Manifesto of the Malgré Tout Collective

Translated by Pablo Mendez and Sebastian Touza*

The times of revolutionary politics are over, we are told, because messianic time is

dead. But in fact, it’s just the opposite: today, a libertarian politics can only exist

precisely if it is able to rid itself of messianic time. One no longer struggles for the advent

of the end of history or the transparent reign of freedom, simply because freedom is not a

state that can be reached, but rather an act that it is necessary to incarnate. Thus, struggle

is truly political when freedom acts. This is why free acts are so rare and the promises of

freedom so frequent. Along with messianic time, a politics of non-domination should rid

itself of the master liberators who promise freedom in the future in exchange for

subservience today. Modernity conceived messianic time under the mythical figure of

progressivism, which implied that thanks to progress in all the different forms of life --the

technical, economical, social and political-- man would become increasingly free. And

this was so because, according to the teachings of Marxism, it was the material life of a

community that determined the consciousness of its inhabitants. And indeed, it’s true that

consciousness is overdetermined, except that it does not identify itself with freedom. In

his situation, Spartacus did not act less freely than Ché.

It’s not by instituting new ways of living that we will become increasingly free, but

the opposite: it’s by acting freely that we can invent new modes of life. The same can be

said about reason and justice. The point is not to reach, at the end of history, a more just

and rational world. Reason and justice are not the goals of rebellion but its causes. If we

are right to rebel, it’s because there is a reason, a truth, a justice in our rebelliousness.

Anyway, we should not ask ourselves what do we have to do so that humanity is free one

day, but instead, what do we have to do in order to be free here and now. This is why we

prefer to talk about “restricted action.” Restricted action seeks to part with that dialectical

view according to which today’s revolt is validated or justified by a becoming of the

world in its globality. What is broken is not libertarian politics, but rather the epic

narrative in which the progressive forces defeat the reactionary ones and once and for all

eradicate scarcity, exploitation, barbarism, and suffering. History has not ended, simply

because it never ends. But if it must be a matter of ends, what has ended is precisely

messianic time, or history with an end.

Restricted action is political practice without messianic promise. It is, in situation, a

what separates it from any type of vanguardism.

Always dependent on the progressivist model, the military role of the vanguard was

to show the points where a situation had to be attacked in order to attain, through its

destruction, the political objective of a new status quo, completely different from the

preceding one and supposedly better. Thus, the vanguard was imprisoned in a

deterministic ideology according to which, once the correlation of forces of the moment

was known, the future would become analytically foreseeable. Hence, the vanguard was

capable of jumping outside the situation in order to look at history as the progressive

unfolding of a plan: the future appeared to be as necessary as the past, and the revolution

a mere acceleration of historical time. In turn, this had as a consequence the reduction of

freedom here and now: the reduction of the revolutionary decision, its invention, and its

novelty, to ineluctable necessity, something as foreseeable as Judas’ treason was for God.

The idea that a state of affairs subsequent to the current situation is foreseeable

presupposes that the laws of historical progress are knowable. Two possibilities follow:

either every new event is reduced to a “fact” that can be explained and represented

according to the parameters of a model; or, if the event is not anticipated by the model,

then it does not exist.

Sartre had observed this in relation to the analysis that Marxists made of the

Hungarian revolt of 1956: before having done any research, before starting to think about

what had happened there, the event already fit within the framework of possibilities

envisaged by the official model. For some, it was a counterrevolutionary reaction that in

the context of the Cold War could only have been supported by Western capitalism; for

others, the Trotskyites, it was a working class rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

In either case, however, nothing new had happened: it was a foreseeable fact because it

left the respective models of analysis intact. Today, something similar happens with

explanations of the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas.

The wager without guarantees on the rupture of the situation is at the same time a

wager on chance, on the non-determinate or the unforeseeable. It’s an opacity in our

models: only the powerful can aspire to dominate, foresee, and determine everything that

is. And us, we can only wish for that event which detotalizes the knowledge and the

model of the powerful.

