Gasping from out the Shallows

[Dan Clore]

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Gasping from out the Shallows: Reflections on revolution in the early
twenty-first century
by Wayne Spencer
Anonim, Sob, 2007-03-31 09:27 English

"Human beings are not fully conscious of their real lives. Groping in
the dark, overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts, at every moment
groups and individuals find themselves faced with outcomes they had not
intended [. . .] What should be abolished continues, and we continue to
wear away with it. We are engulfed. Separated from each other. The years
pass and we haven’t changed anything."
(Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief
Unity of Time, 1959)

"We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations,
into the network of possible itineraries. We get used to it, it seems."
(Guy Debord, Critique of Separation, 1961)

"If it seems somewhat absurd to talk of revolution, this is obviously
because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared
from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social
transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more
absurd, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or
another."
(Internationale Situationniste #6, 1961)

"Many people are sceptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary
movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated
or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two
things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we
will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying
themselves with some category separate from the workers, such as artists
(in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new
proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody)."
(Internationale Situationniste #7, 1962)

"The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows."
(George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, 1868)

INTRODUCTION

1

"In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may
consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering
the social space-time that the society allots to them (regardless of
variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion)"
(Situationist International, Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of
Nature, Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963)

2

The first movement of the revolutionary proletariat against the
alienation of capitalism, a movement exemplified by the great waves of
workers' struggles and revolutions that convulsed the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, was destroyed by the machinations,
mystifications and munitions of social democracy, fascism and
Bolshevism. With the defeat in the mid-1930s of the attempts by the
revolutionary workers and peasants of Spain to establish a self-managed
society, the century chimed midnight. In the course of the 1950s, a
second movement of proletarian contestation began to grow restless under
the new conditions of alienation erected out of the partial successes
and ultimate failure of the earlier expressions of proletarian
dissatisfaction. This contestation affected both poles of the apparently
divided but actually united system of global capitalism: the state
capitalism of the societies expropriated by Bolshevism and the affluent
consumer capitalism of the West. In the Soviet bloc, the uprisings in
East Berlin in 1953, Poznan' in Poland in 1956 and across Hungary in
1956, along with innumerable other acts of defiance both large and
small, expressed the proletariat's rejection of the pseudo-communist
bureaucracies that reigned in the proletariat's name yet subjected every
aspect of society to an authoritarian domination for its own interests
as a ruling class. In the West, wildcat strikes defied the unions, and
sabotage, absenteeism, shoddy work and an avowed contempt for work
revealed that sections of the proletariat were dissatisfied with the
well-paid alienated labour on which the post-war consumer societies were
based; so too there was a more sporadic and confused refusal of the
machinery of permitted consumption. In May 1968 in France and during the
1969 'Hot Autumn' in Italy, proletarian discontent coalesced into vast
movements and refused quietly to subside afterwards; so much so that
these two countries were singled out as objects of particular horror by
an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development meeting of
employment experts convened in 1971 out of fearful apprehension that
"the industrial countries . . . are undergoing a revolution" whose first
principle is the "challenge to authority". According to this collection
of specialists in workers submission, the perspective of a society
"without classes, hierarchy, authority and regulations" was abroad in
"industrial France", while in Italy "the effects of industrial conflicts
and social malaise are constantly combined" and "minor details of
technical progress in workplaces . . . provoke conflicts whose violence
is out of all proportion to their causes". They were right to be
alarmed. In their study of 123 industrial conflicts in France in 1971,
for example, Claude Durand and Pierre Dubois found that "significant
illegalities", such as occupations of premises or physical violence
against employers, cadres, supervisors or police, had occurred in half
of all disputes. And high levels of conflict persisted in many other
regions of the advanced capitalist societies. However, by the end of the
following decade, the second upsurge of the proletariat had been
defeated. The state capitalist societies of Eastern Europe had all been
overthrown, but they have been succeeded not by the management by
proletarians themselves of all aspects of their individual and
collective lives, but rather by the forms of representative democracy,
alienated production and commodified everyday life characteristic of
western liberal capitalism. In the west itself, the society of the
abundant commodity continued to dominate every aspect of social life.

3

In the following sections of this document, I shall offer some
tentative, incomplete and doubtless all too fallible views as to how and
why the challenges to the dominant society in the second half of the
twentieth century failed. To this end, I shall consider the four most
developed movements to suppress the global commodity economy identified
by Chris Shutes in his pamphlet On the Poverty of Berkeley Life and the
Marginal Status of American Society in General (Berkeley, 1983), namely
those to be found in Italy, Britain, Poland and South Africa. The goal
in doing so is not to advance abstract historical understanding, nor to
lambast and lament those who failed to overcome all the obstacles to
revolution before them in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, nor to flatter the
sense of superiority or the cynical submissiveness of those who come
after them. An understanding of the failure of those revolutionary
efforts is important only as part of a practical project to renew and
intensify the revolutionary assault on contemporary alienation by going
beyond what was said and done before.

ITALY

4

The emergence of modernized class conflict in Italy was signalled by a
series of unusually intense struggles in the factories in the central
and northern regions of the country during 1968. Typically led by
skilled workers angry at the deterioration of their relatively
privileged terms and conditions, these struggles soon led to even less
restrained assaults on the miseries of work by semi-skilled workers,
often immigrants from the south, who regarded with equal contempt the
authoritarian world of work to be found in the north and the local
traditions of fearful deference that sustained it. In the course of
1969, some 5,000 strikes involving nearly 8 million workers broke out,
with many escaping union control and being conducted directly by
proletarians themselves. The methods used in the most radical of these
conflicts included novel developments such as the 'chess-board' strike
(a scacchiera), in which an unpredictable rolling sequence of short
strikes by groups of workers in different parts of the production
process would cripple a factory at minimal cost to the workers as a
whole, as well as go-slows, factory occupations, sabotage of goods and
machinery, and physical assaults on supervisory, personnel and
management personnel. At their peak, the struggles began to approach a
total rejection of both alienated labour and the notion of rendering
alienation more comfortable by reforms in productive practices and
quantitative increases in wages and holidays; as workers from Mirafiori
and several other Turin factories put it in a demonstration on 3 July
1969: "What do we want? Everything!". In other instances, however,
proletarians expressed their dissatisfactions, with some success, in
terms of demands for fixed-sum or other wage increases, generalized
upgrading, control over speed of work or other superficial changes to work.

5

The 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 did not destroy capitalism. What confronted the
proletariat after its conclusion was the new pattern of accommodation
with capitalism that its own struggles, its own successes, had produced.
It was imperative to create the consciousness and practices to overcome
this new alienated equilibrium. Several obstacles stood in the way of
the necessary advance in understanding and action. These included the
legal action taken against thousands of workers whose actions has
infringed the law and the terrorist attacks staged by elements of the
state and their far-right supporters but attributed to the opponents of
the state as part of a 'strategy of tension'. Perhaps more important,
however, as dangers to the deepening of the thought and praxis of the
discontented proletariat were other factors that threatened to draw the
proletariat back towards the goals and methods of trade unionism,
starting with the unions.

