The positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence. This perspective is the essence of what separates us from both the left and the right. We cannot allow its fundamental importance to be obscured, or ourselves to be mistaken for either the right or the left. We cannot allow any Leninist organization to get away with claiming that it is only ‘a little bit pregnant’ with state capitalism.

Introduction

1

Greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society.

2

The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough.

3

The repression of egoism can never totally succeed, except as the destruction of human subjectivity, the extinction of the human species itself, because egoism is an essential moment of human subjectivity. Its repression simply means that it returns in a hidden, duplicitous form. If it cannot show itself in the open market, it will find itself or create for itself a black market. If it is not tolerated in transparent n1 relations, the repressed self will split in two; into a represented self, a personal organization of appearances, a persona, and that which cringes and plots behind this character-armour n2 . The repression of egoism, contrary to the dictates of every one of the so-called “Communists” (in opposition to Marx and Engels), from Lenin right down to Mao, can never be the basis of communist society.

Moreover, the repressive conception of “communism” misses precisely the whole point. It misses out on the validity of the egoistic moment. This is true even in the inverted form in which it emerges from an immanent critique of altruistic ideology: if I die, the world dies for me. Without life, I cannot love another. However, what it misses in “theory” — i.e., in its ideological representations — it nonetheless preserves in practice, and precisely with the help of that very ideology: its real basis is the egoism of the state-capitalist bureaucracy. This ideology of self-sacrifice serves admirably the task of extracting surplus-labour from the proletariat.

The actual negation of narrow egoism is a matter of transcendance (“aufhebung” n3 ), of the transition from a narrow to a qualitatively expanded form of egoism. The original self-expansion of egoism was identically the demise of the primitive community. But its further self-expansion will resolve itself into a community once again. It is only when greed itself at last (or rather, once again) beckons in the direction of community that that direction will be taken. Here the ancient Christian truth that no earthly force can withstand human greed rejoins us on our side of the barricades.

4

It was the struggle over their growing wealth which rent asunder the early tribal and village communities n1 . The elaboration of the patriarchal pattern, the growth of exchange-relations, of usury, debt-slavery, and war can all be traced to this. It is only when the same motive which originally occasioned this dissolution of community calls for its reconstitution that community can be constituted again. And this motive is, simply, the struggle for a richer life. For only that motive is irresistible: only that motive — greed — can undo its own work. It is only when that subjective moment, through the historical deepening of its own possibility, turns against its own present objectification — in a word, capital (capitalist private property, privative appropriation; that is, privatization, exclusion — “society” as an association of strangers, of estrangement — in short, the totality of alienation) — that the threshold of the great transformation is reached. And the struggle of this new subjectivity against the previous objectification (global capitalist society; in a word, capital), the process of the negation of that objectification IS the communist revolution.

5

We have no doubt that people are corruptible, but we know for ourselves that there are things more tempting, more seductive, than money, capital, and Power n1 — so much so that no genuinely greedy human being could possibly resist their allure — and it is upon this corruptibility of man that we found our hopes for revolution. Revolution is nothing other than the self-accelerating spread throughout society of this more profound corruption, of this deeper seduction. Currently, greed is always pursued and associated with isolation and privatism simply because everyone under the reign of capital is condemned to pursue greed in this narrow way. Greed doesn’t yet know its own potentiality.

We say once again: the present forms of greed lose out in the end because they turn out to be not greedy enough.

6

Narrow greed is a holdover from times of natural scarcity. Its desires are represented to itself in the form of commodities, power, sex(-objects), and even more abstractly, as money and as images. We are told in a thousand ways that only these few things are worth having — by rulers who work to insure that these are the only things available (to be bought). The survival of the narrow greed in a world of potential plenty is propagated in the form of ideology by those very people who control access to these things. Ultimately, in our daily lives, we suffer the humiliation of being forced accomplices in the maintenance of this “scarcity,” this poverty of choices.

7

Narrow greed will turn against itself. No more powerful weapon against greed could possibly be found than greed itself. There could be no more formidable tool for transforming narrow selfishness than this selfishness itself. In its own process, through its own development, it must discover a fuller form of greed, and a richer form of wealth. It must discover its own narrowness.

A frontal assault on someone’s narrow selfishness will run up against his strongest defenses. Wouldn’t it be easier to turn that strength around upon itself? Wouldn’t it be easier to induce that person to transform (him)/(her) self n1 through (his)/(her) own desires? This is the method of seduction. It involves speaking from what is most radical in you to what is most radical in the other person; that is, speaking from what you really have in common: root subjectivity; radical subjectivity, the basis, at last historically discovered, upon which to work out the construction of authentic community. This is the method of immanent critique n2 ; of the evocation of self-critique. It is the practice of dialectic itself. Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta!

8

The perspective of communist egoism is the perspective of that selfishness which desires nothing so much as other selves, of that egoism which wants nothing so much as other egos; of that greed which is greedy to love — love being the “total appropriation” n1 of man by man.

9

Our reversal of perspective on egoism n1 , our detournement n2 of “greed,” and the scandalous effect which this produces and is intended to produce in the prevailing consciousness, is no mere formal trick, and no arbitrary play on words. Words, and precisely because of their meanings, are a real part of history, of the “historical material,” and of the historical process. To abandon them to their usurpers, to invent new words, or to use other words because of the difficulty of winning back the true, historic words, is to abandon the field to the enemy. It is a theoretical concession, and a practical concession, which we cannot afford. To do so would only add to the confusion, a confusion which, in part, forms the basis of the established order n3 .

Our reversal of perspective, on the contrary, is clarifying within the very terms of the confusion. It is already a revolutionary act at the level of the subjective conditions of revolution: the reversed perspective — the revolved perspective — is the perspective of revolution itself. Ideology is the sublime hustle. The use-value of ideology is as a tool for exploitation — the ideologue uses ideology to con you into letting him put his egoism above yours, in the name of altruism, morality, and the “general interest.” Our winning back in a positive connotation of a word like “greed” or “selfishness” — the central, universal, and mutually agreed upon prejoratives of the two extreme representations of modern capitalism, private capitalist and state capitalist ideology, which try to confine the totality of possible opposition within the universe bounded by their polar pseudo-opposition — is such an act because it locates precisely the point of their essential unity, the exact point of departure for a revolutionary movement which, by breaking away there, simultaneously, identically, and singularly breaks with both.

No less is our expropriation of a word like “communism” such an act, for it is already an “expropriation of the expropriators.” c1 The “Free World” is not free and the “Communist World” is not communist.

10

We use the words “communist society” to mean the direct opposite of that which masquerades as such in the present world namely, bureaucratic state-capitalism n1 . That the classical private capitalist societies of the “West” — themselves maturing toward a form of state-capitalism — collude with “Eastern” powers in the propagation of this lie, is hardly an accident, and should come as no surprise. It is, rather, one facet among myriads of an “antagonistic cooperation” n2 which reveals the hidden essential unity binding together these pseudo-opposites.

The true communist society begins with the expropriation of the whole of capitalist society by “ the associated producers, c2 which, if we are to judge by the numerous n3 historical attempts at this process so far, will take the form of global organization of workplace, community, regional, etc., councils; the workers’ councils, or, to use their original, Russian name, expropriated (in fact, as in name) by the Bolshevik bureaucrats — the Soviets.

11

We conceive the realized social individual, “communist man,” as having for his property — that is, for the object of his appropriation — his whole society, the totality of his social life. All of society is wealth for him. His intercourse with his society — i.e., his living relations with the rest of the social individuals and their objectification — is in its totality the appropriation of social life. Productive activity becomes a form of individual consumption just as consumption itself is a form of (self) production.

The activity of simultaneous appropriation by each individual of all the rest, or of the appropriation of society by all at once inter-appropriation (realized inter-subjectivity, or co-property) — itself constitutes the totality of social production. This appropriation by all at once of all is none other than the resonance n1 state of egoism:

“Communism is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and [is] thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. c3

In communist society, according to its concept, the “form, of intercourse c4 becomes the total appropriation of man by man. Social individuals can appropriate one another subjectively (i.e., as subjects), and all-sidedly, through all the forms of human intercourse — by talking together, producing together, making love together, etc., etc., and all the fruits of their appropriation, i.e., themselves in their developed richness, become thus the property of themselves, and of all society, of all the other social individuals.

