Seeing Like a State, Chapter 5

Summary of Chapter 5: The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis

The “plan” is Lenin’s high modernist revolutionism, and the “diagnosis” is the response of two of his critics, Luxemburg and Kollantay. Scott sets up the stakes:

Lenin’s design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full power to see the plan through. And just as Le Corbusier and Lenin shared a broadly comparable high modernism, so Jane Jacobs’s perspective was shared by Rosa Luxemburg and Aleksandra Kollontay, who opposed Lenin’s politics. Jacobs doubted both the possibility and the desirability of the centrally planned city, and Luxemburg and Kollontay doubted the possibility and desirability of a revolution planned from above by the vanguard party. (147)

Scott draws from several key writings which reveal Lenin as a High Modernist. He discusses the idea of the party as a vanguard, and the implications of the term “mass:”

Although the terms became standard in socialist parlance, they are heavy with implications. Nothing better conveys the impression of mere quantity and number without order than the word “masses.” Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling crowd without any cohesion—without a history, without ideas, without a plan of action. Lenin was all too aware, of course, that the working class does have its own history and values, but this history and these values will lead the working class in the wrong direction unless they are replaced by the historical analysis and advanced revolutionary theory of scientific socialism. (150)

Thus the vanguard party not only is essential to the tactical cohesion of the masses but also must literally do their thinking for them” (151).

This is the core of Lenin’s case against spontaneity. There are only two ideologies: bourgeois and socialist. Given the pervasiveness and historical power of bourgeois ideology, the spontaneous development of the working class will always lead to the triumph of bourgeois ideology. In Lenin’s memorable formulation, ‘the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.’ Social democratic consciousness, in contrast, must come from outside, that is, from the socialist intelligentsia.

Lenin draws on the metaphors of army, classroom, and also factory owners/executives [do we sense the disciplinary archipelago?]; and also architecture:

What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing. (152)

It is surely a great paradox of What Is to Be Done? that Lenin takes a subject—promoting revolution—that is inseparable from popular anger, violence, and the determination of new political ends and transforms it into a discourse on technical specialization, hierarchy, and the efficient and predictable organization of means. Politics miraculously disappears from within the revolutionary ranks and is left to the elite of the vanguard party, much as industrial engineers might discuss, among themselves, how to lay out a factory floor.

Lenin’s revolutionary elite are “professionals,” not unlike those working for capitalist high modernism:

Just as Le Corbusier imagines that the public will acquiesce to the knowledge and calculations of the master architect, so Lenin is confident that a sensible worker will want to place himself under the authority of professional revolutionists. (153)

... the principle behind Lenin’s concerns ... stems from the sharply delineated, functional roles that the party and the working class each played. Class consciousness, in the final analysis, is an objective truth carried solely by the ideologically enlightened who direct the vanguard party. (154)

Lenin also uses a contagion metaphor, as in the party has to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas and practices among the proletariat, which could derail its (i.e., the vanguard’s) plan for revolution.

If we consider the vanguard party, as Lenin did, to be a machine for bringing about the revolution, then we see that the vanguard party’s relation to the working class is not much different from a capitalist entrepreneur’s relation to the working class. The working class is necessary to production; its members must be trained and instructed, and the efficient organization of their work must be left to professional specialists. The ends of the revolutionist and the capitalist are, of course, utterly different, but the problem of means that confronts each is similar and is similarly resolved. (156)

Lenin and Le Corbusier, notwithstanding the great disparity in their training and purpose, shared some basic elements of the high modernist outlook. While the scientific pretensions of each may seem implausible to us, they both believed in the existence of a master science that served as the claim to authority of a small planning elite. (157)

Both, of course, had the improvement of the human condition as their ultimate goal, and both attempted to attain it with methods that were profoundly hierarchical and authoritarian.

The actual revolutions of 1917 did not correspond with the plan Lenin had laid out in What Is to Be Done? “The high-modernist scheme for revolution was no more borne out in practice than were high-modernist plans for Brasilia and Chandigarh borne out in practice.” Obviously, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not bring the revolution about; [to the contrary, they showed up late and derailed it]. “What Lenin did succeed brilliantly in doing was in capturing the revolution once it was an accomplished fact” (158).

What followed in the years until 1921 is best described as the reconquest, now by the fledgling Bolshevik state, of Russia. The reconquest was not simply a civil war against the ‘Whites’; it was also a war against the autonomous forces that had seized local power in the revolution. (159)

The model for the vanguard party depicted so sharply in What Is to Be Done? is an impressive example of executive command and control. Applied to the actual revolutionary process, however, it is a pipe dream, bearing hardly any relation to the facts. Where the model is descriptively accurate, alas, is in the exercise of state authority after the revolutionary seizure of power.

What What Is to Be Done? was in fact used for, was the creation of an official mythology after the fact, based on the glorious leadership of Lenin, etc.

