This is a text written mainly by Paolo Virno, I believe, signed by the “Immaterial Workers of the World” which I found online here and here. The translation is by Myk Zeitlin. The text is online in Italian here and in Spanish here. It’s title is “What did I tell you?”, in Italian, “Che te lo dico a fare”. It first appeared in issue 18 of Derive Approdi, contents listed here. There’s a short preface to the text which isn’t translated. I may take a crack at that in the next week or so.

The Social Working Day

Politics today is governed by a social time outside of the cardinal points (?). The fixation of a new calendar is the prize of the political struggle.

Social time escapes from the cardinal points at the time when there is no longer anything that distinguishes work from the rest of human activity. So, at the time when work ceases to constitute a special and separate practice, inside of which are in force criteria and peculiar procedures, which are completely different from the criteria and procedures that regulate non-work time.

Work and non-work develop an identical productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociality, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, capacity to abstract and to apprehend. From the point of view of ” what” one does and ” how” one does it, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. That is to say, unemployment is unwaged labour, and labour in its turn is waged unemployment. One can maintain, with good reason, that as much as one never stops working, so one works always less. These paradoxical or contradictory formulations testify together to the leaving of the cardinal points of social time.

The old distinction between ” work” and ” non-work” is resolved in this between waged life and unwaged life. The boundary between the one and the other is arbitrary, mutable, subject to political decision.

The productive co-operation in which labour power participates is ever more ample, more rich, than that put in the field by the labour process. This includes also non-work. Labour power valorises capital only because it never loses its quality as non-work. Unproductivity, in the eyes of the capitalist (and of the destitute economist) is any service that does not claim in its cause unwaged life.

As social co-operation precedes and exceeds the labour process, postfordist labour is always also submerged labour. This expression doesn’ t mean only uncontractualised employment, ” black work”. Submerged labour is in the first place unwaged life, or rather that part of human activity that, homogenised completely into labour, is not however computed as productive force.

We call production time the indissoluble unity of unwaged and waged life, work and non-work, emerged social activity and submerged social activity. Labour time is only a fraction, and not necessarily the most relevant, of production time.

Surplus value springs today from productive activity that surpasses labour activity in the strict sense. The growth of surplus value is gained, today, by modifying the proportion between the paid part and that unpaid of PRODUCTION TIME as a whole (not just between the paid and unpaid parts of LABOUR TIME only). Beyond the surplus labour of individuals, unwaged production time includes its infralaborative and extralaborative co-operation.

Practical politics at the level of postfordism must make all productive time completely visible, in its complete extent, making of it the only legitimate criteria for the distribution of wealth. The objective of a CITIZEN’S INCOME is obviously central. With this we reclaim retribution for the production time which overflows beyond labour time. The citizen’s income is the SALARY FOR SOCIAL CO-OPERATION which precedes and exceeds labour time. The citizen’ s
income is nothing but the institution of a NEW CALENDAR.

The citizen’s income risks however reducing itself to a (giaculatoria rassicurante)??. Or to a fetish. Rather than give new breath to political action, it could simply confirm the paralysis. If it does not break down into precise points on the budget and federalism, and above all if not sustained by the invention of a REVOLUTIONARY UNION OF IMMATERIAL, FLEXIBLE AND PRECARIOUS LABOUR, the fervent litany on the citizen’s income is equivalent to a discourse on a ” more just society” . And discourses on a ” more just society” we know are often the alibi of apathy or of the sly winking of petty trade.

The New Species

With the expression “mass intellectuality” it is never wished to designate a certain number of particular trades, but a quality of ALL postfordist labour. This formulation signals that labour has become essentially linguistic (mental, cognitive) or, but this is the same thing, that language has been put to work. It is very easy, but wrong to say that mass intellectuality is an economic-sociological category among others, which replaces linearly that used in the fordist ambit. But it is also easy and mistaken to say that mass intellectuality transcends economy and sociology, being defined above all by cultural constellations, ethical dispositions, living contexts. The matter is more complicated. Mass intellectuality is a NEW SPECIES. It is the central axis of capitalist accumulation: therefore it has an extraordinary socio-economic relevance. But it is the central axis of capitalist accumulation PRECISELY BECAUSE (not despite) its salient characteristics can only be described in ethical-cultural terms, as together differentiated from forms of life. Mass intellectuality stands at the centre of the postfordist economy precisely because its mode of being escapes from all concepts of political economy. This is the paradox to confront in terms of theory of organisation.

The principle form of existence of the ” new species” is the RESERVOIR OF MASS INTELLECTUALITY. The reservoir is the spatial/temporal ambit in which comes extralavorative socialisation. It is the context in which one forges the co-operation which precedes and exceeds the labour process. To be concrete, social labour power institutes a bringing together of independent relationships within itself, which last as long as the employment (or lack of employment) of individuals; relationships which give the unitary presupposition of all kinds of flexible and precarious jobs.

The reservoir, in which one develops linguistic co-operation, is the fundamental reality of waged labour no less than of autonomous labour. The legal specifications of types of occupation are precisely just specifications. Communicative and relational labour, formed by the reservoir, is thus eventually also autonomous. But it is not communicative and relational because it is autonomous. In the reservoir of mass intellectuality it is impossible to sever working attitude from the ” world of life” . In this sense the reservoir makes universal and paradigmatic the traditional characteristics of female labour.

The reservoir exhibits within itself, like a geological dissection, all the decisive elements of the globalised economy: migratory flux, communicative networks, clots of abstract knowledge, articulations of state administration. The reservoir is a microcosm which exemplifies, on a local scale, the interlacing of the productive forces mobilised by postfordism.

The fragmentation of the workers defers the unity of the reservoir, and vice versa. Political organisation is the organisation of the reservoir or is nothing.

The reservoir of mass intellectuality requires the growth of a NONREPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY and the formation of a NON-STATAL PUBLIC SPHERE. Everything that is tied to the exchange of equivalents postulates political representation (nonche) the identification of “public” and “statal”. The other way round, everything that coincides with productive co-operation excludes representation and founds a public dimension asymmetrical to the state. So, since the reservoir of mass intellectuality makes everything one with social co-operation which precedes and exceeds work in the strict sense, of itself it needs to say democratic, but not representable, public, but not of the state.

The organisational forms which attach (?) to the reservoir are the Social Centre, the Commune, the Soviet. The growth of a non-representative democracy and the formation of a non-governmental public sphere have as an inescapable condition the MAXIMUM DEVELOPMENT OF FEDERALISM, the drastic decentralisation of public spending, the proliferation of local elective assemblies.

A radical federalism holds in hatred the (gaglioffe???) inventions that are the province and the region. They deal with imaginary entities, to dissolve, concentrating the resources thus saved on the effectively LOCAL dimension. Or, if you prefer, municipal. Understanding municipality to mean nothing other than the determined territory in which the reservoir of mass intellectuality organises itself as counter-power.

Every aspect of a federalist re-articulation of powers and competencies can and must be forced in a soviet sense; direct democracy, local self-government, revocable mandates, votes for immigrants and their eligibility for communal administration etc.

Federalism must constitute besides, the institutional premise for a kind of NEP (yes, precisely the NEP promoted by Lenin after the defeat of the revolution in the West. New economic politics designed to run the transition). The federalist NEP consists in giving place to forms of self-entrepreneuriality (or of “business politics” ) within the reservoir of mass intellectuality. A postfordist NEP, a transition which has local roots, here is a definition of federalism fit for drinking.

Participation with our own list, or in others’ lists, in communal or ward elections etc.is an opportune and necessary step. So as opportune and necessary can result the relationship with that caricature of charismatic-bonapartist politics which is today in Italy the mayor. From itself the participation in local elections and eventual talking with the ” party of the mayors” is not something good in itself, nor a copernican revolution: its use is measured, step by step, by the growth of institutions of non-representative democracy (soviet and NEP). As Donnie Brasco said, what did I tell you to do?

Immaterial Workers of the World

It is not wise to be scared of words. For example of the word: UNION. The hatred and contempt that the merchants of labour-power have merited in the course of time should not deter from the salient point: the territorial or ganisation of the most urgent demands of the reservoir of postfordist labour. But (attention!) of the reservoir SUCH AS IT IS before it differentiates itself into wage labour, autonomous, servile, intellectual, executive etc. labour. The development of a REVOLUTIONARY UNIONISM in the heart of postfordism is, and will remain for some time, the principle task of the grand politics. The rest counts and has weight, of course, but is precisely the rest.

We start from a fact so evident and banal, that it escapes however from view and from attention. Postfordist labour is not disposed, in Italy, to even the minimum of self-defence, resistance, collective bargaining. The situation, from this point of view, can be compared to the start of the industrial revolution. The absence of any elementary protection regarding in particular the small productive unit, the fruit of systematic “externalisation” ; the new services, from the pony express (couriers) to the chat-line telephonists; the training contracts; the intermittent performance of intellectual labour (TV collaborators, translators etc.). And regarding, naturally, the immigrants.

A large part of indigenous employed labour shares, today, some typical characteristics of the conditions of migrants. And vice-versa: the migrant exemplifies in the most apparent mode the situation which faces a large part of employed labour. Employees in the personal service sector, in building, as seasonal workers in agriculture, the migrants play likewise a strategic role in
the most advanced industrial regions, from the North East to Pedemontana alle Marche. At the extreme margin, and nevertheless at the foundation, of productive co-operation, the migrant experiments to the highest degree with that clandestinity and that personal rule by which, however, is characterised also the precariarity of the Italian language: enough to think of the young textile workers of Val Bormida forced to sign a redundancy letter which the boss uses when they become pregnant. The two principal points of application of union activity are the “fixed term workers” (that is those that pass several times, in one sense or another, the frontier between labour and non-labour), and the migrants (from) outside the community.

Models of revolutionary unionism are, inevitably, the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Spanish CNT-FAI in the years before the civil war, the Italian Chambers of Labour running between the 18th and 19th Centuries. Models to study at the root, to sketch out again, that attach themselves well to the reservoir of mass intellectuality. The organisations of catholic voluntary workers offer, in some cases, useful points to put in focus a union form capable of grasping the connections between production and reproduction, labour and non-labour, culture and material interests.

