Unnatural Acts - Collective Inventions (1979)

I

The almost constant stream of bad news to which we are subjected has recently become a virtual tidal wave, a swelling breaker of discomfort and disaster, both imagined and real. The so-called “gas shortage’’, inflation, the real decline in living standards experienced by the American work force — all of these “difficulties” are being lived by us, and their effects are immediately apparent in rising frustration and anger, our frustration and anger.

We are all now forced to spend more time doing nothing, to work more to buy less to work more... In this Monopoly game in which we are the pieces being moved about the board, we line up and are lined up: we pay higher prices in order to receive a diminishing part of what, as a whole, we produce. At this point, when most of us can no longer pass ‘‘Go"', the average American (who is not average, but different — and divided at present) has begun to stop and think that maybe the game has been rigged ail along.

Like the latest sensational murder, the “news” of the current economic crisis is packaged and presented to us in the most lurid detail, while the real crime of modern society — this society itself — goes unmentioned. Yet amid the unceasing babble about presidential candidates, Marlon Brando’s sex life, and the roller skating craze, reality imposes itself: something is going on, and the man and the woman in the street, in the gas lines or in the enforced limbo of unemployment or welfare, has something to say about it. Even the media must take note, and the corporations are already afraid that our immediate perceptions of what we see around us are dangerously close . . . to the truth.

All the public interest messages, all the sponsored T.V. programs. of the oil companies, are to no avail: the credibility of the “seven sisters” (Exxon and co.) and their brethren in the rest of U.S. business is at a new low. As the public waits for hours before going to work, as it watches gas prices rise and sees corporate profits soar, many perceive that the “gas shortage” is a contrived and manipulated one, that it is a badly concealed Shell game designed to produce a permanent increase in prices and force “decontrol” of the industry. Even those on the take — state officials — know that there is no supply problem and that refineries are operating at reduced capacity or producing excessively high-octane fuel, and doing so not because there is any real shortage of oil, but because the international petroleum companies (with their integrated system of supplies, distribution and markets) are pursuing their own politics of energy — for high stakes.

Having tried to float the excuse of the “Iranian shortfall” (all the while selling Iranian oil at exorbitant prices in Europe and increasing Saudi production}, the companies now realize that their cover is blown. Since that old scapegoat, “the Arabs” (and who really owns, who distributes "Arab" oil?}, won't wash either, the propaganda pipelines have now outdone themselves by trying to blame the victim: the companies now cite a “sudden increase in consumer demand” as the invisible hand behind events. As blatantly preposterous as this maneuver is, it is far easier for the companies to lie than to explain their own deliberate failure to expand refining capacity or to install desulfurization units on existing refineries to handle Alaskan crude. Instead of increasing capital expenditures in the U.S., they have preferred to seek refuge in the “tax shelters” and cheap labor markets of the Caribbean.

Corporations will always attempt to “explain” themselves, but they will never reveal the logic — the calculus of expropriated work and exercised power — that is their very reason for existence. In the present instance, the companies’ smokescreen, in fact, may become physical: if the executives have their way, environmental standards will be relaxed, allowing more lead to be spewed into an already polluted sky. At such a point, business will really make a killing.

Why, then, are the screws now being turned by oil companies and industry in general? Behind the phony gas shortage, there is a genuine problem, namely the worsening structural crisis of advanced capitalist economies in Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. This crisis is real: inflation and the attempts to limit wages are no “acts of nature”, still less are they the result of simple errors in decision-making by government and its multinational clients. Rather, they are symptoms which tell us something about the disease itself. They reveal the nature of the system producing them. The “business cycle”, which only appears (and is made to appear) natural, operates in all market economies (and its effects are being increasingly felt in the bureaucratic capitalist economies of Eastern Europe, Russia and China, as they become increasingly integrated into the world capitalist market!. All the policy initiatives of Keynesian economics have only been (conscious) attempts to moderate the cyclical tendencies toward inflation and recession in advanced capitalism, and these policies have proven to be more and more ineffective. Wage and price controls are now measures of last resort, rather than ongoing features of a capitalist “planned economy’.

The present price increases represent the desperate actions of a corporate structure which is preparing for the coming recession, even as these same measures — by “managing’’ demand in a downward direction — hasten the arrival of the next downturn in economic activity. This recession is now a “contingency” for the companies, but it will be a reality of unemployment and austerity for the “American consumer’, who is, after all, also a worker, 8 housewife, someone already unemployed, a person — not a mere statistic. Despite the bravado of corporate economists, there will be no “soft landing” in the next deflation. Capitalist “stabilization” is always implemented, literally, at our expense. And in the present conflict between small and large capital, between “independent” owners and the multinational oil companies, we can only be losers, no matter who “wine”.

What can be done about this state of affairs, about these affairs of state and economy? Our frustration is already a weapon, but it is one which is easily turned against us: we vent our rage against others in the same gas line, or we let our anger be invested in the ambitions of ambitious politicians. Popular outrage — as long as it remains inarticulate — can easily be converted into mere populist discontent, and the Jerry Browns of this world are all-too-adept at such cynical arts and crafts. Following close behind — and clutching at the same train of power — are the various leftist parties, who at least have the virtue of being more candid in their recruiting drives: they explicitly want to organize you — and organize you around their program. Fortunately, such parties are likely to be poorly attended, if for no other reason than that their fare is so primitive. No one is convinced by the simplistic rhetoric in which “big oil” only awaits the “conscious vanguard” in order to be vanquished. After all, even the Santa Clara county board of supervisors voted to nationalize the oil companies. in any case, we do not simply want to “fight back’ for sit back and let the militants fight “for us’; we want to fight for something totally different, and it is precisely this difference which is in acute shortage among the various politburos of Trotskyism and Maoism.

Moving farther to the right — but on the same wavelength of opportunism — there are the pathetic cranks who bemoan the fact that the United States is being “pushed around” and who propose the inane solution of “Vote the Bastards out!’ Such illegitimate creatures of reaction, who would have us vote against incumbents while new powerholders are groomed in the {right) wings, have not been pushed far enough, that is, overboard!

II

The sky really is falling. It is not pieces of Skylab (planned obsolescence reaches new heights) that are crashing to earth today, it is the many illusions about the social world we live in — the false horizons of traditional ideology and empty “non-conformism" — that are coming to ground. The choice between “winning through intimidation” and “therapeutic” resignation no longer seems so appealing. Out of this positive disillusionment emerges the truly significant feature in contemporary American society: A general crisis of confidence in existing institutions. Breaking the temporary social peace of the last few years, new skirmishes are taking place: after Three Mile Island, a new March on Washington in which Jerry Brown received the jeering welcome he deserved; after the sell-out contract negotiated by the Teamsters and the tucking companies, a Teamster steel-haulers’ wildcat organized against the union and its partners in management; and now the “City Hall Riot’ in San Francisco.

Such currents of opposition are tentative, of course, and, by their limited nature, susceptible to reformism, whether that of solar pacifism, ideas about a “democratic” union, or the constituency politics of the “gay community”. Nonetheless, real openings exist in the shielding of advanced capitalist society. These fissures - the result of social fission — will widen only to the extent that their shortcomings are brought into the open and examined, only if they go forward. The anti-nuclear movement, for example, will either expand into an anti-capitalist movement (and thus become a movement genuinely opposed to hierarchy and a movement beyond religious ‘‘witness”) of become part of a retooling process which, ironically, will give new life (and half-lives!) to the society the “‘no nuke” protesters oppose.

While it is certainly true that the technology purposely utilised by modern capitalism is increasingly poisonous to public health — and the rise in occupational hazards is no accident — this society actually thrives on its defects and engages in a conscious form of social recall in which criticism of the excesses of the system serves to perpetuate it by introducing “new and improved" models of the same machine. However bitter their dispute, Ralph Nader and his opponents operate under an unwritten gentlemen's agreement in which, throughout all the “public” debate, the basic design — the social structure itself — is never put into question.

If reformism only greases the wheels of the existing machinery, the choice confronting us cannot simply be reduced to one of “apocalypse or revolution’. of eco-catastrophe or libertarian communism (even if that is our goal!) Modem capitalism has always proved able to manage its crises. In fact, crisis management lies at the core of its success. It is when this core is exposed, however, when the various cooling tanks of redress and reinforcement overheat, that things and, more importantly, people become more interesting. As people start to talk to each other, to rediscover what they have in common, the prevailing “culture of narcissism’’ recedes.

Out of the current dissatisfaction, new ideas and a new radical awareness have undoubtedly emerged: the dissatisfied are once again considering the question of what constitutes opposition, and of how it must express itself. A truly revolutionary alternative to world capitalism will only arise from a further revolution in social consciousness; when those of us who derive no real benefit from the existing system realize that no real altematives presently exist. Rather, they must be created through a process of critical “research and development”.

In this “dry” summer, the days — working days — really are longer. While the media and their political stars talk about our resentment over gas lines, new lines of thought and action are being drawn, and they are being drawn along class lines. To speak of class conflict is not to revive the myth of the “heroic worker" but to recognize that the realities of work — its organization and its product — dominate our lives. We are in the absurd position of having economics control us, rather than being in a truly rational position where the economy could be made to enrich life. It is precisely an end to this unnatural order that we are seeking. We do live in an “era of limits"’, but these limits are not realty material ones, but rather are social barriers: roadblocks of authority, tradition and habit that confront us (and sometimes are even put up by us) in our “personal” and public lives. These walls obviously must be demolished if a new society is to be created, and already the siege has begun.

The ability of contemporary protest to go beyond immediate issues is nowhere more clearly shown than in the San Francisco street rebellion of May 21, 19791 What began as a mass cry for vengeance — all the more ironic in that it opposed capitalist injustice from the standpoint of capitalist "justice" — quickly degenerated, that is, developed, into a physical assault upon city government and its computers, upon government itself. The rioters directly attacked those “community” leaders who had staked their careers on “representing” cultural diversity. The community of insurgency born in the streets cannot — and could not — be reduced to a “gay riot’: not only did “straights” participate, but the myth of gay uniformity exploded in the flames of burning police cars and the confusion of gay leaders.

In attacking banks as well as the occupying troops of the SFPD, boutiques as well as electoral bosses, the streetfighters really did manifest a “general anti-establishment feeling", as the appointed pimp, Harry Britt, unwittingly described it. By repulsing a police attack on the Castro street ghetto, in surging back toward City Hall and the business district, the rebellion shattered more than windows: as the rank-and-file of the streets squared off with the police rank-and-file, the center could indeed no longer “hold”. While the newspapers decry “mob rule’, this violence illuminated more than the class nature of the judicial system. iI exposed the real mob that rules San Francisco: the modish swine of commerce, law, politics — the official and unofficial mafia that engages in institutionalized extortion every day.

The new battlefield of social warfare runs from the lettuce fields of Salinas to the bedroom communities of the Bay Area and farther, to the combat zones of Europe and Latin America, to the genuinely dissident groups in China and those forces that opposes — from the left of the Fedayeen — Khomeini’s obscurantist dictatorship in Iran. These quite different movements have no objective (or subjective) unity, but they converge — and transcend their specificity — precisely as they discover their common enemies: party leaders and business executives; union officials and “right to work" slavetraders; lay priests of pop psychology and religious conmen. These often rival elements of officialdorm find an ulterior unity in their joint defense of a world system in which the fundamental division of labor is between those who command wealth and power and those who are their unwilling accomplices.

The riptides of discontent which are appearing in the U.S. today are no more “last gasp” of the sixties: they prefigure something new, and as the mass culture of the seventies disintegrates. we must prepare to declare war upon the emerging culture of the eighties and its pretended “opposition”. As individuals seek to translate ideas into revolt itself, our tendency openly hopes to contribute to the hostilities, Not through a simple denunciation of the status quo, but by offering new perspectives on contemporary history, by provoking thought. Our viewpoint is anti-authoritarian, and our action is collective, but we must also be inventive. We fight for revolutionary autonomy — not as a dogmatic slogan, but as the necessary precondition for the reinvention of social life. Immediately, the struggle is for “decontrol", for an end to dependence on capitalist institutions and ideology. We have ideas. We hope you have better ideas.

29 May 1979

• 1Libcom note: A reference to the "White Night Riots" in San Francisco. This is also covered in the Collective Inventions text Crimes of Freedom.