
The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

  The equal right of all to the goods and enjoyment of this world, the
  destruction of all authority, the negation of all moral restraints --
  these, at bottom, are the raison d'être of the March 18th insurrection and
  the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an army. 

Enquête parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars 


73 
   The real movement that abolishes reigning conditions governed society from
   the moment the bourgeoisie triumphed in the economic sphere, and it did so 
   visibly once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The
   development of the forces of production had shattered the old relations of
   production; every static order had crumbled to nothing. And everything that
   had formerly been absolute became historical. 

74 
   It is because human beings have thus been thrust into history, and into
   participation in the labor and the struggles which constitute history, that
   they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a clear-eyed
   manner. The history in question has no goal aside from whatever effects it
   works upon itself, even though the last unconscious metaphysical vision of
   the historical era may view the productive progression through which history
   has unfolded as itself the object of that history. As for the subject of
   history, it can only be the self-production of the living: the living
   becoming master and possessor of its world -- that is, of history -- and
   coming to exist as consciousness of its own activity. 

75 
   The class struggles of the long revolutionary period ushered in by the rise
   of the bourgeoisie have evolved in tandem with the "thought of history," with
   the dialectic -- with a truly historical thinking that is not content simply
   to seek the meaning of what is but aspires to understand the dissolution of
   everything that is -- and in the process to dissolve all separation. 

76 
   For Hegel it was no longer a matter of interpreting the world, but rather of
   interpreting the world's transformation. Inasmuch as he did no more than
   interpret that transformation, however, Hegel was merely the philosophical
   culmination of philosophy. He sought to understand a world that made itself.
   Such historical thought was still part of that consciousness which comes on
   the scene too late and supplies a justification after the fact. It thus
   transcended separation -- but it did so in thought only. Hegel's paradoxical
   posture, which subordinates the meaning of all reality to its historical
   culmination, while at the same time revealing this meaning by proclaiming 
   itself to be that culmination, arises from the simple fact that the great
   thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth
   centuries strove in his philosophy merely for reconciliation with the results
   of those revolutions. "Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it
   does not reflect the entire process of that revolution, but only its
   concluding phase. It is thus a philosophy, not of the revolution, but of the
   restoration" (Karl Korsch, "Theses on Hegel and Revolution"). Hegel performed
   the task of the philosopher -- "the glorification of what exists" -- for the
   last time, but, even for him, what existed could only be the totality of the
   movement of history. Since the external position of thought was nevertheless
   maintained, this could be masked only by identifying that thought with a
   preexisting project of the Spirit -- of that absolute heroic force which has
   done what it willed and willed what it has done, that force whose achievement
   is the present. So philosophy, as it expires in the arms of truly historical
   thinking, can no longer glorify its world without denying it, for even in
   order to express itself it must assume that the total history in which it has
   vested everything has come to an end, and that the only court capable of
   ruling on truth or falsehood has been adjourned. 

77 
   When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that historical
   thought has not after all forgotten and lost itself, that thought's 
   conclusions are negated, but at the same time the validity of its method is
   confirmed. 

78 
   Historical thought can be saved only if it becomes practical thought; and the
   practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class cannot be less than
   historical consciousness applied to the totality of its world. All the
   theoretical strands of the revolutionary workers' movement stem from critical
   confrontation with Hegelian thought, and this goes for Marx as for Stirner
   and Bakunin. 

79 
   The inseparability of Marx's theory from the Hegelian method is itself
   inseparable from that theory's revolutionary character, that is to say, from
   its truth. It is under this aspect that the relationship between Marx and
   Hegel has generally been ignored, ill understood or even denounced as the
   weak point of what has been fallaciously transformed into a Marxist dogma.
   Deploring the less-than-scientific predictions of the Manifesto of 1848
   concerning the imminence of proletarian revolution in Germany, Bernstein
   perfectly described this connection between the dialectical method and a
   historical taking of sides: "Such historical autosuggestion, so grievously
   mistaken that the commonest of political visionaries would be hard pressed to
   top it, would be incomprehensible in a Marx -- who by that period had already
   become a serious student of the economy -- were it not possible to recognize
   here the traces of a lingering loyalty to Hegel's antithetical dialectics,
   from which Marx, no more than Engels, had never completely emancipated
   himself. In view of the general turbulence of the times, this was all the
   more fatal to him." 

80 
   The inversion that Marx effected in order to salvage the thought of the
   bourgeois revolutions by "transplanting" it was no trivial substitution of
   the material development of the forces of production for the unfolding of the
   Hegelian Spirit on its way to its rendezvous with itself in time, its
   objectification being indistinguishable from its alienation, and its
   historical wounds leaving no scars. For history, once it becomes real, no
   longer has an end. What Marx did was to demolish Hegel's detached stance with
   respect to what occurs, along with the contemplation of a supreme external
   agent of whatever kind. Theory thence-forward had nothing to know beyond what
   it itself did. By contrast, the contemplation of the movement of the economy
   in the dominant thought of present-day society is indeed a non-inverted
   legacy of the undialectical aspect of the Hegelian attempt to create a
   circular system; this thought is an approbatory one which no longer has the
   dimension of the concept, which no longer has any need of Hegelianism to
   justify it, because the movement that it is designed to laud is a sector of
   the world where thought no longer has any place -- a sector whose mechanical
   development in effect dominates the world's development overall. Marx's
   project is the project of a conscious history whereby the quantitative realm
   that arises from the blind development of purely economic productive forces
   would be transformed into a qualitative appropriation of history. The 
   critique of political economy is the first act of this end of prehistory: "Of
   all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the
   revolutionary class itself." 

81 
   The close affinity of Marx's thinking with scientific thinking lies in its
   rational grasp of the forces actually at work in society. Fundamentally,
   though, Marx's theory lies beyond science, which is only preserved within it
   inasmuch as it is transcended by it. For Marx it is the struggle -- and by no
   means the law -- that has to be understood. "We know only a single science,"
   says The German Ideology, "the science of history." 

82 
   The bourgeois era, though eager to give history a scientific foundation,
   neglects the fact that the science available to it must certainly have been
   itself founded -- along with the economy -- on history. On the other hand,
   history is fundamentally dependent on economic knowledge only so long as it
   remains merely economic history. History's intervention in the economy (a
   global process that is after all capable of changing its own basic scientific
   preconditions) has in fact been overlooked by scientific observers to a
   degree well illustrated by the vain calculations of those socialists who
   believed that they could ascertain the exact periodicity of crises. Now that
   continual tinkering by the State has succeeded in compensating for the
   tendency for crises to occur, the same type of reasoning takes this delicate
   balance for a permanent economic harmony. If it is to master the science of
   society and bring it under its governance, the project of transcending the
   economy and taking possession of history cannot itself be scientific in
   character. The revolutionary point of view, so long as it persists in
   espousing the notion that history in the present period can be mastered by
   means of scientific knowledge, has failed to rid itself of all its bourgeois
   traits. 