It is perfectly natural for leaders and generals to exaggerate their influence on events; that is the way the world looks from where they sit, and it is rarely in the interest of their subordinates to contradict their picture.

After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quickly as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience. (160)

This altered story is told in such a way as to give it a sense of inevitability, thus diminishing both the actual contingency of events, and the spontaneous actions that played a large role:

It is exceptionally rare to find any historical account that stresses the contingencies. The very exercise of producing an account of a past event virtually requires an often counterfactual neatness and coherence. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event in which he or she participated will recognize this phenomenon. (390n37)

S next turns to the Lenin of State and Revolution, from 1917. Lenin here echoes the egalitarian positions of the anarchists and of Luxemburg (and Marx, as S also points out), but only strategically, as he wants to undermine the Kerensky regime; nevertheless his “high-modemist convictions still pervade the text” (161). Lenin was a fan of Fordism/Taylorism; he argued that capitalist infrastructure, bureaucracy, and technology simplify administration sufficiently, so that anyone can do it with basic enough training:

the great majority of functions of the old ‘state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced to such simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they would be quite within the reach of every literate person, and it will be possible to perform them for working men’s wages, which circumstance can (and must) strip those functions of every shadow of privilege and every appearance of official grandeur. (Lenin, quoted on p. 162)

The next source is Lenin’s Agrarian Question; more high modernist stuff, celebrating the inevitability of a centralized factory system imposed by capitalism (which is then to be taken over by the revolutionary proletariat). Lenin is a fan of electrification, in the sense of a centralized network that delivered power and efficiency everywhere: “The way that electricity worked was very much the way that Lenin hoped the power of the socialist state would work” (167).

Rosa Luxemburg (168ff) offered a very different view of revolution. “Luxemburg differed most sharply with Lenin in her relative faith in the autonomous creativity of the working class” (168). Luxemburg was nevertheless still a vanguardist, like Lenin:

Neither Lenin nor Luxemburg had what might be called a sociology of the party. That is, it did not occur to them that the intelligentsia of the party might have interests that did not coincide with the workers’ interests, however defined. They were quick to see a sociology of trade-union bureaucracies but not a sociology of the revolutionary Marxist party. (169)

Luxemburg, like Lenin, also used the metaphor of the party as like a factory manager, issuing orders which the worker should follow, because the manager/party sees the big picture, which the worker does not. However, this supremacy is not taken as far as in Lenin’s thought: “For Luxemburg, the party might well be more farsighted than the workers, but it would nevertheless be constantly surprised and taught new lessons by those whom it presumed to lead.” “Eschewing military, engineering, and factory parallels, she wrote more frequently of growth, development, experience, and learning.” Illustrating this is Luxemburg’s view on the role of strikes, standing in contrast to Lenin’s top-down view:

A strike or a revolution was not simply an end toward which tactics and command ought to be directed; the process leading to it was at the same time shaping the character of the proletariat. How the revolution was made mattered as much as whether it was made at all, for the process itself had heavy consequences. (170)

Per Scott, Luxemburg found Lenin’s “hierarchical logic” to be “both utterly unrealistic and morally distasteful.” ... “even if such discipline were conceivable, by imposing it the party would deprive itself of the independent, creative force of a proletariat that was, after all, the subject of the revolution.”

Lenin comes across as a rigid schoolmaster with quite definite lessons to convey—a schoolmaster who senses the unruliness of his pupils and wants desperately to keep them in line for their own good. Luxemburg sees that unruliness as well, but she takes it for a sign of vitality, a potentially valuable resource; she fears that an overly strict schoolmaster will destroy the pupils’ enthusiasm and leave a sullen, dispirited classroom where nothing is really learned. (171)

A footnote provides insight into Luxemburg’s [enlightenment] view of the transformation of proletarian consciousness through political action:

“...[The awakening of revolutionary energy could be effected] only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgment on the part of the masses, which capacity was systematically killed by the social democracy for decades under various pretexts.” (Luxemburg, quoted in 393n79)

The mass strike, then, was not a tactical invention of the vanguard party to be used at the appropriate moment. It was, rather, the "living pulse-beat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving-wheel, . . . the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” (172)

Luxemburg’s understanding of the revolutionary process, curiously enough, provided a better description of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power than did the utopian scenario in What Is to Be Done?

Luxemburg argued that the Bolsheviks’ “dictatorial methods and their mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism” (173).

Thus she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the proletariat—a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective was to create a self-conscious workers’ movement, not just to use the proletariat as instruments.

Luxemburg wrote that the “collective ego of the working class” had to make its own mistakes to “learn the historical dialectic by itself,” not just be led by the vanguard party.

