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“Equal right to
all the goods and pleasures of this world, the destruction of all
authority, the negation of all moral restraints — in the final
analysis these are the aims behind the March 18th insurrection and
the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an
army.” —Parliamentary
Inquest on the Paris Commune The real movement that transforms
existing conditions has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisie’s
victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance became visible
once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development
of productive forces shattered the old production relations and all static
order crumbled. Everything that was absolute became historical. When people are thrust into
history and forced to participate in the work and struggles which constitute
history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a
clear and disabused manner. This history has no goal distinct from what
it creates within itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical
vision of the historical era considered the productive progression through
which history has unfolded as itself the object of history. As for the
subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production
of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of
their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.
The class struggles of the
long revolutionary period ushered in by the rise of the bourgeoisie
have developed in tandem with the dialectical “thought of history,”
the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning of what exists,
but which strives to learn how to supersede what exists, and in the process
breaks down every separation. For Hegel the point was no
longer to interpret the world, but to interpret the transformation
of the world. But because he limited himself to merely interpreting
that transformation, Hegel only represents the philosophical
culmination of philosophy. He seeks to understand a world that develops
by itself. This historical thought is still a consciousness that
always arrives too late and that can only offer retrospective justifications
of what has already happened. It has thus gone beyond separation only
in thought. Hegel’s paradoxical stance — his subordination
of the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination while at the
same time proclaiming that his own system represents that culmination
— flows from the simple fact that this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought in his philosophy only
a reconciliation with the results of those revolutions. “Even
as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express the entire
process of this revolution, but only its concluding phase. It is thus
a philosophy not of the revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl
Korsch, “Theses on Hegel and Revolution”). Hegel performed the
task of the philosopher — “the glorification of what exists”
— for the last time; but already what existed for him could be nothing
less than the entire movement of history. Since he nevertheless maintained
the external position of thought, this externality could be masked
only by identifying that thought with a preexisting project of the Spirit
— of that absolute heroic force which has done what it willed and
willed what it has done, and whose ultimate goal coincides with the present.
Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by historical thought,
has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world only by denying
it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total history
to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and that
the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed. When the proletariat demonstrates
through its own actions that this historical thought has not been forgotten,
its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at the same
time a confirmation of its method. Historical thought can be saved
only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat
as a revolutionary class can be nothing less than historical consciousness
operating on the totality of its world. All the theoretical currents of
the revolutionary working-class movement — Stirner and Bakunin
as well as Marx — grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian
thought. The inseparability of Marx’s
theory from the Hegelian method is itself inseparable from that theory’s
revolutionary character, that is, from its truth. It is in this regard
that the relationship between Marx and Hegel has generally been ignored
or misunderstood, or even denounced as the weak point of what became fallaciously
transformed into a doctrine: “Marxism.” Bernstein implicitly
revealed this connection between the dialectical method and historical
partisanship when in his book Evolutionary Socialism
he deplored the 1847 Manifesto’s unscientific predictions
of imminent proletarian revolution in Germany: “This historical self-deception,
so erroneous that the most naďve political visionary could hardly have
done any worse, would be incomprehensible in a Marx who at that time had
already seriously studied economics if we did not recognize that it reflected
the lingering influence of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic, from which
Marx, like Engels, could never completely free himself. In those times
of general effervescence this influence was all the more fatal to him.”
The inversion carried out by
Marx in order to “salvage” the thought of the bourgeois revolutions
by transferring it to a different context does not trivially consist of
putting the materialist development of productive forces in place of the
journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter with itself
— the Spirit whose objectification is identical to its alienation
and whose historical wounds leave no scars. For once history becomes real,
it no longer has an end. Marx demolished Hegel’s position
of detachment from events, as well as passive contemplation
by any supreme external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theory’s concern
is simply to know what it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day society’s
passive contemplation of the movement of the economy is an untranscended
holdover from the undialectical aspect of Hegel’s attempt
to create a circular system: it is an approval that is no longer on the
conceptual level and that no longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself,
because the movement it now praises is a sector of a world where thought
no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical development effectively
dominates everything. Marx’s project is the project of a conscious
history, in which the quantitativeness that arises out of the blind development
of merely economic productive forces must be transformed into a qualitative
appropriation of history. The critique of political economy is
the first act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments
of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class
itself.” Marx’s theory is closely
linked with scientific thought insofar as it seeks a rational understanding
of the forces that really operate in society. But it ultimately goes beyond
scientific thought; it preserves scientific
thought only by superseding it. It seeks to understand social struggles,
not sociological laws. “We recognize only one science: the
science of history” (The German Ideology). The bourgeois era, which wants
to give history a scientific foundation, overlooks the fact that the science
available to it could itself arise only on the foundation of the historical
development of the economy. But history is fundamentally dependent on
this economic knowledge only so long as it remains merely economic
history. The extent to which the viewpoint of scientific observation
could overlook history’s effect on the economy (an overall process
which modifies its own basic scientific premises) is shown by the vanity
of those socialists who thought they had calculated the exact periodicity
of economic crises. Now that constant government intervention has succeeded
in counteracting the tendencies toward crisis, the same type of mentality
sees this delicate balance as a definitive economic harmony. The project
of transcending the economy and mastering history must grasp and incorporate
the science of society, but it cannot itself be a scientific
project. The revolutionary movement remains bourgeois insofar
as it thinks it can master current history by means of scientific knowledge.