The fruits of your appropriation, of your consumption of physical and emotional riches, is something from which I am excluded at the level of immediacy, of immediate consumption: you eat the pear, therefore I cannot eat just that bite of just that pear; you share your love with this person, and I am perhaps excluded from sharing myself at this moment with you. But this is not at all a problem for me, for I am busy elsewhere, with the same project and praxis of self-enrichment on my own and together with others. But later, mediately, when I come back to you, your appropriation, and the self-enrichment you derive from it, comes back to me, becomes my consumption, my appropriation, in my appropriation of you, and is the richer for it. Today, we have to be jealous of each others’ pleasures not because our pleasures are so many and so great, but because they are so meager and so few. Here, on the other side of poverty, on the other side of scarcity, my jealousy would only deprive myself, my exclusion of your pleasure would only exclude my own, and I am free at last to take pleasure in your pleasure. Whereas, within the realm of poverty, your strength is a threat to me, your development is at the expense of mine, and in general your addition is my subtraction; on the contrary, in the society of realized wealth, your strength is my strength, the inner wealth of your being is my wealth, my property, and every one of your human powers is a multiplication of my own. Thus, the contradiction between my consumption and yours, between my appropriation, my property, and yours; the conflict between my well-being and yours becomes its opposite: synthesis; identity; inter-reinforcement; interamplification; resonance.

12

The positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence. This perspective is the essence of what separates us from both the left and the right. We cannot allow its fundamental importance to be obscured, or ourselves to be mistaken for either the right or the left. We cannot allow any Leninist organization to get away with claiming that it is only ‘a little bit pregnant’ with state capitalism.

I. Wealth

13

“When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange a1 ?” c5

14

“The exchange of human activity with production itself as well as the exchange of human products with one another is equivalently the species-activity and species-spirit whose actual, conscious, authentic existence is social activity and social satisfaction. As human nature is the true communal nature, or communal being of man, men through the activation of their nature create and produce a human communal being, a social being which is no abstractly universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the nature of being of every single individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth.” c6

15

“The new proletariat inherits the riches of the bourgeois world and it gives it its historical chance. Its task is to transform and destroy these riches, to constitute them as part of a human project: the total appropriation of nature and human nature by man. A realized human nature can only mean the infinite multiplication of real desires and their gratification.” c7

16

The resonance of egoisms has to be looked at from the point of view of wealth (greed): developed individuals make a richer community, and a richer community makes for richer individualities. Beyond a certain stage of the development of productive forces, “collectivism the suppression of individuality” is a forfeiture of wealth for the community, just as ‘individualism = the suppression of community’ is a forfeiture of wealth for the individualist.

17

The impoverished man typical of capitalist society, the so-called “greedy” man, is the man who is only excited by money, who is only interested in fragments of other people — in buying their skills, their services, their products, and the rest is “none of his business.” He lives in a world of prostitutes, that is, a world of proletarians. He is the master of the partial appropriation of man by man, that is, of exploitation. n1

The rich man, the greedy man of communist society, is the man who has discovered how to appropriate the richest “thing” around, the most interesting and valuable object, the subject, beginning with the appropriation of himself as such; the man who has socially mastered the possibility together with the necessary conditions of this total appropriation of man by man, the coherence of whose social life is the self-need of man. This is the secret of what we mean when we say: the negation of capital is the realization of real wealth, subjectively and objectively.

The communist egoist, the genuinely greedy person, wants other subjects. The narrow egoist, the exploiter, only wants something from them.

18

A society rich in selves is the only really rich society. Richness in subjects, in subjectivity, in practically and creatively potent human beings, is finally the only real wealth for the subject.

19

Ultimately, wealth is nothing but society itself.

20

The logic of exchange-value, of commodity exchange-relations, is the very logic of narrow egoism itself.

In the exchange of a commodity which I own, for money owned by somebody else, I have parted with, alienated, the use value of the commodity. It is lost to me, in order that I may realize its exchange-value, its money form, its general use-value, that is, its expression in the form of general social usefulness or abstract labour-time, which I can then reconvert into any particular use-value to the extent that its production has, by my stage of capitalist development, assumed the form of commodity-production. Its general usefulness — its usefulness as money, as exchange-value — is here in direct contradiction to its particular usefulness, its specific use-value.

The logic of exchange-relations in communist society, according to the inner coherence of its concept, is quite the contrary however. The use-values in whose production I participate, and in whose consumption you and I both participate, are not lost to me except if I consume them immediately, i.e., your consumption of them is not a loss for me. They are social use values, and society is my larger self, my necessary self, absolutely necessary to my production and reproduction. (Even if I should take up the life of an isolated hermit, and somehow survive at it, my changed self-activity would shortly render me a different person). Their use-value, consumed directly by others returns to me in the form of the maintained or improved creative capacity of those others in social production; in the form of the reposited or increased production of the class of human beings upon whom my reproduction depends — the single class — or rather, the single global non-class of associated producers, who produce the totality of the wealth I consume; prerequisites to my production of my self. Thus, no social use-value is alienated from me. Rather, all of it stays within my (expanded) self, accumulates there, and goes to enhance the total quality of my life.

Therefore, also, within the global production-planning process of the councils, I have a legitimate beef whenever asked to participate in some production which does not satisfy this logic. Any production which does not satisfy this logic is truly socially destructive, antisocial, and an anti-use-value (anti-wealth). It is therefore, at very best, a waste of my time, that is, of my life. Anything that is not worthy to be preserved will have to be destroyed.

21

“The independent, material form of wealth disappears and wealth is shown to be simply the activity of men. Everything which is not the result of human activity, of labour, is nature and, as such, is not social wealth. The phantom of the world of goods fades away and it is seen to be simply a continually disappearing and continually reproduced objectivization of human labour. All solid material wealth is only the transitory materialization of social labour, crystallization of the production process whose measure is time, the measure of a movement itself.” c8

22

In the last analysis, all you have to give is yourself. Your self is your only gift. If you don’t possess yourself — i.e., if you let yourself be forced to sell yourself — you have nothing to bestow upon another individual, another self. In the realized society called communist society, exchange must become visibly and fully what it always was essentially, self exchange.

II. Individualism and Collectivism

23

“To be avoided above all is establishing ‘society’ once again as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being.” n1 The expression of his life — even if it does not appear immediately in the form of communal expression carried out together with others — is therefore a manifestation and affirmation of social life. The individual and generic life of man are not distinct, however much — and necessarily so — the mode of existence of individual life is either a more particular or a more general mode of generic or generic life a more particular or universal mode of individual life. “...Though man is therefore a unique individual — and precisely this particularity makes him an individual, a really individual communal being — he is equally the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective existence of society as thought and experienced.” c9

24

“Altruism is the other side of the coin of “hell-is-other people”; only this time mystification appears under a positive sign. Let’s put an end to this old soldier crap once and for all! For others to interest me I must find in myself the energy for such an interest. What binds me to others must grow out of what binds me to the most exuberant and demanding part of my will (volonte) to live; not the other way around. It is always myself that I am looking for in other people; my enrichment; my realization. Let everyone understand this and ‘each for himself’ taken to its ultimate conclusion will be transformed into ‘all for each.’ The freedom of one will be the freedom of all. A community which is not built on the demands of individuals and their dialectic can only reinforce the oppressive violence of Power. The Other in whom I do not find myself is nothing but a thing, and altruism leads me to the love of things, to the love of my isolation.... For myself, I recognize no equality except that which my will to live according to my desires recognizes in the will to live of others. Revolutionary equality will be indivisibly individual and collective.” c10

25

“Let us notice first of all that the so-called rights of man... are simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.... Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others. The limits within which each individual can act without harming others are determined by law, just as a boundary between two fields is marked by a stake. It is a question of liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.... Liberty as a right of man is not founded upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man. It is the right of such separation. n1 The right of the circumscribed individual, withdrawn into himself.... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty.” n2 , c11

26

“Too many corpses strew the path of individualism and collectivism. Under two apparently contrary rationalities has raged an identical gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated man.” c12

27

Is it necessary once again to point out the self-absurdity of the one-sided abstractions “the individual” and “society,” and of the ideologies founded on this one-sidedness — “individualism” (or “egoism”) and so-called “socialism” (or “collectivism”)?

We can be individuals only socially.

We can be social only individually.

Individuals constitute society.

Society constitutes individuals.

28

Dig deeply enough into the individual and you will find society. Dig deeply enough into society and you will find the individual. Dig deeply enough into either and you will come out the “other” side. The concept named “the individual,” fully grasped, is the same as the concept named “society.” The concept named “society,” fully grasped, is also “the individual.” One is impossible, does not exist, without the other. At the heart of society is its “opposite,” the individual. At the center of the individual is his “antithesis,” society. We must speak of the social individual. Both of the abstract universals, “society” and “the individual” find their concrete universal in the social individual.

29

Society, without the individual, is empty, is without its existence, just as the individual, without society, is without its existence — and even outside human society, is not a human individual (even if it should chance to survive as a biological individual. However, even as such, it is the issue of a human social — in this case, sexual — relationship). Unless both these moments can be affirmed simultaneously, univocally; grasped as a single, unitary concept — in fact as a conceptual singularity — their contradiction having been transcended (to begin with, in thought), then neither “the individual” nor “society” has been understood.