But the point is not to have an irrationalist vocation; rather, it’s a matter of undoing

the old alliance between rationality and determinism. As a matter of fact, there is no

reason to identify the historical rebels with vanguards or with powerful progressivists.

When the revolutionaries engaged in action and thought, they asked themselves what

could they do in history that was free and radical. But immediately a master liberator

would appear and declare: “We are making history, we are leading humanity toward its

salvation.” And as a result of having one eye in the present and the other one in the

future, the Left has become squint-eyed… For this reason, we cannot but appreciate the

words of Zapatista subcommander Marcos when he compares his revolt with the writing

of a poem: far from banal scepticism, his comparison separates him from the logic of

means and ends. Mallarmé certainly revolutionized poetic language, but he, however,

only sought to do something absolutely revolutionary in poetry. The promise of a better

world can no longer legitimate political action. Or, to put it differently, the end does not

justify the means. We cannot continue to eat the cannibals in order to put an end to

cannibalism. From the moment that a restricted action becomes a global action, it cannot

help but think in terms of an army of the good and, consequently, in terms of a good

barbarism.

Thus, during the years of the Cold War, many believed it was necessary to support

the Soviet Union, “the universal homeland of socialism,” in spite of Stalin’s crimes. Who

cared if millions died, if the world would finally be happy! But this does not mean that

it’s necessary to confront the old revolutionary foundations with the bourgeois

democratic legality of human rights and the reactionary slogan of “saving the body,” as

humanists propose in order to de-politicize situations, so that there is no longer a subject

but only body-objects to be saved. (In fact, restricted action does not exclude violence,

but rather armed power or domination.) Indeed, today we are presented with a model that

is content with being a caricatured inversion of the previous one: the messiah has been

replaced by the apocalypse. It’s as if the future gave us nothing but barbaric and

threatening messages. And this is an excuse for leaving things as they are and limit any

political action to a bourgeois-democratic defense of human rights, of constituted

legality, and majoritarian consensus. In the postmodern vision of the end of history, this

is the best of the possible worlds, because any other can only offer us prodigious

barbarism. In this way, political action is no longer justified by a future good but by an

evil always ready to come back. As such, it does not even have its own initiative: political

action has become pure reaction in the face of the worse. This is the trap in which

unfortunately many “anti” groups fall.

Thus, people occupy the position of jurors-spectators --or public opinion--

condemning or approving the behavior of others, the true public actors. They are not men

and women who freely build a different life; rather, they are the public, represented by an

opinion poll, a graph, figures. The goal is not to divide consciences but to gain support or

consensus, not to incite thought but to excite common sense and opinion. This is why this

spectator-individual no longer conceives himself as immersed in a situation; he is neither

worker, nor woman, nor immigrant, nor disabled person, but rather an illusory

transhistorical and trans-situational consciousness. Although his judgement of what

happens is indelibly linked to the common sense or the consensual norm of a particular

epoch, it is nonetheless lived as simply “human.”

The spectator-individual is a particularly effective invention of the era of mass media.

Indeed, a media or communicational mechanism is characterized by the construction of

three places: the addresser, the addressee, and the referent or “reality” that is

communicated. In the mass media, the addresser is generally anonymous. Who writes the

wire or the news? Who is the “objective” of the camera? The addressee, in turn, is the

majority viewpoint. Thus the worker, the woman, the immigrant, the disabled person are

transformed into spectator-individuals when they occupy the place of the message’s

addressee. To occupy this place means to accept all the discursive presuppositions

without which the message could not be decoded: in other words, the acceptance of an

entire common sense. To become addressee, it’s necessary to abandon the being in

situation to become a “common person,” a “person from the street,” not more and not less

than a dominant or majority gaze. Finally, the referent or “reality” constructed by the

media is not the concrete situation of the worker, the woman, the immigrant, or the

disabled person, but “the world.” The “world” is an ensemble of facts: wars, genocide,

famines, petty crimes, the dollar crisis, ecological disasters, meteorological bulletins,

football matches or film releases, presented without an idea of continuity and without

historical or situational contextualization. The “world” is everything that constitutes an

opinion topic and is part of everyday communication and sociability.

