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Re: fyi: "Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory"
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Vikki Riley <riley.vikki-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
> "From boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in
> lines, at desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from
> prison-like schools to repetitious, mindless "entertainment," from desolate
> and crime-ridden streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a
> treadmill on which we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place."
>
> Are you doing this Chris? Or are you describing life in Alifornia and
> American TV?
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Christopher Gray <rasputin-AT-teleport.com
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> The Minimum Definition of Intelligence
>> Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory
>>
>>
>>
>> A Note from the Editor
>>
>> The "anarchist community", today, is renown for replicating and increasing
>> the rate of errors wherever it scourges for self-meaning, especially with
>> regard to theory and historical truth. So, in the case of this text! Rather
>> than check for accuracy, they copy from each other until, like the "secret"
>> passed around a table, the "returning" resembles the original only in the
>> imagination. This is the spectacularization process embodied in
>> characterological slack.
>>
>> This particular text has been diluted into many titles, many with recycled
>> views camouflaging contact with the authors as well as psycho-malpractice.
>> These include:
>>
>> Self-Theory: The Pleasure of Thinking For Yourself
>>
>> This was the one put out by the associates of For Ourselves at The
>> Spectacle in East Lansing, Michigan USA in 1975. They re-formatted, stuck to
>> the original text, gave credit, and forwarded communication.
>>
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory: A Beginner's Guide
>>
>> This also stuck fairly close to the original, changed graphics, but left
>> out both the For Ourselves Post-notes and Preamble, and failed to mention
>> the original authors.
>>
>> From here on, the rest of the copies lose more and more of the reality of
>> the text, the times, and the authors in the copy process. They all begin to
>> blindfully believe, and even state, that the first copy was the original..
>> That kind of investigation-free falsification is characterologically
>> intentional and mocks the very call for authenticity that 'self-theory'
>> demands as a practicable self-definition.
>>
>> It is no wonder that the "anarchist movement" is anaemic and unattractive,
>> and according to colonizing "plan", they blame the historical victim — the
>> all of humanity — because they refuse to follow these 'copies' of the
>> failing side of the "Anarchist" and the "Situationist" once again....
>> Repeating failure better is their next-to-greatest accomplishment. The
>> greatest is reserved for their dismissal from the stage[d] history to which
>> they lay pompous claim....
>>
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory
>> The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking For Yourself
>> Revolutionary Self-help: A Beginner's Manual
>> The Joy of Thinking... For Yourself
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory: A Beginner's Manual
>> There's "making theory your own" and there's the "ownership of theory" —
>> the definition of "ideology". These replicants separate the "self" and the
>> "other" (or "non-self") from their social totalness found precisely within
>> each other. Theirs is an endless "therapy" for an endless "atomism". The
>> title mutations exemplify the trend of turning even the most vibrant moments
>> into vapid, lifeless consumables, complete with marketing trend and annual
>> reports (e.g., the "SF Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair"), as does the
>> eradication of the organizational (social and practicable-connected)
>> statement in the original. Attacks on Leninism walk hand-in-hand with his
>> adhocist shadow.
>>
>> Hording credit and communication is an anarcho-Stalinist trait. It wears a
>> heavy dose of the scent of its enemies to lure in "followers of the faith";
>> it "needs" more than desires loyal objects. It is a life style based in a
>> state of denial of "the other", and justifies falsification of all
>> transcendent connectivity in the name of abstract individualism and abstract
>> collectivism. Duct tape sells big time in black....
>>
>> Essentially, metaphorically, and explicitly, this "movement" is for the
>> anti-copyright, that "new world" assessment wherein the current one is
>> mirrored — merely co-dependently — and abstractively negated. It cannot
>> comprehend — and fears — the concept of an omni-copyright, a world wherein
>> all that has come before it is used more robustly and without
>> totality-sacrificial filtering by an old world stupor. So much gaze and so
>> little imagination! A movement chasing capital's tail, drumming to the
>> mantra of "duh".
>>
>> This is the original text, without any of their fear of authentic
>> historical moments lived by and created through the members of For
>> Ourselves. I would rather embrace and appreciate the flaws of a truthful
>> past as my own, than pass off flawed replicas as my own truth. Sure, we all
>> make mistakes — providing all of us the opportunity to freshly and
>> dialectically transcend them — but here's a movement that doesn't even
>> bother to improve on much of anything from the past. It finds a depressing
>> contentment to dress, rant, and fail better than the past. They either don't
>> care very much — resplendent spectators to their own existences — or hate
>> their jobs as distractors, inverters, and diverters to do better in
>> anything. This, while swilling, regurgitating, and never digesting the
>> theory of the Situationists and Anarchists with a gluttonous disdain.
>>
>> As usual in the work of the 'half-assed', I have found misppelled words
>> such as "blinders" spelled as "blinkers" spattered throughout. There are
>> missing periods, words run together, chunks of missing text, ad finitum.
>> It's like a dream without color, speech without pauses, or music without
>> silence: all examples of the life-posing and the righteously
>> self-dispossessed.
>>
>> Beyond appalling, it's quite sad how a "movement" pretending to be "for a
>> new world" is actually the vanguard of one embracing greater quantitifcation
>> of any real life (thus far spared from mediation, scarcification,
>> paltrification, etc.) and of the qualification of lowered expectations in a
>> "new world [made-to-]order", i.e., one whose marching orders are built upon
>> "Generalized Self-dumbification", with a parade of "anarchist" commodities
>> storm-trooping the launch of this dismal world onto all of us disbelivers.
>> They are the perfect hosts of that dysfunctional and equally-unattractive
>> reality. Like the perpetual preview of the never-seen giant squid or coming
>> idiot science and communications attractions from the blimping Gore and
>> Moore — we keep wondering what sustains them, and conclude that their 'anti'
>> power is seethed from that same fester as triad of
>> self-and-other-sacrificing religions from the Middle East. Both are dead-set
>> against everyone, especially themselves. If left to their mutations, the
>> text will undoubtedly end up as "The Self-sacrifice Manual" or "The Pain of
>> Thinking".
>>
>> In countering that, I have re-included the original title, the group
>> post-notes, the Preamble, and links to the groups other projects. The time
>> spent actually learning from history and from paradox seems so much more
>> enjoyable than pretending to exist in a fog of self-absence, wearing the
>> skinned creations of friends from the past who were gutsy enough to demand
>> more of themselves and of us.
>>
>> Original Introduction
>>
>> This booklet is for people who are dissatisfied with their lives. If you
>> are happy with your present existence, we have no argument with you.
>>
>> However, if you are tired of waiting for your life to change...
>> tired of waiting for authentic community, love and adventure...
>> tired of waiting for the end of money and forced work...
>> tired of looking for new pastimes to pass the time...
>> tired of waiting for a lush, rich existence...
>> tired of waiting for a situation in which you can realise all your
>> desires...
>> tired of waiting for the end of all authorities, alienations, ideologies
>> and moralities...
>> ...then we think you'll find what follows to be quite handy.
>>
>> I
>>
>> One of the great secrets of our miserable yet potentially marvellous time
>> is that thinking can be a pleasure. This is a manual for constructing your
>> own self-theory. Constructing your self-theory is a revelutionary pleasure,
>> the pleasure of constructing your self-theory of revolution.
>>
>> Building your self-theory is a destructive/constructive pleasure, because
>> you are building a theory-of-practice for the destructive/constructive
>> transformation of this society.
>>
>> Self-theory is a theory of adventure. It is as erotic and humorous as an
>> authentic revolution.
>>
>> The alienation felt as a result of having had your thinking done for you
>> by the ideologies of our day, can lead to the search for the pleasurable
>> negation of that alienation: thinking for yourself. It is the pleasure of
>> making your mind your own.
>>
>> Self-theory is the body of critical thought you construct for your own
>> use. You construct it and use it when you make an analysis of why your life
>> is the way it is, why the world is the way it is. (And 'thinking' and
>> 'feeling' are inseparable, since thought comes from subjective, emotive
>> experience.) You build your self-theory when you develop a theory of
>> practice — a theory of how to get what you desire for your life.
>>
>> Theory will be either a practical theory — a theory of revolutionary
>> practice — or it will be nothing... nothing but an aquarium of ideas, a
>> contemplative interpretation of the world. The realm of ideals is the
>> eternal waiting-room of unrealised desire.
>>
>> Those who assume (usually unconsciously) the impossibility of realising
>> their life's desires, and of thus fighting for themselves, usually end up
>> fighting for an ideal or cause instead (i.e., the illusion of selfactivity
>> or self-practice). Those who know that this is the acceptance of alienation
>> will now know that all ideals and causes are ideologies.
>>
>> II
>>
>> Whenever a system of ideas is structured with an abstraction at the centre
>> — assigning a role or duties to you for its sake — this system is an
>> ideology. An ideology is a system of false consciousness in which you no
>> longer function as the subject in your relation to the world.
