Throughout the 20 issues of AntiClockWise the subject of
nihilism recurred regularly and was addressed by several correspondents. These
forays, with a couple of repetitions, are reproduced here.
AntiClockWise #1 Nihilism – Raoul Vaneigem; K. Eliot; ACW
AntiClockWise #7 Nihilism – Edited from IS 11, 1967 in
Leaving the 20th Century by Chris Gray
AntiClockWise #15 Nihilists – Extracts from letters from
Elliot Cantsin and from a Liverpool correspondent
AntiClockWise #16 Oh no, a rant against nihilism – Paul
Petard
AntiClockWise #18 The Sauce of the Nihil – Feral Faun
AntiClockWise #20 Nihilism: Replies – Paul Petard; Matthew
Fuller
NIHILISM – Raoul
Vaneigem (Take from The Revolution of Everyday Life) (AntiClockWise #1) “We
don’t know where we’re going and, frankly, we don’t care”
Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best. “The show is
over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and
go home. They turn round … No more coats and no more homes.”
Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. Until its
abolition, the spectacle can never be anything except the spectacle of
nihilism.
For the last century and a half, the most lurid
contributions to art and life have been the fruit of free experiment in the field
of abolished values.
Paradox:- a) the great propagators of nihilism lacked an
essential weapon, the sense of historic reality, the sense of the reality of
decay, erosion, fragmentation; b) those who have made history in the period of
bourgeois decline have been tragically lacking in an acute awareness of the
immense dissolvent power of history in this period.
Nihilism sweeps everything before it, God included.
How long must we bear the hegemony of these communist
bureaucrats, fascist brutes, opinion makers, pockmarked politicians,
sub-Joycean writers, neo-Dadaist thinkers – all preaching the fragmentary, all
working assiduously for the Big Sleep and justifying themselves in the name of
one order or another: the family, morality, culture, the flag, the space race,
margarine etc. NIHILISM SWEEPS EVERYTHING BEFORE IT, GOD INCLUDED. NIHILISM IS
A SELF DESTRUCT MECHANISM: TODAY A FLAME, TOMORROW ASHES …
Anyone who combines consciousness of past renunciations with
a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready to take up arms in the
cause of the transformation of daily life and of the world.
The active nihilist does not simply watch things fall apart.
S/he criticises the causes of disintegration by speeding up the process.
Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism
is pre-revolutionary, passive nihilism is counter-revolutionary. And most
people waltz tragi-comically between the two.
The nihilist makes one mistake: s/he does not realise that
other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now
an active historical factor.
***************************************************************************
By K. Eliot
The concept of an autonomous class must be developed, as
anarchist is as defunct as the rest of political terminology. Autonomy is not a
label for a political group; it is a movement of ungovernable individuals
against a world based on exploitation and the cheap pacifying trick of
consumerism. The autonomists will resurrect ‘politics’ – the politics of class,
the politics of sexuality, the politics of pleasure and of everyday life – on
its own terms to use against hierarchical power. The weapons of the autonomists
could include:-
Ridicule of the system we live under. People can stand being
insulted or assaulted, but not being laughed at.
The raising of pleasure from forgotten memories, and a
realisation of the supremacy of the individual within a community of
individuals.
Violent insurrection of individuals against manifestations
of the system, either alone or with others, for no other reason than they wish
to do so for themselves and for no cause, party or ideology. Peaceful protest
en masse never achieved anything – if you want peace, prepare for war!
Autonomist violence has no sex/sexuality, no age, no race,
no colour, no obvious perpetrators, no wish to injure anyone (but those who
uphold the system should expect no mercy) – it will be a real pleasure to see
the courts burn, the business community panic and hierarchies tremble … what
happens after that is anyone’s guess, but we will have had our bit of fun!
K.Eliot
***************************************************************************
We must be prepared to take what is apt from anarchism,
surrealism, the situationists, and anything else of use – and throw the rest on
a bonfire of redundant ideas. There can be no more nihilists fitting into role
models created by society – the ‘artist’, the eccentric, the apathetic youth,
the suicide, the mass murderer, the recluse etc.
