Alfredo bonanno pdf

Class struggle exists in all of the individual and collective acts of revolt in which small portions of our daily life are taken back or small portions of the apparatus of domination and exploitation are obstructed, damaged or destroyed. In a significant sense, there are no isolated, individual acts of revolt.

All such acts are responses to the social situation, and many involve some level of complicity, indicating some level of collective struggle. Consider, for example, the spontaneous, mostly unspoken organisation of the theft of goods and the sabotage of the work process that goes on at most workplaces; this informal co-ordination of subversive activity carried out in the interest of each individual involved is a central principle of collective activity for insurrectionary anarchists, because the collectivity exists to serve the interests and desires of each of the individuals in re-appropriating their lives and often carries within it a conception of ways of relating free of exploitation and domination.

But even lone acts of revolt have their social aspects and are part of the general struggle of the dispossessed. Through a critical attitude towards the struggles of the past, the changes in the forces of domination and their variation between different places, and the development of present struggles, we can make our attack more strategic and targeted.

Such a critical attitude is what allows struggles to circulate. Being strategic, however, does not mean there is only one way to struggle; clear strategies are necessary to allow different methods to be used in a co-ordinated and fruitful way. Individual and social struggle are neither contradictory, nor identical. In Italy, the failure of the social movements of the s and s led some to reassess the revolutionary movement and others to abandon it all together.

These groups acted as professional revolutionaries, reducing their lives to a singular social role. This separated them from insurrectionary anarchists who believed that a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism and the state still continued, for no determinist history could name the correct moment to rebel. In fact, determinist history often becomes an excuse for not acting and only pushes a possible rupture with the present further into the impossible.

Anarchists were very active in that struggle, which was organised into self-managed leagues. These ad hoc, autonomous leagues took three general principles to guide the organisation of struggle: permanent conflict, self-management and attack.

Permanent conflict meant that the struggle would remain in conflict with the construction of the base until it was defeated without mediating or negotiating.

The leagues were self-generated and self-managed; they refused permanent delegation of representatives and the professionalisation of struggle. The leagues were organisations of attack on the construction of the base, not the defence of the interests of this or that group.

This style of organisation allowed groups to take the actions they saw as most effective while still being able to co-ordinate attack when useful, thus keeping open the potential of struggle to spread.

It also kept the focus of organisation on the goal of ending the construction of the base instead of the building of permanent organisations, for which mediating with state institutions for a share of power usually becomes the focus and limiting the autonomy of struggle the means.

As the anarchists involved in the Comiso struggle understood, one of the central reasons that social struggles are kept from developing in a positive direction is the prevalence of forms of organisation that cut us off from our own power to act and close off the potential of insurrection. These are permanent organisations, those that synthesise all struggle within a single organisation, and organisations that mediate struggles with the institutions of domination.

Permanent organisations tend to develop into institutions that stand above the struggling multitude. They tend to develop a formal or informal hierarchy and to disempower the multitude: power is alienated from its active form within the multitude and instituted within the organisation.

This transforms the active multitude into a passive mass. The hierarchical constitution of power relations removes decision from the time such a decision is necessary and places it within the organisation. The practical consequence of such an organisation is that the active powers of those involved in the struggle are stifled by the organisation.

Decisions that should be made by those involved in an action are deferred to the organisation; moreover, permanent organisations tend to make decisions based not on the necessity of a specific goal or action, but on the needs of that organisation, especially its preservation.

The organisation becomes an end in itself. One needs only to look at the operations of the many socialist parties to see this in its most blatant form. As an organisation moves towards permanence and comes to stand above the multitude, the organiser appears — often claiming to have created the struggle — and begins to speak for the mass. It is the job of the organiser to transform the multitude into a controllable mass and to represent that mass to the media or state institutions.

The goal of such image maintenance is never to attack a specific institution of domination, but to affect public opinion, to forever build the movement or, even worse, the organisation.

The organiser must always worry about how the actions of others will reflect on the movement; they must, therefore, both attempt to discipline the struggling multitude and try to control how the movement is represented in the media. Image usually replaces action for the permanent organisation and the organiser. Thus, many insurrectionary anarchists have been very critical of carrying on the struggle within the capitalist mass media.

In Italy, this has put them at odds with organisations such as Ya Basta! On a basic level, we need to ask, what is opinion? An opinion is not something first found among the public in general and then, afterwards, replayed through the media, as a simple reporting of the public opinion.