6

The trade unions themselves, having initially been surprised and
outmanoeuvred by workers' militancy, launched strong efforts to contain
that dissatisfaction within methods and objectives consistent with the
existence of the commodity economy. Workers' rejection of hierarchy and
division had confusedly been expressed through egalitarian wage demands.
These demands, which tacitly accepted the institution of work, were
taken up by the unions as part of new negotiating packages. In the same
vein, the unions recuperated the emerging critique of the alienation of
the totality of proletarians' labour, as expressed by the attacks on the
ruinously high line speeds and crude authoritarianism that were the most
obvious manifestations of a work extracted from them in the service of
the commodity, converting this into a demand for an extension of the
involvement of workers' representatives in the regulation and reform of
shop floor procedures. The unions also introduced organizational changes
that improved their capacity to recuperate and divert struggles. The
1970 Workers Charter had extended the recognition of unions and allowed
for the deduction of union dues from wage packets. This was a first step
toward making unions more available to workers and tying workers more
closely to the unions. Other organizational and procedural changes went
further down this road. For example, the unions took greater steps to
consult members over the demands to be included in the negotiations over
national contract and opened the way for individual militants to be
co-opted into the running of union-led struggles. The unions emerged in
a better financial position and in a better position to exercise control
over workers' dissatisfaction and struggles. One important development
was the absorption into the union structure of the system of factory
delegates and councils. Developed, it would seem, by union militants and
reformists from the Manifesto group and the Socialist Party of
Proletarian Unity, the system of electing delegates to councils was
understood as a means of replacing the unmediated associations between
proletarians that had spontaneously emerged in the course of struggles
with a permanent and separate structure to represent workers' interests
as alienated producers within a capitalism that was taken for granted.
This made it not just the natural territory of trade unions, whose very
raison d'être is to mediate the humane and affluent incorporation of the
proletariat into capitalism, but a highly attractive one at a time when
the unions found themselves out of touch with their constituency.
Accordingly, the metalworking unions and the Confederazione Generale
Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) adopted the delegates and the councils as
constituent elements of their grassroots structure in 1970, followed in
1972 by the new federation between the CGIL, the Confederazione Italiana
Sindacati Lavoratori and the Unione Italiana del Lavoro. By 1973 there
were 97,161 delegates grouped into 9,813 councils. These proved
instrumental in negotiating the 3,225 plant-level agreements in force by
that year and in many instances had involved themselves in the
day-to-day negotiation or regulation of work-rates, work-loads, breaks,
etc. Every action taken by the delegates in the name of the workers
struck at the autonomy of the proletariat and confined it within the
logic of capitalism. Over time, the unions increased the powers
possessed by the council secretariats and executives so as largely to
eliminate delegates' control over the councils. However, this did not
change the essence of the councils. They remained what they had always
been: separate bodies for the incorporation of the proletariat into the
separate economy and a bulwark for the dominant society.

7

The onset of economic difficulties and rising inflation in Italy,
phenomena that were in part the result of proletarians' success in
reducing productivity and increasing wages, soon gave rise to a
spectacle of economic crisis. This did not merely counsel acquiescence
and sacrifice on the part of workers but in its pseudo-oppositional
variants encouraged an increasingly exclusive focus on the active
defence of the superficial ameliorations to work already won and the
endless pursuit of further wage increases to offset the depredations of
inflation. In this way, the spectacle once again discovered urgent
privations, supposedly basic needs, and outrageous injustices within
abundance whose resolution justified the postponement of profound social
transformation and the persistence of alienated production and
consumption. In this way, the results of proletarians' initial efforts
to escape the commodity economy returned to them in alienated form to
urge the abandonment of any intensification of those efforts.

8

Alongside the clamorous talk of crisis, the ordinary spectacle of the
pleasures and compensations of consumption -- as conveyed by
advertising, entertainment, journalism, high culture, education, etc --
continued to saturate society with propaganda in favour of an everyday
life confined to the consumption of the products of alienated labour and
the ideologies that give them false meaning. At every turn, proletarians
were confronted with seductive visions of a life of consumption that
would gratify desires and realize dreams without the need for revolution.

9

In the event, although vast struggles continue to harry Italian
capitalism over the next several years, the proletariat failed to
discover the means to overcome the obstacles before it. The trade unions
succeeding in drawing huge additional numbers of workers within the
orbit of their ideology of perpetual negotiated surrender to the
alienation of labour, as membership grew from some 4.5 million in 1968
to over 6 million in 1973. Even where wildcat struggles escaped union
control, they repeatedly settled for extending the margins of the
bounded and false autonomy the individual possesses within the terms of
the capitalist system. Wages typically increased, and in some workplaces
the workers may have put themselves in a position to exercise a degree
of choice as to how and when was carried out; nonetheless, 100% of their
labour power remained expropriated from them and the total alienated
space-time constructed out of that fundamental alienation continued to
dominate society without abatement. In effect, although proletarians
from time to time went beyond trade unionist organization, they did not
overcome the underlying trade unionist ideology that regards work as a
necessary evil that is justified by the domestic life and commodity
consumption it makes possible.

10

The faltering of proletarian struggle was in part attributable to a
failure to confront the whole of the daily life that advanced capitalism
provides. Outside of work, the everyday life of consumable roles and
pleasures was the subject of very little critique, and workers who
carved out greater free time by absenteeism or reduced hours tended to
adopt conventional ways of life once beyond the factory gates. This is
not to say that there was no criticism of how life was lived, for
especially in the northern areas where the scale of immigration from the
south had exceeded the capacity of corrupt administrations and private
business to provide the banal facilities of everyday life in advanced
capitalism, furious struggles for adequate accommodation and other goods
were conducted. These struggles over a myriad of details of daily life
gave the contestation in those areas a breadth that might have opened
the way to a comprehensive critique of everyday life. But its focus on
deficiencies in supply, on the ways in which the available facilities
fell short of the ordinary expectations of the modern consumer, exposed
it to recuperation into reformist campaigns for the provision of a
properly modern alienation, inevitably led by specialists in each
separate domain of consumption that was in issue, or to degeneration
into a host of individual scrambles to use the increased wages that had
been secured in order to purchase private solutions. Indeed, the extra
money that became available as a by-product of factory struggles placed
within proletarians' reach a greater range of consumable needs and
pleasures generally, calling for an awareness and practical critique of
the poverties of the domain of separate consumption increasingly opening
to it. Such a refusal did not develop. Apart from some promising but
narrow critiques by feminists, domestic life and commodity consumption
was accepted without reflection. This blindness to the nature and
poverties of important aspects of capitalist daily life crippled the
proletarian movement. It left untouched the pseudo-pleasures that the
spectacle offers as compensation for work and that encourage those
disgusted with what they do at work to seek reforms of working time, or
simply to persist with gritted teeth, for the sake of what their work
enables them to buy and do. The refuge of private life continued to
beckon to workers exhausted by endless partial struggles. More
importantly, the thought that there is something better, something
worthwhile, to do in the everyday life outside of work powerfully
contributed to the failure of proletarian consciousness to develop to
the point where the prospect of leaving the means of producing
individual and collective life in the hands of capitalism is regarded as
utterly intolerable.

11

In this impasse, the proletariat received no assistance from the
'workerist' left (or its 'autonomist' successor). The grand theory of
workerist intellectuals was notable for its hermetic obscurity and
uselessness. Starting with a handful of fetishized abstractions derived
from classical Marxism or newly coined, a series of largely a priori
deductions would follow, resulting in nothing more than the conclusions
the ideology had presupposed at the outset. Worse, perhaps, these
pseudo-analyses all too frequently sought not to transcend bourgeois
political economy but simply to practice it better than the people the
corporations and the state paid. The point of view adopted was that of
the narrowest and most pessimistic economic specialist; inevitably,
almost nothing could be seen by means of this self-imposed myopia except
the reified movements of a few economic variables and the shadows of a
disembodied and idealized proletariat. The results were risible. Beyond
these rarefied games of tenured revolutionaries, the workerists never
escaped the Leninism that had destroyed the Russian Revolution and
created an authoritarian state capitalism to support its rule in the
name of an excluded and subjugated proletariat. For the workerist,
proletarian autonomy was entirely consistent with the hierarchical
subordination of the proletariat to a hierarchical vanguard
organization, while revolutionary struggle in practice consisted of the
vigorous and inflexible pursuit without end of trade unionist
improvements to wages and conditions. The revolutionary transformation
of the individual or the society was always and everywhere postponed for
a swiftly receding millenarian tomorrow.