30

Self-production can only be social; society is self-production, that is, society is the only possible means-of-production of selves. You cannot ever talk about the “self” without identically implicating or talking about “society.” The “self” exists only in association with other selves, i.e. in and as an association of selves, a society. It is no accident that the Latin root of ‘consciousness’ — conscienta — means literally “together-knowledge”; “to know together.” c13 Subjectivity is essentially intersubjective, that is, essentially social.

31

Your “individuality” is already a “social structure,” and has been so from its very inception (including, from its very conception).

32

Individuals are produced only by society. Society is produced only by individuals.

33

Society can be realized only egoistically, just as the ego can be arrived at, can be realized, and is possible at all only socially.

34

The self is pre-eminently and essentially social; society is pre-eminently and essentially selfish.

35

If the philosophers of one-sided individualism, of narrow egoism — that is, of the axiology of the self — want to understand Marx’s socialism, they should reflect on his statement to the effect that the other is a necessary part of your self. c14

36

The principle “I want nothing other than myself” — the principle of self-desire, self-attachment (self-cathexis, or self-centration) — becomes the principle of daily life in communist society once it is socially actualized that the other is a necessary part of my self. c15 Society becomes an object of cathexis without this any longer necessitating projection-identification — i.e., the alienation of cathexis from the self — once the social nature of the self, and the “self nature” of society has become a palpable and transparent truth of experience.

37

State-capital, in sublating n1 private capital, negates or represses private capital. The ideology of anti-individualism — that is, of collectivism or one-sided socialism — so essential to Maoism in particular and to revolutionary ideology n2 in general is congruent precisely with the project of the repression of private capitalism and private accumulation, together with the characterological tendencies corresponding to these, on the part of bureaucratic capitalism (state-capitalism). This policy of repression, typified by the Maoist slogan “smash self” n3 , also has the effect of inhibiting the emergence of communist egoism within the home proletariat; a form of egoism which the bureaucracy confounds, consciously or unconsciously, with bourgeois egoism.

38

Even privatism itself is a social expression (see Thesis 23); an expression of social life in a definite historical form of society. That is, privatism is itself an expression of the social individual produced by contemporary society. People who do not think dialectically end up making enormous errors here, practically as well as theoretically, because they can not grasp contemporary as itself a social truth, an (admittedly self-reproducing) subjectification (i.e., internalization), of capitalist society, which is precisely an antisocial society. So much so that ‘the socialization of society’ is, where capitalist society is concerned, but another name for the project of social revolution itself.

The ideologies of anti-socialism are based on the misery of association (collective boredom, inauthentic association, etc.) a1 under contemporary conditions, that is, on the misery of association-as-alienation and as-estrangement. They are expressions of the poverty of social life — its virtual nonexistence as such — in the world of strangers, the bellum omnium contra omnes, which is capitalist society.

39

The leftist, trapped in the permanent false choice between following his own immediate desires and sacrificing for his ideals, despises the “selfish” person who unhesitatingly chooses immediate, private satisfaction. The genuine communist also despises this latter type, but for the opposite reason: being restricted to immediate private satisfaction is not satisfying enough. To the communist, furthermore, for such “selfish” people to remain satisfied with their privatized, alienated lives is a direct barrier to the realization of the communist’s own expanded self-interest. Somewhere in every rank and file leftist lurks a confused intuition that this is the real reason for his contempt: but this intuition is continually stifled by the leftist’s own insistence on the “necessity” of sacrifice.

40

The lonely individualism of Ayn Rand c16 , et. al., is only alienation accepted and alienation perfected.

Communist individualism or individualist communism is the name for the solution to the riddle of pre-history, which, while it has momentarily, at times and places in this century, existed, as yet knows not its own name.

41

Any “collectivism” on our part is an individualist collectivism. Any “individualism” on our part is a collectivist individualism.

42

“Nothing is more to me than myself.” c17

Fine. As it stands, this theorem is wholly acceptable. This is a classic statement of the egoistic postulate by the classic exponent of individualist anarchism and narrow egoism, and an early antagonist of Marx, Max Stirner. His latter-day followers, conscious and unconscious, include the “Objectivists,” the “classical liberals”, and the so-called “libertarian right” in general. The problem is that, in the further elaboration of his own book, Stirner’s own understanding of his own statement proved to be unequal to it. Stirner proved to be insensitive to what the concept of “self” — in order to be adequate to reality — must entail; what must be its content, if it is expanded (i.e., developed) beyond the level of its self-contradiction — namely all of the other selves which intermutually “constitute” or produce it; in short, society. This error in general must be attributed to undeveloped concrete self-knowledge; Stirner did not know himself, his own true identity. He did not know himself as society, or society as his real self.

43

If the validity of the egoistic moment has not been understood, then nothing has been understood. For each social individual, when his life is at stake, everything is at stake. If I allow myself to be sacrificed, then I have allowed the whole world — all possible values — to be sacrificed as far as I am concerned. If I am lost, then all the world is lost to me. Each time a person dies, a world dies.

44

The community of egoists is the only possible community not founded on the repression of individual development and thus ultimately of collective development as well.

45

“Communist egoism” names the synthesis of individualism and collectivism, just as communist society names the actual, material, sensuous solution to the historical contradiction of the “particular” and the “general” interest, a contradiction engendered especially in the cleavage of society against itself into classes. This “solution” cannot be of the form of a mere idea or abstraction, but only of a concrete form of society.

46

The global and exclusive power of workers’ councils, of the anti-state n1 , of the associated producers n2 , or “generalized self-management” a1 that is, concerted egoism, is the productive force and the social relation of production which can supersede all the results of the uncoordinated egoistic activity of men. These are, in their totality, alienation; the unconscious development of the economy, and the unconscious production by the proletariat of the economic “laws” of capitalism, with all their disastrous consequences for the proletariat. The theory of communist egoism is complete only as a theory of revolutionary organization and as a theory of revolutionary practice in general; as a theory of the new social relations and as a theory of the practice of the councils. That is, it is adequate only as a theory of communist society and as a theory of the transition from (state) capitalist to communist society. Obviously then, these theses have still a long way to go toward the concrete.

47

The essence of communism is egoism; the essence of egoism is communism. This is the world-changing secret which the world at large still keeps from itself. The unraveling of this secret as the emergence of radical subjectivity is nothing other than the process of the formation of communist society itself. It already contains the objective process.

48

“But man is only individualized through the process of history. He originally appears as a generic being, a tribal being, a herd animal — though by no means a “political animal” in the political sense. Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization.” c26

49

Thus, in a sense, all history has (in the long run and if only implicitly) been a process of individualization. This individualization reaches its highest point of advertisement in the epoch of corporate capitalism. But private property’s “individualism” is naught but its most cherished illusion. The predominant characteristic of private property is a materialized reification where the egoism of its subjects (capitalists and workers alike) is suppressed and subordinated to the pseudo-subjectivity of the “economy for itself.” n1 The truth of the capitalist society and its private property is not individual property, but dispossession — viz., the proletariat. The truth of private property is nothing other than the production, reproduction, and growth of a dispossessed and propertyless class, i.e., the class of wage-labour. Private property is thus the very negation of individualism and of individual property. For the overwhelming majority of its subjects, i.e. the proletariat, private property is by no means individual property, but rather it is loss (i.e. sale — alienation) of self, being-for-another. Even the capitalists are at best mere agents of capital — managers of their own (and of the general) dispossession. The mythical “individualism” of capitalist society can only be realized in its own negation and in the negation of the society from which it sprang. Thus the Paris Commune of 1871, the first realized “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” n2 , c27 attempted to abolish private property in order “to make individual property a truth.” c28 “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of the law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property [!] based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” c29 The revolution of generalized self-management is the movement from narrow to full egoism, egoism’s own self-enrichment. It is egoism’s ascent from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

III. The Dialectic of Egoism

50

The concept of communist society can be arrived at, by one pathway, through the analysis and development of the self-contradiction of egoism, of the self-contradictory structure of the egoistic project. Communist society itself, and the self-transcendance of the narrow egoism of privatized man, can only be the outcome of the immanent and historical dialectic of egoism itself.

51

The egoistic project, in order to become adequate to itself, must include more than one ego.

52

Communist egoism, likewise communist society, is only the final n1 conclusion of the immanent critique n2 , the self-critique — of bourgeois egoism, of privatized life.

53

“Communism is simply incomprehensible to our saint a1 because the communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or self-sacrifice against egoism nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; on the contrary, they demonstrate the material basis engendering it, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, such as Stirner preaches so extensively. They do not put to the people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are well aware that egoism, just as much as self-sacrifice, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him..., to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general,” self-sacrificing man.... Communist theoreticians, the only ones who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons.” They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, the so-called “general,” is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and by no means opposes the latter as an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice always being destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction, together with its unity, also disappear.” c30

54

The suppression of private egoism follows the same course as private egoism c31 . The path out of narrow egoism is the straight and narrow path of this egoism itself. c32 (But, as Einstein argued with respect to physical time-space, what is straight and narrow from the narrow viewpoint of the immanent observer may be anything but straight to a larger view — highly curvaceous, in fact; even curved back on itself). The abstract negation of egoism — repression — will not suffice, but only its determinate negation, and its immanent negation — that is, auto-negation.

