Stolen Time...

"Very important observations that must be included in the subject of "Freedom" in the bourgeois state:The reign of the bourgeoisie has endured longer than anyone ever expected. Yet confident declarations of thousand year empires or assertions of the self-evident human *naturalness* of its form of society, like those one associates with the 3rd Reich or the Russian Revolution or the Mahdi and other non-bourgeois moments of glory, seem to me surprisingly absent from *capitalist* history, even in the afterglows of its numerous successful revolutions: and this fact I think reflects even its own pessimistic evaluations of itshistorical prospects. I suppose they thought "live by the sword die by the sword": legitimation has always been a problem for an ideology born and perpetuated by usurpation, and which has to depend, in very principle and for its perpetuity, on the tightrope walk of competitive pluralism.Still, both capitalists and anti-capitalists got it wrong; Marx in particular. They have endured through "decadence" and prospered.The reason quite obviously is its immense creativity and resourcefulness -- which is not to say that there is something superhuman about bourgeois' individuals themselves, but that they have proven extraordinarily masterful at extracting creativity in their subjects. In the context of production, I mean the massive advances in science and technology and invention -- which fills our shelves with products we can hardly believe we ever managed to imagine wanting. Nothing of the magnitude is likely to have emerged so swiftly under feudalism or other anthropological conditions.But even more critical for its survival, it has astonished us in its ability tofind and engineer strategic shifts that have vastly deferred the day of reckoning that is so evidently latent in the nature of its ideologicalself-contradictions. It shifts its labour force to new countries, breaks into new markets (the USSR was a nest-egg it kept for a rainy day!), pushes back frontiers, finds it canrun a democratic system in which the people fail to vote for themselves, manipulates its electoral base, works mathematical wonders in the kitchen with the balance sheets, and acrobatically avoids the arthritis of corporatism. All these manoeuvres arent just about avoiding economic breakdown. Nor are they anything to do with military expertise in seeing off rivals. Above all,they have had the effect of allowing it to preserve and elaborate the ethical and ideological illusions, like freedom, without the chickens coming home to roost. Logic insists that they still will, still must, but we are beginning to wonder if this fit old codger won't wing it forever and never be caught out blagging it. Even revolutions which have understood it and escaped it for a length of time -- as in Russia, have staggered back into its grasp eventually, miscalculating the life left in the old stag and coming a cropper on its ever more elaborate antlers.*But these fetes are not performed by the bourgeoisie, but by its employees!* It is impossible to believe that a proletariat that has shown the ingenuity to create such mind-boggling gadgets and execute such complex and improbable tasks of social policing and conflict-management are not also ingenious enough not to have understood, sufficiently often, their political and social position. I am therefore obliged to face the conclusion, which is in fact next to self-evident being so undeniable, that the proletariat has worked *deliberately* to preserve the bourgeois state that exploits it.I have in the past explained this failure of class-logic with an individualist argument: the reluctance of the people to make revolution more often (to be glib) is because no matter how certain their victory as a class, the firstperson to storm the gates is bound to be shot dead, so that no one is ever the first and an otherwise logically inevitable revolution fails to ignite. Marxism could never get this because it took the social unit to be "class" instead of the "individual".There is some truth in such individualist arguments to be sure -- but it is not enough, I now think, to explain the low incidence of revolt across the centuries and continents as a whole.Similarly, whilst false consciousness and mediated self-interests go some way to explain why the proletariat makes such creative efforts on the bourgeoisie's behalf, we should be very reluctant to attribute to such a talented human population such immense and consistent ignorance of their position. How, for one thing, do we explain our own consciousness when we are manufactured from the same conditions? Do radicals think they are superior mutations? Aren't we just marked, rather, by being a bit slow on the uptake? lately realizing what the proletariat has always well enough known.The conclusion is unavoidable that there is simply no appetite for this "Freedom" which the bourgeoisie has gone to such pains to elevate as its most defining social value: Freedom is the bedrock of the Ethos which consolidates bourgeois entitlement to wear the crown of Divine Right stolen from the aristocracy and the Churches, but that's *all* it is.This is a glaring paradox. Nevertheless it seems true that although the bourgeois state depends critically upon the offer of Freedom to the people, and stabilizes and preserves its power by so doing, this does not imply or require that the people actually have any appetite for it. Somehow it seems as if they understand ("instinctively" if you like) that the offer is a necessary proof of good faith, a courtesy, but that its promise is just a game on both sides. If total freedom, which under capitalism, means the severance of all social relationships, who wants it? Should we be surprised to find out that the people know that they *don't*? Bourgeois history and institutions *appear* at least to have delivered many things which people have found very much to their liking -- urbanization, and the social hot-house of the factories, cafes, stadia and supermarkets.Moreover it is important to understand that social continuity is a value