therapy-mongers, racism awareness trainers and sisterisers term ‘consciousness raising’ is their practice of beating people into unconsciousness with their ideological billyclubs.

The path from ideology (self-negation) to radical subjectivity (self-affirmation) passes through Point Zero, the capital city of nihilism. This is the windswept still point in social space and time... the social limbo wherein which one recognises that the present is devoid of life; that there is no life in one’s daily existence. A nihilist knows the difference between surviving and living.

Nihilists go through a reversal or perspective on their life and the world. Nothing is true for them but their desires, their will to be. They refuse all ideology in their hatred for the miserable social relations in modern capitalist-global society. From this reversed perspective they see with a newly acquired clarity the upside-down world of reification(i), the inversion of subject and object, of abstract and concrete. It is the theatrical landscape of fetishised commodities, mental projections, separations and ideologies: art, God, city planning, ethics, smile buttons, radio stations that say they love you and detergents that have compassion for your hands.

Daily conversation offers sedatives like: “You can’t always get what you want”, “Life has its ups and downs”, and other dogmas of the secular religion of survival. ‘Common sense’ is just the nonsense of common alienation. Every day people are denied an authentic life and sold back its representation.

Nihilists constantly feel the urge to destroy the system which destroys them each day. They cannot go on living as they are, their minds are on fire. Soon enough they run up against the fact that they must come up with a coherent set of tactics that will have a practical effect on the world.

But if a nihilist does not know of the historical possibility for the transformation of the world, his or her subjective rage will coralise into a role: the suicide, the solitary murderer, the street hoodlum vandal, the neo-dadaist, the professional mental patient... all seeking compensation for a life of dead time.

The nihilists’ mistake is that they do not realise that there are others who are also nihilists. Consequently they assume that common communication and participation in a project of self-realisation is impossible.

V

To have a ‘political’ orientation towards one’s life is just to know that you can only change your life by changing the nature of life itself through transfermation of the world — and that transformation of the world requires collective effort.

This project of collective self-realisation can properly be termed politics. However, ‘politics’ has become a mystified, separated category of human activity. Along with all the other socially enforced separations of human activity, ‘politics’ has become just another interest. It even has its specialists — be they politicians or politicos. It is possible to be interested (or not) in football, stamp collecting, disco music or fashion. What people see as ‘politics’ today is the social falsification of the project of collective self-realisation — and that suits those in power just fine.

Collective self-realisation is the revolutionary project. It is the collective seizure of the totality of nature and social relations and their transformation according to conscious desire.

Authentic therapy is changing one’s life by changing the nature of social life. Therapy must be social if it is to be of any real consequence. Social therapy (the healing of society) and individual therapy (the healing of the individual) are linked together: each requires the other, each is a necessary part of the other.

For example: in spectacular society we are expected to repress our real feelings and play a role. This is called ‘playing a part in society’. (How revealing that phrase is!) Individuals put on character armour — a steel-like suit of role playing is directly related to the end of social role playing.

VI

To think subjectively is to use your life — as it is now and as you want it to be — as the centre of your thinking. This positive self-centring is accomplished by the continuous assault on externals: all the false issues, false conflicts, false problems, false identities and false dichotomies.

People are kept from analysing the totality of everyday existence by being asked their opinion of every detail: all the spectacular trifles, phoney controversies and false scandals. Are you for or against trades unions, cruise missiles, identity cards... what’s your opinion of soft drugs, jogging, UFO’s, progressive taxation?

These are false issues. The only issue for us is how we live.

There is an old Jewish saying, “If you have only two alternatives, then choose the third”. It offers a way of getting the subject to search for a new perspective on the problem. We can give the lie to both sides of a false conflict by taking our ‘third choice’ — to view the situation from the perspective of radical subjectivity.

Being conscious of the third choice is refusing to choose between two supposedly opposite, but really equal, polarities that try to define themselves as the totality of a situation. In its simplest form, this consciousness is expressed by the worker who is brought to trial for armed robbery and asked, “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”. “I’m unemployed”, he replies. A more theoretical but equally classic illustration is the refusal to acknowledge any essential difference between the corporate-capitalist ruling classes of the ‘West’ and the state-capitalist ruling classes of the ‘East’. All we have to do is look at the basic social relations of production in the USA and Europe on the one hand, and the USSR and China on the other, to see that they are essentially the same: over there, as here, the vast majority go to work for a wage or salary in exchange for giving up control over both the means of production and what they produce (which is then sold back to them in the form of commodities).