12

The second half of the 1970s brought a seemingly radical wing of the
proletarian movement into increasing prominence: the autonomia. Bringing
together, amongst others, students disappointed by their education in
the newly-expanded universities and apprehensive at their prospects in
economically difficult times, young people chafing at the persistence of
archaic family and social controls or condemned by recession to
unemployment or mundane work, and young workers who rejected the caution
and conservatism of the generation of 1968/9, the autonomia movement
eschewed the Leninism of the workerists in favour of smaller and more
informal groups with an expressly egalitarian orientation. It also
rejected the conservative cultures to be found in society at large and
its workerist opponents, embracing more playful mores and
counter-cultural styles (e.g. the Metropolitan Indians, a loose
confederation that intermittently adopted pseudo-Native American dress
and argot derived from westerns). The actions pursued by the various
segments of the autonomia included wildcat strikes and factory
occupations; the creation of social centres, typically in squatted
buildings, that provided living quarters and a base for autonomous
activities; "autoriduzione" (refusing to pay all or part of the cost of
goods or services), often for leisure and cultural events; patrols
against drug-pushers and attacks on fascists; protest marches;
disruption of musical and other events; and a collective 'hanging-out'
together. In 1977 the conflict between the autonomia and the state
rapidly escalated, starting on February. At the beginning of the month a
demonstration to protest an armed invasion of Rome University by
fascists that had led to two people being shot was itself fired on by
the police. A number of universities were occupied the next day and
demonstrations followed. On 17th February when Metropolitan Indians and
other autonomists attended a speech being given by Luciano Lama, the
CGIL secretary and an exponent of economic austerity, at the University
of Rome. The university was occupied by students and others and Lama
urged that the occupation be broken. Equipped with a dummy in a cart
bearing the message "Nessuno Lama" ("Nobody loves him"), the autonomists
responded by chanting slogans such as "more work, less pay" and pelting
Lama and his CGIL minders with water and paint bombs. After Lama's
speech, the CGIL minders attacked the protesters. This provoked a
counter-attack that expelled the minders from the campus, which in turn
led to an invasion by the police. Over the course of the next few
months, skirmishes at protest marches led to the death by gunshots of
two protesters and a policeman, riotous responses by the autonomia, and
a programme of state repression that saw movement radio stations closed,
the occupation of the University of Rome broken by armoured cars, and
thousands of militants arrested and held for long periods for trial in
special courts. In 1978 elements of the autonomia turned decisively to
armed struggle, joining or supplementing the existing leftist terrorist
factions underground. During the two years 1978–1979, the armed groups
carried out 49 killings and 1,863 armed actions that did not result in
fatalities; in 1980–1981 the numbers were 40 and 359, respectively. Each
of these actions only oiled the wheels of state repression and helped
the state to drive an ideological wedge between the proletariat and a
revolutionary project represented as the obscure and murderous property
of separate gangs. The larger movement of the autonomia soon disappeared.

13

The failure of the autonomia cannot simply be regarded as a product of
external repression; it also had to do with factors within the movement
that limited the extent to which it broadened and deepened its attack
upon the dominant society. The movement was in part a product of the
unevenness of development of Italian capitalism, an unevenness that
pitched modern ideologies of capitalist life against more archaic
conceptions of submission and excluded a section of the younger
generations from work during a period of economic restructuring. For
this reason, the autonomia incorporated within itself not just a
dissatisfaction that reached to the very roots of contemporary
capitalism but also a relatively superficial disappointment at the lack
of means and opportunities to indulge the proclivities the spectacle had
created. The result was ambivalence or even outright enthusiasm within
autonomia for certain of the leading edges of commodity consumption, and
especially the domain of youth culture. From the 1950s onwards, popular
youth culture has been a central part of the development of advanced
capitalism, producing vast new markets for clothes, films, music and
other commodities and an associated spectacle of unrestrained,
hedonistic consumption that has increasingly become a key exemplar of
what desirable life consists of in contemporary times. The rock and roll
spectacle's catalogue of sensationalist thrills, fun and ecstasy
produced by cacophony, speed, stereotyped bodily movement, abundant
mechanistic sex, stylish dress, drink, drugs and the collective
ideologies that allow these sensations to be construed as enjoyable has
naturally horrified the bearers of moralist attitudes fashioned in more
austere periods of capitalist development (e.g. many of the members of
the Italian Communist Party); but the clash between the old and new
means of adaptation to life dominated by the commodity, a clash that has
undoubtedly sharpened the desirability and the apparent subversiveness
of the latter, is only one more false division in the spectacle. By
failing to repudiate youth culture in its entirety, autonomia fell into
the contradictory position of proclaiming its rejection of the dominant
society while simultaneously embracing an important dimension of the
everyday life that the self-same society held out. It may from time to
time have disrupted popular culture events, as in 1977 when the
Metropolitan Indians stormed a jazz concert in Umbria, and denounced
musical spectacles, yet dreams of producing or consuming popular culture
permeated the movement without effective challenge, as can be seen for
example in the music played on movement radio stations and at social
centres, the autoriduzione that sought to reduce ticket prices for rock
concerts and films, and the fashions in casual clothing marketed to the
young that were taken up almost ubiquitously by movement members. Even
the eventual slide into a destructive use of hard drugs by parts of the
movement can be understood as more than the product of despair at the
worsening conditions brought about by state repression. It was also
another instance of the movement seeking the pleasures and consolations
of the hedonistic spectacle.

14

Another aspect of the dominant society reproduced within autonomia was
the domination of the individual by the collective. The organisations
created within autonomia lacked the overt hierarchy of the leftist
vanguards-in-waiting but in practice organisations existed as entities
greater than the individual and not just associations formed by
individuals to accomplish specific and agreed-upon objectives together.
One consequence of this was that the organisation and revolution itself
took on the air of an external, abstract cause to be served by
individuals, encouraging either grim dedication, sacrificial militantism
and a lack of internal and self-critique on the one hand, or an
ecumenical 'tolerance' that equally restricted the free play of
criticism on the other. The most obvious instance of militantism within
the movement was its militaristic wing, both before and after its slide
into counter-revolutionary terrorism. However, it was also present
elsewhere, for example in the collective style of the Metropolitan
Indians, a style that in any event was sometimes indistinguishable in
essence from the disarmed puerility and superficial mockery of the more
obvious components of the dominant society with which the cynical
spectator lubricates his submission to that same society’s fundamental
alienations. The absence of a thoroughgoing culture of continuous
critical evaluation of self and others could be seen in the survival
within the movement of the attitudes and practices of the most degraded
masculinity and the evasive and defensive reactions offered to the
justified criticism of those survivals by feminists and others within
the movement. Rhetorical exchanges between groups on the basis of
inflexible positions were common; careful and relentless re-examination
of presuppositions, organizational practices, and programmatic
statements within groups rather less so.

15

The limitations of autonomia's critique of the dominant society no doubt
contributed to its failure to draw in the mass of the proletariat and
its consequent death in isolation. The emphasis within the movement on
particular commodity enthusiasms as part of its practical
self-definition could serve only to separate it from those who merely
happened to have different consumer tastes. Along with its collectivism
and its tendency to glorify marginal survival techniques in the name of
a "revolt against work", it also prevented the movement from offering a
total and coherent theoretico-practical critique of the dominant
alienation in which others could find an illumination of their own
miseries and a practical project for assailing shared miseries together.
In general, the movement failed to articulate a critique of alienation
in terms that persuasively revealed what its own members' confinement to
a marginal survival, and the inflation-protected and relatively secure
and affluent survival of the bulk of the proletariat, had in common. The
distance between the autonomia and all too many other proletarians can
be seen in the comments of a Fiat Worker in Bologna about his fellow
workers' response to a large autonomia demonstration in Rome a few days
before: "There is the feeling that something big is happening. But
Sunday's news from Rome (the demo) didn't succeed in stopping the usual
talk about Sunday's football matches" (Italy 1978-8: Living with an
Earthquake, Red Notes, 1978; page 64). The tragedy and death knell of
autonomia was that nothing it had said or done, and certainly not the
ritualistic demonstrations and violent trashings that changed nothing
but the headlines in the media, had prompted workers such as these to
critically engage its own enthusiasms for the sporting and other
spectacles that bound them to the commodity society, let alone discover
a common cause with it.

BRITAIN

16

In Britain during the 1960s, around 95% of strikes were unofficial
initiatives by the workers themselves. In the 1970s, large union-led
disputes became more common, to the point that in 1971 and 1972 the
number of days lost to official strikes exceeded those lost to
unofficial strikes. But the large majority of strikes continued to be
launched without union sanction or control. Also common was a palpable
contempt for work, expressed in conversation, absenteeism, sabotage,
non-cooperation, low productivity and poor quality work. This "British
Disease" persisted throughout the 1970s, reaching its peak with the
waves of industrial disputes that made up the "Winter of Discontent" of
1978-9 that shattered the Labour Government's latest attempt to restrict
wage increases. However, three months after the Winter of Discontent
began to fade in the wake of an agreement between the government and the
Trade Union Council in February 1979, the Conservative Party of Margaret
Thatcher was elected. Over the course of the ensuing decades, the
incidence of strikes and other forms of proletarian resistance
decreased. In 1998 the number of strikes was the lowest since records
began to be collected in 1891.

