A critique of optimism — the religious dogma that states there will be an ultimate triumph of good over evil — in the far left

Preface

You know it is a book if it weighs a quarter pound.

A book is dependent more on the quantity of its words than on quality of writing. Certainly, I have written better elsewhere but our book, this book, has a weight about it that goes beyond the writing – it has been assigned its own four ounces of reality, its half inch of spine width; Nihilist Communism is a true thing in the world of things, it has independent existence. Admittedly, the viability of this existence has been sustained amongst a very small readership, but nevertheless this book is real.

The phenomenon of books escaping from their authors is a curious matter and it is difficult to know how to respond to it; at one level we feel responsible for it, it is ours; at a different level entirely (the text is anti-copyright), it functions under its own power. I sense that my right to talk about it, alter it, frame it, is debatable. After all, there are live threads leading from the event of its initial publication which I might now cut with these comments here. It seems to me that there are more disconnections in the republishing of a book than there are continuities. At the least, there is the opportunity to modify and manipulate what went before.

If we cannot possess it entirely, we also cannot flee it.

It is as well to acknowledge here that I would not mind if this book had no readership at all, as its republication causes me more anxiety than pride. I fully understand why Darwin sat on his theory for 20 years; I wish I too were in possession of a decisive caution, a secure certainty in what we have done. However, if I am nervous about our ideas appearing before a wider readership then this is compounded by an unthinking rashness that desires both to gamble, and also perhaps to lose. At the point of publication of the second edition I feel a sense of the inexorable that binds me to this book even as my first instinct is for flight from it.

My ambivalence is no doubt attributable to my revisiting the motivations behind our initial publication – namely a farewell to the milieu and a summation of the dead-ends we had encountered. Perhaps I am no longer disturbed by those dead-ends, perhaps I am more disturbed by my inability to deal with them at that time. I think there was and is a residue of shame at my/our involvement in the tawdry theatrics of the milieu and this is expressed in the book. We were as much shaped by the milieu as anyone else: we took our cues, spoke the lines, made the gestures. Even as we broke from it, we were still too implicated.

Strangely, although this initial purpose of breaking away served adequately for my co-author, I found that many new opportunities were subsequently opened up for exploration by the publishing of Nihilist Communism. Once the break had been made I was more capable of understanding that the book’s publication did not mark an end at all but, on the contrary, it created an entirely new theoretical framework through which I could explore social relations. In part, the sudden appearance of this new investigative threshold was related to my gaining access to the internet, where rapid circulation of connections within the milieu has meant an increased statistical likelihood of my encountering others who were capable of responding positively to me and I to them. In other words, an entirely new means of relating within the milieu became possible to those criticised within Nihilist Communism.

An archaeology of ourselves

Nihilist Communism is the last book published in the Nineteenth Century, it was generated from within a political milieu which sustained itself through personal correspondence and meetings and we personally used and inhabited those conventions. However, I think this milieu of face to face interactions is now disappeared entirely. Our book was published on the cusp of the transformation within the milieu from the C19th to the C21st and if it had not appeared when it did in 2003, I think it would not have appeared at all in the form it took. In my opinion, if we had had access to a satisfying internet forum, I think we would have felt content that our ideas had been digitally archived on group sites and text libraries – the urge towards producing an objectively existing record in book form would have been much less pressing.

That Nihilist Communism squeezed through these apertures (of technological transformation; of direct personal disengagement; of shifts in modes of connection within the milieu; of the appearance and decline of popular anti-capitalism) now resonates upon rereading it, in both its form and its content. Over the space of six years the book has become an archaeological artefact, immediately evocatory of a threshold between a past that is now banished and a present mode of organizing that is still very far from realising its virtual potential.

Internet organising, for good or ill, has almost entirely replaced significant real world interventions. That Nihilist Communism was intended as a retreat from participation, a relinquishment of the morality of involvement, and that this should coincide with a more general retreat into internet communities is, I think, archeologically important – I think our book records this relinquishment and objectively articulates the wider collective giving up on previous cast iron assumptions concerning recruitment, organisational autonomy and moralistic, effort-based commitment.

Our constant reference within the text to how hated we were, and how potentially hated we would be, indicates the hostile nature of milieu relations before internet based modes of organising took hold. Where previously, relations that were derived from a scene of face to face encounters were defined by the inter/intra group personal rivalries of dominating individuals, suddenly, with the advent of internet relations, nothing anybody said or thought made any difference one way or the other. The old London Scene, a system of personal rivalries, resentments and allegiances, which spread its issues throughout the u.k., has long since dissipated. Anger at, and rejection of, another’s ideas is expressed more explosively now on internet forums but such intolerance also rapidly fizzles away. If the internet has had a negative impact on meaningful and important relations between milieu-based individuals (and it has) then it has also undermined the traditional controlling behaviours of group gatekeepers.

I should note here, with regard to this general trend towards disengagement from elective, face-to-face group formations, that I now contain all of my designated political activities to computer based time. The consequences of this are quite remarkable. Just at the points where I have been unable to advance an inch in real space I have found openings for huge explorations of virtual depth. I am not sure of the significance of this disproportion but we should always keep in mind that our most telling and decisive victories tend to occur along well marked routes offering least resistance. Elsewhere in our lives, in those real struggles that are not political, it is always more a matter of hacking through an endless thicket, without either direction or orientation.

However, I don’t have too much choice about where my politics may appear anyway. I find that nowadays I do not have the necessary reserves of energy to expend on those activities which have always produced as returns only an awareness of the depletion of those reserves. The unhappy personal relations with people I did not really want to know, and which made up the totality of my previous anarchist involvement are all now far in the past. I am happy to keep my engagement with others of the politically minded at stick length. Of course, I accept that my attitude to this may change in the future; that the dictatorship by circumstance to behaviour is a central message of Nihilist Communism.

Where one aims the missile of one’s self

It is important, in my opinion, for those who have an interest in the critique of capitalism, to concentrate energies where they produce most demonstrable effect, even if the objective worth of that effect is only a personal advantage (however that might be gauged). I feel no particular guilt about my deliberate noninvolvement in Building the Movement. In fact, I think I perform my disengagement with a certain panache and style, but I also think it is worth recording my retreat here as I am certain that after the onset of very brief struggles against its pull there is a widespread submission of individuals to the tendency of nonparticipation within the milieu. It seems reasonable to.

It seems reasonable to suppose this failure of capacity to achieve things is largely technologically driven. In my experience, communications technology dissipates the ability to focus and complete projects. On the other hand, the same communications technology is capable of maintaining a pilot light level of interest amongst individuals where before they would have experienced a complete extinguishment of their politics. The latent potential of mere consumers of radical products is unmeasurable; the effect of their passively circulating critical memes as a type of background noise will forever go unresearched. I, for one, am not in the business of condemning people for their lack of involvement – I recognise there are many good arguments for complete disengagement.

Writing techniques

A book may be written and assembled by any number of editorial strategies, but the immanent achievement of book status is dependent wholly on quantity of words. In our case, we achieved the requisite number through repetition of, and variation upon, a limited number of themes which appear as well, or as badly, put on the first page as on the last. Nihilist Communism does not advance a complex central argument supported by numerous proofs or derivative observations. On the contrary, its arguments do not advance at all but rather pulse constantly throughout the text’s sentences. Our arguments, our insights, our themes, our breakthroughs, our flaws are all hammered at on every page of the book.

Again, this repetitious aspect is an archaeological feature consequent of the book’s derivation from short texts developed in correspondence between ourselves and then sent, by post or email, to numerous other individuals and organisations. I remember no undue effort at editing. Whilst this technique does not typically produce a work that conforms to academic specifications it does at least record the process of engagement and writing as it really occurred – it still has a real time immediacy. It records the combination of efforts and preoccupations of two individuals at a particular juncture.

If we had set out to write a pamphlet we would have edited the text down and produced a concentrated work which might have made more political impact than Nihilist Communism did.... But the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink maximalism of the work has many benefits, not least its political irreducibility. The immensity and richness of the archaeological artefacts uncovered in Burial Mound One at Sutton Hoo, were, over the course of a thousand years, compressed into a seam of material only an inch thick. We might have produced a similarly compressed, rich seam but instead we created a loose aggregate of arguments set beside other unintended material which situates us in our time. The book is much more significant for not appearing as a compressed theoretical pamphlet. Strangely, it remains truthful because it has been realised in book size, in three dimensions, truthful to us and to the now lost world we then inhabited.

Psychology.

The text of Nihilist Communism and the idea behind Monsieur Dupont in general situated whatever contribution we were making to our milieu within our actual experience. We did not want to pretend that we lived a Revolutionary Lifestyle, we did not want to presume some objective significance in what we were doing beyond the objective significance of any other person. We absolutely refused to talk as if from the perspective of history, or as if we were mouthpieces relaying objective forces. We wanted to make it quite clear that we were not the carriers of proletarian consciousness; we could not predict what was going to happen in the history of capitalism – we did predict, not unreasonably, that capitalist relations would continue to be reproduced from basic productive circuits, and no matter the political framework, until such circuits were interrupted. We were unable to discern any historical movement towards revolution, we felt neither optimism nor pessimism. Emphatically, we did not consider our lives, opinions, or actions were that much of a big deal. We were not prone to making statements such as, “we have the power to change things, we only need to realise it.”