The utopian currents of socialism,
though they are historically grounded in criticism of the existing social
organization, can rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore history
(that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking place and any
passage of time outside the immutable perfection of their image of a happy
society), but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian
thinkers were completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier
centuries. They sought the completion and fulfillment of this general
rational system. They did not consider themselves unarmed prophets, for
they firmly believed in the social power of scientific proof and even,
in the case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “Why,”
Sombart asked, “would they want to seize through struggle what merely
needed to be proved?” But the utopians’ scientific
understanding did not include the awareness that some social groups have
vested interests in maintaining the status quo, forces to maintain it,
and forms of false consciousness to reinforce it. Their grasp of reality
thus lagged far behind the historical reality of the development of science
itself, which had been largely oriented by the social requirements
arising from such factors, which determined not only what findings were
considered acceptable, but even what might or might not become an object
of scientific research. The utopian socialists remained prisoners of the
scientific manner of expounding the truth, and they viewed this
truth as a pure abstract image — the form in which it had established
itself at a much earlier stage of social development. As Sorel noted,
the utopians took astronomy as their model for discovering and
demonstrating the laws of society: their unhistorical conception of harmony
was the natural result of their attempt to apply to society the science
least dependent on history. They described this harmony as if they were
Newtons discovering universal scientific laws, and the happy ending which
they constantly evoked “plays a role in their social science analogous
to the role of inertia in classical physics” (Materials for a
Theory of the Proletariat). The scientific-determinist
aspect of Marx’s thought was precisely what made it vulnerable to
“ideologization,” both during his own lifetime and even more
so in the theoretical heritage he left to the workers movement. The advent
of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics,
the historical science par excellence, which is increasingly
seen as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own future negation. In
this way revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this
negation, tends to be pushed out of theory’s field of vision. Instead,
it becomes important to patiently study economic development, and to go
back to accepting the suffering which that development imposes with a
Hegelian tranquility. The result remains “a graveyard of good intentions.”
It is now discovered that, according to the “science of revolutions,”
consciousness always comes too soon, and has to be taught. “History
has shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were wrong,” Engels
wrote in 1895. “It has made clear that the state of economic development
on the Continent at that time was far from being ripe.” Throughout
his life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but
the exposition of his theory was carried out on the terrain
of the dominant thought insofar as it took the form of critiques of particular
disciplines, most notably the critique of the fundamental science of bourgeois
society, political economy. It was in this mutilated form, which eventually
came to be seen as orthodox, that Marx’s theory was transformed into
“Marxism.” The weakness of Marx’s
theory is naturally linked to the weakness of the revolutionary struggle
of the proletariat of his time. The German working class failed to inaugurate
a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune was defeated in isolation.
As a result, revolutionary theory could not yet be fully realized. The
fact that Marx was reduced to defending and refining it by cloistered
scholarly work in the British Museum had a debilitating effect on the
theory itself. The scientific conclusions that Marx drew about the future
development of the working class, along with the organizational practice
apparently called for by those conclusions, became obstacles to proletarian
consciousness at a later stage. The theoretical shortcomings
of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution (both in
its content and in its
form of exposition) all ultimately result from identifying the proletariat
with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of
power. As early as the Communist
Manifesto, Marx’s effort to demonstrate the legitimacy of proletarian
power by citing a repetitive sequence of precedents led him to
oversimplify his historical analysis into a linear model of the
development of modes of production, in which class struggles invariably
resulted “either in a revolutionary transformation of the entire
society or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.” The plain
facts of history, however, are that the “Asiatic mode of production”
(as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere) preserved its immobility despite
all its class conflicts, that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal
lords, and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the
rule of the freemen. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the
bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won, and
that it is also the only class for which the development of the economy
was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.
The same oversimplification led Marx to neglect the economic role of the
state in the management of class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed
to liberate the economy from the state, this was true only to the extent
that the previous state was an instrument of class oppression within a
static economy. The bourgeoisie originally developed its independent
economic power during the medieval period when the state had been weakening
and feudalism was breaking up the stable equilibrium between different
powers. The modern state, on the other hand, which began to support the
bourgeoisie’s development through its mercantile policies and which
developed into the bourgeoisie’s own state during the laissez-faire
era, was eventually to emerge as a central power in the planned management
of the economic process. Marx was nevertheless able to describe
the “Bonapartist” prototype of modern statist bureaucracy, the
fusion of capital and state to create a “national power of capital
over labor, a public force designed to maintain social servitude”
— a form of social order in which the bourgeoisie renounces all historical
life apart from what has been reduced to the economic history of things,
and would like to be “condemned to the same political nothingness
as all the other classes.” The sociopolitical foundations of the
modern spectacle are already discernable here, and these foundations negatively
imply that the proletariat is the only pretender to historical life.
The only two classes that really
correspond to Marx’s theory, the two pure classes that the entire
analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes in
history, but operating under very different conditions. The bourgeois
revolution is over; the proletarian revolution is a yet-unrealized project,
born on the foundation of the earlier revolution but differing from it
qualitatively. If one overlooks the originality of the historical
role of the bourgeoisie, one tends also to overlook
the concrete originality of the proletarian project, which can achieve
nothing unless it carries its own banners and recognizes the “immensity
of its own tasks.” The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the
class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot create its own
new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness.