There is no ideology, because ideology always serves the
ruling class.
Nihilism – Edited
from IS 11, 1967 in Leaving the 20th Century by Chris Gray
(AntiClockWise #7)
Rosanov’s definition of nihilism is the best: The show is
over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and
go home. They turn round … No more coats and no more homes.
Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. Once myth no
longer justifies the ways of power to men, the real possibilities of social
action and experiment appear. Myth excuses social regression, but it also
reinforces it. Its explosion frees an energy and creativity too long syphoned
away from authentic experience into religious transcendence and abstraction.
Christianity neutered the explosive nihilism of certain
gnostic sects, and improvised a new order from the remains. But the
establishment of the bourgeois world made any new recuperation of nihilistic
energy onto the plane of myth impossible. In place of a myth, the bourgeoisie
can only produce ideologies. And because ideology is essentially a partial,
technical rationality, it can never integrate the total negation of the
nihilist. As a last ditch effort, Power has produced the spectacle of nihilism
– on the principle that the more we contemplate, as spectators, the degradation
of all values, the less likely we are to get on with a little real destruction.
For the last century and a half the most striking
contribution to art and life has been the fruit of free experiment with the
possibilities of a bankrupt civilisation. The erotic reason of Sade;
Kierkegaard’s sarcasm; Nietzsche’s lashing irony; Ahab’s blasphemy; Mallarme’s
deadpan; Carroll’s fantasy; Dada’s negativism – these are the forces which have
reached out to confront people with some of the dankness and acridity of
decaying values.
The great propagators of nihilism lacked an essential
weapon: the sense of historic reality, the sense of the reality of decay,
erosion and fragmentation. Those who have made history in the period of
bourgeois decline have lacked a sense of the total decomposition of social
forms which nihilism announces.
What we need now is the conjunction of nihilism and
historical consciousness. As long as the two fail to join forces, we shall have
to endure the present empire of political and artistic hacks, all preaching the
fragmentary, all working assiduously for the Big Sleep, and justifying
themselves in the name of one order or another: the family, morality, culture,
the space-race, the future of margarine … everyone is going to pass through
nihilism. It is the bath. All that is left of the past or the future is the
demand for the present – for a present which has still to be constructed.
Today, the destructive and the constructive moments of history are slowly
coming together. When the two meet, that will be total revolution. And
revolution is the only wealth left in the affluent society.
A nihilist is someone who takes the distinction between
living and surviving seriously. If living is impossible, why survive? Once you
are in that void, everything breaks up. Past and future explode; the present is
ground zero. And from ground zero there are only two ways out, two kinds of
nihilism: active and passive.
The passive nihilist compromises with his own lucidity about
the collapse of all values. He (sic) makes one last nihilistic gesture: throws
dice to decide his cause and becomes its devoted slave, for Art’s sake, and for
the sake of a little bread … Nothing is true, so a few gestures become hip. Joe
Soap intellectuals, pataphysicians, crypto-fascists, aesthetes of the acte
gratuity, mercenaries, Kim Philbys, pop-artists, psychedelic impresarios –
bandwagon and after bandwagon works out its own version of the credo quia
absurdum est: you don’t believe it , but you do it anyway; you get used to it
and you even get to like it in the end. Passive nihilism is an overture to
conformism.
The active nihilist does not intend to simply watch things
fall apart. He intends to speed up the process. Sabotage is a natural response
to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive
nihilism is counter-revolutionary. And most people oscillate between the
two. But circumstances inevitably end by drawing a line and people suddenly
find themselves, once and for all, on one side or the other of the barricades.
Consumer society’s frantic need to manufacture new needs
adroitly cashes in on the way-out, the bizarre and the shocking. Black humour
and real agony turn up on Madison Avenue. Flirtation with non-conformism is an
integral part of the prevailing values. Awareness of the decay of values has
its role to play in sales strategy. There’s money to be made in decomposition.
More and more pure rubbish is marketed. The figurine salt cellar of Kennedy,
complete with ‘bullet holes’ through which to pour of the salt, for sale in the
supermarket, should be enough to convince anyone, if there is anyone who still
needs convincing, how easily a joke which would once have delighted Ravachol or
Peter the Painter now merely helps to keep the market going.
Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression
in Dada. Dada really did contain the seeds by which nihilism could have been
surpassed; but it just left them to rot, along with the rest. The whole
ambiguity of Surrealism, on the other hand, lies in the fact that it was an
accurate critique made at the wrong moment. While its critique of the
supercession aborted by dada was perfectly justified, when it in turn tried to
surpass Dada, it did so without beginning again with Dada’s initial nihilism,
without basing itself on Dada-anti-Dada, without seeing Dada historically.
History was the nightmare from which the Surrealists never awoke: they were
defenceless before the communist party; they were out of their depth with the
Spanish Civil War. For all their yapping, they slunk after the official left
like faithful dogs.
The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their
civilisation of its discontents – working in the last analysis far more
coherently than Freud himself – built the first laboratory to revitalise
everyday life. Their activity was far more radical than their theory. “The
point was to work completely in the dark. We didn’t know where we were going”.
The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and pure rubbish
cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end, everything was
transformed. Though people and things stayed the same they took on totally new
meanings.
The initial weakness of Dada lay in its extraordinary
humility. Every morning, Tzara, clown with the gravity of a pope, is said to
have repeated Descartes’s statement, “I’m not even interested in knowing
whether anyone ever existed before me”. Yet this same Tzara was to end up a
Stalinist, sneering at men like Ravachol, Bonnot and Makhno’s peasant army. If
Dada broke up because it could not superseded itself, then the blame lies on
the Dadaists themselves for having failed to search for the real historic
occasions when such supercession becomes possible: the moments when the masses
arise and seize their destiny in their own hands.
Nihilists –
Extracts from letters from Elliot Cantsin and from a Liverpool correspondent. (AntiClockWise
#15)
“I don’t like the term nihilism. In Kropotkin’s
autobiography he describes what nihilism meant in Russia in his time, and it
was pretty cool. It really just meant Bohemian. The nihilists hated Russian
aristocratic society, just as I and many other contemporary alternative culture
anarchists hate everything about commercial capitalist class society. But they
didn’t hate EVERYTHING; they had values, they were aesthetes, revolutionary
artists. The term nihilist became known in the West through Turgenev’s novel
‘Father and Sons’ in which he describes nihilists as he saw them. Now Turgenev
himself was a classist aristocrat and, seeing the nihilists negate everything
HE held dear, he took them at their word as being nihilists who negated
everything and believed in nothing. This view of nihilism became very trendy.
Here in the U.S. many right wing commercialists in the underground use nihilism
as an excuse to mock us leftists who are foolishly idealistic to believe in something.
In the U.S. believing in nothing is a way to justify living a life of
commercialism. Here in Tinsel-land any excuse is good enough to justify a life
of commercialism. The alternatives are usually living in the street, in prison
or in a lunatic asylum. But I see you are the right kind of nihilist …”
From a Liverpool
correspondent:
I call myself a nihilist because I have lost faith in the
anarchist movement. I now realise, after my naïve flirtation with anarchism,
that all politics, however ultra left, merely plays into the hands of a huge
spectacular game. It is a safety valve to focus our justified anger on an
agenda of single issues. Also, politics is so serious and every situation calls
for a defined response that must correlate to all previous responses.
On the one hand there are po-faced class struggle anarchists
whose good intentions are ruined by a desperate search to put the world to
rights. Most of these people are now little more than another lefty marginal
group, hopelessly devoid of spirit, creativity and new ideas. The Merseyside
Anarchist ran an editorial for several issues declaring that anyone who did not
agree with their syndicalist view of politics was not entitled to call
themselves an anarchist. Okay, I thought, and rather than argue the toss with
them and their ilk, I turned my back on it all. Hence, nihilist …
Then there are the green lifestyle anarchists who reject
traditional political roles, but fall into the old trap of single issue
concerns and drippy search for a personal nirvana conducted with a disgusting
middle class liberalism – a luxury the proletariat cannot afford in its
struggle to liberate themselves from the oppressive rigours of their everyday
lives.