83 
   The utopian strands in socialism, though they do have their historical roots
   in the critique of the existing social organization, are properly so called
   inasmuch as they deny history -- inasmuch, that is, as they deny the struggle
   that exists, along with any movement of the times beyond the immutable
   perfection of their image of a happy society. Not, however, because they deny
   science. On the contrary, the utopians were completely in thrall to
   scientific thinking, in the form in which this had imposed itself in the
   preceding centuries. Their goal was the perfection of this rational system.
   They certainly did not look upon themselves as prophets disarmed, for they
   believed firmly in the social power of scientific proof -- and even, in the
   case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. "However did they
   imagine," Sombart wonders, "that what needed to be proved might be won by
   fighting?" All the same, the utopians' scientific orientation did not extend
   to knowledge of the fact that social groups are liable to have vested
   interests in a status quo, forces at their disposal equipped to maintain it
   and indeed forms of false consciousness designed to buttress their positions.
   Their idea of things thus lagged far behind the historical reality of the
   development of science itself, which was by this time largely governed by the
   social demand arising from factors, such as those mentioned above, which
   determined not only what was considered scientifically acceptable but also
   just what might become an object of scientific research. The utopian
   socialists remained prisoners to the scientific manner of expounding the
   truth, and they viewed this truth in accordance with its pure abstract image
   -- the form in which it had established itself at a much earlier moment in
   social development. As Sorel noted, the utopians took astronomy as their
   model for the discovery and demonstration of the laws of society: their
   conception of harmony, so hostile to history, was the product, logically
   enough, of an attempted application to society of the science least dependent
   on history. This conception was introduced and promoted with an experimental
   ingenuousness worthy of Newtonism, and the smiling future continually evoked
   by the utopians played "a role in their social science analogous to that
   played by inertia in rational mechanics" (Matériaux pour une théorie du
   prolétariat). 

84 
   The scientific-determinist side of Marx's thought was indeed what made it
   vulnerable to "ideologization"; the breach was opened in Marx's own lifetime,
   and greatly widened in his theoretical legacy to the workers' movement. The
   advent of the subject of history was consequently set back even further, as
   economics, the historical science par excellence, was depended on more and
   more as guarantor of the necessity of its own future negation. In this way 
   revolutionary practice -- the only true agent of this negation -- tended to
   be thrust out of theory's field of vision altogether. It became important
   patiently to study economic development, and once more to accept, with
   Hegelian tranquility, the suffering it imposed -- that suffering whose
   outcome was still a "graveyard of good intentions." All of a sudden it was
   discovered that, according to the "science of revolutions," consciousness now
   always came on the scene too soon, and needed to be taught. "History has
   proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong," Engels would write in 1895.
   "It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent
   at that time was not, by a long way, ripe...." Throughout his life Marx
   upheld his theory's unitary standpoint, yet in the exposition of that theory
   he was drawn onto the ground of the dominant forms of thought, in that he
   undertook critiques of particular disciplines, and notably that of the
   fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was in this
   mutilated form, later taken as definitive, that Marx's theory became
   "Marxism." 

85 
   The weakness of Marx's theory is naturally part and parcel of the weakness of
   the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The working class
   failed to inaugurate permanent revolution in 1848, and the Commune went down
   in isolation. Revolutionary theory was thus still unable to come into full
   possession of its own existence. That Marx should have been reduced to
   defending and honing that theory in the detachment of scholarly work in the
   British Museum can only have had a debilitating effect on the theory itself.
   What is certain is that the scientific conclusions that Marx drew about the
   future development of the working class -- along with the organizational
   practice founded on them -- would later become obstacles to proletarian
   consciousness. 

86 
   All the theoretical shortcomings of a scientific defense of proletarian
   revolution, be they in the content or in the form of the exposition, come
   down in the end to the identification of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie
   with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power. 

87 
   As early as the Manifesto, the urge to demonstrate the scientific legitimacy
   of proletarian power by citing a sequence of precedents only served to muddy
   Marx's historical thinking. This approach led him to defend a linear model of
   the development of modes of production according to which, at each stage,
   class struggles would end "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of
   society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." The plain
   facts of history, however, are that, just as the "Asiatic mode of production"
   (as Marx himself observed in another connection) preserved its stasis in
   spite of class conflict, so too no jacquerie of serfs ever overthrew the
   barons and no slave revolt in the ancient world ever ended the rule of
   freemen. The first thing the linear model loses sight of is the fact that the
   bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever been victorious;
   the only class, also, for which the development of the economy was the cause
   and consequence of its capture of society. The same simplified view led Marx
   to neglect the economic role of the State in the management of a class
   society. If the rising bourgeoisie appears to have liberated the economy from
   the State, this is true only to the extent that the State was formerly the
   instrument of class oppression in a static economy. The bourgeoisie developed
   its autonomous economic power during the medieval period when the State had
   been weakened, when feudalism was breaking up a stable equilibrium between
   powers. The modern State, on the other hand, which first supported the
   developing bourgeoisie thanks to the mercantile system, and then went on, in
   the time of "laisser faire, laisser passer," to become the bourgeoisie's own
   State, was eventually to emerge as wielder of a power central to the planned
   management of the economic process. Marx was already able, under the rubric
   of Bonapartism, accurately to depict a foreshadowing of modern State
   bureaucracy in that fusion of capital and State which established "capital's
   national power over labor and a public authority designed to maintain social
   servitude"; the bourgeoisie thus renounced any historical existence beyond
   its own reduction to the economic history of things, and permitted itself to
   be "condemned along with the other classes to a like political nullity."
   Already discernible in outline here are the sociopolitical bases of the
   modern spectacle, which in a negative way defines the proletariat as the only
   pretender to historical existence. 

88 
   The only two classes that really correspond to Marx's theory, the two pure
   classes that the whole thrust of Capital's analysis tends to bring to the
   fore, are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are also the only two
   revolutionary classes in history -- but they are revolutionary under
   different conditions. The bourgeois revolution is a fait accompli. The
   proletarian revolution is a project, formulated on the basis of the earlier
   revolution but differing qualitatively from it. To neglect the originality of
   the bourgeoisie's historical role serves only to conceal the concrete
   originality of the proletarian project, which can get nowhere unless it
   advances under its own banner and comes to grips with the "prodigiousness of
   its own aims." The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class of the
   developing economy. The proletariat will never come to embody power unless it
   becomes the class of consciousness. The growth of the forces of production
   cannot in itself guarantee this accession to power -- not even indirectly,
   via the increase in dispossession that this growth entails. Nor can any
   Jacobin-style seizure of the State be a means to that end. The proletariat
   cannot make use of any ideology designed to pass partial goals off as general
   ones, because it cannot maintain any partial reality that is truly its own. 