The growth of productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence
of such a power — not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession
which that growth entails. Nor can a Jacobin-style seizure of the state
be a means to this end. The proletariat cannot make use of any ideology
designed to disguise its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat
cannot preserve any partial reality that is truly its own. If Marx, during a certain period
of his participation in the proletarian struggle, placed too great a reliance
on scientific prediction, to the point of creating the intellectual basis
for the illusions of economism, it is clear that he himself did not succumb
to those illusions. In a well-known letter of 7 December 1867, accompanying
an article criticizing Capital which he himself had written but
which he wanted Engels to present to the press as the work of an adversary,
Marx clearly indicated the limits of his own science: “The author’s
subjective tendency (imposed on him, perhaps, by his political
position and his past), namely the manner in which he views and presents
the final outcome of the present movement and the present social process,
has no connection with his actual analysis.” By thus disparaging
the “tendentious conclusions” of his own objective analysis,
and by the irony of the “perhaps” with reference to the extrascientific
choices supposedly “imposed” on him, Marx implicitly revealed
the methodological key to fusing the two aspects. The fusion of knowledge and
action must be effected within the historical struggle itself, in such
a way that each depends on the other for its validation. The proletarian
class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing revolutionary
struggles and in its reorganization of society at the moment of revolution
— this is where the practical conditions of consciousness
must exist, conditions in which the theory of praxis is confirmed by becoming
practical theory. But this crucial question of organization was virtually
ignored by revolutionary theory during the founding period of the workers
movement, the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary
character it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly
vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). Instead,
the organizational question became the weakest point of radical theory,
a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of hierarchical and statist
tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization
of the workers movement that were developed on the basis of this dereliction
of theory in turn tended to inhibit the maintenance of a unitary theory
by breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented disciplines.
This ideologically alienated theory was no longer able to recognize the
practical verifications of the unitary historical thought it had betrayed
when such verifications emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles;
instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and memory
of those verifications. Yet those historical forms which took shape in
struggle were the very practical terrain that was needed in order to validate
the theory. They were what the theory needed, yet that need had not been
formulated theoretically. The soviet, for example, was not a
theoretical discovery. And to go back even further, the highest theoretical
truth of the International Workingmen’s Association was its own existence
in practice. The First International’s
initial successes enabled it to free itself from the confused influences
of the dominant ideology that had survived within it. But the defeat and
repression that it soon encountered brought to the surface a conflict
between two different conceptions of proletarian revolution, each of which
contained an authoritarian aspect that amounted to abandoning
the conscious self-emancipation of the working class. The rift between
the Marxists and the Bakuninists, which eventually became irreconcilable,
actually centered on two different issues, the question of power in a
future revolutionary society and the question of the organization of the
current movement, and each of the adversaries reversed their positions
when they went from one aspect to the other. Bakunin denounced the illusion
that classes could be abolished by means of an authoritarian implementation
of state power, warning that this would lead to the reconstitution of
a bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable
(or of those reputed to be such). Marx, who believed that the concomitant
maturation of economic contradictions and of the workers’ education
in democracy would reduce the role of the proletarian state to a brief
phase needed to legitimize the new social relations brought into being
by objective factors, denounced Bakunin and his supporters as an authoritarian
conspiratorial elite who were deliberately placing themselves above the
International with the harebrained scheme of imposing on society an irresponsible
dictatorship of the most revolutionary (or of those who would designate
themselves as such). Bakunin did in fact recruit followers on such a basis:
“In the midst of the popular tempest we must be the invisible pilots
guiding the revolution, not through any kind of overt power but through
the collective dictatorship of our Alliance — a dictatorship without
any badges or titles or official status, yet all the more powerful because
it will have none of the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies
of working-class revolution opposed each other, each containing a partially
true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting
itself up as an ideological authority. Powerful organizations
such as German Social Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation faithfully
served one or the other of these ideologies; and everywhere the result
was very different from what had been sought. The fact that anarchists have
seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present
represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist
struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously —
the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been
ludicrous). From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist
anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence on
this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to any consideration
of methods. Its critique of political struggle has consequently
remained an abstract one, while its commitment to economic struggle has
been channeled toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly
be achieved by a single blow on this terrain, on the day of the general
strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have saddled themselves with
fulfilling an ideal. Anarchism remains a merely ideological
negation of the state and of class society — the very social conditions
which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the ideology
of pure freedom, an ideology that amalgamates everything and dismisses
any notion of historical evil. This fusion of all partial demands
into a single all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit
of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the name of the
whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical
specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been considered only
in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim and in advance of
any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all too obvious
incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular struggle by repeating
and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing lesson, because this
lesson has from the beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of
the movement. This perspective is reflected in Bakunin’s 1873 letter
of resignation from the Jura Federation: “During the past nine years
the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world,
if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a
new one. It’s no longer the time for ideas, it’s time for actions.”
This perspective undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thought’s
recognition that ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the
historical terrain by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition
to practice have already been discovered and will never change. The anarchists, who explicitly
distinguish themselves from the rest of the workers movement by their
ideological conviction, reproduce this separation of competencies within
their own ranks by providing a terrain that facilitates the informal domination
of each particular anarchist organization by propagandists and defenders
of their ideology, specialists whose mediocre intellectual activity is
largely limited to the constant regurgitation of a few eternal truths.