Thus, many progressive people ask themselves: what can we do about what is

happening in the world? What can we do in the face of events such as the Rwanda

massacre, the hole in the ozone layer, or American interventionism? The answer may

seem disappointing: nothing. Because this ensemble of facts that is called “the world” is a

construction aimed at the spectator-individual and not to the person in situation. In other

words, such a world does not exist outside the discursive presuppositions that constitute

it. Hence, we cannot accept such a world without accepting at the same time its

presuppositions, without occupying the place of the receiver or spectator-individual.

It’s necessary to choose: either world or situation, because they are two mutually

exclusive realities, in the same way that the individual and the political subject exclude

each other. Is this an acknowledgement of the impotence of restricted, situational action

in front of the world? Just the opposite: it’s the “world” what reduces any political action

to impotence, because it removes it from concrete action. Which means that the mass

media’s concern with the world not only puts us in a position of impotence in the face of

its spectacle, but it also anesthetizes us and prevents us from acting right where we can

do it: namely, in our situation.

Thus, restricted action is opposed to any vain desire for power, to any omnipotent

messianism which, from a quasi-delirious position, looks at the world as it is and dictates

how it should be. If restricted action is a praxis in and for the situation, it’s because its

delimitation and its terms are not equivalent to information provided by the mass media.

What comes to be presented as the situation must be simultaneously the fruit of an

investigation, of a thought, and of a praxis which allows us to say: if this is the structure

of the situation in question, then this will be our wager. When that is the case, even

mistakes will be part of a moment in the reconstruction of a praxis of freedom. In this

sense, it’s necessary to be categorical: the “world” as a totality of facts is a media

illusion. There is only a multiplicity of situations, each of which relates to a problem, to a

concrete universal that radically distinguishes itself from the “world” as arbitrary totality.

The other temptation that has dominated the modern theory and praxis of political

action is the idea that there is a situation that subsumes all the others. From this

perspective, sexual repression, racial discrimination, the phallocentric submission of

women, the institutionalization of the insane, the normalization of marginals, and all

other social conflicts were subordinated to one big foundational struggle: class struggle.

Or, to put it in a different way, all the situations were superstructural in relation to a basic

structural situation: capitalism and its globalization. Of course, the point is not to negate

capitalist exploitation, the tyranny of capital, or the worship of the commodity. In our

opinion, the mistake is to believe that the medicalization of subjectivity, racial

discrimination, the codification of the family, the “technologization” of life and other

realities of our times are the consequence of a mode of production. What numerous

historical investigations allow us to corroborate today is that these modes of being,

acting, knowing, and even loving, arose from historical ruptures that preceded the

appearance and institution of capitalism as mode of production and exchange of

commodities. Thus, it would not be a mistake to speak today of a “capitalistic” era, in

which multiple situations come together and connect with each other. The working class

one, to the detriment of workers’ struggles and other struggles. For the same reason, one

cannot oppose to capitalism a global alternative situation called “socialism.” As Marx

himself taught us, it was capitalism itself that, by universalizing market exchange, created

what we nowadays call the “world.”

The world as globality does not exist without the flattening of every concrete

situation --something that is qualitatively different from the quantitative violence of the

commodity. The argument about the “complexity” of today’s world, which regards any

attempt to transform it as vain, is a consequence of the failure derived from acting at the

level of a globality or of a world-system. It is the illusion produced by the reduction of

the situational multiplicity to a single explanatory principle. Among the main figures of

current common sense provoking the anguish of people while ensuring and structuring

their impotence are clichés such as: “the world is becoming increasingly smaller” or “in

characterize the painful experience structuring the subjectivity of our contemporaries.

If the world is increasingly smaller, if we cannot go anywhere because everything is

always “in the same place,” then the trappings of the structure that hinders every free act

become visible. But when we add to this a dizzying pace of time, the trap is finally

closed. These phrases, proper to the society of the spectacle, fit perfectly within the logic

of the commodity: they are statements from a world founded on the quest for profit and

efficiency. Indeed, the world is small, minuscule even, when we think of it through the

problem of overproduction of commodities that are impossible to sell. The joke about

“selling refrigerators to the Eskimos” is a reality of the world of the commodity, which is

always becoming narrower. This is why the refrigerator, like any commodity, must be

perishable, for even before the Eskimo has paid the second instalment, a new model will

be coming out of the factories. Thus, time becomes dizzying, time does not give time to

time: such is the barbarism of a society structured on the basis of the production of

commodities.