89 
   It is true that during a certain period of his participation in the struggle
   of the proletariat Marx overrated the value of scientific prediction --
   indeed he went so far in this direction that he provided the illusions of
   economism with an intellectual justification; however, he clearly never fell
   prey himself to such illusions. In a well-known letter of 7 December 1867,
   accompanying an article criticizing Capital which he himself had written, and
   which Engels was supposed to publish as if it were that of an opponent, Marx
   clearly indicated the limits of his scientific stance: "The author's 
   subjective tendency (imposed on him, perhaps, by his political position and
   his past) -- that is to say, the way in which he himself pictures, and
   portrays for others, the ultimate outcome of the present movement, the
   present social process -- has nothing whatsoever to do with his real
   analysis." By thus censuring the "tendentious conclusions" of his own
   objective analysis, and by interpolating an ironic "perhaps" apropos of the
   unscientific choices supposedly "imposed" on him, Marx in effect reveals the
   methodological key to tackling the two aspects of the matter. 

90 
   The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical
   struggle itself, in such a way that each of these poles depends for its
   validation on the other. What constitutes the proletarian class as a subject
   is its organizing of revolutionary struggles and its organizing of society at
   the moment of revolution: this is the point at which the practical conditions
   of consciousness must be assembled and the theory of praxis verified by
   virtue of its transformation into theory-in-practice. This pivotal issue of
   organization, however, received but the scantest attention from revolutionary
   theory during the founding period of the workers' movement -- the very period
   when that theory still possessed the unitary character which it had inherited
   from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a
   unitary historical practice). As it turned out, organization became the locus
   of revolutionary theory's inconsistency, allowing the tenets of that theory
   to be imposed by statist and hierarchical methods borrowed from the bourgeois
   revolution. The forms of organization developed subsequently by the workers'
   movement on the basis of this dereliction of theory have tended in turn to
   bar the construction of a unitary theory, to break theory up instead into a
   variety of specialized and fragmentary types of knowledge. Thus ideologically
   alienated, theory cannot even recognize the practical verification of the
   unitary historical thought that it has betrayed whenever that verification
   emerges in spontaneous workers' struggles; on the contrary, all it can do is
   help to repress it and destroy all memory of it. Yet such historical forms,
   thrown up by the struggle, are the very practical medium that theory needs in
   order to be true. They are in fact a requirement of theory, but one that has
   not been given theoretical expression. The soviets, for example, were not a
   theoretical discovery; and, to go back even farther, the highest theoretical
   truth attained by the International Workingmen's Association was its own
   existence in practice. 

91 
   Early successes in the First International's struggle enabled it to free
   itself from the confused influences that the dominant ideology continued for
   a time to exercise upon it from within. But the defeat and repression that it
   soon confronted brought to the surface a conflict between two conceptions of
   the proletarian revolution, each of which had an authoritarian dimension
   spelling the abandonment of the conscious self-emancipation of the working
   class. The rift between Marxists and Bakuninists, which eventually became an
   irreconcilable one, had a dual aspect in that it bore both upon the question
   of power in a future revolutionary society and upon the current organization
   of the movement; and both the opposing factions reversed their own position
   in moving from one of these issues to the other. Bakunin denounced as an
   illusion the idea that classes could be abolished by means of an
   authoritarian use of State power, warning that this course would lead to the
   reconstruction of a bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship of the
   most knowledgeable (or of those reputed to be the most knowledgeable). Marx,
   who held that the combined maturation, of economic contradictions on the one
   hand, and of the democratic education of the workers on the other hand, would
   reduce the proletarian State's role to the short phase needed to give the
   stamp of legality to new social relations brought into being by objective
   factors, charged Bakunin and his supporters with the authoritarianism of a
   conspiratorial elite that had deliberately placed itself above the
   International with the hare-brained intention of imposing on society an
   irresponsible dictatorship of the most revolutionary (or of those
   self-designated as such). Bakunin unquestionably recruited followers on just
   such a basis: "in the midst of the popular tempest, we must be the invisible
   pilots guiding the Revolution, not by any kind of overt power but by the
   collective dictatorship of all our allies, a dictatorship without badges,
   without official titles, without any official status, and therefore all the
   more powerful, as it does not carry the trappings of power." This was clearly
   a clash between two ideologies of workers' revolution; each embodied a
   partially correct critique, but each, having lost the unity of historical
   thought, aspired to set itself up as an ideological authority. Powerful
   organizations, among them the German Social Democracy and the Iberian
   Anarchist Federation, would subsequently faithfully serve one or the other of
   these ideologies; in every case the result produced was greatly different
   from the one sought. 

92 
   The fact that the anarchists regard the goal of the proletarian revolution as
   immediately present is at once the great strength and the great weakness of
   the real anarchist struggle (I refer to the struggle of collectivist
   anarchism; the claims of anarchism in its individualist variants are
   laughable). Collectivist anarchism retains only the terminal point of the
   historical thought of modern class struggles, and its unconditional demand
   that this point be attained instantly is echoed in its systematic contempt
   for method. Its critique of the political struggle consequently remains an
   abstract one, while its commitment to the economic struggle is framed only in
   terms of the mirage of a definitive solution to be achieved at one stroke, on
   the economic battleground itself, on the day of the general strike or
   insurrection. The anarchist agenda is the fulfillment of an ideal. Anarchism
   is the still ideological negation of the State and of classes, that is to
   say, of the very social preconditions of any separated ideology. It is an 
   ideology of pure freedom which makes everything equal and eschews any
   suggestion of historical evil. This position, which fuses all partial demands
   into a single demand, has given anarchism the great merit of representing the
   refusal of existing conditions from the standpoint of the whole of life, not
   merely from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization. On the
   other hand, the fact that this fusion of demands is envisaged in the
   absolute, at the whim of the individual, and in advance of any actualization,
   has doomed anarchism to an incoherence that is only too easy to discern: the
   doctrine requires no more than the reiteration, and the reintroduction into
   each particular struggle, of the same simple and all-encompassing idea -- the
   same end-point that anarchism has identified from the first as the movement's
   sole and entire goal. Thus Bakunin, on quitting the Jura Federation in 1873,
   found it easy to write that "During the last nine years more than enough
   ideas for the salvation of the world have been developed in the International
   (if the world can be saved by ideas) and I defy anyone to come up with a new
   one. This is the time not for ideas but for action, for deeds." No doubt this
   attitude preserves the commitment of the truly historical thought of the
   proletariat to the notion that ideas must become practical, but it leaves the
   ground of history by assuming that the adequate forms of this transition to
   practice have already been discovered and are no longer subject to variation.