She believed that Lenin and Trotsky had completely corrupted a proper understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To her, it meant rule by the whole proletariat, which required the broadest political freedoms for all workers (though not for enemy classes) so that they could bring their influence and wisdom to bear on the building of socialism. It did not mean, as Lenin and Trotsky assumed, that a small circle of party leaders would exercise dictatorial power merely in the name of the proletariat. (173-4)

L and L had fundamentally opposing understandings of socialism:

Lenin proceeded as if the road to socialism were already mapped out in detail and the task of the party were to use the iron discipline of the party apparatus to make sure that the revolutionary movement kept to that road. Luxemburg, on the contrary, believed that the future of socialism was to be discovered and worked out in a genuine collaboration between workers and their revolutionary state. … The openness that characterized a socialist future was not a shortcoming but rather a sign of its superiority, as a dialectical process, over the cut-and-dried formulas of utopian socialism. (174)

Scott notes how similar her view is to Malatesta’s. Her criticisms of Lenin were very prescient:

Unless the working class as a whole participated in the political process, she added ominously, “socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”

Scott now turns to the writings of Alexandra Kollontay in support of the short-lived Worker’s Opposition within the Bolshevik party; her arguments are similar to those made by Luxemburg; only the working class could create actual communism, it could not be imposed from above by bureaucrats

Her experience of being patronized and condescended to as a representative of the women’s section seems directly tied to her accusation that the party was also treating the workers as infants rather than as autonomous, creative adults. (176)

Summarizing the link between the viewpoints of Lenin and Le Corbusier: “Each of these schemes implies a single, unitary answer discoverable by specialists and hence a command center, which can, or ought to, impose the correct solution” (178). In contrast, Scott finds in Luxemburg’s and Kollontay’s bottom-up visions of revolution the theme of mētis, which will be the ultimate lesson of this book:

Kollontay's point of departure, like Luxemburg’s, is an assumption about what kinds of tasks are the making of revolutions and the creating of new forms of production. For both of them, such tasks are voyages in uncharted waters. There may be some rules of thumb, but there can be no blueprints or battle plans drawn up in advance; the numerous unknowns in the equation make a one-step solution inconceivable. In more technical language, such goals can be approached only by a stochastic process of successive approximations, trial and error, experiment, and learning through experience. The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called mētis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” mētis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances. (177-8)

Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: Separation

Vaneigem’s summary:

Privative appropriation, the basis of social organisation, keeps individuals separated from themselves and from others. Artificial unitary paradises seek to conceal this separation by co-opting more or less successfully people’s prematurely shattered dreams of unity. To no avail. People may be forced to swing back and forth across the narrow gap between the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of destroying, but this very oscillation suffices to bring Power to its knees. (117)

Like the related primitive accumulation in classical Marxism, privative appropriation plays a foundational role in creating the social order of “separation,” whereby resources are appropriated away from the [commons] into the private hands of individuals, castes, classes, which at the same time atomizes and alienates individuals away from the sense of social unity which, as the Situationalists consistently argue, we all truly long for. Separation, to be maintained, thus has to be dissimulated, and the rebellion against it in search of unity needs to be coöpted and diverted into maintaining separation.

“What is God? The guarantor and quintessence of the myth used to justify the domination of man by man.” V follows this with a dense theory of how the tripartite nature of the Christian god corresponds to soul, spirit, and body, leading into a master/servant dialectic.

God is a harmony of lies, an ideal form uniting the slave’s voluntary sacrifice (Christ), the consenting sacrifice of the master (the Father; the slave as the master’s son), and the indissoluble link between them (the Holy Ghost). The same model underlies the ideal picture of man as a divine, whole and mythic creature: a body subordinated to a guiding spirit working for the greater glory of the soul— the soul being the all-embracing synthesis. (119)

“We thus have a type of relationship in which two terms take their meaning from an absolute principle, from an obscure and inaccessible norm of unchallengeable transcendence (God, blood, holiness, grace, etc).” However, in today’s world ruled by the bourgeoisie, this has been reduced to “a vague nostalgia for warmth of the unitary myth and a set of cold and flavourless abstractions: body and spirit, being and consciousness, individual and society, private and public, general and particular, etc, etc.”

The old aristocratic orders were “unitary regimes” which supplanted the natural human wish for unity with myths and abstractions; this has become fragmented under the bourgeoisie (as they overthrew the old myths and abstractions but replaced them with inferior ones), which only makes the drive for unity more urgently felt.

By laying bare the economic and social foundations of separation, the bourgeoisie supplied the arms which will serve to end separation once and for all. And the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie and of all hierarchical power. … This mission can only be accomplished by the new proletariat, which must forcibly wrest the third force (spontaneous creation, poetry) from the gods, and keep it alive in the everyday life of all.

V traces the history of dualism in science, theology, and philosophy as part of the bourgeois overthrow of the previous unitary order and the emergence of capitalism, which is a dualist order, lacking a transcendent third (and thus more bare-faced and unstable).