This world is reflected in the ideology of the societies of the spectacle: our

contemporaries perceive themselves as “productive units” not only in the economic

sphere, but also in the affective, bodily, social, etc. Thus they find themselves trapped in

this freedom-killing vision which separates them from their concrete situations. The

world then appears to be divided into two categories, according to a truly supermarketstyle

Darwinism: on the one hand is the large mass of exhausted people (the acceleration

of time and the shrinkage of space constitute, strictly speaking, the experience of

depression), and on the other hand are the strong, enterprising, and productive people,

who dominate the world but do so in constant anguish of falling into the first group. It’s

not surprising that the concrete considerations of people in situation do not figure in this

spectacular vision, given the fact that what characterizes all consensual dominant

ideologies is that they make such considerations disappear. The statement “the world is

one and is increasingly smaller” is the totalitarian proposition that tends to conceal that

reality is infinite in its dimensions and possibilities.

To say that everything is similar and that everything is small is a reactionary

profession of faith whose effects on reality are very serious. That time escapes from our

hands, because of its peculiar acceleration at the end of the century, is a socio-historical

pseudo-corroboration that seeks to conceal the fact that every day can contain an eternity.

The fact is that, in a month of insurrections, in a few years of autonomous experience, or

in all those events in which the free subject acts, the long-standing suspicion that eternity

takes refuge between the minutes of the clock is confirmed.

We are now going to define what we understand by “concrete universal.” We say it’s

restricted political action that, on the base of a concrete situation, proceeds toward a

universal rupture at the level of its quality and structure. We say universal because, unlike

a global model that ignores the particularity of the elements of the situation, it questions

the foundational core of that situation. This is why it would be a mistake, as we will see

in a moment, to confuse restricted action with a partial, limited, or sectoral claim.

What is at stake here is not the dialectic of reformism and revolution: the global and

totalitarian vision of society belongs not only to the modern conceptions of revolution,

but also to reformism. Let’s take first a classical example: that of the working class. As

its name indicates, this class is a part or subset of a situation: the capitalist system of

production. As such, this class can make a partial or self-interested claim. Take for

example a claim raised by a union. Such a claim is perfectly “negotiable” within the

framework of the situation, and, from the moment the class becomes unionized, it can

even obtain a favorable decision from the ordinary justice system. But, as Marxists used

to reproach trade unionists, any action in that sense --even a violent one-- can be social,

but it’s not political if it does not question the structure of the situation. In this case,

justice does not reside in the provision of higher or lower wages to workers, but in the

destruction of the system that alienates their labor time.

For the same reason, this latter position is not “negotiable,” or cannot be answered

from the normality of the situation, because it implies its destruction. In this way,

political action ceases to be a partial claim, so as to become a singularity: something

unforeseeable by the situation because it questions its very foundations. At this point it’s

no longer a matter of a class, but of an unclassifiable or anomalous political subject. This

subject does not exist outside the situation. It’s a subject that arises from, but is not linked

to, the situation because the situation does not foresee it. At the same time, this

singularity is universal from the very moment it introduces a rupture that concerns all the

inhabitants of the situation (bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, proletarians,

etc.), who now have to decide whether or not to commit to the struggle that questions not

only the situation they inhabit, but also what they in themselves are.

This is why the commitment to a struggle is a completely different thing from

external or humanist solidarity. Let’s take a second example: the black population of the

United States. As a subset or part of a situation, black people have struggled for the right

to be recognized as equal to white people. Not only as far as the right to vote is

concerned, but also with regard to their functions: a black person should not be

discriminated as a candidate for a job, since he is “as capable as a white person” to do it.

