Our Situation
We are each born into this world, and this world is not our making vis-à-vis
ourselves as real beings, born and raised in certain historical conditions.
We find ourselves in a world, and in political/economic systems which are
overwhelming in their scope, power, and historic inertia. We all feel ourselves
to be individuals, yet we all participate in a kind of collective, social
consciousness. What is this "collective consciousness?" Where is it? How
does it manifest itself? Was it always in existence? If not, then how did
it come to be? It seems to me there is, potentially at best, a kind of quasi-collective
consciousness that exists as a kind of ideal projection. But really, what
exists now, is not a "collective consciousness" but rather just its opposite
-- an alienated projection of class interests, hierarchical power, antagonistic
division, manipulation, commodification, and reification. What passes for
"collective consciousness" is really nothing but the pseudo-collectivity
of capitalist class power relations which define the world of accepted ideas,
as well as, the modes of communication, and the goals and means of a social
system whose basic relation is separation, not collectivization. In other
words, the consciousness of the (pseudo) "collective" is disengaged from
the "collective" and given an autonomous power over and above the disenfranchised
and powerless mass of individuals, and rendered into the service of mass-hypnosis,
commodity production and circulation, capital accumulation, and state power.
In other words, what passes for "collective consciousness" becomes the ideology
of a spectacle which appears to be simultaneously the totality of society,
a part of society which stands superior to the rest of society, and the goal
of society. All the power and creativity that is daily disengaged from all
individuals, primarily through work and consumption, returns as a mysterious
alien force which then rules over society, which becomes our "economy," our
"government," our "world," which becomes a "second nature" - and which appears
without question, becomes the sun which never rests over modern passivity,
becomes the laudatory monologue ever proclaiming its own glory, spiced-up
with the fear and terror of ever-emerging crisis, breakdown, violence, threats,
war, starvation, disease, ecological decay, and global catastrophe. This
is the woeful map of our alienation, which has now become a global system.
In a real sense, this human world is "created by ourselves" -- but created
in conditions that none of us have chosen, and that none of us have any clear
way of changing, and that none of us are being asked to change, and, in fact,
this system is a class system, which means that it is presided over by people
who suffer from the illusion that they benefit from this state-of-affairs,
simply because they squeeze out monstrous wealth and power, and they use
their resources, their mass-technologies of ideological projection and control,
their seductive methods of commodity intensification, their police, their
armies, their politicians, their bureaucrats - all to insure the security
of their positions as top-dogs, as king-rats, as chief-cannibals over a reified
and alienated world.
So I ask you -- do you deserve this? Did you give your consent? Did you
sign a contract? Can you "fix yourself" outside of fixing the social-historical
context in which you were formed, in which you have to operate everyday,
in which you are embedded? Where do you end and your social reality begin?
How can you separate them? We live in a world of alienation in which what
it means to be a human being, what it means to be a body, a mind, a self
-- to a very real extent -- are products of socially determining factors
that are out of our control, at least up till now. The question is: can we
become conscious enough, can we become the CLASS OF CONSCIOUSNESS -- which
means, can we create the ideas, the means, the modes of collective power,
to turn the tables on our alienation and also on the entrenched class powers
that think they benefit from it. Can we engage ourselves in a Copernican
revolution in our social relations. Can we REVOLVE OUR CONSCIOUSNESS in such
a way that brings into existence a world in which the statement "the collective
consciousness is all of us, here and now" actually has a decisive meaning
because the collective can bring its plans, hopes, imaginations, and desires
into reality by way of real acts through the creation of real self-managed
situations. Nothing less that the abolition of the economy, politics, the
state, the spectacle -- and all the other separations between people and
their social-historical reality - can free up humanity enough so that we
can actually put ourselves in the driver's seat of our own self-evolution.
To not come to grips with this problem, this question of our historical epoch,
is to not address the problem of human subjectivity and its possibilities.