55

The development of egoism — the historical phenomenology of subjectivity — is a dialectic also in this sense: the way out of narrow egoism passes through narrow egoism itself. And all attempts to block this way tend only to inhibit the development and arrest it at this narrow stage.

56

Private egoism is egoism in conflict with its own essence. (But this becomes true visibly, and therefore fully, once, and only once, the conditions necessitating narrow appropriation — often lumped sloppily under the confusionist category “scarcity” — are gone and the conditions for a fuller, wider appropriation have matured. Specifically, this means the conditions for the appropriation of other people as subjects (mutuality) as opposed to merely as objects (exploitation). Thus, for example, the present “recession,” the growth of poverty and desperation which it entails, has been at first a major setback in this regard, and has drastically curtailed the daily experiential base which for a while — at the peak of the “prosperity” of the sixties — made this critique feel true.).

57

What we tend not to be immediately aware of is that the prevailing narrow and impoverishing form of egoism, of self-gratification, is one deeply mixed with its opposite; with the renunciation of self-gratification; that the “greed” we normally experience is a greed radically admixed with its own negation, with the embittered renunciation of greed, basing itself as it must on the narrow conditions of self-enjoyment presently available and especially formerly available to it, under conditions of extreme deprivation and toil. Specifically, the form of self-enjoyment which is excluded, the secret self-denial hiding at the heart of privatized egoism, is the denial of all the social pleasures, the communal pleasures of spontaneous gregariousness, the warmth of human solidarity, the exuberance of authentic festivity — the pleasures of association and social satisfaction in general. The vestiges of these are confined within the ever-narrowing circle of the private family, itself the nuclear remnant, adapted by capital, of the bygone primitive-communist kinship societies and their “extended families”, which publicizes its final self-critique in the burgeoning rates of divorce, divorce being recognized as and officially titled “estrangement.” This especially in the “advanced” capitalist countries — that is, the countries which have reached the advanced stages of social alienation.

The lag in appropriation of the newer conditions of “non-scarcity,” of potential and (to some extent already) actual abundance, is the context in which the present historical stage of the ‘dialectic of egoism’ must be understood. The positive moment of the early “hip” movement (of which moment today’s professional street vermin and gutter hippies are in no sense the heirs) — the whole libidinal emergence which began in the sixties, and now, in the recession of the seventies, is eclipsed again is comprehensible in part as a beginning of the appropriation of those new conditions. n1

58

The root illusion of all pious and ascetic ideologies is that, since exploitation is the partial appropriation of man by man, the way to rid the world of this “sin” is in instituting the non-appropriation of man by man, rather than the total appropriation: that the way to the negation (“quieting”) of desire is its repression rather than its fulfillment: touch me not and I will touch not thee. The logic of privation.

The problem of the misery of narrow egoism admits of only two solutions: either (1) its exaggeration to the point where it overspills its own limits; its expansion until it becomes one with the totality, rediscovering precisely within itself its supposed opposite and that which it formerly excluded, or (2) its repression, and with that evidentially, the unending reign of the present form, which is all that its historical repression has so far succeeded in producing.

59

Communism is not the self-repression of egoism. It is only when narrow egoism wants to transcend itself for its own deepest reasons: when it finds internal reasons, egoistic reasons; when it sees itself becoming its own ruin, defeating to itself, self-defeating, and — therefore, self-contradictory — that it brings itself to its own end, and communism begins. Private egoism historically is its own undoing. Its exercise brings about its own socialization — social egoism. Communism is the negation of egoism only by virtue of being a higher form of egoism — egoism’s own higher form. Narrow egoism, the ideology of self-gratification and self-realization, and the practice of exclusive self-gratification and self-realization becomes, at a certain stage in its development, a fetter upon self-realization and a fetter upon selfgratification. It becomes the main limit and obstacle to its own goals. It becomes a barrier to itself. This is the self-negativity which awakens in it the desire for its own transcendance: for self-transcendance, a supersession in accord with itself, with its own essence, and on its own terms, basing itself on the possibility of the community of gratification as the unlimited amplification of gratification. This is the immanent self-critique of narrow egoism; the death sentence which it pronounces upon itself. Thus the determinate negation of narrow egoism can only be through its own organic development, its own further development. That is, it can only be self-negation. “Happiness” at the expense of others; the exclusion of the others’ happiness from your own henceforth appears as a miserable basis; as the opposite of happiness, as misery, and private property as a wealth of poverty, compared to the new basis which has grown up secretly with modern society itself.

Communism is the comprehension of exclusive egoism as historically self-contradictory and thus finite: doomed to perish — as not eternal “human nature” but, on the contrary, self-canceling; transitory; transitional; as the decidedly unnatural (antisocial) condition of man prior to the historical self-completion of the human species. Communism is the comprehension of bourgeois egoism as already containing and implying its own historical negation, as containing its own negation in embryo — containing the seeds of its own destruction — by virtue of its being false to itself. Society, “socialism” — and social production — was its repressed essence all along.

60

All along the line, consciously or not, “me first” has always been the necessary pattern of everyone’s practice. Everyone at every moment of their lives consciously or not acts in his own self-interest at some level. Anything else would be inconceivable, impossible. n1 Unable to pursue his desires directly, a masochist uses the mediation of pain. The masochists of morality, ideology and causes seek pleasure by means of the pain of subordinating themselves through these projections.

The moral idealist attempts to get what he wants through the mediation of his projected ideal, because he doesn’t know how to get what he wants directly. He doesn’t know the practical means within himself as the subject and center of that practice, so he posits his center outside of himself as a rigidified generalization which is to “decide for him.” In so doing he makes the mistake of thinking that consistency with his ideal is always consistency with his self-interest.

61

“Communist egoism” names the negation of the negation of primitive egoism (narrow egoism). But the aspect of the process as an immanent or self-critique, and never an external or mechanical negation (e.g. the “smash self” n1 ideology of Maoism) must above all be emphasized, against all coercive and bureaucratic methods. Social(ized) egoism, communist egoism, is the negation of the negation of capitalist egoism, but it is the self-negation of the self-negation of that egoism. This second negation is essential to narrow egoism itself, no less than the first negation, which produces its antithesis — moralism, anti-egoism; altruism. This second negation is necessary to narrow egoism, to the preservation of its own premises, once it advances to a certain threshold in its self-development. The proper method to catalyze — to stimulate and accelerate — this process is another, i.e., from the ‘outside’, is the evocative method; the method of seduction. The method of rebuke, though useful at certain crucial turns here too, is, especially in the form of the method of chastisement, more adequate to the first, not the second, negation of narrow egoism. The method of chastisement is that of forcibly drawing out moral projections from the psyche, of creating “handles” in the victim’s head for easy manipulation (“handling”) by authorities and ideologues of all sorts; of instilling submissiveness, of inducing the split in the victim between the sense of duty and the sense of inclination; of forming the guilt-loop of alienated self-control.

The second negation means, on the contrary, the negation of altruism, the overcoming of all these separations; the collapse of the projections back into the psyche; their re-owning in the coalescence of the self: the centration, instead of the alienation, of self-control. This is the very formation of the “self” capable of “self” management.

62

Don’t get us wrong. Make no mistake. This theory is no apologia for narrow egoism. We have no interest in that negation of altruism which is simply a return to narrow egoism; a regression. Communist egoism, and not altruism, is the true opposite of narrow egoism. Communist egoism, and not narrow egoism, is the true opposite of altruism. Although altruism and narrow egoism are commonly taken as true opposites, they have this in common: an immanent critique of either must arrive at communist egoism. That is, communist egoism is the synthesis of altruism and narrow egoism. Communist egoism is simultaneously, identically both of them and neither; it is that unitary rejection of both which is also their unitary affirmation. n1

IV. The Resonance of Egoisms

63

“In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” c33

64

“In the laboratories of individual creativity, a revolutionary alchemy transmutes the basest metals of everyday life into gold. First and foremost, the problem is to dissolve the consciousness of constraints — that is, the feeling of impotence — in the magnetic exercise of creativity; melt them in the surge of creative power, in the serene affirmation of its genius. Megalomania, sterile on the level of prestige and the spectacle, represents in this context an important stage in the struggle opposing the ego to the coalesced forces of conditioning. “Today, nihilism reigns triumphant, and in its night the spark of creativity, which is the spark of all real life, shines only the more brightly. And while the project of a superior organization of survival proves abortive, there is, as these sparks become more frequent and gradually dissolve into a single light, the promise of a new organization, based this time on a harmony of individual wills. Historic becoming has taken us to the crossing point where radical subjectivity is confronted with the possibility of transforming the world. This privileged moment is the reversal of perspective “. c34

65

Communist society is conceivable only on the foundation of the resonance of egoisms. Thus its basis is the cohesion of egoisms, whereas heretofore egoism has appeared as the force of separation and privitization par excellence.