93 
   The anarchists, whose ideological fervor clearly distinguished them from the
   rest of the workers' movement, extended this specialization of tasks into
   their own ranks, so offering a hospitable field of action, within any
   anarchist organization, to the propagandists and defenders of anarchist
   ideology; and the mediocrity of these specialists was only reinforced by the
   fact that their intellectual activity was generally confined to the
   repetition of a clutch of unchanging truths. An ideological respect for
   unanimity in the taking of decisions tended to favor the uncontrolled
   exercise of power, within the organization itself, by "specialists of
   freedom"; and revolutionary anarchism expects a comparable unanimity,
   obtained by comparable means, from the people once they are liberated.
   Furthermore, the refusal to distinguish between the opposed situations of a
   minority grouped in the ongoing struggle and a new society of free
   individuals has led time and again to the permanent isolation of anarchists
   when the time for common decisions arrives -- one need only think of the
   countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that have been contained and
   crushed at a local level. 

94 
   The illusion more or less explicitly upheld in all genuine anarchism is that
   of the permanent imminence of a revolution which, because it will be made
   instantaneously, is bound to validate both anarchist ideology and the form of
   practical organization that flows from it. In 1936 anarchism really did lead
   a social revolution, setting up the most advanced model of proletarian power
   ever realized. Even here, though, it is pertinent to recall, for one thing,
   that the general insurrection was dictated by an army pronunciamento.
   Furthermore, inasmuch as the revolution was not completed in its earliest
   days -- Franco, enjoying strong foreign backing at a time when the rest of
   the international proletarian movement had already been defeated, held power
   in half the country, while bourgeois forces and other workers' parties of
   statist bent still existed in the Republican camp -- the organized anarchist
   movement proved incapable of broadening the revolution's semi-victories, or
   even of safeguarding them. The movement's leaders became government ministers
   -- hostages to a bourgeois state that was dismantling the revolution even as
   it proceeded to lose the civil war. 

95 
   The "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International was the scientific
   ideology of the socialist revolution, an ideology which asserted that its
   whole truth resided in objective economic processes, and in the gradual
   recognition of their necessity by a working class educated by the
   organization. This ideology exhumed utopian socialism's faith in pedagogics,
   eking this out with a contemplative evocation of the course of history. So
   out of touch was this attitude with the Hegelian dimension of a total
   history, however, that it lost even the static image of the totality present
   in the utopians' (and signally in Fourier's) critique. A scientific
   orientation of this variety, hardly capable of doing anything more than
   rehash symmetrical ethical alternatives, informed Hilferding's insipid
   observation in Das Finanzkapital that recognizing the necessity of socialism
   "gives no clue as to what practical attitude should be adopted. For it is one
   thing to recognize a necessity, and quite another to place oneself in the
   service of that necessity." Those who chose not to understand that for Marx,
   and for the revolutionary proletariat, a unitary historical thought was
   itself nothing more and nothing less than the practical attitude to be
   adopted could only fall victim to the practice which that choice immediately
   entailed. 

96 
   The ideology of the social-democratic organization placed that organization
   in the hands of teachers who were supposed to educate the working class, and
   the organizational form adopted corresponded perfectly to the sort of passive
   learning that this implied. The participation of the socialists of the Second
   International in the political and economic struggles was concrete enough,
   but it was profoundly uncritical. Theirs was a manifestly reformist practice
   carried on in the name of an illusory revolution. It was inevitable that this
   ideology of revolution should founder on the very success of those who
   proclaimed it. The setting apart of parliamentary representatives and
   journalists within the movement encouraged people who had in any case been
   recruited from the bourgeois intelligentsia to pursue a bourgeois style of
   life, while the trade-union bureaucracy turned even those drawn in through
   industrial struggle, and of working-class background, into mere brokers of
   labor -- traders in labor-power as a commodity to be bought and sold like any
   other. For the activity of all these people to have retained any
   revolutionary aspect whatsoever, capitalism would have had to find itself
   conveniently unable to put up with a reformism on the economic plane that it
   was perfectly able to tolerate on the political, in the shape of the social
   democrats' legalistic agitation. The "science" of the social democrats
   vouched for the inevitability of such a paradoxical occurrence; history,
   however, gave the lie to it at every turn. 

97 
   This was a contradiction that Bernstein, being the social democrat farthest
   removed from political ideology, and the one who most unabashedly embraced
   the methodology of bourgeois science, was honest enough to draw attention to;
   the reformism of the English workers' movement, which did without
   revolutionary ideology altogether, also attested to it; but only historical
   development itself could demonstrate it beyond all possibility of doubt.
   Though prey to all kinds of illusions in other areas, Bernstein had rejected
   the notion that a crisis of capitalism must miraculously occur, thus forcing
   the hand of the socialists, who declined to assume any revolutionary mantle
   in the absence of such a legitimating event. The profound social upheaval set
   in train by the First World War, though it raised consciousness on a wide
   scale, proved twice over that the social-democratic hierarchy had failed to
   educate the German workers in a revolutionary way, that it had failed, in
   short, to turn them into theoreticians: the first time was when the
   overwhelming majority of the party lent its support to the imperialist war;
   the second time was when, in defeat, the party crushed the Spartacist
   revolutionaries. The sometime worker Ebert still believed in sin -- declaring
   that he hated revolution "like sin." He also proved himself to be a fine
   herald of that image of socialism which was soon to emerge as the mortal
   enemy of the proletariat of Russia and elsewhere, by precisely articulating
   the agenda of this new form of alienation: "Socialism," said Ebert, "means
   working hard." 

98 
   As a Marxist thinker, Lenin was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist
   who applied the revolutionary ideology of "orthodox Marxism" to the
   conditions existing in Russia, conditions that did not permit of the sort of
   reformist practice pursued in parallel fashion by the Second International.
   The task of directing the proletariat from without, by means of a disciplined
   clandestine party under the control of intellectuals who had become
   "professional revolutionaries," gave rise to a genuine profession -- and one
   disinclined to make compacts with any professional strata of capitalist
   society (even had such an overture -- presupposing the attainment of an
   advanced stage of bourgeois development -- been within the power of the
   czarist political regime to make). In consequence the speciality of the
   profession in question became that of total social management. 

99 
   With the advent of the war, and the collapse of international social
   democracy in face of it, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the
   Bolsheviks was able to cast its net across the globe. The bloody end of the
   workers' movement's democratic illusions made a Russia of the whole world,
   and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary rift opened up by this
   period of crisis, proposed its hierarchical and ideological model to the
   proletariat of all countries as the way to "talk Russian" to the ruling
   class. Lenin never reproached the Second International's Marxism for being a
   revolutionary ideology -- but only for having ceased to be such an ideology. 