>>
>> The various forms of ideology are all structured around different
>> abstractions, yet they all serve the interests of a dominant (or aspiring
>> dominant) class by giving you a sense of purpose in your sacrifice,
>> suffering and submission.
>>
>> Religious ideology is the oldest example, the fantastic projection called
>> 'God' is the Supreme Subject of the cosmos, acting on every human being as
>> 'His' subject.
>>
>> In the 'scientific' and 'democratic' ideologies of bourgeois enterprise,
>> capital investment is the 'productive' subject directing world history — the
>> 'invisible hand' guiding human development. The bourgeoisie had to attack
>> and weaken the power that religious ideology once held. It exposed the
>> mystification of the religious world in its technological investigation,
>> expanding the realm of things and methods out of which it could make a
>> profit.
>>
>> The various brands of Leninism are 'revolutionary' ideologies in which
>> their Party is the rightful subject to dictate world history, by leading its
>> object — the proletariat — to the goal of replacing the bourgeois apparatus
>> with a Leninist one.
>>
>> The many other forms of the dominant ideologies can be seen daily. The
>> rise of the new religiomsyticisms serve the dominant structure of social
>> relations in a round about way. They provide a neat form in which the
>> emptiness of daily life may be obscured, and like drugs, make it easier to
>> live with. Volunteerism (shoulder to the wheel) and determinism (it'll all
>> work out) prevent us from recognising our real place in the functioning of
>> the world. In avant-garde ideology, novelty in (and of) itself is what's
>> important. In survivalism, subjectivity is preempted by fear through the
>> invocation of the image of an impending world catastrophe.
>>
>> In accepting ideologies we accept an inversion of subject and object;
>> things take on a human power and will, while human beings have their place
>> as things. Ideology is upside-down theory. We further accept the separation
>> between the narrow reality of our daily life, and the image of a world
>> totality that's out of our grasp. Ideology offers us only a voyeur's
>> relationship with the totality.
>>
>> In this separation, and this acceptance of sacrifice for the cause, every
>> ideology serves to protect the dominant social order. Authorities whose
>> power depends on separation must deny us our subjectivity in order to
>> survive themselves. Such denial comes in the form of demanding sacrifices
>> for 'the common good', 'the national interest', 'the war effort', 'the
>> revolution'....
>>
>> III
>>
>> We get rid of the blinders of ideology by constantly asking ourselves...
>> How do I feel?
>>
>> Am I enjoying myself?
>> How's my life?
>> Am I getting what I want?
>> Why not?
>> What's keeping me from getting what I want?
>> This is having consciousnessof the commonplace, awareness of one's
>> everyday routine. That Everyday Life — real life — exists, is a public
>> secret that gets less secret every day, as the poverty of daily life gets
>> more and more visible.
>>
>> IV
>>
>> The construction of self-theory is based on thinking for yourself, being
>> fully conscious of desires and their validity. It is the construction of
>> radical subjectivity.
>>
>> Authentic 'consciousness raising' can only be the 'raising' of people's
>> thinking to the level' of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness:
>> developing their basic subjectivity, free of ideology and imposed morality
>> in all its forms.
>>
>> The essence of what many leftists, therapy-mongers, racism awareness
>> trainers and sisterisers term 'consciousness raising' is their practice of
>> beating people into unconsciousness with their ideological billyclubs.
>>
>> The path from ideology (self-negation) to radical subjectivity
>> (self-affirmation) passes through Point Zero, the capital city of nihilism.
>> This is the windswept still point in social space and time... the social
>> limbo wherein which one recognises that the present is devoid of life; that
>> there is no life in one's daily existence. A nihilist knows the difference
>> between surviving and living.
>>
>> Nihilists go through a reversal or perspective on their life and the
>> world. Nothing is true for them but their desires, their will to be. They
>> refuse all ideology in their hatred for the miserable social relations in
>> modern capitalist-global society. From this reversed perspective they see
>> with a newly acquired clarity the upside-down world of reification(i), the
>> inversion of subject and object, of abstract and concrete. It is the
>> theatrical landscape of fetishised commodities, mental projections,
>> separations and ideologies: art, God, city planning, ethics, smile buttons,
>> radio stations that say they love you and detergents that have compassion
>> for your hands.
>>
>> Daily conversation offers sedatives like: "You can't always get what you
>> want", "Life has its ups and downs", and other dogmas of the secular
>> religion of survival. 'Common sense' is just the nonsense of common
>> alienation. Every day people are denied an authentic life and sold back its
>> representation.
>>
>> Nihilists constantly feel the urge to destroy the system which destroys
>> them each day. They cannot go on living as they are, their minds are on
>> fire. Soon enough they run up against the fact that they must come up with a
>> coherent set of tactics that will have a practical effect on the world.
>>
>> But if a nihilist does not know of the historical possibility for the
>> transformation of the world, his or her subjective rage will coralise into a
>> role: the suicide, the solitary murderer, the street hoodlum vandal, the
>> neo-dadaist, the professional mental patient... all seeking compensation for
>> a life of dead time.
>>
>> The nihilists' mistake is that they do not realise that there are others
>> who are also nihilists. Consequently they assume that common communication
>> and participation in a project of self-realisation is impossible.
>>
>> V
>>
>> To have a 'political' orientation towards one's life is just to know that
>> you can only change your life by changing the nature of life itself through
>> transfermation of the world — and that transformation of the world requires
>> collective effort.
>>
>> This project of collective self-realisation can properly be termed
>> politics. However, 'politics' has become a mystified, separated category of
>> human activity. Along with all the other socially enforced separations of
>> human activity, 'politics' has become just another interest. It even has its
>> specialists — be they politicians or politicos. It is possible to be
>> interested (or not) in football, stamp collecting, disco music or fashion.
>> What people see as 'politics' today is the social falsification of the
>> project of collective self-realisation — and that suits those in power just
>> fine.
>>
>> Collective self-realisation is the revolutionary project. It is the
>> collective seizure of the totality of nature and social relations and their
>> transformation according to conscious desire.
>>
>> Authentic therapy is changing one's life by changing the nature of social
>> life. Therapy must be social if it is to be of any real consequence. Social
>> therapy (the healing of society) and individual therapy (the healing of the
>> individual) are linked together: each requires the other, each is a
>> necessary part of the other.
>>
>> For example: in spectacular society we are expected to repress our real
>> feelings and play a role. This is called 'playing a part in society'. (How
>> revealing that phrase is!) Individuals put on character armour - a
>> steel-like suit of role playing is directly related to the end of social
>> role playing.
>>
>> VI
>>
>> To think subjectively is to use your life — as it is now and as you want
>> it to be — as the centre of your thinking. This positive self-centring is
>> accomplished by the continuous assault on externals: all the false issues,
>> false conflicts, false problems, false identities and false dichotomies.
>>
>> People are kept from analysing the totality of everyday existence by being
>> asked their opinion of every detail: all the spectacular trifles, phoney
>> controversies and false scandals. Are you for or against trades unions,
>> cruise missiles, identity cards... what's your opinion of soft drugs,
>> jogging, UFO's, progressive taxation?
>>
>> These are false issues. The only issue for us is how we live.
>>
>> There is an old Jewish saying, "If you have only two alternatives, then
>> choose the third". It offers a way of getting the subject to search for a
>> new perspective on the problem. We can give the lie to both sides of a false
>> conflict by taking our 'third choice' — to view the situation from the
>> perspective of radical subjectivity.
>>
>> Being conscious of the third choice is refusing to choose between two
>> supposedly opposite, but really equal, polarities that try to define
>> themselves as the totality of a situation. In its simplest form, this
>> consciousness is expressed by the worker who is brought to trial for armed
>> robbery and asked, "Do you plead guilty or not guilty?". "I'm unemployed",
>> he replies. A more theoretical but equally classic illustration is the
>> refusal to acknowledge any essential difference between the
>> corporate-capitalist ruling classes of the 'West' and the state-capitalist
>> ruling classes of the 'East'. All we have to do is look at the basic social
>> relations of production in the USA and Europe on the one hand, and the USSR
>> and China on the other, to see that they are essentially the same: over
>> there, as here, the vast majority go to work for a wage or salary in
>> exchange for giving up control over both the means of production and what
>> they produce (which is then sold back to them in the form of commodities).
>>
>> In the case of the 'West' the surplus value (ie that which is produced
>> over and above the value of the workers' wages) is the property of the
>> corporate managements who keep up a show of domestic competition. In the
>> 'East' the surplus value is the property of the state bureaucracy, which
>> does not permit domestic competition but engages in international
>> competition as furiously as any other capitalist nation. Big difference.
