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vote; black/gay/women's studies - all of these 'recuperated' and
essentially conservative and exploitative enterprises were present
in the aspiration of the liberation movements at their beginning in
the way that a capitalist exploitation was not. Of course at an
individual level, the reforms devised and pushed through may have
made life easier for some people, a passionate debate about the
rights with a university chancellor is preferable to being chased by a
bigoted mob. But that is not our point.

It is no doubt preferable to exist in a freer climate than an
oppressive one, to exist under a democratic state than a fascist
one, but this is saying nothing of value, to live in a condition of
lessened exploitation is not the end of revolutionary aspiration and
it is demonstrably not the means either. We have understood
since the anti-fascist political mystification of the Thirties and the
basic social relation within all states (including its psuedo-
opposition) is the same and the political condition within each state
mutually conditions the others - it is not a matter of supporting this
democratic nation against fascistic one but of viewing all
nations together as an array of possible political methods of
domination under a given set of economic conditions. This
nation's democracy cannot be exported so as to replace that
nation's totalitarianism; this nation's democracy is as much a
strategy as the other's fascism, a strategy decided upon and
implemented by the same class in the same moment, just as a
particular company might count razor wire and sticking plasters
amongst its products. in history all individual states become more
or less authoritarian and more of less open as events dictate, they
tend to swap masks between themselves. The liberal state utilizes
the specter of totalitarianism to defend its own inequities: there is
the ongoing threat of dangerous and unwished for transformation,
of losing 'what we have got,' and of the rescinding of reforms by
pressure of 'objective' circumstance, of the democratic state
becoming totalitarian, of the reforms recently won being reversed
(thus under the constant threat of the so-called police state pro-
revolutionaries are forced to defend what now exists as 'civil
liberties' rather than fighting for something else entirely). This
element of falsity in pro-revolutionary thought is a product of the
fatal confusion of political expediences with economic actuality, a
confusion brought on by the gradual erasure of the experience of
work (and therefore mislaying the true character of exploitation)
and its subsequent replacement by academic research.