17

Thatcher's approach to industrial relations was in part organized around
the notion of "returning the unions to their members". The underlying
assumption was that the rank-and-file were more moderate than the
leadership of the unions. As Ian Macleod, a Conservative Minister of
Labour in the 1950s, once observed, "this is not my experience, nor is
it the experience of any Minister of Labour"; and, no doubt, it was
equally untrue in 1979. Nonetheless, despite her ideological delirium,
Thatcher had stumbled upon two central weaknesses of the British
proletariat, namely the profound underdevelopment of its understanding
of its own actions and dissatisfactions and its failure to develop a
practical critique of commodity society that was fully autonomous of the
unions and other separate powers. It was these and other weaknesses that
Thatcher wielded against the proletariat.

18

It might reasonably be said that what Thatcher did was call the
proletariat's bluff. The spectacle of crisis and looming disaster had
been prominent throughout the 1970s. From every corner, ecological,
economic, terrorist or other catastrophes loomed. These permitted the
spectacle to yet again reinvent its tawdry fabricated consumer needs and
state 'protections' as urgent necessities and encourage the spectator to
abandon fundamental social change in favour of supposedly imperative
reforms, wage demands or a cynical private hedonism. At the end of the
decade, the ideology of Thatcherism added to these apprehensions of
collapse a stark demonstration that the manner in which state, industry,
work and trade were organised could no longer sustain economic growth
and widespread consumption, and that radical and painful change was
necessary in order to secure the continuance of consumer society. This
ideological attack was able to exploit several fault lines in
proletarian thought and feeling. Although disputes in the workplace had
been sharp and numerous, they stayed at the level of contesting the
details of how the expropriation of the proletariat's labour was to be
organised and remunerated. What underpinned disputes with employers
remained a notion of fair treatment and equitable rewards, together with
a presupposition that large employers must somewhere possess the
resources to meet their demands without difficulty. Both ideas accepted
the legitimacy of the alienation of labour and were vulnerable to
arguments of practicability within the terms of the capitalism they took
for granted. A notable cause of the frozen and underdeveloped state of
proletarian thought and practice was the shop steward system. Stewards
were officials of a trade union but they were directly elected by
relatively small groups of workers and it was not unusual for them to
work side-by-side with the workers they represented. Their position
close to the workers led to them being perceived as distinct from
regional and national union officers of the union and the invidious
compromises with which those more remote figures were associated. It
also permitted them quickly to take up workers' grievances or wildcat
refusals, removing them from workers' own hands and ensuring that they
were understood and pursued as negotiable demands for the amelioration
of particular features of alienated labour. Where disputes did escalate,
they often resulted in walkouts, which only served to disperse the
workers whom shared resentments had brought together, scattering them
back into their individual daily lives as passive and separated
individuals. In these ways, the forms of struggle adopted tended to make
proletarians spectators of their own struggles and failed to create the
practical conditions of control and decision in which consciousness
could develop. They equally meant that disputes generally concerned
individual workplaces or sectors of employment, with little effort being
made to communicate with other proletarians, an omission that over time
prevented the development of a wider movement and fostered a chasm of
incomprehension between the workers who were frequently involved in
strikes and other disputes and those, perhaps the majority, who rarely
took action and for whom the actions of other workers were little more
than a cause of irritating nuisances in everyday life and the inflation
that constantly threatened their real income. Moreover, the proletarians
who vigorously attacked their conditions of work did not extend that
contestation to the rest of everyday life, tending indeed to seek refuge
from the horrors of alienated work in the equally alienated consumption
of the goods, spectacles and ideas that such work produced. Proletarian
thought and desire continued to be captivated by the vast array of
things, pleasures, tales and ideologies that advanced capitalism was
producing in abundance and the spectacle everywhere offered to the gaze.
Rather than practical questions of the revolutionary abolition of
everything that exists separate from individuals, they were dominated at
every turn by spectacular fantasies about domestic life, gardening,
sport, royalty, crime, sex, drink, music, films, clothes, hairstyles,
etc. The result was that proletarians' theoretical understanding of
capitalism and their own struggles against it was rudimentary throughout
the decades down to the rise of Thatcherism. When finally confronted by
the forceful Thatcherite argument that in order to continue enjoying the
consumption it craved there was no alternative but to submit to economic
restructuring, it had little practical answer to offer. It was all too
obvious that its long-standing strategy of simply maximizing wages and
minimizing work was a failure as a means of advancing individuals'
alienated interests within capitalism. Thatcherism was clearly onto
something here. Yet it had developed neither the consciousness nor the
unalienated forms of association from which a new strategy of resistance
could develop and a rejection of capitalism and its economic logic
emerge. What ensued for all too many was confusion, collapse or
acquiescence, a surrender to Thatcher's project or a retreat into
nihilism, narrow self-interest, madness or despair.

19

However, Thatcherism cannot properly be understood merely as a grim
demand for unconditional proletarian surrender. Amongst other things, it
was also an ideology of liberation. As pseudo-revolutionary ideology, it
attacked both the state (or at least those parts engaged in economic
management) and the unions as separate hierarchical powers controlling
the individual. It identified freedom with the unfettered making of
choices within the market and the ownership of property, and equated
adventure with the unsupported individual pursuit of market risk. It
promised as the reward for initial sacrifice new, modern employment and
a massive expansion of the universe of consumable desires with which the
proletariat remained entranced. The proletariat was not beyond its
seductions, perhaps especially as individuals and corporations
unconstrained by the petit-bourgeois and patrician moralities of the
Conservatives widened the opportunities within the world of work for the
exercise of a degraded pseudo-autonomy and began to produce for
consumption the elements of an expanded commodified hedonism, a hedonism
that could even proclaim itself in opposition to Thatcherism. The
resumption of increases in real wages for many, and the growing
availability of credit, also served as temptations to the proletariat to
seek happiness in the refurbished and expanded world of the commodity.

20

Needless to say, far from all proletarians succumbed to Thatcherite
arguments. But proletarian resistance was hampered at every stage by its
fatal entanglement with trade unionism. The Conservatives undertook a
long series of reforms to industrial relations law, introducing measures
that required pre-strike ballots restricted secondary picketing, etc.
They and the employers they influenced also substantially reduced the
extent of the collective bargaining in which unions played a prominent
part. These measures, together with the loss of a sympathetic Labour
government, produced timidity and malaise amongst trade unions and
provided incentives for workers to pursue struggles autonomously. For
example, the various industrial relations restrictions that were enacted
were expressly restricted to trade unions and did not hamper wildcat
actions. What the unions could not do under the industrial relations
legislation, the workers acting themselves could. However, the distance
between the unions and the proletariat was not sufficiently wide so as
to allow workers to discard the unions with ease. The British
proletariat has typically not waited for union approval before taking
action, but it has relied on unions to a large extent to undertake
negotiations on its behalf, translate its gains into agreements, offer
it protection from reprisals, organize relations between workplaces,
handle many mundane day-to-day matters, and even to bring it together as
an acting collective in the first place. For all its dissatisfaction
with unions, it has never wholly repudiated them in theory or practice.
The notion that unions were an infuriatingly defective but nonetheless
essential basis of workers' struggles against employers weighed heavily
on the proletariat throughout the 1980s and beyond, with the result that
it repeatedly failed to take up the opportunities to cast aside the
increasingly ineffective unions and pursue autonomous action. Instead,
the inactivity and pessimism that had afflicted the unions was
transmitted on to workers who remained stuck within them or found
themselves unable to conceive practical means to proceed without them.