In the case of the ‘West’ the surplus value (ie that which is produced over and above the value of the workers’ wages) is the property of the corporate managements who keep up a show of domestic competition. In the ‘East’ the surplus value is the property of the state bureaucracy, which does not permit domestic competition but engages in international competition as furiously as any other capitalist nation. Big difference.

An example of a false problem is that stupid conversational question, “What’s your philosophy of life?”. It poses an abstract concept of ‘Life’ that, despite the word’s constant appearance in conversation, has nothing to do with real life, because it ignores the fact that ‘living’ is what we are doing at the present moment.

In the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phoney social identities, corresponding to their individual role in the Spectacle (in which people contemplate and consume images of what life is, so that they will forget how to live for themselves). These social identities can be ethnic (’Italian’), racial (’Black’), organisational (’Trade Unionist’), residential (’New Yorker’), sexual (’Gay’), cultural (’sports’ fan’), and so on: but all are rooted in a common desire for affiliation, for belonging.

Obviously being ‘black’ is a lot more real as an identification than being a ‘sports fan’, but beyond a certain point these identities only serve to mask our real position in society. Again, the only issue for us is how we live. Concretely, this means understanding the reasons for the nature of one’s life in one’s relation to society as a whole. To do this one has to shed all the false identities, the partial associations, and begin with oneself as the centre. From here we can examine the material basis of life, stripped of all mystification.

For example: suppose I want a cup of coffee from the machine at work. First of all, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantations and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have all the workers who made the different parts of the machine and assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, drilled the oil and refined it. Then all the workers who transported the raw materials and parts over three continents and two oceans. Then the clerks, typists and communications workers who co-ordinate the production and transportation. Finally you have all the workers who produce all the other things necessary for the others to survive. That gives me a direct material relationship to several million people: in fact, to the immense majority of the world’s population. They produce my life: and I help to produce theirs. In this light, all partial group identities and special interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of one’s life that is presently locked up in the frustrated creativity of those millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by alienation, warped by the insane rationale of capital accumulation! Here we begin to discover a real social identity: in people all over the world who are fighting to win back their lives, we find ourselves.

We are constantly being asked to choose between two sides in a false conflict. Governments, charities and propagandists of all kinds are fond of presenting us with choices that are no choice at all (eg the Central Electricity Generating Board presented its nuclear programme with the slogan ‘Nuclear Age or Stone Age’. The CEGB would like us to believe that these are the only two alternatives — we have the illusion of choice, but as long as they control the choices we perceive as available to us, they also control the outcome).

The new moralists love to tell those in the rich West how they will ‘have to make sacrifices’, how they ‘exploit the starving children of the Third World’. The choice we are given is between sacrificial altruism or narrow individualism. (Charities cash in on the resulting guilt by offering us a feeling of having done something, in exchange for a coin in the collecting tin.) Yes, by living in the rich West we do exploit the poor of the Third World — but not personally, not deliberately. We can make some changes in our life, boycott, make sacrifices, but the effects are marginal. We become aware of the false conflict we are being presented with when we realise that under this global social system we, as individuals, are as locked in our global role as ‘exploiters’ as others are in their global role as the exploited. We have a role in society, but little or no power to do anything about it. We reject the false choice of ‘sacrifice or selfishness’ by calling for the destruction of the global social system whose existence forces that decision upon us. It isn’t a case of tinkering with the system, of offering token sacrifices or calling for ‘a little less selfishness’. Charities and reformers never break out of the terrain of the false choice.

Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present situation constantly drag us back to their false choices — that is, any choice which keeps their power intact. With myths like ‘If we shared it all out there wouldn’t be enough to go round’, they attempt to deny the existence of any other choices and to hide from us the fact that the material preconditions for social revolution already exist.

VII

Any journey towards self-demystification must avoid those two quagmires of lost thought — absolutism and cynicism; twin swamps that camouflage themselves as meadows of subjectivity.

Absolutism is the total acceptance or rejection of all components of particular ideologies, spectacles and reifications. An absolutist cannot see any other choice than complete acceptance or complete rejection .

The absolutist wanders along the shelves of the ideological supermarket looking for the ideal commodity, and then buys it — lock, stock and barrel. but the ideological supermarket — like any supermarket — is fit only for looting. It is more productive for us if we can move along the shelves, rip open the packets, take out what looks authentic and useful, and dump the rest.

Cynicism is a reaction to a world dominated by ideology and morality. Faced with conflicting ideologies the cynic says: “a plague on both your houses”. The cynic is as much a consumer as the absolutist, but one who has given up hope of ever finding the ideal commodity.

VIII

The process of dialectical thinking is constructive thinking, a process of continually synthesising one’s current body of self- theory with new observations and appropriations; a resolution of the contradictions between the previous body of theory and new theoretical elements. The resulting synthesis is thus not some quantitative summation of the previous and the new, but their qualitative supersession, a new totality.

This synthetic / dialectic method of constructing a theory is counter to the eclectic style which just collects a rag-bag of its favourite bits from favourite ideologies without ever confronting the resulting contradictions. Modern examples include libertarian capitalism, christian marxism and liberalism in general.

If we are continually conscious of how we want to live, we can critically appropriate from anything in the construction of our self-theory: ideologies, culture critics, technocratic experts, sociological studies, mystics and so forth. All the rubbish of the old world can be scavenged for useful material by those who desire to reconstruct it.

IX

The nature of modern society, its global and capitalist unity, indicates to us the necessity of making our self-theory a unitary critique. By this we mean a critique of all geographic areas where various forms of socio-economic domination exist (ie both the capitalism of the ‘free’ world and the state-capitalism of the ‘communist’ world), as well as a critique of all alienations (sexual poverty, enforced survival, urbanism, etc). In other words, a critique of the totality of daily existence everywhere, from the perspective of the totality of one’s desires.

Ranged against this project are all the politicians and bureaucrats, preachers and gurus, city planners and policemen, reformers and militants, central committees and censors, corporate managers and union leaders, male supremacists and feminist ideologues, psyche-sociologists and conservation capitalists who work to subordinate individual desire to a reified ‘common good’ that has supposedly designated them as its representatives. They are all forces of the old world, all bosses, priests and creeps who have something to lose if people extend the game of seizing back their minds into seizing back their lives.

Revolutionary theory and revolutionary ideology are enemies — and both know it.

X

By now it should be obvious that self-demystification and the construction of our own revolutionary theory doesn’t eradicate our alienation: ‘the world’ (capital and the Spec tacle) goes on, reproducing itself every day.

Although this booklet had the construction of self-theory as its focus, we never intended to imply that revolutionary theory can exist separate from revolutionary practice. In order to be consequential, effectively to reconstruct the world, practice must seek its theory, and theory must be realised in practice. The revolutionary prospect of disalienation and the transformation of social relations requires that one’s theory be nothing other than a theory of practice, of what we do and how we live. Otherwise theory will degenerate into an impotent contemplation of the world, and ultimately into survival ideology — a projected mental fogbank, a static body of reified thought, of intellectual armour, that acts as a buffer between the daily world and oneself. And if revolutionary practice is not the practice of revolutionary theory, it degenerates into altruistic militantism, ‘revolutionary’ activity as one’s social duty.

We don’t strive for a coherent theory purely as an end in itself. For us, the practical use value of coherence is that having a coherent self-theory makes it easier for someone to think. As an example, it’s easier to get a handle on future developments in social control if you have a coherent understanding of modern social control ideologies and techniques up to the present.

Having a coherent theory makes it easier to conceive of the theoretical practice for realising your desires for your life.

XI

In the process of constructing self-theory, the last ideologies that have to be wrestled with and determinedly pinned down are the ones that most closely resemble revolutionary theory. These final mystifications are a) situationism b)councilism.

The Situationist International (1958-1971) was an international revolutionary organisation that made an immense contribution to revolutionary theory. Situationist theory is a body of critical theory that can be appropriated into one’s self-theory, and nothing more. Anything more is the ideological misappropriation known as situationism.