The spirit of feudal lordship had found an adequate justification in a certain transcendence. But a capitalist God is an absurdity. Whereas lordship called for a trinitarian system, capitalist exploitation is dualistic. Moreover, it cannot be dissociated from the material nature of economic relationships. (120)

The mystical authority of the feudal lord was very different from that instituted by the bourgeoisie. For the lord did not simply change his role and become a factory boss: once the mysterious superiority of blood and lineage is abolished, nothing is left but a mechanics of exploitation and a race for profit which have no justification but themselves. Boss and worker are separated not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by quantitative distinctions of money and power. Indeed, what makes capitalist exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between ‘equals.’ All the same, the bourgeoisie’s work of destruction—though quite unintentionally, of course—reveals the justification for every revolution. (120-1)

Commodification adds individual fantasies to the collective ones, but these are unsatisfying, and thus lead to a stronger desire for real unity:

Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms—ideologies, illusions of social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people—we are offered a whole range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man’s—land between the permissible and the forbidden: individualised ideology, obsession, monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions, drugs and other highs (alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change, of rarefied sensations, etc). All these pursuits allow us to lose ourselves completely while preserving the impression of self-realisation, but the corrosiveness of such activities stems above all from their partial quality. The passion for play is no longer alienating if the person who gives himself up to it seeks play in the whole of life—in love, in thought, in the construction of situations. In the same way, the wish to kill is no longer megalomania if it is combined with revolutionary consciousness. (121)

The urge to destroy the current order may be expressed negatively, leading only to self-destruction, or, “should a revolutionary consciousness prevail,” with positive liberation.

The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man. (122)

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Authoritarian High Modernism

This chapter introduces the concept of “High Modernism” which will be explored through subsequent chapters.

All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. (87)

Yet they not only summarize facts, they transform them in portraying them; not just description, but prescription:

The state has no monopoly on utilitarian simplifications. What the state does at least aspire to, though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful institution in society: the state. (87-8)

This had to wait until the mid-19^th to 20^th century, when state power grew to match its ambitions. “I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements” (88). These are:

1. “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society”. S terms this high modernism (after Harvey), an ideology shared by both right and [statist] left.

2. “the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” (88-9)

3. “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”

The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias. (89)

S sees Nazism as a reactionary form of Modernism. He discusses “progressive” variants of High Modernism:

Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

A section on “the discovery of society” (90ff) details the role of the social sciences; S quotes Condorcet on the “moral sciences,” which are to be modeled after the physical sciences.

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. (91)

The development of statistics:

The existing social order, which had been more or less taken by earlier states as a given, reproducing itself under the watchful eye of the state, was for the first time the subject of active management. It was possible to conceive of an artificial, engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident, but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria. (92)

There is a link between class control, and colonialism, in this project:

It is important to recognize that, among Western powers, virtually all the initiatives associated with the “civilizing missions” of colonialism were preceded by comparable programs to assimilate and civilize their own lower-class populations, both rural and urban. The difference, perhaps, is that in the colonial setting officials had greater coercive power over an objectified and alien population, thus allowing for greater feats of social engineering. (378n19)

The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian. In place of multiple sources of invention and change, there was a single planning authority; in place of the plasticity and autonomy of existing social life, there was a fixed social order in which positions were designated. (93)

In the 20^th century, industrial warfare and the response to the Depression both required a more thorough mobilization of society; as did the rebuilding of post-war states. Beyond this, both revolutionary and colonial societies exerted special concentrated power [meeting the three criteria listed above].

The “birth” of 20^th-Century High Modernism can be located in post-WWI Germany, under Walter Rathenau, who was motivated in part by his belief in productivism:

For many specialists, a narrow and materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a scientific control of the entire labor process. (98)

Productivism had two lineages: 1) Taylorism; 2) the European school of “energetics.” S quotes Rabinbach (from the Human Motor book) on the point that productivism is “politically promiscuous,” embraced by both left and right (99). Productivism is a technological fix for class struggle; for capitalists, enabling control of worker; for the statist left, the elimination of capitalist management:

For much of the left, productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum solution, or ‘best practice,’ for any problem in the organization of work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism in the interest, presumably, of all.

Scott lists Thorstein Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, and Ayn Rand as all very different expounders of this ideology.

The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass destruction. (100)

Lenin was impressed with Rathenau’s example, and with Taylorism:

A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin. (101)

S ends with three sources of resistance to “the authoritarian temptations of twentieth-century high modernism” in liberal democracies:

1. The “existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.” Scott notes that such private spheres have been much eroded, but the idea that there is a proper outside to the control of the state still forms a limit.

2. The “private sector in liberal political economy;” this is thought to be outside the capacity of the state to recreate or master, and thus limits the state’s “economic sovereignty” [quoting from The Foucault Effect].