An opinion exists in the media first. Secondly, the media then reproduces the opinion a million times over, linking the opinion to a certain type of person conservatives think X, liberals think Y. Opinions are massified ideas. We are all supposed to choose — as we choose our leaders or our burgers — instead of thinking for ourselves.

It is obvious, therefore, that anarchists cannot use the opinion-making factory to create counter-opinions, and hopefully anarchists would never want to operate on the level of opinion even if we could somehow exert control over the content spewed out of the factory gates.

Anyhow, the ethic of anarchism could never be communicated in the form of opinion; it would die once massified. Yet, it is exactly on the level of opinion that the organiser works, for opinion and image-maintenance are the very tools of power, tools used to shape and discipline a multitude into a controllable mass.

Instead of moving power and decision making into an organisation, most insurrectionary anarchists recognise the need to organise in a fashion that lacks the formality and authority which separate organisers and organised; this is called informal organisation. Informal organisations, on the other hand, dissolve when their goal is achieved or abandoned; they do not perpetuate themselves merely for the sake of the organisation if the goals that caused people to organise have ceased to exist.

As in the case of the Comiso leagues, informal organisation is a means for affinity groups to co-ordinate efforts when necessary. We must always remember that many things can be done more easily by an affinity group or individual, and, in these cases, higher levels of organisation just make the decision making process cumbersome — it stifles us. Informal organisation must be based on an ethic of autonomous action; autonomy is necessary to prevent our active powers from becoming alienated, to prevent the formation of relations of authority.

Autonomy is refusing to obey or give orders, which are always shouted from above or beyond the situation. Autonomy allows decisions to be made when they are necessary, instead of being pre-determined or delayed by the decision of a committee or meeting. On the contrary, plans and agreements are useful and important.

What is emphasised is a flexibility that allows people to discard plans when they become useless. Plans should be adaptable to events as they unfold. Compromising with those who we oppose e. The scraps handed down to appease and divert us by those we oppose must be refused. As such, compromise only makes the state and capital stronger.

To continually refuse to compromise is to be in perpetual conflict with the established order and its structures of domination and deprivation. Permanent conflict is uncontrollable autonomous action that does not compromise with power. In solidarity with the villagers, Nikos placed a bomb in the Ministry of Industry and Development that was intended to explode when no one was in the building; unfortunately, it never went off at all.

Nikos was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but is now free. TVX Gold is a multinational company whose headquarters is in Canada, there are thus many points at which revolutionary solidarity with the villagers of Stryminikos could have been enacted. Revolutionary solidarity communicates the link between the exploitation and repression of others and our own fate, and it shows people the points at which capitalism or the state operate in similar ways in very different places.

By creating links between struggles against the state and capital, revolutionary solidarity has the potential to take our local struggles to a global level. Moreover, revolutionary solidarity is always an active attack; it always involves the recovery of our own active powers that multiply in combination — in solidarity — with the active powers of others. This is a revolutionary struggle because it is not only aimed at a mere reform, but ultimately its goal is the disappearance of prisons, which involves a radical social change.

It is a self-organised struggle, in which there are not any leaders or representatives, neither inside the prisons nor outside, but only solidarity that grows between exploited people both from inside and outside the walls. One of the primary strengths of informal organisation is that it allows anarchists to intervene in intermediate or specific struggles without compromising principles or demanding uniformity of action and politics. Informally organised struggles may be composed of affinity groups with quite different political perspectives from each other.

Some people may wish to open the possibility for insurrection, while others are only concerned with an immediate goal. There is no reason why those who share an immediate practical aim but diverge in their long-term goals might not come together. For example, an anti-genetic engineering GE group could form and decide to co-ordinate the tearing up test crops and to circulate anti-GE leaflets.

In this case those who want an insurrectionary rupture with this social order and those who merely hate genetic engineering could easily work together towards this immediate goal. Groups that take a more insurrectionary approach to action, however, often end up in conflict with other groups working around similar issues.

The Earth Liberation Front, an informally organised set of groups which have taken a position of attack on those they see as destroying the earth, have been vilified by the mainstream environmental movement.

At the same time, they would probably be critiqued by many insurrectionary anarchists for focusing defensively on the protection of the earth and ignoring the social aspect of revolution. What is important to allow different groups to work together is co-ordination with autonomy. For those who wish to open the possibility of insurrection, such co-operation will not close the door on their dreams.