For those who newly discover it, SI theory has a way of seeming like ‘the answer I’ve been searching for for years’, the answer to the riddle of one’s dead life. But that’s exactly when a new alertness and self-possession become necessary. Situationism can be quite the complete survival ideology, a defence mechanism against the wear and tear of daily life. included in the ideology is the spectacular commodity-role of being ‘a situationist’, ie a radical jade and ardent esoteric.

Councilism (aka ‘Workers’ Control’, ‘Syndicalism’) offers ‘self- management’ as a replacement for the capitalist system of production.

Real self-management is the direct management (unmediated by any separate leadership) of social production, distribution and communication by workers and their communities. The movement for self-management has appeared again and again all over the world in the course of social revolution. Russia in 1905 and 1917-21, Spain in 1936-7, Hungary in 1956, Algeria in 1960, Chile in 1972 and Portugal in 1975. The form of organisation most often created in the practice of self-management has been workers’ councils: sovereign general assemblies of the producers and neighbourhoods that elect mandated delegates to co-ordinate their activities. The delegates are not representatives, but carry out decisions already made by their assemblies. Delegates can be recalled at any time, should the general assembly feel that its decisions are not being rigorously carried out.

Councilism is this historical practice and theory of self- management turned into an ideology. Whereas the participants in these uprisings lived a critique of the social totality, beginning with a critique of wage labour, of the commodity economy and exchange value, councilism makes a partial critique: it seeks not the self-managed, continuous and qualitative transformation of the whole world, but the static, quantitive self-management of the world as it is. The economy thus remains a separate realm cut off from the rest of daily life and dominating it. On the other hand a movement for generalised self- management seeks the transformation of all sectors of social life and all social relations (production, sexuality, housing, services, communications, etc), councilism thinks that a self-managed economy is all that matters. It misses, literally, the whole point: subjectivity and the desire to transform the whole of life. The problem with workers’ control is that all it controls is work.

The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down. Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement in which all the mystifications of the past are being consciously swept away.

Post-notes

This booklet is part of the collective self-theory of the members of our organization. It is the statement of what we call our meta-theory, our theory of the practice of theory-making.

The preparation and dissemination of The Minimum Definition of Intelligence is undertaken for the same reason we do everything else we do: because we want to catalyze a social revolution that will transform the present static layout of alienation into a moving landscape of realized dreams. We know we can only create the lives that we want tin the process of everyone else creating the lives that they want. We are revolutionaries because our desires require a social revolution for their realization.

The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down. Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement in which all the mystifications of the past are consciously being swept away.

Preamble

We have woken up to discover that our lives are becoming unliveable. From boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in lines, at desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from prison-like schools to repetitious, mindless “entertainment,” from desolate and crime-ridden streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a treadmill on which we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place.

Like the immense majority of the population, we have no control over the use to which our lives are put: we are people who have nothing to sell but our capacity to work. We have come together because we can no longer tolerate the way we are forced to exist, we can no longer tolerate being squeezed dry of our energies, being used up and thrown away, only to create a world that grows more alien and ugly every day.

The system of Capital, whether in its “Western” private-corporate or “Eastern” state-bureaucratic form, was brutal and exploitative even during its ascent: now, where it is in decay, it poisons air and water, produces goods and services of deteriorating quality, and is less and less able to employ us even to its own advantage. Its logic of accumulation and competition leads inexorably toward its own collapse. Even as it links all the people of the world together in one vast network of production and consumption, it isolates us from each other; even as it stimulates greater and greater advances in technology and productive power, it finds itself incapable of putting them to use: even as it multiplies the possibilities for human self-realization, we find ourselves strangled in layers of guilt, fear and self-contempt.

But it is we ourselves — our strength, our intelligence, our creativity, our passions-that are the greatest productive power of all. It is we who produce and reproduce the world as it is, in the image of Capital; it is we who reinforce in each other the conditioning of family, school, church and media, the conditioning that keeps us slaves. When we decide together to end our misery, to take our lives into our own hands, we can recreate the world the way we want it. The technical resources and worldwide productive network developed under the old system give us the means: the crisis and continuing collapse of that system give us the chance and the urgent need.