The social centres are, potentially, the CHAMBERS OF LABOUR of the archipelago of submersed, intermittent, flexible activity. A postfordist “chamber of labour” combines different and complimentary functions: a permanent RECEPTION CENTRE for clandestine immigration, an autonomous and alternative JOB CENTRE of mass intellectuality, data-base or ARCHIVE of information and knowledge; legal RED AID for questions of working rights; HOUSE OF MUTUAL AID.

In the large cities the union must root itself in the university. It must open, in every faculty, a section or a “counter” to assess and analyse the conditions of the student-workers and the worker-students. These hybrid figures are an evident key to the problem for whoever wants to organise the reservoir of immaterial labour.

The radical union of the new IWW has as its aim the construction of an ALLIANCE. The reservoir of postfordist labour is today stretched between two trunks: a “middle class” and a “new poverty” . MIDDLE CLASS: sectors of autonomous labour of the second generation, the central nucleus (stable, with directional roles) of the co-operative or the micro-company of the “tertiary sector” , the “symbolic analysts” who the American ex-Minister of Labour Robert Reich speaks of, certain jobs of co-ordination in the innovated factory (FIAT of Melfi), a free-professionalism not without resources in the cultural industry and in communication. NEW POVERTY: the immigrants, the subaltern strata of the “tertiary sector”, the precarious workers without a safety net, off-the-cards workers. To ignore the division is mad. To pick out one of the two polarities to the detriment of the other is like a lie. It is necessary to determine, through the concrete elaboration of a platform of demands, the point of convergence and of reciprocal potentiality between the “middle class” and the “new poverty” , instead of dealing on the run alternatively with the hardships of the one and the tragedies of the other. But it is necessary to know that a spontaneous recomposition is not possible starting from material conditions. What is needed, in the immediate moment, is a POLITICAL PACT (with some inevitable split within the “middle class” ). Or, more precisely, a profitable ALLIANCE.

The union pledges itself to elaborating a “statute of rights” of postfordist labour, that does not oppose “rigidity” to “flexibility” but aims to make of the latter a point of force, or the favourable material base of the institutions of counterpower of living labour. The “statute of rights” requires a long apprenticeship in the form of an INQUIRY, or, but it is the same, a grasp of the words of the mass.

The union fights for the abolition of all forms of copyright, of authors rights, limitations of access to knowledge and information. The productive force based on knowledge and on communication is constitutively common, shared out (?), public. If many arrive at it in unison, it is not devalued, on the contrary, it increases and multiplies its usefulness. The abolition of copyright is the irrenuncable condition of non-representative democracy and of a public sphere finally not of the state.

The union foresees in the school and the university the possibility of a “third sector” : certainly not private or businesslike, but neither state-bureaucratic, anchored in the swindling myth of the legal value of the certificate of study. With a brief image: when one is called on to chose between a headmaster-businessman or a headmaster-prefect, one can only respond requiring the abrogation of the headmaster TOUT COURT.

The reference point for union action is the “class struggle in France” of the last ten years: from the co-ordinations of the infirmary workers (1987) to the victorious struggle against the entrance wage (1994), from the transport workers strike which paralysed the Paris region, winning the solidarity of the users (1995) to the dispute over the guaranteed income opened by the unemployed (1997). Taken by itself, each episode is only interesting; considered together, in their sequence and internal links, these same conflicts constitute instead a true and real laboratory of the possible antagonism in the postfordist environment. The grave limits of the Italian Cobas (one thinks of the great dispute of the teachers in 1987) has been its business-based, or rather territorial character. And so, above all, the inability to flow out from the stable and guaranteed sectors of employment (public services and big factories). And to insert itself in the fabric of the flexible, mobile, precarious proletariat. From this its progressive decline.

To discuss revolutionary unionism, in Italy, means to pose also the question of Rifondazione communista. Or better, of the destiny of this organisation after the split and the leaving of the governing majority. Rifondazione is in fact at a junction: either the fetishization of the party form or getting used to living through the crisis with an inventive and experimental spirit; either to bare as a diminution the (quasi) extraparliamentary condition to which it has been reduced, or to take it as an opportunity to relaunch the social conflict. In synthesis: either the mythic-ritual cult of identity or investing itself (a part of itself, more or less) in a union action at the level of the times. Tertium non datur. The clever theorist does not exist to retain much further as realistic a mythic-ritual option by Rifondazione. It is true, the probabilities are decisively on that side. But whoever is not indifferent to practical politics is not content with disenchanted expectation. There are other problems. Do not ignore the weight that a commitment by militants from Rifondazione would have in the construction of an organisational network between the now proverbial couriers or the textile workers of Val Bormida. Bet on the improbable. Proceed by trial and error.

Socialdemocratic Europe and Forum for guaranteed income

Let’s not make a mistake. It is an error to believe that there still subsists a “socialdemocratic question” , or rather a complex project of society against liberalism, a defence to the bitter end of the welfare state, a reformist attempt at a “workers use of the state” . None of this. Socialdemocracy, today in government in Europe, compares without exception, even if also in different measure, to the US Democratic Party; political forces voted alternately, not as an alternative. Alternating within a horizon of political economy predetermined and immovable.

This means, among other things, that the socialdemocracies of today are no longer compact political bodies endowed with that granite identity that the infernal couple “labourism and statism” had as a standard in the past. In the socialdemocracies, as also in the American Democratic Party, it is possible to recognise heterogenous stratifications, diverse generational and cultural sediments, lobbies in conflict among themselves. The only serious analysis of socialdemocracy (serious because aimed at a practical questioning on single questions) is a transversal analysis.

Within socialdemocracy and the Greens it is possible to pick out today a European tendency inclined to promote experiments, even if partial and limited, of a citizens income. A tendency that admits, even under the technical and econometric profile, the failure of all other proposals intended to contain and to govern structural mass unemployment. Speaking with this tendency (in Italy coinciding maybe with that part of the 77 generation which, out of hatred of Berlinguerism and the historic compromise, looked with sympathy on the birth of the PDS) is obviously fundamental.

The grand politics, which has as its base the revolutionary syndicalism of the postfordist IWW has in the citizens income NOT yet a point of arrival, BUT of starting. That which really counts are the struggles, the forms of counterpower, the ability to take the initiative of immaterial labour, which can arise on the base of an even very timid supply of money to the unemployed. But this starting point must be followed, step by step, by a TRANSVERSAL political-cultural battle, planted within and outside the European democratic party (read: socialdemocracy no longer socialdemocratic a Green).

To take the initiative with pliability and lack of prejudice implies, however, the simultaneous construction of an appropriate “place” , of a structure far more agile which could co-ordinate, deepen, empower political action. A FORUM FOR NON-REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY AND A CITIZENS INCOME is the order of the day. To tell the truth it is already late. To favour transversalism is certainly not to limit it. To anticipate a fragment of a non-state public sphere is therefore not a parody. To make visible a collection of analyses, opinions, proposals that, radical but not at all extremist, converge in the demand: CAN YOU IMAGINE REVOLUTION?

This is a response by Negri.

BIOPOLITICS AND COUNTERPOWER by Toni Negri

In what mode can a political initiative in metropolitan Italy (which is what the documents we are discussing deal with) be put in relation with the web of forces social and political, critical and radical of Europe? The question is twice difficult to satisfy, or – if you like – twice paradoxical. To what advantage, in act, to claim a uniting with the political forces when all the action forecast and solicited by the document is essentially social?

Why claim a European dialectic of movement, political and social, when, to be realistic (as is opportune) not even the metropolitan Italian web seems today effectively practical, in a critical and radical perspective?

The responses to these questions are diverse. I believe the one given to question 1 is fundamental. To approach it let us put in evidence some principles of that which is called the new political science. (When I speak of the ‘ new political science’ I
speak, ironically but not too much, as the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution spoke of their ‘new science’. They claimed that some intuitive principles had to be affirmed, in the age of Light, and universally diffused, so that, irresistibly, they constitute the base of all correct political reasoning. Can we suppose that Foucault and Deleuze represent for us that intuitive patrimony that for the Founding Fathers was represented by Hume and Rousseau?)

Today, the first principle of the new political science is the affirmation of the biopolitical battleground (?-campo). It means that there is no ‘autonomy of the political’; that on the contrary production and administration completely merge, without a residue, because to the extent that production becomes social, politics becomes productive. Seen from the point of view of the subjects, biopolitics means that the economic and the political, the union and the bosses, the voluntary and the institutional order of social production etc. live the one within the other; the field of politics is therefore defined in a completely new way (it is intuitively evident) of biopolitics, in this way – according to this – is defined newly and fully the productive. The second principle of the ‘ new political science’ is that the struggle for power, in the case of biopower, develops within the biopolitical field, and that consequently the bioploitical field is qualified by a radical antagonism. The antagonism is manifest whenever the decisions over biopower, on the part of the producers of the social, reveal themselves irreducible to those that express the economic and political expropriators of social capital and the democratic institutions that represent them. Or better, wherever the social expression of productive power (biopolitics) is held back, distorted, blocked in forms of preservation of economic order and/or of the reproduction of preconstituted biopower.

If things are so, one can therefore respond to the double paradox raised in question 1 (why a social action, to become effective, must cross politics) recognising tranquilly that the relationship between social action and the political is made necessary by the biopolitical integration of the two. In the Fordist regime this integration was anticipated (in crude but comparable forms) by the wage-form: the workers wage represented in fact the antagonism between the political and the social. Today, in the post-fordist regimes, the biopolitical integration of the social becomes ever more strong and effective: the relationship between the wage and value, between production and politics, between wage and politics ever more direct. So it is necessary to merge social and political action, and to manage them together.

But, still trying to respond to question 1, one must immediately add that, however much it is integrated, the biopolitical web is antagonistic. When we accept entering public institutions, we do not therefore enter them because through them it is possible to produce long marches of transformation of their nature; nor because it is possible, by hiding in them to wait for the fatal moment of their revolutionisation: if we enter them it is to exercise a real dualist function (of reapropriation of space, material means and political possibility of alternative investment). I believe that to this proposal an old, very old category, that of dual power can and must be taken up again. (There are comrades who protest against the use of concepts referable to the practice of communist or ‘revolutionary syndicalist’ struggle. To this annoyance one can, without arrogance, respond the ‘the dualism of power’ constitutes maybe the most elementary and pragmatic form of politics: that there is no politics where there is not ‘ dualism of power’ and that as a consequence to refuse to use these terms is completely senseless because these terms are far more old and far more anthropologically rooted than however glorious the communist practice has experimented. Certainly when we talk of the ‘dualism of power’ we do not mean the legitimization of the immediate and summary destruction of the adversary; we mean above all an exercise of antagonism which aims to take away substance from the capacity of the exploiters to exercise biopower – a long and vast exercise not a short and excited phase of war, and above all an exercise of ontological destruction of the adversary, a process of biopolitical hegemony. On the other hand we must pay attention to not confusing entrance into a process of public administration with the simple exercise of lobbying functions, without any general
power.)

