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economy as are Religions, entertainments and reformist politics
(does no the 'party' or group have to be preserved as a thing in
itself, kept going by small clerical acts and cash raised? The acts
that uphold the group are not in themselves revolutionary and have
no connection to the revolution, they are dead acts, they are
labor; the group is maintained as the church is maintained: by
accumulation). All pretensions to consciousness are determined
by the same forces as ideology, they cannot escape their
determinate conditions, and so cannot be identified except as
ideology (more or less true, more or less false), these are not
grounds for building a reliable foundation for revolutionary practice.
In practice, the revolutionary subject (the working class) cannot
recognize consciousness, or it cannot distinguish it from ideology:
why, it may ask itself, is the truth of this agitator before me more
true than the truth of that last one which was proved by my
experience to be a lie, (and proved objectively in the ideological
co-option of every revolutionary body that has so far existed).

We are interested in the critique of the concept of consciousness
because many messiahs and spoonbenders are currently standing
up and demanding participation in the struggle against capital on
their terms (for example, the English website for the 2001
Barcelona anti-capitalist protests claimed the possibility of a pre-
revolutionary situation; this has proved to be, and was always
anyway, completely false). Our self-appointed task is to go around
pricking these millenarian bubbles if only to save gullible
individuals the costs of air travel and involvement with
opportunistic and exploitative groups (Globalize Resistance, for
example, rented a train - as you do- and ran an excursion down to
Genoa, thus the reinvention of the package holiday, or is it the
International Brigades? But this group or any other similar has no
presence in the estates where we live or our workplaces, it does
not touch real life; recruitment of those with disposable incomes
goes on, as does the process of accumulation in the name of
revolution).

No amount of anti-capitalist protest can lead to a 'pre-revolutionary
situation' (by what mechanism would it force itself into a position of
revolutionary subject?) but the protests are called for in terms of
'raising consciousness' or, as some say, 'political radicalization',
but if the call to arms is false (that this is some pre-revolutionary
preliminary, and a stage in building consciousness) then surely the