3: Most importantly, democratic institutions and liberal freedoms; “the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt” (102), and thus limit the power of elites and bureaucrats.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 11

 

Summary of Chapter 11: Mediated Abstraction, Abstracted Mediation

ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ

Vaneigem’s summary:

Reality is today imprisoned within metaphysics in the same way as it was once imprisoned within theology. The way of seeing which Power imposes ‘abstracts’ mediations from their original function, which is to extend the demands that arise in lived experience into the real world. But mediation never completely loses contact with experience: it resists the magnetic pull of authority. The point where resistance begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. Until now, metaphysicians have only organised the world in various ways; our problem is to change it, by opposing them (1). The regime of guaranteed survival is slowly undermining the belief that Power is necessary (2). This leads to a growing rejection of the forms which govern us, a rejection of their ordering principle (3). Radical theory, which is the only guarantee of the coherence of such a rejection, penetrates the masses because it extends their spontaneous creativity. ‘Revolutionary’ ideology is theory co-opted by the authorities. Words exist at the frontier between the will to live and its repression; the way they are employed determines their meaning; history controls the ways in which they are employed. The historical crisis of language indicates the possibility of transcending it towards the poetry of action, towards the great game with signs (4).

The first section begins with some trying to find yourself stuff, which you can’t, because of alienation and “non-totality.”

… the world, in certain periods, takes on the very forms of the dominant metaphysic. No matter how demented it may seem to us to believe in God and the Devil, this phantom pair become a living reality from the moment that a society considers them sufficiently present to inspire the text of its laws. In the same way, the stupid distinction between cause and effect has been able to govern societies in which human behaviour and phenomena in general were analysed in such terms. Even now nobody should underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between thought and action, theory and practice, real and imaginary . . . these ideas are forces of organisation. The world of falsehood is a real world; people are killing one another there, and we had best not forget it. (95)

[V’s “dominant metaphysic” seems to be about binary oppositions everyone takes for granted in a given “period.” The action/theory opposition brings Simondon to mind?]

In the modern world, “grace” remains like a "pacemaker" (granted by government rather than God) in the modern secularized subject?

Oppression reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves but also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them is also the false bond that unites them with Power, reinforcing this Power and making them choose it as their protector, as their father.

The most interesting aspect of this chapter is its discussion of the connection between mediations [e.g., technology, language, representation] and “Power” [hierarchical authority]:

As soon as mediation escapes my control, every step I take drags me towards something foreign and inhuman. Engels painstakingly showed that a stone, a fragment of nature alien to man, became human as soon as it became an extension of the hand by serving as a tool (and the stone in its turn humanised the hand of the hominid). But once it is appropriated by a master, an employer, a ministry of planning, a management, the tool’s meaning is changed: it deflects the action of its user towards other purposes. And what is true for tools is true for all mediations. (96) 

For the Situationalists, as for Marx and Engels, such mediation plays an essential role in the development of a human subject through interaction with their environment, in which they shape and learn about the world around them, and achieve self-consciousness. However, according to V, “Power” appropriates this mediation, inserting itself into the relation of subject-mediator-environment, thus stealing power from the individual subject, and diverting the outcome for its own ends. As “the magnetism of the governing principle always draws to itself the largest possible number of mediations,” this intervenes more and more assiduously, even cancerously, in all forms of art, work, and language.

Just as God was the supreme dispenser of grace, the magnetism of the governing principle always draws to itself the largest possible number of mediations. Power is the sum of alienated and alienating mediations.

V opposes alienating abstraction with spontaneity, but not simplistically, this is what he means by the “look-out post of subjectivity.”

Section 2 reinvokes the slave mentality, alienation in “a world of non-totality.”

In mankind’s struggle for survival, hierarchical social organisation was undeniably a decisive step forward. At one point in history the cohesion of a collectivity around its leader gave it the best, perhaps the only chance of self-preservation. (97)

This took different forms under feudalism and under the bourgeoisie.

If the bourgeoisie prefers man to God, it is because only man produces and consumes, supplies and demands. The divine universe, which is pre-economic, incurs their disapproval just as much as the post-economic world of the whole man. (98)

“By force-feeding survival to satiation point, consumer society awakens a new appetite for life.” This is an argument V has made before; he here adds that “Power no longer protects the people; it protects itself against the people.” [This seems a bit to beg the question as to whether it didn’t always do that? But the point he is trying to make is that people (in the wealthier nations, in the relatively wealthy time in which he is writing) are no longer terrified of starvation, etc. and so come to question the value of “Power” (aka hierarchy) which had previously seemed like a necessary aspect of social organization [V seems to be conceding that point simply to give the history a dialectic form]].

The third section celebrates "spontaneous poetry" as a practice of freedom:

Every time the total and immediate consummation of an action is deferred, Power is confirmed in its function of grand mediator. Sponta­neous poetry, on the other hand, is the anti-mediation par excellence.