The ‘ metropolitan (postfordist) labour clubs’ if there should ever be such a thing, can not but be organs of counterpower, or at least of dualism of power: they can not but express the radical diversity of interests of those who want to produce and are impeded from it (the unemployed), of those who produce and are exploited (the workers), of those who produce the sociality of the conditions of production and are expelled from it etc., in respect of those who hold the keys of these mechanisms of production of capitalist order of society. This said we move on to question 2, and that is how to transport this paradoxical antagonistic relationship from the Italian metropolis to that of Europe?

We immediately leave the terrain by a possible simple objection: it is already very difficult to resolve certain problems in metropolitan Italy, so that to extend the range to the European terrain seems, immediately illusory and adventurist, The ‘ new political science’ offers us a third intuitive and necessary principle: the antagonistic relationship is global and nomadic.

What does this mean? For those that look it means that we will not manage to give any solution to the problems that are in front of us, if we don’t pose them immediately in a global light. But the global is nomadic, is so because of forces, powers, movements that refuse the limits of the nation state, that have already gone beyond it, that project their desires outside of any structural determination of the local, because by the local one carries backwards a radical antagonism. So again we find ourselves in front of a (necessary) journey of biopolitical integration between the local and global (for now we content ourselves with Europe) but, _at the same time_ of very singular contradictions that make untravelable the journey between local and global politics. (Here we expound on a theme: that of federalism. In constitutional history if federalism on one side has often represented a model of democracy – though certainly not direct – close to the citizen, on the other side it has also represented a reticular organisation of power that neutralises local contradictions, and in the end destroys any antagonist resource.

Today many comrades insist on federalism as a model of grass roots democracy. They are undoubtedly right. But they can defend the federalist model only if they can make rise again the antagonist resources rather than the consensual ones and those of constitutional equilibrium. And above all if they will arrange to define and manage the federalist model as a runway of linking with Europe and, at the same time, of exporting elements of social antagonism, of biopolitical contradictions. Today the ‘ new political science’ to which we refer proposes a new definition of federalism: the definition of a nomadic federalism, in which the preconstituted values and powers are not saved and defended; on the contrary the powers are predisposed to struggle and to hegemony of all those who want to produce – and are excluded from doing it – who want to circulate (and are forbidden by the opposition of borders and laws) who want to live freely and produce as much as their potential allows.)

So how to respond to the second question that we have posed? How to transfer the antagonist relations that we propose in metropolitan Italy, through an exercise of counterpower, on the European level? How to conceive of a metropolitan counterpower in the environment of a nomadic European federalism? The first two principles of the ‘ new political science’, the one about biopolitics and the one about the antagonistic nature of decisions over biopower, open up two fundamental constitutional demands: that of universal and unconditional ‘citizens income’ and that of ‘proletarian reapropriation’, or better of a constitutionalization of a counterpower that could affect the distribution of biopowers in terms of class. How to insert in this conceptual environment the third principle, that of ‘ nomadic federalism’? The only road to go down seems to be that which shows how none of these principles can live in the absence of the others: this requires (?) the logic of the new ‘ political science’. There is no possibility of ‘counterpower ‘ in fact, wherever citizens are excluded from income; for the poor there is no democracy. Neither is there a possibility of income if there is not the capacity for autonomous reapropriation of spaces of administration; for the slaves there is no citizenship.

Finally there is neither the possibility of wages or of the power of citizenship if workers are not allowed to move freely in the biopolitical space of production. Wages and citizenship are not in fact merely a collection of legal norms but an excess of movements, a desiring machine and an ontological device of transformation – always open. We re-propose now, in a slightly more complex form, our third question; how to insert a ‘ nomad (or nomadic) federalism int’o the program of European proletarians? I don’t know how to reply to this question. What is true is that in Europe, against the socialdemocratic forces that, on this theme, are particularly mute and often reluctant to take positions in favour of nomadism by immigrants, there emerge ever more political positions, Verts and Grunen who seem open to this program. The theme that we propose, that of making central ‘nomadic federalism’ in a program of ‘ citizens income’ and of ‘proletarian reappropriation of administrative spaces’ can maybe be proposed in the discussions with the French and German greens. It is true that these political forces are, some times, if not indifferent, certainly less attentive to the other themes that are central for us: as much that of ‘ citizens income’ as of ‘reappropriation of administrative spaces’. However I believe that we must lead the collection of forces to which we refer into the environment of a European political action: hoping that in brief it will now how to express also the ‘deep red’ of the tradition of workers and proletarian struggle of the centuries, and viceversa.

1. Resisting is Creating

Contrary to the defensive position in which rebel and alternative groups and movements often find themselves, we believe true resistance must include the creation, here and now, of the ties and pioneering alternative forms of movements, groups and persons who, through an activism for life, overcome capitalism and reaction. We believe that we are witnessing today, at an international level, the beginning of a counteroffensive, after a long period of doubts, backward steps and the destruction of alternative forces. This setback has been widely taken advantage of by the forces of neoliberalism and capitalism in order to destroy a good part of what one hundred and fifty years of revolutionary struggles have built. Thus, resisting is creating the new forms, the new theoretical hypotheses and practices that will meet the current challenge.

2. Resisting Sadness

We are living through a period that is profoundly marked by sadness. Not just the sadness of tears, but also, and above all, the sadness of impotence. The men and women of our time are living in the certainty that life,s complexity is such that the only thing we can do, at the risk of making it worse, is to submit to the discipline of economics, self-interest and egoism. The social and individual sadness wears us down and convinces us that we no longer have the means of living a true life, and so we submit to the order and discipline of survival. The tyrant needs the sadness, because in that way each one of us is isolated in his own small, virtual and disturbing world. But, at the same time, men need the tyrant, in order to justify their sadness. We believe that the first step to be taken against sadness (the manner in which capitalism is present in our lives) is the creation of concrete ties of solidarity. Breaking the isolation, creating solidarity, is the beginning of a commitment, of an activism that no longer operates “against,” but rather “for” life, happiness, through the liberation of potency.

3. Resistance is Multiplicity

The struggle against capitalism, which cannot be reduced to the struggle against neoliberalism, implies practices of multiplicity. Capitalism has invented a single, one dimensional world, but that world does not, “in itself,” exist. It requires our submission and our agreement in order to exist. That unified world – which is a world become merchandise – is opposed to the multiplicity of life. It is opposed to the infinite dimensions of desire, of imagination and of creation. It is opposed, fundamentally, to justice. That is why we believe that every struggle against capitalism that is trying to be global or all-encompassing remains trapped in the structure of capitalism itself, that is, globalism. Resistance should start from and develop multiplicities, through the creation of ties of solidarity and help. In no case, however, should it be a management or structure that globalizes, that centralizes, those struggles.

4. Resisting is a Dispersed Center

A resistance network that respects multiplicity is a circle that contains, poetically and paradoxically, its center in all parts.

5. Resisting is Not Desiring Power

One hundred and fifty years of revolutions have taught us that, contrary to the classic vision, the place of power, the centers of power, are, at the same time, centers of minimal power, or impotence. Power deals with management, so to speak. It is not, in itself, able to change the social structure from above, if the potency of the real ties in the base do not allow them to do so. Potency is, then, by its nature, separate from established power. That is why we think that what happens “above” is in the order of management, and politics, in the noble sense, is what happens “below,” in the arena of constituted power. That is why alternative resistance will be powerful as it abandons the trap of hope, that is, the classic political mechanism of deferring the moment of liberation invariably to a “mañana,” to a later. The “liberating masters” are asking us for obedience today, in the name of a liberation we will see tomorrow, but mañana is always mañana. This is why we are proposing to the liberating masters (political commissars, bureaucratized leaders and other sad activists) liberation here and now, and obedience mañana.

6. Resisting the Serial

Power maintains and develops sadness, aided by the ideology of insecurity. Capitalism could not exist without serializing, without dividing, without separating. And separation triumphs when, little by little, people, towns, nations exist obsessed with insecurity. Nothing is easier to discipline than a town of sheep convinced that they are, each and every one of them, a wolf for the other. Insecurity and violence are real, but only insofar as we accept them. That is, that we accept this ideological illusion that makes us believe that we, each one of us, are individuals isolated from the rest. The sad man lives as if he had been flung onto a set: the others are extras. Nature, the world and animals are “useful,” and each one of us is the central and sole protagonist of our lives. Then the individual is no longer a person, the individual is a fiction, a label. The person, on the other hand, is each one of us, but on the condition that we open our eyes to the reality of our belonging to this substantive everything that is the world. It is about rejecting the labels of profession, nationality, civil status, unemployed, employees, handicapped, etcetera. It is behind these labels that the power is trying to unify and standardize the multiplicity that each one of us is. But we are multiplicities, mixed with multiplicities. That is why the social tie is not something that has to be constructed, but rather assumed. Individuals, labels, live and reinforce the virtual world. They receive news of their own lives through the television screen. Alternative resistance involves giving a place to the reality of men, women, nature. Individuals find themselves like sad sedentary beings, trapped in their labels and roles. That is why the alternative involves assuming a libertarian nomadism.

7. Resisting Without Masters

The creation of a different life must involve, fundamentally, the creation of alternatives, of ways of life, of ways of desiring. If we desire what the master has, if we desire in the same way the master does, we will be condemned to repeat the famous revolutions, but, this time, in the physical meaning of the word “revolution,” that is, a full circle to a same point. It is then about inventing and creating new practices and images of happiness, in the concrete. If we think that one can only be happy in the individualist way of the master, and we ask for a revolution that satisfies us, we will be eternally condemned to changing masters. A communism must be created, not out of necessity, but out of the pleasure brought by solidarity. It should not be shared in the sad way, that is, because we are obligated. The pleasure of a fuller, more free life must be discovered. In the society of separation, of atomization, that is, in capitalist society, men and women do not find what they desire: they must be content with desiring what they find. Separation is separation, of one from the other, as well as of each of us from the world, of the worker from his product, but, at the same time, each one of us from us, separated, exiled from our very selves. It is the structure of sadness.