>>
>> An example of a false problem is that stupid conversational question,
>> "What's your philosophy of life?". It poses an abstract concept of 'Life'
>> that, despite the word's constant appearance in conversation, has nothing to
>> do with real life, because it ignores the fact that 'living' is what we are
>> doing at the present moment.
>>
>> In the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phoney
>> social identities, corresponding to their individual role in the Spectacle
>> (in which people contemplate and consume images of what life is, so that
>> they will forget how to live for themselves). These social identities can be
>> ethnic ('Italian'), racial ('Black'), organisational ('Trade Unionist'),
>> residential ('New Yorker'), sexual ('Gay'), cultural ('sports' fan'), and so
>> on: but all are rooted in a common desire for affiliation, for belonging..
>>
>> Obviously being 'black' is a lot more real as an identification than being
>> a 'sports fan', but beyond a certain point these identities only serve to
>> mask our real position in society. Again, the only issue for us is how we
>> live. Concretely, this means understanding the reasons for the nature of
>> one's life in one's relation to society as a whole. To do this one has to
>> shed all the false identities, the partial associations, and begin with
>> oneself as the centre. From here we can examine the material basis of life,
>> stripped of all mystification.
>>
>> For example: suppose I want a cup of coffee from the machine at work.
>> First of all, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers
>> on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantations and in the
>> refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have all the
>> workers who made the different parts of the machine and assembled it. Then
>> the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, drilled
>> the oil and refined it. Then all the workers who transported the raw
>> materials and parts over three continents and two oceans. Then the clerks,
>> typists and communications workers who co-ordinate the production and
>> transportation. Finally you have all the workers who produce all the other
>> things necessary for the others to survive. That gives me a direct material
>> relationship to several million people: in fact, to the immense majority of
>> the world's population. They produce my life: and I help to produce theirs.
>> In this light, all partial group identities and special interests fade into
>> insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of one's life that is
>> presently locked up in the frustrated creativity of those millions of
>> workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production,
>> strangled by alienation, warped by the insane rationale of capital
>> accumulation! Here we begin to discover a real social identity: in people
>> all over the world who are fighting to win back their lives, we find
>> ourselves.
>>
>> We are constantly being asked to choose between two sides in a false
>> conflict. Governments, charities and propagandists of all kinds are fond of
>> presenting us with choices that are no choice at all (eg the Central
>> Electricity Generating Board presented its nuclear programme with the slogan
>> 'Nuclear Age or Stone Age'. The CEGB would like us to believe that these are
>> the only two alternatives — we have the illusion of choice, but as long as
>> they control the choices we perceive as available to us, they also control
>> the outcome).
>>
>> The new moralists love to tell those in the rich West how they will 'have
>> to make sacrifices', how they 'exploit the starving children of the Third
>> World'. The choice we are given is between sacrificial altruism or narrow
>> individualism. (Charities cash in on the resulting guilt by offering us a
>> feeling of having done something, in exchange for a coin in the collecting
>> tin.) Yes, by living in the rich West we do exploit the poor of the Third
>> World — but not personally, not deliberately. We can make some changes in
>> our life, boycott, make sacrifices, but the effects are marginal. We become
>> aware of the false conflict we are being presented with when we realise that
>> under this global social system we, as individuals, are as locked in our
>> global role as 'exploiters' as others are in their global role as the
>> exploited. We have a role in society, but little or no power to do anything
>> about it. We reject the false choice of 'sacrifice or selfishness' by
>> calling for the destruction of the global social system whose existence
>> forces that decision upon us. It isn't a case of tinkering with the system,
>> of offering token sacrifices or calling for 'a little less selfishness'.
>> Charities and reformers never break out of the terrain of the false choice.
>>
>> Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present situation
>> constantly drag us back to their false choices — that is, any choice which
>> keeps their power intact. With myths like 'If we shared it all out there
>> wouldn't be enough to go round', they attempt to deny the existence of any
>> other choices and to hide from us the fact that the material preconditions
>> for social revolution already exist.
>>
>> VII
>>
>> Any journey towards self-demystification must avoid those two quagmires of
>> lost thought — absolutism and cynicism; twin swamps that camouflage
>> themselves as meadows of subjectivity.
>>
>> Absolutism is the total acceptance or rejection of all components of
>> particular ideologies, spectacles and reifications. An absolutist cannot see
>> any other choice than complete acceptance or complete rejection .
>>
>> The absolutist wanders along the shelves of the ideological supermarket
>> looking for the ideal commodity, and then buys it — lock, stock and barrel.
>> but the ideological supermarket — like any supermarket — is fit only for
>> looting. It is more productive for us if we can move along the shelves, rip
>> open the packets, take out what looks authentic and useful, and dump the
>> rest.
>>
>> Cynicism is a reaction to a world dominated by ideology and morality.
>> Faced with conflicting ideologies the cynic says: "a plague on both your
>> houses". The cynic is as much a consumer as the absolutist, but one who has
>> given up hope of ever finding the ideal commodity.
>>
>> VIII
>>
>> The process of dialectical thinking is constructive thinking, a process of
>> continually synthesising one's current body of self- theory with new
>> observations and appropriations; a resolution of the contradictions between
>> the previous body of theory and new theoretical elements. The resulting
>> synthesis is thus not some quantitative summation of the previous and the
>> new, but their qualitative supersession, a new totality.
>>
>> This synthetic / dialectic method of constructing a theory is counter to
>> the eclectic style which just collects a rag-bag of its favourite bits from
>> favourite ideologies without ever confronting the resulting contradictions.
>> Modern examples include libertarian capitalism, christian marxism and
>> liberalism in general.
>>
>> If we are continually conscious of how we want to live, we can critically
>> appropriate from anything in the construction of our self-theory:
>> ideologies, culture critics, technocratic experts, sociological studies,
>> mystics and so forth. All the rubbish of the old world can be scavenged for
>> useful material by those who desire to reconstruct it.
>>
>> IX
>>
>> The nature of modern society, its global and capitalist unity, indicates
>> to us the necessity of making our self-theory a unitary critique. By this we
>> mean a critique of all geographic areas where various forms of
>> socio-economic domination exist (ie both the capitalism of the 'free' world
>> and the state-capitalism of the 'communist' world), as well as a critique of
>> all alienations (sexual poverty, enforced survival, urbanism, etc). In other
>> words, a critique of the totality of daily existence everywhere, from the
>> perspective of the totality of one's desires.
>>
>> Ranged against this project are all the politicians and bureaucrats,
>> preachers and gurus, city planners and policemen, reformers and militants,
>> central committees and censors, corporate managers and union leaders, male
>> supremacists and feminist ideologues, psyche-sociologists and conservation
>> capitalists who work to subordinate individual desire to a reified 'common
>> good' that has supposedly designated them as its representatives. They are
>> all forces of the old world, all bosses, priests and creeps who have
>> something to lose if people extend the game of seizing back their minds into
>> seizing back their lives.
>>
>> Revolutionary theory and revolutionary ideology are enemies — and both
>> know it.
>>
>> X
>>
>> By now it should be obvious that self-demystification and the construction
>> of our own revolutionary theory doesn't eradicate our alienation: 'the
>> world' (capital and the Spec tacle) goes on, reproducing itself every day.
>>
>> Although this booklet had the construction of self-theory as its focus, we
>> never intended to imply that revolutionary theory can exist separate from
>> revolutionary practice. In order to be consequential, effectively to
>> reconstruct the world, practice must seek its theory, and theory must be
>> realised in practice. The revolutionary prospect of disalienation and the
>> transformation of social relations requires that one's theory be nothing
>> other than a theory of practice, of what we do and how we live. Otherwise
>> theory will degenerate into an impotent contemplation of the world, and
>> ultimately into survival ideology — a projected mental fogbank, a static
>> body of reified thought, of intellectual armour, that acts as a buffer
>> between the daily world and oneself. And if revolutionary practice is not
>> the practice of revolutionary theory, it degenerates into altruistic
>> militantism, 'revolutionary' activity as one's social duty.
>>
>> We don't strive for a coherent theory purely as an end in itself. For us,
>> the practical use value of coherence is that having a coherent self-theory
>> makes it easier for someone to think. As an example, it's easier to get a
>> handle on future developments in social control if you have a coherent
>> understanding of modern social control ideologies and techniques up to the
>> present.
>>
>> Having a coherent theory makes it easier to conceive of the theoretical
>> practice for realising your desires for your life.
>>
>> XI
>>
>> In the process of constructing self-theory, the last ideologies that have
>> to be wrestled with and determinedly pinned down are the ones that most
>> closely resemble revolutionary theory. These final mystifications are a)
>> situationism b)councilism.
>>
>> The Situationist International (1958-1971) was an international
>> revolutionary organisation that made an immense contribution to
>> revolutionary theory. Situationist theory is a body of critical theory that
>> can be appropriated into one's self-theory, and nothing more. Anything more
>> is the ideological misappropriation known as situationism.
