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seriously even though it was intended as a piece of malicious
flippancy. (To illustrate the tendency to move towards absurdity in
the pro-revolutionary milieu, we were then condemned by one of
his colleagues for formulating revolutionary consciousness as
merely 'being awake'). As a consequence of all this confusion we
intend to formulate our critique of the communist objective of
consciousness as slowly as we can, without, of course,
abandoning the graphic an passionate qualities of our prose that
so many people have told us they really enjoy...

We think revolutionary expertise, which bases itself in
organizational certainty and theoretical rigidity, measures only pro-
revolutionary fabrication, it has but one relation to actual social
conditions, which is that it is wholly unable to escape its
determinations. Predictions for the future are hypothesized
out of past happenings mistake the very nature of revolution, which
we all agree is an event that is precisely not conditioned by the
past and is characterized as a complete transformation of humans
existence out of the economic mode. If we cannot recognize the
future in the present then we cannot decide which pro-
revolutionary activity or value of the present should be promoted or
carried through to the future. It is our contention that most pro-
revolutionary activity extends existing conditions and acts to
prevent the future. We think many pro-revolutionary rather enjoy
the antagonism of capitalist society and the part they place by
supporting a 'side'.

We cannot say for certain what is to be done. What we do know is
that the past appears, in one form or another, in the present,
before our eyes, and from this appearance of dead forms we can
identify what we think is counter-revolutionary. For example we
see that consciousness is a concept that has been consistently
deployed n past revolutionary attempts and because those
attempts all failed the concept of consciousness and its role must
be questioned. Our critique of consciousness begins with our
understanding of the failure of revolutions: we see that
consciousness, as an ogranizing principle, has always been
deployed by a certain section of the bourgeoisie which seeks to
use working class muscle to gain political power for itself.

As an alternative to the consciousness, which is, of course, also a
'recruiting' model, we argue that once factories have been seized