The anarchists’ ideological reverence for unanimous decisionmaking
has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled manipulation of their own
organizations by specialists in freedom; and revolutionary anarchism
expects the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means, from the
masses once they have been liberated. Furthermore, the anarchists’
refusal to take into account the great differences between the conditions
of a minority banded together in present-day struggles and of a postrevolutionary
society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the isolation of anarchists
when the moment arrives for collective decisionmaking, as is shown by
the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and
crushed at a local level. The illusion more or less explicitly
maintained by genuine anarchism is its constant belief that a revolution
is just around the corner, and that the instantaneous accomplishment of
this revolution will demonstrate the truth of anarchist ideology and of
the form of practical organization that has developed in accordance with
that ideology. In 1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution,
a revolution that was the most advanced expression of proletarian
power ever realized. But even in that case it should be noted that the
general uprising began as a merely defensive reaction to the army’s
attempted coup. Furthermore, inasmuch as the revolution was not carried
to completion during its opening days (because Franco controlled half
the country and was being strongly supported from abroad, because the
rest of the international proletarian movement had already been defeated,
and because the anti-Franco camp included various bourgeois forces and
statist working-class parties) the organized anarchist movement proved
incapable of extending the revolution’s partial victories, or even
of defending them. Its recognized leaders became government ministers,
hostages to a bourgeois state that was destroying the revolution even
as it proceeded to lose the civil war. The “orthodox Marxism”
of the Second International is the scientific ideology of socialist revolution,
an ideology which identifies its whole truth with objective economic processes
and with the increasing recognition of the inevitability of those processes
by a working class educated by the organization. This ideology revives
the sort of faith in pedagogical demonstration that was found among the
utopian socialists, but combines that faith with a contemplative
invocation of the course of history. This attitude has lost both the Hegelian
dimension of total history and the static image of totality presented
by the utopians (most richly by Fourier). This type of scientific attitude,
which can do nothing more than revive the traditional dilemmas between
symmetrical ethical choices, is at the root of Hilferding’s absurd
conclusion that recognizing the inevitability of socialism “gives
no indication as to what practical attitude should be adopted. For it
is one thing to recognize that something is inevitable, and quite another
to put oneself in the service of that inevitability” (Finanzkapital).
Those who failed to realize that for Marx and for the revolutionary proletariat
unitary historical thought was in no way distinct from the practical
attitude to be adopted generally ended up becoming victims of the
practice they did adopt. The ideology of the social-democratic
organizations put those organizations under the control of the professors
who were educating the working class, and their organizational forms corresponded
to this type of passive apprenticeship. The participation of the socialists
of the Second International in political and economic struggles was admittedly
concrete, but it was profoundly uncritical. It was a manifestly
reformist practice carried on in the name of an illusory
revolutionism. This ideology of revolution inevitably foundered on
the very successes of those who proclaimed it. The elevation of the socialist
journalists and parliamentary representatives above the rest of the movement
encouraged people who had in any case usually been recruited from the
bourgeois intelligentsia to become habituated to a bourgeois lifestyle.
And even industrial workers who had been recruited out of struggles in
the factories were transformed by the trade-union bureaucracy into brokers
of labor-power, whose task was to make sure that that commodity was sold
at a “fair” price. For the activity of all these people to have
retained any appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism would have
had to have turned out to be conveniently incapable of tolerating this
reformism on the economic plane, despite the fact that it had no trouble
tolerating the legalistic political expressions of the same reformism.
The social democrats’ scientific ideology confidently affirmed that
capitalism could not tolerate these economic antagonisms; but history
repeatedly proved them wrong. Bernstein, the social democrat
least attached to political ideology and most openly attached to the methodology
of bourgeois science, was honest enough to point out this contradiction
(a contradiction which had also been implied by the the reformist movement
of the English workers, who never bothered to invoke any revolutionary
ideology whatsoever). But it was historical development itself which ultimately
provided the definitive demonstration. Although full of illusions in other
regards, Bernstein had denied that a crisis of capitalist production would
miraculously force the hand of the socialists, who wanted to inherit the
revolution only by way of this orthodox sequence of events. The profound
social upheaval touched off by World War I, though it led to a widespread
awakening of radical consciousness, twice demonstrated that the social-democratic
hierarchy had failed to provide the German workers with a revolutionary
education capable of turning them into theorists: first, when
the overwhelming majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war;
then, following the German defeat, when the party crushed the Spartakist
revolutionaries. The ex-worker Ebert, who had become one of the social-democratic
leaders, apparently still believed in sin since he admitted that he hated
revolution “like sin.” And he proved himself a fitting precursor
of the socialist representation that was soon to emerge as the
mortal enemy of the proletariat in Russia and elsewhere, when he accurately
summed up the essence of this new form of alienation: “Socialism
means working a lot.” As a Marxist thinker, Lenin
was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist who applied the
revolutionary ideology of “orthodox Marxism” within
the conditions existing in Russia, conditions which did not lend themselves
to the reformist practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International.
In the Russian context, the Bolshevik practice of directing the proletariat
from outside, by means of a disciplined underground party under the control
of intellectuals who had become “professional revolutionaries,”
became a new profession — a profession which refused to come to terms
with any of the professional ruling strata of capitalist society (the
Czarist political regime was in any case incapable of offering any opportunities
for such compromise, which depends on an advanced stage of bourgeois power).
As a result of this intransigence, the Bolsheviks ended up becoming the
sole practitioners of the profession of totalitarian social domination.