I now sit back and make up my own mind on things. A bad
attitude, cynicism and ridicule are essential weapons in trying to get to grips
with this society. There is no ideology. My revolution is nihilistic assault on
everyday life, both politically and culturally.
I’m not quite sure what the one more effort is for nihilists
to become revolutionaries, but it is fun finding out and meeting new people
doing the same thing.
Oh no, a rant
against nihilism by Paul Petard. (AntiClockWise #16)
It always amuses me when individuals adopt the label
‘nihilist’ and insist that they are totally against all forms of ideology and
say they reject all politics. Of course, this is just a contradiction. Being
rigidly against all forms of ideology is itself an ideology and being
consciously against all politics is itself a political stance. Claiming to
‘reject politics; is dishonest as everybody has politics of one sort of
another, whether or not they care to admit it. Even if it is just mindlessly
sitting in front of the telly and not giving a damn about anything, that is a
form of political response. Nobody is above politics or can reject politics or
wash their hands of it. Whether bourgeois or proletarian, everybody lives in,
or under, the domination of the capitalist political economy.
When the situationists said ‘Nihilists, one more effort if
we are to be revolutionaries” they were not praising nihilism but criticising
it. Nihilism and cynicism in themselves are inadequate as a response to
alienation, they lead to a dead end, or even worse cause further alienation.
Cynicism is very easily recuperated and turned into a weapon of the system. If
everyday life is a miserable competitive rat race, well ‘”That’s life” and
“Nothing can be done about it”. We have to go beyond just nihilist
disillusionment with this present society and move towards a positive
revolutionary alternative instead.
Everyday life is based on a consumerist illusion of
individual free choice under the rule of the market. This manipulates us into
seeing any problems we have as simply individual problems and it encourages us
to struggle only individually in isolation. But there can be no isolated
individual struggle against the misery of everyday life. There are no
individual solutions to the problem of capitalist loneliness. Why? … because
individual solutions are lonely solutions. So called ‘everyday life’ is not
something freely chosen and reproduced just by individuals. ‘Everyday life’ is
a product of the capitalist system and it is organised and reproduced by
capitalist society as a whole, not at random by individuals. Therefore it needs
an organised and collective response by us in order to change it. Individuality
certainly exists and is very important, but collective action is also
essential.
Now, I’m not trying to be a miserable lefty killjoy and say
we should all go and join some party or support the trade unions or “Kick the
Tories out!” I wouldn’t insult anyone by asking them to waste their time doing
such rubbish. But rejecting organised political responses means dropping out. Or
rather, it means dropping in … to the market: going wherever the market
forces you while deluding yourself you are “making up your own mind” and “doing
your own thing”. Proletarians have to come together and organise politically
with a set of ideas if they are to effect any real change.
Nihilists are like the monster with the big suction nose in
the film Yellow Submarine. They go round sucking everything up into nothing but
eventually they go too far and suck themselves up. The problem with nihilism is
that it just leads to a negative nothing when what we need is a positive
something.
The Sauce of the
Nihil: Feral Faun. (AntiClockWise #18)
The following is a response to the article in Issue 16 criticising
the notion of ‘nihilism’. This article is part of a letter from Feral Faun, an
American contact.
I think that Paul’s rant on nihilism is full of false
conceptions which indicate that, whatever protests he might wish to make, Paul is
a leftist. His claim that to be “rigidly” (a use of language on his part that
is blatantly intended to enforce his perspective) anti-ideological is an
ideology is as absurd as the claim by fundamentalist Christians that atheism is
a religion, or the claim by absolutists that the statement “There are no
absolutes” is an absolute. Paul has an ideology so he must assume everyone does
to justify himself against the critiques of ideology.
Paul is also a strict dualist in terms of the question of
politics – you are either political or apolitical. And, as he rightly suggests,
being apolitical is a political stance simply because the passivity upholds the
present system. But he totally ignores a third option – that of being actively
anti-political, of choosing to actively seek the destruction of the polis
itself. This is because the polis is, for Paul, a given, unquestionable, destined
to always be there (he doesn’t explicitly say this, but it permeates his
letter). Because Paul rejects nihilism even as a tool, because he rejects the
possibility of opposing ideology, he makes himself incapable of questioning the
given of the ideologies he has chosen. I will grant that an anti-political
perspective is political in the same way as atheism is theological. Because a
concept of god exists it is necessary to consciously oppose it. Because the
polis exists, it is necessary to consciously oppose it.
