Old militantism provides the opposite example. There is something amazing about the cluelessness of militants in various situations. We remember this scene from Genoa: about 50 militants of the Trostkyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire wave their red flags labeled “100% on the Left.” They are motionless, timeless. They shout their pre-approved slogans, surrounded by peace-police. […] When compelled to com- ment on us the militants speak of adventurism, mindlessness. Their pretext is that the conditions are not right. We say that nothing was lacking, that everything was there — except them.
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation. Just as we desert the inconsistency to which activism condemns them.
Activists themselves feel this inconsistency. And this is why, periodically, they turn toward their elders, the militants. They borrow their strategies, terrains of struggle, slogans. What appeals to them in militantism is the consistency, the structure, the loyalty they lack. And so the activists revert to old-new disputes and demand — “citizenship for all,” “free movement of people,” “guaranteed income,” “free public transport.”
The problem with demands is that, by formulating needs in terms that make them audible
to power, they say nothing about those needs, and what real transformations of the world they require. Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness. In addition, demands often end up masking the real conflicts. Demanding free public transportation only slows the spread of fare-dodging techniques, at least for this specific milieu. Calling for the free movement of people merely means avoiding the issue of a practical escape from a tightening of control. Fighting for a guaranteed income is, at best, to condemn ourselves to the illusion that an amelioration of the worst of capitalism is necessary to get out of it. Whatever form it takes, the impasse is always the same: the subjective resources mobilized may be revolutionary, yet they remain imbedded in a program of (radical) reformism. Under the pretext of overcoming the alternative between reform and revolution we sink into a timely ambiguity.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
During the conflict against the loi Travail, the emergence of what became the "cortege de tete," the lead contingent in marches, was the result of a vision. A few hundred "young people" saw, as early as the first demonstrations, that the union groups were marching like zombies, that they didn't believe a word of the slogans they were mouthing, that their security marshals were clubbing the high-school students, that there was no way to follow that big cadaver, and so it was necessary to claim the front of the demonstration at all costs. Which is what was done. And done again. And again. Until a limit was reached where, with the "cortege de tete" repeating itself, it was no longer a gesture in a situation, but a subject mirrored back in the media, the alternative media in particular. So it was time to desert that desertion, which was congealing and becoming a parody of itself. And to keep moving. That being said, for the whole time it was vibrant, the "cortege de tere" was the locus from which things became clear, the site of a contagion in the ability to see what was going down. From the simple fact that there was struggle, that different determinations were clashing, that forces were joining, allying, separating, that strategies were called into play, and that all this was manifesting in the streets and not just on tele vision, there was a situation.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.150-151
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The formation of new organizations depends on a deeper critique, translated into acts. There must be a complete break with ideology, in which revolutionary groups think they possess official titles guaranteeing their function (that is, we must resume the Marxian critique of the role of ideologies). It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity -- the terrain of the self-mystification of "serious politics" -- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions; with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles, since the latter are inseparable from all other aspects of the overall problem of our society. Specialization and pseudoseriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies in everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who "devotes himself" to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.
Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0
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For Mouvement Communiste, Négation, Intervention Communiste, and others the breakdown of the old workers’ movement was something to be celebrated, not because the corrupt leadership of the workers’ organisations would no longer be able to restrain the autonomy of the masses, but because such a shift represented a transcendence of the historical function of the workers’ movement, a transcendence that would mark the reemergence of the communist movement, the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. And it did so in an immediate sense, for the riots and wildcat strikes of that decade were read by these writers as a total refusal of all the mediations of the workers’ movement, not in favour of some other more “democratic” mediation like that of workers’ councils, but in a way that posed the immediate production of communist relations as the only possible revolutionary horizon. Thus whereas communism had previously been seen as something that needed to be created after the revolution, the revolution was now seen as nothing other than the production of communism (abolishing wage labour and the state). The notion of a period of transition was jettisoned.
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead
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The workers’ failures were necessary since it was capital that constituted their organizing principle:
“The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions, shows that the proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social order which presented an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, and thus to the development of capital, but that at the moment that it became a matter of establishing a different community, it remained a prisoner of the logic of the rationality of the development of those productive forces, and confined itself within the problem of managing them.” [Jacques Camatte, ‘Proletariat and Revolution’, 1975]
In a recent text Dauvé sums up this estimation of the old workers’ movement:
“The workers’ movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. … The purpose of the old labour movement was to take over the same world and manage it in a new way: putting the idle to work, developing production, introducing workers’ democracy (in principle, at least). Only a tiny minority, ‘anarchist’ as well as 'marxist', held that a different society meant the destruction of State, commodity and wage labour, although it rarely defined this as a process, rather as a programme to put into practice after the seizure of power…” [Gilles Dauvé, ‘Out of the Future’ in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement (1997) pp. 12-13.]
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead