Preamble

This is the definition of class hatred

Death appears as the harsh victory of the law of our ancestors over the dimension of our becoming. It is a fact that, as productivity increases, each succeeding generation becomes smaller. The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalisation of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground. We do not, in our busy insect-like comings and goings, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done as an exploited class will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world was built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were dead in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones.

They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done and after their deaths what they did and who they were has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present.

This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has bought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, we work as they worked, we make as they made, we are paid as they were paid. We do not possess either our acts or the world that conditions us, just as they owned nothing of their lives.
Yes they produced value, they made the world in which we now live. The world that now weighs down upon us is constructed from the wealth they made, wealth that was taken from them as soon as they were paid their wage, taken and owned by someone else, owned and used to define the nature of ownership and the class domination that preserves it.

We too must work, and the value we produce leaks away from us, from each only a trickle but in all a sea of it and that, for the next generation, will thicken into wealth for others to own and as a congealed structure it will be used as a vantage point for the bourgeoisie to direct new enterprises in new and different directions but demanding always the same work.

The class war begins in the desecration of our ancestors: millions of people going to their graves as failures, forever denied the experience of a full human existence, their being was simply cancelled out. The violence of the bourgeoisie's appropriation of the world of work becomes the structure that dominates our existence. As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.

Introduction

There has been an increasing tendency within the pro-revolutionary milieu towards theoretical error since the 1960's. It is our intention to hammer in to the milieu some theoretical nails to halt this slide. To this end we have produced two essays in the hope that the trend may be reversed. The first essay deals with the decline of revolutionary perspective into political activism. It is our intent to strongly delineate the limits we have observed in practical activity, revolutionary ambition, the make-up of the revolutionary subject and the role of the pro-revolutionary minority. The second essay deals with the manufacture of pseudo-subjectivities and how they have been contained within capitalism as elements of its own self-organisation and maintenance (spectacular forms, as the Situationists would say), it also considers the alleged role of consumerism and the consequences of prioritising anti-capitalist struggle in commercial and financial spheres.

Above all it is our intent to restate the character of the real struggle against capital. Capitalism is not an idea and it cannot be opposed by ideas or by ideas-driven action. There is no debate to be had with it, it has no ideas of its own except to say that all ideas are its own, it has no ideas intrinsic to itself.

Capitalism is, at its most basic level, a social relation of force. Capitalist society is made up of conflicting forces and it is only at this level that it can be undone, firstly in the collapse of its own forces and then in the revolutionary intervention of the proletariat. If capitalism is to collapse then it will do so at the level of the relation of economic forces, all of which (for the moment at least), and including the proletariat, can be said to be capitalist forces. It is during the collapse that revolutionary ideas begin to take hold.