100 
   This same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia
   and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world, also marks the
   definitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the
   modern spectacle's rule: this was the moment when an image of the working
   class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself. 

101 
   "In all earlier revolutions," wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne for 21
   December 1918, "the opponents confronted one another face to face: class
   against class, program against program. In the present revolution, the troops
   that protect the old order, instead of intervening in the name of the ruling
   classes, intervene under the banner of a 'social-democratic party.' If the
   central question of the revolution were posed openly and honestly -- in the
   form 'Capitalism or socialism?' -- then no doubt or hesitation would be
   possible today among the broad proletarian masses." Thus, a few days before
   its destruction, the radical current within the German proletariat uncovered
   the secret of the new conditions brought into being by the whole process
   which had gone before (and to which the image of the working class had
   largely contributed): the spectacular organization of the ruling order's
   defense, and a social reign of appearances under which no "central question"
   could any longer be "openly and honestly" posed. By this time the
   revolutionary image of the proletariat had become both the main element in,
   and the chief result of, a general falsification of society. 

102 
   The organization of the proletariat according to the Bolshevik model stemmed
   from the backwardness of Russia and from the abdication from the
   revolutionary struggle of the workers' movement in the advanced countries.
   Russian backwardness also embodied all the conditions needed to carry this
   form of organization in the direction of the counterrevolutionary reversal
   that it had unconsciously contained from its beginnings; and the repeated
   balking of the mass of the European workers' movement at the Hic Rhodus, hic
   salta of the 1918-1920 period -- a balking that included the violent
   annihilation of its own radical minority -- further facilitated the complete
   unfolding of a process whose end result could fraudulently present itself to
   the world as the only possible proletarian solution. The Bolshevik party
   justified itself in terms of the necessity of a State monopoly over the
   representation and defense of the power of the workers, and its success in
   this quest turned the party into what it truly was, namely the party of the 
   owners of the proletariat, which essentially dislodged all earlier forms of
   ownership. 

103 
   For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had
   engaged in an unresolved debate over which conditions were most propitious
   for the overthrow of czarism: the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the weight in
   the balance of the peasant majority, the decisive role to be played by a
   centralized and militant proletariat and so on. When practice finally
   provided the solution, however, it did so thanks to a factor that had figured
   in none of these hypotheses, namely the revolutionary bureaucracy which
   placed itself at the head of the proletariat, seized the State and proceeded
   to impose a new form of class rule on society. A strictly bourgeois
   revolution was impossible; talk of a "democratic dictatorship of workers and
   peasants" had no real meaning; and, as for the proletarian power of the
   soviets, it could not be maintained at once against the class of small
   landholding peasants, against a national and international White reaction,
   and against its own externalized and alienated representation in the shape of
   a workers' party of absolute masters of the State, of the economy, of the
   means of expression and (before long) of thought. Trotsky and Parvus's theory
   of permanent revolution -- which Lenin in effect espoused in April 1917 --
   was the only theory that held true for countries that were backward from the
   point of view of the social development of the bourgeoisie, but even here it
   only applied once the unknown quantity of the bureaucracy's class power had
   come into play. In the many clashes within the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin
   was the most consistent defender of the concentration of dictatorial powers
   in the hands of this supreme ideological representation. He invariably had
   the advantage over his opponents because he championed solutions that flowed
   logically from the earlier choices made by the minority that now exercised
   absolute power: a democracy refused to peasants on the State level should be
   by the same token refused to workers, and hence also to Communist union
   leaders, to party members in general, and even, in the end, to the highest
   ranks of the party's hierarchy. At the Tenth Congress, as the Kronstadt
   soviet was being put down by force of arms and deluged in slander, Lenin
   passed a judgment on the leftist bureaucrats of the "Workers' Opposition,"
   the logic of which Stalin would later extend into a perfect division of the
   world: "Here with us -- or out there with a gun in your hand -- but not as an
   opposition. We have had enough of opposition."

104 
   Finding itself the sole owner of a state capitalism, the bureaucracy at first
   secured its power internally by entering, after Kronstadt, and under the "New
   Economic Policy," into a temporary alliance with the peasantry; externally,
   in parallel fashion, it defended its power by using the regimented workers of
   the bureaucratic parties of the Third International to back up Russian
   diplomacy, to sabotage revolutionary movements and to support bourgeois
   governments on whose support in the international sphere it was counting (the
   Kuomintang in the China of 1925-1927, Popular Fronts in Spain and France,
   etc.). In pursuit of its self-realization, however, bureaucratic society then
   proceeded, by means of terror exercised against the peasantry, to effect
   history's most brutal primitive accumulation of capital ever. The
   industrialization of the Stalin era reveals the bureaucracy's true nature:
   the prolonging of the reign of the economy and the salvaging of all essential
   aspects of market society, not least the institution of labor-as-commodity.
   The economy in its independence thus showed itself so thoroughly able to
   dominate society as to recreate for its own purposes that class domination
   which is essential to its operation. It proved, in other words, that the
   bourgeoisie had created a power so autonomous that, so long as it endured, it
   could even do without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not, in
   Bruno Rizzi's sense, "the last property-owning class in history," for it was
   merely a substitute ruling class for the market economy. A tottering
   capitalist property system was replaced by an inferior version of itself --
   simplified, less diversified and concentrated as the collective property of
   the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped type of ruling class was likewise
   a reflection of economic underdevelopment, and it had no agenda beyond
   correcting this backwardness in particular parts of the world. The
   hierarchical, statist framework for this cheap remake of the capitalist
   ruling class was supplied by the party of the workers, organized on the
   bourgeois model of separation. As Anton Ciliga noted from the depths of one
   of Stalin's prisons, "Technical questions of organization turned out to be
   social questions" (Lenin and Revolution).

105 
   As the coherence of the separate, the revolutionary ideology of which
   Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression governed the management of
   a reality that was resistant to it; with Stalinism, this ideology
   rediscovered its own incoherent essence. Ideology was no longer a weapon, but
   an end in itself. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form
   of madness. Eventually both reality and the goal sought dissolved in a
   totalitarian ideology proclaiming that whatever it said was all there was.
   This was a local primitivism of the spectacle that has nonetheless played an
   essential part in the spectacle's worldwide development. The ideology that
   took on material form in this context-did not transform the world
   economically, as capitalism in its affluent stage has done; it succeeded only
   in using police methods to transform perception.