The ruling ideologies of the world superpowers, with their interlocking sets of lies, offer us only the false choice of “Communism” versus “Capitalism”. But in the history of revolution during this century (Russia, 1905; Germany, 1919-20; Spain, 1936-37; Hungary, 1956) we have discovered the general form through which we can take back power over our own lives: workers’councils. At their highest moments these councils were popular assemblies in workplaces and communities, joined together by means of strictly mandated delegates who carried out decisions already made by their assemblies and who could be recalled by them at any time. The councils organized their nwn defense and restarted production under their own management. By now, through a system of councils at the local, regional, and global level, using modern telecommunications and data processing, we can coordinate and plan world production as well as be free to shape our own immediate environment. Any compromise with bureaucracy and official heirarchy, anything short of the total power of workers’ councils, can only reproduce misery and alienation in a new form, as a good look at the so-called “Communist” countries will show. For this reason, no political party can represent the revolutionary movement or seize power “on its behalf”, since this would be simply a change of ruling classes, not their abolition. The plan of the freely associated producers is in absolute opposition to the dictatorial Plan of state and corporate production. Only all of us together can decide what is best for us.

For these reasons, we call upon you and upon all the hundreds of millions like you and us, to join us in the revolutionary transformation of every aspect of life. We want to abolish the system of wage and salaried labor, of commodity exchange-value and of profit, of corporate and bureaucratic power. We want to decide the nature and conditions of everything we do, to manage all social life collectively and democratically. We want to end the division of mental from manual work and of “free” time from work time, by bringing into play all our abilities for enjoyable creative activity. We want the whole world to be our conscious self-creation, so that our days are full of wonder, learning, and pleasure. Nothing less.

In setting down this minimum program, we are not trying to impose an ideal on reality, nor are we alone in wanting what we want. Our ideas are already in everyone’s minds, consciously or unconsciously, because they are nothing but an expression of the real movement that exists all over the planet. But in order to win, this movement must know itself, its aims, and its enemies, as never before.

We do not speak for this movement, but for ourselves as of it. We recognize no Cause over and above ourselves. But our selves are already social: the whole human race produces the life of each one of its members, now more than ever before. Our aim is simply to make this process conscious for the first time, to give to the production of human life the imaginative intensity of a work at art.

It is in this spirit that we call upon you to organize, as we are doing, where you work and where you live, to begin planning the way we can run society together, to defend yourselves against the deepening misery that is being imposed on all of us. We call upon you to assault actively the lies, the self-deceptions born of fear, that keep everyone frozen in place while the world is falling apart around us. We call upon you to link up with us and with others who are doing the same thing. Above all, we call upon you to take yourselves and your desires seriously, to realize your own power to master your own lives.

It’s now or never. If we are to have a future, we ourselves must be that future.

FOR OURSELVES!

February 16, 1974 

http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/SelfTheory/SelfTheory.htm

"On the Degradation of Language and the Art of Listening", a short essay from blog "FROM POLITICS TO LIFE"

 

When you call someone a name you stop listening to him.

I do not write, publish, speak or discuss in order to propagate a fixed set of ideas for others to embrace; I’m not interested in disciples or followers. I do so to communicate and discuss my own fluid and evolving ideas, my desires, my dreams, my experiences and my projects as clearly as possible in order to discover affinities, to find accomplices with whom to share my activities. I am convinced that the only real wealth worth pursuing is found in other people with whom one can share the creation of a life together aimed at the realization of the needs and desires of each and every one. Therefore, I gladly throw my words out into the world as a wager that they will strike a resonant chord with others with whom I can share projects of revolt against the ruling order and of taking back our lives and activities as our own. Unfortunately, often these words, chosen with so much care, seem to meet misunderstandings of the strangest sorts.