And therefore, by implication of the above, we did not consider any other small group of politicised individuals, or any leadership cadre salted into a particular industry, as being anything more significant than individuals expressing their opinions more or less in accordance with the pressure of economic forces. It was important to us then, and it continues to be a central facet of the critique of the left, to reveal the psychological/ambivalent motivations that underlay many of the untheorised assumptions and practices of the milieu. Objectively, there is no historic tradition, there is no appointed priesthood, no holy books handed down. We discovered that no communist group functions in advance of the curve, no communist group has anything particularly relevant to pass on to the proletariat. All is self-delusion and dysfunction, but masking what? What are the mechanisms, beyond Changing the World (which evidently is not changing) that are at work here?

The tendency within communist groups to produce such frameworks and fetishes directly contributes to the reproduction of received commodity relations within the milieu – where there should be lived relations, problematised between individuals based on acknowledgement of impotence before the sheer scale of the capitalist relation, there is too often imposed a set of relations between given and uncriticised things (groups, ideals, actions, journals etc).

The milieu is constituted of nothing more than individuals expressing their discontent with the present and their hopes for a different mode of social organisation in the future – whatever disrupts or obscures the objective baselessness of the opinions expressed within the milieu (whether by means of promoting organisational fetishism, militantism, moral denunciation, theoretical expertise etc), with the intent to produce an authoritative voice, is always a lie.

Monsieur Dupont refused the trend of individuals within the milieu to speak in the first person plural in the pretence that behind their actual ones and twos they really spoke for thousands. We went in the opposite direction and pretended our two was really one. In part, our assumption of a shared identity referred to the collective figures then common within the avant-garde (in particular Luther Blisset), but it was also a recognition of the clown Monsieur Hulot. It was important to us, in order to think clearly, to rid ourselves from moral responsibility, from that terrible weight of significance that political activists carry on their shoulders – we did not want to continue to subject ourselves to the inhibitive pressures that have induced variously megalomania, conservatism, intolerances, despair, on those charged with a political mission.

The impersonal rigour of clowns (and above all we were hard men given to an appreciation of craft) is based in the rehearsal of a set of pre-established acts that are made to occur outside of the person performing them. The performer is not the clown, the clown is a character not a person. In assuming a shared identity we were suddenly freed from that urge towards conformity and saying the right thing that exists at the heart of all radical discourses as the vital matter of what is optimal, what is appropriate – we were able to put on a Performance in which our person, our standing, our dignity, was not at stake. The clown is fundamentally an instrument of disinterested investigation of the world. In particular, clowning explores the tension of what might go wrong. Within the pro-revolutionary milieu everything had already gone wrong. This milieu, this community, is the one location in the universe where Murphy’s Law is the only law and whilst everyone involved had noticed this, they tended to exteriorise the blame, becoming host to, and personifying, a <em>fundamental attribution error<em>.

From inside, looking out

Within the carapace of Monsieur Dupont, our personal experiences, small and irrelevant, became the base for our performances and the core of our awareness. However, we were careful to perform without the usual reflux of politics into our lives, we reversed the adage that the personal is political. Our performance became distinct from our everyday life and the advantages of this were clear. We found we did not have to be driven in order to trace the submerged codes of small group life, we did not have to immerse our persons, lose ourselves, in the mission. By assuming a shared, mysterious, identity, we were now able to say the first thing that came into our heads, we were able to speak lightly, and then see what happened.

Writing Nihilist Communism was a means of accessing another way of thinking, it helped us create a divergent means for producing theory. We broke from the conventions of commitment to the subjective form, where allegiance is used as a lever upon a ready constructed platform of principles, where it is incumbent upon the recruit to become host to what is already established, his purpose to become the vessel for it all.

We were investigating the same issues as everyone else: subjectivity; non-receptivity; organisational failure; the reproduction of commodity forms within the anti-commodity project etc. However, it was no longer important to us to achieve the right conclusions or affirm the established principles. We were content to work within a frame that worked for us – we did not demand agreement with our findings, but we did require a realistic and honest evaluation of both our project and other contemporary and historical interventions.

At every point we had to stop and ask ourselves, “What is the basis for proceeding? What justifies our going on?” Our investigations hit deadends at every turn, we were unable to theorise a positive, voluntarist, organisational, historicist way out from capital. Our opposition to the present state of things and our commitment to communism remained intact but in the process of our investigations we abandoned any remaining illusions about generating a social movement capable of deliberately changing the world from within the capitalist productive relation. Our challenge to the milieu was to adopt a collective disillusionment, and then to move on from there.

The interventions of Monsieur Dupont, clown, diarist, essayist, correspondent, had the result of releasing what had become an unbearable tension in our lives. He settled matters, closed doors, and helped us to move on. I freely admit that much of what I personally wrote in Nihilist Communism I now find crass and I wish I could erase it. But, luckily, this was a shared project and thus my personal reservations are held back by my co-author’s interest. The collective aspect of the book is significant, it fixes in place that which I might otherwise prefer to change; whilst collective identity contributes to the repetitions, it also constructs a set of permissions and boundaries which contrast sharply with those that we would have set working individually.

We wrote for each other, to not offend the other, and thus set out positions which as individuals we might not wholly agree with, or even would not have thought of. Collective writing produces a feedback loop of exaggeration in which the outside world, represented by the other, fails to correct but on the contrary encourages further exploration along the same path.

The texts included here were written in a rising spiral of excitement and as such we abandoned all claims to research. We relied instead on our intuitive reactions and our capacity to paste in patches and improvisations. All caution was abandoned in pursuit of something that we felt was radically different to anything written before. And we did feel that we had uncovered something, a form of critique, a perspective, a set of concepts that, although common in other areas of society, had never been coherently presented within the pro-revolutionary milieu before.

The measure of what we have contributed

I am now so familiar with the core concepts that we first set out in the texts that make up Nihilist Communism, and which have since become the parameters of my research, that I no longer find these early texts particularly profound. But as I continue to encounter the same category errors within the milieu today, errors concerning agency and subjectivity, which we focused our critique on in the past, it would seem the ideas expressed within this book retain their radical edge.

The texts collected here now seem to be quite primitive, but there are other more dominant positions within the milieu that are more primitive still. I accept that it is possible, and some have said this to me, that Nihilist Communism does not say anything new, or profound or anything that everybody has not already been thinking. And yet, if others have been thinking the same, if our work contains nothing but commonplaces and the bleeding obvious, it remains a fact that nobody else prior to the publication of Nihilist Communism put such thoughts and feelings to paper. In the end the relevance of this material is for others to decide; interpretations will produce counter-interpretations and evaluations will cause re-evaluations – again, with this edition Nihilist Communism must do its own work, stand by itself. I am an inattentive parent, which is perhaps just as well because I am as aware as anyone that significance is prone to cycles of reversal and rereversal, critique is even more susceptible to bubbles of certainty than the banking system.

Nihilist Communism is not a book much quoted, there are not pages and pages of google references, but perhaps it has had some influence. Certainly, it was of its time and contributed to a shift in the terrain around 2003/4 when the critique of the fetish of activism really took off. We found our texts re-posted on several insurrectionist anarchist and communist sites, which inspired me to attempt engagement with the groups involved – with varying results. If I were to pinpoint our contribution to the milieu I would say it lay in our focusing on the nature of milieu character traits, group dynamics, the nature of revolutionary subjectivity, the relation between ideas and events, the relation between groups and the proletariat, and how external forces impact at different scales.

It is also worth recording, that as one ages, external triggers to personal involvement are set at a higher and higher threshold; where as youths we were happy to submit to a pre-existing group hierarchy and undertake the mundane and unrewarding tasks of organising, now we are only interested in participation where the specific richness of our experience would really make a difference; in all other circumstances the meagreness of the rewards means it is not worth it for us. We are in a position now where the mountain really must move in our direction – I think this is true of much of the proletariat too. The fact that the productive relation is not ostensibly at stake within the class struggle is the major cause of non-involvement. As soon as the question of ownership moves to centre stage the situation will quickly change. Let he who has ears hear!

Our efforts at reclassification were improvisatory and conducted within the received terms of the milieu at the level of statements made therein. We related such statements to observable external and internal relations and judged them accordingly. We had no prior knowledge of the academic specialisations that address matters of classification, but I have since found confirmation of our intuitive method with other bodies of knowledge derived from, for example cybernetics, systems theory, evolutionary biology, and radical constructivist epistemology.

Specifically, the problem as we saw it was that the relation between economic forces and resultant events on the one side, and revolutionary groups on the other, was simply accepted as given by the groups themselves. In examining the statements of these groups concerning this relation made over a long history and setting them alongside our personal intuitive shift towards disbelief, we began to question the true basis of this presumed relation and to speculate on the hidden motives it was based upon.