66

The essence of the resonance of egoisms is this: the other person is a part of your wealth. c35

67

The resonance of egoisms is the unity, the synthesis, the singularity, of the “particular” and the “general” interest: communist society.

68

The cohesion of communist society, once the threshold of its conditions-proper has been reached, is conceivable on this basis: that the community, society, association itself is the greatest personal value that the social individuals each possess. That is, their social relationships are this greatest value and this greatest wealth. The social relation itself becomes the unitary, unified, and universal means to the attainment of every end; to the gratification of every need, and thus also an end in itself. Society holds together to the extent that the social individuals find a greater value in its reproduction than in any act that would destroy it.

V. Communist Society

69

“... in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy, we have the wealthy man and the plenitude of human need. The wealthy man is at the same time the one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life, and whose own self-realization exists as an inner necessity, a need. Not only the wealth but also the poverty of man acquires, in a socialist perspective, a human and thus a social meaning. Poverty is the passive bond which leads man to experience a need for the greatest wealth, the other person. The sway of the objective entity within me, the sensuous eruption of my life-activity, is the passion which here becomes the activity of my being.” c36

70

“Authentic common life arises not through reflection; rather it comes about from the need and egoism of individuals, that is, immediately from the activation of their very existence. It is not up to man whether this common life exists or not. However, so long as man does not recognize himself as man and does not organize the world humanly, this common life appears in the form of alienation, because its subject, man, is a being alienated from itself.” c37

71

We anticipate a profound reversal of perspective at the threshold of communal society, in which any possible strictly privatized value will pale into insignificance, and be experienced as narrow and impoverished, in comparison to the individual, personal, “private” value to each social individual of his social existence. And this attitude would be then, under those conditions, no mere idealistic posture or pious wish, no mere moral abstraction, no representation over and above the real conditions — which is all it can ever be today — but, on the contrary, would arise from the most immediate, palpable, and concrete facts of life. Increasingly up to the present, since the breakup of early communal forms, all wealth has been private, that is, only private property has been recognized as wealth. In the future, if there is a future, the narrow and the privatized will be revealed as the essence of poverty, and wealth will be realized as social wealth, as wealth in human beings; in their relations and their capacities, in their faculties and their objectifications. n1 That is, the greatest wealth, and the necessary context of all wealth, is society itself.

72

The central problem of communist social relations is the following: what is to be the basis of human relationships, of the interpersonal cohesion, beyond kinship and exchangevalue, that is, beyond the blood-relations which formed the incredible binding-force, and great weakness, of primitive communist societies, and the exchange-value relations into which these increasingly dissolved in the formation of classsocieties?

The solution can only be of the form of real affinity, practically, sensuously discovered and verified, practically superseded and dissolved; free association; the resonance of passions. But within this statement of the solution, everything still remains to be said.

73

Let’s get one thing straight right now. All this talk of “historical necessity” and “inevitability” only succeeds in making of this mystic “necessity” a pseudo-subject, and of decoying attention from the real subjects, ourselves. Communist society is “historically determined” and “objectively determined” to be produced only to the extent that we are subjectively “bound and determined” to produce it. And this does not deny at all that such a subjectivity has its necessary objective conditions that can only develop historically.

VI. Radical Subjectivity

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What is this “radical subjectivity”? c38 From now on, the revolutionary subject is the conscious — and positively self-conscious — egoist, as opposed to the unconscious or negatively self-conscious (guilty) egoists among whom the revolutionary walks unrecognized but recognizing them. He can sustain this positive attitude toward his expanded egoism, and its first signs in others, by virtue of his comprehension of its positive social outcome in a society, separated from this one by the socio-psychotherapeutic process of revolution, in which the egoism of each is the first condition for the fulfillment of the egoism of all.

75

Contrary to the ideological banality, it is only the most greedy people who can never be “bought off.” a1

76

What we have called “communist egoism” is essentially the same as what Vaneigem and his Situationists have named “radical subjectivity.” In all their writings, it is there in “spirit,” if not ever fully in “letter.” In their failure to develop this concept in all its ramifications, and to cohere their whole practice with it, and in the remnants of moralism and secular Christianism n1 which therein still remained, we locate the very root of their failure.

77

Radical subjectivity, that is, communist egoism or the (realized) “social individual” c39 (Marx) is the concrete universal which is emergent in our time. It is the particular which is (potentially) everywhere. Radical subjectivity is our very root, the root of what we all have in common, the real basis of community. Root subjectivity — the “primitive” human root — could only be divulged as such at the far end of prehistory, as the outcome of the process of that prehistory itself, and as the secret basis of its supersession.

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“I am nothing, but I must be everything.” c40

Within this monstrous decrepitude of contemporary “society”, the nihilist, its commonplace product, knows only the first half of this statement. I am nothing. Therefore, anything else can only be less than nothing to me. In the upside-down world of alienation, it is the totality of things, of commodities, of money, of capital, that is everything, and we, the workers who make it, are shit. The nihilist is like a syllogism suspended at the minor premise, an acrobat whose somersault is broken in mid-flight. For him, the logic of this empirical truth, this truth of experience, of daily life, does not immediately tumble over into its opposite, its necessary conclusion: I am nothing, but I must be everything! — the conclusion that would make a revolutionary of him.

We produce commodities, money, capital. We produce everything that makes up social wealth. We must become explicitly what we already are implicitly: everything! This becoming-visible, this becoming-true of the social truth expresses the total process of the communist revolution.

VII. Pleasure

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Bourgeois political economy, the science of the exchange-value, was always only the false consciousness of the economy, and the science of alienation. n1 This is the first and final message of its Marxian critique. With the dying-out of exchange-value, the science of use-value (thus all the concrete sciences, now unified through their unified subjective use) will become the only useful science. And the science of use-value is the science of pleasure.

80

“Real economy — savings — consists in the saving of working time (the minimum, and reduction to the minimum, of production costs); but this saving is identical with the development of productivity. Economizing, therefore, does not mean the giving up of pleasure, but the development of power and productive capacity, and thus both the capacity for and means of enjoyment. The capacity for enjoyment is a condition of enjoyment and therefore its primary means; and this capacity is the development of an individual’s talents, and thus of the productive force. To economize on labour time means to increase the amount of the free time, i.e. time for the complete development of the individual, which again reacts as the greatest productive force on the productive force of labour. From the standpoint of the immediate production process it may be considered as production of fixed capital; this fixed capital being man himself. It is also self-evident that the immediate labour time cannot remain in its abstract contradiction to free time as in bourgeois economy. Work cannot become a game a1 as Fourier would like it to be; his great merit was that he declared that the ultimate object must be to raise to a higher level not distribution but the mode of production. Free time — which includes leisure time as well as time for higher activities — naturally transforms anyone who enjoys it into a different person, and it is this different person who then enters the direct process of production. The man who is being formed finds discipline in this process, while for the man who is already formed it is practice, experimental science, materially creative and self-objectifying knowledge, and he contains within his own head the accumulated wisdom of society.” c41

81

The major shortcoming of contemporary individuals is their incapacity for pleasure. Our daily lives are impoverished in part because we are open to the world, and therefore to pleasure (as well as to pain) only in such narrow and limited ways. These are the defenses, the character-armour, congruent with a world overloaded with pain, a world of suffering, which was and is the world of poverty with its struggle for existence, its “war of all against all,” where to be open is to be weak, and to be weak is to be made a victim. The self-contradiction of bourgeois egoism sharpens and becomes conscious only in the environment of that incipient world of plenty and world of pleasure which bourgeois society, during the prosperity phase of its economic cycle, itself foreshadows; that is, only when the walls which lock out pain begin to be perceived in daily experience as walls which lock out pleasure. The struggle against the social organization for pain and for the social organization for pleasure is the revolutionary struggle.

The problem, formulated another way, is the present narrow character of “the appropriation of nature and human nature by man .” c42

82

In the revolutionary process, the struggle is the struggle of pleasure; the pleasure is the pleasure of struggle.

83

Today, people oppress each other by the smallness of their desire; their poverty of social needs; their lack of a fuller egoism, a fuller greed. We are asking people to ask for more, so that we can ask for more, and get more from them — get what we can only get by being allowed to give more.

We do not ask you for much: we ask from you only your own egoism, and we do so not out of altruism, but for our own egoistic reasons. From the depths of our own, we ask you for the depths of yours. But in asking you for that, we ask you to give everything you’ve got; to give your all.

84

“Positive human self-consciousness” c43 can only be guiltless egoism, which can only mean communist egoism, the egoism which does not exclude the pleasure of other egos, but on the contrary, appropriates this as its own pleasure, includes it precisely for its own selfish reasons.

85

The negatively self-conscious egoist is the guilty egoist, the egoist who strives after his own narrow desires guiltily, and thus works against himself; resists himself — opposes a part of his own energy to his own project.

