A toast to revolutionary workers

Radical criticism has merely analysed the Old World and its negation. It must now either realise itself in the practical activity of the revolutionary masses or betray itself by becoming a barrier to that activity.

So long as the project of the whole human being remains the spectre haunting the void of unmediated self-realisation, so long as the proletariat does not achieve a de facto reappropriation of theory from those who have distilled it from the proletariat's own movement, so long will each radical step forward be followed by ideology's two steps back.

By urging proletarians to lay hold of a theory derived from direct daily experience (and from the lack of it), my Traite de savoir-vivre cast its lot unequivocably with the cause of transcendence. But by the same token it laid itself open to all the falsifications that are bound to accompany any and all delay in putting these lessons into insurrectional practice. The moment radical theory becomes independent of the self-movement of revolutionary consciousness, as when this consciousness is suddenly inhibited by history, it becomes other than itself while remaining itself, and cannot completely evade capture by a parallel but contrary movement - by regression towards separated thought, towards the spectacle. Even when a book like this one contrives to embody its own self-criticism, this merely exposes it to ideo­logical parasites; these run the gamut, in this instance, from subjectivism to nihilism, via communitarianism and apolitical hedonism - to say nothing of our old friends the puffed-up bullfrogs of critical criticism.

Before too long, radical working-class action will subordinate the spheres of production and consumption to the needs and passions of individuals. Working-class action is, ini dally at least, the only force capable of subverting these spheres. The historical procrastinations of this movement show, however, that the portion of the proletariat which has no direct control over economic processes has been capable at best, in its ascendant phase, of framing and disseminating a theory which it could not itself actualise or adjust. In a period of defeat, moreover, it has turned this theory into a regression of the intellect: a consciousness which never attained a true purchase on its own time has developed into a strictly retrospective parading of banners.

The subjective expression of the situationist project reached its highest point when it prepared the ground for May 1968 and accelerated the growth of consciousness of the new forms of exploitation. Its lowest ebb has been an intellectualised reading born of the inabiliry of a large number of people to destroy what can only be destroyed (through sabotage and subversion - not occupations) by the workers responsible for the economy's key sectors.

The situationist project nevertheless represented the most advanced practical thought of a proletarian sector with no access to the levers of the commodity process. What is more, in its formulation this project never for a moment relinquished as its appointed and indivisible task the annihilation of the social organisation of survival in favour of generalised workers' control. It is therefore bound to rediscover its real internal movement in a working-class context, and there resurface, leaving the spectacle's hot-air specialists picking over the carcass of its former incarnation to see what use they can make of these remains.

Radical theory belongs to whoever causes it to progress. To defend it against books or other cultural merchandise wherein it reposes too often and too long on display is not to set an anti-work, anti-self-sacrifice, anti-hierarchy worker against a proletarian restricted to an unarmed con­sciousness of the same refusals; rather, it is to call upon those who find themselves at the most basic level of the unitary struggle against the society of survival to use the forms of expression most effectively available to them, and to perform revolutionary deeds which forge their own language by creating conditions from which there is no possible turning back. Sabotage of the forced-labour system, destruction of the processes of commodity production and reproduction, expropriation of stores and plant in the name of the revolutionary forces and of all those allied with them by reason of passionate attraction - here are means capable of putting an end, not only to the bureaucratic reserve army constituted by intellectualising workers and workerist intellectuals alike, but also to the intelle<..1:ual-manual dichotomy itself - and indeed eventually to the whole world of separations. Down with the division oflabour and the universal factory! Long live the unity of non-work and generalised workers' control!

The main theses of the Traite de savoir-vivre must now find corrobora­tion of a concrete sort in the actions of its anti-readers: not in the shape of student agitation but in the shape of total revolution. The task of theory henceforth is to carty violence where violence already holds sway. Workers of Asturias, Limburg, Poznan, Lyons, Detroit, Csepel, Leningrad, Canton, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Liverpool, Kiruna, Coimbra - it is you who are destined to let the entire proletariat add the joy of revolution made for one and for all to the lesser, everyday pleasures of love, iconoclasm and obedience to the dictates of passion!