Paul says that because capitalism is organised and
systematic it requires an organised and collective response to change it. I’m
not sure why he wants to change the capitalist system in the first
place. It seems quite capable of changing itself constantly as it needs
to. I want to destroy it, not change it. But there is a deeper absurdity in
Paul’s perspective. To claim that you cure a disease by using some of its
symptoms – or even partial causes – makes no sense. Since capitalism is
organised, what is clearly necessary is an analysis of the relationship between
capitalism, authority and organisation.
Historically, every successful revolutionary organisation
has ended up recreating capitalism in one form or another. This has already led
to radical critiques of revolutionary organisation, critiques which Paul’s
simplistic dismissal indicates he is ignorant of. Granted, one can argue that
in the midst of riots of related uprisings a king of spontaneous ‘organisation’
occurs, but that is clearly not what Paul means. He is talking about a planned
out, collective response … but who is to do the planning and what is to be the
role of the individual in this collectivity? The spontaneous ‘organisation’
that arises in riots is not a collective, it is a union of egoists
(Stirner), a reaction of individuals to their immediate circumstances and their
immediate desires moving them to act together for the moment because their
desires coincide. They are unified not be an idea, nor by an organisation that
defines their goals, but by the fact that, for the moment, acting together is
the best way of creating what we want.
There is no question that radical unions, workers councils,
political parties, peace groups and the like offer more guarantees than
spontaneous uprisings, but all the guarantee is is the reform of capital, the
continuation of the present system of social relationships in a somewhat more
palatable mask. It is the spontaneous, temporary unities that can be seen in
riots, in vandalism and related small-group acts of revolt and the like which
offers the possibility of the destruction of capitalism and the opening up of
possibilities to explore new ways of relating.
Paul is correct in saying that the statement “One more
effort, nihilists, if you would be revolutionaries” was part of a critique the
situationists made of nihilism, but I have reason to believe that Paul has
never read the full context of that critique. It was the friendliest critique
the situationists ever made of anyone. For one thing, the situationists knew
that nihilism has no relation to cynicism. At its best, cynicism is the failure
of nihilism, the inability of someone to fully and intelligently critique all
social values. More often, it is simply the disappointment of a believer in social
values when these values prove hollow. In a sense, cynicism can become the
‘passive nihilism’ that the istuationists talked of, a sinking into despair.
But the situationists also mentioned ‘active nihilism’, the active questioning
of every social value. The situationists considered this questioning essential
, but not enough to be revolutionary. This questioning needs to lead to a
reversal of perspective, according to the situationists, in which the
individual, having rejected society’s perspective, is able to see what
surrounds them from their own “radical subjectivity”, from their own passions
and desires. For the situationists, only when such a reversal of perspective
occurs does the possibility of the destruction of capital and the creation of
new ways of relating occur.
Maybe it would be better to call active nihilists
‘iconoclasts’, but the point of the situationists remains the same: only a
person who rejects all the social values we’ve been taught has the possibility
of reversing perspective – they still have to make that “one more effort” that
pulls them beyond mere rejection – but it is only active nihilists, not
leftists, not Trotskyists, not Maoists, not anarchists, not ideologues of any
sort, who may reach the point where they can transcend nihilism. I think it
would be a mistake to view this process in an absolutely linear way (i.e. as
one by one smashing each social value and then one day suddenly reversing
perspective) but the situationists have made a valid analysis. Paul has not.