It is the energy presently tied-up in guilt, in self-policing, in self-repression — character-armor — which, once freed can build the new world.

People seeking, in good conscience and without guilt, more pleasure for their own everyday lives, contain the whole of the revolution.

86

Self-sacrifice is always Christian. Always.

87

The ‘expansion of egoism’ refers not only to the expansion (of self-identity) over many selves at any one time, but also to its expansion over time “at” any one self. The sacrifice of a future, greater pleasure to a more immediate but lesser one is precisely that: sacrifice; not the other way around. The responsible individual must decide for himself what is to his greatest advantage: this theory is no morality that can decide for him. The theory and practice of expanded egoism can have no consort with any ideology of hedonism, any more than with any brand of puritanism. This theory and practice is inseparable from the expanded consciousness of pleasure whose possibility has developed in the historical labourprocess, in the expansion of human capacities, selfpowers, and needs. And it is inseparable no less from that pleasure of consciousness which it implies and contains and which simultaneously contains it. Self-discipline, as directly opposed to authoritarian discipline, externally imposed and internalized as such — the coherent use of my life for myself, according to my own immanent standards and to ends of my own, is in itself already a pleasure for me. Self-mastery, the conscious and effective wielding of myself for myself in the world, is indeed an esthetic self-pleasure. It is the art of life. a1

When my self is the work of my own art, and my own work of art, then I take pleasure in myself.

Then I know myself as wealth — for myself as well as for others. I know myself as rich, as rich in myself, as a wealthy man through my self-possession. And yet this subjective wealth, this richness in self which I possess is also society. This is proven by the fact that outside society, or without it, all my wealth would wither into dust. The identity of myself and my society is proven by the fact that the nonexistence of society implies the non-existence of myself. But this is a dialectical, mediated identity, not a formal, abstract, immediate one; an identity that preserves within itself the moment of differentiation.

VIII. Sexuality

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“The immediate, natural, and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of male-to-female. n1 In this natural species relationship man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being, a human being. The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man’s natural behavior has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him. It also shows how far man’s needs have become human needs, and consequently how far the other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being .” c44

89

Orgastically potent n1 sexual experience is the very archetype of the resonance of egoisms: the immediate unity of pleasure-getting and pleasure-giving.

90

I don’t just want a fuller sex life; I want my whole life to be a “sex-life”!

91

The sociality of man reveals itself nowhere more strongly than in sexual sociability and sexual solidarity. The sexual need, more profoundly and more immediately than any other, reveals the fallacy of narrow egoism — the need to touch another person, another’s body; to be physically close, to caress and be caressed. Perhaps it is out of the desire, congruent with narrow egoism, to deny the inter-subjectivity of this most profoundly intersubjective of needs, that so many perversions begin; in order to objectify a1 the subject who is the aim of this need.

But here also is a threshold, and an “attractor” n1 where the expansion of egoism can stop, can get hung-up for epochs: a collective egoism that never grows bigger than the couple, the collective of two; the isolated duo, the nuclear family. We have here the ideology which holds that the egoistic project could become adequate to itself if only it included two egos. This is but another form of the ideology of antisocialism; the ideology that seeks to deny the social ingredient in the individual, the self, the personal world, and ends up by denying and depleting the self as well; ends up with an emptied self. According to this ideology, only the personal, intimate, family world, the private world of the home, is real. The strange, crazy, cold “outside” world — the social world — is held to be unreal, though it must be related to, if only to support this narrow “real” world. This ideology knows society only as an invasion of privacy. This is the ideology that will keep the personal world narrow and impoverished, and the social world menacing and alien. Will we get beyond it? Do we want to? Need to? Only time will tell. Capitalist anti-socialism is now rapidly reaching its logical conclusion: the destruction of society. Over this question, all of our lives are at stake.

92

Freud even bases his case for instinctual repression on the postulate of such an eternal condition as described above (with the help of a few of his typical reified n1 false antitheses). “The conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people, in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization is founded on relations between larger groups of persons. When a love relationship is at its height no room is left for any interest in the surrounding world; the pair of lovers are sufficient unto themselves, do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy”. c45 Like most calls for moral enforcement, it assumes, unbeknownst to its author (who characteristically believes, on the contrary, that people already want too much and are already too selfish) that human greed will not expand beyond a certain narrow domain.

93

The early women’s movement was one of the few loci of the nearly self-conscious emergence of radical subjectivity within the New Left. The women who created it refused to put off the struggle against their special oppression until “after the Revolution”.

If human beings have reduced each other to sexual pseudo-objects, have “objectified” a1 each other sexually, this is by no means the only or the most fundamental way in which they have been “objectified”. This is only one facet of a general dehumanization and de-subjectification. The overcoming of this specific “objectification”, of the problem posed most subjectively by the early women’s liberation movement, and named “sexism” by the partisans of that movement, can only be of the form of sexual subjectivity as opposed to this sexual “objectivity”, and (expanded) sexual egoism as opposed to sexual duty, sexual self-sacrifice, and sexual exploitation. This solution is opposed identically to the various directions taken by the later ideological expropriators of the women’s movement; namely that of the abstract negation of sexism — counter-sexism (anti-masculinism), reverse exploitation through the ideological manipulation of male guilt, sexual abstinence, or moralistic lesbianism.

Lately, more and more women have felt called on to act in a new role — that of “sister.” The joy of the initial abstract unity has been replaced by the threat of exclusion for unsisterly behavior. Oppression takes a new form: women over women.

It’s not the moments of genuine warmth and intimacy, of authentic community, within the women’s movement that we want to criticize, but precisely the ideology that ultimately poisoned these.

The “community” founded on gender is still an abstract community, still a false community; still the domination over the individual and her desires through the use of abstract categories and external qualities, by the ideological representatives of these. The pseudo-community of “sisters” — assumed and moralistically enforced — is still a community founded on oppression: the repression of radical subjectivity; the representation and enforcement of an abstract determination defining a group of people in this case, gender n1 — over against their concrete particularity and their conscious self-determination.

Bosses come in all genders, no less than in all colors. How much humiliation will it take to learn that a boss having similar skin color or the same type of sexual glands “objectifies” one no less than any other? Next time a feminist bureaucrat addresses you as “Sister”, listen to the tone of her voice. Why is she whining? Do her words fall like a threat, or like a chain? What is it she wants from you? Does she want a subject or a slave; a sex, i.e., a walking abstraction, or a person?

IX. Authority

94

The development of generalized self-management is impeded by, precisely, generalized incapacity for self-management — the terror at the thought of freedom; frozen subjectivity; the authoritarian personality. This usually takes the form of a dire fear and distrust of others in a situation of revolutionary self-management — “the other guy is a fuckup”; “the other guy is too stupid and irresponsible to ever make it work,” etc. — valid fears, to which we can only say that everybody is right about everybody else to date.

The authoritarian personality is essentially the slavish personality, the personality that needs authority — that precisely can’t manage without it. This character-structure hides its essence in the role of the master; it reveals its essence in the role of the slave. Capitalist society is society founded on the expanded reproduction of the habit of submission, of the alienation (disowning) of subjectivity (wage-labour). The proletarian is precisely the desubjectified man, the pseudo-object, ruled by the pseudo-subject, capital, which he produces and reproduces. Revolutionary practice is therefore the practice of “subjectification” n1 ; of the expanded reproduction of subjectivity, or radical subjects. n2 The detournement of moralism (of the pseudo-critique of “greed”), the validation and expansion of egoism, is thus an essential moment of revolutionary practice. And this is a moment of that moment.

Beyond the need of authority lies the authority of needs and the authority of desire.

95

In any hierarchical relationship the dominator as well as the submissive pays his dues. The price paid for the “glory of command” is indeed heavy. Every tyrant resents his duties. He is relegated to drag the dead weight of the dormant creative potential of the submissive all along the road of his hierarchical excursion. Obviously, this cannot compare to the amount of pleasure-energy released playfully and willingly, not coercively, when everyone plays the game. (The price of one’s authority over others is the sumtotal of one’s acceptance of the same authority over oneself.).

96

In a self-managed society, the prevention of communal squalor, of social malpractice in general (the nonfulfillment of production-plans, etc.) depends, not on nobody being an authority, but on everybody being an authority where his own needs and desires, his own interests, are concerned. And this means expanded self-interests; social self-interests. This means that anybody must be self-authorized to mess with anybody else befouling a communal place, impeding collectively agreed-upon production, etc., and must know how to do so. Only such a non-centralized, all-sided flow of practical-critical feedback and social dialogue can reproduce such a society. The end of specialized supervision can only be in the process of generalized supervision and collective self-supervision. The end of the special police depends on general self-regulation, that is, generalized self-management — people taking responsibility for their social needs. This is the opposite of the repressive conception, “self-policing” based on the present external policing, which serves an alien interest, and is internalized as such.

