Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 12

Summary of Chapter 12: Sacrifice

This chapter begins a new section, titled “The impossibility of realisation: power as sum of seductions,” which V summarizes:

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: for a cause that mutilates them {twelve}; for an imaginary unity that fragments them {thirteen}; for an appearance that reifies them {fourteen}; for roles that wrest them from authentic life (fifteen}; for a time whose passage defines and confines them {sixteen}. (105)

This chapter will thus be on “the cause that mutilates.” V’s summary (107):

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing – not even the option of death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of masochism wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary self -sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: the appeal to art, the appeal to human feelings and the appeal to the present (2).

“Where people are not broken – and broken in – by force and fraud, they are seduced.” The seduction of the current consumerist world (and its parallel in the State-socialist world, at the time V was writing), is familiar from earlier chapters. The way that myth and sacrifice operate in the current bourgeois world is a sort of debasement of their aristocratic predecessors (cf. Chapter 8).

the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and fragmenting it. It does not abolish it, however, because if it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit – and hence to exist. The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. (108)

Throughout this book V has been discussing “privative appropriation” (l’appropriation privative), and only now has it occured to me to wonder how this relates to the more common phrase “primitive accumulation.” V defines privative appropriation elsewhere (Vaneigem 2009) as “the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over socioeconomic survival whose form remains complex — from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, all the way to the ‘pure’ exercise of power over people (hierarchy).”

He mocks the pro-Soviet, statist left as also demanding “sacrifice.” Fanatics across the political spectrum sacrifice themselves to a Cause, which is really an aesthetics of death.

For aesthetics is carnival paralysed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life. (109)

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. (110)

Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. (111)

Thus for V, any of these specific causes or goals is a “thing,” a limitation to which individuals are called to sacrifice themselves; the real aim of revolution in his eyes is this reawakening of the “carnival spirit.”

The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution.

The ‘road to socialism’ consists in this: as people become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art. (112)

He traces how art changed from ancient, to bourgeois times, and its role in recuperating struggle into the service of the status quo.

The function of the spectacle in ideology, art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. (113)

New art movements are subject to planned obsolescence, such that the “dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces.” V is critical of attempts to resist this manufacturing a new aesthetic out of everyday life via “Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators,” as these do not truly challenge the spectacle. He considers the potentials, and failures, of surrealism, but notes that the “present state of affairs tends to favour situationist agitation” (115).

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one. (115)

The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive.

We never really give ourselves over completely to what we are doing, except perhaps in orgasm. Our present is grounded in what we are going to do later and in what we have just done, with the result that it always bears the stamp of unpleasure. In collective as well as in individual history, the cult of the past and the cult of the future are equally reactionary. Everything which has to be built has to be built in the present. (116)

I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: ‘Act as though there were no tomorrow.’

Vaneigem, Raoul (2009 [1963]) “Basic Banalities.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-basic-banalities

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 8

Summary of Chapter 8: Exchange and Gift

V’s summary:

Both the nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving transcends the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to be overthrown and transcended in the long revolution (1). History is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation, and also, paradoxically, the continuous strengthening of a movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation. The historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is based on magic. This magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. The extreme quantification of exchange reduces man to an object. From this rock bottom a new type of human relationship, involving neither exchange nor sacrifice, can be born (2). (75)

Vaneigem begins with the recurrent theme, of the present social order as an interregnum between two revolutions, a “no-man’s land” in history waiting for its culmination and transcendence:

The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious interregnum between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the anarchic order of future classless societies. The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange is the uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy pleasure of giving oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged, from the pleasure of giving through self-love, which the new generations of proletarians are little by little beginning to discover.

This is also true where (at V’s time of writing) the “shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red flag” (76). The bourgeoisie does of course play an important, though temporary, role in this history:

to give the devil his due, it is through the historical presence and mediation of the bourgeoisie that such a future becomes accessible to the proletariat. Is it not thanks to the technical progress and the productive forces developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position to realise, through the scientifically worked-out project of a new society, its egalitarian visions, its dreams of omnipotence and its desire to live without dead time?

Social organisation – hierarchical since it is based on privative appropriation – gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use; it creates between itself and mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the mystery of nature. (77)

From this point of view history is just the transformation of natural alienation into social alienation: a process of disalienation transformed into a process of social alienation, a movement of liberation producing new chains. Eventually, though, the will for human liberation will launch a direct attack on the whole collection of paralysing mechanisms, that is, on the social organisation based on privative appropriation. This is the movement of disalienation which will at once undo history and realise it in new modes of life.

The bourgeoisie’s accession to power signals man’s victory over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical social organisation, born out of the struggle against hunger, sickness and material distress, loses its justification, and is obliged to take full responsibility for the malaise of industrial civilisations.

The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of man in his historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy. (78)

The old feudal elites justified their rule in terms of myth and sacrifice, though this in reality meant “mythical power for those who sacrifice themselves in reality, real power for those who sacrifice themselves in myth.” (79)

The sacrifice-gift, the potlatch – the game of exchange or loser-take-all, in which the size of the sacrifice determined the prestige of the giver – obviously had no place in a rationalised trading economy. Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it re-emerged in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonised everyday life and turned this too into a market.

Strictly quantified, first by money and then by what might be called ‘sociometric units of power’, exchange pollutes all our relationships, feelings and thoughts. Where exchange dominates, only things are left, a world plugged into the organisation charts of cybernetic power: the world of reification. Yet this world is also, paradoxically, the jumping-off point for a total reconstruction of life and thought. A rock bottom on which we can really start to build. (80)

V posits also a final stage, or possibly an alternate non-revolutionary future, of “cybernetic democracy:”

The sacrifice of the masters is followed by the last stage in the history of sacrifice: the sacrifice of specialists. In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a cybernetic programme whose hyper-rationality of exchange is destined to abolish sacrifice – and man along with it. The day pure exchange comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robot citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice is no more part of the programme of machines than it is of a quite opposite project, the project of the whole human being. (81)

The order of exchange will fall apart, and be replaced by that of the pure gift:

We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful potlatches the affluent society will see – whether it likes it or no – when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewellery simply for the pleasure of giving them away, offers a glimpse of what the will to live has in store for consumer society.

We will have to renew our acquaintance with feudal imperfection, not in order to perfect it, but in order to transcend it. We will have to rediscover the harmony of unitary society while freeing it from the phantom of divinity and from hierarchy sanctified. The new innocence is not so far removed from the ordeals and judgements of God: the inequality of blood is closer to the equality of free individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois equality. The cramped style of the nobility was only a crude sketch of the grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves. Yet it was a style of life nonetheless – a world away from the wretched forms of mere survival which ravage the individual’s existence in our time. (81-2)