The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6

Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).