In other words, to not come to grips with this problem is to succumb to alienation
and its reifications. It is, as they say, to be doing nothing but pissing
in the wind. And like alienation and its reification, the piss will come
flying back in your face.
___________________
Commodities
"The commodity can be understood in its undistorted essence
only when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in
this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume
decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the
attitudes that people adopt toward it, as it subjugates their consciousness
to the forms in which this reification finds expression..."
George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
___________________
"The wealth of those societies in which
the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense
accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation
must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”
"A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that
by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature
of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from
fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the
object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or
indirectly as means of production.”
"Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the
two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties,
and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses
of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized
standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity
of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects
to be measured, partly in convention.”
"The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a
thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity,
it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron,
corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value,
something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount
of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of
use-value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such
as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use-values of
commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial
knowledge of commodities. Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption:
they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social
form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they
are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange-value.”
"Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation,
as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those
of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence
exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and
consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is inseparably
connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.
Let us consider the matter a little more closely...."
Karl Marx, Capital
___________________
Well, well, well. What is going on here? Somehow,
the use-value of commodities must become aligned with the exchange-value
of commodities, or rather, the use-value (quality) must take the form of
a quantity, that is, a price -- but that seems impossible -- as one side
is the quality, form, usefulness etc. but the other side is pure abstraction,
like a measurement on a number scale. So there must be some mediating factor,
something embedded and yet distinct from the commodity that can mediate between
its use-value and exchange-value. Could it be money? Money obviously mediates
the act of exchange, and money is surely a form of measurement -- but a measurement
of what? What is being measured? Supply and demand? Well supply is, again,
a quantity, and demand is a quality, a feeling of want or desire. So supply
and demand may be factored in, but they do not solve the problem, they still
do not account for the bottom-line measurement that can mediate the VALUE
of the commodities -- the relation of each commodity against all other commodities
and the translation of this measurement into the material embodiment into
a certain amount of money. So what is being measured? Do you know? Have you
ever stopped and wondered? Isn't it funny -- we each of us engage in this
behavior of commodity exchange countless times in our life, each and everyday,
yet do we really understand what is going on? How can seventeen umbrellas
be measured as equivalent to, oh say, 100 hits of LSD.... Well for now I'll
leave it to you to come up with an answer.... But here is my point -- this
system of commodity production and exchange is the basic mode of operation
of capitalist society. It is "how things work." And it appears to us as
totally natural, primarily because the system has produced a form of living,
a culture, that has become all-encompassing. "All we see are things and their
prices." Through the mode of commodity production there is a hidden secret,
a sleight-of-hand, which when seen for what it is, can be exposed as the
source of wealth/poverty, class antagonism, and the accumulation of CAPITAL.
Through some process there is an accumulation of wealth in the hands of the
owners of capital, despite the fact that it is the workers who do most of
the work, who produce the commodities. And this process creates the relation
of ALIENATION. This process creates a surplus that then stands opposed to
the workers that produce it -- and its accumulation as capital becomes yet
a more enlarged embodiment of wealth that the workers are then obliged to
continue to work for, to sell themselves to, to exchange their daily lives,
skills, time, and energies -- for a wage. They, themselves, become commodities
that are sold for a price. Further, the accumulation of capital cannot just
stand pat, the whole circuit of capital->commodity production-->commodity
exchange--accumulation-->commodity production--commodity exchange--accumulation
must successfully make it through each stage, must complete the circuit,
or else there will be breakdown, crisis. Further, each capital, and the system
of capitals as a whole, fights in the market for dominance and for an ever
expanding market. There is an inherent expansionism in capitalism, and thus
an inherent conflict between capitals and between national organizations
of capital (as in national states). Actually there are many points of conflict
-- because there are inherent contradictions in the functioning of this system.