“Power” (aka centralized power, domination/hierarchy) plays a role a bit like Althusser’s state Subject, inserted into or entangled into mediation (art, technology, “the Spectacle,” etc. as the relation of subjects with their environments). In the comfortable modern consumerist (and state socialist) world, “Ideological hypnosis is replacing the bayonet” (99). “But the more mediations are alienated, the more the thirst for the immediate rages, the more the savage poetry of revolutions tramples down frontiers.”

In its final phase, authority will culminate in the union of abstract and concrete. Power is already making the concrete abstract, even if it still occasionally resorts to the electric chair. The very face of the world, as illuminated by Power, is about to be organised according to a metaphysic of reality …

This ends with a lengthy quote on Form from the novel Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz.

In section 4, radical theory (aka critique) is opposed by ideology, and revolutions and revolutionary movements have failed or been coopted by those who turn theory into ideology, such as the Leninists who “explained” revolution with bullets to the sailors of Kronstadt, and to the Makhnovists (100).

Whenever the powers-that-be get their hands on theory, it turns into ideology: an ad hominem argument against man himself. Radical theory comes out of the individual, out of being as subject: it penetrates the masses through what is most creative in each person, through subjectivity, through the desire for realisation. Ideological conditioning is quite the opposite: the technical management of the inhuman, of the weight of things. It turns men into objects which have no meaning apart from the Order in which they have their place. It assembles them in order to isolate them, makes the crowd into a multiplicity of solitudes.

    Ideology is the falsehood of language, radical theory the truth of language. (101)

The fight is unfair. Words serve Power better than they do men; they serve it more faithfully than most men do, and more scrupulously than the other mediations (space, time, technology ...). For all transcendence depends on language and is developed through a system of signs and symbols (words, dance, ritual, music, sculpture, building ...).

Language, as the servant of “Power,” abstracts, and forces complex living experience into reductive categories, in order to reproduce the familiar signs (or Forms, in the earlier Gombrowicz quote). “The repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.” [A more nuanced version of this argument would be D&G on the refrain.]

Yet lived experience keeps generating the radical gesture of spontaneity and poetry:

Even when it is co-opted and turned against its original purpose, poetry always gets what it wants in the end. The ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite’ which produced the Stalinist State will one day realise the classless society. No poetic sign is ever completely turned by ideology. (102)

Poetry is opposed by anti-poetry [about as apt a description of generative “AI” as any]:

The language that neglects radical actions, creative actions, human actions par excellence, from their realisation, becomes anti-poetry. It defines the linguistics of power: its science of information. This information is the model of false communication, the communication of the inauthentic, non-living. There is a principle that I find holds good: as soon as language no longer obeys the desire for realisation, it falsifies communication; it no longer communicates anything except that false promise of truth which is called a lie. But this lie is the truth of what destroys me, infects me with its virus of submission.

“Each word, idea , or symbol is a double agent” serving either the centralization of Power, or the liberatory “will to live.”

In a general way, the fight for language is the fight for the freedom to love, for the reversal of perspective. The battle is between metaphysical facts and the reality of facts: I mean between facts conceived statically as part of a system of interpretation of the world and facts understood in their development by the praxis which transforms them.

Power cannot be overthrown like a government. The united front against authority covers the whole spectrum of everyday life and enlists the vast majority of people. (102-3)

Three weapons in the service of freedom:

1) Poeticization. “‘Information’ should be corrected in the direction of poetry” (103), aka the poeticization or repoeticization of language, “leading eventually to a glossary or encyclopaedia” (which presumably translates the words used by Power into opposing or subversive meanings?)

2) Dialogue. “Open dialogue, the language of the dialectic; conversation, and forms of non-spectacular discussion.”

3) Sensual speech. “Sensual speech” is a concept from the mystic Jakob Boehme, which V states is a form of “propaganda by the deed.”

V discusses direct communication without words, as between lovers, and celebrates [Edward] Lear and [Lewis] Carroll, and Dada, as resistance in the realm of language.

By exposing falsified communication Dada began to transcend language in the direction of poetry. Today, the language of myth and the language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies them: the language of deeds. This language contains in itself the critique of all modes of expression and is thus a continuous self-criticism. (104)

V ends with a dream of a post-revolutionary, seemingly post-linguistic? society, which makes Fourier seem boringly practical, though the final “do” is a double-entendre: to “speak” here means to speak within the ideological system of Forms and familiar signs, while to “do” is what we can do with language outside of this, when theory and practice have been reunited in totality:]

The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. But we shall have to speak until we can do without words.

