Saturday, June 6, 2009

25

How is an anti-capitalist protester going to change the world?
By what mean exactly? We have given our formula, yes it is
simplistic, it is materialistic, mechanistic even, but even so,
everything in the world is made, and power derives from the
control of this making, if the making is stopped then the source of
this power is interrupted, that is our formula. So now let us hear
the plans of the anti-capitalist, what fro them is the source of
capitalist power, how is ownership maintained? How are the anti-
capitalists to engage the power they have theorized, and how to
overthrow it? If it is a good recipe then we shall use it, if however,
it begins: first take several million assorted people over the world
and get them all angry about the conditions of their life, and induce
them to catch a plane to some foreign city to march down the main
thoroughfare, perhaps breaking a few windows, then we say this is
not a good recipe but a continuation of miragic democracy by
means other than the vote.

The world will not be changed by millions of people voting for
change, or demonstrating for change, because capitalist power is
not constituted with reference to human feelings: political desires
and demonstrations, which are the social forms consciousness
takes, cannot touch capitalist domination but are merely
determined by it. We have no place for consciousness in our
scheme, we see no need for a generalized formulated desire for
revolution. Revolution belongs to the mute body and its resistance
to, and its giving out to, the imposition of work, what is needed in
the revolutionary struggle is precedence given to the needs of the
body (consumer culture is a contemporary echo of this). The
slogans are not inspiring or romantic: more rest, more pay, less
work, no deals on productivity. However, once this demand-
regime is set in motion it cannot be side-tracked except by
counterfeit political demands, or formulations of radical
consciousness made by those who seek to lead it. Once the body
tends toward rest, it cannot rid itself of that inclination unless it is
roused again to work for some political vision. In short the struggle
of industrial workers against capital will be conducted entirely in
selfish terms, which in the end describes itself as the struggle
against work in the interest of highly paid sleep. In the present
nothing has significance but the desire to extend half-hour lunch
breaks into hour lunch breaks. If all pro-revolutionaries grasp this

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