>>
>> For those who newly discover it, SI theory has a way of seeming like 'the
>> answer I've been searching for for years', the answer to the riddle of one's
>> dead life. But that's exactly when a new alertness and self-possession
>> become necessary. Situationism can be quite the complete survival ideology,
>> a defence mechanism against the wear and tear of daily life. included in the
>> ideology is the spectacular commodity-role of being 'a situationist', ie a
>> radical jade and ardent esoteric.
>>
>> Councilism (aka 'Workers' Control', 'Syndicalism') offers 'self-
>> management' as a replacement for the capitalist system of production.
>>
>> Real self-management is the direct management (unmediated by any separate
>> leadership) of social production, distribution and communication by workers
>> and their communities. The movement for self-management has appeared again
>> and again all over the world in the course of social revolution. Russia in
>> 1905 and 1917-21, Spain in 1936-7, Hungary in 1956, Algeria in 1960, Chile
>> in 1972 and Portugal in 1975. The form of organisation most often created in
>> the practice of self-management has been workers' councils: sovereign
>> general assemblies of the producers and neighbourhoods that elect mandated
>> delegates to co-ordinate their activities. The delegates are not
>> representatives, but carry out decisions already made by their assemblies.
>> Delegates can be recalled at any time, should the general assembly feel that
>> its decisions are not being rigorously carried out.
>>
>> Councilism is this historical practice and theory of self- management
>> turned into an ideology. Whereas the participants in these uprisings lived a
>> critique of the social totality, beginning with a critique of wage labour,
>> of the commodity economy and exchange value, councilism makes a partial
>> critique: it seeks not the self-managed, continuous and qualitative
>> transformation of the whole world, but the static, quantitive
>> self-management of the world as it is. The economy thus remains a separate
>> realm cut off from the rest of daily life and dominating it. On the other
>> hand a movement for generalised self- management seeks the transformation of
>> all sectors of social life and all social relations (production, sexuality,
>> housing, services, communications, etc), councilism thinks that a
>> self-managed economy is all that matters. It misses, literally, the whole
>> point: subjectivity and the desire to transform the whole of life. The
>> problem with workers' control is that all it controls is work.
>>
>> The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
>> activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down.
>> Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not
>> sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement
>> in which all the mystifications of the past are being consciously swept
>> away.
>>
>> Post-notes
>>
>> This booklet is part of the collective self-theory of the members of our
>> organization. It is the statement of what we call our meta-theory, our
>> theory of the practice of theory-making.
>>
>> The preparation and dissemination of The Minimum Definition of
>> Intelligence is undertaken for the same reason we do everything else we do:
>> because we want to catalyze a social revolution that will transform the
>> present static layout of alienation into a moving landscape of realized
>> dreams. We know we can only create the lives that we want tin the process of
>> everyone else creating the lives that they want. We are revolutionaries
>> because our desires require a social revolution for their realization.
>>
>> The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
>> activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down.
>> Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not
>> sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement
>> in which all the mystifications of the past are consciously being swept
>> away.
>>
>> Preamble
>>
>> We have woken up to discover that our lives are becoming unliveable. From
>> boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in lines,
>> at desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from prison-like
>> schools to repetitious, mindless "entertainment," from desolate and
>> crime-ridden streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a
>> treadmill on which we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place.
>>
>> Like the immense majority of the population, we have no control over the
>> use to which our lives are put: we are people who have nothing to sell but
>> our capacity to work. We have come together because we can no longer
>> tolerate the way we are forced to exist, we can no longer tolerate being
>> squeezed dry of our energies, being used up and thrown away, only to create
>> a world that grows more alien and ugly every day.
>>
>> The system of Capital, whether in its "Western" private-corporate or
>> "Eastern" state-bureaucratic form, was brutal and exploitative even during
>> its ascent: now, where it is in decay, it poisons air and water, produces
>> goods and services of deteriorating quality, and is less and less able to
>> employ us even to its own advantage. Its logic of accumulation and
>> competition leads inexorably toward its own collapse. Even as it links all
>> the people of the world together in one vast network of production and
>> consumption, it isolates us from each other; even as it stimulates greater
>> and greater advances in technology and productive power, it finds itself
>> incapable of putting them to use: even as it multiplies the possibilities
>> for human self-realization, we find ourselves strangled in layers of guilt,
>> fear and self-contempt.
>>
>> But it is we ourselves — our strength, our intelligence, our creativity,
>> our passions-that are the greatest productive power of all. It is we who
>> produce and reproduce the world as it is, in the image of Capital; it is we
>> who reinforce in each other the conditioning of family, school, church and
>> media, the conditioning that keeps us slaves. When we decide together to end
>> our misery, to take our lives into our own hands, we can recreate the world
>> the way we want it. The technical resources and worldwide productive network
>> developed under the old system give us the means: the crisis and continuing
>> collapse of that system give us the chance and the urgent need.
>>
>> The ruling ideologies of the world superpowers, with their interlocking
>> sets of lies, offer us only the false choice of "Communism" versus
>> "Capitalism". But in the history of revolution during this century (Russia,
>> 1905; Germany, 1919-20; Spain, 1936-37; Hungary, 1956) we have discovered
>> the general form through which we can take back power over our own lives:
>> workers'councils. At their highest moments these councils were popular
>> assemblies in workplaces and communities, joined together by means of
>> strictly mandated delegates who carried out decisions already made by their
>> assemblies and who could be recalled by them at any time. The councils
>> organized their nwn defense and restarted production under their own
>> management. By now, through a system of councils at the local, regional, and
>> global level, using modern telecommunications and data processing, we can
>> coordinate and plan world production as well as be free to shape our own
>> immediate environment. Any compromise with bureaucracy and official
>> heirarchy, anything short of the total power of workers' councils, can only
>> reproduce misery and alienation in a new form, as a good look at the
>> so-called "Communist" countries will show. For this reason, no political
>> party can represent the revolutionary movement or seize power "on its
>> behalf", since this would be simply a change of ruling classes, not their
>> abolition. The plan of the freely associated producers is in absolute
>> opposition to the dictatorial Plan of state and corporate production. Only
>> all of us together can decide what is best for us.
>>
>> For these reasons, we call upon you and upon all the hundreds of millions
>> like you and us, to join us in the revolutionary transformation of every
>> aspect of life. We want to abolish the system of wage and salaried labor, of
>> commodity exchange-value and of profit, of corporate and bureaucratic power.
>> We want to decide the nature and conditions of everything we do, to manage
>> all social life collectively and democratically. We want to end the division
>> of mental from manual work and of "free" time from work time, by bringing
>> into play all our abilities for enjoyable creative activity. We want the
>> whole world to be our conscious self-creation, so that our days are full of
>> wonder, learning, and pleasure. Nothing less.
>>
>> In setting down this minimum program, we are not trying to impose an ideal
>> on reality, nor are we alone in wanting what we want. Our ideas are already
>> in everyone's minds, consciously or unconsciously, because they are nothing
>> but an expression of the real movement that exists all over the planet. But
>> in order to win, this movement must know itself, its aims, and its enemies,
>> as never before.
>>
>> We do not speak for this movement, but for ourselves as of it. We
>> recognize no Cause over and above ourselves. But our selves are already
>> social: the whole human race produces the life of each one of its members,
>> now more than ever before. Our aim is simply to make this process conscious
>> for the first time, to give to the production of human life the imaginative
>> intensity of a work at art.
>>
>> It is in this spirit that we call upon you to organize, as we are doing,
>> where you work and where you live, to begin planning the way we can run
>> society together, to defend yourselves against the deepening misery that is
>> being imposed on all of us. We call upon you to assault actively the lies,
>> the self-deceptions born of fear, that keep everyone frozen in place while
>> the world is falling apart around us. We call upon you to link up with us
>> and with others who are doing the same thing. Above all, we call upon you to
>> take yourselves and your desires seriously, to realize your own power to
>> master your own lives.
>>
>> It's now or never. If we are to have a future, we ourselves must be that
>> future.
>>
>> FOR OURSELVES!
>>
>> ----
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>> requests-AT-lists.nothingness.org
>>
>>
>
----
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To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe situationist" in the body of a message
to requests-AT-lists.nothingness.org
> "From boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in
> lines, at desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from
> prison-like schools to repetitious, mindless "entertainment," from desolate
> and crime-ridden streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a
> treadmill on which we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place."
>
> Are you doing this Chris? Or are you describing life in Alifornia and
> American TV?
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Christopher Gray <rasputin-AT-teleport.com
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> The Minimum Definition of Intelligence
>> Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory
>>
>>
>>
>> A Note from the Editor
>>
>> The "anarchist community", today, is renown for replicating and increasing
>> the rate of errors wherever it scourges for self-meaning, especially with
>> regard to theory and historical truth. So, in the case of this text! Rather
>> than check for accuracy, they copy from each other until, like the "secret"
>> passed around a table, the "returning" resembles the original only in the
>> imagination. This is the spectacularization process embodied in
>> characterological slack.
