Now Diversion - Jonathan Horelick

The time has come to make our concept of democratic organization more precise, to state our sense of rules, methods and objectives, in view of how we want to live and to combat the old world.

After having seen the menace of abstraction peering out from the most eloquent critical discussions, always isolated from an ongoing public praxis, the former use of the term “historical relations” seems to satisfy the kind of association which does and ought to occur between autonomous individuals at the base of the revolutionary group in this sense alone. Our relations will be historical to the extent that they are both subjective and practical. The key to the concrete truth of revolutionary activity is contained in its capacity to spread its relations and its practice. And, no doubt, in spreading the reality of what it can do it extends the possibility of what it can be. But the truth of each revolutionary is also the truth of his ability to be with others in order to be himself and to make the group radically more. The struggle of groups of individuals to be themselves expresses nothing less than their own immediate struggle for a history of individuals. The possibility of this history is inseparable from the actual struggles of revolutionary groups, the sum-total of their talents and determination, in combating the ruling spectacle.

The general question of what is now to be done involves nothing principally but the everyday life of revolutionary organization. Both the recurrence of formless, habitual encounters which never fail to carry a mock ambience of critical harmony as the bad replacement for qualitative works and in contrast the occasional intervals of real collaboration must be left behind as the gross reflections of a finished period. Collective revolutionary practice must still begin an elementary exploration of situations, outside, although not excluding, the subversion of the university and the cultural scene. Inseparably, the compositions of tracts, posters, manifestoes and magazines must become increasingly concrete, active analyses. Certainly, such an experiment will require an enlarged deployment of many of the diverse techniques of communication and inseparably the negation of their dominant use. But the experiment must concern the individuals themselves, their immediate way of life and the situations which chance as well as their radicalism allows each of them to offer to the collective milieu of subversion. The struggle of revolutionary groups cannot fix its horizons lower than the formation of an everyday interaction between its members. And their interaction in turn must also concern the immediate satisfaction of their desire to play, that is to say, to act together. The question of how to make theory more practical is inseparable from how each actually lives day by day. From train turnstiles to evacuated workplaces and consumer spectacles, the radical group must make its perspective known. The situations which are not yet accessible will not exclude the capacity to find them nor the desire to divert those which are most familiar and, accordingly, most banal. One cannot make less of an assertion without hiding in the pure shelter of theory and contemplative organization. The truth of organization is its immediate subversion of banalities within the concrete.

Here, and only here, can the new life of the revolutionary community begin to be a history. The question “what would be fun to do tomorrow” presupposes a minimum proof of the capacity to express theory and situate it among all those today who want to form new organizations and all those endeavoring to enter them in the future. Previous experience has shown that the mastery of fundamental theoretical expression through the group, and ultimately through others, is hazardous and detrimental as it existed. The point of entry into an anti-hierarchical group must glow with the common meeting of achievements. Each can only approach the collective game as the possible milieu for the refinement and extension of his proven creativity, in the communication and publication of radical theory as well as the arrogance of his refusal of power. Nothing need be said about all those in the past who did not bother to capitalize on the opportunity to write tracts, to study vital readings and to master the dialectical method (without discipline) as well as the initial patience and generosity of those who knew best.

At the beginning of new stages of radical experience, with the growth and extension of organization, the radicalization of agitational aims and even the desire to fulfill those which exist already in a superior way, the usage of the arms of expulsion, ultimatum and breaks requires the maximum possible delay until the minimum of collective projects is set specifically in motion along with the choice of individual tasks. After long trying experience, it is necessary to make that arm serve concretely, wherever necessary, in the fundamental defense of the absolute liberty of the group and each individual. Revolutionary organization can no longer accept the paltry contents of its breaks any more than it can accept the trite substance of its praxis. Accordingly, the pure questions of bad conduct, the failure to participate in a real schedule of disalienation, the deviation of individuals from a common decision and agreement, deserve an interval of real criticism between total acceptance and extreme measures of sanction. The search for transitional methods should be no more tiring than are individuals to whom they apply.

Under the peculiar atmosphere known to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of anarchism--bearing the most stupid varieties of pacifism and laissez-faire individualism--let us warn those in advance who do not hold a “taste for violence” that the present tasks before new revolutionary groups here exclude all taste for non-violence and the aversion for defending the truth. Let the whole spider web of mysticisms and mystiques spare themselves the agony of approaching us.

There is no other adventure but the concrete. Today, we know where we are. Others now must begin to surprise those who have already had the honor to participate in the revolution. Clearly, the foul days of mix-up with the small desires of reproducers, of amateur idealists and “organization men,” are behind us. In America, revolutionary theory has found an initial place at last. Our time has not expressed the search and the realization of a situationist theory but that revolutionary position which was rediscovered by the situationists.

Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1#toc65