One quibble I have with the situationists is that they
choose to say that the “one more effort” creates “revolutionaries”. This forces
one to redefine and explain what they mean by “revolutionary”. There have been,
and continue to be, all sorts of revolutionaries who have never reversed their
perspective, who support revolution as part of an ideology. Where their
revolutions have succeeded they have often created versions of capitalism
uglier and more repressive than what had existed before. The person who has reversed
perspective, liberating their radical subjectivity, essentially becomes not a
revolutionary, but rather an intelligent, conscious egoist( in Stirner’s sense)
for whom revolution is not a value in itself, but is a tool for destroying what prevents the liberation of
one’s desires. As an acquaintance of mine put it “Too many revolutionaries
without a revolution; we need a revolution without revolutionaries”. Feral
Faun, 1991
Nihilism: Replies
to Feral Faun by Paul Petard and Matthew Fuller (AntiClockWise #20)
Below are two responses to an article in Issue 18 by Feral
Faun, which in turn was a response to an article by Paul in Issue 16
criticising the concept of nihilism.
“I’d like to make points in reply to Feral Faun’s article
‘The sauce of the nihil’ in ACW No. 18.
1. When I wrote my short piece in ACW criticising nihilism I
was aware it had quite a few shortcomings and it was likely to provoke a
critical response. Feral faun’s article contained some good arguments. In
particular it outlined the important difference between the despair of ‘passive
nihilism’, that is much in evidence today, and the active nihilism explored by
the situationists. But Feral spoils things by jumping to conclusions, accusing
me unfairly of saying and implying things that I never said or implied at all.
Feral insists I believe the polis is unquestionable despite me not
saying or suggesting anything of the sort. Nowhere in my article did I say I
want to “change capitalism”, nor did I reject the possibility of opposing
ideology. What I was attempting to argue was that “opposing ideology” is not as
simple and straightforward as labelling oneself a “nihilist”, individually
adopting a bohemian lifestyle or mentality and then imagining oneself to be
outside the social system and the political economy that reproduced ideology.
At the moment nobody is outside the capitalist political economy.
2. Feral seems to be well into Stirnerite egoism. Now I
myself am a bit of a fan of ‘St. Max’ and his bible (“The Ego and its Own”),
Stirner does a brilliantly entertaining demolition job on everything from
divinity, to liberal humanism, to nationalism and even communism, but we should
not end up turning Max into an idol! Sadly, Stirner’s egoism contains many
flaws. Stirner leaves himself wide open to being distorted and used as an
excuse for ‘free market’ capitalism which imposes an extreme atomisation
and lonely separation between human individuals, suppressing the social
side of human existence. A lot of what Stirner says is really not much more than
a series of truisms that can be used to rationalise everything and anything
from riding your bike the wrong way down a one way street to being a boss or
dictator! Stirner fails to take account of the possibility that egoists,
starting from their own egoistic motives, might end up freely choosing to
behave in a communal and altruistic manner towards each other. And they might
do so in a much deeper and complex way than just a temporary opportunist ‘union
of egos’. He also does not pay enough attention to the fact that social and
altruistic influences and forces might be an inherent part of one’s own ego. If
you can have a ‘union of egos’ then you can also have a communion of
egos. Indeed, why not go further and end up with a … communism of
egos?!! The only real egoists in the world are hermits. And anyway if Stirner
was such a mean selfish antisocial egoistic sod why did he write all his ideas
down in a nice book so we could all have the pleasure of reading it? Maybe he
wasn’t such a hard fellow after all.
3. It is just anarcho prejudice to assume spontaneous
organisation must always be better than formal organisation. The two things
don’t have to be opposites; they can complement each other in a situation. In a
riot, for instance, we may start off spontaneously invading a building. We
might then decide to plan a rota, temporarily delegating tasks such as lookout
and food supply to certain individuals. On the other hand, if we don’t do this,
we might just spontaneously go hungry and get arrested by the police hiding
round the corner! There have been certain moments in history when the creation
of organisational forms such as workers councils have made a valid contribution
to insurrectionary situations. At the moment nearly all formal revolutionary
organisations are a joke, but that is very much to do with the specific
situation we are now in in the 1990s. It is not automatically always the case.”
Paul.
Matthew Fuller’s piece:
“What a cosy, nicely personalised way of adapting to
capitalist society claiming the rejection of all values is. After all, you
can’t be proved wrong can you? If I say that I want to destroy capitalist
society, but not society as such, is that just because I’m thick? (One social
value I don’t want to get round to destroying is talking over ideas like this
in order to get to a different position). I wouldn’t mind knowing how just how
someone who has destroyed all social values is supposed to get on with people
they meet in the street; are they allowed to have mates? Claiming a pure
intransigent relationship to society owes more to the tradition of avant-garde
art or the political vanguard in its despising of those who can’t quite get
round to destroying all those distastefully common social values. I know Feral
doesn’t actually hold the ideas of those who’ve got all the right ideas (don’t
they just know it) but the idea that you can individually supersede capitalist
relations is a con. A con revealed in the polluted air you breathe and the food
produced by wage labour that you eat.
Radical subjectivity needs to be supplemented by a
collective subjectivity. Not a collective in the sense of the ‘right-on
collective, man’ way of making capitalist relations just that little less
intolerable, but the unties that Feral hints at in riots and other group acts
of revolts and unities that form us as part of an ecology, a class or whatever.
These unities extend, in my experience, far further than
Feral dares to believe and need to be extended, sustained. They extend further
than the spasmodic tremor of riots in friendships; friendship that I know I can
rely on for my transgressions of decency, friendships that transgress property
and friendships that go beyond the idea of the sovereign individual that feral
relies on so much in order to avoid being swamped, perhaps swamped by
capitalist relations, or perhaps being swamped by something a little more
enjoyable. And not just in friendships - with people I don’t even know. The
knowledge that millions of us had the government right over the barrel on the
Poll Tax (yes, just to bring in another one and, no, it wasn’t a complete
defeat for the powerful or a revolution without revolutionaries) still gave me
a sense of our power, our resistance that makes me go on
and do more. And it is this relationship, the me and the us, me as part of us,
that makes movement possible, that puts a sustained destruction of social
relations with a price on everything well within our grasp.
Feral’s argument that every “successful” revolutionary
organisation has ended up recreating capitalism and that therefore organisation
is a no-no looks a bit shaky too when compared with the later assertion that it
is in riots and other temporary forms of subversion that freedom is found. What
happens after a riot, according to Feral’s formula? Possibilities are opened up
to explore new ways of relating, but the cops still come back. Capitalism
reasserts itself, if not in the hearts of rioters, in the terrain of the
riot. So what does this show? Not much,
just that everything is in continual movement, depending on the antagonistic
development of powers, of individuals and groups positioned in relationship to
each other. Feral’s demand that revolutions remain in a static position, the
position of their inception, a fleeting moment, denies the versatility of those
that make them and actually gives some kind of awesome magic power to those
poised to defeat them. Not daring to extend our power for fear of the unknown
reduces the possible to a radically phrased Time and Motion study that is
content with nothing but the most miniscule. What Feral realises however is
that however temporary, a displacement of restraint with freedom is still a
taste. Why the attempt to extend this infinity of freedom suddenly becomes kind
of ungroovy is a bit of a mystery.
It is this freedom that we need and that we embody in our
destruction of power relations. But what do we all it? Ideology? Being
revolutionary or what? Feral gives some hint of this when writing that the
organisation needed is “… a reaction of individuals to their immediate
circumstances moving them to act together when their ideas coincide”. These
immediate circumstances might well be the need to take over housing or
organising the production and distribution of food – spontaneous reactions that
can become long term and still not lose their necessity and vitality. How they
come around to the understanding that their desires do indeed lead them in the
same direction implies some kind of theoretical common ground in which to
negotiate this unity. (Theoretical in the sense that “theory” is when you have
ideas, “ideology” is when ideas have you). A common ground implies a
relationship that already forms some kind of counter power to those of the
dominant forces in society. These common grounds are where ideas and
relationships are formed in antagonism to those which the powerful attempt to
enforce. To deny this is to assign to power a near or complete control over us.
To allow even theoretically the powerful such immense influence is to accept
for ever the role of the marginalised. It’s a heroic pose but a waste of time.
We are the ones whose productivity keeps the parasites in place and it is when
we forget our strength, or pretend to minimalise it, that they begin to win.” Matthew Fuller