>>
>> This particular text has been diluted into many titles, many with recycled
>> views camouflaging contact with the authors as well as psycho-malpractice.
>> These include:
>>
>> Self-Theory: The Pleasure of Thinking For Yourself
>>
>> This was the one put out by the associates of For Ourselves at The
>> Spectacle in East Lansing, Michigan USA in 1975. They re-formatted, stuck to
>> the original text, gave credit, and forwarded communication.
>>
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory: A Beginner's Guide
>>
>> This also stuck fairly close to the original, changed graphics, but left
>> out both the For Ourselves Post-notes and Preamble, and failed to mention
>> the original authors.
>>
>> From here on, the rest of the copies lose more and more of the reality of
>> the text, the times, and the authors in the copy process. They all begin to
>> blindfully believe, and even state, that the first copy was the original..
>> That kind of investigation-free falsification is characterologically
>> intentional and mocks the very call for authenticity that 'self-theory'
>> demands as a practicable self-definition.
>>
>> It is no wonder that the "anarchist movement" is anaemic and unattractive,
>> and according to colonizing "plan", they blame the historical victim — the
>> all of humanity — because they refuse to follow these 'copies' of the
>> failing side of the "Anarchist" and the "Situationist" once again....
>> Repeating failure better is their next-to-greatest accomplishment. The
>> greatest is reserved for their dismissal from the stage[d] history to which
>> they lay pompous claim....
>>
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory
>> The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking For Yourself
>> Revolutionary Self-help: A Beginner's Manual
>> The Joy of Thinking... For Yourself
>> Revolutionary Self-Theory: A Beginner's Manual
>> There's "making theory your own" and there's the "ownership of theory" —
>> the definition of "ideology". These replicants separate the "self" and the
>> "other" (or "non-self") from their social totalness found precisely within
>> each other. Theirs is an endless "therapy" for an endless "atomism". The
>> title mutations exemplify the trend of turning even the most vibrant moments
>> into vapid, lifeless consumables, complete with marketing trend and annual
>> reports (e.g., the "SF Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair"), as does the
>> eradication of the organizational (social and practicable-connected)
>> statement in the original. Attacks on Leninism walk hand-in-hand with his
>> adhocist shadow.
>>
>> Hording credit and communication is an anarcho-Stalinist trait. It wears a
>> heavy dose of the scent of its enemies to lure in "followers of the faith";
>> it "needs" more than desires loyal objects. It is a life style based in a
>> state of denial of "the other", and justifies falsification of all
>> transcendent connectivity in the name of abstract individualism and abstract
>> collectivism. Duct tape sells big time in black....
>>
>> Essentially, metaphorically, and explicitly, this "movement" is for the
>> anti-copyright, that "new world" assessment wherein the current one is
>> mirrored — merely co-dependently — and abstractively negated. It cannot
>> comprehend — and fears — the concept of an omni-copyright, a world wherein
>> all that has come before it is used more robustly and without
>> totality-sacrificial filtering by an old world stupor. So much gaze and so
>> little imagination! A movement chasing capital's tail, drumming to the
>> mantra of "duh".
>>
>> This is the original text, without any of their fear of authentic
>> historical moments lived by and created through the members of For
>> Ourselves. I would rather embrace and appreciate the flaws of a truthful
>> past as my own, than pass off flawed replicas as my own truth. Sure, we all
>> make mistakes — providing all of us the opportunity to freshly and
>> dialectically transcend them — but here's a movement that doesn't even
>> bother to improve on much of anything from the past. It finds a depressing
>> contentment to dress, rant, and fail better than the past. They either don't
>> care very much — resplendent spectators to their own existences — or hate
>> their jobs as distractors, inverters, and diverters to do better in
>> anything. This, while swilling, regurgitating, and never digesting the
>> theory of the Situationists and Anarchists with a gluttonous disdain.
>>
>> As usual in the work of the 'half-assed', I have found misppelled words
>> such as "blinders" spelled as "blinkers" spattered throughout. There are
>> missing periods, words run together, chunks of missing text, ad finitum.
>> It's like a dream without color, speech without pauses, or music without
>> silence: all examples of the life-posing and the righteously
>> self-dispossessed.
>>
>> Beyond appalling, it's quite sad how a "movement" pretending to be "for a
>> new world" is actually the vanguard of one embracing greater quantitifcation
>> of any real life (thus far spared from mediation, scarcification,
>> paltrification, etc.) and of the qualification of lowered expectations in a
>> "new world [made-to-]order", i.e., one whose marching orders are built upon
>> "Generalized Self-dumbification", with a parade of "anarchist" commodities
>> storm-trooping the launch of this dismal world onto all of us disbelivers.
>> They are the perfect hosts of that dysfunctional and equally-unattractive
>> reality. Like the perpetual preview of the never-seen giant squid or coming
>> idiot science and communications attractions from the blimping Gore and
>> Moore — we keep wondering what sustains them, and conclude that their 'anti'
>> power is seethed from that same fester as triad of
>> self-and-other-sacrificing religions from the Middle East. Both are dead-set
>> against everyone, especially themselves. If left to their mutations, the
>> text will undoubtedly end up as "The Self-sacrifice Manual" or "The Pain of
>> Thinking".
>>
>> In countering that, I have re-included the original title, the group
>> post-notes, the Preamble, and links to the groups other projects. The time
>> spent actually learning from history and from paradox seems so much more
>> enjoyable than pretending to exist in a fog of self-absence, wearing the
>> skinned creations of friends from the past who were gutsy enough to demand
>> more of themselves and of us.
>>
>> Original Introduction
>>
>> This booklet is for people who are dissatisfied with their lives. If you
>> are happy with your present existence, we have no argument with you.
>>
>> However, if you are tired of waiting for your life to change...
>> tired of waiting for authentic community, love and adventure...
>> tired of waiting for the end of money and forced work...
>> tired of looking for new pastimes to pass the time...
>> tired of waiting for a lush, rich existence...
>> tired of waiting for a situation in which you can realise all your
>> desires...
>> tired of waiting for the end of all authorities, alienations, ideologies
>> and moralities...
>> ...then we think you'll find what follows to be quite handy.
>>
>> I
>>
>> One of the great secrets of our miserable yet potentially marvellous time
>> is that thinking can be a pleasure. This is a manual for constructing your
>> own self-theory. Constructing your self-theory is a revelutionary pleasure,
>> the pleasure of constructing your self-theory of revolution.
>>
>> Building your self-theory is a destructive/constructive pleasure, because
>> you are building a theory-of-practice for the destructive/constructive
>> transformation of this society.
>>
>> Self-theory is a theory of adventure. It is as erotic and humorous as an
>> authentic revolution.
>>
>> The alienation felt as a result of having had your thinking done for you
>> by the ideologies of our day, can lead to the search for the pleasurable
>> negation of that alienation: thinking for yourself. It is the pleasure of
>> making your mind your own.
>>
>> Self-theory is the body of critical thought you construct for your own
>> use. You construct it and use it when you make an analysis of why your life
>> is the way it is, why the world is the way it is. (And 'thinking' and
>> 'feeling' are inseparable, since thought comes from subjective, emotive
>> experience.) You build your self-theory when you develop a theory of
>> practice — a theory of how to get what you desire for your life.
>>
>> Theory will be either a practical theory — a theory of revolutionary
>> practice — or it will be nothing... nothing but an aquarium of ideas, a
>> contemplative interpretation of the world. The realm of ideals is the
>> eternal waiting-room of unrealised desire.
>>
>> Those who assume (usually unconsciously) the impossibility of realising
>> their life's desires, and of thus fighting for themselves, usually end up
>> fighting for an ideal or cause instead (i.e., the illusion of selfactivity
>> or self-practice). Those who know that this is the acceptance of alienation
>> will now know that all ideals and causes are ideologies.
>>
>> II
>>
>> Whenever a system of ideas is structured with an abstraction at the centre
>> — assigning a role or duties to you for its sake — this system is an
>> ideology. An ideology is a system of false consciousness in which you no
>> longer function as the subject in your relation to the world.
>>
>> The various forms of ideology are all structured around different
>> abstractions, yet they all serve the interests of a dominant (or aspiring
>> dominant) class by giving you a sense of purpose in your sacrifice,
>> suffering and submission.
>>
>> Religious ideology is the oldest example, the fantastic projection called
>> 'God' is the Supreme Subject of the cosmos, acting on every human being as
>> 'His' subject.