But the point here is that this system is a particular system, it is a game
with its own rules, and its seizure of control of human society was a real
historical process. Yes, commodity exchange of various kinds, and at various
levels, existed before capitalism. But the evolution of capitalism and its
form of surplus generation and ownership meant that the development of commodity
relations became the DOMINATING organizing force of society, and this organizing
force inherently must expand and control more and more and more territory,
it must be able to render more "things," more resources, more people into
the commodity form. It cannot stop this process without going into crisis
-- it must break through all limits, all resistance, it must colonize life
intensively and extensively. That is the world we live in, this is the dominating
force that builds cities, creates technologies, stands behind imperialisms,
creates the growing contradiction between wealth and poverty, creates tensions
that can lead to war, renders everything it touches into a market relation,
and comes up against its own external limit in biospheric degradation.
___________________
"The development of productive forces is the unconscious
history that has actually created and altered the living conditions of human
groups — the conditions enabling them to survive and the expansion of those
conditions. It has been the economic basis of all human undertakings. Within
natural economies, the emergence of a commodity sector represented a surplus
survival. Commodity production, which implies the exchange of varied products
between independent producers, tended for a long time to retain its small-scale
craft aspects, relegated as it was to a marginal economic role where its
quantitative reality was still hidden. But whenever it encountered the social
conditions of large-scale commerce and capital accumulation, it took total
control of the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity
had already shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process
of quantitative development. This constant expansion of economic power in
the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity,
into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient
to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the
same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level. Economic
growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them
into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated
from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire
economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it
has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. The pseudo-nature
within which human labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain
forever in its service; and since this demand is formulated by and answerable
only to itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects
and endeavors into its own reinforcement. The abundance of commodities —
that is, the abundance of commodity relations — amounts to nothing more than
an augmented survival."
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
___________________
I would add here that augmented survival is now obliged
to show its underside, that is, the threat of terror, economic collapse,
environmental destruction, and....
And so here we are -- floating in our tranquil pools of unhappiness -- surrounded
by desolation and terror, "listening to the new told lies, with supreme visions
of lonely tunes...."
Well so where are we? Why have I gone on and on about
this? Because, dear friend, until you grasp these very fundamental relations,
these very real developments, you will never get to the real basis of our
history and our daily lives. In a sense we are victims, but only as long
as we accept that role. Understanding the basic rules of political-economy
can give insight into global capitalism in at least rudimentary sense (which,
quite frankly is about all my pea-brain can handle.) But we are not victims,
we are the creators of a world, but we create that world according to rules
that are not of our conscious making. But we do inherent the results of history
up to this point, for better and worse. Capitalism has revolutionized the
world, and there are countless ways that we benefit from that system. But
everything has its limits. The system is full of contradictions that lead
it to crisis, and those crisis have nasty way of a becoming deeper and more
profound. And a primary crisis is the colonization of daily life by capital,
and the rendering of us all into being servants of its quantitative dictates.
Thus as the system slides into crisis, it will take us with it. When capitalism
falls, it will fall on you. Our schooldays’ civics lesson about voting and
changing government is entertainingly sweet and naive, but also ultimately
bland and banal -- because it misses everything that is important. We must
begin to reference and expose the ways people actually live -- that is, how
we work (and for who, and why) and how we survive, how we spend our time,
and what purpose do our daily lives serve. We must engage realities of enforced
hierarchy and its forms of domination, and the ways we alienate power to
forces outside ourselves, as a matter of routine. We must come to grips with
the effects this must have on our psychologies. We need to expose and subvert
the mass need for authoritarian domination - and how this domination is made
necessary by way of our own alienation, our own constant retreat from control
of our own lives. Along with alienation comes dependency, we all depend on
capitalism, no matter where it is taking us. Some people say (over and over
and over) "well, four years from now we might be conscious enough to elect
a better leader!" Not only does this viewpoint ignore the fact that our society
is presided over by a small but extremely wealthy class of people who were
never elected and whose decisions fundamentally affect the lives of millions,
but also that these billionaire power-players also buy and sell politicians,
and that legislation is not just written and passed in the interests of the
corporate power bases -- but, in fact, the strategizers for the corporations
are writing the legislation themselves and giving our "representatives" their
marching orders.