21

What did erupt in Britain was a series of riots. Beginning in the St.
Pauls district of Bristol in April 1980, rioting later broke out in
Brixton in April 1981 and then a growing number of town and cities in
July 1981, including Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Leicester. Often
in response to police actions, rioting continued to recur in isolated
outbreaks or larger waves throughout the following decade. Police were
attacked, shops were looted, and cars and buildings destroyed. However,
a riot suspends habitual behaviour and social relations only briefly.
The important question is: what happens next? In the case of the British
riots of the 1980s and early 1990s, the answer in practice was that
there was a retreat to a wholly untransformed everyday life. The goods
that were looted in defiance of the usual rules of the commodity
economy, for example, were taken back into the separate and limited
space that the commodity economy has granted to everyday life and then
used in ways in complete conformity with the models of life the
spectacle proclaims. The territory seized was returned to its owners and
the state, who sooner or later reconstructed it in accordance with the
needs of the commodity economy. Even when riots broke out later in the
same or another place, there was no advance in the theory or practice of
the rioters. The same things happened once again, with the same limited
results.

22

There could be no advance in the rioters' contestation of society
outside of a critical understanding of what they had done and wished:
without a continuous conscious refinement of their thoughts and actions.
In the event, the rioters refused any encounter with revolutionary
theory, with the thought that would allow them to explain to themselves
what they were doing and then to take it further. This is not to say
that they did not think at all about what they had done; it is just that
that reflection was conducted almost entirely with the categories,
desiderata, information and logic derived from the ruling spectacle. For
all the practical lucidity the rioters may have shown in relation to
some aspects of the dominant society, they remained satisfied or blind
consumers of other elements of that society. They may have despised the
police, schools, leftists and a few other prominent institutions of
capitalist society, but they remained mired in the pseudo-rebellious
seductions of the spectacle. Despite the economic difficulties of the
times that had reduced the scale or number of mainstream businesses to
the point where many young people could not secure employment, the
spectacle continued to be everywhere in their lives. In particular, the
spectacle of decomposition -- the specialized spectacle that converts
the failings of the system into consumable images, objects, modes of
behaviour and justifications for cynical acceptance of the degraded
world as inescapable -- successfully held out its abundant seductions to
marginal youth. What bound those youths who had gone beyond a respect
for the law and the state to the dominant society were the models of
happy pseudo-alternative life that the spectacle of decomposition
offered. These models include codes of honour, gender roles,
hierarchies, vocabularies of slang, pantheons of sub-cultural heroes,
tastes for abstract intoxication and violent stimuli, constantly
shifting lists of acceptably hip clothes and hairstyles, and associated
criminal or other employments in which to work. They also contain
various ideologies that claim that a submission to such external ways of
thinking and acting, that a joyful embrace of marginal strategies of
survival within capitalism, constitutes a living to the full
qualitatively superior to the daily grind that everyone else engages in.
The rioters wholly failed to critique their involvement in these
non-mainstream modes of subjection. Indeed, as time passed, it seemed
they grew only more and more caught up in them.

23

The riots had always been used by some as a platform on which to seek
the approval of other members of subcultures who value the display of
violent machismo; but increasingly the limited confrontations acted out
by rioters seemed to serve little other purpose than flattering the
pseudo-rebellious pretensions of hierarchical youth cultures and helping
individuals create or maintain credentials within them. At their worst,
as for example in the case of some of the riots that took place in
various housing estates in the north of England during 1991, these
violent encounters resembled less a conflict between the proletariat and
the state than an internecine squabble between competing hierarchical
powers equally intent in dominating the disputed territory and
population for their own separate ends. In other instances, riots appear
to have primarily arisen from a frustrated desire for the more turbulent
forms of spectacular entertainment. Over time, the British economy has
grown increasingly able to provide for the consumable preferences these
rioters held on to. Former industrial towns, and other urban locations,
have been converted into loci of a new night-time economy of consumable
hedonism and mandatory intoxication. In vast corporate bars and the
neon-lit streets around them, the taste for wild entertainment whose
frustration by the underdevelopment of the economy once led it to seek
its satisfaction in the explosions of Molotov cocktails and the other
paraphernalia of directionless riots consumed as stimuli now finds
realization in pneumatic music, brain-numbing binge drinking,
barely-conscious sex, ritualistic violence against other proletarians,
and the putative pleasures of vomiting cheap drink and bad food onto the
pavement. There is also the expanded market for illegal drugs or the
cheap thrills and gratifying displays of joyriding on offer. The latter
has the air of defiance about it but it changes nothing in the
reproduction of the commodity-spectacle society. It even serves as a
useful means of re-associating car-driving with liberation, freedom and
irresistible desire at a time when its reputation has been tarnished by
the realities of Britain's hopelessly overcrowded roads. Moreover, it
helps inject new demand into both the saturated market for cars and the
market for anti-theft devices and the police. The spectacle of
threatening crime has for decades been an invaluable tool for worrying
people into support for the state. Joy-riders dutifully act out the part
of predatory nihilists in this law-and-order parable.

24

The rioters' failure to develop a theoretical understanding of their
actions affected their ability to communicate their dissatisfaction to
other proletarians and find common ground with them. By saying nothing
for themselves, they allowed their struggles to be presented to others
by the spectacle. What could be seen in the spectacle was enough to
encourage a few of those in an analogous social position to follow their
example, hence the spread of the riots. However, the transformation of
the society in which the rioters found themselves depended not just on
other marginal youth but on the wider proletariat whose alienated labour
produces the society. The proletariat in general appears to have
regarded the rioters with disdain or indifference. They could see
nothing in the riots that spoke to their own conditions and the rioters
took no steps to illuminate them. By remaining silent, by refusing to
engage in the production and communication of their own theory, the
rioters thus ensured that their struggles would not spread beyond the
strata of the proletariat in which they erupted and would not broadly
challenge the dominant society. They thereby helped create the
conditions of their own failure.

25

Another notable reaction to Thatcherism in the 1980s was the miners'
strike of 1984-5. A proposal to close 20 pits, with the loss of 20,000
jobs, vividly revealed the imperialist autonomy of the economy and
offered the miners the opportunity to develop in response a conscious
theoretico-practical refusal of the subjection of individuals to the
economy such as might have brought together all of the proletarian
dissatisfaction with alienation coursing beneath the surface of British
society. However, this unification could not be brought about on the
basis of a campaign for jobs or by way of the notion that the fate
threatening the miners would soon afflict everyone else. By 1983, real
earnings (i.e. earnings net of inflation) were again increasing and so
too was the consumption of consumer durables and other commodities.
Equally, the large majority of proletarians saw no reason to fear the
loss of their own particular jobs (for example, in a national survey in
1986, 80% of workers said there was "no chance" that they would lose
their job and another 5% considered such an eventuality to be very or
quite unlikely). A critique that rejected unemployment and work, poverty
and affluence, as equally repugnant expressions of the total domination
of society by the economy was perhaps the only means by which the miners
could speak to other workers and serve as a rallying point for all the
fundamental disgust that capitalism produces and proletarians choke
back. But this did not develop. Throughout a year-long strike marked by
mass and sometimes violent pickets against a government and coal board
that was determined to defeat them and was prepared to use vast
financial and police resources to do so, the miners failed to disengage
themselves from trade unionist ideology or even the National Union of
Mineworkers that was handling the dispute with considerable
pusillanimity and ineptitude. Aided by geographical isolation and the
considerable dangers of the industry, mining communities continued to be
characterised by a working class culture that had largely evaporated
elsewhere in Britain in consequence of the mobility and multiple
consumer identities fostered by advanced capitalism and its spectacle of
what is possible and pleasurable. This old culture was a product of the
defeat of the first revolutionary workers' movements and promoted a
wary, defensive but profound collective resignation to the inevitability
of capitalism through an enveloping ethos of trade unionist solidarity
and petty-bourgeois mores. In the 1984 strike, the road out of trade
unionism lay through the contestation and supersession of this culture
of proud abjection, of all of the ways of thinking and living of which
it consisted. Although the long strike produced strains within mining
communities, resentments toward the union, and some innovations, such as
the greater involvement of women partners in the support of the strike,
the miners did not initiate a root-and-branch assault on the culture
that bound them to the union, and (aside for the scabs who sank below
even trade unionism) they stayed largely loyal to it. The unions and its
intellectual apologists spoke for the miners and did so in social
democratic terms that had ceased to be credible years before, helping to
ensure limited solidarity and comprehension on the part of other
proletarians. Thus, for example, by the time the strike ended, 92% of
respondents to a Gallup Poll were prepared to express disapproval of the
miners' methods and only 4% were in favour. Practical expressions of
support beyond charitable donations were also limited. It would appear
that proletarians took pity on the miners but were ultimately prepared
to accept that the sacrifice of miners' livelihoods and communities was
inevitable, or even was one of the prices that had to be paid in order
to secure an affluence that the miners had not called into question.
They did not see the miners' struggle as going to the heart of their own
concerns. By remaining behind the union and staying within the
constraints of the culture of which it was the centre, the miners
ensured that they did not fashion a theoretical perspective or means of
communication that could shake the indifference around them and link
them to other workers and their miseries, leaving it only a matter of
time before the government's greater resources would prevail over their
withdrawal of a labour that capital had decided to live without.