>>
>> In the 'scientific' and 'democratic' ideologies of bourgeois enterprise,
>> capital investment is the 'productive' subject directing world history — the
>> 'invisible hand' guiding human development. The bourgeoisie had to attack
>> and weaken the power that religious ideology once held. It exposed the
>> mystification of the religious world in its technological investigation,
>> expanding the realm of things and methods out of which it could make a
>> profit.
>>
>> The various brands of Leninism are 'revolutionary' ideologies in which
>> their Party is the rightful subject to dictate world history, by leading its
>> object — the proletariat — to the goal of replacing the bourgeois apparatus
>> with a Leninist one.
>>
>> The many other forms of the dominant ideologies can be seen daily. The
>> rise of the new religiomsyticisms serve the dominant structure of social
>> relations in a round about way. They provide a neat form in which the
>> emptiness of daily life may be obscured, and like drugs, make it easier to
>> live with. Volunteerism (shoulder to the wheel) and determinism (it'll all
>> work out) prevent us from recognising our real place in the functioning of
>> the world. In avant-garde ideology, novelty in (and of) itself is what's
>> important. In survivalism, subjectivity is preempted by fear through the
>> invocation of the image of an impending world catastrophe.
>>
>> In accepting ideologies we accept an inversion of subject and object;
>> things take on a human power and will, while human beings have their place
>> as things. Ideology is upside-down theory. We further accept the separation
>> between the narrow reality of our daily life, and the image of a world
>> totality that's out of our grasp. Ideology offers us only a voyeur's
>> relationship with the totality.
>>
>> In this separation, and this acceptance of sacrifice for the cause, every
>> ideology serves to protect the dominant social order. Authorities whose
>> power depends on separation must deny us our subjectivity in order to
>> survive themselves. Such denial comes in the form of demanding sacrifices
>> for 'the common good', 'the national interest', 'the war effort', 'the
>> revolution'....
>>
>> III
>>
>> We get rid of the blinders of ideology by constantly asking ourselves...
>> How do I feel?
>>
>> Am I enjoying myself?
>> How's my life?
>> Am I getting what I want?
>> Why not?
>> What's keeping me from getting what I want?
>> This is having consciousnessof the commonplace, awareness of one's
>> everyday routine. That Everyday Life — real life — exists, is a public
>> secret that gets less secret every day, as the poverty of daily life gets
>> more and more visible.
>>
>> IV
>>
>> The construction of self-theory is based on thinking for yourself, being
>> fully conscious of desires and their validity. It is the construction of
>> radical subjectivity.
>>
>> Authentic 'consciousness raising' can only be the 'raising' of people's
>> thinking to the level' of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness:
>> developing their basic subjectivity, free of ideology and imposed morality
>> in all its forms.
>>
>> The essence of what many leftists, therapy-mongers, racism awareness
>> trainers and sisterisers term 'consciousness raising' is their practice of
>> beating people into unconsciousness with their ideological billyclubs.
>>
>> The path from ideology (self-negation) to radical subjectivity
>> (self-affirmation) passes through Point Zero, the capital city of nihilism.
>> This is the windswept still point in social space and time... the social
>> limbo wherein which one recognises that the present is devoid of life; that
>> there is no life in one's daily existence. A nihilist knows the difference
>> between surviving and living.
>>
>> Nihilists go through a reversal or perspective on their life and the
>> world. Nothing is true for them but their desires, their will to be. They
>> refuse all ideology in their hatred for the miserable social relations in
>> modern capitalist-global society. From this reversed perspective they see
>> with a newly acquired clarity the upside-down world of reification(i), the
>> inversion of subject and object, of abstract and concrete. It is the
>> theatrical landscape of fetishised commodities, mental projections,
>> separations and ideologies: art, God, city planning, ethics, smile buttons,
>> radio stations that say they love you and detergents that have compassion
>> for your hands.
>>
>> Daily conversation offers sedatives like: "You can't always get what you
>> want", "Life has its ups and downs", and other dogmas of the secular
>> religion of survival. 'Common sense' is just the nonsense of common
>> alienation. Every day people are denied an authentic life and sold back its
>> representation.
>>
>> Nihilists constantly feel the urge to destroy the system which destroys
>> them each day. They cannot go on living as they are, their minds are on
>> fire. Soon enough they run up against the fact that they must come up with a
>> coherent set of tactics that will have a practical effect on the world.
>>
>> But if a nihilist does not know of the historical possibility for the
>> transformation of the world, his or her subjective rage will coralise into a
>> role: the suicide, the solitary murderer, the street hoodlum vandal, the
>> neo-dadaist, the professional mental patient... all seeking compensation for
>> a life of dead time.
>>
>> The nihilists' mistake is that they do not realise that there are others
>> who are also nihilists. Consequently they assume that common communication
>> and participation in a project of self-realisation is impossible.
>>
>> V
>>
>> To have a 'political' orientation towards one's life is just to know that
>> you can only change your life by changing the nature of life itself through
>> transfermation of the world — and that transformation of the world requires
>> collective effort.
>>
>> This project of collective self-realisation can properly be termed
>> politics. However, 'politics' has become a mystified, separated category of
>> human activity. Along with all the other socially enforced separations of
>> human activity, 'politics' has become just another interest. It even has its
>> specialists — be they politicians or politicos. It is possible to be
>> interested (or not) in football, stamp collecting, disco music or fashion.
>> What people see as 'politics' today is the social falsification of the
>> project of collective self-realisation — and that suits those in power just
>> fine.
>>
>> Collective self-realisation is the revolutionary project. It is the
>> collective seizure of the totality of nature and social relations and their
>> transformation according to conscious desire.
>>
>> Authentic therapy is changing one's life by changing the nature of social
>> life. Therapy must be social if it is to be of any real consequence. Social
>> therapy (the healing of society) and individual therapy (the healing of the
>> individual) are linked together: each requires the other, each is a
>> necessary part of the other.
>>
>> For example: in spectacular society we are expected to repress our real
>> feelings and play a role. This is called 'playing a part in society'. (How
>> revealing that phrase is!) Individuals put on character armour - a
>> steel-like suit of role playing is directly related to the end of social
>> role playing.
>>
>> VI
>>
>> To think subjectively is to use your life — as it is now and as you want
>> it to be — as the centre of your thinking. This positive self-centring is
>> accomplished by the continuous assault on externals: all the false issues,
>> false conflicts, false problems, false identities and false dichotomies.
>>
>> People are kept from analysing the totality of everyday existence by being
>> asked their opinion of every detail: all the spectacular trifles, phoney
>> controversies and false scandals. Are you for or against trades unions,
>> cruise missiles, identity cards... what's your opinion of soft drugs,
>> jogging, UFO's, progressive taxation?
>>
>> These are false issues. The only issue for us is how we live.
>>
>> There is an old Jewish saying, "If you have only two alternatives, then
>> choose the third". It offers a way of getting the subject to search for a
>> new perspective on the problem. We can give the lie to both sides of a false
>> conflict by taking our 'third choice' — to view the situation from the
>> perspective of radical subjectivity.
>>
>> Being conscious of the third choice is refusing to choose between two
>> supposedly opposite, but really equal, polarities that try to define
>> themselves as the totality of a situation. In its simplest form, this
>> consciousness is expressed by the worker who is brought to trial for armed
>> robbery and asked, "Do you plead guilty or not guilty?". "I'm unemployed",
>> he replies. A more theoretical but equally classic illustration is the
>> refusal to acknowledge any essential difference between the
>> corporate-capitalist ruling classes of the 'West' and the state-capitalist
>> ruling classes of the 'East'. All we have to do is look at the basic social
>> relations of production in the USA and Europe on the one hand, and the USSR
>> and China on the other, to see that they are essentially the same: over
>> there, as here, the vast majority go to work for a wage or salary in
>> exchange for giving up control over both the means of production and what
>> they produce (which is then sold back to them in the form of commodities).
>>
>> In the case of the 'West' the surplus value (ie that which is produced
>> over and above the value of the workers' wages) is the property of the
>> corporate managements who keep up a show of domestic competition. In the
>> 'East' the surplus value is the property of the state bureaucracy, which
>> does not permit domestic competition but engages in international
>> competition as furiously as any other capitalist nation. Big difference.
>>
>> An example of a false problem is that stupid conversational question,
>> "What's your philosophy of life?". It poses an abstract concept of 'Life'
>> that, despite the word's constant appearance in conversation, has nothing to
>> do with real life, because it ignores the fact that 'living' is what we are
>> doing at the present moment.
>>
>> In the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phoney
>> social identities, corresponding to their individual role in the Spectacle
>> (in which people contemplate and consume images of what life is, so that
>> they will forget how to live for themselves). These social identities can be
>> ethnic ('Italian'), racial ('Black'), organisational ('Trade Unionist'),
>> residential ('New Yorker'), sexual ('Gay'), cultural ('sports' fan'), and so
>> on: but all are rooted in a common desire for affiliation, for belonging..