Our purpose was to re-categorise subjective elements as well as release the moral tensions and theoretical obligations that dominated groups. We hoped to provoke a more realistic and lived relation between consciousness and capacity to enforce change. In this project, which we discovered and made up as we went along, we were to some degree successful and found a degree of resonance with others. In particular, our distancing neologisms pro-revolutionary and leaderless leninism have had a wider circulation than we might have previously expected (see Appendix: Seminar 4).

Our contribution to the critique of anti-activism was not a mere endorsement of the wider Class Struggle rejection of summit protests. We saw the post-2003 return to membership organisations, platforms of principles, organisational positions, celebrations of proletarian culture, and so on as a further retreat from dealing with the real problems of the milieu, namely its excess of consciousness in relation to its deficit of effectiveness.

All this seems to situate Monsieur Dupont and the book Nihilist Communism simply within the conventions of a milieu that is defined by its political consciousness but this would be to give a false impression.

An important strand in our critique was the very existence of a separate sphere of so-called political questions. We were as much engaged with avant-garde activities as politics. As communists we saw what might be called aesthetics, i.e. the relation of human beings to the production of meaning and significance, to be of much greater importance than questions of political economy. The second half of Nihilist Communism therefore tales the form of a critique of cultural production and cultural identity – the influence here of the Situationists and Surrealists is clear.

I have stated above that I retain the framework set out by Nihilist Communism in my ongoing investigations. This is true to a large degree but one aspect that occurs to me which I have since abandoned was our attempt to represent the ruling class as an intelligence-based subject position. I think it is fair to say that I no longer use this method. I prefer to think in terms of the integrated totality of the capitalist relation functioning automatically and to which capitalists, states, institutions, organizations, all respond as if to a pre-established environment. Previously, it seemed important to stress the hostility of capital to life, now it seems more important to emphasise the inextricable nature of the productive system. However, this does not indicate a major theoretical shift but is simply a matter of deploying a different investigative framework for exploring different objects of interest.

Finally, a short note on the mutual denunciations within the milieu that arose after 2003 concerning primitivism and leftism. We would certainly not define ourselves as workerist or progressivist. Our critique of capitalism, our understanding of commodity production, was based on an assumption that dead labour in the form of the commodity dominates present lived existence and that social relations are expressed directly in the productive technology of the time. If we are against capitalism then we are against the form capitalism takes in our lives, i.e. the specific structurings by dead labour of our lived existence.

Whilst we would never define ourselves as primitivists, or consider ourselves as having anything in common with the tedious ideology of primitivism, we always appreciate the most radical formulations of the critique of alienation, i.e. the critique of machines. It is also the case that on a personal level we feel an awe-struck appreciation for earlier forms/techniques of relations with the natural world – thus it is plain that we do not subscribe to the ideal of social liberation via increased automation.

We do not wish for the world to go back but neither do we wish it to carry on forward. Our ambivalence on the question of technological development, and the relations bound up in machines, means we cannot support the self-management of production by the working class as a political aim and we fundamentally reject the implication that self-management is synonymous with communism. By implication this sets us beyond the pale of historicism; we remain convinced that communism has been possible during every period in history.

On Crisis

The struggle of the body for rest is not the revolution, it is merely the crisis of capital. A crisis because it brings the massed, accumulated, fossilised acts of the past and the sedimenting/accumulating dead acts of the present, along with the possible conditions for the future, together in collision and in this standstill all value ceases to be enforced, leaving the world in a kind of zero hour/zero place where everything is contestable (when the traffic stopped last September during the Fuel Protests, a man on a bicycle passed me and said, ‘I can hear the birds singing’ - we have heard what economic collapse sounds like). When industry stops everything in society, otherwise absolutely determined by it, floats free from its gravity. In this particular crisis of capital all hell breaks loose; then comes the time for organisation, you can call that consciousness if you want. We don’t care.

We variously represented the crisis of capitalism in Nihilist Communism sometimes as being pushed by incompatible interests of the class struggle and sometimes as an internal failing of the mechanics of the capitalist system itself. At the time of writing the book, an unintended economic crisis did not seem very likely. However, in March 2009, unprecedented disruptions have objectively occurred within the productive system – recent images of Singapore harbour clogged with rusting container ships indicates a veritable blockage. And in particular, news of the downturn within Chinese manufacturing, the flux-like proletarianisation/de-proletarianisation of millions of people returning to peasant existence from the Shenzhen province seems to be of radical importance. It seems likely to me that the cycles of the conflict in Shenzhen will be decisive for how the crisis will turn out in the rest of the world.

Our argument regarding economic crisis was simple: as the breakdown of the set of relations built into capitalism progressed so this would set free different forces within human society – how these forces will shape society is entirely unpredictable but communist ideas have more of a chance in such circumstances than in stable times.

Anyone can write a book

On editing the material here it was pointed out to me that certain texts seemed to be included in some versions but were absent in others. We were presented with the problem of editing. We had to ask ourselves a set of questions. Would a rewrite be a reasonable approach? Should the text be re-presented entirely as it was? Should parts of it be retained at all? If we re-wrote, should we adopt the style we used then, and write as if we were still living then? Or should we interpose current theoretical adjustments and concerns? As it is, we have done all of these things and done them more or less randomly. This edition of Nihilist Communism is a patchwork of archaeological artefact and rewrites, of found object and editorial intervention, of rigourous focus and offhanded laxity; there are sections of clarity set alongside others of obscurity (in places I have no idea what we were alluding to); there is good writing and there is bad. As a book of fragments, a book because it weighs five ounces, it retains the spirit of the Monsieur Dupont project

See, we have written a book! I thank Leona for editing this, and Ardent Press for republication. I dedicate this edition’s half inch of spine space, with respect and love, to the other Monsieur Dupont.

Frere Dupont

March 2009

Preamble

This is the definition of class hatred

Death appears as the harsh victory of the law of our ancestors over the dimension of our becoming. It is a fact that, as productivity increases, each succeeding generation becomes smaller. The defeat of our fathers is revisited upon us as the limits of our world. Yes, structure is human, it is the monumentalisation of congealed sweat, sweat squeezed from old exploitation and represented as nature, the world we inhabit, the objective ground. We do not, in our busy insect-like comings and goings, make the immediate world in which we live, we do not make a contribution, on the contrary we are set in motion by it; a generation will pass before what we have done as an exploited class will seep through as an effect of objectivity. (Our wealth is laid down in heaven.) The structure of the world was built by the dead, they were paid in wages, and when the wages were spent and they were dead in the ground, what they had made continued to exist, these cities, roads and factories are their calcified bones.

They had nothing but their wages to show for what they had done and after their deaths what they did and who they were has been cancelled out. But what they made has continued into our present, their burial and decay is our present.

This is the definition of class hatred. We are no closer now to rest, to freedom, to communism than they were, their sacrifice has bought us nothing, what they did counted for nothing, we have inherited nothing, we work as they worked, we make as they made, we are paid as they were paid. We do not possess either our acts or the world that conditions us, just as they owned nothing of their lives.

Yes they produced value, they made the world in which we now live. The world that now weighs down upon us is constructed from the wealth they made, wealth that was taken from them as soon as they were paid their wage, taken and owned by someone else, owned and used to define the nature of ownership and the class domination that preserves it.

We too must work, and the value we produce leaks away from us, from each only a trickle but in all a sea of it and that, for the next generation, will thicken into wealth for others to own and as a congealed structure it will be used as a vantage point for the bourgeoisie to direct new enterprises in new and different directions but demanding always the same work.

The class war begins in the desecration of our ancestors: millions of people going to their graves as failures, forever denied the experience of a full human existence, their being was simply cancelled out. The violence of the bourgeoisie’s appropriation of the world of work becomes the structure that dominates our existence. As our parents die, we can say truly that their lives were for nothing, that the black earth that is thrown down onto them blacks out our sky.

Introduction

There has been an increasing tendency within the pro-revolutionary milieu towards theoretical error since the 1960’s. It is our intention to hammer in to the milieu some theoretical nails to halt this slide. To this end we have produced two essays in the hope that the trend may be reversed. The first essay deals with the decline of revolutionary perspective into political activism. It is our intent to strongly delineate the limits we have observed in practical activity, revolutionary ambition, the make-up of the revolutionary subject and the role of the pro-revolutionary minority. The second essay deals with the manufacture of pseudo-subjectivities and how they have been contained within capitalism as elements of its own self-organisation and maintenance (spectacular forms, as the Situationists would say), it also considers the alleged role of consumerism and the consequences of prioritising anti-capitalist struggle in commercial and financial spheres.

Above all it is our intent to restate the character of the real struggle against capital. Capitalism is not an idea and it cannot be opposed by ideas or by ideas-driven action. There is no debate to be had with it, it has no ideas of its own except to say that all ideas are its own, it has no ideas intrinsic to itself.