POLAND

26

From late 1945 until 1947, strikes in Polish factories were common,
with the autumn of 1946 in particular seeing a huge mobilization in most
of the major centres of industry. In the following years, the crude
police terrorism and anti-worker laws of a state capitalist regime
seeking to expropriate the totality of labour and social life for its
own benefit managed from time to time to secure the disgruntled
acquiescence of proletarians; but eruptions of discord and dissent
repeatedly returned. In the mid-1950s, wildcat strikes continuously
disrupted Polish industry. In June 1956, workers in Poznan' went further.
Reacting to a refusal by party officials to address their economic
concerns, some 75,000 marched on the city centre. Party, police and
security buildings were attacked, prisoners were released and police
dossiers destroyed, and barricades thrown up. Nearly three days of
fighting with the security police and army followed. The party managed
to suppress the Poznan' uprising and to overcome a large wave of strikes
in 1957; yet social peace eluded it. In December 1970, a wave of violent
conflicts with striking workers erupted, as thousands of workers around
the country attacked party headquarter buildings and fought government
troops; scores of workers were killed. This new peak of resistance,
however, also produced developments that were to have disastrous
consequences in the following decade. For the first time, factory
occupations and inter-factory committees to exchange information and
co-ordinate struggles came into being. In both cases, the organizational
structures erected were not subject to the total control of the striking
proletarians. An element of mediation and hierarchy emerged as a group
of elected or self-appointed specialists began to carry out important
aspects of struggles as separate leaders. These specialists in the
organization of the proletariat came to conceive and pursue the project
of creating a trade union. Matters came to a head in August 1980. Price
increases and the dismissal of Anna Waletynowicz, an admired veteran of
the 1970 protests, provoked strikes in Gdan'sk and Szczecin, which soon
came to engulf almost the whole of each city, as well as spreading
elsewhere on the Baltic coast. Lech Wa?e;sa and the other bureaucratic
specialists who exercised control over the inter-factory committees
entered into negotiations with the government for the legal right to
form a trade union. A moment of choice had arrived for the proletariat:
either take the management of its struggles back into its own hands and
deepen its attack on the separate power of the state and economy or
surrender to an organization that would negotiate in its name in the
hope of improving the terms on which the economy and the state dominated
it. In the event, the proletariat failed to act for itself and
Solidarnos'c' (Solidarity) was born.

27

Solidarnos'c' accepted the legitimacy of both the state and the separate
economy, aiming only to create a mediated voice for workers within
production and a measure of independence within a banal daily life
confined between the state and the economy. Its limited objectives
inevitably brought it into conflict with a party whose logic required it
to dominate every aspect of society. But the tendency of both its
philosophy and its hierarchical structure of governing local and
national committees was to reduce the proletariat to order-takers and
spectators in any conflicts that might ensue with the state. It also
discouraged the development of a critique that ranged over ever aspect
of alienated life, whether economic, political or domestic. The road to
self-managed revolution led directly out of the union. It was not taken.
In the months that followed the foundation of Solidarnos'c', Wa?e;sa's
attempts to secure control over the organization and moderate local
struggles that threatened to go beyond what he felt the communist party
would tolerate created conflicts and dissent within the union. However,
these remained within the structures of the union and were often
dominated by bureaucratic factions. Solidarnos'c' continued to be trusted
by the large majority of the proletariat and it soon had ten million
members.

28

On 13th December 1981, the Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski,
declared Martial Law and the leadership of the national Solidarnos'c'
movement was soon detained. This decapitation of the union provided an
opportunity for autonomous organization and struggle by the proletariat,
especially as the imposition of martial law left Solidarnos'c''s strategy
of collaboration with the state in ruins. However, although workers
resisted the militarization of workplaces by sit-ins, occupations and
physical force, and the period of martial law was marked by numerous
protest and clashes with the authorities, these typically remained under
the control and co-ordination of local Solidarnos'c' organisations or
other equally hierarchical bodies. The habit of submission persisted
after Martial Law was lifted in July 1983. In 1984 the Party ended the
suspension of independent trade union activity that had been imposed at
the outset of martial law and granted a legal right to strike.
Solidarnos'c' itself remained proscribed but some union activists proposed
to take advantage of the new conditions to form local unions and even a
new national union. The leadership of Solidarnos'c' discouraged both this
union-building work and industrial action generally. It equally opposed
local activists' efforts to register local Solidarnos'c' unions after a
general amnesty was granted in 1986 and the possibility of legal
recognition of Solidarnos'c' was re-opened. Instead, the national
leadership created first a Provisional Council and later a National
Executive Commission, and adopted an increasingly free-market ideology.
The union was preparing for a capitalist solution to Poland's economic
problems that would centrally turn on subjecting workers to freer market
forces. It was interested in workers' struggles only insofar as they
could be used as bargaining chips to advance its separate interests.
More than this, as the state capitalist regime began to disintegrate
after the communists' disastrous showing in a round of free elections
that had permitted in June 1989 in the characteristically delusional
expectation that they the ruling party emerge triumphant, the
Solidarnos'c' leadership was in effect preparing to assume power and
commence the construction of a system of liberal capitalism. Strikes
continue to break out in these last days of state capitalism, but the
proletariat failed to look beyond its immediate conditions. The question
of who was to dominate society in the post-communist era was now at
large but only Solidarnos'c' and other advocates of the continuance of
capitalism in another form were thinking at this level of theory and
practice. The proletariat was crippled by its long years of alienated
thought and action within hierarchical unions and committees, an
alienation that left it bereft of the desire, the organization means,
and the consciousness necessary to seize control of the society that was
collapsing around it and was to be rebuilt outside and against it. It
continued to share Solidarnos'c''s fundamental acceptance of a separate
economy, a separate state and an everyday life shaped by both. As new
foundations for a different society were proposed and constructed, it
lacked the theoretical consciousness and means of association necessary
to contest the fundamentals of the new alienation. It was unable to
begin a struggle against separation and for a self-managed society at
the moment when the implosion of the dominant society opened history to
its grasp. It was accordingly swept aside and left to quibble over the
compensation to be offered for its continued exclusion from the
conscious control of the socio-economic mechanisms for the making of
history.