With the advent of the war
and the collapse of international social democracy in the face of that
war, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able
to spread its influence all over the world. The bloody end of the democratic
illusions of the workers movement transformed the entire world into a
Russia, and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary breakthrough
engendered by this period of crisis, offered its hierarchical and ideological
model to the proletariat of all countries, urging them to adopt it in
order to “speak Russian” to their own ruling classes. Lenin
did not reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary
ideology, but for ceasing to be a revolutionary ideology.
The historical moment when
Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy
fought victoriously for the old world marks the definitive inauguration
of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s
domination: the representation of the working class has become
the most fundamental enemy of the working class. “In all previous revolutions,”
wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of 21 December 1918, “the
combatants faced each other openly and directly: class against class,
program against program. In the present revolution, the troops protecting
the old order are not fighting under the insignia of the ruling class,
but under the banner of a ‘social-democratic party.’ If the
central question of revolution was posed openly and honestly — Capitalism
or socialism? — the great mass of the proletariat would today have
no doubts or hesitations.” Thus, a few days before its destruction,
the radical current of the German proletariat discovered the secret of
the new conditions engendered by the whole process that had gone before
(a development to which the representation of the working class had greatly
contributed): the spectacular organization of the ruling order’s
defense, the social reign of appearances where no “central question”
can any longer be posed “openly and honestly.” The revolutionary
representation of the proletariat had at this stage become both the primary
cause and the central result of the general falsification of society.
The organization of the proletariat
in accordance with the Bolshevik model resulted from the backwardness
of Russia and from the abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the workers
movement of the advanced countries. These same backward conditions also
tended to foster the counterrevolutionary aspects which that form of organization
had unconsciously contained from its inception. The repeated failure of
the mass of the European workers movement to take advantage of the golden
opportunities of the 1918-1920 period (a failure which included the violent
destruction of its own radical minority) favored the consolidation of
the Bolshevik development and enabled that fraudulent outcome to present
itself to the world as the only possible proletarian solution. By seizing
a state monopoly as sole representative and defender of working-class
power, the Bolshevik Party justified itself and became what it already
was: the party of the owners of the proletariat, owners
who essentially eliminated earlier forms of property. For twenty years the various
tendencies of Russian social democracy had engaged in an unresolved debate
over all the conditions that might bear on the overthrow of Czarism —
the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the preponderance of the peasant majority,
and the potentially decisive role of a proletariat which was concentrated
and combative but which constituted only a small minority of the population.
This debate was eventually resolved in practice by a factor that had not
figured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy that placed
itself at the head of the proletariat, seized state power, and proceeded
to impose a new form of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution
had been impossible; talk of a “democratic dictatorship of workers
and peasants” was meaningless verbiage; and the proletarian power
of the soviets could not simultaneously maintain itself against the class
of small landowners, against the national and international White reaction,
and against its own representation which had become externalized and alienated
in the form of a working-class party that maintained total control over
the state, the economy, the means of expression, and soon even over people’s
thoughts. Trotsky and Parvus’s theory of permanent revolution, which
Lenin adopted in April 1917, was the only theory that proved true for
countries where there was minimal social development of the bourgeoisie,
but even there it became true only after the unknown factor of bureaucratic
class power came into the picture. In the numerous arguments within the
Bolshevik leadership, Lenin was the most consistent advocate of concentrating
dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological representation.
Lenin was right every time in the sense that he invariably supported the
solution implied by earlier choices of the minority that now exercised
absolute power: the democracy that was kept from peasants by means of
the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which led
to denying it to Communist union leaders and to party members in general,
and finally to the highest ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth
Congress, as the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried
under a barrage of slander, Lenin attacked the radical bureaucrats who
had formed a “Workers’ Opposition” faction with the following
ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin would later extend to an absolute
division of the world: “You can stand here with us, or against us
out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition. . . .
We’ve had enough opposition.” After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy
consolidated its power as sole owner of a system of state capitalism
— internally by means of a temporary alliance with the peasantry
(the “New Economic Policy”) and externally by using the workers
regimented into the bureaucratic parties of the Third International as
a backup force for Russian diplomacy, sabotaging the entire revolutionary
movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose support it in turn
hoped to secure in the sphere of international politics (the Kuomintang
regime in the China of 1925-27, the Popular Fronts in Spain and France,
etc.). The bureaucratic society then carried this consolidation of power
to the next stage by subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror, implementing
the most brutal primitive accumulation of capital in history. The industrialization
of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: the
continuation of the reign of the economy and the preservation of the essence
of market society: commodity labor. It also demonstrated
the independence of the economy: the economy
has come to dominate society so completely that it has
proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs
for its own continued operation. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie
has created an independent power which, so long
as it remains independent, can even do without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian
bureaucracy was not “the last owning class in history” in Bruno
Rizzi’s sense; it was merely a substitute ruling class for
the commodity economy. A tottering capitalist property system was replaced
by a cruder version of itself — simplified, less diversified, and
concentrated as the collective property of the bureaucratic class.
This underdeveloped type of ruling class is also a reflection of economic
underdevelopment, and it has no agenda beyond overcoming this underdevelopment
in certain regions of the world. The hierarchical and statist framework
for this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided by the
working-class party (which was itself modeled on the hierarchical separations
of bourgeois organization). As Ante Ciliga noted while in one of Stalin’s
prisons, “Technical questions of organization turned out to be social
questions” (Lenin and the Revolution). Leninism was the highest voluntaristic
expression of revolutionary ideology; it was a coherence of the separate,
governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent of Stalinism, revolutionary
ideology returned to its fundamental incoherence. At that stage,
ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a
lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.