Capitalism is, at its most basic level, a social relation of force. Capitalist society is made up of conflicting forces and it is only at this level that it can be undone, firstly in the collapse of its own forces and then in the revolutionary intervention of the proletariat. If capitalism is to collapse then it will do so at the level of the relation of economic forces, all of which (for the moment at least), and including the proletariat, can be said to be capitalist forces. It is during the collapse that revolutionary ideas begin to take hold.

Nihilist communism: some basic elaborations

This is the fable of the thirsty crow

Long ago in a southern country there lived a crow of determined character. One hot summer’s day this crow was flying over the baking land of that country and felt the fire of thirst in its throat. It had flown this way many times before and knew of a river nearby where it could safely drink. But when it landed beside the river it found not even a trickle of water for its need, the river had not flowed there for many weeks.

The land about was so hot and dry, nobody could hope to find even a drop of water there, but the thirsty aow had to drink or it would die from the heat of the day. It hopped desperately about the river bank in search of water, if only it could find just one drop, one drop in that terrible desert, one drop to keep it alive.

The thirsty crow was about to give up its search when it saw with its black eye a stone jar set on a wall beneath an olive tree. At once the aow flew to the lowest branch of the tree so it could look down into the jar, and with excitement it found that the jar did indeed hold some water.

Quickly the bird hopped onto the wall and thrust its head into the stone jar but, alas, the water was too shallow and the jar too deep, the water was just out of reach.

Luckily the thirsty crow was an intellectual, it knew that if it knocked the jar over, the water would soon be absorbed into the dusty earth. So it became the crafty crow and performed an old trick known since the beginning of the world by all the aafty, thirsty crows. In its beak it carried small pebbles from the ground to the jar. By dropping the pebbles into the jar it would make the level of the water rise and when the water had risen high enough the crow would be able to drink. The industrious aow dropped one, two, several stones into the water, again it tried to drink from the jar but still its beak did not reach the water. So, it brought more stones, many more stones, each of them was patiently carried in the thirsty crow’s beak and dropped hopefully into the jar. The crow was at a loss. It had no explanation. The water did not increase, the trick of the pebbles did not work. Was it not well known that the stones always made the water rise? In accordance with this law it had brought stones. Had the law been suspended? If not then why had the water not risen? The silly crow could make no sense of it. Crows may be crafty, industrious, credulous and even thirsty but they know only one trick on hot, waterless, sun-blistering days. So the stubborn crow brought more stones. Many more stones. In fact, so many stones that soon the jar was overflowing with stones and they began building up beside it but never did one drop of water rise up to meet that dry and eager beak.

Angry and despairing, the thirsty crow looked ever further afield for more stones to pile around the jar, it was determined not to give in. Soon its desire for water was forgotten, it cared for nothing but the bringing of stones to that jar. In this way the wall beneath the olive tree grew taller.

It is not certain if this unfortunate crow died of thirst, or if it is how religion first began.

Introducing Monsieur Dupont

We are two communists who, for several years, have been engaging with the anarchist and communist milieu in Britain.

Monsieur Dupont is the name we have decided to use for our joint theoretical activity.

This book is a composite of texts that attempt to outline our discontent with the concept of consciousness and in particular the way this concept is generally used by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries. It follows that these texts are also a critique of the roles that ‘revolutionary experts’ and activists have given themselves.

Unsurprisingly our criticisms of the gestures made by pro-revolutionary activists (those who are, like us, for communist revolution) and the assumptions on which they have been based have caused us to become completely isolated in regard to that milieu. For undermining the practice and status of political activism we have been vilified for being ridiculous and slanderous and insincere; indeed this name-calling has spread like village gossip, and no contemplation of our ideas is possible without the unintelligent repetition of the exact wording of this judgement on our moral lapse and our outsider status before any consideration of our actual ideas is begun. It is enough to say that there have been sporadic attempts to have us ‘expelled’, shut up, and calls for others not to read our wicked ideas. These disparate communist tendencies (they rarely agree with each other) are at least united in their opposition to our critique of all of them!

Most of what appears below was developed in discussions with the Anarchist Federation (of the UK) and later posted to an international internet discussion list of communists; both groups adopted an attitude of hostility towards us; there may be the occasional reference to these groups in the texts.

It is likely that that there are small contradictions in our text, this is because our ideas are not fixed but float about within a set frame; we have encountered people who have expressed their hatred of us by trawling our texts in the hope of ‘exposing’ us, we do not think this is useful, we are, however, happy to attempt to clarify anything that seems self-contradictory in correspondence, but equally, we hope that our correspondents will put some effort in themselves and think beyond whatever problems they find.

We see ideas as a process and make no claims for the status of our writing other than it being a ‘work in progress’.

Finally, although we have a postal address in Cambridge, UK, we have nothing to do with the academia there, or the dreadful bohemians who grow like fungi outside its hallowed halls.

We start, as we end, in simplicity

The closest that the world has ever been to communism (it probably wasn’t that close) was at the end of the First World War; lere has never been a time before or since when the world was о open to the possible. But what are we to make of the nscrutable events of this near miss? How applicable are those acts now? And what of the context? What value should we place in our pro-revolutionary theory on the part played by objective conditions, that is, the conditions not created by revolutionaries? Or put another way, how much of what happens in revolutions is not designed or led by revolutionaries?

Many pro-revolutionaries argue that there can be no revolutionary attempt without the significant input of a revolutionary consciousness, but we are not so sure. In fact we are so unsure hat we cannot grasp the precise meaning that they project onto he terms ‘revolutionary consciousness’ and ‘working class consciousness’. We are also unsure whether these pro-evolutionaries really have a grip on the concepts they perceive to bе indispensable. We try to keep an open mind about the events hat will make up the revolution but we fail to see a revolutionary role for any form of political consciousness, revolutionary or otherwise. Quite the contrary, when we consider past “evolutionary attempts and pro-revolutionary organisation and their political interventions we see in the function of consciousness only an inhibiting influence.

In our opinion a great number of pro-revolutionaries hold onto the ‘consciousness’ model as part of the habit of being a pro-revolutionary, it is woven into their being: they must sell their paper, perform actions that are designed to inspire others, and defend the integrity of their group. However, we also think that most of them (and this also includes most of those who do not belong to an official group, and who don’t produce a regular paper) do not have a properly formed conception of what working class consciousness really is, or a working knowledge of how it is to be transmitted to those who do not have it.

Some formulations of consciousness by pro-revolutionaries are extremely naive, one recently informed us that it was ‘being awake’, we chose to consider and investigate this statement seriously even though it was intended as a piece of malicious flippancy. (To illustrate the tendency to move towards absurdity in the pro-revolutionary milieu, we were then condemned by one of his colleagues for formulating revolutionary consciousness as merely ‘being awake’). As a consequence of all this confusion we intend to formulate our critique of the communist objective of consciousness as slowly as we can, without, of course, abandoning the graphic and passionate qualities of our prose that so many people have told us they really enjoy...

We think revolutionary expertise, which bases itself in organisational certainty and theoretical rigidity, measures only pro-revolutionary fabrication, it has but one relation to actual social conditions, which is that it is wholly unable to escape its determinations. Predictions for the future that are hypothesised out of past happenings mistake the very nature of revolution, which we all agree is an event that is precisely not conditioned by the past and is characterised as a complete transformation of human existence out of the economic mode. If we cannot recognise the future in the present then we cannot decide which pro-revolutionary activity or value of the present should be promoted or carried through to the future. It is our contention that most pro-revolutionary activity extends existing conditions and acts to prevent the future. We think many pro-revolutionaries rather enjoy the antagonism of capitalist society and the part they play by supporting a ‘side’.

We cannot say for certain what is to be done. What we do know is that the past appears, in one form or another, in the present, before our eyes, and from this appearance of dead forms we can identify what we think is counter-revolutionary. For example we see that consciousness is a concept that has been consistently deployed in past revolutionary attempts and because those attempts all failed the concept of consciousness and its role must be questioned. Our critique of consciousness begins with our understanding of the failure of revolutions: we see that consciousness, as an organising principle, has always been deployed by a certain section of the bourgeoisie which seeks to use working class muscle to gain political power for itself.

As an alternative to the consciousness, which is, of course, also a ‘recruiting’ model, we argue that once factories have been seized by workers and capitalist production halted then through the resulting crack opened up in the structure of capitalist society humanity may find it possible to assert itself for itself. We therefore see revolution in two stages: (1) the seizure of production by the working class pursuing its self-interest; (2) the collapse of existing forms of power brought on by the contradiction of working class ownership. The collapse of established power will bring a new material base of human society into existence, drawing from this base the mass of humanity will have the opportunity to remake itself.

How the working class goes about the first stage of the revolution we can only guess at, but we can surmise that things will follow similar patterns (positive and negative) to events that have happened before, and those who have studied such things (pro-revolutionaries) will bring their ideas (for good or ill — but it will happen, as we can see in history) to the frontline of communist activity during such times.