Informal organisation, with its ethics of autonomy and no compromise, does not control struggle, and uncontrollability opens the possibility for an insurrectionary rupture with the present social order.. He made a radical anarchist statement to the court during his trial, giving the reasons for the bombing, and explaining his insurrectionary hatred for the state and industry.

Further Reading. Email: acraticus yahoo. Many insurrectionary anarchist writings can be obtained from Elephant Editions publications. I have a theory. So I spend my days patiently continuingly attempting to stop the madness which drives the governments and corporations, and each day I hear of new atrocities.

I go on another A to B demonstration, shout some slogans, and then at the end of day I again open up this special compartment and put the anger of some new atrocity in it, all in anticipation of the day when I shall need this anger to bring the Empire down. But a new fear has overcome me. I perceive my anger calling me from inside this compartment, I hear the door unlatching from inside, and this new terrible question approaches me:. Will it be when the next river or lake is destroyed after being needlessly polluted?

When logging companies have destroyed another eco-system and driven the native peoples from the land? When your local factory exports another shipment of arms designed and destined to kill people like you and me? If corporations continue to wreak havoc upon the ozone layer, if ecology is cast blindly aside in favour of profit? If certain parties proceed in a manner which is clearly imperilling the lives of a multitude of glorious and beautiful animals and plants on our planet?

Do we hope for this whilst the system carries on destroying us and the planet to such an extent that the world may not be worth living in when we finally get round to doing anything about it? Do we carry on waiting and waiting until things get critical? Is it then the time for insurrection? You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.

Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Roots of Insurrectionary Anarchy As insurrectionary anarchism is a developing practice — not an ideological model of the future or a determinist history — insurrectionary anarchists do not take the work of any single revolutionary theoretician as their central doctrine: thus insurrectionary anarchists are not Bakuninists, for example, and feel no need to defend all his writings and actions.

Social and Individual Struggle Another issue that has caused a lot of debate within anarchist circles is the supposed contradiction between individual and social struggle: again, this is a question of the organisation of struggle. Critique of Organisation In Italy, the failure of the social movements of the s and s led some to reassess the revolutionary movement and others to abandon it all together. Is then the time for insurrection?

Or will it be too late…? Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. The father, David Hedger Duke, volunteered for service in […]. CAQ subscription information follows the article. This article appea […].

You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out. February 22, A debate has developed over whether the space weapon envisioned by the Reagan Administration for the first phase of its plan for a defense against missiles could strike offensively at targets in orbit and on earth.

The license also […]. Sam […]. What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most […]. The austerity of the cloister has nothing to envy of the atmosphere one breathes in their pages. Their authors, priests of the revolution of revenge and punishment, pass their time weighing up blame and retribution.

Moreover, these vestals in jeans have taken a vow of chastity, so they also expect and impose it. They want to be rewarded for their sacrifice. First they abandoned the comfortable surroundings of their class of origin, then they put their abilities at the disposal of the disinherited. They have grown accustomed to using words that are not their own and to putting up with dirty tablecloths and unmade beds. So, one might listen to them at least.

They dream of orderly revolutions, neatly drawn up principles, anarchy without turbulence. If things take a different turn they start screaming provocation, yelling loud enough for the police to hear them. We are all concerned with the revolutionary problem of how and what to produce, but nobody points out that producing is a revolutionary problem.

If production is at the root of capitalist exploitation, to change the mode of production would merely change the mode of exploitation.

The producer is sacred. Hands off! Sanctify his sacrifice in the name of the revolution, and les jeux sont faits. The critique of political economy is a rationalisation of the mode of production with the least effort by those who enjoy the benefits of it all. Everyone else, those who suffer exploitation, must take care to see that nothing is lacking.

Otherwise, how would we live? The son of darkness sees nothing when he comes out into the light, just like when he was groping around in the dark. Joy blinds him. It kills him. So he says it is a hallucination and condemns it. The flabby fat bourgeois bask in opulent idleness. So, enjoyment is sinful. That would mean sharing the same sensations as the bourgeoisie and betraying those of the producing proletariat. Not so. The bourgeois goes to great lengths to keep the process of exploitation going.

He is stressed too and never finds time for joy. His cruises are occasions for new investments, his lovers fifth columns for getting information on competitors. The productivity god also kills its most faithful disciples. Wrench their heads off, nothing but a deluge of rubbish will pour out. The hungry wretch harbours feelings of revenge when he sees the rich surrounded by their fawning entourage.