SOUTH AFRICA

29

The Soweto uprising in 1976 marked an intensification of the struggle
against the apartheid regime. At its most radical edge, the new movement
of black resistance widely contested the various aspects of the white
domination of society, rejected reformism and collaboration, and refused
the mediation of the myriad bureaucratic parties in search of power,
raising hopes that it would form one basis of a global revolution for
self-management. Within a decade, however, it had been overtaken by
reformist currents that it had failed adequately to critique and resist.
One of the enemies it omitted systematically to confront was the array
of civic associations, street and area committees, youth groups,
churches, women's organisations, religious groups, sports clubs, etc, to
be found in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and beyond. These served
as institutions and service providers for the black population that were
separate from both the existing state and the people themselves. Through
their insinuation throughout everyday life, they began to produce on a
daily basis both the ordinary social relations of and practices of
liberal bourgeois society and the ideology that justifies such dutiful
submission to alienation as freedom. This anticipatory habituation to
the thought and actions of submissive citizens of representative
democracy did not, however, encourage acquiescence to the
authoritarianism of apartheid, and perhaps for this reason appears to
have eluded the opposition that it merited on the part of the radical
wings of the South African revolutionary struggle. What was nothing more
than training in how to confine oneself to the narrow and mediocre life
that liberal capitalism permits was left unchallenged. The same
blindness extended to another important current that served to contain
and limit revolutionary struggle in that country, namely the trade union
movement. Black South Africans were granted the right to join trade
unions in 1979 and in 1985 the Congress of South African Trade Unions
(COSATU) was formed, bringing together unions representing 500,000
members into a single federation. A series of huge strike waves,
including general strikes in 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1989 that involved
millions of workers, gripped the country. These crippled industry and
shook the confidence of the ruling circles of apartheid society, but
they were largely conducted at the instance and under the control of the
union leaderships. Workers remained the followers of the thought and
plans of separate powers. They developed neither an autonomous practice
nor an independent practice, and there was little theoretical critique
from the township radicals encouraging them to do so. More generally,
although boycotts, rent strikes, and other forms of resistance to
apartheid were sometimes pursued outside of the control or mediation of
reformist organization and individuals, they confined themselves to
applying pressure for a social change that it was left to others to
carry out. Even the most radical currents were hampered by an exclusive
focus on the racialization of power that deprived them of a coherent
theoretical and practical opposition to separate power and alienation
generally. When the South African regime began the process of moving the
country towards a multi-racial capitalist democracy in 1990,
proletarians were disarmed theoretically and passive in practice, doing
nothing to interrupt or subvert a change that eliminated some of the
vilest impositions of state racism but left untouched the fundamental
domination exercised over everyday life by hierarchical power and the
separate economy of the non-racial commodity. Having failed to notice
the refurbished alienation in gestation everywhere around it, the
proletariat was mystified, outmanoeuvred and subjugated when that
alienation stepped forward to succeed apartheid and bring South Africa
closer to the forms of liberal capitalist society dominant in the West.

TODAY, TOMORROW AND A DAY OR TWO AFTER THAT

30

The commodity-spectacle society has not ceased to extend its domination
both intensively and extensively. As the productive power of capitalism
grows, the spectacle uses the increasing technological, organizational
and other resources available to it to banish from consciousness any
conception of a society not dominated by the state and the economy. It
everywhere equates all desirable or even possible human life with life
in the society of the spectacle.

31

From the earliest moments of life, the myriad processes of parenting,
entertainment, education, training, advertising, fashion, art, therapy,
social work, etc, inculcate with ever-growing intensity the thoughts and
feelings that take for granted separate power and the separate economy
as inescapable givens of human existence. A growing mass of media
pundits and academic experts from diverse fields urge or compel the
spectators to dedicate more and more of his or her time to developing or
assiduously maintaining the skills, looks and other attributes necessary
for success in the reigning society. The spectacular images of
mainstream or pseudo-alternative achievement do the same, but more
subtly and without the disagreeable didacticism. In these ways, human
beings are relentlessly shaped from infancy so that they possess the
emotional and intellectual apparatus, the minds and bodies, necessary to
serve the modern commodity and the state. Every other stated goal is a
lie or a delusion.

32

In the world of work, employers increasingly seek to intensify the
subordination of proletarians to work and the economy. This is not
necessarily or mainly a matter of imposing crude authoritarian
domination by management over every gesture of the worker, although in
sections of the economy where that seems possible, as in some call
centres, management may try to do so. It is also not necessarily a
matter of simply speeding up the pace of work, although managements do
seek to eliminate non-productive time as far as possible and to
accelerate any activities characterized by relatively simple repetitive
actions. It is more a case of reducing the subjective distance between
proletarians and their work and demanding a closer attention to, and
perhaps identification with, work process than hitherto. At a relatively
coarse level, corporations typically promulgate ideological 'visions' of
their own activity that they expect their workers to embrace and parrot.
These have some success with the gullible, the desperate and the
ambitious, but they are perhaps normally too obviously ludicrous and
deceptive to be taken seriously by the average employee. Other processes
are more important. In general, work has become in some respects more
complex and faster changing, if only because of the reliance on new
technologies. This not only requires greater thought and engagement with
a given task but obliges the worker to acquire, update and display the
technical skills required to carry out the job. Alongside this, the
granting of a limited degree of autonomy to workers in some fields,
which permits or requires them to take actions without prior direction
by binding codes or direct management instruction, expropriates more of
their imaginations and reasoning power from them and seeks to foster
illusions of self-control. The ideology of 'accountability' that often
accompanies this mirage of autonomy makes things still worse, promoting
the assiduous documentation of work done and its craven display for the
approval of superiors and in the hope of securing performance-related
pay additions or avoiding sanctions. That said, the dominant society
recognizes that these and other attempts by employers to ensnare the
senses and souls of those whose work they expropriate are far from
infallible. Thus the spectacle continues to circulate the ideology that
work is wasted time and that relief, freedom or self-realization is to
be found in the consumption of the delusive commodities capitalism
produces and circulates. The drink, dance, drugs, etc, consumed in
desperate abundance each evening or weekend suggests that there are many
who still seek to persuade themselves of the truth of this proposition.

33

Another aspect of the spectacle's escalating project to absorb the whole
of the available space and time is the relentless and massive
refashioning of the human and natural environment to accord with the
interests of the commodity. Cities and countryside have been, and
continue to be, variously reconstructed as homogeneous wastelands given
over to industrial agriculture, suburban life, financial services,
industry or the circulation of vehicles; as playgrounds for commodified
desire and the display and consumption of cultural commodities; or as
spectacular parodies or representations of elements of the past. Those
who imagine or seek authenticity and community in these sometimes dour
and sometimes gaudy wastelands burned over by the commodity merely
betray a superstitious belief in ghosts.

34

The spectacle's claim to the totality has even affected the world of the
celebrity. The transcendental star still exists as an object of distant
admiration. However, the spectacle's stars have tended recently to
descend from the skies. In reality-television programmes and the pages
of celebrity gossip, the new celebrities are reassuringly familiar to
the spectator. They perform their function of consolation in a manner
different from the classical star: by demonstrating that even amongst
those who are rich, famous, powerful, talented, influential, beautiful
or just noticed, life is fundamentally the same as it is everywhere
else. The celebrity has much the same mediocre thoughts, feelings,
values, goals, neuroses, etc, as the spectator. There can be no escape.
There is nothing else and can be nothing else. The miserable life of the
spectator is confirmed as valid, even celebrated, by its ubiquitous
reflection amongst the once-golden people. But stars can move from the
mundane to the transcendental, and back again, as the needs of
spectacular non-life require. The death of a star, for example, may be
taken up as an opportunity for a ritualised indulgence in collective
lamentation for a supposedly extraordinary person.

35

Central to the spectacle's colonization of the society is the vast and
diverse array of commodities that an expanded and more sophisticated
production and distribution of commodities has made available (the
American food industry alone launched 11,500 new products in 1992). The
burden of inspecting, evaluating, discussing, purchasing and maintaining
the mass of goods and ideas that individual spectacular ideologies put
forward as constituting all or part of the good life serves to support
the system by the simple device of occupying a considerable part of the
spectator's free time. But the importance of the sheer scale of
consumption for the spectacle does not stop here. The spectacle rarely
calls for craven surrender; it rather speaks of freedom and
individuality. The world of consumption is the cornerstone of this lie.
In the spectacle, it is the process of choosing amongst the competing
commodities and commodified thoughts that constitutes the essence of
liberty and self-determination, and the spectator is encouraged to take
this rummaging amongst the dead for the free and authentic expression of
his or her subjectivity.

36

The need to generate demand for a wider range of commodities, and
recuperate the aspiration for life beyond the mundane, has seen the
spectacle supplement the still-available models of adherence to
tradition or duty with an increasing emphasis on fun and hedonism, on
the equally dutiful pursuit of those thrills, pleasures, sensualities,
derangements and ecstasies that can be contained within the separate
domain of everyday life and mediated by commodities. Pleasure is not
always revolutionary. It is now one of the central defences of the
commodity-spectacle society.

37

The past 40 years have also seen a progressive expansion of the
spectacle of decomposition, to the point where its litany of cruelties,
humiliations, deaths, accidents, disasters, wars, illnesses,
disabilities, peccadilloes, frauds, lies and other transgressions
transfixes the appalled or delighted gaze of growing numbers of
spectators. In general, this spectacle encourages the ordinary cynicism
of the contemporary spectator who agrees that more or less everything is
shit yet continues to find consolations in the life he professes to
disdain and reasons to work and consume. It also provides heightened
stimuli for the spectator who has grown weary of more ordinary varieties
of nonsense.