It may appear to some readers that our consideration of the question of consciousness becomes a little obscure in places, a complete refutation of the concept is quite complex, but it should always be kept in mind that we are concerned with the second most basic activity of pro-revolutionaries: the communication of ideas and the explanation of actions taken. It may also seem that we are only concerned with old left formations and theories, and that anti-capitalism as it has recently appeared already outflanks us by its very modernity. It is true that this text does not attempt to engage anti-capitalism in the modality of its own language but our project was begun as an explicit critique of present day anti-capitalism, and has been continued as a critique with its left-communist supporters. At all times in our critique, when we refer to the concept of consciousness we are in fact addressing the actions of pro-revolutionaries on consciousness: we could equally use the words ‘organisation’ or propaganda’, the meaning of the deployment of which is a conjecture concerning the profound effect on directionless bodies made by the application of externally organised catalysts. What we have in our sights are the underlying motivations and assumptions of pro-revolutionary activists.

Basic statement

The working class, as the revolutionary body, do not require consciousness but a peculiar alignment of events, and a series of causes and effects which produces a specific economic crisis that ends up with workers holding the levers of production.

The revolution is in two stages. The first is this naked, non-conscious holding of productive power by the working class (that is to say, of course, it is conscious and some consequences are foreseen, there is a clearness of perception and a definite awareness of relative forces but there is no alignment with the archetypal codes of political consciousness: liberty, equality, fraternity”). We see that the working class arrive at this first level of revolution by force of circumstance. In defending their own interest in an increasingly unpredictable world, and with capitalists bailing out, they end up, almost by chance, in charge of the productive economy. We say that their brief period of ownership will occur by chance because it will not have been actively, or consciously pursued — the proletariat will have consistently asserted its own interest and this steady course, when taken with general economic breakdown, will be enough to cause a proletarian dictatorship.

A new material base will begin to come into existence at this point, and all human activity will be determined by, and be reflective of these different conditions. The second stage of revolution is made by the vast mass of humanity realising what the essential proletariat have achieved and then escaping through the hole created by events. The second phase is about becoming human and throwing off the economic model entirely, during this period the working class will cease to exist, as will all social categorisations, and humanity will organise both itself and its relationship to the material base by itself and for itself.

On the role of consciousness, of course, there is reflection and understanding of what is happening but it is not consciousness in the Marxist/Hegelian sense, which we characterise as the coordination of pre-set values among a great many people as a preliminary stage for engaging with the world. Therefore it is possible that a world-wide consciousness could come into existence because of revolution because consciousness is not a precondition of revolutionary action but a consequence of revolution accomplished.

On consciousness

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. — 1984

Many pro-revolutionaries argue that revolution cannot happen without a revolutionary will propelling the revolutionary body forward. For them the revolutionary body must be conscious of its goal and of the connection between its actions and the goal, it must be aware of the consequences of what it is doing when it is engaging in revolutionary activity. For many pro-revolutionaries this means the revolutionary body must consciously embody both explicit revolutionary and post-revolutionary values. The question of consciousness is therefore absolutely central to the revolutionary project and to pro-revolutionary practice. But certain problems become apparent when consideration is paid to the specific formulations of consciousness and the means of its arrival or manifestation in the revolutionary body. The first of these is the relative but objective separation of pro-revolutionaries from the revolutionary body, there seems little in common between the political values of the pro-revolutionaries and the economic struggles of the revolutionary body. This separation is most clearly stated in class terms: all too few pro-revolutionaries are proletarians, this immediate distance calls for solutions to the problem of how to reach out to the workers, what language to use, which short terms goals may be pursued without compromising the revolutionary project, which revolutionary values are appropriate for expression in this situation, and so on. Most crucially there is the problem of reproducing class relations within the revolutionary movement: middle class intellectuals as leaders and workers as, well, workers. From our experience of the current pro-revolutionary milieu, we have found no serious theoretical address of this problem. Most pro-revolutionaries have no clear-cut definitions of what revolutionary consciousness is, or how it is to be transmitted by pro-revolutionaries to the revolutionary body without the contamination of class domination. We have found that pro-revolutionaries are simply not prepared to discuss why ft is that revolutionary consciousness has been steadily leaking out of the proletariat since 1945, and why after fifty years of pro-revolutionaries ‘speaking the workers language’ this drift has not been reversed. They have been busily dropping pebbles in the jar but the level of the water has not risen. Why has the pro-revolutionary movement had no success in conveying its message? Why has the working class not listened to its educators?

Consciousness is a political category. A world-wide or even national conscious proletarian identity would involve a high degree of organisation, which is another word for consciousness. There is no objectively existing, separate sphere of revolutionary consciousness and certainly none that is owned by a particular section of humanity; the working class especially do not own consciousness, they do not own anything (except their playstations). So, if revolutionary consciousness does not exist objectively, that is, as an immediate determination of the material base, then organisations must bring it into the world. Organisation carries consciousness into the world; as consciousness is not present ‘naturally’ it must be transmitted by an organising agency, but which organisation?

It is the pro-revolutionaries themselves who contribute consciousness to the revolution, but unless we understand pro-revolutionaries as being an objective expression of the negation of capitalist society then we are bound to see both their antagonism to all aspects of the existing order (and not just to some political issues) and their role of transmitting to the working class values that transcend existing conditions, as being more than a little subjective and therefore fallible. Most pro-revolutionary groups view themselves as being objectively constituted by the need of society to overthrow capital and therefore they see themselves as qualified to prescribe values and strategies to the proletariat. We completely refute this assumption; all pro-revolutionary groups are subjective bodies, created by the subjective will of their participants, their perspective therefore never escapes their subjectivity (if this were not so, then there would not be many small pro-revolutionary groups competing against each other, but only one organisation. Of course, most pro-consciousness organisations have a tendency to see themselves as the one true faith, and on this basis launch their critiques of each other). Pro-revolutionary groups are not the historic party, they have not been thrown up by the economic bаsе, they are not an inescapable result of capitalism’s contradictions. In most cases pro-revolutionary groups are created in response to purely political events and have little connection to workers’ struggles. Those who argue for the transmission of revolutionary consciousness to the working class by pro-revolutionaries see their role, effectively, as one of leadership. It is interesting for us to observe how those who argue for the ‘transmission of consciousness’ model do not practically escape from the confines of their milieu and do not reach the working class, they seem content to exhort each other to be more realistic, speak in a language the workers will understand, etc etc. But nothing ever happens, if these activists were any good then they would surely be locally recruiting five or more new adherents every week. The fact that the message is not getting through is, for us, the final critique of the concept of ‘messages’. To set in advance what ideological requirements are to be met by the proletariat, despite all experience of the failure of this method, is putting the cart before the horse and is a good example of impatience, this is as true for ‘councilists’ as it is for vanguardists.

Because pro-revolutionaries have not learned how to wait, have not learned to engage at the level of their experience — they are always wanting to lead the way, wishing to push forward their hot-brained solutions — they are forever looking back and wondering why nobody is following them. Theories of consciousness and organisation are always attempts to impose past reflective forms onto living struggles — consciousness in these schemes becomes a stage, a precondition for the revolution. These pro-conscious/pro-revolutionaries think that no matter how intense a specific struggle might be, if it is not explicitly political then it is lacking in essence and therefore not wholly real — to the struggle they bring always the political dimension but never consider how the political dimension may, in reality, be lagging behind the economic struggle.

A qualification

Echanges et Mouvement, from their tentative Basic Principles:

“In capitalist society the true contradiction is not one of ideas — revolutionary, reformist, conservative reactionary, etc. — but one of interests. No kind of will or desire can overthrow commodity production or abolish the wage system. This will only break down as a result of class struggle arising from the very position of the working class in the system of capitalist production. According to a widespread opinion “class consciousness” and “unity” are seen to be the main and necessary conditions for what is considered as “revolutionary behaviour” or as “working class action”. This view overlooks or misinterprets how action and consciousness are influencing each other. Workers don’t act as a “revolutionary class” because first of all they are or become “conscious” of what they want. “Unity” is not a precondition for, but is created in, and as a result of, struggle. Workers are a “revolutionary class” because their position as a class inside the capitalist system makes it inevitable that the mere defence of their own interests brings them into direct opposition to the fundamentals of the existing order. Such struggles are fought continuously in the factories and elsewhere, and potentially they are revolutionary. The development of class struggle with all its changing forms is therefore far more important than the development of the so-called “revolutionary movement”, regardless of the meaning given to this word. The break with any form of exploitation or political practice and thought (reformism, etc.) is not a matter of theoretical discussion and conceptions but a matter of class struggle and workers’ practice, a practice which is the result of their daily conditions of exploitation.”