The enemy must be destroyed before anything else. But save the booty. Wealth must not be destroyed, it must be used. What counts is grabbing it from whoever is holding on to it at the time so that everyone has access to it.

Good answer. But really, what will we do after we have cut off so many heads we are bored with it? What will we do when there are no more landlords to be found even if we go looking for them with lanterns? Then it will be the reign of the revolution. To each according to their needs, from each according to their possibilities. Pay attention, comrade. There is a smell of bookkeeping here. We are talking of consumption and production. Everything is still in the dimension of productivity.

Arithmetic makes you feel safe. Two and two make four. Numbers rule the world. We all need something solid and durable. Stones to build a wall to stem the impulses that start choking us. We all need objectivity. The boss swears by his wallet, the peasant by his spade, the revolutionary by his gun.

Let in a glimmer of criticism and the whole scaffolding will collapse. In its heavy objectivity, the everyday world conditions and reproduces us. We are all children of daily banality. The boss fears the revolution because it would deprive him of his wealth, the peasant will make it to get a piece of land, the revolutionary to put his theory to the test.

If the problem is seen in these terms, there is no difference between the wallet, land and revolutionary theory. These objects are all quite imaginary, mere mirrors of human illusion. It distinguishes boss from peasant and establishes the link between the latter and the revolutionary.

The forms of organisation production takes are ideological vehicles to conceal illusory individual identity. This identity is projected into the illusory economic concept of value. A code establishes its interpretation. The bosses control part of this code, as we see in consumerism. The technology of psychological warfare and total repression also gives its contribution to strengthening the idea that one is human on condition that one produces.

Other parts of the code can be modified. They cannot undergo revolutionary change but are simply adjusted from time to time. Think, for example, of the mass consumerism that has taken the place of the luxury consumerism of years gone by. Then there are more refined forms such as the selfmanaged control of production. Another component of the code of exploitation. And so on. Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my comrade. Why did they want to turn a sword into a pitchfork?

Why must man continually strive to distinguish himself from nature? Men, if they cannot attain what is necessary, tire themselves with that which is useless.

In this way people are transformed from historically determined units into a duality means and end simultaneously. They realise themselves through the satisfaction of their needs i. Anyone can see how much mythology is concealed in statements such as this. If man distinguishes himself from nature through work, how can he fulfil himself in the satisfaction of his needs?

Commodities have a profoundly symbolic content. They become a point of reference, a unit of measure, an exchange value. The spectacle begins. Roles are cast and reproduce themselves to infinity.

The actors continue to play their parts without any particular modifications. The satisfaction of needs becomes no more than a reflex, marginal effect.

An abyss gapes open between nature and man. It must be filled, and the expansion of the commodity market is seeing to it. The spectacle is expanding to the point of devouring itself along with its contradictions. Stage and audience enter the same dimension, proposing themselves for a higher, more far-reaching level of the same spectacle, and so on to infinity. They are pointed at.

They are surrounded by barbed wire. If they refuse englobement or an alternative form of codification, they are criminalized. They are clearly mad!

It is forbidden to refuse the illusory in a world that has based reality on illusion, concreteness on the unreal. Capital manages the spectacle according to the laws of accumulation. But nothing can be accumulated to infinity. Not even capital. A quantitative process in absolute is an illusion, a quantitative illusion to be precise.

The bosses understand this perfectly. Exploitation adopts different forms and ideological models precisely to ensure this accumulation in qualitatively different ways, as it cannot continue in the quantitative aspect indefinitely.

The fact that the whole process becomes paradoxical and illusory does not matter much to capital, because it is precisely that which holds the reins and makes the rules. It is the exploited who foot the bill. So it is up to them to see the trick and worry about recognising reality. For capital things are fine as they are, even though they are based on the greatest conjuring trick in the world. The exploited almost feel nostalgia for this swindle. They have grown accustomed to their chains and become attached to them.

Now and then they have fantasies about fascinating uprisings and blood baths, then they let themselves be taken in by the speeches of the new political leaders. The quantitative illusion spreads. The exploited enlist, count themselves, draw their conclusions. Fierce slogans make bourgeois hearts miss a beat. The greater the number, the more the leaders prance around arrogantly and the more demanding they become.