38

The spectacle's reign may be unchallenged but that does not mean that
opposition is absent within it. The spectacle displays numerous false
means and objects of struggle for the conscientious. Of course, the
pseudo-opposition between liberal capitalism and state capitalism has
now ceased to be the central organising divide of the spectacle of false
political choices; however, innumerable hierarchical organizations
proposing greater or lesser ameliorations of the dominant system beckon
to those who seek to improve the world other than by destroying
everything that exists separate from individuals. Capitalism is now
systematically reformist, and all aspects of collective life are more or
less constantly under investigation by experts or amateurs with a view
to their renovation and improvement as parts of the system of
alienation. This does not mean that all reformists expressly accept
capitalism, even if many do. The World Social Forum and the rest of the
anti-globalization movement, for example, bring together various groups
and projects that combine sometimes virulent expressions of opposition
to the dominant society with programmes that leave the fundamental
separations of that society untouched. One way or another, the spectacle
never fails to have at hand an unending stream of urgent matters that
appear to be sufficiently pressing to justify collaboration with
elements of the dominant society and a deferment of fundamental change
that by a quirk of history always turns out to be perpetual. The war in
Iraq is an example. The calls for demonstrations (or other equally
alienated forms of protest) are endless. The spectator is encouraged by
leftists to join a shuffling column of passive, separated individuals
that has been organized by others to shout idiotic clichés at leaders
for the benefit of leaders who have decided in advance not to listen
(and of course the mass media). The purpose of the protests is typically
to bring an end to a war that the dominant society would happily live
without and perhaps challenge a "neo-liberalism" whose crime, here as
elsewhere, is to pursue the interests of the hegemonic economy without
the benefit of humanistic means for the pacification of the population
and mechanisms to redistribute some of the worthless wealth of a society
of alienation to the poor. The fundamental alienations of a society that
makes life barely worth living at home, and that would equally ensure
that the lives of Iraqis preserved by peace would pass away in mediocre
separation from history, are not attacked. They only grow stronger from
the inattention.

39

In recent years social science has taken an increased interest in
questions of the "quality of life" or "happiness". This branch of
scientific inquiry may be understood as studying the factors that are
associated with people's propensity to deceive themselves or others into
thinking that they are content with their lives. Typically it is found
that some 80-95% of respondents in the advanced industrial countries
profess themselves happy and satisfied. These results, which resemble
the plebiscites in authoritarian regimes that inevitably deliver huge
proportions in favour of whoever happens to be in charge at the time,
perhaps illustrate the desperate attempts that people make to associate
their lives with the mirages of contentment that the spectacle spreads
across society. But neither everyday experience nor dialectics should be
forgotten. As successful as the commodity-spectacle society has been in
preserving itself to date, the mediocre existences that its
superabundant goods and ideologies inevitably deliver continue to exist
as a source of dissatisfaction. There is also the fundamental and stark
contradiction between what the dominant society can do and the
possibilities that the state of knowledge and technology in principle
make available to humankind. Even some social scientists have begun to
talk of "affluenza" or other mysterious syndromes of faltering
contentment amongst well-off consumers. And entrepreneurs of goods and
ideas have for some years promoted "down-sizing", spiritual practices,
alternative tourism, green products, and other consumable means of
expelling whatever epiphenomena of alienation that ideologue at hand
claims to be evils of consumption. Some contemporary dissatisfaction
with consumerism remains superficial, as yet expressing nothing more
than a wish for a reform of alienated work and consumption to make it
less authoritarian, ecologically damaging, time consuming, etc. Other
elements have, or may come to have, a more profound discontentment as
their basis.

40

One imperative for revolutionary theory in the early twenty-first
century, an objective to be pursued as much in relation to the
theorist's own life as for wider social phenomena, is to resume the task
of identifying the dissatisfactions that strike at the roots of
contemporary alienation, criticizing the points at which the individuals
concerned are entangled with alienated goals and means, and generally
encouraging a more conscious, consistent and effective expression of
autonomous revolutionary contestation. Nothing, however, can be gained
by indulging in wholly archaic leftist fantasies about the economic
failings of capitalism and the revolutionary potential of struggles to
defend or improve the wages and working conditions of workers. For
example, during the 2006 struggles over the Contrat Première Embauche
(CPE or First Employment Contract) in France, a group of strikers from
Saint-Nazaire issued a leaflet that claimed that, "we are fighting
against a law aimed at totally destroying the rights of working people
[. . .], a 'modernization' designed to take us back to the conditions of
near slavery suffered by workers and unemployed people in the nineteenth
century" (To People in Other Countries, 3 April 2006; an English
translation by Ken Knabb is included in his online Documents from the
Anti-CPE Uprising in France). These notions, which were also propounded
by others, constitute empty rhetoric that detaches the authors from the
realities of contemporary labour for the majority of the proletariat in
the advanced capitalist nations. The British example may be instructive
in this connection. The first Thatcher government introduced a law that
exempted people who had worked for less than two years from protection
against unfair dismal, a measure quite similar to the proposed CPE.
There was no return to nineteenth century conditions in Britain in the
following years. In fact, real wages increased (the total wage and
non-wage costs paid by employers less inflation increased in the British
private sector by 53.3% between 1975 and 2002). More pertinently,
permanent jobs (mostly full-time) remain the dominant form of employment
decades later, with only 5.5% of all employees being in temporary work.
As regards average hours of work, these levelled off at the start of the
1980s after a long period of steady reduction, but have not increased
since (and may even have decreased once again in recent years). Of
course, the intensity of work has increased but hardly to the levels
experienced in Victorian times. To assert otherwise is to betray a
profound ignorance of Victorian working conditions. Finally, it is not
without interest to note that the neo-liberal Blair government actually
reversed the Thatcher two-year rule. This should not come as a surprise.
Unfair dismissal rules serve a useful purpose for capitalism. In the
words of a textbook on British employment law: "Some important elements
of modern employment law were introduced originally in order to help
reduce the need for strikes to occur. The major example is unfair
dismissal law which originally dates from 1971 when the government was
especially concerned with the negative impact on productivity caused by
localised, 'wild-cat' strikes precipitated by the apparently unjust
dismissal of colleagues" (Stephen Taylor and Astra Emir, Employment Law:
An Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2006; page 13). Given this
conservative function, which is not restricted to Britain, is it any
surprise that the bulk of the protesters abandoned their actions when
the CPE was preserved and declined to mount an assault on capitalism?

41

Precarious employment and poor wages undoubtedly exist within advanced
capitalist economies; but they are minority conditions, and even those
who suffer from them are relentlessly exposed to the dominant spectacle
and its ideas of life, happiness and escape. In general, the functioning
of advanced capitalism typically depends on relatively stable
employment, high wages and extensive consumption. One conclusion to
which the experience of the last 40 years points, I would suggest, is
that any theoretical and practical critique that fails centrally and
totally to repudiate the well-remunerated labour and massive consumption
on which the advanced economies rest, that confines itself to pursuing
increased wages and more bearable work, pushes out of sight and mind the
actual poverties of everyday life and leads back to the alienation of
life and labour from whose practical acceptance it has never escaped. Of
course, the smallest of daily insults, humiliations or hypocrisies can
open a person's mind to the nature of contemporary society and serve as
a point of departure from the illusions and satisfactions of the
spectacle. However, a point of departure must precisely be departed
from, and quickly, if the individuals concerned are not to find their
thought and practise imprisoned within the endless disputes and debates
whereby the society regulates its functioning and determines the
distribution of the resources it expropriates. There can be no
revolution except the modern. The predicament of the proletariat is not
that capitalism is proposing to take away its highly-paid jobs and the
commodities that these buy but rather that it proposes perpetually to
force it to accept these substitutes for real life and nothing else. The
sense that the best that global capitalism can in principle offer would
never be enough lies at the beginning and not the end of revolutionary
consciousness and revolutionary struggle.

Wayne Spencer
March 2007
No Copyright
The author can be contacted at aqr...@dsl.pipex.com

--
Dan Clore

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