8. A Politics of Liberty

Politics, in effect, in its deepest meaning, is connected with emancipating practices, with the ideas and images of happiness that are derived from them. The political is fidelity to an active search for liberty. In contrast to that idea of the political, politics arises as the management of the situation as it appears to be given.

Management is a moment, it is a task, it is one aspect. But this one element tries to be everything. It claims the all of politics. It demands all the attention, and it hierarchizes priorities, limiting, halting and institutionalizing the vital energies that transcend it. Management is representation, and representation, as such, is only part of the real movement. This real movement does not require representation in order to exist, and the former representation on the other hand, tends to confine the potency of representation.

Revolutionary politics is that which pursues liberty at all times, but not associated so much with men or institutions, but rather as a constant evolution that does not allow itself to be tied down, to lose, to be embodied or institutionalized. The search for liberty is tied to the creating of the real movement, of the practical critique, of constant questioning and of the unlimited development of life.

In this sense, revolutionary politics is not the opposite of management. In any event, what the politics are opposed to is separation and the deification of management. The latter, as part of everything, is part of politics. Management, when it tries to be the everything of politics is, on the other hand, the precise mechanism of the virtualization that is plunging us into impotence.

Politics as such is nothing other than the harmony of the multiplicity of life in permanent conflict with its own limits. Liberty is the deployment of its abilities and strengths; management is just a limited and circumscribed moment in which this deployment is represented.

9. Resistance and Counterculture

To resist is to create and to develop counterpower and counterculture. Artistic creation is not a luxury of man, it is a vital necessity, of which the great majority find themselves deprived. In the society of sadness, art was separated from life, what,s more, art is increasingly more separated from art itself, because it is possessed, made rotten, by mercantile values. That is why artists understand perhaps better than many that resisting is creating. We are also directing ourselves to them, so that creation might overcome sadness, that is, separation, so that creation might free itself from the trap of money and recover its place in the heart of life.

10. Resisting Separation

Resisting is, at the same time, overcoming the capitalist separation between theory and practice, between the engineer and the worker, between the head and the body. A theory that is separated from practice is transformed into a sterile idea. That is why there are a myriad sterile ideas in our universities. At the same time, practices that are separated from theory are condemned to disappear, exhausted, fated to self-reabsorption. Resisting, then, is creating ties between theoretical hypotheses and practical hypotheses. Everything that knows something must also know how to transmit itself to those who wish to free themselves. In this way we create relationships, the ties that empower theories and practices of emancipation, turning our backs to the siren songs that propose that we “concern ourselves with our own lives.” In that way, we respond that our lives because they are no longer just about survival extend beyond the limits of our own skin.

11. Resisting Normalization

Resisting means, at the same time, deconstructing the falsely democratic talk that attempts to deal with the excluded sectors and people. The “excluded” do not exist in our societies. In our societies, we are all included in different ways, in ways which are more or less degrading and terrible, but included. Exclusion is not an accident, it is not an excess. What they call exclusion and insecurity is what we should see as the very essence of this society which loves death. This is why fighting against labels implies our desire to make contact with the struggles of the so-called “abnormals” or handicapped. Different persons and ways of being exist. Labels act as mini-concentration camps, where each one of us is defined by a given level of impotence. What interests us is potency, liberty. A handicapped person exists only in a society which accepts the difference between the strong and the weak. If we reject this, which is barbarism, we will not be able to retain the classification, the selection, of capitalism. That is why the alternative implies a world where each one of us assumes his or her fragility, and where each one of us develops what he can, with others and for life. We know, for example, the incredible richness of the deaf culture, created once men and women of courage learned how to break out of the prison of medical taxonomy. Similarly, the struggle against the psychiatrization of society, and so many other struggles which, far from being small struggles for a bit more space, are real creations which enrich life. For that, we are also inviting groups in struggle against the medical-social normalization discipline to resist with us.

There are similar occurrences with the forms of the subjects themselves in the educational systems. Normalization operates here as a constant threat of failure or unemployment. On the contrary, there exist parallel, alternative and diverse experiences regarding schooling, in which problems tied to education are deployed in a different logic.

The handicapped, unemployed, pensioners, marginalized cultures, homosexuals: these are all forms of sociological classification that operate to separate and isolate, based on impotence, on what they cannot do, rendering unilateral and poor what is multiple, rich, what can be viewed as full of potency.

12. Resisting Retreat

Resisting is also rejecting the temptation of a retreat to identity, which separates nationals from foreigners. Immigration, the migratory flows, are not a problem. They have been a profound reality of humanity forever, and will be so forever. It is not about being philanthropically good to foreigners. It is about desiring the richness that mestizaje produces. Resisting is creating ties among those “without” without homes, without work, without papers, those without dignity, those without land, all those without who do not have the “right skin color,” the right sexual practices, etcetera. A union of those without, a fraternity of those without, not in order to be “with,” but in order to build societies where those without and those with no longer exist.

13. Resisting Ignorance

Our societies, which purport to being scientific cultures are, in reality from an historical and anthropological perspective the societies which have produced the highest level of ignorance that the human odyssey has known. If all societies have technicians, our society is the first to be actually possessed by technology. Ninety percent of our contemporaries are incapable of knowing what happens between the moment they push the buttons and the moment in which the desired effect is produced. Ninety percent of our contemporaries know nothing about almost all the means and mechanics of the world in which they live. Thus our culture produces ignorant men and women, who, feeling exiled from their environment, are able to simply destroy it. The violence of this exile is such that humanity, for the first time, finds itself facing the real and concrete perhaps inevitable possibility of its destruction. They tell us that, given the complexity of technology, men should accept it without understanding it. The ecological disaster, however, demonstrates that those who believe they understand technology are far from managing it. It is urgent that collectives, groups, socialization forums of knowledge, be created, so that men can once more have their feet in the real world. Nowadays, genetic technology is putting us on the edge of a selection among human beings according to criteria of productivity and profit. Eugenics, in the name of the good, dehumanizes humanity. They tell us, from the screens that order our lives, that we can already proceed to cloning a human being, and our sad, disoriented humanity does not know what a human being is. These are deeply political questions which should not be left in the hands of technicians. The public man should not turn into the technical man.

14. Resistance is Constant

Resisting is affirming that, contrary to what we might believe, liberty will never be a point of arrival. Hope, paradoxically, plunges us in sadness. Liberty and justice exist only in the here and now, in and through the paths which build them. There is no good master or utopia fulfilled. Utopia is the political name of the very essence of life, that is, constant evolution. This is why the objective of resistance will never be power. Power and the powerful are themselves condemned to not being able to distance themselves too far from what a people desire. That is why it is always a slave mentality to believe that the power decides what is real in our lives. That is why the sad man we would say needs the tyrant. It is not enough to ask those men who hold power to dictate such and such a law, separate from the practices of the social base. We cannot, for example, ask a government to dictate laws of solidarity with foreigners if we do not built this solidarity in the social base. Law and the power, if they are democratic, should reflect the state of the real life of society. That is why our problem is not whether the power is corrupt and arbitrary. Our problem and our challenge is the society that this power reflects. Our task, as free men and women, is to see that ties of solidarity exist, of liberty and friendship, which truly prevent the power from being reactionary. There is no liberty other than the practice of liberation.

15. The Alternative is Struggle

One cannot truly be anti-capitalist and accept, at the same time, the images of happiness and fulfillment which the system itself generates. If one desires to be like the master, to have what the master has, one is in the position of being a slave. The path of liberty is incompatible with the master,s desire. It is exactly from the resistance that other images of happiness and liberty arise, alternative images, tied to creation and communism.

Desiring the master’s power is the opposite of desiring liberty. And liberty is to become free, it is struggle. The building of ties increases potency. Capitalist separation diminishes it. The struggle for liberty is now communist struggle to recover and increase potency. Capitalism, on the contrary, operates by abstraction, by serializing and reification, breaking down ties and plunging them into impotence. That is why the struggle for liberty and democracy is a constant becoming, never finding a definitive incarnation. That is why the struggle is always finding potency, building ties, nurturing the desire for liberty in each specific situation.

16. Worker Resistance

Resistance and the creation of new societies demands that we look at the same time at the question of the so-called revolutionary subject, that is, the working class, messianic character within modern historicism. Contrary to what postmodern sociologists say about complexity, the working class is not disappearing. The workers, function has simply been displaced and arranged geographically. Thus, if there are numerically fewer workers in the central countries, production has been displaced to the so-called peripheral countries, where the brutal exploitation of men, women and children guarantees enormous profits to capitalist companies. And so, in the central countries, through evoking insecurity and fear, they propose national alliances to the popular classes, in order to better exploit the third world. We are saying that capitalist production is a dispersed, unequal and combined production. That is why the struggle, the resistance, must be multiple, but, at the same time, one of solidarity. Individual or group liberation does not exist. Liberty is conjured only in universal terms, or, said in another way, my liberty does not end where another,s begins. My liberty, rather, does not exist without the other,s. We think that, if a revolutionary subject does not exist, multiple revolutionary subjects, of all sorts, do exist. These days we are seeing the flourishing of coordinadoras, collectives and workers groups, inundating group struggles with their demands. These struggles must, in each singularity and in each specific situation, transcend the master,s labels, that is, they must reject the separation between the employed and unemployed, between nationals and foreigners. Not because the employed person, the national, the man, the white, is being charitable with the unemployed, the foreigner, the woman, the handicapped, the minor, but because every struggle which accepts and reproduces these differences it must be said clearly and once and for all is a struggle, however violent it might be, that respects and reinforces capitalism.

But the workers, function is displaced in another sense. From the classic factory as a privileged physical space constituting value, to the social fabric, in which capital assumes the task of coordinating and subsuming each and every one of the social activities. Value is dispersed throughout all of society. It circulates through all the multiple forms of work. Capitalist accumulation is expanded to the entire society, and, therefore, it can be sabotaged at any point in the circuit, through acts of rebellion. Work adds value to the world in multiple ways, through the combination of a complex of purely technical, professional, administrative and creative tasks, whether manual or intellectual. In the base of the entire process is the strength of cooperation as the productive force of value.