They draw up great programmes for the conquest of power. This new power is preparing to spread on the remains of the old. Of course, deep changes are being programmed in the code of illusions. But everything must be submitted to the symbol of quantitative accumulation. The demands of the revolution increase as militant forces grow. In the same way, the rate of the social profit that is taking the place of private profit must also grow.

So capital enters a new, illusory, spectacular, phase. Old needs press on insistently under new labels. The productivity god continues to rule, unrivalled. How good it is to count ourselves. It makes us feel strong. The unions count themselves. The parties count themselves. The bosses count themselves. So do we. And when we stop counting we try to ensure that things stay as they are. If change cannot be avoided, we will bring it about without disturbing anyone. Ghosts are easily penetrated.

Every now and then politics come to the fore. Capital often invents ingenious solutions. Then social peace hits us. The silence of the graveyard. The illusion spreads to such an extent that the spectacle absorbs nearly all the available forces. Not a sound. Then the defects and monotony of the mis-en-scene. The curtain rises on unforeseen situations. The capitalist machinery begins to falter. Revolutionary involvement is rediscovered.

Everyone extremely ferocious. Leaflets everywhere. Mountains of leaflets and pamphlets and papers and books. Old ideological differences lined up like tin soldiers. Even the anarchists rediscovered themselves. And they did so historically, according to the needs of the moment. Everyone was quite dull-witted. The anarchists too. Some people woke up from their spectacular slumber and, looking around for space and air to breathe, seeing anarchists said to themselves, At last!

They soon realised their mistake. Things did not go as they should have done in that direction either. There too, stupidity and spectacle. And so they ran away. They closed up in themselves. They fell apart. But it also produced its antibodies. The process of the quantitative illusion became evident.

On the one hand it received fresh lymph to build a new view of the commodity spectacle, on the other there was a flaw. It has become blatantly obvious that confrontation at the level of production is ineffective. Take over the factories, the fields, the schools and the neighbourhoods and selfmanage them, the old revolutionary anarchists proclaimed. We will destroy power in all its forms, they added. But without getting to the roots of the problem.

Although conscious of its gravity and extent, they preferred to ignore it, putting their hopes in the creative spontaneity of the revolution. But in the meantime they wanted to hold on to control of production. Whatever happens, whatever creative forms the revolution might express, we must take over the means of production they insisted. Otherwise the enemy will defeat us at that level. So they began to accept all kinds of compromise. They ended up creating another, even more macabre, spectacle.

And spectacular illusion has its own rules. Anyone who wants to direct it must abide by them. They must know and apply them, swear by them. The first is that production affects everything. If you do not produce you are not a man, the revolution is not for you. Why should we tolerate parasites? Should we go to work in place of them perhaps? Should we see to their livelihood as well as our own?

Well, in that case better attack them right away. We know who our allies are, who we want to side with. Train militants who know the techniques of struggle at the place of production. How will we be able to stop them from making mistakes? At the spectacular level of organisation there are some who are capable of making far more noise than we are. And they have breath to spare. Struggle at the workplace. Struggle for the defence of jobs.

Struggle for production. With great scenic skill capital has succeeded in making the exploited love exploitation, the hanged man the rope and the slave his chains. This idealisation of work has been the death of the revolution until now. The movement of the exploited has been corrupted by the bourgeois morality of production, which is not only foreign to it, but is also contrary to it.

It is no accident that the trade unions were the first sector to be corrupted, precisely because of their closer proximity to the management of the spectacle of production. In this way the quantitative evaluation of needs is overturned. The need for communism transforms all other needs and their pressures on man. Christianity and revolutionary movements have walked hand in hand throughout history. We must suffer in order to conquer paradise or to acquire the class consciousness that will take us to the revolution.

But the work ethic is a product of the same bourgeois rationalism that allowed the bourgeoisie to conquer power. Corporatism resurfaces through the mesh of proletarian internationalism. Everyone struggles within their own sector. At most they contact similar ones in other countries, through the unions. The monolithic multinationals are opposed by monolithic international unions. The heir to the revolution is destined to become the consumer and main actor of the capitalist spectacle of tomorrow.

Idealised at the level of the clash as the beneficiary of its outcome, the revolutionary class disappears in the idealisation of production. When the exploited come to be enclosed within a class, all the elements of the spectacular already exist, just as they do for the class of exploiters. The only way for the exploited to escape the globalising project of capital is through the refusal of work, production and political economy. The marginalised look for work. They do not find it.