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The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 9

Summary of Chapter 9: Technology and its mediated use

Vaneigem’s summary:

Contrary to the interest of those who control its use, technology tends to demystify the world. The democratic reign of consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. At the same time, organisation – the technology of new technologies – deprives modern productive forces of their subversive and seductive qualities. Such organisation is simply the organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations weaken men by making themselves indispensable. A social mask conceals people and things, transforming them, in the present stage of privative appropriation, into dead things - into commodities. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social relationships. The shell of the old hierarchical society will be burst open from within by the cancerous expansion of its technical apparatus (2). (83)

The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilisations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in automated civilisations, where people are already dying of boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival sickness.

“Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration.” Machines are both perfectly intelligible, and miraculous.

this ambiguity is useful to the masters: old con about happy tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to justify the rational exploitation of people today. (84)

[Interestingly enough, both this phenomenon and its opposite are at play in the current AI hype. As Bender and Hanna (2025) point out, the “doomer” scenario also helps, by making AI seem more capable and important than it is.]

In his typically dense and wide-ranging manner, V runs through desanctification, liberalism, and fascism, all in one paragraph (with a nod to Ubu thrown in). The basic argument is that commodity culture has created the conditions for its own destruction, through general dissatisfaction and disenchantment.

Today the promises of the old society of production are raining down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody is likely to call manna from heaven. You can hardly believe in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people used to believe in productive forces. There is a certain hagiographical literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine much on the electric toothbrush.

He takes aim at the “cyberneticists” and their dream of a general science of organization transforming society; read today, it is easy to substitute the fantasies of Silicon Valley technocrats:

The first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed at Disneyland.

He contrasts the fantasies of the cyberneticists with the utopianism of Fourier, and foretells the failure of the former:

By laying the basis for a perfect power structure, the cyberneticians will only stimulate the perfection of its refusal. Their programming of new techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned to its own use by another kind of organisation. A revolutionary organisation. (85)

V’s summation of the dual alienations of production and consumption in the modern world contrasts and resonates with Simondon’s conclusion (covered recently):

It has been known for ages that the master uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective world, that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion of action in a real passivity and transform him into an essentially dependent being.

Again paralleling Simondon, he goes into the whole “technology-as-humanity’s-confrontation’with-nature” theme, and how this becomes superficial in a world in which everything is fake, including “nature.”

What we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialise it by liberating the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation, by snatching it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only at the end of a process of social disalienation will nature become a worthwhile opponent, in a society in which man’s creativity will not come up against man himself as the first obstacle to its expansion. (87)

Technocratic organization aims at a mastery it cannot achieve, and in its failure, will create the space for a revolutionary transformation of society.

But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. And cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of organisation will be laughed off the stage. (86)

Technological organisation cannot be destroyed from without. Its collapse will result from internal decay. Far from being punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power they would have a hard time staying there. (87)

Let us so hope!

Bender, Emily M.; and Hanna, Alex (2025) The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper-Collins, New York.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 20

 

Summary of Chapter 20: A Final Note on Skill

Braverman notes that his argument in this book goes against the “popular view” of his time, that increased mechanization leads to an increase in skilled work, because there is a need for training to use the machinery.

The concepts of “skill,” “training,” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of “upgrading"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration. (294)

He criticizes discussion of “average skill” in this regard, when it is really an issue of polarization.

The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.

“For most of those who hold it, the ‘upgrading’ thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education” (295). This is “a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.”

B not surprisingly demolishes the argument for the first trend (that workers have been “upgraded” into higher skill levels) by showing that the supporting statistics have been created retroactively “based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word” (297). To illustrate this he gives a great example of the difference between horse-driving and automobile-driving occupations:

Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxidrivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled” laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled.” When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill.” Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses. (297-8)

It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. (298)

The “semi-skilled” category and descriptions barely differs from the “unskilled”. The issue of some required training is raised, but B points out that even “unskilled” job typically require some training. The operative/assembly line jobs, which the statisticians take as “semi-skilled” and thus an upgrade for formerly “unskilled” workers, are typically easier to learn [and thus in actuality less skilled, per Braverman] than the jobs that are being left behind. B denounces this as the “imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises” (300). He goes on to emphasize the range of skills represented in the category of “farm laborer,” contradicting contemporary sociologists who imagine that any movement of workers out of this category is an upgrade. Likewise, statisticians consider “service worker,” as well as clerical work, as higher categories than industrial operative or laborer, but Braverman has already pointed out in previous chapters how these categories obscure an actual deskilling and decrease in pay.

The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition of long standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. … The weight of the prejudice which rates all “white-collar” above all “blue-collar” work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom (301-2)

Another argument the sociologists Braverman is arguing against put forward as evidence of increased skill is increased education. B points out this has to do with far more than work:

In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education. (302)

B recounts the history of how high school diplomas became widely seen as requirements for many jobs in the US, for reasons unrelated to the actual skill required in work, such as policies to control unemployment.