My desires, my dreams and, thus, my projects are informed by a revolutionary perspective, that is, by the recognition that it is necessary to make a fundamental, destructive break with the existing world in order to open the possibility for a world in which we can truly create our lives together on our own terms. The existing world, dominated by the state, capital and their technological and ideological machinery of control, defines wealth in terms of the things that one owns. In such a world, human beings themselves become things that are owned by the apparatus, the ruling institutions. Their value is not in the unique beauty of their being, but in their capacity to produce more things either physically in the form of products or socially in the form of roles and predetermined relationships. Thus, what is unique in each of us is suppressed in the interest of production. Wealth in this sense is purely quantitative, the ownership of a large amount of shit, possession of a greater share of the impoverished reality that this world imposes. All this must be destroyed if we are to create a world in which we recognize the qualitative wealth of the uniqueness that each one of us has to offer the other. And this is the project I try to express.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to express such a project. Finding the balance between the simplicity that makes one’s language accessible and the complexity that is necessary to express how this revolutionary desire confronts the catastrophic reality of the world in which we live is not easy. It requires a certain precision and delicacy. By delicacy, I do not at all mean gentleness. Rather, I mean the use of great care in choosing the words that can best express one’s meaning while avoiding the pitfalls set by the increasing degradation of language in anarchist circles that has been caused by ideological thinking. But even this is not always enough. Real communication is never one-way, and the degradation of language (and ideas) doesn’t just affect how people say things, but also how they hear things. Those who make their language the servant of ideological ways of thinking will not so much listen to what someone says as filter it into the appropriate places within the frameworks of their systems for viewing the world.

The desire for simplicity itself can be a danger here. Things certainly seem simpler when we feel we have found the answers, so that we no longer need to call our ideas, our activities, our lives and ourselves into question. In a world of every day misery and catastrophe, the codified categories of ideology can be particularly reassuring. But this sort of reassurance comes at the expense of real communication and real discussion. Exchanges of words are reduced to mutual reassurances, evangelistic outreach and condemnations of those who don’t agree. The capacity to listen disappears, taking with it any possibility for real debate. Let’s look at a few examples of how this can work.

Activism, as a specialized role, carries its own vague ideology: things are bad, we need to do something to change them, we need to organize people for this purpose. Quite vague, indeed. But it doesn’t prevent activists from being fervent believers and hard-core evangelists. For the activist, as for any evangelist, the individuals they encounter are not unique human beings with whom to create relationships or share life, they are ciphers to convert into tools for the cause. Activists have sacrificed their own uniqueness and humanity to whatever cause, so why would they expect less of others? Thus, when activists speak of communicating with others, they mean that they are out to organize those others to fight for their cause. The activist transforms talking with your neighbors about the realities you face together into community organizing to build a movement.

Unfortunately, this activist ideology can seep into the way of thinking of individuals who are critical of activism and leftism, leading even these people to hear meanings in words that aren’t there. Thus, recently when I spoke of the need to talk with those around us about what we are facing in the world today and what we desire, one person asked if I was talking about “movement building”, a term with which I wasn’t familiar, but that sounds like something that would contradict my entire project as I’ve live and expressed it. (This individual was at least just asking and not immediately labeling and accusing, but her question left me flabbergasted.) Another, when I was not present, said that it sounded like the same old leftist shit (or something to that effect) and then later referred to me in writing as a “reformist community organizer”. I never knew that the idea of talking with one’s neighbors could carry so much baggage. Then again I’ve never been an activist or an organizer, and have carefully kept my distance from that sort of thinking. I always thought talking with someone meant just that, talking with someone. But ideological filters to listening can twist the simplest things into a complex maze of hidden implications in which the possibilities for meaningful discussion get lost.