They are pushed into ghettos. They are criminalised. Then that all becomes part of the management of the productive spectacle as a whole. Producers and unemployed are equally indispensable to capital. But the balance is a delicate one. Contradictions explode and produce various kinds of crisis, and it is in this context that revolutionary intervention takes place.

So, the refusal of work, the destruction of work, is an affirmation of the need for non-work The affirmation that man can reproduce and objectify himself in non-work through the various solicitations that this stimulates in him.

The idea of destroying work is absurd if it is seen from the point of view of the work ethic. But how? So many people are looking for work, so many unemployed, and you talk about destroying work? The Luddite ghost appears and puts all the revolutionaries-who-have-read-all-the-classics to fright. The rigid model of the frontal attack on capitalist forces must not be touched.

All the failures and suffering of the past are irrelevant; so is the shame and betrayal. Ahead comrades, better days will come, onwards again! The spectacle offered by the bureaucratic leisure organisations is deliberately designed to depress even the most fertile imagination.

But this is no more than an ideological cover, one of the many instruments of the total war that make up the spectacle as a whole. The need for communism transforms everything. But revolutionaries are dutiful people and are afraid to break with all models, not least that of revolution, which constitutes an obstacle to the full realisation of what the concept means. They are afraid they might find themselves without a role in life. Have you ever met a revolutionary without a revolutionary project?

A project that is well defined and presented clearly to the masses? Whatever kind of revolutionary would be one who claimed to destroy the model, the wrapping, the very foundations of the revolution? By attacking concepts such as quantification, class, project, model, historical task and other such old stuff, one would run the risk of having nothing to do, of being obliged to act in reality, modestly, like everyone else. Like millions of others who are building the revolution day by day without waiting for signs of a fatal deadline.

And to do this you need courage. With rigid models and little quantitative games you remain within the realm of the unreal, the illusory project of the revolution, an amplification of the spectacle of capital. It is difficult even to talk about such things because it does not make sense to mention them in the pages of a treatise. To reduce these problems to a complete and final analysis would be to miss the point. The best thing would be an informal discussion capable of bringing about the subtle magic of wordplay.

Summer nights are heavy. One sleeps badly in tiny rooms. It is the Eve of the Guillotine. The exploited also find time to play. But their play is not joy. It is a macabre ritual. An awaiting death. A suspension of work in order to lighten the pressure of the violence accumulated during the activity of production. In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital.

When we become conscious of the process of exploitation the first thing we feel is a sense of revenge, the last is joy. Liberation is seen as setting right a balance that has been upset by the wickedness of capitalism, not as the coming of a world of play to take the place of the world of work.

This is the first phase of the attack on the bosses. The phase of immediate awareness. What strikes us are the chains, the whip, the prison walls, sexual and racial barriers. Everything must come down. So we arm ourselves and strike the adversary to make them pay for their responsibility. During the night of the guillotine the foundations for a new spectacle are laid. It is impossible to make the revolution with the guillotine alone.

Revenge is the antechamber of power. Anyone who wants to avenge themselves requires a leader. A leader to take them to victory and restore wounded justice. And whoever cries for vengeance wants to come into possession of what has been taken away from them. Right to the supreme abstraction, the appropriation of surplus value.

The world of the future must be one where everybody works. So we will have imposed slavery on everyone with the exception of those who make it function and who, precisely for that reason, become the new bosses. Very well! We will carry the Christian ethic of sin, judgement and reparation into the revolution. That is all part of the spectacle. Even when it is not managed by power directly it can easily be taken over.

Role reversal is one of the techniques of drama. It might be necessary to attack using the arms of revenge and punishment at a certain moment in the class struggle.

The movement might not possess any others. So it will be the moment for the guillotine. But revolutionaries must be aware of the limitations of such arms. They should not deceive themselves or others. Within the paranoid framework of a rationalising machine such as capitalism the concept of the revolution of revenge can even become part of the spectacle as it continually adapts itself. The movement of production seems to come about thanks to the blessing of economic science, but in reality it is based on the illusory anthropology of the separation of tasks.

There is no joy in work, even if it is selfmanaged. The revolution cannot be reduced to a simple reorganisation of work. Not that alone. There is no joy in sacrifice, death and revenge. Just as there is no joy in counting oneself. Arithmetic is the negation of joy.