97

In the socialist society of the future — if it is to be at all — everyone will have to be his own expert, his own authority, on “savoir-vivre”, on “how-to-live”. There will be no higher authority over a given matter than the general assembly of those self-interested in that matter.

98

Every treatise on the theory of practice is a “Traite de Savoir-Vivre” c46 , a “Treatise on How to Live”, whether its author fully knows it or not. “How-to-live” is just the general problem of the theory of practice stated most subjectively.

99

Freedom from external authority means being your own authority; self-authority. Freedom = self-mastery. The meaning of the phrase “a world of masters without slaves” c47 can be conceived only in the concept of self-mastery. But this cannot be limited to “individual” self-mastery. The concept of individual self-mastery already necessarily includes the moment of social self-mastery. Communist society can only mean the conscious self-mastery of the totality of their social self-production by the associated producers. Self-determination, self-government, self-management — in their necessary, completed meaning, can mean nothing less. The general name of the problem we confront is “to learn how to live,” i.e. socially, how to “associate”. c48 “Live” here is opposed to merely surviving, and to dying supposedly trying to live (the “beautiful losers” syndrome), etc. But this has nothing to do with morality — nothing, that is, but to abolish it!

X. Morality

100

The old moral question of whether one “thinks first of oneself or of others” falls apart when we come to think only of ourselves and for this reason negate the otherness of others.

101

Intelligence ends where morality begins. Morality ends where intelligence begins. The theory of practice, the unitary critique of all ideology, must at the same time be the critique not only of any moralism, but of any possible moralism. Every moral is subjectivity disowned and subjectivity alienated. Every moral is a psychic totem, a mental fetishobject, before which the moral fetishist subordinates himself, bows down, and offers sacrifice — indeed offers himself in sacrifice. Every ideal is separated subjectivity; a part of the self separated off, ejected, frozen, and held over the rest of the self. It is a depletion of subjectivity, a loss of freedom, a choice made in advance. The formation of the moral ideal is at the same time a decline in subjective mobility and maneuverability; a ball-and-chain about the dancer’s ankle; a self-laming and self-maiming in the dance of life.

102

Morality and that which ties you to it, self-guilt, guilt for even being, is an enormous encumbrance. You can throw it off! You can drop all that weighty moral baggage, before it drags you down! You don’t need it! It is but a poor substitute for the fine tool of practical intelligence, expanded self-interest, self-consciousness itself.

When, if I should encounter a contradiction between a useful abstraction I had made about my practice, and my concrete self-interest in a given situation, if I abandon my concrete desire in favor of the practice of that abstraction, that mere generalization, out of abstract respect for superficial “consistency”, or, say, at the behest of another, who threatens me with the word “hypocrite”, then I am projecting that abstraction into a position above myself, freezing it into a “principle” n1 , a moral, and I am reproducing as an ideologue the other person who has rebuked me in comparison to that moral, by being susceptible to him expropriating the representation of myself which I have erected or condoned, and using it against my real self. As a mere generalization, a practical abstraction — as theory — I have already refuted it for myself in practice, proven its invalidity for this instance. But as a moral reification, on the contrary, it is my duty to obey it. Not I but “it” is my master: “it” gives the orders, I alienate my will into it; “it” is the subject of my practice, I “its” object.

103

The projections of my subjectivity, nurtured by guilt, stick out of my head like so many handles offered to any manipulator, any ideologue, who wants to get a hold of me, and whose trade skill is the ability to perceive such handles.

Only when I dissolve my guilt, when I free myself to be shamelessly selfish, when I grasp selfishness as my only “duty” — taking care of myself as necessarily my first social responsibility — can I be free.

104

The critique of the totemic relationship, clarified by Feuerbach c49 in relation to religion, thence applied to political economy by Marx c50 , and lately developed one-sidedly by the Gestalt therapists (especially Perls c51 ) locates the inversion that lies at the heart of all domination and self-enslavement. Totemic fetishism or projection lies also at the heart of every moral ideology, which is revealed also in the observation that every ideology is a moralism, and a social plan for the allocation of guilt. While usable precisely for the same ends, ideology in general, moralism in particular, are in essence the more sophisticated and subtle means of exploitation, as opposed to naked coercion.

105

It is my guilt about my desires which makes me susceptible to ideological exploitation by others, and which motivates me in producing excuses and justifications (rationalizations) in terms of the dominant ideology (the ideology which I let dominate me). The trick of ideology consists in this: to re-present desires in a pseudo-universal — i.e., unselfish, altruistic — and therefore unreproachable, form, always in terms of some abstract “general interest”. In order to reconcile myself with my ideology I must make myself a liar. But it is a losers’ game. The lawyers of the dominant class already have it set up in advance their way, and here I am on their terrain. The use-value of practical generalizations is that of theory — intelligence of human practice; knowledge of means, techniques, and consequences. The use-value of morality is that of ideology — to dominate others, to attempt to get what is wanted in a narrowly selfish way, by representing it as unselfish, universal, in a climate where transparent selfishness, and transparency about desires, is not tolerated, is chastised.

106

In the abstract negation of morality, its mere antithesis — typical especially of the Situationist mentality — moralism is transformed into anti-moralism, which is really only an anti-moralism moralism, and not truly the opposite of moralism at all. According to the logical substructure of this ideology, one has a duty to do at all times what is immoral according to the dominant ideology — that is, the ideology by which the Situationist still defines and dominates himself, though here in a negative form. Thus, it is abstractly required to live by stealing, to practice sexual promiscuity, to live in squalor, to drop out of school, to never work, etc., etc. This is still qualitatively as far from the determinate negation of moralism as is moralism itself.

107

As for ourselves, we have no morality. We have only our feelings, our needs, our desires; our thoughts, our consciousness, our practical knowledge of practical consequences, at each given stage of our development. In short, our subjectivities, our selves. Compassion doesn’t need to be coerced out of us; it comes naturally. We feel others’ suffering, as well as their joy, because we are open to feeling our own.

108

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their conditions is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. Their criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation, but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.” c52

As with religion, so with respect to the other projections, individual and collective (commodities, money, capital, the state, ideologies of every description, morality in particular, reified [hierarchical] institutions of all sorts — pseudo-subjects all. Try substituting them in!)

109

“The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, despised and rejected being.” c53

110

The criticism of morality ends with the doctrine that you are the supreme being for you. (That is, your being, your self-consciousness, your being-for-yourself, is the necessary medium through which all other values — which constitute or give content to its value — including my value for you, or myself as one of your values, come into being for you. If you should lose your being, then all other beings, and therewith all values, would be lost to you. Further, and more concretely, to the extent that we produce socially, and that we produce a society; that we exchange self-powers and their objectifications, that we depend upon one another for the reproduction of ourselves, then my loss, or the loss of me, is your loss, and a depletion of your self). It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions under which you, the subject, are subordinated to some thing — some fetish, some totem, some projection, some reification, some cause, some ideal, some moral, some principle, some pseudo-subject — some being supposedly “higher than your self.”

111

What cause or ideal is there, what projection out of yourself, that can be higher, for you, than you, its source? What external to your self that you value can warrant for you your sacrifice? What value is there that you would not lose if you lost yourself? Something can be a value for you only if it includes and conserves in it your self, the necessary foundation of all your values. When you are lost to you, all the emanations of yourself, and all the values in the world that you affirmed, are lost for you also; cut off at their root.

Taking risks is another matter. You must gamble your self in order to gain any value; you must risk yourself in order to gain yourself back again more richly. What is called cowardice’ is not the practice of the realization expressed above, but its opposite: too little value placed on one’s self, and on those values and other persons which are part of it, so that one fails to defend one’s self in the expanded sense, or mistakes mere survival for life.

112

It is not by any means only the narrowly “selfish”, “egoistic” desires and tendencies which are repressed continually (moralistically, while at the same time being reinforced practically) in the daily life of privatized society, but also — really, more so — the “non-egoistic”, the so-called “unselfish” tendencies: natural gregariousness, spontaneous human solidarity, natural compassion and empathy, simple sociability and love. There is an energy produced in each human being every day which aims at a social satisfaction and which if not satisfied socially turns against itself, becomes depression, withdrawal, etc. Unlike tribal societies, wherein these “unselfish tendencies” form the main base of social survival, in our society, overdeveloped (late) capitalist society, these emotions only break surface occasionally, exceptionally. In the vast accumulations of constant and variable capital n1 known today as “cities”, the continual steadfast repression of these tendencies is increasingly a necessity of survival. With increasing rarity does social good-feeling pass between strangers on the street. Any stranger is best regarded an enemy. And these teeming anthills are a world of strangers. The growing phenomenon of mass, random murders can be understood as a becoming apparent of what was always essential to capitalist society, now entering its historic extremity: “the war of all against all” is becoming armed. a1

Once anesthetized, beginning in the early life of the individual, these social desires and tendencies can usually be re-evoked only falsely, artificially, coercively. Hence the belief that these emotions need to be enforced through the manipulation of guilt. Anyone still manifesting such tendencies in their direct, spontaneous form into young adulthood is immediately suspect, or at best, considered “naive” and a “fool” for his apparent “idealism” and/or “childishness” (despite all the altruistic pretenses of official society): these emotional tendencies are being seen as a weakness (which, in the society of estrangement, they undoubtedly are, until or unless such an individual develops full consciousness of these tendencies and of their social context, appropriating these as part of a revolutionary project).