The text continues elsewhere:

“The bulletin [Echanges] was started as a means of spreading and receiving information. Those participating in this project decided not to bother with the clarification of standpoints held in common (which usually accompanies the birth of a new group) but to accept the existing tacit agreement. The basic implicit agreement which underlay the content and form of the information published was still badly defined at the start, but as the project developed, it revealed a sufficiently unified approach among participants even if participants were very diverse as explained above. This tacit agreement expressed itself in the analysis of various phenomena of the class struggle taking place every day and placed in the context of a more general understanding of the world. These phenomena include what many other people think to be individual forms of protest which are in fact part of a collective movement ( e.g. absenteeism, turnover, refusal of work, etc.) This is necessarily linked to the critique of the existing theories of modern society. To do this, we must have information about these conflicts and theories. If inside Echanges we sometimes draw different conclusions from a specific fact or from a set of facts, we still think that the information which describes these facts should have certain qualities. Here too, a few simple principles guide our way of selecting the information published in the bulletin... “The raison d’etre of the bulletin is directly determined by the double inadequacy of the official means of information: lack of information on class conflicts, exaggeration of the importance of political and economic information (two ways of masking realfty). “Hence the double task of looking for information concerning the experience of struggle of all sorts and of making a meaningful choice from the mass of political, diplomatic and economical news. ... “Class struggle exists and develops independently of these “revolutionary groups” or “movements”. The level and size of the so-called “intervention of revolutionary groups in the struggles” never determine or fundamentally influence the level and size of working class struggle. We may be individually involved in such struggles either because we belong to the collectivity involved in a particular struggle or because we participate in one or another of the host of temporary organisms created during a particular struggle and for that struggle alone. We consider that outside these struggles the exchange of information, discussions and the seeking of theoretical insights are an essential instrument of our own activity which eventually might serve others as well.”

Despite their brilliant, simple and clear wariness of “consciousness” a problem remains with the approach of Echanges. This is that they are too, as it were, polite, and they seem hesitant about the possible concrete role of left and pro-revolutionary individuals and groups in moments of intense class struggle (and even revolution). In their introductory text and elsewhere Echanges appear coy about what they are doing themselves and what practical effect they might have. It is clear that their journals are only read by those who might understand them, that is, a thin scattering of radicals across various countries. Their journals are read by people who are like themselves, and not by the working class in general or even by the workers involved in the struggles that Echanges report and analyse. Echanges are absolutely right about how the working class might become revolutionary, but they seem to fail to acknowledge the role that their readership and themselves (those who might understand what they are talking about) could have in present class struggles and future ones.

Because their modesty forbids them to give this scattering of radicals, themselves included, any real importance in the development of events they fail to see, or explain, just what it is they are doing, or think they are doing. Of course, they are right to understand that they have no (or extremely little) effect on class struggle in the present time, but their modesty seems to have led them to deny the role they have now and might have in future.

What we have to understand is that the effect that we might have on left radicals (that is, the only people who are able to listen to us) is very important because, whether we like it or not, many of these individuals will come to the fore in times of revolutionary upheaval. This will be due to their prolonged interest in “changing the world”, their knowledge of what might happen in certain situations and their general silver-tongue-edness. Thus it is most important and a matter of constant urgency that we engage this disparate group in dialogue in order to get as many of them as possible to ditch their leftist/liberalist/statist/managerial, etc, convictions and take on communist positions. This process of development must be done by engaging people both on paper, in journals, and at discussion meetings, and also in areas of practical struggles. [It goes without saying that we can also engage, as a separate activity from “political” work, with our fellow workers in struggles at our workplaces, in the knowledge that we may also be listened to in these situations, where rather than trying to install “consciousness” we will provide, or suggest, concrete tactics and strategies.]

Echanges say that their “activity... eventually might serve others as well”, but they do not explore what this means in any real depth. One reason why Echanges do not seem to explore this aspect of their activity might be because the truth of what they must do, by their own logic, is to actually go against most of the “revolutionary” communist and anarchist milieu. The difference between Echanges and the rest of the communist milieu is over the concept of “consciousness”, which Echanges almost completely reject. To take the logic of their position into the arena of the communist milieu, as an explicit argument, creates the risk of being totally rejected by that milieu. To examine the concept of consciousness in any depth leads to the equating of that concept, with leadership and organisation of the working class by “revolutionary experts”. To go down this theoretical road leads to the realisation that in an important aspect there is little real difference between the projects of anarchism and most of communism and their supposedly deadly enemy, Leninism. If one is going to make this conclusion then one is going to lose most of ones “friends” in the political milieu. Echanges seem to have tried to avoid this, and, indeed, because of this they have had some limited continuing respect amongst the communist milieu down the years. [Monsieur Dupont have no wish to be so circumspect.]

“Working class consciousness”?

1) The reason MD advocate the possibility of revolution via the intervention of a relatively, numerically, small section of the proletariat is very simple, we see that only a relatively small section (a vast minority) of the proletariat have potential power over the process of capitalist production.

The acts of most people do not effect the world but function at a level of wholly contained effects of the world’s turning. In contrast the proletariat’s anti-act, the act of non-production or of ceasing work, instantly has effect (like in a dream) on capitalism as a whole (in the past few months, lorry drivers, postmen, tube workers and now railway guards have stopped sectors of the British economy). Most workers are now employed in sectors that are peripheral to the economy’s well-being, if they take industrial action it causes inconvenience only to the immediate employer and perhaps a few companies up and down the supply chain. In contrast the essential proletariat is that group of workers who can halt vast areas of the economy by stopping their work.

These workers are employed in the economy’s core industries, industries that can only operate with a relatively high level of labour input into their processes, which gives to those workers an already existing control over process; core workers’ latent power can be demonstrated immediately in industrial action which spreads its knock-on effect to all businesses in the locality and beyond, producing spiralling repercussions in society. Core-workers include factory workers, dustmen, power workers, distribution workers (post, rail, road haulage, ferries, dockers, etc); in all of these examples the cessation of work causes immediate and widespread problems for the economy, and this is why it is precisely in these industries that wildcat action is most frequent, quite simply, industrial action in these industries has a history of success.

Our certainty concerning the revolutionary potential of the essential proletariat is not at all founded upon a presumption of the superiority of life lived as a proletarian, or that working class existence is an end itself that should be pursued by pro-revolutionaries. We do not see the modes of working class organisation as an indicator of a possible, post-revolutionary future, nor as an inherently preferable, that is, more morally pure, existence in the present, as compared with middle class life. We say this because these are the pretended presumptions of many inverted snobs in the ‘class struggle’ movement, they tick off proletarian characteristics like naturalists identifying a separate species. We do not pointedly prefer football to opera, we do not think it is better, more pure, more human to be poor than to be rich. We do not think it is inevitable that human kindness is more likely to be encountered in working class individuals than in middle class individuals. We do not think working class people are better than anybody else because they have been defined as belonging to one or other social category. We are not interested in working class culture. We do not accept that you can be working class if you are not employed as a worker no matter what your family history (this is not intended as an insult or slight on people’s sense of themselves and where they come from, but we are bored with university lecturers who use ‘life was hard back then’ as a means of asserting their authority). Quite simply, we see the working class as being an economic function organised as part of capitalism and not an ethnic identity, if you are no longer employed as an industrial worker then you are not an industrial worker. The same goes for industrial workers when they are on holiday, off sick, in the pub, or indeed any time when they are not present on the actual production line, that is, any time they are not working or having an effect on their work (in official or unofficial industrial action, when they are preventing production).

We are not interested in theoretically expanding the working class to include all militant formations from blacks, gays, women, disabled to peasants; we are not interested in the working class becoming more human (that is, more political) by means of a raising up through consciousness. We do not celebrate the working class: working class life is rubbish, it is not a condition to be aspired to, and the past thirty years of pro-revolutionary fetishisation of the proletariat as a thing in itself (the legend has it that the leftist group Militant, used to force its activists to wear flat caps and donkey jackets on their paper sells so as to ‘fit in’) has mistaken and confused the actual power of the working class and reduced the proletariat to the status of just another oppressed minority. Finally we do not endorse the delinquency of the underclass or interpret it as rebelliousness, we see permanent delinquency as the psychological absorption of dehumanisation, no more than a v-sign offered by one who is standing in quicksand. Underclass delinquency fulfils the function ascribed to it by the state: it causes life, particularly that lived on the housing schemes, to be even more constrained than it is already by employment.

The working class is nothing but the collective position of those who are brought closest to the machinery of the capitalist system; a human function in the capitalist machine; the working class are the revolutionary body because of, and only because of, their position in the capitalist economy, they are the one social body that can close the system down.

From our experience we see the proletariat as being made up of many individuals, all different, and with just one thing shared by all of them — they have the same economic position, they all have the same functional status (labour) and all have the same economic value (wages). If general circumstances force you to work in an essential industry (and by essential we mean those industries that will make the continuation of capitalist society impossible by their absence) then you are a proletarian, this social status is not something to be fetishised, it’s just a fact The working class is merely a function of the capitalist economy. We are interested in the proletariat only to the measure that the proletariat literally has in its hands the levers of capitalism’s power. Only those who can be effective will be effective.