The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well
as purpose; nothing exists but what it says
exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confined to
certain underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential
role in the spectacle’s global development. This particular materialization
of ideology did not transform the world economically, as did advanced
capitalism; it simply used police-state methods to transform people’s
perception of the world. The ruling totalitarian-ideological
class is the ruler of a world turned upside down: the more
powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power
is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this
one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously
attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible
leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy
must be invisible as a class. As a result all social life becomes
insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental
contradiction. Stalinism was also a reign
of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which
this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class
itself, because this class had no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized
status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members.
Its ownership had to be masked because it was based on false consciousness.
This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of
a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured.
The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership
over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie:
they have to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society;
they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet
in order to actually participate in this counterfeit entity, their legitimacy
must be validated. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to
power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have
to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove
himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official
line is that there is no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally
dependent on the seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology,
which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime”
of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats
are collectively empowered to make all the social decisions, the cohesion
of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist
power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth
of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary
line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without
appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy —
who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded
“a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized
bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of
Stalin — the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as a
supreme being, for whom there exists no higher type of spirit.
“The lord of the world comes to recognize his own nature — omnipresent
power — through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly
powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defines
the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages
that terrain.” By the time ideology has become
total through its possession of total power, and has changed from partial
truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so totally
annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical
knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives
in a perpetual present in which everything that has previously happened
exists only as a terrain accessible to its police. The project already
envisioned by Napoleon of “monarchically directing the energy of
memory” has been realized in Stalinism’s constant rewriting
of the past, which alters not only the interpretations of past events
but even the events themselves. But the price paid for this emancipation
from all historical reality is the loss of the rational frame of reference
that is indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system.
It is well known how much the scientific application of an ideology gone
mad has cost the Russian economy (one need only recall the Lysenko fiasco).
This contradiction — the fact that a totalitarian bureaucracy trying
to administer an industrialized society is caught between its need for
rationality and its repression of rationality — is also one of its
main weaknesses in comparison with normal capitalist development. Just
as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture as ordinary
capitalism has done, it also proves to be inferior to the latter in the
field of industrial production, because it can only plan that production
in an authoritarian manner based on unrealism and generalized
falsehood. Between the two world wars
the revolutionary working-class movement was destroyed by the joint action
of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism (the latter’s
organizational form having been inspired by the totalitarian party that
had first been tried out and developed in Russia). Fascism was a desperate
attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis
and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist
society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization
in the form of massive state intervention in its management. But this
rationalization is hampered by the extreme irrationality of its methods.
Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois
ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral
order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty
bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic
crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement’s failure to bring
about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. Fascism
presents itself as it is — a violent resurrection of myth
calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues:
race, blood, leader. It is a technologically
equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythical rehashes are
re-presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning
and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation of the
modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class
movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society.
However, since fascism is also the most costly method of preserving
the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the
major capitalist states which represent stronger and more rational forms
of that order. When the Russian bureaucracy
has finally succeeded in doing away with the vestiges of bourgeois property
that hampered its rule over the economy, and in developing this economy
for its own purposes, and in being recognized as a member of the club
of great powers, it wants to enjoy its world in peace and to disencumber
itself from the arbitrariness to which it is still subjected.
It thus denounces the Stalinism at its
origin. But this denunciation remains Stalinist — arbitrary, unexplained,
and subject to continual modification —
because the ideological lie at its origin can never be revealed.
The bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically
because its existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly,
which, for all its cumbersomeness, is its only title to power. This ideology
has lost the passion of its original expression, but its passionless routinization
still has the repressive function of controlling all thought and prohibiting
any competition whatsoever. The bureaucracy is thus helplessly tied to
an ideology that is no longer believed by anyone. The power that used
to inspire terror now inspires ridicule, but this ridiculed power still
defends itself with the threat of resorting to the terrorizing force it
would like to be rid of. Thus, at the very time when the bureaucracy hopes
to demonstrate its superiority on the terrain of capitalism it reveals
itself to be a poor cousin of capitalism. Just as its actual
history contradicts its façade of legality and its crudely maintained
ignorance contradicts its scientific pretensions, so its attempt to vie
with the bourgeoisie in the production of commodity abundance is stymied
by the fact that such abundance contains its own implicit ideology,
and is generally accompanied by the freedom to choose from an unlimited
range of spectacular false alternatives — a pseudofreedom that remains
incompatible with the bureaucracy’s ideology. At the present stage in the
bureaucracy’s development its ideological title to power is already
collapsing internationally. The power that established itself nationally
in the name of an ostensibly internationalist perspective is now obliged
to recognize that it can no longer impose its system of lies beyond its
own national borders. The unequal economic development of diverse bureaucracies
with competing interests that have succeeded
in establishing their own “socialism” in more than one country
has led to an all-out public confrontation between the Russian lie and
the Chinese lie. From this point on, each bureaucracy in power will have
to find its own way; and the same is true for each of the totalitarian
parties aspiring to such power (notably those that still survive from
the Stalinist period among certain national working classes). This international
collapse has been further aggravated by the expressions of internal negation
which first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East
Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government
of steel workers” — a negation which has in one case already
gone to the point of sovereign workers councils
in Hungary. But in the final analysis, this crumbling of the global alliance
of pseudosocialist bureaucracies is also a most unfavorable development
for the future of capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is in the process
of losing the adversary that objectively supported it by providing an
illusory unification of all opposition to the existing order. This division
of labor between two mutually reinforcing forms of the spectacle comes
to an end when the pseudorevolutionary role in turn divides. The spectacular
component of the destruction of the worker-class movement is itself headed
for destruction. The only current partisans
of the Leninist illusion are the various Trotskyist tendencies, which
stubbornly persist in identifying the proletarian project with an ideologically
based hierarchical organization despite all the historical experiences
that have refuted that perspective. The distance that separates Trotskyism
from a revolutionary critique of present-day society is not unrelated
to the respectful distance the Trotskyists maintain toward positions that
were already mistaken when they were acted on in real struggles. Until
1927 Trotsky remained fundamentally loyal to the upper bureaucracy, while
seeking to gain control of it so as to make it resume a genuinely Bolshevik
foreign policy. (It is well known, for example, that in order to help
conceal Lenin’s famous “Testament” he went so far as to
slanderously disavow his own supporter Max Eastman,
who had made it public.) Trotsky was doomed by his basic perspective,
because once the bureaucracy became aware that it had evolved into a counterrevolutionary
class on the domestic front, it was bound to opt for a similarly counterrevolutionary
role in other countries (though still, of course, in the name of
revolution). Trotsky’s subsequent efforts to create a Fourth International
reflect the same inconsistency. Once he had become an unconditional partisan
of the Bolshevik form of organization (which he did during the second
Russian revolution) he refused for the rest of his life to recognize the
bureaucracy’s nature as a new ruling class. When Lukács, in 1923,
presented this same organizational form as the long-sought link between
theory and practice, in which proletarians cease being mere “spectators”
of the events that occur in their organization and begin consciously choosing
and experiencing those events, he was describing as merits of the Bolshevik
Party everything that that party was not. Despite his profound
theoretical work Lukács remained an ideologue, speaking in the name of
the power that was most grossly alien to the proletarian movement, yet
believing and giving his audience to believe that he found himself completely
at home with it. As subsequent events demonstrated how that power
disavows and suppresses its lackeys, Lukács’s endless self-repudiations
revealed with caricatural clarity that he had identified with the total
opposite of himself and of everything he had argued for in History
and Class Consciousness. No one better than Lukács illustrates the
validity of the fundamental rule for assessing all the intellectuals of
this century: What they respect is
a precise gauge of their own degradation. Yet Lenin had hardly
encouraged these sorts of illusions about his activities; on the contrary,
he acknowledged that “a political party cannot examine its members
to see if there are contradictions between their philosophy and the party
program.” The party whose idealized portrait Lukács had so inopportunely
drawn was in reality designed for only one very specific and limited task:
the seizure of state power. Since the neo-Leninist illusion
carried on by present-day Trotskyism is constantly being contradicted
by the reality of modern capitalist societies (whether bourgeois or bureaucratic),
it is not surprising that it gets its most favorable reception in the
formally independent “underdeveloped” countries, where the local
ruling classes’ versions of bureaucratic state socialism end up amounting
to little more than a mere ideology of economic development.
The hybrid composition of these ruling classes is more or less clearly
related to their position in the bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. Their
international maneuvering between those two poles of capitalist power,
along with the numerous ideological compromises (notably with Islam) stemming
from their heterogeneous social bases, end up removing from these degraded
versions of ideological socialism everything serious except the police.
One type of bureaucracy establishes itself by forging an organization
capable of combining national struggle with agrarian peasant revolt; it
then, as in China, tends to apply the Stalinist model of industrialization
in societies that are even less developed than Russia was in 1917. A bureaucracy
able to industrialize the nation may also develop out of the petty bourgeoisie,
with power being seized by army officers, as happened in Egypt. In other
situations, such as the aftermath of the Algerian war of independence,
a bureaucracy that has established itself as a para-state authority in
the course of struggle may seek a stabilizing compromise by merging with
a weak national bourgeoisie. Finally, in the former colonies of black
Africa that remain openly tied to the American and European bourgeoisie,
a local bourgeoisie constitutes itself (usually based on the power of
traditional tribal chiefs) through its possession of the state.
Foreign imperialism remains the real master of the economy of these countries,
but at a certain stage its native agents are rewarded for their sale of
local products by being granted possession of a local state — a state
that is independent from the local masses but not from imperialism. The
result is an artificial bourgeoisie which is incapable of accumulating
capital and which simply squanders the surplus value it extracts
from local labor and the subsidies it receives from protector states and
international monopolies. Because of the obvious inability of these bourgeois
classes to fulfill the normal economic functions of a bourgeoisie, they
soon find themselves challenged by oppositional movements based on the
bureaucratic model (adapted to particular local
conditions) that are eager to seize this heritage. But the bureaucracy’s
successful realization of its fundamental project of industrialization
produces the historical conditions for its own defeat: by accumulating
capital it also accumulates a proletariat, thus creating its own negation
in countries where that negation had not previously existed. In the course of the complex
and terrible evolution that has brought the era of class struggles to
a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has
lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective. In the final
analysis, it has also lost its illusions. But it has not lost
its being. The proletariat has not been eliminated. It remains irreducibly
present within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism: it consists
of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives
and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves
as the proletariat, the force working to negate this society from within.