17. Work and Not Working

Part of the building of the hierarchies and classifications that they impose on us stem from the confusion of the technical division of work and the social division of work. We understand two different things under the notion of work. On the one hand, a constituent activity, anthropological or ontological, of man, the totality of social relationships that make us up, the materialistic perspective of society and history. But, on the other hand, work is that duty, alienating, that modern slavery under which capital separates us into classes. It is that which makes us suffer when we have and when we have not. Abolishing work in this latter sense is to realize the possibilities of the communist idea of work, in the former sense.

The hierarchies that are founded in the one dimensionality of life regarding alienated work, in employment, are those which should be broken up, opening up the multiplicity of the knowledge and practices of life.

Work, from the ontological perspective, the totality of activities that effectively give value to the world (technical, scientific, artistic, political) are, at the same time, a source of radical democratization and a definitive and total questioning of capitalism.

18. Resisting is Constructing Practices

Resisting is not, then, having opinions. In our world, contrary to what is believed, there is not a “single way of thinking.” There are innumerable different ideas. What happens is that different opinions do not imply really alternative practices. Those opinions, therefore, are only opinions ruled by the single way of thinking, or by the single practice. This mechanism of sadness, which makes us have different opinions and single practices, must be stopped. Breaking with the world of the spectacle means no longer being spectators of our own lives, spectators of the world. Attacking the virtual world this world that needs to discipline us, to serialize us, that needs each and every one of us to be in front of the television at the same hour in order to inform us is not, then, saying how the world, the economy, education, should be, in an abstract way. Resisting is building millions of practices, of resistance groups that will not allow themselves to be trapped by what the virtual world calls “seriousness.” To be truly serious is not to think globally and confirm our impotence. To be serious involves building, here and now, the networks and ties of resistance that will free life from this world of death. Sadness is profoundly reactionary. It is understandable, but it is still reactionary. Sadness makes us impotent. Liberation is, ultimately, also liberation from the political commissars, in short, from all these bitter and sad liberating masters. That is why resisting is also this invitation to create networks that will take us out of isolation. The power wants us isolated and sad. We know how to be happy and in solidarity. It is in this sense that we do not recognize activism as an individual choice. We all have a particular level of commitment. Activists and independents do not exist. We are all tied together. The question is in knowing, on the one hand, what degree of commitment one has, and, on the other, what side of the struggle one is committed to.

19. Connecting is Empowering

It is absolutely essential to reflect on our practices. To think about them, to make them visible, intelligible, comprehensible. To be able to conceptualize what we are doing is part of the legitimacy of our constructs, and, in addition, of the socialization of knowledge between those who think doing, and those who do thinking. To ourselves be readers, thinkers and theoreticians of our practices, in order to avoid our becoming impoverished with normalizing readings. To be capable of valuing our work.

20. Resisting is Creating Ties

This manifesto is not an invitation to join a program, or even less an organization. We are simply inviting men an women, groups and collectives, who feel themselves reflected in these concerns, get in contact with us, to tell us your experiences and concerns, in order to begin here and now to destroy the isolation.

We are asking those in different countries who receive this manifesto through different means to photocopy it or to distribute it through whatever means they have at their disposal.

For our part without limiting ourselves or rejecting methods such as the Internet we think it would be better if this manifesto could circulate more concretely, from hand to hand.

All those who, singly or together, would like to make comments or proposals, to send them to us. We are committing ourselves to seeing that they are circulated through the NETWORK OF ALTERNATIVE RESISTANCE. While not proposing to build a center or directive, we are putting the entirety of the RRA,s contacts at the disposal of compañeros and friends, so that these projects and dialogues do not become concentric.

21. Collective of Collectives

Many of our collectives and groups have magazines or publications. One can often find experiences and knowledge in them that could be of benefit to other groups. The RRA is proposing to accumulate them and to put this liberating knowledge at the disposal of other groups, which will be able to help and to empower the compañeros, struggles.

Hundreds of struggles are exhausted by isolation and lack of help. Hundreds of struggles find it necessary to, so to speak, start from zero. And each struggle that fails is not just an “experience.” Every struggle that fails reinforces, emboldens the enemy. Thus the necessity for our helping ourselves, for creating “solidarity rearguards,” so that each person – who is struggling in his or her own way, anywhere in the world, in his or her own circumstances, for life and against oppression will be able to count on us, as we hope to be able to count on you.

22. Active Anti-Capitalism

Capitalism will not fall from above. That is why there are no small or large programs in the building of alternatives.

From the Autumn of Buenos Aires, 1999.

Fraternal greetings to all the BROTHERS OF THE COAST*

*”Brothers of the coast”: greetings to pirates. Unlike the corsairs, traders, slave traders and mercantilists of the seas, the pirates were communists, and they created free communities.

Signatures :

El Mate (Argentina)

Mothers Association of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)

Amauta Collective (Peru)

Collectif Malgré Tout (Paris, France)

Collectif Che (Toulon, France)

Collective Against Expulsions (Liège, Belgium)

Social Center (Brussels, Belgium)

Manifesto

by the Malgre Tout Collective

Translated by Pablo Mendez and Sebastian Touza* ( and changed to non-gendered pronouns by Dave Eden)

1. The End of History

The times of revolutionary politics are over, we are told, because messianic time is dead. But in fact, it’s just the opposite: today, a libertarian politics can only exist precisely if it is able to rid itself of messianic time. One no longer struggles for the advent of the end of history or the transparent reign of freedom, simply because freedom is not a state that can be reached, but rather an act that it is necessary to incarnate. Thus, struggle is truly political when freedom acts. This is why free acts are so rare and the promises of freedom so frequent. Along with messianic time, a politics of non-domination should rid itself of the master liberators who promise freedom in the future in exchange for subservience today. Modernity conceived messianic time under the mythical figure of progressivism, which implied that thanks to progress in all the different forms of life –the technical, economical, social and political– man would become increasingly free. And this was so because, according to the teachings of Marxism, it was the material life of a community that determined the consciousness of its inhabitants. And indeed, it’s true that consciousness is overdetermined, except that it does not identify itself with freedom. In his situation, Spartacus did not act less freely than Ché.

It’s not by instituting new ways of living that we will become increasingly free, but he opposite: it’s by acting freely that we can invent new modes of life. The same can be said about reason and justice. The point is not to reach, at the end of history, a more just and rational world. Reason and justice are not the goals of rebellion but its causes. If we are right to rebel, it’s because there is a reason, a truth, a justice in our rebelliousness.

Anyway, we should not ask ourselves what do we have to do so that humanity is free one day, but instead, what do we have to do in order to be free here and now. This is why we prefer to talk about “restricted action.” Restricted action seeks to part with that dialectical view according to which today’s revolt is validated or justified by a becoming of the world in its globality. What is broken is not libertarian politics, but rather the epic narrative in which the progressive forces defeat the reactionary ones and once and for all eradicate scarcity, exploitation, barbarism, and suffering. History has not ended, simply because it never ends. But if it must be a matter of ends, what has ended is precisely messianic time, or history with an end.

2. Restricted Action

Restricted action is political practice without messianic promise. It is, in situation, a wager without guarantees on the rupture of the status quo. This absence of guarantees is what separates it from any type of vanguardism.

Always dependent on the progressivist model, the military role of the vanguard was to show the points where a situation had to be attacked in order to attain, through its destruction, the political objective of a new status quo, completely different from the preceding one and supposedly better. Thus, the vanguard was imprisoned in a deterministic ideology according to which, once the correlation of forces of the moment was known, the future would become analytically foreseeable. Hence, the vanguard was capable of jumping outside the situation in order to look at history as the progressive unfolding of a plan: the future appeared to be as necessary as the past, and the revolution a mere acceleration of historical time. In turn, this had as a consequence the reduction of freedom here and now: the reduction of the revolutionary decision, its invention, and its novelty, to ineluctable necessity, something as foreseeable as Judas’ treason was for God.

The idea that a state of affairs subsequent to the current situation is foreseeable resupposes that the laws of historical progress are knowable. Two possibilities follow: either every new event is reduced to a “fact” that can be explained and represented according to the parameters of a model; or, if the event is not anticipated by the model, then it does not exist. Sartre had observed this in relation to the analysis that Marxists made of the Hungarian revolt of 1956: before having done any research, before starting to think about what had happened there, the event already fit within the framework of possibilities envisaged by the official model. For some, it was a counterrevolutionary reaction that in the context of the Cold War could only have been supported by Western capitalism; for others, the Trotskyites, it was a working class rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy. In either case, however, nothing new had happened: it was a foreseeable fact because it left the respective models of analysis intact. Today, something similar happens with explanations of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas. The wager without guarantees on the rupture of the situation is at the same time a wager on chance, on the non-determinate or the unforeseeable. It’s an opacity in our models: only the powerful can aspire to dominate, foresee, and determine everything that is. And us, we can only wish for that event which detotalizes the knowledge and the model of the powerful.

But the point is not to have an irrationalist vocation; rather, it’s a matter of undoing the old alliance between rationality and determinism. As a matter of fact, there is no reason to identify the historical rebels with vanguards or with powerful progressivists. When the revolutionaries engaged in action and thought, they asked themselves what could they do in history that was free and radical. But immediately a master liberator would appear and declare: “We are making history, we are leading humanity toward its salvation.” And as a result of having one eye in the present and the other one in the future, the Left has become squint-eyed… For this reason, we cannot but appreciate the words of Zapatista subcommander Marcos when he compares his revolt with the writing of a poem: far from banal scepticism, his comparison separates him from the logic of means and ends. Mallarmé certainly revolutionized poetic language, but he, however, only sought to do something absolutely revolutionary in poetry. The promise of a better world can no longer legitimate political action. Or, to put it differently, the end does not justify the means. We cannot continue to eat the cannibals in order to put an end to cannibalism. From the moment that a restricted action becomes a global action, it cannot help but think in terms of an army of the good and, consequently, in terms of a good barbarism.

Thus, during the years of the Cold War, many believed it was necessary to support the Soviet Union, “the universal homeland of socialism,” in spite of Stalin’s crimes. Who cared if millions died, if the world would finally be happy! But this does not mean that it’s necessary to confront the old revolutionary foundations with the bourgeois democratic legality of human rights and the reactionary slogan of “saving the body,” as humanists propose in order to de-politicize situations, so that there is no longer a subject but only body-objects to be saved. (In fact, restricted action does not exclude violence, but rather armed power or domination.) Indeed, today we are presented with a model that is content with being a caricatured inversion of the previous one: the messiah has been replaced by the apocalypse. It’s as if the future gave us nothing but barbaric and threatening messages. And this is an excuse for leaving things as they are and limit any political action to a bourgeois-democratic defense of human rights, of constituted legality, and majoritarian consensus. In the postmodern vision of the end of history, this is the best of the possible worlds, because any other can only offer us prodigious barbarism. In this way, political action is no longer justified by a future good but by an evil always ready to come back. As such, it does not even have its own initiative: political action has become pure reaction in the face of the worse. This is the trap in which unfortunately many “anti” groups fall.