Without the criticism of arms, the arms of criticism are but weapons of suicide. Many proletarians successfully avoid the despair of terrorism and the poverty of militantism only to become voyeurs of the working class, spectators of their own shelved potential. Cuckolded and defeated as revolutionaries sans revolution, they settle for the role of revolutionary-by­proxy, awaiting the moment when the falling rate of petty-bureaucratic power hands them a chance to offer themselves as mediators and play the leader under the banner of their very inability to smash the spectacle. They are the reason why the organisation of insurgent workers - the only revolutionary organisation needed henceforth - must be the work of the insurgent workers themselves. Otherwise the proletariat as a whole will have no organisational model in its fight for generalised workers' control. The advent of this type of organisation will mark the final passing of repressive organisations (States, parties, unions, hierarchical groups of all kinds) along with their critical corollary, that fetishism of organisation which flourishes in the ranks of the non-productive proletariat. The immediate practice of such an organisation will eradicate the contradiction between voluntarism and realism which marked the limits of the Situationist International:1 confronted by the perpetual re-emergence within itself of the relationships characteristic of the dominant world outside, that group found that its own means of dealing with this situation, exclusion and rupture, were inadequate, and a way was never found to harmonise inter-subjective agreements and differences. It will become clear eventually that the portion of the proletariat with no concrete possibility of subverting the means of production is in need not of organisations but rather of individuals acting for themselves. Such individuals may federate from time to time into commando groups for the purposes of sabotage (attacks on the apparatus of repression, occupation of radio stations, etc). They will intervene wherever and when­ever the prospect of tactical and strategic effectiveness is offered. Their sole concern will be to pursue undivided gratification and, inseparably, to kindle the fire of working-class guerrilla warfare - that negative and positive fire which, though it begins in the vety heart of the proletariat, is nevertheless the only possible basis for that class's abolition as part of the abolition of class society in its entirety.

The workers may still lack the coherence of their own potential strength, but one thing is certain: once they do achieve that coherence, their victory will be definitive. The recent histoty of wildcat actions and riots is the writing on the wall which announces the resurgence of workers' councils and the return of Communes. The sudden reappearance of these forms - sure to be met by a repressive counter-attack whose violence will put the repression of intellectual movements in the shade is likely to surprise only those who cannot discern, beneath the pluralisms of the spectacle's immobility, the unitary progress of the old mole, the proletariat's continu­ing clandestine struggle for the appropriation of history and the global overthrow of al the conditions of daily life. In the meantime, the necessity of history-for-itself may be perceived in all its cunning in the negative coherence attained by a proletariat disarmed, a sort of concave unanimity which stands as a monumental warning to everything which threatens the radicalism of the working class from within: to intellectual ising tendencies, which cause consciousness to regress to the level of book learning and culture; to uncontrolled mediators and their bureaucratic 'opposition'; to the status-lovers, more enamoured of the renewal of roles than of their dissolution in the playful emulation characteristic of the basic guerrilla group; and to all those forces which press for the abandonment of concrete subversion, of the revolutionary conquest of territory, of the unitary. international march towards the end of separations, the end of self-sacrifice, the end of forced labour, the end of hierarchy, and the end of the commodity in its every last manifestation.

The gauntlet thrown down by reification to each person's creativity can no longer be picked up by means of some theoretical "What is to be done?". The proper response lies rather in the practice of the revolutionaty act. Anyone who fails to discover in revolution the crucial passion which opens the door to all others can attain but a travesty of real pleasure. The Traite de savoir-vivre sought to trace the shortest path from individual subjectivity to its actualisation in history-made-by-all. From the standpoint of the long revolution, it was a mere point of departure - on the road towards communalism and generalised self-management. Similarly, the Traite is merely an outline albeit an outline of the death sentence which the society of survival pronounces upon itself, and which will one day be executed without appeal by the international of factories, fields and streets.

We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

October 1972

• 1I left the Situationist International and its growing burden of empty self-imporatance in November 1970.