The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee – not always valid – of getting workers who can read. (304)

He goes into a lengthy and quite savage critique of the education system:

We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons – which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training – it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational” structure.... The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factor – the purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational system – we have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart. (304-5)

Braverman turns to the central thesis of the book:

For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. (307)

[And this is not because of any inherent aspect of technological development, but because of the particular shape this development takes in a capitalist system.]

B moves on to the next key point, which is what lessons this study of labor in monopoly capitalism can have for a post-capitalist society: “The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process.” This can to an extent build off the current educational system:

But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it. (308)

In this light, B criticizes certain schemes for workplace democracy which he thinks do not go far enough in actually challenging control over the means of production:

The demands for “workers 'participation” and “workers’ control,” from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism­ – election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc. – upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor – without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production – balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts,” and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers’ control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers’ control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers’ democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.

In this context he remarks that the Soviet Union, which seized ownership from the bourgeoisie but did not institute true worker’s control in the workplace, was stuck in the “abortive first stage of revolution” from a truly Marxist perspective.

In contrast to B’s more hopeful vision, the current capitalist system separates knowledge and skill from labor, robbing humanity of “its birthright of conscious and masterful labor” (309). He ends by casting back to the previously noted, almost refreshingly naive directness of the Taylorians, who had explained that under Scientific Management there is in fact no “unskilled” labor, because all workers will have been trained to carry out their specific tasks:

It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading” in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. “Training a worker,” wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.” Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 7

 

Summary of Chapter 7: The Age of Happiness

Chapter 7 begins a new subsection of part 1, titled, “The impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation,” under which heading V states:

In the realm of Power, mediation is the false necessity wherein people learn to lose themselves rationally. Mediation’s power to alienate is now being reinforced, and also brought into question, by the dictatorship of consumption (seven), by the predominance of exchange over gift (eight), by cybernetisation (nine), and by the reign of the quantitative (ten). (65)

This chapter, then, will be about the “dictatorship of consumption. Vaneigem’s summary:

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees of survival which were demanded by the disinherited members of the production-based society of former days (1). Affluent survival entails the pauper­isation of life (2). Purchasing power is a licence to purchase power, to become an object in the order of things. The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall, albeit at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the dictatorship of consumer goods (3). (65)

V begins the chapter with condemnations of both the welfare state and consumerism, noting with great sarcasm the obfuscation of the working class, who can now be imagined to be “rich” because they have various objects, and how consumption is meant to stand in for or replace the goals of revolution. Nevertheless, the younger generation are not taken in, and V celebrates various examples of uprising/insurrection.

The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that consumption, with its logic of things, forbids all qualitative differences and recognises only differences of quantity between values and between people. (69)

Vaneigem notes that consumer goods are losing their use value, with their value for consumption being all that matters. Noting Stalin’s revealing phrase that humans are “the most precious kind of capital,” V asserts that even this is no longer true: humans are only good for moving consumption along, gaining our entire identity from what we buy. “Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete” (70). V observes with some irony that

a historical period based on such an anti-human truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the life that was lived, if obscurely, by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries. (70-1)

The great Bourgeois revolutions of the west have turned out to be no better than counter-revolutions, producing a society, not of “masters without slaves,” but of “slaves without masters.” At the same time, as the Stalin quote revealed, state “socialism” is also not truly revolutionary, but just another variation on the capitalist/consumerist order. [and has not China since demonstrated this even more clearly?]

The old proletarian sold his labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time he had was passed pleasantly enough in conversation, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.... On the one hand, homo consumator buys a bottle of whiskey and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies it. On the other hand, communist man buys ideology and gets a bottle of vodka for free. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes are taking a common path, the first thanks to an economy of production, the second thanks to an economy of consumption. (72-3)

In the Soviet Union, the “surplus value of power” is the support of the bureaucrat. “He earns it not on the basis of money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation of confidence-capital obtained through the docile absorption of ideological matter.” (73)

In capitalist countries, the material profit reaped by the employer from both production and consumption remains distinct from the ideological profit which the employer is not alone in deriving from the organisation of consumption. This is all that prevents us from reducing the difference between a manager and worker to the difference between a new Rolls Royce every year and a VW lovingly maintained for five.

But State planning reduces everyone to no more than agents for consumption. Although many of V’s Cold War observations can sound a bit dated, the following presciently evokes the fantasies of some current Silicon Valley technocrats:

The culmination of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming, and making others consume, the doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves would be at once program and print-out. (73-4)

He ends by expressing hope that the disaffected proletarian youth of the first world, and the peasantry of the third world, will have none of this, and will join forces in revolt, putting an end to the bourgeois half-revolution:

The revolt against the welfare state will set the minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget this, but you forget it at your peril. As Saint-Just said, those who make a revolution by halves are only digging their own graves. (74)