in its own right -- no matter how far that social arrangement may fall short of theoretical alternatives. Simply -- a relationship now is always worth more than two tomorrow. You cannot equate them. Relationships (both individual ones, neighbourhoods and nationalities) take TIME to acquire their value to their members. Social upheaval -- as in the vandalism of working class "slums" perpetrated by socialist governments after the last world war, as well as the refugee movements and the phenomenon of post-imperial immigration -- destroy a complex and rich social ecology which takes historical time to be replaced. All populations are sensibly *conservative*. Other things being equal, the people are more likely to kick out a ruling class for imposing radical change than for preventing it.Even promotion of a classes status entails loss. A comrade might become a foreman, a boss an unwelcome co-worker: these changes are often opposed even by those who nominally stand to advance themselves by it.I don't claim that these explanations are exhaustive. I wish only, for now, to draw attention to the fact that the interrelationship of the ruling systems ideology and the practical social values of the exploited classes is complex. This area must be absolutely CENTRAL to any radical strategy -- to understand not only what social needs are, but how they are met, and by what. We might have to take into account not only the falsified promises of the bourgeois state, but the possibility that its very falsity rather than being deceiving and bad for being deceptive, is reassuring. That this possibility is immediately relevant to our political activity isobvious. Anyone who thinks simply exposing "the truth" is going to radicalize the people will then be an utter fool -- the populace doesn't much care that it is lied to, it might be more likely to take it as an example to follow than as a corruption to attack. It doesn't much care that "Freedom" is an ethical lip-service in a system in which power is far more to the point -- it understands that a system restrained by the need to conform to benign appearances is better than one which is brutally frank -- a little sugar helps the medicine go down. So we invaded Iraq to get the oil not to save the arabs -- good! we need petrol for our cars don't we? Yes, as I've said before and still say, Ethical Legitimation is the mortally important underbelly of the dominant political system --?and radicals must target the mechanisms of it -- but the way that it *works* is not so simple as you radicals would have liked. You cannot simply appeal to right and wrong by setting yourself up on pedestals and telling the truth (that is a naive appeal to the authority of christianity which has long lost it), you have,rather, to control the process itself -- you have to have *moral authority* of your own in the first place. This is why, in biblical times and before, we see in the Middle East social groups whose political influence is rooted on the practice of piety in their own everyday lives (the Essenes for an example).A pertinent but eccentric anthropological comparison is to those indian tribes in which the accumulation of gifts, or some other arbitrary embodiment of prestige, is used to mediate their social status. By living out in the moments of *Everyday Life* a consistent ethos of your own, you acquire a certain kind of social power. You deserve and earn faith in proportion to what you can bravely endure. A man draws strength from virtue the same way that the Greeks drew strength from burning their boats.But beware of this: the love of men and the love of truth will always conflict.(not to mention women!)Here, once again we are brought back to the subject and role of "Freedom". Situations have nothing to do with it. They are from the very start, that is from the insitigation of the bourgeois version of it, definitionally opposed to it. You can see just how true my assertion that "situationism" is not the "S.I." really is. Hopefully you can see now too how true is my assertion that marxist ideas are merely *contained in* situationist ones rather than vice versa. You can see now why I have argued so hard that the revolution is the revolution of everyday life and that *ethics* in each and every situation of our lives is the vital key to its radical redemption and liberation. And you ought to see now why we should stop turning our faces from "religion" and thereby making ourselves blind to the processes which have constructed the matrix of power and value in which we live and which even, naively puristically, underlies our own futile attempts to oppose it.Freedom is a real value. But to pursue it involves exerting influence upon the wills of others. Why should I have any respect for the right of liars to lie or fools to believe untruths? The real meaning of freedom must be disinterred -- it has been buried since the day the bourgeoisie overthrew and imprisoned Christianity. Muslims know this, but we have refused to listen.In no way should the illusory nature of bourgeois revolutionism?deflect us from believing that change is both desirable and possible. Freedom has another meaning, but it is never to be found in "autonomy" or the absence of moral and social subordination. In my power to *choose* to subordinate myself to a code and to a social cause in which I believe I execute my freedom. Freedom has no other use or value EXCEPT IN ITS EXCHANGE. The possession of a huge mountain of freedoms which you cannot give away is true poverty! The society in which you live does not genuinely value freedom in that way. Rather it is the freedom to enter into coherent social groups which gives whatever little or much freedom you possess its real value; and in the strength you possess to surrender the "desires" you contain to the social necessities of creative transformation and collective good. Nothing is inherently good or bad -- it only becomes good or bad by what you do with it. The power to make the right, the ethical, choice is the only true measure of your freedom you will ever have." ~ Jet Black

Sleep baby, sleep...