106 
   The ideological-totalitarian class in power is the power of a world turned on
   its head: the stronger the class, the more forcefully it proclaims that it
   does not exist, and its strength serves first and foremost to assert its
   nonexistence. This is as far as its modesty goes, however, for its official
   nonexistence is supposed to coincide with the ne plus ultra of historical
   development, which is indeed owed to its infallible leadership. Though
   everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy is obliged to be a class
   imperceptible to consciousness, thus making the whole of social life
   unfathomable and insane. The social organization of the absolute lie reposes
   on this fundamental contradiction.

107 
   Stalinism was a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terror on
   which the bureaucracy's power was founded was bound to strike the class
   itself, because this class had no legal basis, no juridical status as a
   property-owning class that could be extended to each of its members
   individually. Its real proprietorship was masked, because it had become an
   owner only by means of false consciousness. False consciousness can maintain
   absolute power only through absolute terror, where all real motives soon
   vanish. Members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership
   over society only collectively, as participants in a basic lie: they have to
   play the part of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they are
   actors faithful to the text of ideological betrayal. Yet their effective
   participation in this counterfeit being has to be perceived as real. No
   bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove
   himself a socialist proletarian he would have to present himself as the
   opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible
   because the official truth of the bureaucracy is that the bureaucracy does
   not exist. Thus each bureaucrat is completely dependent on a central
   guarantee from ideology, which acknowledges the collective participation in
   "socialist power" of all such bureaucrats as it does not liquidate. As a
   group the bureaucrats may be said to make all the decisions, but the
   cohesiveness of their class can only be ensured by the concentration of their
   terroristic power in one person. In this person reposes the only practical
   truth of the lie in power: the power to lay down an unchallengeable boundary
   that is ever subject to revision. Stalin thus had the power to decide without
   appeal exactly who was a bureaucrat, and hence an owner; his word alone
   distinguished "proletarians" in power from "traitors in the pay of the Mikado
   and Wall Street." The atomized bureaucrat could find the shared essence of
   his juridical status only in the person of Stalin -- that lord and master of
   the world who takes himself in this way to be the absolute person and for
   whom there exists no higher type of spirit: "The lord of the world becomes
   really conscious of what he is -- viz., the universal might of actuality --
   by that power of destruction which he exercises against the contrasted
   selfhood of his subjects." He is at once the power that defines the field of
   domination and the power that devastates that field.

108 
   By the time ideology, become absolute because it possesses absolute power,
   has been transformed from a fragmentary knowledge into a totalitarian lie,
   truly historical thinking has for its part been so utterly annihilated that
   history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no
   longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present
   in which everything that has happened earlier exists for it solely as a space
   accessible to its police. A project already formulated by Napoleon, that of
   "monarchically directing the energy of memories," has thus been made concrete
   in a permanent manipulation of the past, and this not just in respect of the
   past's meaning, but even in respect of the facts themselves. The price paid
   for this emancipation from all historical reality, though, is the loss of the
   rational orientation indispensable to capitalism as a historical social
   system. We know how much the scientific application of an ideology gone mad
   has cost Russia -- one need only think of the Lysenko fiasco. The internal
   contradictions besetting totalitarian bureaucracy in its administration of an
   industrialized society -- its simultaneous need for rationality and refusal
   of it -- also constitutes one of its chief shortcomings as compared with
   normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the
   question of agriculture as capitalism does, so too it turns out eventually to
   be inferior to capitalism in industrial production, which it seeks to plan in
   an authoritarian manner on the twin bases of a complete lack of realism and
   an adherence to an all-embracing lie.

109 
   Between the two world wars the revolutionary workers movement was destroyed
   by the action, on the one hand, of the Stalinist bureaucracy and, on the
   other, of fascist totalitarianism, the latter having borrowed its
   organizational form from the totalitarian party as first tried out in Russia.
   Fascism was an attempt of the bourgeois economy to defend itself, in
   extremis, from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion; it was a
   state of siege in capitalist society, a way for that society to survive
   through the administration of an emergency dose of rationalization in the
   form of massive State intervention in its management. Such rationalization,
   however, inevitably bore the stamp of the immensely irrational nature of the
   means whereby it was imposed. Even though fascism came to the aid of the
   chief icons (the family, private property, the moral order, the nation) of a
   bourgeois order that was by now conservative, and effectively mobilized both
   the petty bourgeoisie and unemployed workers panic-stricken because of the
   crisis or disillusioned by the impotence of revolutionary socialism, it was
   not itself fundamentally ideological in character. Fascism presented itself
   for what it was -- a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation
   in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, leader. Fascism
   is a cult of the archaic completely fitted out by modern technology. Its
   degenerate ersatz of myth has been revived in the spectacular context of the
   most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus one factor in the
   formation of the modern spectacle, as well as being, thanks to its part in
   the destruction of the old workers' movement, one of the founding forces of
   present-day society. But inasmuch as fascism happens also to be the costliest
   method of maintaining the capitalist order, it was normal enough that it
   should be dislodged by more rational and stronger forms of this order -- that
   it should leave the front of the stage to the lead players, namely the
   capitalist States.

110 
   When the Russian bureaucracy at last successfully disencumbered itself of
   relics of bourgeois property standing in the way of its hegemony over the
   economy, once it had developed this economy in accordance with its own
   purposes, and once it had achieved recognition from without as a great power
   among others, it sought to enjoy its own world in tranquility, and to remove
   the arbitrariness to which it was still itself subjected; it therefore
   proceeded to denounce the Stalinism of its beginnings. Such a denunciation
   was bound, however, to remain Stalinist, arbitrary, unexplained and subject
   to continual adjustment, for the simple reason that the ideological falsehood
   that had attended the bureaucracy's birth could never be exposed. The
   bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically because
   its existence as a class depends on its monopoly of an ideology -- which, for
   all its cumbersomeness, is its sole title to ownership. Admittedly this
   ideology has lost the passion that informed its original self-affirmation,
   yet even the pithless triviality which is all that is left retains the
   oppressive role of prohibiting the least suggestion of competition and
   holding the entirety of thought captive. The bureaucracy is thus helplessly
   tied to an ideology no longer believed by anyone. What inspired terror now
   inspires derision, but even this derision would disappear were it not for the
   fact that the terror it mocks still lurks in the wings. So it is that at the
   very moment when the bureaucracy attempts to demonstrate its superiority on
   capitalism's own ground, it is exposed as capitalism's poor cousin. Just as
   its actual history is at odds with its judicial status, and its crudely
   maintained ignorance in contradiction with its scientific pretensions, so its
   wish to vie with the bourgeoisie in the production of an abundance of
   commodities is stymied by the fact that an abundance of this kind contains 
   its own implicit ideology, and is generally accompanied by the freedom to
   choose from an unlimited range of spectacular false alternatives -- a
   pseudo-freedom, yes, but one which, for all that, is incompatible with the
   bureaucracy's ideology.

