For Revolutionary Self Help

‘But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze. The crises that shake the world are not fundamentally different from the conflicts in which my actions and thoughts confront the hostile forces that entangle and deflect them.’



-Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life

The title of Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations in English, The Revolution of Everyday Life, is often mocked for sounding rather more like a self-help book than a Revolutionary Tract. But such a critique fail to understand why The Revolution of Everyday Life was and is read by millions while the very best most ‘’far left’’ texts can hope for is that they gain some recognition from the chattering classes.

For The Revolution of Everyday Life is a self-help text, and is one unlike all the others, for it recognises the real source of its readers misery and meaningless, not our place in our society, or our attitude toward it, but rather our society itself. Its success comes from the fact that it speaks of what people actually care about, the desire to live joyously, the desire to feel like you have control over your life, to have fulfilling and fully formed relationships with others, in other terms, the desire to be happy.

If we have disdain for the genre of ‘Self-Help’ it must be because we think it fails in the role it assigns for itself, to help people live better. It must be because we think it is Idealist nonsense that imagines we can think our way out of poverty, violence and illness. It must be because we see that our dissatisfaction with life is not incidental, but rather an endemic and necessary feature of the world we live in and we can only solve our dissatisfaction through changing the world.

For otherwise, nothing you are saying is in the slightest revolutionary. If you can only speak of dead abstract notions of ‘Class’, ‘History’, ‘Hegemony’ and so on, and say nothing of the lived experiences of human beings then you are saying nothing at all. Something is only revolutionary if it offers people a way to improve their lives, some way out of the misery of everyday life, and that is why I am for Revolutionary Self Help!

And I don’t not mean the promise of a better life, the abstract ideal of a better world, ‘after the revolution’, in a 1000 years, 100 or 10, I mean change in the here and now! When the paper-seller asks the Party Official when the revolution will come, when their salvation will come, and the Official answers ‘Long after you are dead’, I would hope the paper-seller would spit in their face, as much as they would any other priest. If your ‘revolutionary work’ is convincing young people to do things that they hate for the purpose of some abstract, far off, and every retreating into the distance ‘revolution’, then you are no better than a priest. Worse in fact, for at least the priest does not poison the word ‘revolution’ for the youth.

So what is revolutionary? When a Kurdish woman read Ocalan and dumps her patriarchal, overbearing boyfriend the next day, that is revolutionary. When a middle age service worker reads Crimethinc and no longer has to choose between eating and allowing her child to go hungry, for she has discovered the joy of shoplifting, that is revolutionary. If you desire to make a better world, as surely any revolutionary does, your work must be about improving lives in the here and now, for otherwise why should anyone care? Who has time to care? Preach to the officer worker drowning in boredom, the unemployed youth frozen by anxiety, or the single parent staring into the abyss of inadequacy all you wish about Socialism, Anarchism or Communism, they won’t care. They might even believe you that there can be a better way of living, and if you’re ‘lucky’ it might even be ‘your’ system, but there are much bigger things on their mind. But if you instead you offer them ways of living outside of the 9-5, ways of rejecting the shame placed on the unemployed and poor, ways of building relationships that aren’t full of toxicity and conflict, then maybe they’ll start listening.

I can only assume some of you are now are asking ‘How is trying to be happy, to improve your life a revolutionary thing?’, for surely while it is a good thing, how will it lead to a revolutionary overthrow? Such a question can only be answered by asking why are we Revolutionaries? Surely the answer is that we see the misery and suffering around us, and desire to put an end to it. That we believe that there are certain features of our present society that cause unnecessary suffering and pain and that the only way to change them is to strike such a society at its base. That satisfaction and happiness for all persons can only come about via structural change.

If you believe such, then it should not be hard to recognise that any drive for human happiness must come into conflict with the structures that we stand against. If it was perfectly possible for everyone to find happiness in current our world, what business would we have being revolutionaries? Any drive for control over your life will inevitably come into conflict with all the structures which presently control it, from the boss, to the police officer to the politician. Any move toward building healthy and fully formed relationships with others encounters the forces that create toxic relationships, patriarchy, power, domination, hierarchy and so on. If you do not recognise these systems as obstacles in your drive for happiness then you will continually find yourself frustrated by them, while being unable to perceive what has held you back.

So does this piece have any actual practical advice? Or it is a piece that declares itself for practicalities while dealing purely in abstractions? I would hope not. I will not offer personal advice, as I do not feel I can offer much but platitudes, but I will offer a tale of collective action which I believe demonstrates clearly how to transform abstract principle into concrete improvement.

Imagine that you are a group of Anarchist/Anti-Authoritarians that live near or in one of the many ‘minority’ neighbourhoods in Western Europe and North America that are under full on police/state occupation. Both you and the residents hate the police, your view may be more ‘refined’, but I would expect theirs to be rather more ‘direct’. You see an opportunity in your shared understanding, but how do you transform such into anything positive? You could distribute leaflets expounding on the nature of the police and the state, but what would be the point? Perhaps their understanding of the issue would be ‘refined’, but is this of any significance? You can say ‘Fuck every cop-caller’ as much as you want, but until there is an alternative they are going to keep calling.

So you decide to start a local Cop Watch, where you follow police around the neighbourhood and expose and impede particularly egregious uses of police power and violence. This is a useful strategy as on average your group will be significantly whiter, to have moved significantly further in the conventional education system, to be from further ‘up’ the class system and to have more developed systems for fighting repression. For all these reasons you are less likely to face the most blunt and direct end of state repression, and thus can use your privilege aggressively. As a group that is far less likely to be out and out attacked on the streets by the police, your very presence will make the police less violent, and since you have various networks you can distribute evidence of police brutality through, they are also less likely to attack other people. Such an intervention is similar to those performed by Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW) in Occupied Palestine. These Comrades know that if they go to a demonstration, because they are Israeli Citizens, the IDF will not use live ammunition. Of course such commitments do not come without risk, Comrades of AATW have been inflicted with permanent brain damage from being shot point blank with ‘rubber coated steel bullets’, (Commonly known as ‘bullets’) but it is such, taking risks when they will lead to concrete benefits for others, that demonstrates to others that your creed has any relevance.

But imagine you did not stop there, but began to distribute information about alternative methods of conflict resolution, to have practical information meetings and such. Now you have really struck the issue at its base! For no matter how terrible the police are, as long as they are the only option, the only people that can resolve conflict within a community, people will keep calling. When people see that not only the Police are violent fascist thugs, but that they do not need to import these people in their communities to resolve conflict, then you have made a truly revolutionary change. [1]

If you wish to make a change, then centre such a desire in improving your own life and the lives of those around you. Do not let Capitalists and petty bourgeoisie idealists captured the terrain of happiness and self-improvement that should rightfully belong to the revolutionary movement, Our Party! Stand against any who would wish to separate your personal life from your political one, because such is to make politics into an abstract thing that holds some small aspect of your life within, rather than being the guide for living in this world!

[1]This is a mythologised version of events which occurred in Lake Worth Florida, a small town in the United States. You can hear their account of events here http://www.crimethinc.com/podcast/38