As for the left, everywhere we see unresurrectable and useless acts, which no matter the intention connect only with institutions that were formed ages ago: revolution has become, for too many, the smashing of mirrors — at the moment this is called anti-capitalism. There are no revolutionary means of connecting to society, there are no means of escaping absolute containment by institutional determinations, except in the locus of production; factory production is where society’s power originates and it is the only place where it can be directly engaged for certain; outside the factories all is spectacle, all is mirrors. Every non-productive social form is more or less unreal and engaging with them in political terms is always a move into falsity. How is an anti-capitalist protester going to change the world? Bу what means exactly? We have given our formula, yes it is simplistic, it is materialistic, mechanistic even, but even so, everything in the world is made, and power derives from the control of this making, if the making is stopped then the source of this power is interrupted, that is our formula. So now let us hear the plans of the anti-capitalists, what for them is the source of capitalist power, how is ownership maintained? How are the anti-capitalists to engage the power they have theorised, and how to overthrow it? If it is a good recipe then we shall use it, if however, it begins: first take several million assorted people over the world and get them all angry about the conditions of their life, and induce them to catch a plane to some foreign city to march down the main thoroughfare, perhaps breaking a few windows, then we say this is not a good recipe but the continuation of miragic democracy by means other than the vote.

The world will not be changed by millions of people voting for change, or demonstrating for change, because capitalist power is not constituted with reference to human feelings: political desires and demonstrations, which are the social forms consciousness takes, cannot touch capitalist domination but are merely determined by it. We have no place for consciousness in our scheme, we see no need for a generalised formulated desire for revolution. Revolution belongs to the mute body and its resistance to, and its giving out to, the imposition of work, what is needed in the revolutionary struggle is precedence given to the needs of the body (consumer culture is a contemporary echo of this). The slogans are not inspiring or romantic: more rest, more pay, less work, no deals on productivity. However, once this demand-regime is set in motion it cannot be side-tracked except by counterfeit political demands, or formulations of radical consciousness made by those who seek to lead it. Once the body tends toward rest, it cannot rid itself of that inclination unless it is roused again to work for some political vision. In short the struggle of industrial workers against capital will be conducted entirely in selfish terms, which in the end describes itself as the struggle against work in the interest of highly paid sleep. In the present nothing has significance but the desire to extend half-hour lunch breaks into hour lunch breaks. If all pro-revolutionaries grasp this they will stop worrying about the precondition of consciousness. It is within the political-economic figure of the imposition of work and its negation, which is comfort, that pro-revolutionaries could make a contribution to their workplace struggles. The struggle is against the maximisation of productivity and for the maximisation of rest, if workers could win their struggle in these terms then they will have broken up the basic mechanism of the capitalist system.

The struggle of the body for rest is not the revolution, it is merely the crisis of capital. A crisis because it brings the massed, accumulated, fossilised acts of the past and the sedimenting/accumulating dead acts of the present, along with the possible conditions for the future, together in collision and in this standstill all value ceases to be enforced, leaving the world in a kind of zero hour/2ero place where everything is contestable (when the traffic stopped last September during the Fuel Protests, a man on a bicycle passed me and said, ‘I can hear the birds singing’ — we have heard what economic collapse sounds like). When industry stops everything in society, otherwise absolutely determined by it, floats free from its gravity. In this particular crisis of capital all hell breaks loose; then comes the time for organisation, you can call that consciousness if you want. We don’t care.

2) The question of consciousness is central because of the ease by which it is defined and thus counterfeited. The proximity of consciousness to ideology is undeniable, a change in conditions renders a truth false. Because that is what we are talking about isn’t it? Truth and Falsity, consciousness and ideology?

Our position is simple: all consciousness is in fact, by a roundabout route, ideology. Consciousness is the appearance in thought of the forms and content of objective conditions. We know that objective conditions are capitalist and are anti-human, therefore it would be naive to place any faith in the transformative properties of consciousness if it fails so easily under the command of, and exploitation by, the owners of material conditions.

Everything that appears (even the struggle against capital) is mediated through infinite filters, nothing political has a direct relation to the base. The truths and values that pro-revolutionaries assert are equally subject to the distorting pressures of the economy as are Religions, entertainments and reformist politics (does not the ‘party’ or group have to be preserved as a thing in itself, kept going by small clerical acts and cash raised? The acts that uphold the group are not in themselves revolutionary and have no connection to the revolution, they are dead acts, they are labour; the group is maintained as the church is maintained: by accumulation). All pretensions to consciousness are determined by the same forces as ideology, they cannot escape their determinate conditions, and so cannot be identified except as ideology (more or less true, more or less false), these are not grounds for building a reliable foundation for revolutionary practice. In practice, the revolutionary subject (the working class) cannot recognise consciousness, or it cannot distinguish it from ideology: why, it may ask itself, is the truth of this agitator before me more true than the truth of that last one which was proved by my experience to be a lie, (and proved objectively in the ideological co-option of every revolutionary body that has so far existed).

We are interested in the critique of the concept of consciousness because many messiahs and spoon-benders are currently standing up and demanding participation in the struggle against capital on their terms (for example, the English website for the 2001 Barcelona anti-capitalist protests claimed the possibility of a pre-revolutionary situation; this has proved to be, and was always anyway, completely false). Our self-appointed task is to go around pricking these millenarian bubbles if only to save gullible individuals the costs of air travel and involvement with opportunistic and exploitative groups (Globalise Resistance, for example, rented a train — as you do — and ran an excursion down to Genoa, thus the reinvention of the package holiday, or is it the International Brigades? But this group or any other similar has no presence in the estates where we live or our workplaces, it does not touch real life; recruitment of those with disposable incomes goes on, as does the process of accumulation in the name of revolution).

No amount of anti-capitalist protest can lead to a ‘pre-revolutionary situation’ (by what mechanism would it force itself into a position of revolutionary subject?) but the protests are called for in terms of ‘raising consciousness’ or, as some say, ‘political radicalisation’, but if the call to arms is false (that this is some pre-revolutionary preliminary, and a stage in building consciousness) then surely the consciousness raising aspect is, in fact, a lie and is therefore a bomb-the-village-to-save-the-village ideology, which is something we cannot accept. Even for buffoons like us in MD intelligence is always negative, critical, so it is politically vital that our first reaction to pro-revolutionary manifestations is one of cynicism. Praise and affirmation of the pro-revolutionary milieu is the greatest sin of the pro-revolutionary; it is not our job to affirm anything.

One defensive definition of revolutionary consciousness we have recently encountered is ‘a definition or a tendency to action on the part of the working class’ (meaning: consciousness arises within the workers in their daily struggles). We agree with the sentiments of this ‘definition’ but we do not call it consciousness — for us consciousness also includes a concept of overcoming present conditions, of having a map of where everything is going to end up, it therefore describes a position of objective authority which we do not think is possible without a lapse into ideology — we do not think the proletariat can possess consciousness until capitalism is finished, otherwise it becomes reified and establishes specific rules of behaviour where certain interests are surreptitiously maintained in present conditions, the stability of which become the end of those who claim to desire their overthrow.

Consciousness, or overcoming the present situation with a ‘strategy’ or an intent to reorganise society as communism, must come at some second stage of revolution, after the conflagration, and from new material conditions. We said we agreed totally with the definition above but that we do not call it ‘consciousness’, we prefer the term ‘interest’. In our scheme the working class act out of solidarity in opposition to capital because they must defend their interest, it is possible that the working class will never escape ‘trade union’ consciousness (ie. being selfish and without transformative vision), that is, they will never stop seeking to defend their interest, never get past wanting more pieces of pie. This is fine by us, it is possible that the working class could drive capitalism into collapse and effect their own erasure and never get beyond a bodily, single-minded pursuit of their own selfish interest. So long as the proletariat’s demands stay within ‘economic’ terms, that is, so long as they remain impervious to political temptation then so long do they stay on course for naked conflict with the bourgeoisie in the factories: political demands obscure the clarity of self-interest, political compromise in times of crisis can easily be reached: it doesn’t cost the owners anything, which owner lost out when workers got the vote?

It is possible that the dictatorship of the proletariat itself would be organised (and then left behind as unsatisfactory and self-contradictory) as a more developed form of interest. This will develop, perhaps, along a line of the social institution of efficiency and use value, basically establishing a supplier-interest by getting needed products to the populace (but then, of course, technology is not neutral and much of what it produces is not useful and will be necessarily abandoned — so the dictatorship will temporarily be over a materially much more basic standard of living).

In short we see no need to marry the proletariat to consciousness and therefore see no need to theoretically expand the proletariat to include everyone (that is everyone paid ‘a wage’ regardless of social status), which is the traditional means by which pro-revolutionaries can inject consciousness: industrial workers can use their revolutionary muscle and teachers and social workers can bring the ideas (as if!).

For us the revolutionary function of the proletariat is very mechanical, and only a relatively small number of people will be significant in the mechanism. On the other hand we think it is important that other groups also act selfishly (the disabled for example, or local communities) and so drain energy from the authorities: these other social and political struggles are marginal and cannot finish the job (they cannot seize the means of production) but they are never-ending in that they are concerned with the articulation of needs which cannot be satisfied. However, we think the damage caused to capital by the anti-capitalists is outweighed by their falsification of their own role, that is their false representations of, and hopes for, consciousness and the political sphere in general and their neglect of production.