111 
   At the present stage in the bureaucracy's development, its ideological title
   to ownership is already collapsing internationally: a power set up on the
   national level as a basically internationalist model must now renounce any
   claim to maintaining its false cohesion irrespective of national frontiers.
   The unequal economic development experienced by those competing bureaucracies
   that have succeeded in owning "socialism" in more than one country has led
   only to a public and all-out confrontation between the Russian lie and the
   Chinese lie. Henceforward each bureaucracy in power, and likewise each of
   those totalitarian parties aspiring to a power that has outlived the
   Stalinist period within one national working class or another, will have to
   find its own way. Considered in conjunction with the expressions of internal
   negation which first became visible to the outside world when the workers of
   East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a "government of
   metalworkers," and which have since even extended to the setting up of
   workers' councils in Hungary, this crumbling of the worldwide alliance
   founded on bureaucratic mystification is in the last analysis the most
   unfavorable portent for the future development of capitalist society. For the
   bourgeoisie is now in danger of losing an adversary that has objectively
   supported it by investing all opposition to its order with a purely illusory
   unity. A rift in the pseudo-revolutionary component of the established
   division of spectacular labor can only herald the end of that system itself.
   This spectacular aspect of the dissolution of the workers' movement is thus
   itself headed for dissolution.

112 
   The mirage of Leninism today has no basis today outside the various
   Trotskyist tendencies, where the conflation of the proletarian project with a
   hierarchical organization grounded in ideology has stolidly survived all the
   evidence of that conflation's real consequences. The gap between Trotskyism
   and a revolutionary critique of present-day society is in effect coextensive
   with the respectful distance that the Trotskyists maintain toward positions
   that were already mistaken when they played themselves out in a real
   struggle. Until 1927 Trotsky remained fundamentally loyal to the high
   bureaucracy, though he sought to gain control of this bureaucracy and cause
   it to resume a properly Bolshevik foreign policy. (It is well known that at
   this time he went so far, in order to help conceal Lenin's famous
   "Testament," as to disavow slanderously his supporter Max Eastman, who had
   made it public.) Trotsky was doomed by his basic perspective; the fact was
   that as soon as the bureaucratic class knew itself, on the basis of the
   results of its action, to be a counterrevolutionary class on the domestic
   front, it was bound to opt for a counterrevolutionary role on the world
   stage, albeit one assumed in the name of revolution -- in short, to act
   abroad just as it did at home. Trotsky's subsequent struggle to set up a
   Fourth International enshrined the same inconsistency. Having once, during
   the second Russian revolution, become an unconditional partisan of the
   Bolshevik form of organization, Trotsky simply refused, for the rest of his
   life, to see that the bureaucracy's power was the power of a separate class.
   When Lukacs, in 1923, pointed to this same organizational form as the
   long-sought mediation between theory and practice thanks to which
   proletarians, instead of being mere "spectators" of events that occur in
   their own organization, consciously choose and experience those events, what
   he was describing as actual virtues of the Bolshevik party were in fact
   everything that the Party was not. The depth of his theoretical work
   notwithstanding, Lukacs was an ideologist speaking for a power that was in
   the crudest way external to the proletarian movement, believing and giving
   his audience to believe that he himself, his entire personal being, partook
   of this power as though it were truly his own. While subsequent events were
   to demonstrate exactly how the power in question repudiated and eliminated
   its servants, Lukacs, with his endless self-repudiations, revealed with
   caricatural clarity precisely what he had identified with, namely, the
   opposite of himself, and the opposite of everything for which he had argued
   in History and Class Consciousness. No one better than Lukacs illustrates the
   validity of a fundamental rule for assessing all the intellectuals of this
   century: what they respect is a precise gauge of their own contemptible
   reality. It certainly cannot be said that Lenin encouraged illusions of this
   kind concerning his activities, for it was Lenin who acknowledged that "a
   political party cannot examine its members to see whether contradictions
   exist between their philosophy and the party program." The real subject of
   Lukacs's purely imaginary -- and inopportune -- portrait was a party that was
   indeed coherent with respect to one precise and partial task only -- to wit,
   the seizure of State power.

113 
   The neo-Leninist mirage entertained by present-day Trotskyism is contradicted
   at every moment by the reality of modern capitalist society, whether of the
   bourgeois or the bureaucratic type. It is therefore not surprising that it
   gets its best reception in the formally independent "underdeveloped"
   countries, where a variety of fraudulent versions of state and bureaucratic
   socialism are consciously passed off by local ruling classes as, quite
   simply, the ideology of economic development. The hybrid nature of such
   classes is more or less directly associated with their position on the
   bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. Their international maneuvering between
   these two poles of existing capitalist power, along with ideological
   compromises (notably with Islam) corresponding to their heterogeneous social
   bases, together serve to strip these last retreads of ideological socialism
   of all credibility except for that of their police. One type of bureaucracy
   has established itself by providing a common framework for nationalist
   struggle and peasant agrarian revolt; in such cases, as in China, the
   Stalinist model of industrialization tends to be applied in societies even
   less advanced than the Russia of 1917. A bureaucracy capable of
   industrializing a nation may also arise out of the petty bourgeoisie, with
   power being seized by army officers, as happened for instance in Egypt. In
   other places, among them Algeria following its war of independence, a
   bureaucracy that has established itself as a para-State authority in the
   course of a struggle seeks stability through compromise, and fuses with a
   weak national bourgeoisie. Lastly, in those former colonies of black Africa
   that have maintained overt ties to Western bourgeoisies, whether European or
   American, a local bourgeoisie is constituted -- generally reposing on the
   power of traditional tribal chiefs -- through possession of the State: in
   such countries, where foreign imperialism is still the true master of the
   economy, a stage is reached at which the compradors' compensation for the
   sale of local products is ownership of a local State that is independent of
   the masses though not of the imperialist power. The result is an artificial
   bourgeoisie that is incapable of accumulating capital and merely squanders
   its revenue -- as much the portion of surplus value it extracts from local
   labor as the foreign subsidies it receives from protector States or
   monopolies. The manifest incapacity of such a bourgeoisie to fulfill normal
   bourgeois economic functions leads to its soon being confronted by a
   subversive opposition, structured on the bureaucratic model and more or less
   well adapted to local conditions, that is eager to usurp what the bourgeoisie
   has inherited. But the successful realization by any bureaucracy of its
   fundamental project of industrialization itself necessarily embodies the
   prospect of its historical failure, for as it accumulates capital it also
   accumulates the proletariat, so creating its own negation in countries where
   that negation did not yet exist.