___________________
We can no longer accept the basic premises of hierarchy
and bureaucratic power. Along with the overthrow of capitalism will come
the abolition of authoritarian hierarchy.
___________________
Consciousness/Spectacle
So we began with the notion of "collective consciousness"
-- but the terms can be seen in two ways. (1) The ideological expression
of the pseudo collectivity -- forms of "false consciousness" that define,
proscribe, dictate, and enforce behaviors and ways of thinking upon the mass
of individuals. This notion points toward a kind of mass-mindedness that
enforces a way of life. This "mass-mindedness" is a product and expression
of capitalist culture and it manifests in particular ways. In our society,
one of the primary forms of the (pseudo-)collective consciousness takes the
form of what has been called "the spectacle."
"Understood in its totality, the spectacle is
both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not
a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real
society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda,
advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model
of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already
been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that
production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification
of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents
the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority
of the time spent outside the production process....”
"The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through
practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god,
it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it
is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity
resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized
gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines, and working for
an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community
and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able
to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunited.”
"The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies
are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From
automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses
to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions
that engender "lonely crowds." With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle
recreates its own presuppositions.”
"Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of
themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates, is
experienced by the producers as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated
products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them. The spectacle
is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it
represents. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all
their power.”
"Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every
detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves
increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being
their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life."
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm
___________________
So, if you can understand what is being said, you can
see that, yes, this society is produced, and reproduced, each day, by all
of us -- but our production, our creation, the results of our life-energies,
take on an independence from us, we alienate them via real social/productive
relations into an independent power that then dominates our lives. That is
how CAPITALISM operates -- that is what it IS -- the accumulation of capital
by way of wage labor and commodity production and exchange and under the
ownership of capitalist class interests. The State primarily exists as a
management body which oversees the workings of the system. The culture becomes
a pseudo-collectivity.
The "collective consciousness" (ideology) is given the means of modern technologies
and mass communications: it becomes a world view that has actually been materialized,
a view of a world that has become objective. We are saturated by its ideologies.
But I also assert that (2) "collective consciousness" can take on another
form -- when it begins to be the expression of our collective desires, and
when we have the means to actually bring them into reality. There is a dialectic
between the "individual" and the "social grouping." All human individuals
are individuals vis-à-vis his/her society. The creation of individuals
is a social process. So what it means to be an individual is also a product
of society and history, and this develops in time. Yes, there may always
be a tension between I and They, but They
are also the means of my greater social realization. The dialectic, when
freed from its current imprisonment, can be move toward a resonation of individuals,
wherein we each begin to recognize our larger SOCIAL SELVES. This will be
the return of the repressed, where all separations will be understood to
be but moments in a greater dialectical unfolding....
___________________
"Self-consciousness exists in itself and for
itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that
is, it exists only by being recognized and acknowledged."
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
___________________
Revolution
I advocate the abolition of the economy, politics, the State. What that would
leave is humanity beginning to collectively, consciously, and directly begin
the adventure of our own revolutionary self-management. What that would leave
is humanity engaging in a world-historical act of self-transformation and
experimentation. I cannot spell out what forms this would take, because I
am just one individual with very limited capacities, although I do have my
own primitively developed ideas. I am not advocating a utopia, that is, an
ideal state, but rather an ongoing experiment whose forms would be evolving
according to possibilities. Basically the idea is power without mediators,
power exercised by the "base" of society, not disowned or projected or alienated
into a class above ourselves -- direct democracy or some form of consensus
in collective forms of self-management. Such forms have come into being for
brief moments in history, but they were always localized, isolated, and eventually
crushed By forces of reaction. Basically a simplistic outline would mean
some kind of generalized movement amongst workers, artists, students, families,
neighborhoods, emerging collectives, etc. The scenario would probably require
some kind of society-wide crisis of a class-contentious nature -- that is,
workers, etc. consciously struggling and organizing against the owners of
capital and state bureaucrats. This leads to a series of strikes, and this
leads to coordination and collectivization of the strike process -- and also
to the rise of autonomy and consciousness amongst the strikers -- in other
words, a "wildcat" consciousness outside of the control of trade union bureaucracies.