But the worst attacks against open, straightforward communication within the anarchist milieu in recent years stem from the intrusion of political correctitude into the milieu. Political correctitude finds its clearest voice in the identity politics that became the dominant voice of the American left in the 1980’s. I was fortunate and managed to have very little direct contact with the preachers of political correctitude and identity politics for quite a while. It was clear to me that they were promoting an ideology based in victimization. Identity politics is an ideology based upon identifying with the category (or categories) through which one is oppressed: race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or whatever. In other words, one identifies with the categories that the ruling order has imposed. This identification is then supposed to be embraced as a source of pride, unity and strength. I don’t want to go into a full critique of this here, but only want to deal with the aspects relevant to communication. First of all, defining one’s identity in terms of one’s oppression is defining oneself as a victim (euphemisms such as “survivor” don’t change this). This leaves one feeling perpetually vulnerable and puts one on the defensive. Here is the basis for political correctitude. People who are always on the defensive, in need of being provided with a feeling of safety, become overly sensitive to language, granting it a power over them that it need not have. In “communication”, such people no longer look for actual meaning, but put their radar out for the code words and phrases that they have defined as inherently oppressive. Their rage will scream out at the wrong word in the wrong place or at another’s refusal to use the words and categories of their ideology. In the meantime, their real oppressors in the ruling class use smooth, politically correct language to enforce their oppression. A linguistic moral order is established that creates only one real change: the reduction of our capacity to communicate. In addition, creating a group identity involves identifying an opposing group to which the first group contrasts itself. If one defines oneself in terms of race or gender or sexual orientation, then this contrasting other must be defined in the same terms, and so the world gets divided into “people of color/white”, “female/male”, “gay/straight”, etc. (or more accurately, this supposedly radical ideology maintains and enforces the divisions the ruling order has already created). Since the first group in each set is oppressed, obviously the second group must be the oppressors, regardless of what any of them as individuals have actually done. Individual responsibility is swallowed up in an automatic collective guilt. But precisely because this collective guilt is detached from the real concrete acts of individuals, some mechanism to explain it must be developed. And so we learn that all “white people”, all “males” and all “straight people” are “privileged”. And people from oppressed groups who adhere to these categories, along with their humble auxiliary of willing political correctitude cops drawn from the “privileged” groups, can use this alleged “privilege” to automatically discredit someone. Thus, this ideology justifies the worst sort of ad hominem argument, the kind based on supposedly inherent traits, not on real actions of the person involved. It should be obvious how this closes down the capacity for really listening, and thus for real discussion and communication. A statement such as “…white folks, straight people and men need to shut the fuck up” is not on offer for discussion or communication and certainly not an attempt to open up an exploration of affinities and possibilities for shared projects. It is a command clearly intended to call someone to accept a subordinate position. Again, people are seen as things, as categories, and “communication” is reduced to the arrangement of these things, making real listening irrelevant.

Communication and the capacity for listening have also deteriorated due to the entrenchment of positions that has become prevalent within anarchist circles in recent years. This entrenchment can be seen in the ongoing tendency to create categorical dichotomies: social anarchism vs. life-style anarchism, green anarchy vs. classical anarchism, and the like. The capacity to make distinctions and even complete breaks where necessary is important and must not be lost in some ecumenical haziness in which we all just embrace each other in an incoherent orgy of contradictory conceptions drained of meaning. But the capacity to make distinctions also means the capacity to recognize false dichotomies that serve no other purpose than to define one’s own ideological identity. In fact, there is much in the entrenchment of positions within the American anarchist milieu that parallels the functioning of identity politics. For example, there tends to be a hyper-sensitivity to words that are taken out of context and drained of meaning (recent discussions about the word “communism” provide a fine example). There is also a tendency to use labels to consign the “other” to a hostile ideological camp and end discussion in this way. A sad example is the way some people have begun to use “leftist” to label anyone who disagrees with them. In this way, the necessary harsh critique of the left loses its content and degenerates into a vacuous “anti-left” ideology that serves no other purpose than to silence one’s critics. If we are to ever discover where our real affinities and differences lie, we need to leave the safety of our entrenched positions, throw away our ideological filters, and actually listen to each other, sharing fierce but principled critiques and recognizing that since we are still living and the world is still changing, none of us has found the answer. We have so much we need to talk about, but it is useless to try if we cannot listen, if we only put up the radar for signals that help us place others and their ideas into our ideological categories. So among the anarchist projects worthy of effort is the revival of the fine art of listening that makes communication as peers possible. But this is not an easy task since it involves attacking one’s own entrenched positions as well as those of others.

Communication is hard enough where the art of listening has been nurtured. A few words are never enough to express all that a person has to say. The passionate reasons that goad one into action cannot fit into a few lines on a few pages. In fact, an endless flow of words would still not be enough to express it all. But the point is not to express it all in words; the point is to leave a clue, a verbal finger pointing toward the moon of one’s ideas and dreams that says just enough to find accomplices in the crime of freedom. Unfortunately, these days most people only “think” from the entrenched positions of their confused ideological conceptions and contradictory dogmas, and so one cannot expect to be understood by very many. From such confinement, most can only see the pointing finger. But the few who can think and feel and dream outside of every ideological fortress may be able to hear these words and respond with comprehension, critically, their eye upon the moon. And maybe a few critical voices, striving fiercely for clarity, will be able to break through the entrenched positions, and the art of listening will make real discussion a possibility again. 

>>> the text found at the blog "From Politics to Life"