from The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raol Vaneigem

Here's a selection from Raol Vaneigem's classic treatise The Revolution of Everyday Life, which was a key text of the Situationist International in 1960s France. A nifty radical arts movement that drew from anarchism and council communism, Situationism garnered a lot of political and cultural sway in the French student movements, and reached a crescendo in the abortive revolution of May 1968.

The Revolution of Everyday Life was first published in 1967—a year before insurrections swept Paris—and it articulated many of the anarchist tendencies that continue to resonate today. In this section, Vaneigem criticises the selfless devotion to Cause and Party that typifies much of the authoritarian left, and insists that the revolutionary impulse is ubiquitous, uncontrollable, passionate and enmeshed in peoples' everyday lives.

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society. The call for sacrifice in such a context is a funeral knell. Jules Vallée fell short of his own train of thought when he wrote: "If the submissive do not outlive the rebellious, one might as well rebel in the name of an idea." For a militant can only be a revolutionary in spite of the ideas which he agrees to serve. The real Vallée, the Communard Vallée, is first the child, then the student, making up in one long Sunday for all the endless weeks that have gone before. Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

When the rebel begins to believe that he is fighting for a higher good, the authoritarian principle gets a fillip. Humanity has never been short of justifications for giving up what is human. ln fact some people possess a veritable reflex of submission, an irrational terror of freedom; this masochism is everywhere visible in everyday life. With what agonizing facility we can give up a wish, a passion, stemming from the most essential part of ourselves. With what passivity, what inertia, we can accept living or acting for some thing--'thing' being the operative word, a word whose dead weight always seems to carry the day. lt is hard to be oneself, so we give up as quickly as possible, seizing whatever pretext offers itself: love of children, of reading, of artichokes, etc, etc. Such is the abstract generality of the ill that our desire for a cure tends to evaporate.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. As I write thousands of workers around the world are downing tools or picking up guns, ostensibly in obedience to directives or principles, but actually, at the profoundest level, in response to their passionate desire to change their lives. The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution. This revolution is nameless, like everything springing from lived experience. Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the everyday clandestinity of acts and dreams.

The Situationist International Text Library/The Revolution of Everyday Life

from "Zapatismo Urbano" by John Holloway

Boy, it's hard to find the time to write reflective anarchist theory when there's so much fighting going on. From now on, we'll start posting interesting snippets of anti-authoritarian content on the blog, while folks 'round here keep working on their various opuses.

Let's start out with a section of an article entitled Zapatismo Urbano by John Holloway. In 2002, Holloway wrote a book called Change the World Without Taking Power; a friend of mine once called the heady collection of political phillosophy a "theoretical justification for the Zapatistas." Others have called Holloway's stuff Autonomist Marxism or a rejection of Marxism altogether. Well, I figure anything with that much contention surrounding it deserves to be looked at. Here goes:

The zapatista uprising has been a fundamental point of reference for urban struggles over the last ten years. And yet there are obvious differences in the conditions and forms of struggle. We who live in the cities and look to the zapatistas are not organised as an army. We do not live within the sort of communal support structures that exist in Chiapas. We do not have land on which to grow the basic foodstuffs necessary for survival, and we are not, on the whole, accustomed to the levels of complete poverty that is the daily experience of the zapatistas of Chiapas.

There are aspects of the zapatista uprising that have not found any echo in the cities. We urban zapatistas generally do not want to be organised as an army and often reject militarism as a form of organisation and concept of struggle. In the current debates in Italy, the zapatistas are even held up as a model in arguing for a complete rejection of all violence. The other aspect of the zapatismo of Chiapas that has found little resonance in the cities is their use of national symbols - the national flag, the playing of the national anthem. The urban-zapatista movement tends not to be nationalist and in many cases it is profoundly anti-nationalist. It has been not so much an inter-national movement as a global movement, a movement of struggle for which global capitalism and not the nation state has been the principal point of reference.

What, then, are the aspects of the zapatista uprising that have found echo in the cities of the world? The most obvious is the mere fact of rebellion - the fact that the zapatistas rose up when the time for rebellion seemed to have passed, their ¡Ya Basta! to a world that is so obviously obscene.

But it is more than that. It is also that their ¡Ya basta! turns too against a Left that had grown stale and stiff and alienating. It is the rejection both of revolutionary vanguardism and of state-oriented reformism, the rejection of the party as an organisational form and of the pursuit of power as an aim.

The rejection of the old forms of left-wing politics leaves us with an enormous question mark. That itself is important. The zapatista saying "caminamos preguntando" acquires a particular resonance because we are conscious that we do not know the way forward. The world around us makes us scream, but where do we go with our scream, what do we do with our scream? The politics of rebellion is a politics of searching - not for the correct line, but for some sort of way forward, some way of making our scream effective. There is no party to tell us which way to go, so we must find it for ourselves.

Zapatismo Urbano, by John Holloway