Anyone who desires to live does not produce death. A transitory acceptance of the guillotine leads to its institutionalisation.

But at the same time, anyone who loves life does not embrace their exploiter. To do so would signify that they are against life in favour of sacrifice, self-punishment, work and death. In the graveyard of work centuries of exploitation have accumulated a huge mountain of revenge. The leaders of the revolution sit upon this mountain, impassively.

They study the best way to draw profit from it. So the spur of revenge must be addressed against the interests of the new caste in power. Symbols and flags. Slogans and complicated analyses. The ideological apparatus does everything that is necessary. It is the work ethic that makes this possible.

Anyone who delights in work and wants to take over the means of production does not want things to go ahead blindly. They know by experience that the bosses have had a strong organisation on their side in order to make exploitation work.

They think that just as strong and perfect an organisation will make liberation possible. Do everything in your power, productivity must be saved at all costs. What a swindle! These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. It is essential to understand that the work ethic is the foundation of the quantitative revolutionary project. Arguments against work would be senseless if they were made by revolutionary organisations with their logic of quantitative growth.

The substitution of the work ethic with the aesthetic of joy would not mean an end to life as so many worried comrades would have it. One could produce as something separate from nature, then join with it as something that is nature itself. So it would be possible to stop producing at any moment, when there is enough. Only joy will be uncontrollable. A force unknown to the civilised larvae that populate our era. A force that will multiply the creative impulse of the revolution a thousandfold.

The social wealth of the communist world is not measured in an accumulation of surplus value, even if it turns out to be managed by a minority that calls itself the party of the proletariat. This situation reproduces power and denies the very essence of anarchy.

Communist social wealth comes from the potential for life that comes after the revolution. Qualitative, not quantitative, accumulation must substitute capitalist accumulation. The revolution of life takes the place of the merely economic revolution, productive potential takes the place of crystallised production, joy takes the place of the spectacle.

The refusal of the spectacular market of capitalist illusions will create another kind of exchange. From fictitious quantitative change to a real qualitative one.

Circulation of goods will not base itself on objects and their illusionist reification, but on the meaning that the objects have for life. And this must be a life meaning, not a death one. So these objects will be limited to the precise moment in which they are exchanged, and their significance will vary according to the situations in which this takes place. It will be personified. Nothing to do with production as we know it now in the dimension of capital.

Exchange itself will have a different meaning when seen through the refusal of unlimited production. There is no such thing as freed labour. There is no such thing as integrated labour manual-intellectual. What does exist is the division of labour and the sale of the workforce, i. The revolution is the negation of labour and the affirmation of joy.

The concept of the selfmanagement of production is valid only as a form of struggle against capitalism, in fact it cannot be separated from the idea of the selfmanagement of the struggle.

If the struggle is victorious the selfmanagement of production becomes superfluous, because after the revolution the organisation of production is superfluous and counter-revolutionary. So long as you make the throw yourself everything is skill and easy winning; only if you suddenly become the one catching the ball that the eternal playmate throws at you, at your centre, with all her strength, in one of those arcs of great divine bridge builders: only then is being able to catch strength, not yours but of a world.

We all believe we have experienced joy. Each single one of us believes we have been happy at least once in our lives. Only this experience of joy has always been passive. We happen to enjoy ourselves. A form of torture like any other. The same goes for Sundays. A dreadful day. The rarefaction of the illusion of free time shows us the emptiness of the mercantile spectacle we are living in.

The same empty gaze alights on the half empty glass, the TV screen, the football match, the heroin dose, the cinema screen, traffic jams, neon lights, prefabricated homes that have completed the killing of the landscape. But that is exactly what capital wants. The experience of free time programmed by our exploiters is lethal.

It makes you want to go to work. To apparent life one ends up preferring certain death. No real joy can reach us from the rational mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Joy does not have fixed rules to catalogue it. Even so, we must be able to desire joy. Otherwise we would be lost. The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about through the search for play.

So, play means something different to what we are used to considering it to be in the dimension of capital. Like serene idleness, the play that opposes itself to the responsibilities of life is an artificial, distorted image of what it really is. By a strange twist of irony the roles are reversed. If life is something serious death is an illusion, in the sense that so long as we are alive death does not exist. Now, the reign of death, i. So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness.

In the physical confrontation with capital play can take different forms, even on this side of the fence.