114 
   In the course of the complex and terrible evolution that has brought the era
   of class struggle under a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the
   industrialized countries has lost the ability to assert its own independence.
   It has also, in the last reckoning, lost its illusions. But it has not lost
   its being. The proletariat has not been eliminated, and indeed it remains
   irreducibly present, under the intensified alienation of modern capitalism,
   in the shape of the vast mass of workers who have lost all power over the use
   of their own lives and who, once they realize this, must necessarily redefine
   themselves as the proletariat -- as negation at work in the bosom of today's
   society. This class is objectively reinforced by the peasantry's gradual
   disappearance, as also by the extension of the logic of the factory system to
   a broad sector of labor in the "services" and the intellectual professions. 
   Subjectively, though, this is a proletariat still very far removed from any
   practical class consciousness, and this goes not only for white-collar
   workers but also for wage workers who as yet know nothing but the impotence
   and mystifications of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers
   that its own externalized power conspires in the continual reinforcement of
   capitalist society, no longer merely thanks to the alienation of its labor,
   but also thanks to the form taken on by unions, parties and institutions of
   State power that it had established in pursuit of its own self-emancipation,
   then it must also discover through concrete historical experience that it is
   indeed that class which is totally opposed to all reified externalizations
   and all specializations of power. The proletariat is the bearer of a
   revolution that can leave no other sphere of society untransformed, that
   enforces the permanent domination of the past by the present and demands a
   universal critique of separation; the action of the proletariat must assume a
   form adequate to these tasks. No quantitative relief of its poverty, no
   illusory hierarchical incorporation, can supply a lasting cure for its
   dissatisfaction, for the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any
   particular wrong it has suffered; nor, therefore, in the righting of any
   particular wrong -- nor even in the righting of many such wrongs; but only in
   the righting of the unqualified wrong that has been perpetrated upon it --
   the universal wrong of its exclusion from life.

115 
   Signs of a new and growing tendency toward negation proliferate in the more
   economically advanced countries. The spectacular system reacts to these signs
   with incomprehension or attempts to misrepresent them, but they are
   sufficient proof that a new period has begun. After the failure of the
   working class's first subversive assault on capitalism, we are now witness to
   the failure of capitalist abundance. On the one hand, we see anti-union
   struggles of Western workers that have to be repressed (and repressed
   primarily by the unions themselves); at the same time rebellious tendencies
   among the young generate a protest that is still tentative and amorphous, yet
   already clearly embodies a rejection of the specialized sphere of the old
   politics, as well as of art and everyday life. These are two sides of the
   same coin, both signaling a new spontaneous struggle emerging under the sign
   of criminality, both portents of a second proletarian onslaught on class
   society. When the lost children of this as-yet immobile horde enter once
   again upon the battlefield, which has changed yet stayed the same, a new
   General Ludd will be at their head -- leading them this time in an onslaught
   on the machinery of permitted consumption.

116 
   That long-sought political form whereby the economic emancipation of labor
   might finally be achieved" has taken on a clear outline in this century, in
   the shape of revolutionary workers' councils vesting all decision-making and
   executive powers in themselves and federating with one another through the
   exchange of delegates answerable to the base and recallable at any time. As
   yet such councils have enjoyed only a brief and experimental existence; their
   appearance has invariably occasioned attack and defeat by one or another of
   class society's means of defence -- often including, it must be said, the
   presence of false consciousness within the councils themselves. As Pannekoek
   rightly stressed, the decision to set up workers' councils does not in itself
   provide solutions so much as it "proposes problems." Yet the power of
   workers' councils is the one context in which the problems of the revolution
   of the proletariat can be truly solved. It is here that the objective
   preconditions of historical consciousness are assembled, opening the door to
   the realization of that active direct communication which marks the end of
   all specialization, all hierarchy, and all separation, and thanks to which
   existing conditions are transformed "into the conditions of unity." And it is
   here too that the proletarian subject can emerge from the struggle against a
   purely contemplative role, for consciousness is now equal to the practical
   organization that it has chosen for itself, and it has become inseparable
   from a coherent intervention in history.

117 
   Once embodied in the power of workers councils -- a power destined to
   supplant all other powers worldwide -- the proletarian movement becomes its
   own product; this product is the producer himself, and in his own eyes the
   producer has himself as his goal. Only in this context can the spectacle's
   negation of life be negated in its turn.

118 
   The appearance of workers councils during the first quarter of this century
   was the high point of the proletarian movement, but this reality has gone
   unnoticed, or else been presented in travestied form, because it inevitably
   vanished along with the remainder of a movement that the whole historical
   experience of the time tended to deny and destroy. From the standpoint of the
   renewal of the proletariat's critical enterprise, however, the councils may
   be seen in their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated
   movement: historical consciousness, aware that this is the only environment
   in which it can thrive, now perceives the councils as situated historically
   not at the periphery of an ebbing tide but rather at the center of a rising
   one.

119 
   A revolutionary organization that exists before the establishment of the
   power of workers' councils -- which must discover its own appropriate form
   through struggle -- will know that, for all these historical reasons, it 
   cannot represent the revolutionary class. It must simply recognize itself as
   radically separated from the world of separation.

120 
   The revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory of
   praxis entering into two-way communication with practical struggles; it is
   thus part of the process of the coming into being of practical theory.

121 
   The revolutionary organization must necessarily constitute an integral
   critique of society -- a critique, that is to say, which refuses to
   compromise with any form of separated power and which is directed globally
   against every aspect of alienated social life. In the revolutionary
   organization's struggle with class society, the weapons are nothing less than
   the essence of the antagonists themselves: the revolutionary organization
   cannot allow the conditions of division and hierarchy that obtain in the
   dominant society to be reproduced within itself. It must also fight
   constantly against its own distortion by and within the reigning spectacle.
   The only restriction on individual participation in the revolutionary
   organization's total democracy is that imposed by the effective recognition
   and appropriation by each member of the coherence of the organization's
   critique, a coherence that must be borne out both in critical theory proper
   and in the relationship between that theory and practical activity.

122 
   As capitalism's ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels
   makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own
   impoverishment, and eventually puts them in the position of having either to
   reject it in its totality or do nothing at all, the revolutionary
   organization must learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of
   alienated forms of struggle.

123 
   The proletarian revolution is predicated entirely on the requirement that,
   for the first time, theory as the understanding of human practice be
   recognized and directly lived by the masses. This revolution demands that
   workers become dialecticians, and inscribe their thought upon practice; it
   thus asks much more of its men without qualities than the bourgeois
   revolution asked of those men with qualifications that it enlisted to run
   things (the partial ideological consciousness constructed by a segment of the
   bourgeois class had as its basis only a key portion of social life, namely
   the economy, where this class was already in power). It is thus the very
   evolution of class society into the spectacular organization of non-life that
   obliges the revolutionary project to become visibly what it always was in
   essence.

124 
   Revolutionary theory is now the sworn enemy of all revolutionary ideology -- 
   and it knows it.


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord
