We are almost tempted to call this and our next post – two short essays by Félix Guattari written in the wake of May 68 in france – “lessons for anarchists”. However we do not pretend to teach anyone, for we are not and do not belong to any ideological groupuscule. Consider then these two pieces as pebbles thrown to disturb the stillness of an overly placid pond.
We Are All Groupuscules
To agitate is to act. We could care less about words; we want actions. It’s easy to say, especially in countries where the material forces are increasingly dependent on the technology of machines and the development of science.
Overthrowing tsarism required bringing tens of millions of the exploited masses together and mobilizing them against the brutal repressive machine of society and the Russian state. It meant making the masses aware of their irresistible force against the weakness of the class enemy, a weakness that was revealed and proven in the struggle for power.
For those of us in wealthy countries, things are different; we may have to face more than just a paper tiger. The enemy has infiltrated everywhere; it has spread out a vast petit bourgeois inter-zone to attenuate class contours as much as possible. The working class itself has been deeply infiltrated, and not only through company unions, treasonous parties, social-democrats and revisionists … It is also infiltrated by participating materially and unconsciously in the dominant systems of state monopoly capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. First, material participation on a global scale: the working classes of economically developed countries are objectively involved, be it only by the growing gap in the relative standard of living and the international exploitation of former colonies. Then, there is unconscious participation in many different ways: workers more or
less passively endorsing the dominant social models, attitudes and mystifying value systems of the bourgeoisie – scourges of theft, sloth, disease, etc. – reproducing on their own alienating institutional objects like the conjugal family and the intra-familial repression between the sexes and ages that it implies, or becoming attached to their nation with its inevitable after-taste of racism (without mentioning regionalism and idiosyncrasies of all kinds: professional, syndical, sports-related, etc. and all of the other imaginary barriers that are artificially raised between workers, such as the ones that are particularly visible in the large-scale organization of the market of sports competitions, etc.).
From a very young age, and if only because they learn to read on the faces of their parents, the victims of capitalism and bureaucratic “socialism” are consumed by unconscious anxiety and guilt, which represent one of the essential parts that keep the system of individual self-subjection to production in working order. Internal cops and judges are even more effective than those of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice. Achieving this result depends on developing a heightened antagonism between an imaginary ideal, which is taught to individuals by means of collective suggestion, and a completely different reality that is waiting for them around the corner. Audio-visual suggestion and the mass media work like a charm! It leads to a deranged promotion of a maternal and familial imaginary world crisscrossed by so-called masculine values, which tend to repudiate and demean the female gender, with another layer promoting an ideal of mythical love, magic comfort and health to mask the negation of finitude and death. Ultimately, it is a system of demands that perpetuates the unconscious dependence on a system of production, the technique of “incentives.”
The result of this work is the serial production of individuals who are as poorly prepared as possible to face life’s most important trials. Helpless, they face reality alone, without options, mired in a stupid morality and imposed ideals that they cannot escape. They are made fragile, vulnerable, ready to grab hold of any institutional garbage prepared to accommodate them: school, hierarchy, army, learning fidelity, submission, modesty, the taste for work, family, nation, union, and many more … Their entire life is now poisoned to one degree or another by the uncertainty of their conditions with regard to the processes of production, distribution and consumption, by the concern over their place in society and the place of their companions. Everything becomes a problem: a new birth, or “it’s not working out well at school,” or “the older ones are bored and playing around,” illness, marriage, housing, vacations, everything is a pain …
A minimum amount of climbing up the pyramid of relationships of production then becomes inevitable. No need to draw a picture or give a lesson. Unlike young workers, activists from a student background who go to work in a factory are guaranteed to “find something else” if they get fired. Whether they want to or not, they cannot escape the potential that marks them with a hierarchical place “that could be much better.” The truth for workers is a de facto and almost absolute dependence on the machine of production. Desire is crushed, except in its residual or “standardized” forms, well-intentioned or activist desire; or drugs become a refuge, if not madness or suicide! Who will show the percentage of “work related accidents” that were really unconscious suicides?
Capitalism can always arrange things and smooth them over locally, but for the most part and essentially, everything has become increasingly worse. In twenty years, some of us will just be twenty years older, but humanity will have almost doubled in size. (If the calculations by experts are correct, the Earth will reach at least 5 billion inhabitants in 1990.) This may cause a few more problems along the way! Since no one and nothing is capable of preparing or organizing anything for these new arrivals-except for a few dreamers in international organizations that have not resolved a single important political problem in the twenty-five years of their existence – it seems clear that many things are going to happen in the coming years. Things of all kinds, covering the whole spectrum: revolutions, but also horrors like fascism and its ilk. What should we do? Wait and see? Start acting? OK, but where, what, how? Pick one thing at random. It is not that simple. The response to many actions has been predicted, organized and calculated by the machines of state power. I am convinced that all of the possible variants of another May 1968 have already been programmed on an IBM. Maybe not in France because they are too poor and, at the same time, too well paid to know that this kind of foolishness is not a guarantee and that nothing serious has been found to replace the armies of cops and bureaucrats. In any case, it is time for revolutionaries to reexamine their programs; some of them are really starting to show their age! It is rime to abandon all triumphalism – which should be written with a double “l” – and notice that not only are we up to our necks in shit, but the shit has penetrated each one of us and each one of our “organizations.”
Class struggle no longer occurs along a clear boundary between proletariat and bourgeoisie that can easily be seen in cities and towns. It is also written in the countless scars on the skin and in the lives of the exploited by marks of authority, rank and standards of living. It has to be deciphered from the different vocabularies they use, their manners of speaking, car brands, fashions, etc. It is endless! Class struggle has contaminated the attitudes of teachers with their students, parents with their children, doctors with their patients. It has reached inside each of us with our ego, with the ideal “standing” that we think we have to attribute to ourselves. It is time to organize at every level to confront this generalized class struggle. It is time to develop a strategy for each of these levels, because they affect each other. What would be gained, for example, by offering the masses a program of anti-authoritarian revolution against the little bosses and the like, if the militants themselves still carry the overactivated bureaucratic viruses, if they still act like utter bastards or perfect Catholics with the militants of other groups, within their own group, with their friends or on their own? What good is it to confirm the legitimacy of the aspirations of the masses if we deny desire wherever it rears its head in daily life? Shrewd politicians are out of touch with reality. They think that we can, that we must do away with all of our concerns in this domain to mobilize its energy for general political objectives. Wrong! In the absence of desire, energy eats away at itself in the form of symptoms, inhibitions and anxiety. And yet, they have had enough time and opportunity to realize this themselves!
Investing the energy capable of modifying the relationships of force is not something that will drop out of the sky; it does not emerge spontaneously from the right program or the pure science of theories. It is determined by transforming biological energy – libido – onto the objectives of social struggle. It is too easy to reduce everything to the famous main contradictions. It is too abstract. It is even a defense mechanism, something that helps develop group fantasies, structures of misunderstanding, a bureaucratic trick; always taking cover behind something that is always behind, always somewhere else, always more important and never within reach of an immediate intervention by those involved. It is the principle of the “just cause” that makes people swallow all of the little dirty tricks, the small-scale bureaucratic perversion, the petty pleasure they take in imposing on you – “for a good cause” – people that piss you off: forcing you to take purely sacrificial and symbolic actions that no one cares about, starting with the masses themselves. It is a form of sexual satisfaction diverted from its normal objectives. This type of perversion would have no importance if it was aimed at something other than revolution – there are plenty of other objects! The trouble is that these monomaniacs of revolutionary leadership, with the unconscious complicity of “the base,” succeed in miring militant investment in particularist impasses. It’s my group, my belief, my newspaper; we are right, we follow our own line, we exist against the other line, we are a small collective identity embodied in a local leader. .. We didn’t go through this in May ’68! Everything was going more or less well until the “spokesperson” of this or that began to reemerge on the scene. As if words needed spokespeople to carry them. They carry themselves to the masses very well and with incredible speed, when they are true. The work of revolutionaries is not to carry words, to have things said, to transport or transmit models and pictures. Their work is to tell the truth where they are, no more and no less, without exaggeration and without tricks. How is this work of truth recognized? It’s very simple, there is a way that works every time: revolutionary truth is something that doesn’t piss you off, something you want to be involved in, that takes away your fear, that gives you strength, that makes you ready to go full tilt, no matter what, even if it kills you. We saw the truth at work in May ’68; everyone understood it right away. The truth is not theory or organization. Theory and organization only get involved after the truth appears. They always find their way in and take things over, even by deforming them or lying. Self-critique is always for theory and organization, not desire.
The question now is the work of truth and desire everywhere where things collide, inhibit each other, get bogged down. De facto and de jure groupuscules, communes, gangs, and everything else on the left have as much analytical work to do on themselves as they do political work to do outside themselves. If they don’t do it, they always risk falling into the madness of hegemony, the obsession with greatness that makes some dream of rebuilding the “party of Maurice Thorez” or Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky, each one as boring and irrelevant as Jesus Christ or de Gaulle, or any of the others who never stop dying.
Each one has its own little annual congress, its little CC [Central Committee], its big PB [Politburo], its secretariat and its secretary-general, and its career militants with seniority, and in the Trotskyist version, everything doubled on an international scale (world congress, international executive committee, IS [International Secretariat], etc.).
Why don’t groupuscules multiply infinitely instead of eating each other? A groupuscule for everyone! In each factory, each street, each school. Finally, the reign of the core committees! These groupuscules, however, would accept to be what they are where they are. And, if possible, a multiplicity of groupuscules would replace the institutions of the bourgeoisie: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Groupuscules that would not be afraid, along with their objectives for revolutionary struggle, to organize themselves to ensure the material and moral survival of each one of their members and of all of the lost souls around them …
Then, anarchy! No coordination, no centralization, no headquarters … Just the opposite! Take the Weathermen in the USA. They are organized in tribes, gangs, etc., but it doesn’t prevent them from coordinating and doing it very well.
What changes if the question of coordination is not between individuals but between basic committees, artificial families, communes … The model of the individual by the dominant social machine is too fragile, too open to any type of suggestion: drugs, fear, family, etc. In a basic group, a minimum of collective identity can be retained without megalomania, with a system of control at hand. Then the desire in question may be in a better position to speak or to fulfill its militant commitments. First, respect for private life must be abandoned: it is the beginning and end of social alienation. An analytical group, a unit of desiring subversion, has no private life; it is turned both inside and out, towards its contingency, its finitude, and towards the objectives for which it is fighting. The revolutionary movement must therefore build a new form of subjectivity that no longer relies on the individual and the conjugal family. Subversion of the abstract models exuded by capitalism, which continue to be supported by most theorists, is the absolute precondition for reengaging the masses in revolutionary struggle.
For the moment, it is of little use to draw up plans for what the society of tomorrow should be – production, state or no state, party or no party, family or no family – when in truth there is no one to serve as a support for utterances about them. Utterances will continue to float in the void, undecidable, as long as collective agents of enunciation are not ready to explore things in reality, as long as we have no means to step back from the dominant ideology that sticks to our skin, which speaks of itself within us, which leads us to commit the most stupid acts and repetitions despite ourselves, and tends to make it so that we are always beaten on the same beaten paths.
(From Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971, by Félix Guattari, introduction by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Ames Hodges, Semiotext(e)-MIT Press, 2015.)
Félix Guattari: We Are All Groupuscules
We are almost tempted to call this and our next post – two short essays by Félix Guattari written in the wake of May 68 in france – “lessons for anarchists”. However we do not pretend to teach anyone, for we are not and do not belong to any ideological groupuscule. Consider then these two pieces as pebbles thrown to disturb the stillness of an overly placid pond.
We Are All Groupuscules
To agitate is to act. We could care less about words; we want actions. It’s easy to say, especially in countries where the material forces are increasingly dependent on the technology of machines and the development of science.
Overthrowing tsarism required bringing tens of millions of the exploited masses together and mobilizing them against the brutal repressive machine of society and the Russian state. It meant making the masses aware of their irresistible force against the weakness of the class enemy, a weakness that was revealed and proven in the struggle for power.
For those of us in wealthy countries, things are different; we may have to face more than just a paper tiger. The enemy has infiltrated everywhere; it has spread out a vast petit bourgeois inter-zone to attenuate class contours as much as possible. The working class itself has been deeply infiltrated, and not only through company unions, treasonous parties, social-democrats and revisionists … It is also infiltrated by participating materially and unconsciously in the dominant systems of state monopoly capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. First, material participation on a global scale: the working classes of economically developed countries are objectively involved, be it only by the growing gap in the relative standard of living and the international exploitation of former colonies. Then, there is unconscious participation in many different ways: workers more or
less passively endorsing the dominant social models, attitudes and mystifying value systems of the bourgeoisie – scourges of theft, sloth, disease, etc. – reproducing on their own alienating institutional objects like the conjugal family and the intra-familial repression between the sexes and ages that it implies, or becoming attached to their nation with its inevitable after-taste of racism (without mentioning regionalism and idiosyncrasies of all kinds: professional, syndical, sports-related, etc. and all of the other imaginary barriers that are artificially raised between workers, such as the ones that are particularly visible in the large-scale organization of the market of sports competitions, etc.).
From a very young age, and if only because they learn to read on the faces of their parents, the victims of capitalism and bureaucratic “socialism” are consumed by unconscious anxiety and guilt, which represent one of the essential parts that keep the system of individual self-subjection to production in working order. Internal cops and judges are even more effective than those of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice. Achieving this result depends on developing a heightened antagonism between an imaginary ideal, which is taught to individuals by means of collective suggestion, and a completely different reality that is waiting for them around the corner. Audio-visual suggestion and the mass media work like a charm! It leads to a deranged promotion of a maternal and familial imaginary world crisscrossed by so-called masculine values, which tend to repudiate and demean the female gender, with another layer promoting an ideal of mythical love, magic comfort and health to mask the negation of finitude and death. Ultimately, it is a system of demands that perpetuates the unconscious dependence on a system of production, the technique of “incentives.”
The result of this work is the serial production of individuals who are as poorly prepared as possible to face life’s most important trials. Helpless, they face reality alone, without options, mired in a stupid morality and imposed ideals that they cannot escape. They are made fragile, vulnerable, ready to grab hold of any institutional garbage prepared to accommodate them: school, hierarchy, army, learning fidelity, submission, modesty, the taste for work, family, nation, union, and many more … Their entire life is now poisoned to one degree or another by the uncertainty of their conditions with regard to the processes of production, distribution and consumption, by the concern over their place in society and the place of their companions. Everything becomes a problem: a new birth, or “it’s not working out well at school,” or “the older ones are bored and playing around,” illness, marriage, housing, vacations, everything is a pain …
A minimum amount of climbing up the pyramid of relationships of production then becomes inevitable. No need to draw a picture or give a lesson. Unlike young workers, activists from a student background who go to work in a factory are guaranteed to “find something else” if they get fired. Whether they want to or not, they cannot escape the potential that marks them with a hierarchical place “that could be much better.” The truth for workers is a de facto and almost absolute dependence on the machine of production. Desire is crushed, except in its residual or “standardized” forms, well-intentioned or activist desire; or drugs become a refuge, if not madness or suicide! Who will show the percentage of “work related accidents” that were really unconscious suicides?
Capitalism can always arrange things and smooth them over locally, but for the most part and essentially, everything has become increasingly worse. In twenty years, some of us will just be twenty years older, but humanity will have almost doubled in size. (If the calculations by experts are correct, the Earth will reach at least 5 billion inhabitants in 1990.) This may cause a few more problems along the way! Since no one and nothing is capable of preparing or organizing anything for these new arrivals-except for a few dreamers in international organizations that have not resolved a single important political problem in the twenty-five years of their existence – it seems clear that many things are going to happen in the coming years. Things of all kinds, covering the whole spectrum: revolutions, but also horrors like fascism and its ilk. What should we do? Wait and see? Start acting? OK, but where, what, how? Pick one thing at random. It is not that simple. The response to many actions has been predicted, organized and calculated by the machines of state power. I am convinced that all of the possible variants of another May 1968 have already been programmed on an IBM. Maybe not in France because they are too poor and, at the same time, too well paid to know that this kind of foolishness is not a guarantee and that nothing serious has been found to replace the armies of cops and bureaucrats. In any case, it is time for revolutionaries to reexamine their programs; some of them are really starting to show their age! It is rime to abandon all triumphalism – which should be written with a double “l” – and notice that not only are we up to our necks in shit, but the shit has penetrated each one of us and each one of our “organizations.”
Class struggle no longer occurs along a clear boundary between proletariat and bourgeoisie that can easily be seen in cities and towns. It is also written in the countless scars on the skin and in the lives of the exploited by marks of authority, rank and standards of living. It has to be deciphered from the different vocabularies they use, their manners of speaking, car brands, fashions, etc. It is endless! Class struggle has contaminated the attitudes of teachers with their students, parents with their children, doctors with their patients. It has reached inside each of us with our ego, with the ideal “standing” that we think we have to attribute to ourselves. It is time to organize at every level to confront this generalized class struggle. It is time to develop a strategy for each of these levels, because they affect each other. What would be gained, for example, by offering the masses a program of anti-authoritarian revolution against the little bosses and the like, if the militants themselves still carry the overactivated bureaucratic viruses, if they still act like utter bastards or perfect Catholics with the militants of other groups, within their own group, with their friends or on their own? What good is it to confirm the legitimacy of the aspirations of the masses if we deny desire wherever it rears its head in daily life? Shrewd politicians are out of touch with reality. They think that we can, that we must do away with all of our concerns in this domain to mobilize its energy for general political objectives. Wrong! In the absence of desire, energy eats away at itself in the form of symptoms, inhibitions and anxiety. And yet, they have had enough time and opportunity to realize this themselves!
Investing the energy capable of modifying the relationships of force is not something that will drop out of the sky; it does not emerge spontaneously from the right program or the pure science of theories. It is determined by transforming biological energy – libido – onto the objectives of social struggle. It is too easy to reduce everything to the famous main contradictions. It is too abstract. It is even a defense mechanism, something that helps develop group fantasies, structures of misunderstanding, a bureaucratic trick; always taking cover behind something that is always behind, always somewhere else, always more important and never within reach of an immediate intervention by those involved. It is the principle of the “just cause” that makes people swallow all of the little dirty tricks, the small-scale bureaucratic perversion, the petty pleasure they take in imposing on you – “for a good cause” – people that piss you off: forcing you to take purely sacrificial and symbolic actions that no one cares about, starting with the masses themselves. It is a form of sexual satisfaction diverted from its normal objectives. This type of perversion would have no importance if it was aimed at something other than revolution – there are plenty of other objects! The trouble is that these monomaniacs of revolutionary leadership, with the unconscious complicity of “the base,” succeed in miring militant investment in particularist impasses. It’s my group, my belief, my newspaper; we are right, we follow our own line, we exist against the other line, we are a small collective identity embodied in a local leader. .. We didn’t go through this in May ’68! Everything was going more or less well until the “spokesperson” of this or that began to reemerge on the scene. As if words needed spokespeople to carry them. They carry themselves to the masses very well and with incredible speed, when they are true. The work of revolutionaries is not to carry words, to have things said, to transport or transmit models and pictures. Their work is to tell the truth where they are, no more and no less, without exaggeration and without tricks. How is this work of truth recognized? It’s very simple, there is a way that works every time: revolutionary truth is something that doesn’t piss you off, something you want to be involved in, that takes away your fear, that gives you strength, that makes you ready to go full tilt, no matter what, even if it kills you. We saw the truth at work in May ’68; everyone understood it right away. The truth is not theory or organization. Theory and organization only get involved after the truth appears. They always find their way in and take things over, even by deforming them or lying. Self-critique is always for theory and organization, not desire.
The question now is the work of truth and desire everywhere where things collide, inhibit each other, get bogged down. De facto and de jure groupuscules, communes, gangs, and everything else on the left have as much analytical work to do on themselves as they do political work to do outside themselves. If they don’t do it, they always risk falling into the madness of hegemony, the obsession with greatness that makes some dream of rebuilding the “party of Maurice Thorez” or Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky, each one as boring and irrelevant as Jesus Christ or de Gaulle, or any of the others who never stop dying.
Each one has its own little annual congress, its little CC [Central Committee], its big PB [Politburo], its secretariat and its secretary-general, and its career militants with seniority, and in the Trotskyist version, everything doubled on an international scale (world congress, international executive committee, IS [International Secretariat], etc.).
Why don’t groupuscules multiply infinitely instead of eating each other? A groupuscule for everyone! In each factory, each street, each school. Finally, the reign of the core committees! These groupuscules, however, would accept to be what they are where they are. And, if possible, a multiplicity of groupuscules would replace the institutions of the bourgeoisie: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Groupuscules that would not be afraid, along with their objectives for revolutionary struggle, to organize themselves to ensure the material and moral survival of each one of their members and of all of the lost souls around them …
Then, anarchy! No coordination, no centralization, no headquarters … Just the opposite! Take the Weathermen in the USA. They are organized in tribes, gangs, etc., but it doesn’t prevent them from coordinating and doing it very well.
What changes if the question of coordination is not between individuals but between basic committees, artificial families, communes … The model of the individual by the dominant social machine is too fragile, too open to any type of suggestion: drugs, fear, family, etc. In a basic group, a minimum of collective identity can be retained without megalomania, with a system of control at hand. Then the desire in question may be in a better position to speak or to fulfill its militant commitments. First, respect for private life must be abandoned: it is the beginning and end of social alienation. An analytical group, a unit of desiring subversion, has no private life; it is turned both inside and out, towards its contingency, its finitude, and towards the objectives for which it is fighting. The revolutionary movement must therefore build a new form of subjectivity that no longer relies on the individual and the conjugal family. Subversion of the abstract models exuded by capitalism, which continue to be supported by most theorists, is the absolute precondition for reengaging the masses in revolutionary struggle.
For the moment, it is of little use to draw up plans for what the society of tomorrow should be – production, state or no state, party or no party, family or no family – when in truth there is no one to serve as a support for utterances about them. Utterances will continue to float in the void, undecidable, as long as collective agents of enunciation are not ready to explore things in reality, as long as we have no means to step back from the dominant ideology that sticks to our skin, which speaks of itself within us, which leads us to commit the most stupid acts and repetitions despite ourselves, and tends to make it so that we are always beaten on the same beaten paths.
(From Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971, by Félix Guattari, introduction by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Ames Hodges, Semiotext(e)-MIT Press, 2015.)