Then comes the fun part: the strikes become generalized, we begin to shut
down the economy -- but of course we can't just shut everything down -- we
need things to survive: like food, medicine, communication, computers, energy,
weapons, etc. etc. -- so rather than just staying "passively" on strike --
we take matters into our own hands -- WE OCCUPY THE FACTORIES, THE OFFICES,
THE STREETS, EVERYTHING. And we just don't passively occupy -- we restart
production UNDER OWN CONTROL -- and we coordinate on a citywide, region-wise,
even international basis. Obviously there is going to be a lot of chaos,
struggle, debate, and of course the capitalists and their functionaries are
not just going to stand by and watch their world evaporate, so it is going
to be a real struggle, in all ways. The stakes will be raised the limit because
everything will be called into question. We will all begin to directly intervene
into the making of our own history -- we will enter "historical space" by
way of "seizing our time." Beware: "Those who make revolution only halfway
merely dig their own graves."
The crucial part, besides defending and extending the
occupation movement, will discovering the methods of coordinating and making
decisions that do not get out of the control of the people themselves --
so that any "representatives" that are needed to coordinate on a "higher"
level are not really "representatives" -- but rather are delegates, immediately
revocable, and whose function is to coordinate and carry our decisions already
made. What would begin happening is a society-wide, ongoing, fluid, and evolving
federation of assemblies making and carrying out plans, processes, and experiments.
We will abolish any need for the state, and certainly will abolish what is
known, reified, and fetishized as "the economy" -- abolished as an entity
separate from people and their desires. The system of commodity exchange
and production would be replaced by production directly for human need. Capitalism
with its need for class hierarchies and with its relentless need for expansion
and commodification of the world -- would be superseded. This movement, this
transcendence, would all be the blossoming of humanity, a flowering of possibilities
-- it would mean a fundamental revolution in the nature of human subjectivity
in its social-historical dimension. For the first time, humanity would come
to be directly engaged consciously in it own development, precisely because
alienated power would be dissolved -- the "economy" - the state - politics
-- as the class-based management system of capitalism -- would all be jettisoned.
But of course, the question presents itself -- can humanity (that is the
workers, the alienated, can we, ourselves) find and develop the capacities
to launch ourselves onto such a trajectory -- can we attain "escape velocity"
from the social conditions that now imprison us? I would assert that without
such a movement, without some such solution as I have very tentatively outlined,
not only will we remain trapped within our own reifications, like a corpse
preserved in alcohol, but we will hopelessly and helplessly witness the ever-deepening
crisis of global-capitalism, and as well as the intensification and irreversibility
of biospheric damage, species extinction, environmental poisoning, and thus
the possible extinction of the human species itself. We are fast approaching
a rendezvous with history. So the question remains -- will the emerging global
crisis in all its modes of expression and ramifications provoke humanity
to look for the means to lift itself out of the crisis in a fundamental way?
I say -- the global crisis begins in our own daily lives, so the problem
is not only awesome in its extent and meaning, but calls into question what
we do everyday -- how we alienate and disown our life-energies, creativities,
and possibilities. This is the action of the subject/object dialectic of
world history. We will learn to transcend who we "think we are," and redefine
what we can become, in a new world of our own making.
___________________
So where does that leave us???
___________________
"The concept of class struggle constituted the
first concrete, tactical marshaling of the shocks and injuries which men
live individually; it was born in the whirlpool of suffering which the reduction
of human relations to mechanisms of exploitation created everywhere in industrial
societies. It issued from a will to transform the world and change life."
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/34
Kathy Kundalini
January 2005