3. The World of the Spectacle

Thus, people occupy the position of jurors-spectators –or public opinion–condemning or approving the behavior of others, the true public actors. They are not men and women who freely build a different life; rather, they are the public, represented by an opinion poll, a graph, figures. The goal is not to divide consciences but to gain support or consensus, not to incite thought but to excite common sense and opinion. This is why this spectator-individual no longer conceives themself as immersed in a situation; he is neither worker, nor woman, nor immigrant, nor disabled person, but rather an illusory transhistorical and trans-situational consciousness. Although his judgement of what happens is indelibly linked to the common sense or the consensual norm of a particular epoch, it is nonetheless lived as simply “human.”

The spectator-individual is a particularly effective invention of the era of mass media. Indeed, a media or communicational mechanism is characterized by the construction of three places: the addresser, the addressee, and the referent or “reality” that is communicated. In the mass media, the addresser is generally anonymous. Who writes the wire or the news? Who is the “objective” of the camera? The addressee, in turn, is the majority viewpoint. Thus the worker, the woman, the immigrant, the disabled person are transformed into spectator-individuals when they occupy the place of the message’s addressee. To occupy this place means to accept all the discursive presuppositions without which the message could not be decoded: in other words, the acceptance of an entire common sense. To become addressee, it’s necessary to abandon the being in situation to become a “common person,” a “person from the street,” not more and not less than a dominant or majority gaze. Finally, the referent or “reality” constructed by the media is not the concrete situation of the worker, the woman, the immigrant, or the disabled person, but “the world.” The “world” is an ensemble of facts: wars, genocide, famines, petty crimes, the dollar crisis, ecological disasters, meteorological bulletins, football matches or film releases, presented without an idea of continuity and without historical or situational contextualization. The “world” is everything that constitutes an opinion topic and is part of everyday communication and sociability.

Thus, many progressive people ask themselves: what can we do about what is happening in the world? What can we do in the face of events such as the Rwanda massacre, the hole in the ozone layer, or American interventionism? The answer may seem disappointing: nothing. Because this ensemble of facts that is called “the world” is a construction aimed at the spectator-individual and not to the person in situation. In other words, such a world does not exist outside the discursive presuppositions that constitute it. Hence, we cannot accept such a world without accepting at the same time its presuppositions, without occupying the place of the receiver or spectator-individual. It’s necessary to choose: either world or situation, because they are two mutually exclusive realities, in the same way that the individual and the political subject exclude each other. Is this an acknowledgement of the impotence of restricted, situational action in front of the world? Just the opposite: it’s the “world” what reduces any political action to impotence, because it removes it from concrete action. Which means that the mass media’s concern with the world not only puts us in a position of impotence in the face of its spectacle, but it also anesthetizes us and prevents us from acting right where we can do it: namely, in our situation.

Thus, restricted action is opposed to any vain desire for power, to any omnipotent messianism which, from a quasi-delirious position, looks at the world as it is and dictates how it should be. If restricted action is a praxis in and for the situation, it’s because its delimitation and its terms are not equivalent to information provided by the mass media. What comes to be presented as the situation must be simultaneously the fruit of an investigation, of a thought, and of a praxis which allows us to say: if this is the structure of the situation in question, then this will be our wager. When that is the case, even mistakes will be part of a moment in the reconstruction of a praxis of freedom. In this sense, it’s necessary to be categorical: the “world” as a totality of facts is a media illusion. There is only a multiplicity of situations, each of which relates to a problem, to a concrete universal that radically distinguishes itself from the “world” as arbitrary totality.

4. The World of Capital

The other temptation that has dominated the modern theory and praxis of political action is the idea that there is a situation that subsumes all the others. From this perspective, sexual repression, racial discrimination, the phallocentric submission of women, the institutionalization of the insane, the normalization of marginals, and all other social conflicts were subordinated to one big foundational struggle: class struggle. Or, to put it in a different way, all the situations were superstructural in relation to a basic structural situation: capitalism and its globalization. Of course, the point is not to negate capitalist exploitation, the tyranny of capital, or the worship of the commodity. In our opinion, the mistake is to believe that the medicalization of subjectivity, racial discrimination, the codification of the family, the “technologization” of life and other realities of our times are the consequence of a mode of production. What numerous historical investigations allow us to corroborate today is that these modes of being, acting, knowing, and even loving, arose from historical ruptures that preceded the appearance and institution of capitalism as mode of production and exchange of commodities. Thus, it would not be a mistake to speak today of a “capitalistic” era, in which multiple situations come together and connect with each other. The working class situation is therefore a concrete universal that a certain Left has turned into an abstract one, to the detriment of workers’ struggles and other struggles. For the same reason, one cannot oppose to capitalism a global alternative situation called “socialism.” As Marx himself taught us, it was capitalism itself that, by universalizing market exchange, created what we nowadays call the “world.” The world as globality does not exist without the flattening of every concrete situation –something that is qualitatively different from the quantitative violence of the commodity. The argument about the “complexity” of today’s world, which regards any attempt to transform it as vain, is a consequence of the failure derived from acting at the level of a globality or of a world-system. It is the illusion produced by the reduction of the situational multiplicity to a single explanatory principle. Among the main figures of current common sense provoking the anguish of people while ensuring and structuring their impotence are clichés such as: “the world is becoming increasingly smaller” or “in this fin-de-siècle everything is accelerated” or even “time flies.” These are all themes that characterize the painful experience structuring the subjectivity of our contemporaries.

If the world is increasingly smaller, if we cannot go anywhere because everything is always “in the same place,” then the trappings of the structure that hinders every free act become visible. But when we add to this a dizzying pace of time, the trap is finally closed. These phrases, proper to the society of the spectacle, fit perfectly within the logic of the commodity: they are statements from a world founded on the quest for profit and efficiency. Indeed, the world is small, minuscule even, when we think of it through the problem of overproduction of commodities that are impossible to sell. The joke about “selling refrigerators to the Eskimos” is a reality of the world of the commodity, which is always becoming narrower. This is why the refrigerator, like any commodity, must be perishable, for even before the Eskimo has paid the second instalment, a new model will be coming out of the factories. Thus, time becomes dizzying, time does not give time to time: such is the barbarism of a society structured on the basis of the production of commodities.

This world is reflected in the ideology of the societies of the spectacle: our contemporaries perceive themselves as “productive units” not only in the economic sphere, but also in the affective, bodily, social, etc. Thus they find themselves trapped in this freedom-killing vision which separates them from their concrete situations. The world then appears to be divided into two categories, according to a truly supermarketstyle Darwinism: on the one hand is the large mass of exhausted people (the acceleration of time and the shrinkage of space constitute, strictly speaking, the experience of depression), and on the other hand are the strong, enterprising, and productive people, who dominate the world but do so in constant anguish of falling into the first group. It’s not surprising that the concrete considerations of people in situation do not figure in this spectacular vision, given the fact that what characterizes all consensual dominant ideologies is that they make such considerations disappear. The statement “the world is one and is increasingly smaller” is the totalitarian proposition that tends to conceal that reality is infinite in its dimensions and possibilities.

To say that everything is similar and that everything is small is a reactionary profession of faith whose effects on reality are very serious. That time escapes from our hands, because of its peculiar acceleration at the end of the century, is a socio-historical pseudo-corroboration that seeks to conceal the fact that every day can contain an eternity. The fact is that, in a month of insurrections, in a few years of autonomous experience, or in all those events in which the free subject acts, the long-standing suspicion that eternity takes refuge between the minutes of the clock is confirmed.

5. The Concrete Universal

We are now going to define what we understand by “concrete universal.” We say it’s restricted political action that, on the base of a concrete situation, proceeds toward a universal rupture at the level of its quality and structure. We say universal because, unlike a global model that ignores the particularity of the elements of the situation, it questions the foundational core of that situation. This is why it would be a mistake, as we will see in a moment, to confuse restricted action with a partial, limited, or sectoral claim.

What is at stake here is not the dialectic of reformism and revolution: the global and totalitarian vision of society belongs not only to the modern conceptions of revolution, but also to reformism. Let’s take first a classical example: that of the working class. As its name indicates, this class is a part or subset of a situation: the capitalist system of production. As such, this class can make a partial or self-interested claim. Take for example a claim raised by a union. Such a claim is perfectly “negotiable” within the framework of the situation, and, from the moment the class becomes unionized, it can even obtain a favorable decision from the ordinary justice system. But, as Marxists used to reproach trade unionists, any action in that sense –even a violent one– can be social, but it’s not political if it does not question the structure of the situation. In this case, justice does not reside in the provision of higher or lower wages to workers, but in the destruction of the system that alienates their labor time.

For the same reason, this latter position is not “negotiable,” or cannot be answered from the normality of the situation, because it implies its destruction. In this way, political action ceases to be a partial claim, so as to become a singularity: something unforeseeable by the situation because it questions its very foundations. At this point it’s no longer a matter of a class, but of an unclassifiable or anomalous political subject. This subject does not exist outside the situation. It’s a subject that arises from, but is not linked to, the situation because the situation does not foresee it. At the same time, this singularity is universal from the very moment it introduces a rupture that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation (bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, proletarians, etc.), who now have to decide whether or not to commit to the struggle that questions not only the situation they inhabit, but also what they in themselves are. This is why the commitment to a struggle is a completely different thing from external or humanist solidarity. Let’s take a second example: the black population of the United States. As a subset or part of a situation, black people have struggled for the right to be recognized as equal to white people. Not only as far as the right to vote is concerned, but also with regard to their functions: a black person should not be discriminated as a candidate for a job, since he is “as capable as a white person” to do it. Which means that he fulfils all the conditions required by the system. This is the reason why the first step towards liberation from slavery was to adopt, in the last century, the religion of white people: being a Christian was the equivalent of being “human” – being like white people, of course, from the standpoint of the white vision of the world. In the twentieth century, the equivalent was integration: assimilation into the system and way of life of white people in order to conquer the same rights. Many white people could, in this way, give lessons of tolerance to their racist fellow compatriots: “blacks are not evil by nature, there are some who are good: those who live like us whites, who are good Americans.” As a reward, they were even sent to Vietnam to show that between Americans there was no racial distinction.

But at the same time, some radical groups of blacks began to criticize the “world of the whites.” Several malicious intellectuals –of all skin colors– interpreted this as inverted racism: scorn toward the “white man” and celebration of Negritude (black is beautiful). But the “white man” is not this or that member of the “white race.” This is not about racist arguments, but about “white man” as a model of behavior or mode of being: an identifying image to which both whites and blacks can be assimilated. Yet the point is that a black minority revealed –as feminism did in turn– that “white man” is a norm of behavior and a worldview that is imposed to all the inhabitants of a situation. In this way, whoever takes a commitment to the black cause does so not as simple external or humanist solidarity, but as a true commitment that implies questioning a situation in which he or she is also implicated. This struggle is, therefore, concrete and universal for the same reason that it is not negotiable through any available administrative or legal mechanism.

6. The political subject

Hence, we can define the subject of restricted action as a ‘minority’. But it’s necessary to dispel two possible misunderstandings that can arise from this concept. Firstly, the concept of minority does not refer to the quantitative. Thus, women are a ‘minority’ that, quantitatively speaking, is the majority. Secondly, the term ‘minority’ has been used by postmodernists to speak of a ‘right to difference’, which is nothing but the recognition ‘by right’ of a reality ‘of fact’, namely cultural diversity. But of course, the moment they invoke such a right, these ideologists can only recognise but the smallest, amusingly exotic differences. When it comes to differences that are highly accentuated, such as the practice of genital mutilation or the tyrannical assassinations carried out in certain Third World regimes, this right to difference collapses. Can one speak of the Rwandan massacre as a simple cultural phenomenon? As we understand it, ‘minority’ is a group that is confronted by a majority-held image or by the norm of a situation. For this reason, it’s not a matter of making partial or sectoral claims that would in any case invoke, at the most, the application of human rights.

The struggle of the minority is universal in that it attacks a dominant common sense, a situational normality that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation. In this respect, the struggle of the minority is not, as we were saying, ‘negotiable’, it cannot find a solution from the point of view of the management of the situation. Thus, the point is not to be in solidarity with a minority or to intervene wherever it manifests itself, but to have the courage to become a minority or to betray what the majority, as a norm, expects from us. To become a minority is to become unpredictable: to create a political subject who is displaced vis-à-vis all the possibilities that a situation proposes. This free act is the only legitimate one, the only foundation that can be claimed by restricted political action.

7. The serious and the tragic

By founding the struggle upon a future to come, upon a better, more rational and more just world, revolutionary modernity functioned on an ‘epic’ model in which the progressive forces of liberation would overcome the reactionary armies of oppression and barbarism. The final victory was the establishment of a free, just and rational world. In turn, ‘managerial politics’ –the dominant politics of today– function solely upon the concept of ‘serious’ matters. Serious matters are approached as fixable in the short or long term, from within the normality of the situation, regardless of how illusory such a notion might be. In the face of serious matters, there is no victory but rather a ‘cure’. All struggles that claim a ‘negotiable’ partiality fall from the start into this trap of the administrative, managerial or legal logic of serious matters. This is why it’s important not to confuse the spectacular dimension or the violence of an action with its political ‘radicality.’ Clandestine activity is not enough to transform a group into a political subject and effectively become a minority.

And so we find that restricted action recuperates a ‘tragic’ dimension of the political subject: it operates upon the only point that is non-negotiable in terms of management; in other words, it operates upon an unpredictable possible –or the ‘impossible’ from the viewpoint of the normality of the status quo. It operates precisely upon the basis of this normality, upon the point of being of the situation, that which makes its existence possible. We say that such point of being is inconsistent because it cannot be taken into consideration by the statements that give any situation its apparent veracity and meaning. In this way, inconsistency is absurd; it is a non-meaning necessarily foreclosed by the consistency of the situation.

For this reason, from the perspective of a common sense or consensus, this truth is unintelligible: it is not a fact that can be demonstrated but a reality that must be forced through. Thus in Europe of the nineteenth century, for example, the fact that industrial capitalism generated terrible social inequalities was an observation that anybody could corroborate. It was a ‘serious matter’, a preoccupation detectable in all studies of that society as well as in the novels of Dickens and Zola. But viewed in such terms, it could only invoke a humanist principle of private or state assistance. This assistance, not surprisingly, corresponded exactly to the logic of the system: the state or the charitable organisations took care of maintaining alive and in good health, during the months of low production, an enormous amount of labour power that could then be used whenever it was once again desirable. Within the logic of the system, this misery could be inhuman but it was not essentially unjust. The buying and selling of labour power took place according to the laws of the free market. That is what Marx says in response to Proudhon: capitalist exploitation is not theft because it fits perfectly within the canons of the established legality of bourgeois democracy. The capitalist and the worker ‘freely’ exchange money for labour. However, it’s precisely here that Marx introduces the idea of ‘forcing’ [forçage]: work cannot be bought or sold as a commodity because it is what produces all commodities. For this reason, this structural injustice does not reflect a failure or a partial dysfunction of capitalism: on the one hand it is perfectly consistent and it leaves no room for reproach; on the other hand, this injustice is what establishes or makes capitalism possible, it is its point of inconsistency, necessarily invisible to capitalism itself.

Thus the free, just and rational rules of the market, the laws of supply and demand, have their origin in an injustice, an alienation and an absurdity that are unintelligible to the system, and which are, consequently, perfectly legal and consensual even in the eyes of a large number of workers and trade unionists. This is why the point is not so much that injustice sparks up rebellion, but rather that rebellion forces the inconsistency of the system: it’s in light of the revolutionary political project that the system reveals itself as unjust. When the militants of the black minority come to say that a Black man can be a White man and a White man is not necessarily White –he can become black, or part of a minority– they force a situation not only at a point which cannot be grasped and is absurd from the perspective of the logic of that same situation, but also at the level of the foundation that explains both discrimination (‘they’re not like us’, say certain Whites) and assimilation (‘we are like them’, reply certain Blacks).

8. The ethics of the individual

From this perspective, in a situation, there is no sounding of alarms that call on the citizenry to revolt against it: every individual is a being in situation, and despite themself, is possessed by its presuppositions. In this respect, s/he plays as a destiny the roles presented to them by the situation. The spectator-individual thus remains impotent in front of the ‘world’, since they can only ask themself the questions that can be answered by the common sense of their situation. The indignation or horror that they may feel when confronted with a fact –that of poverty, for example, or discrimination– do not generate political action. The individual is always faced with ‘serious’ circumstances that lead them to appeal to the knowledge of the administration or the intervention of the judge. The individual asks themself how something could have happened, but never why. The question of why leads to the point of being of the situation, to its foundation or its condition of existence, to the blind spot or the nucleus that is obscured and inaccessible to them. It’s not a coincidence, then, that post-modern ideology, in defending the consensus and the existent legality as the framework of all politics, privileges the figure of the individual. In the face of the old mass politics, the individual is seen as a nucleus of rationality and lucidity.

From Le Bon to Freud and beyond, the man of the masses was conceived as someone who, like a hypnotized person or a zombie, nullifies his reflexive individuality in order to obey the orders of the Party, the Führer or the church, and thus finds himself capable of committing the worst types of barbarism. But why should it be assumed that individuals cease to be individuals when they come together? Why should it be assumed that a person thinks when they are alone but not when they are in a group? It’s believed that if a multitude acts together in a uniform way, it’s because each individual has abandoned ‘their’ will, ‘their’ own choice, in order to submit themself to the decision of an Other. Often this Other is characterized by an impersonal ‘One’ to which the individual delegates their reflection and volition. But in fact it’s the other way around: the individual as an autonomous entity, meaning someone who determines their own rules of behavior, is an illusion. There is nothing left but a ‘one says’, ‘one sees’, ‘one does’: when the individual talks, their voice emits discourses written elsewhere; if their eyes can see, it’s always someone else’s sight; if they acts, it’s because they are interpreting a role that has been assigned to them. The individual constitutes themself as such, on the basis of their identification with a dominant model. Therefore, in contrast to what many authors have thought, there is no such thing as a non-alienated, authentic individual, free beyond the social masquerade. There is no critical nucleus in the individual. On the contrary: by seeing themself as an autonomous and indivisible unity, they negates the fact that they are a being in a situation, that they are constituted of languages, values, beliefs or myths that they have neither created nor does he dominate.

If we can think of the situation as a theatre play, the individual in it always plays a role. Hence the illusion of invisibility, of continuity in time emerges: they are always the same because in the same situation they repeat the same role. But in fact, being always in situation, they are someone else every time there is a change in the situation: a discontinuity in time. When the ideologues of postmodernity privilege individuality, they do so based on a right to mobility, a right to the conservation of religious or political beliefs, a right to read and write what we like, to live as we will, etc. In this way they think they are responding to all kinds of fundamentalisms, when in fact they are only recuperating the old liberal rights. But these are only formal rights: they do not contemplate the essential integration of the individual, their destiny, since in order to constitute themself as individuality, they must interpret a pre-established role. The individual does not exist outside the situation that constitutes them, and they cannot claim any freedom if they do not transform, if they do not question, this situation. Hence, there is no freedom of thought that is not linked to a practice of transformation of the status quo, and there is no radical action that does not return to the point of inconsistency of the situation. To privilege the struggle for free thought by itself, as if human freedom were located there, is an individualist illusion of the ‘beautiful souls’.

Far from endangering the rights acquired through historical struggles, this critique of the individual allows us to think in terms of civic rights. If individuals can act and think without restrictions, it’s thanks to the conquest of these civic rights. These were the invention of a revolutionary project that responded to a historically determined conception of man; it was not, however, the unveiling of the ‘free’ nature of the individual.

9. A non-state politics

When we speak of the subject, one must not confound this concept with the idea of a “subjectivity” understood as the nucleus of individual or collective experiences, even though an individual or a collective may constitute itself, eventually, as a political subject (and also an artistic, scientific, or loving subject, as conceived by the philosopher Alain Badiou). Indeed, an individual or a collective constitutes itself as subject when it enters into a relation, through thought or practice, with a truth of the situation, the point of nonconsistency upon which it is founded, that point of being that is the condition of its possibility.

Let us repeat it: it’s because this subject’s action cannot be anticipated by the situation, or it cannot be “negotiated” in conformity with its legality, that he or she incarnates a free act. In this way, with the idea of restricted action, we are attempting to define a politics that cannot be confounded simply with State management. Indeed, the classic definition of politics –the one we find in any dictionary– identifies the concept with the “art of governing the republic”, meaning the ability, the knowledge or the technique to manage public affairs or problems. For this reason, the idea of politics remained inescapably linked to the idea of the State. However, one must not confound the State with a simple institution or organization. In a larger definition, we should think of “state” as the normal state of any situation. From this perspective, any “negotiable” action, any corporate or partial social claim that proves to be manageable or solvable within an established legality, is part of this static definition of politics, even if the action involves the use of illegal measures to obtain what is demanded. This is why the great challenge today is to think politics in a way that removes the issue of power from the central position it currently occupies.

Today, the State as a site of effective power which should, by force or vote, be occupied by a politically revolutionary party becomes a formidable illusion, simply because the point upon which a situation is founded and given legitimacy is not something that depends on the State. The latter only over-codifies a reality for which it is more an effect than the cause. To some extent, this is something that was known to Marxists, yet they thought that a change in legislation and in the ideological apparatus of the State would favour the revolutionary transformation of society. (Towards the end of his life, however, Lenin became aware of the error: “We have painted the tsarist State in red”.) Thus, in soviet Russia and in other States, a series of deployments of bourgeois State power were not only painted in red but were also brought to the highest level of barbarism: the medicalization of subjectivity, media alienation, normalization, racial discrimination and worker despoliation. It sufficed to add the adjective “revolutionary” to this barbarism for the victims to accept it in the name of the future good. Even when many of these old revolutionaries speak today of their projects for a society of the future, we can clearly see to what extent they continue to be prisoners of the assumptions that underlie present situations. In their projects, there is also a state-based, managerial conception of politics (they want to be ready in case they attain power). It goes back to good order, rational society, just distribution, and truly free relations between human beings. It goes back to good barbarism against the bad one, the paradoxical idea of a liberating master and the imperative of a world “the way it should be.”

We could say that restricted political action and the philosophy of the situation make an appeal to a liberating humility: we can only speak, and this is already quite difficult, of the situation in which we live. Yet it’s not only a matter of humility, it’s also a critical position: any knowledge regarding an ulterior situation that it would be necessary to attain cannot be but a vain speculation, given that there is no knowledge capable of shedding the assumptions of the situation in which it is born. Which is why the philosophy of revolt does not aspire to any knowledge at all. Rather, it aspires to a truth, a relation with the being of the situation, this hole, this opacity hidden within established knowledge, because the situation, far from rendering action provincial, leads us to the thought of a concrete universal.

10. Conclusion

The challenge of our time is to think of and invent a new liberating praxis. A praxis that implies the formation of a myriad of concrete minority organisations and experiences, not as a means of achieving majority status at some point in the future, but as a way to invent and create a life and a politics based on freedom. To renounce majority status is not the standard of failure or impotence. By representing dominant images and structures, the majority is the most impotent from the point of view of freedom. It’s necessary to understand that power-over [pouvoir] and power-to-do [puissance] are two mutually exclusive realities: nobody is more impotent than a master filled with the power to change life. Conceived and structured in terms of taking State power –either through violence or by means of elections– the party ends up being, today, the very image of this impotence. Notably, this is due to the assumption that sustains the party, which is, as we have seen, that power is what founds a situation, and that it must be located in the State.

Under the pretext of unifying the multiplicity of minority struggles into a global strategy – -whether it is at the national or the world scale– the party is an organization that separates minorities from their situations in order to transform them into an “alternative” majority.

Therefore, together with messianic time, what must be questioned is the party, the master liberator par excellence. As any militant has encountered as part of their everyday practice, all the work and the concrete experience gathered by the grassroots organisations, themselves built equally out of failures and mistakes, are crossed out by the “abstract” slogans of the party. And this is simply because, for the party, the global strategy and the occupation of power become priorities over concrete and restricted actions, always with the illusion that, once power is taken over, things will, in their totality, change. However, there cannot be a solution of continuity between (minority) politics –i.e., power-to-do– and (majority) management –i.e., power-over. Even if these are structurally condemned to exist side by side, we must break with the illusion that it’s necessary to reach majority status in order to conduct a politics of the minority.

A multiplicity of libertarian groups and collectives –linked in each case to a concrete universal– is the image of a multiple radical political power [puissance]. However, the non-totalisation or non-submission of this multiplicity to the “impotent” power of the Party does not imply that the exchange of experiences between these groups is not desirable or even indispensable. The moment is difficult, the challenge is large, but fidelity to two centuries of revolutionary struggles allows us to preserve the same impulse, the same desire on which these were inspired. Instead of crying over the ruins of the old revolutionary edifice, one must consider that this fragmentation, this dispersion and this non-totality are precisely the necessary conditions for a new revolutionary power to free itself from the totalitarian myth of messianic progressivism.

September 1995

* We would like to thank Miguel Benasayag, facilitator of the Malgré Tout collective, for permission to translate and publish this text, and Fiona Jeffries and Scott Uzelman for editorial assistance.

According to one of the collective’s founders, the philosopher and psychanalyst Miguel Benasayag, Malgré Tout (“in spite of everything”) was formed in 1988 with the purpose of creating a decentralised space for the expression and exchange of political ideas and practices. While acknowledging the need to discuss the crisis of modernity, the collective has sought to distance itself on the one hand from the immobilizing sophistry of so many postmodern thinkers, and, on the other, from the deceptive thinking and action of the pragmatist left, which Malgré Tout sees as corroded by a complete devotion to influencing government policy. Some of the collective’s practices over the years include work with undocumented migrants in France, with social movements in Argentina, and with social centres in Italy. At the moment of writing the manifesto, the Malgré Tout collective was composed, among others, by Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michael Löwy, and Miguel Benasayag (facilitator).

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Regenerating Rebellion, Wollongong 4th October

University of Wollongong. 10 am Building 19 Room 1030

Capitalism is clearly a catastrophe. Across the globe our lives are immiserated in countless ways and the ecological damage that has already been wrought is both incalculable and terrifying. Perhaps in the past we could have taken some kind of hope from capitalism’s tragedies as signs of a deep crisis that might open the door to emancipation. We can’t do that anymore. We have seen, to our sadness, how the apparently terminal crises in capitalism often only (when the smoke has cleared) lead to a restrengthening of capitalism, often at a great cost to life and the planet. The only ‘crisis’ that can threaten capitalism, is the crisis we create, through our rebellion against, and our exit from, capitalism. Crisis is not the opportunity for us to seize our freedom, but rather our freedom is the crisis of capitalism itself. It is the hope and joy in and of our freedom, as a present living potential that can end this horrible nightmare of capitalism and generate a different kind of society ( which we do, though you might not, call communism) that is the reason for this gathering. We would like to invite you to this, and offer the opportunity for the creation of dialogue and debate, and thus, in a small way start build pathways to different kinds of life. We hope that by gathering together we can collectively reflect on the world we live in, the struggles that happen across it and perhaps develop ways of working together that increase our chances of creating dignity and freedom.

One of the immense challenges that confront us is the attempt to make sense of the world we live in. A task that is always difficult due to the insane nature of capitalism. But more specifically we need to grapple with the way that capitalism has profoundly transformed life across the globe in the last 40 years (often called ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalisation’, ‘empire’ etc). Often this means the very substance of our lives – how we work, socialise, consume – has profoundly changed: it’s still capitalism but not as we once knew it. Thus the old methods, ideologies and organisations of struggling, which were already often broken or breaking, cannot effectively grapple with the present conditions.

Across the globe countless comrades are attempting to reinvent new and relevant ways of struggling: and there is a vast diversity of thinkings and methodologies. But in Australia we seem stuck. The enthusiasm of the alterglobalisation struggles broke on the reef of the War on Terror and has not been able to reconstitute itself since. This does not mean that people do not struggle – in fact the reverse is true. But rather as of yet these struggles, overt and covert, political and apolitical remain fractured and isolated, unable to reach a critical mass where a substantial challenge to capital is created.

The absence of mass and overt rebellion does not mean that capital has successfully bought off or pacified the multitude within the borders of Australia. True, a complex network of control and recuperation is deployed to keep people in the matrix of work and consumption but this doesn’t mean that antagonism is not there. Indeed it is our belief that our society has a volcanic nature: under the appearance of social peace, under the simulated reality presented by cultural and ideological apparatuses exists mass of dissatisfaction, antagonism, despair and defiance. Many of us, rebel in our own ways as much as we can. It is here, in the marrow of daily life, where we find the hope of communism. But to see it we need a certain way of looking, what the Zapatistas call an “inverted periscope.”

It also seems reasonably clear that what we can call the ‘Left’ – especially that organised into formal groups either revolutionary or reformist – has not grasped the massive changes that have swept across capitalism. This is because they are often welded to outdate ideologies, to an understanding of struggle that has passed. To admit that things have changed seems to be admitting that change is impossible. We think the reverse. Neo-liberalism was primarily a counter-revolution, that is a reaction to the great struggles of the masses of the globe. There is no point romanticising the past because that is what countless millions struggled against. Rather we need the courage to inherit the legacy of rebellion and take it up, remould it and live it for new strange times.

We are then in a strange place. On one hand we need to clear away the debris of the past; on the other we need a keen and attentive understanding of history. If we want to rebel, and we believe we and countless others do, if we want a different kind of society, lives with dignity, a world of free association then we need to come together to encounter each other, to assemble together, to create in solidarity and to rebel.

To help this, over the weekend we will be discussing three questions: Where are we? What have we done? What can we do?

Where are we? What is the nature of capitalism today? What are the crisis and conflicts? What are our experiences of work, study, family etc? How do race, gender and sexuality function in contemporary society? In other words what is the broad context of struggle?

What have we done? A chance to reflect on our experiences of struggle, the different tactics and strategies used, what worked what failed, what were the debates, splits, etc?

What can we do?…. Perhaps the most important, and hardest, question.

We hope all the discussion will be wide ranging and all are welcome. Perhaps this could be just one point in a longer journey. Contributions can be deeply personal, abstractly theoretical, said with big words, expressed by poetry or dance, whatever, the point is that we will actively try to communicate and understand each other. Rebellion is about love after all…..