>>
>> Obviously being 'black' is a lot more real as an identification than being
>> a 'sports fan', but beyond a certain point these identities only serve to
>> mask our real position in society. Again, the only issue for us is how we
>> live. Concretely, this means understanding the reasons for the nature of
>> one's life in one's relation to society as a whole. To do this one has to
>> shed all the false identities, the partial associations, and begin with
>> oneself as the centre. From here we can examine the material basis of life,
>> stripped of all mystification.
>>
>> For example: suppose I want a cup of coffee from the machine at work.
>> First of all, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers
>> on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantations and in the
>> refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have all the
>> workers who made the different parts of the machine and assembled it. Then
>> the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, drilled
>> the oil and refined it. Then all the workers who transported the raw
>> materials and parts over three continents and two oceans. Then the clerks,
>> typists and communications workers who co-ordinate the production and
>> transportation. Finally you have all the workers who produce all the other
>> things necessary for the others to survive. That gives me a direct material
>> relationship to several million people: in fact, to the immense majority of
>> the world's population. They produce my life: and I help to produce theirs.
>> In this light, all partial group identities and special interests fade into
>> insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of one's life that is
>> presently locked up in the frustrated creativity of those millions of
>> workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production,
>> strangled by alienation, warped by the insane rationale of capital
>> accumulation! Here we begin to discover a real social identity: in people
>> all over the world who are fighting to win back their lives, we find
>> ourselves.
>>
>> We are constantly being asked to choose between two sides in a false
>> conflict. Governments, charities and propagandists of all kinds are fond of
>> presenting us with choices that are no choice at all (eg the Central
>> Electricity Generating Board presented its nuclear programme with the slogan
>> 'Nuclear Age or Stone Age'. The CEGB would like us to believe that these are
>> the only two alternatives — we have the illusion of choice, but as long as
>> they control the choices we perceive as available to us, they also control
>> the outcome).
>>
>> The new moralists love to tell those in the rich West how they will 'have
>> to make sacrifices', how they 'exploit the starving children of the Third
>> World'. The choice we are given is between sacrificial altruism or narrow
>> individualism. (Charities cash in on the resulting guilt by offering us a
>> feeling of having done something, in exchange for a coin in the collecting
>> tin.) Yes, by living in the rich West we do exploit the poor of the Third
>> World — but not personally, not deliberately. We can make some changes in
>> our life, boycott, make sacrifices, but the effects are marginal. We become
>> aware of the false conflict we are being presented with when we realise that
>> under this global social system we, as individuals, are as locked in our
>> global role as 'exploiters' as others are in their global role as the
>> exploited. We have a role in society, but little or no power to do anything
>> about it. We reject the false choice of 'sacrifice or selfishness' by
>> calling for the destruction of the global social system whose existence
>> forces that decision upon us. It isn't a case of tinkering with the system,
>> of offering token sacrifices or calling for 'a little less selfishness'.
>> Charities and reformers never break out of the terrain of the false choice.
>>
>> Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present situation
>> constantly drag us back to their false choices — that is, any choice which
>> keeps their power intact. With myths like 'If we shared it all out there
>> wouldn't be enough to go round', they attempt to deny the existence of any
>> other choices and to hide from us the fact that the material preconditions
>> for social revolution already exist.
>>
>> VII
>>
>> Any journey towards self-demystification must avoid those two quagmires of
>> lost thought — absolutism and cynicism; twin swamps that camouflage
>> themselves as meadows of subjectivity.
>>
>> Absolutism is the total acceptance or rejection of all components of
>> particular ideologies, spectacles and reifications. An absolutist cannot see
>> any other choice than complete acceptance or complete rejection .
>>
>> The absolutist wanders along the shelves of the ideological supermarket
>> looking for the ideal commodity, and then buys it — lock, stock and barrel.
>> but the ideological supermarket — like any supermarket — is fit only for
>> looting. It is more productive for us if we can move along the shelves, rip
>> open the packets, take out what looks authentic and useful, and dump the
>> rest.
>>
>> Cynicism is a reaction to a world dominated by ideology and morality.
>> Faced with conflicting ideologies the cynic says: "a plague on both your
>> houses". The cynic is as much a consumer as the absolutist, but one who has
>> given up hope of ever finding the ideal commodity.
>>
>> VIII
>>
>> The process of dialectical thinking is constructive thinking, a process of
>> continually synthesising one's current body of self- theory with new
>> observations and appropriations; a resolution of the contradictions between
>> the previous body of theory and new theoretical elements. The resulting
>> synthesis is thus not some quantitative summation of the previous and the
>> new, but their qualitative supersession, a new totality.
>>
>> This synthetic / dialectic method of constructing a theory is counter to
>> the eclectic style which just collects a rag-bag of its favourite bits from
>> favourite ideologies without ever confronting the resulting contradictions.
>> Modern examples include libertarian capitalism, christian marxism and
>> liberalism in general.
>>
>> If we are continually conscious of how we want to live, we can critically
>> appropriate from anything in the construction of our self-theory:
>> ideologies, culture critics, technocratic experts, sociological studies,
>> mystics and so forth. All the rubbish of the old world can be scavenged for
>> useful material by those who desire to reconstruct it.
>>
>> IX
>>
>> The nature of modern society, its global and capitalist unity, indicates
>> to us the necessity of making our self-theory a unitary critique. By this we
>> mean a critique of all geographic areas where various forms of
>> socio-economic domination exist (ie both the capitalism of the 'free' world
>> and the state-capitalism of the 'communist' world), as well as a critique of
>> all alienations (sexual poverty, enforced survival, urbanism, etc). In other
>> words, a critique of the totality of daily existence everywhere, from the
>> perspective of the totality of one's desires.
>>
>> Ranged against this project are all the politicians and bureaucrats,
>> preachers and gurus, city planners and policemen, reformers and militants,
>> central committees and censors, corporate managers and union leaders, male
>> supremacists and feminist ideologues, psyche-sociologists and conservation
>> capitalists who work to subordinate individual desire to a reified 'common
>> good' that has supposedly designated them as its representatives. They are
>> all forces of the old world, all bosses, priests and creeps who have
>> something to lose if people extend the game of seizing back their minds into
>> seizing back their lives.
>>
>> Revolutionary theory and revolutionary ideology are enemies — and both
>> know it.
>>
>> X
>>
>> By now it should be obvious that self-demystification and the construction
>> of our own revolutionary theory doesn't eradicate our alienation: 'the
>> world' (capital and the Spec tacle) goes on, reproducing itself every day.
>>
>> Although this booklet had the construction of self-theory as its focus, we
>> never intended to imply that revolutionary theory can exist separate from
>> revolutionary practice. In order to be consequential, effectively to
>> reconstruct the world, practice must seek its theory, and theory must be
>> realised in practice. The revolutionary prospect of disalienation and the
>> transformation of social relations requires that one's theory be nothing
>> other than a theory of practice, of what we do and how we live. Otherwise
>> theory will degenerate into an impotent contemplation of the world, and
>> ultimately into survival ideology — a projected mental fogbank, a static
>> body of reified thought, of intellectual armour, that acts as a buffer
>> between the daily world and oneself. And if revolutionary practice is not
>> the practice of revolutionary theory, it degenerates into altruistic
>> militantism, 'revolutionary' activity as one's social duty.
>>
>> We don't strive for a coherent theory purely as an end in itself. For us,
>> the practical use value of coherence is that having a coherent self-theory
>> makes it easier for someone to think. As an example, it's easier to get a
>> handle on future developments in social control if you have a coherent
>> understanding of modern social control ideologies and techniques up to the
>> present.
>>
>> Having a coherent theory makes it easier to conceive of the theoretical
>> practice for realising your desires for your life.
>>
>> XI
>>
>> In the process of constructing self-theory, the last ideologies that have
>> to be wrestled with and determinedly pinned down are the ones that most
>> closely resemble revolutionary theory. These final mystifications are a)
>> situationism b)councilism.
>>
>> The Situationist International (1958-1971) was an international
>> revolutionary organisation that made an immense contribution to
>> revolutionary theory. Situationist theory is a body of critical theory that
>> can be appropriated into one's self-theory, and nothing more. Anything more
>> is the ideological misappropriation known as situationism.
>>
>> For those who newly discover it, SI theory has a way of seeming like 'the
>> answer I've been searching for for years', the answer to the riddle of one's
>> dead life. But that's exactly when a new alertness and self-possession
>> become necessary. Situationism can be quite the complete survival ideology,
>> a defence mechanism against the wear and tear of daily life. included in the
>> ideology is the spectacular commodity-role of being 'a situationist', ie a
>> radical jade and ardent esoteric.
>>
>> Councilism (aka 'Workers' Control', 'Syndicalism') offers 'self-
>> management' as a replacement for the capitalist system of production.