This proletariat is being objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination
of the peasantry and by the increasing degree to which the “service”
sectors and intellectual professions are being subjected to factorylike
working conditions. Subjectively, however, the proletariat is
still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes
not only for white-collar workers but also for the blue-collar workers,
who have yet to become aware of any perspective beyond the impotence and
mystifications of the old politics. But when this
proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the
constant reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer merely in the
form of its alienated labor but also in the form of the unions, political
parties, and institutions of state power that it had created in the effort
to emancipate itself, it also discovers through concrete historical experience
that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified externalizations
and all specializations of power. The proletariat is the bearer of a revolution
that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying
the permanent domination of the present over the past and the total critique
of separation; and it must discover the appropriate
forms of action to carry out this revolution. No quantitative amelioration
of its misery, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can
provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because
the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong
it has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong.
It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but
only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded
from any real life. New signs of negation are proliferating
in the most economically advanced countries. The spectacle reacts to these
signs with incomprehension and misrepresentation, but they are sufficient
proof that a new period has begun. We have already seen the failure of
the working class’s first assault against capitalism; now we are
witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance. Anti-union struggles
of Western workers are being repressed first of all by the unions; and
rebellious youth are raising
new protests, protests which are still vague and confused but which clearly
imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized
politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous struggle that is at
first taking on a criminal appearance, and they are both harbingers
of a second proletarian assault against class society. As
the lost children of this as yet immobile army reappear on this battleground
— a battleground which has changed and yet remains the same —
they are following
a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack the
machinery of permitted consumption. “The long-sought political
form through which the working class could carry out its own economic
liberation” has taken on a clear outline in this century, in the
shape of revolutionary workers councils which
assume all decisionmaking and executive powers and which
federate with each other by means of delegates who are answerable
to their base and recallable at any moment. The councils that have actually
emerged have as yet provided no more than a rough hint of their possibilities
because they have immediately been opposed and defeated by class society’s
various defensive forces, among which their own false consciousness must
often be included. As Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting for the power
of workers councils “poses problems” rather than providing a
solution. But it is precisely within this form of social organization
that the problems of proletarian revolution can find their real solution.
This is the terrain where the objective preconditions of historical consciousness
are brought together — the terrain where active direct communication
is realized, marking the end of specialization, hierarchy and separation,
and the transformation of existing conditions into “conditions of
unity.” In this process proletarian subjects can emerge from their
struggle against their purely contemplative role: their consciousness
now is equal to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves
because this consciousness has become inseparable from coherent intervention
in history. With
the power of the councils — a power that must internationally supplant
all other forms of power — the proletarian movement becomes its own
product. This product is nothing other than the producers themselves,
whose goal has become nothing other than their own fulfillment. Only in
this way can the spectacle’s negation of life be negated in its turn.
The appearance of workers councils
during the first quarter of this century was the most advanced expression
of the old proletarian movement, but it has gone unnoticed, except in
travestied forms, because it was repressed and destroyed along with all
the rest of the movement. Now, from the vantage point
of the new stage of proletarian critique, the councils can be seen in
their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated movement.
The historical consciousness which recognizes that the councils are the
only terrain in which it can thrive can now see that they are no longer
at the periphery of a movement that is subsiding, but at the center of
a movement that is rising. A revolutionary organization
that exists before the establishment of the power of workers councils
must discover its own appropriate form through struggle; but all these
historical experiences have already made it clear that it cannot claim
to represent the working class. Its task, rather, is to itself
embody a radical separation from the world of separation. Revolutionary organization
is the coherent expression of the theory of praxis as it enters into two-way
communication with practical struggles in the process of becoming practical
theory. Its own practice is to foster the communication and coherence
of these struggles. At the revolutionary moment when social separations
are dissolved, the organization must dissolve itself as a separate organization.
A revolutionary organization
must constitute an integral critique of society, that is, it must make
a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated social life while
refusing to compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the
world. In the organization’s struggle with class society, the weapons
are nothing other than the essence of the combatants themselves:
a revolutionary organization must thus see to
it that the dominant society’s conditions of separation and hierarchy
are not reproduced within itself. It must constantly struggle against
its deformation by the ruling spectacle. The only limit to participation
in its total democracy is that each of its members must have recognized
and appropriated the coherence of the organization’s critique, a
coherence that must be demonstrated both in the critical theory as such
and in the relation between that theory and practical activity. As capitalism’s ever-intensifying
imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for
workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, putting them in
the position of having to reject that impoverishment in its totality
or not at all, revolutionary organization has had to learn that it
can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle.
Proletarian revolution depends
entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as understanding
of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires that
workers become dialecticians and put their thought into practice. It thus
demands of its “people without qualities”
more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified individuals
it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial ideological consciousness
created by a segment of the bourgeois class was based on the economy,
that central part of social life in which that class was already
in power). The very development of class society to the stage of
the spectacular organization of nonlife thus leads the revolutionary project
to become visibly what it had always been in essence.
Revolutionary theory is now
the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it knows it. Chapter 4 of Guy Debord’s
The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). Translated by Ken
Knabb. This translation is not copyrighted.
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