113

I listen to criticism because I am greedy. I listen to criticism because I am selfish. I would not deny myself another’s insights. But egoistic criticism is a use-value or it is nothing; use-value not only to its recipient, but to its donor as well. I would not bother to criticize someone in whom I had no interest. Anything else would be service rendered to an ideal, a moral projection — only a moralist seeks to strike against what contradicts him, his moral, equally over the whole manifold of space-time; only an ideal is “eternal” in this way. Whereas I am mortal. My libido is concentrated around myself; its intensity falls off exponentially with subjective distance from its source.

This egoistic criticism is the opposite of the masochistic and ritualized (spectacular) “criticism and self-criticism” of Maoist morality. Authoritarian criticism aims at my repression, at reinforcing and reproducing passivity and servility, at maintaining the habit of submission. It aims at weakening, rather than strengthening, my subjectivity, at keeping me an authoritarian personality — a slave.

Egoistic criticism, on the contrary, aims at strengthening me, in the mutual interest of my self and my critic, for the benefit of our common wealth and our common project. It is immanent criticism, criticism of me in my own interest. By the same token, for such criticism to be possible, for someone’s criticism to “interest” me, I must see myself in them, and them in myself; we must share a common interest, a concrete community.

114

The critique of revolutionary ideology, anarchist and Leninist alike, with its sacrificial collectivist morality and, in particular, the critique of Maoism with its morality of poverty, reveals once and for all the poverty of all morality.

And this in a double sense. First, in that morality is the ideological product of poverty; of the underdeveloped state of human productive forces, and especially of the cleavage of the “general” and “particular” interests, whose root is the self-cleavage of society; social classes. Morality is the expression of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. It locates the general interest as a projection out of a social situation in which it could only be found as a contradiction. In morality, the contradiction is represented as an abstract identity of the interests of all men, as the interest of an abstract man who has no real social existence. Second, in the sense that morality — which is projection, or selfdisowning — is a depletion of the real social wealth, of subjectivity, the wealth of the self.

115

Our subjectivity and our self-rediscovery in every here and now, i.e. our self-reproduction, is the only possible guarantee of our subjectivity. We must re-win ourselves constantly. “Communist egoism” can be made into an ideology. “The right to be greedy” can be turned into a morality. Easily. No objectification is immune. This ideology begins whenever some bureaucrat — for this act would confirm him so being — tries to order me, in the name of my “self-interest,” to desist from some activity I have freely undertaken, on the grounds that it is “objectively” sacrificial, and I let him get away with it. (Here is revealed the lie of representation: he represents me even against myself — he owns “me”, is more “me” than I am.) If I keep this up, the final scenario can be easily envisioned: some bureaucrat points a gun at me saying: “In the name of your expanded self-interest, that of the proletariat as a whole, we have determined that it is best for you for us to kill you” and pulls the trigger. (cf. Kronstadt, the ideology of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, etc.). n1

116

In a revolutionary situation it takes much more than the mere wish to prevent a bureaucracy from arising. The roots of bureaucracy lie in personal self denial a1 , in treating myself and my desires in a bureaucratic manner, in short, being a bureaucrat with myself. The mere abstract negation of its institutionalized form is like arriving with a bucket of water after the house has already burned down. In every rationalization and hesitation, in every stuttering and swallowing down of desire, of felt resentments, miscommunications and secret humiliations lie the seeds of our demise, our Thermidor. The logical outgrowth of any self denial by any revolutionary is the triumph of the counterrevolution and the reign of the Bolsheviks all over again.

“...it is always the principle of useful suffering and willing sacrifice that forms the most solid base for hierarchical power.” c54 The moment you sit by passively while not getting what you want, you are preparing the ground for your own destruction.

117

We are on the verge of liberation only when it can be said of each of us that he/she has become so rebellious, so irrepressible, and so unruly that she/he cannot be mastered by anything less than his/her self (i.e., among other things, when no mere projection or reification of a part of ourselves will suffice, any longer, or will be able successfully to rule over us.).

118

The “game” a1 is a form of armour, ideology is a “game”, character-armour is compulsive role-playing, the “script” is the self-image projected through time, the temporalized self-spectacle. In the white heat of the act of their comprehension as lived experience and as interpersonal praxis going on all around us, these names, and the concepts they name game, armour, ideology, role, character, script melt into one.

The self-spectacle, the spectacular self — self-representation — will be found necessary, a necessary use-value, a necessary interpersonal tool, in fact, a “survival kit”, and thus be reproduced, so long as (1) the dissonance of egoisms, the totality of conditions known in general as “poverty”, “scarcity”, prevails, and consequently, (2) people cannot get what they want often enough by being transparent with one another, by simply asking for it, and, (3) they cannot or will not take the risk of asking, the gamble of transparency, either for fear of the pain of refusal or out of the desperation of their need, and would therefore prefer to extract what they can by circuitous means, by subterfuge and deception, decoy and trickery — in short, by intransparent means.

The spectacular presentation of self in everyday life, the personal organization of false appearances (persona) — partly compulsive and involuntary, as especially in muscle armour — the little lie — these are the means of the devious route to the realization of desire. In their conscious part, they will be resorted to so long as the more direct means, transparency, does not work any better. In their more unconscious, compulsive part, they are the mark of repression and domination, the cowering wince of the whipped cur, frozen into a posture.

Character-armour is indeed the form of peoples’ complicity in the spectacle. Not that feeling guilty about one’s character-armour will do anything but exacerbate this problem.

XI. Revolution

119

“Productive forces and social relationships — the two different sides of the development of the social individual — appear to be and are, only a means for capital, to enable it to produce from its own cramped base. But in fact they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation.” c55

120

In the end, egoism is our only friend; in the last analysis greed is the only thing we can trust. Any revolutionary who is to be counted on can only be in it for himself unselfish people can always switch loyalty from one projection to another. Furthermore, only the most greedy people can be relied on to follow through on their revolutionary project. Others less greedy can always be bought off so as to stop short of themselves.

121

The practical necessity of greed and the truth of our statements concerning the failures engendered by greed which is not greedy enough are demonstrated continually in the history of the modern revolutionary movement. Just as, in 1871, internalized ideology and a miserable handful of guards were enough to deter the armed Communards from seizing the French National Bank at a time when money was desperately needed, so in 1968 French insurgents (mystified by trade-unionist and anarcho-syndicalist ideology) failed to comprehend all the world around them as social property (and therefore theirs) and thus tended to restrict self-organization to “their own” work places. Though greedy and egoistic in their own right, both these movements fell victim to the mystification, the fetishism of privatized territory. In both cases, the revolutionaries were left in paltriness, the pathetic possessors of mere fragments of a revolution (these fragments by their very nature sublated into naught). In both cases it was a limited greed, in their theory and their spirit, that led to the practical (indeed even military) defeat of these revolutions. The meaning of Marx’s “I am nothing, but I must be everything” unfolds its truth fully when we realize that only when we become everything shall we cease to be nothing.

122

“Revolution ceases to be as soon as it is necessary to be sacrificed to it.” — graffito, Paris, May-June, 1968. c56

123

The social revolution is when social human beings, social individuals wake up inside the living, waking nightmare of privatized life.

124

Revolution is the social moment of the collapse of all projections. In the moment of social revolution the present, the historical present, the presence of history opens up like the sky.

125

Don’t be too afraid. What is left after the collapse of all projections is you, your self, precisely that in you which alone was not self-projection. Don’t panic — you’ve been lost so long, it may take you a moment, after the deluge, to find your self again, there at the center of everything. Apres le deluge, moi! After the deluge: you!

And your self will not be found alone.

126

The road to further evolution passes through revolution. The path that leads from survival to life passes through the valley of the shadow of death. We have decided to go, to take the gamble, for ourselves. Do you want to come with us, for yourself? We want you. We need you. You decide.

For ourselves! May 1, 1974

Postnotes

I. Notations

Thesis 3

n1

By “transparent” relations we mean relations beyond duplicity; relations in which the essential is also visible, i.e., in which the essence appears. “Transparency” is when you can see from the surface of social phenomena through into their core; when their truth is apparent on the surface. On the contrary, the social relations of capitalist society are opaque; shot through with a contradiction between appearance and essence; things are, more often than not the exact opposite of what they appear to be. For example, in capital, the apparent social imperative of the production of maximal use-value — “we’re here to serve you”; “to produce a quality product”, et