Incidentally, it may seem that our formulations of how a revolution could take place are rather dystopian, a-human; certainly it gives us little pleasure to slowly erase our previously held leftist tendencies but at least our concepts are clear and lay down precise criteria. This cannot be said of most pro-revolutionaries, who get extremely vague when discussing how such-and-such of their gestures will engage with, let alone overthrow, present conditions. We would, perhaps, place more trust in pro-revolutionaries and thus in a human-based, participatory revolution, if it were not for the lamentable history of ideas-led revolutions. Pro-revolutionary practice is synonymous with rivalry, personal ambition, corruption, stupidity and failure. If the supporters of these groups did not continue to predict imminent revolution because of what they are doing and did not adopt a slavishly affirmative attitude towards their groups, and if they could maintain a sceptical and critical perspective then the meaning of themselves might amount to more than the feeble attempts to alleviate their personal experiences of alienation by universalising their rebellions and resentments. It is our lot to be bequeathed a legacy of bad acts, which forecloses the possibility of all acts. It is our personal experience that ‘revolutionaries’, as often as not, behave very badly in ethical terms (the surrendering of the Mayday 2001 crowd to the police in London being the latest example of losses and defeats incurred through ridiculous stunts), as if their heightened political consciousness gives them the right to neglect ordinary decency; this degeneracy is characteristic as much of anarchists as Trotskyites, anybody, in fact, who thinks they have consciousness and cannot bring themselves to reflect critically upon it. So there it is, revolution cannot be left to ‘conscious’ human actions and our only hope lies in the structural conflict of social forces created by capitalism/the economy — again, the blind mole tunnelling in the dark.

Note, aside, interjection: We do not pretend articulacy in any specialised language, our position is developed through our personal experience. We, as MD, are not interested in explaining capitalism as a totality of processes and forces, which we feel is beyond our capabilities, we are content to describe capitalism as we experience it directly. This is probably the source of our ‘difference’ to other pro-revolutionary groups. For example, the theoretical conception of the working class in pro-conscious and political terms by many pro-revolutionaries is unacceptable to us, and we fail to see the purpose in these fantastical conjectures if the pro-revolutionaries are in good faith. How can anyone say the working class should act politically? Surely this goes to the heart of the problem of consciousness and the function of the working class; it is not for the working class to support or oppose nations, fascism, democracy, or any other political form; how could this opposition organise itself? How could the Kosovo proletariat oppose Serbia, or the Serbian proletariat oppose Slobbo, or indeed the proletariat of the West oppose NATO? To live in a European slum is surely better than dying in a concentration camp but how could the proletariat intervene and make a choice in such an alternative? The working class is not a politically constituted body, it cannot make final judgements on political questions by making a bloc intervention — political strategies are more likely to divide the working class than unify it, which is the purpose of democracy. Politics always functions to obscure self-knowledge of self-interest.

Further thoughts and explanations

We do not say that consciousness is impossible although we suspect it is (otherwise why has it been forgotten? How did it pass into non-existence so that we must talk about it being resurrected before a revolution can take place?), we simply cannot see consciousness competing with ideology under present conditions. Therefore, we suspect that all pretences at consciousness in the past show themselves to be ideology; that is, we suspect that all ideas-led revolutions in the past were not a realisation of working class consciousness in society but seizures of state power by the bourgeoisie, who used ‘revolutionary consciousness’ as an ideology. The ruse of higher imperatives masked the illegality of their appropriations. None of this necessarily forecloses the possibility of an authentic consciousness, it is possible that the great spirit of enlightenment will descend into the clayish heads of the masses and they will at last see the truth. But we should all be very sceptical when it is claimed that this is actually occurring. It seems to us that every half-definition of consciousness given to us during the months we have been formulating our critique is precisely what we define as a leadership impulse — we have been disappointed to discover such disagreeable codes flashing through the texts of our comrades.

We think everyone we have so far encountered and who supports the consciousness figure means exactly what we accuse them of: there is always present in their theoretical models the fundamentals of force and of hierarchy, even when they abase themselves before the proletariat muttering, “we must learn from the struggle itself.” The pedagogic relation of revolutionary to worker is downwardly directed. Even among, or especially among, those who appreciate the centrality of the workers to the revolution it is a given that the workers’ struggles must be politicised.

And then among the anarchists there is outright contempt for the working class, ‘the willing slaves’ who comply with their bosses and do not rebel, for these passive and useless automatons, the pro-revolutionary group substitutes itself and its direct action; the struggle becomes that of active groups against the state and so, even in the heart of libertarianism, the concept of a vanguard and substituted elite takes hold. Because they have not addressed the issue of what consciousness is, anti-capitalist groups model themselves on and crudely reproduce previous authoritarian forms based upon a conceptualisation of passive masses and active elites.

One of our critics wrote: “We must insist on ‘opening up specific struggles’, on calling for their extension, generalisation, on fighting corporatism which wants to enclose workers in their little corner with their specific demands...”. These sentiments form the dreary end of almost every single leaflet that emerges from the communist camp. The game is given away: the role for expanding struggles fails on those who have the vision, the owners of consciousness. But the deliberate expansions and connections of struggle always follow the lines set by those doing the expanding and connecting, the lines deployed by these revolutionaries are not purely objective but are developed subjectively and therefore carry their own cultural/political baggage (you still meet anarchists who go on about the struggles of the Irish and Palestinian ‘peoples’ despite anarchism’s explicit refutation of national liberation struggles); in other words it is easy to vaguely call for the expansion of struggles but that expansion has to have a specific content and it is this political content which we reject — if this were not a problem then there would not be thousands of tiny revolutionary groups in the world, there would only be one all inclusive revolutionary party; the fact that we all disagree with each other even though we are all more or less saying the same thing is the finaf disproof for consciousness, in the same way all the various religious sects in the world are the final disproof for the universal message of The Word of God.

Summary and counter-interpretation

Our main critique of pro-revolutionary groups is simple and is the form of a question: what do pro-revolutionaries do (and what is the use of consciousness) when there is no revolution? The answer, ‘make revolution’, recreates the separation of ‘the movement’ from ‘the people’, the cycle of representation, leadership, the reinstitution of particular cultures as universal objectives begins again. Whilst the answer, ‘build the movement up so it can force conditions of revolution’ merely initiates a cycle of accumulation.

From one perspective it could be argued that we, at MD, are among the most conscious, or the most pro-consciousness in the pro-revolutionary milieu: we are against the reification of consciousness, against its every political manifestation, against its ownership and definition, against its subjective organisation by small groups that have no relation to the revolutionary body but are related to, determined by, and cannot escape from the economic base (as is the case for all social entities).

We are pro-consciousness if you understand our arguments as being carried by the Hegelian stream: from simplicity towards higher simplicity by route of the complexities of alienation; just as in Marx, history rises from simple communism, and ends in communism proper. We are certainly pro-human, and wish to see the return of humanity to its essence as a simple, that is as a non-alienated existence. Like Bataille said, as water moving through water.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

We would re-emphasise that we do not see the working class take over of the factories as a revolution as such but simply the downfall of capital, we see the revolution (and communist consciousness) arising after this period of crisis when a new material base of reality is coming into existence: we see revolution as being in two stages (as, we believe, did Marx) and it is in the second stage, the becoming human stage, that the vast mass of human beings participate (via consciousness by which we mean organisation/common values, etc, which is determined by the new material conditions). The occupations of the factories are only a means and not an end, therefore we are not ‘ultra-councilist’ as those who would marginalise us would have it; we do not propose workers’ councils at all, we do not presume to call for any specific political institution, we leave that to the participants at the time. We say only that, for capitalist process to be suspended, the ownership of production must directly pass to the workers, without any mediation by political institutions or bodies.

Incidentally, by factory workers we mean those employed under factory conditions and this includes distribution staff etc, we mean those workers who have the power to stop the economy (this excludes shop-workers, teachers, politicised groups, the unemployed, ethnicities and other marginal categories).

Groups

Our experience, and the experience of proletarians, is that there is always more going on in revolutionary groups than the stated aims and principles and it is this which has so thoroughly cheesed everyone off with revolutionary consciousness (the reproduction of leadership structures and authoritarian tendencies). The nonappearance of consciousness in the working class is its critique of consciousness.

The absolute refusal of pro-revolutionary groops to recognise the failure of all pro-revolutionary groops in communicating their message can only be explained if the communication of messages is secondary to a leadership impulse. We see Lenin everywhere, yes like Blanqui’s ghost, and a line of kings rising up. We cannot bury him deep enough and no matter how we pile the dirt on his head he reappears in every tuppenny-hapenny anarchist group and communist sect. We are obsessed, that is the job we have awarded ourselves.

Given the terrible history of the revolutionary movement and its betrayals of the working class surely it is imperative that every pro-revolutionary group reaches the level of integrity whereby it is able to recognise and denounce its organising tendencies and look for other ways of acting. We do not say what pro-revolutionary groops should do, we only say what they should not do; we also say what we do, we are open to critique for this, and welcome it.

Is Lenin on sale again?

When the way is lost the traveller looks up to the heavens, world