>>
>> Real self-management is the direct management (unmediated by any separate
>> leadership) of social production, distribution and communication by workers
>> and their communities. The movement for self-management has appeared again
>> and again all over the world in the course of social revolution. Russia in
>> 1905 and 1917-21, Spain in 1936-7, Hungary in 1956, Algeria in 1960, Chile
>> in 1972 and Portugal in 1975. The form of organisation most often created in
>> the practice of self-management has been workers' councils: sovereign
>> general assemblies of the producers and neighbourhoods that elect mandated
>> delegates to co-ordinate their activities. The delegates are not
>> representatives, but carry out decisions already made by their assemblies.
>> Delegates can be recalled at any time, should the general assembly feel that
>> its decisions are not being rigorously carried out.
>>
>> Councilism is this historical practice and theory of self- management
>> turned into an ideology. Whereas the participants in these uprisings lived a
>> critique of the social totality, beginning with a critique of wage labour,
>> of the commodity economy and exchange value, councilism makes a partial
>> critique: it seeks not the self-managed, continuous and qualitative
>> transformation of the whole world, but the static, quantitive
>> self-management of the world as it is. The economy thus remains a separate
>> realm cut off from the rest of daily life and dominating it. On the other
>> hand a movement for generalised self- management seeks the transformation of
>> all sectors of social life and all social relations (production, sexuality,
>> housing, services, communications, etc), councilism thinks that a
>> self-managed economy is all that matters. It misses, literally, the whole
>> point: subjectivity and the desire to transform the whole of life. The
>> problem with workers' control is that all it controls is work.
>>
>> The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
>> activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down.
>> Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not
>> sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement
>> in which all the mystifications of the past are being consciously swept
>> away.
>>
>> Post-notes
>>
>> This booklet is part of the collective self-theory of the members of our
>> organization. It is the statement of what we call our meta-theory, our
>> theory of the practice of theory-making.
>>
>> The preparation and dissemination of The Minimum Definition of
>> Intelligence is undertaken for the same reason we do everything else we do:
>> because we want to catalyze a social revolution that will transform the
>> present static layout of alienation into a moving landscape of realized
>> dreams. We know we can only create the lives that we want tin the process of
>> everyone else creating the lives that they want. We are revolutionaries
>> because our desires require a social revolution for their realization.
>>
>> The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
>> activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down.
>> Spontaneous rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not
>> sufficient. An authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement
>> in which all the mystifications of the past are consciously being swept
>> away.
>>
>> Preamble
>>
>> We have woken up to discover that our lives are becoming unliveable. From
>> boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in lines,
>> at desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from prison-like
>> schools to repetitious, mindless "entertainment," from desolate and
>> crime-ridden streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a
>> treadmill on which we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place.
>>
>> Like the immense majority of the population, we have no control over the
>> use to which our lives are put: we are people who have nothing to sell but
>> our capacity to work. We have come together because we can no longer
>> tolerate the way we are forced to exist, we can no longer tolerate being
>> squeezed dry of our energies, being used up and thrown away, only to create
>> a world that grows more alien and ugly every day.
>>
>> The system of Capital, whether in its "Western" private-corporate or
>> "Eastern" state-bureaucratic form, was brutal and exploitative even during
>> its ascent: now, where it is in decay, it poisons air and water, produces
>> goods and services of deteriorating quality, and is less and less able to
>> employ us even to its own advantage. Its logic of accumulation and
>> competition leads inexorably toward its own collapse. Even as it links all
>> the people of the world together in one vast network of production and
>> consumption, it isolates us from each other; even as it stimulates greater
>> and greater advances in technology and productive power, it finds itself
>> incapable of putting them to use: even as it multiplies the possibilities
>> for human self-realization, we find ourselves strangled in layers of guilt,
>> fear and self-contempt.
>>
>> But it is we ourselves — our strength, our intelligence, our creativity,
>> our passions-that are the greatest productive power of all. It is we who
>> produce and reproduce the world as it is, in the image of Capital; it is we
>> who reinforce in each other the conditioning of family, school, church and
>> media, the conditioning that keeps us slaves. When we decide together to end
>> our misery, to take our lives into our own hands, we can recreate the world
>> the way we want it. The technical resources and worldwide productive network
>> developed under the old system give us the means: the crisis and continuing
>> collapse of that system give us the chance and the urgent need.
>>
>> The ruling ideologies of the world superpowers, with their interlocking
>> sets of lies, offer us only the false choice of "Communism" versus
>> "Capitalism". But in the history of revolution during this century (Russia,
>> 1905; Germany, 1919-20; Spain, 1936-37; Hungary, 1956) we have discovered
>> the general form through which we can take back power over our own lives:
>> workers'councils. At their highest moments these councils were popular
>> assemblies in workplaces and communities, joined together by means of
>> strictly mandated delegates who carried out decisions already made by their
>> assemblies and who could be recalled by them at any time. The councils
>> organized their nwn defense and restarted production under their own
>> management. By now, through a system of councils at the local, regional, and
>> global level, using modern telecommunications and data processing, we can
>> coordinate and plan world production as well as be free to shape our own
>> immediate environment. Any compromise with bureaucracy and official
>> heirarchy, anything short of the total power of workers' councils, can only
>> reproduce misery and alienation in a new form, as a good look at the
>> so-called "Communist" countries will show. For this reason, no political
>> party can represent the revolutionary movement or seize power "on its
>> behalf", since this would be simply a change of ruling classes, not their
>> abolition. The plan of the freely associated producers is in absolute
>> opposition to the dictatorial Plan of state and corporate production. Only
>> all of us together can decide what is best for us.
>>
>> For these reasons, we call upon you and upon all the hundreds of millions
>> like you and us, to join us in the revolutionary transformation of every
>> aspect of life. We want to abolish the system of wage and salaried labor, of
>> commodity exchange-value and of profit, of corporate and bureaucratic power.
>> We want to decide the nature and conditions of everything we do, to manage
>> all social life collectively and democratically. We want to end the division
>> of mental from manual work and of "free" time from work time, by bringing
>> into play all our abilities for enjoyable creative activity. We want the
>> whole world to be our conscious self-creation, so that our days are full of
>> wonder, learning, and pleasure. Nothing less.
>>
>> In setting down this minimum program, we are not trying to impose an ideal
>> on reality, nor are we alone in wanting what we want. Our ideas are already
>> in everyone's minds, consciously or unconsciously, because they are nothing
>> but an expression of the real movement that exists all over the planet. But
>> in order to win, this movement must know itself, its aims, and its enemies,
>> as never before.
>>
>> We do not speak for this movement, but for ourselves as of it. We
>> recognize no Cause over and above ourselves. But our selves are already
>> social: the whole human race produces the life of each one of its members,
>> now more than ever before. Our aim is simply to make this process conscious
>> for the first time, to give to the production of human life the imaginative
>> intensity of a work at art.
>>
>> It is in this spirit that we call upon you to organize, as we are doing,
>> where you work and where you live, to begin planning the way we can run
>> society together, to defend yourselves against the deepening misery that is
>> being imposed on all of us. We call upon you to assault actively the lies,
>> the self-deceptions born of fear, that keep everyone frozen in place while
>> the world is falling apart around us. We call upon you to link up with us
>> and with others who are doing the same thing. Above all, we call upon you to
>> take yourselves and your desires seriously, to realize your own power to
>> master your own lives.
>>
>> It's now or never. If we are to have a future, we ourselves must be that
>> future.
>>
>> FOR OURSELVES!
>>
>> ----
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>> requests-AT-lists.nothingness.org
>>
>>
>
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creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / Christopher Gray / 30 Jun 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / richard haden <richard_haden-AT-yahoo.com> / 30 Jun 2009
fyi: "Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory" / Christopher Gray <rasputin-AT-teleport.com> / 01 Jul 2009
Re: fyi: "Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory" / richard haden <richard_haden-AT-yahoo.com> / 01 Jul 2009
Re: fyi: "Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory" / Vikki Riley <riley.vikki-AT-gmail.com> / 01 Jul 2009
• Re: fyi: "Theses on the Construction of One's Own Self-theory" / Vikki Riley <riley.vikki-AT-gmail.com> / 01 Jul 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / Vikki Riley <riley.vikki-AT-gmail.com> / 01 Jul 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / JEAN PARR <jeanparr-AT-btinternet.com> / 01 Jul 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / JEAN PARR <jeanparr-AT-btinternet.com> / 02 Jul 2009
RE: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / Diana Manister <dmanister-AT-hotmail.com> / 02 Jul 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / JEAN PARR <jeanparr-AT-btinternet.com> / 02 Jul 2009
Re: creating social festival in place of capital and class (a pre-invitation) / Vikki Riley <riley.vikki-AT-gmail.com> / 02 Jul 2009
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