Which means that he fulfils all the conditions required by the system. This is the reason

why the first step towards liberation from slavery was to adopt, in the last century, the

religion of white people: being a Christian was the equivalent of being “human” -- being

like white people, of course, from the standpoint of the white vision of the world. In the

twentieth century, the equivalent was integration: assimilation into the system and way of

life of white people in order to conquer the same rights. Many white people could, in this

way, give lessons of tolerance to their racist fellow compatriots: “blacks are not evil by

nature, there are some who are good: those who live like us whites, who are good

Americans.” As a reward, they were even sent to Vietnam to show that between

Americans there was no racial distinction.

But at the same time, some radical groups of blacks began to criticize the “world of

the whites.” Several malicious intellectuals --of all skin colors-- interpreted this as

inverted racism: scorn toward the “white man” and celebration of Negritude (black is

beautiful). But the “white man” is not this or that member of the “white race.” This is not

about racist arguments, but about “white man” as a model of behavior or mode of being:

an identifying image to which both whites and blacks can be assimilated. Yet the point is

that a black minority revealed --as feminism did in turn-- that “white man” is a norm of

behavior and a worldview that is imposed to all the inhabitants of a situation. In this way,

whoever takes a commitment to the black cause does so not as simple external or

humanist solidarity, but as a true commitment that implies questioning a situation in

which he or she is also implicated. This struggle is, therefore, concrete and universal for

the same reason that it is not negotiable through any available administrative or legal

mechanism.

Hence, we can define the subject of restricted action as a ‘minority’. But it’s

necessary to dispel two possible misunderstandings that can arise from this concept.

Firstly, the concept of minority does not refer to the quantitative. Thus, women are a

‘minority’ that, quantitatively speaking, is the majority. Secondly, the term ‘minority’ has

been used by postmodernists to speak of a ‘right to difference’, which is nothing but the

recognition ‘by right’ of a reality ‘of fact’, namely cultural diversity. But of course, the

moment they invoke such a right, these ideologists can only recognise but the smallest,

amusingly exotic differences. When it comes to differences that are highly accentuated,

such as the practice of genital mutilation or the tyrannical assassinations carried out in

certain Third World regimes, this right to difference collapses. Can one speak of the

Rwandan massacre as a simple cultural phenomenon? As we understand it, ‘minority’ is a

group that is confronted by a majority-held image or by the norm of a situation. For this

reason, it’s not a matter of making partial or sectoral claims that would in any case

invoke, at the most, the application of human rights.

The struggle of the minority is universal in that it attacks a dominant common

sense, a situational normality that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation. In this

respect, the struggle of the minority is not, as we were saying, ‘negotiable’, it cannot find

a solution from the point of view of the management of the situation. Thus, the point is

not to be in solidarity with a minority or to intervene wherever it manifests itself, but to

have the courage to become a minority or to betray what the majority, as a norm, expects

from us. To become a minority is to become unpredictable: to create a political subject

only legitimate one, the only foundation that can be claimed by restricted political action.

By founding the struggle upon a future to come, upon a better, more rational and

more just world, revolutionary modernity functioned on an ‘epic’ model in which the

progressive forces of liberation would overcome the reactionary armies of oppression and

barbarism. The final victory was the establishment of a free, just and rational world.

In turn, ‘managerial politics’ --the dominant politics of today-- function solely

upon the concept of ‘serious’ matters. Serious matters are approached as fixable in the

short or long term, from within the normality of the situation, regardless of how illusory

such a notion might be. In the face of serious matters, there is no victory but rather a

‘cure’. All struggles that claim a ‘negotiable’ partiality fall from the start into this trap of

the administrative, managerial or legal logic of serious matters. This is why it’s important

not to confuse the spectacular dimension or the violence of an action with its political

‘radicality.’ Clandestine activity is not enough to transform a group into a political

subject and effectively become a minority.

And so we find that restricted action recuperates a ‘tragic’ dimension of the

political subject: it operates upon the only point that is non-negotiable in terms of

management; in other words, it operates upon an unpredictable possible --or the

‘impossible’ from the viewpoint of the normality of the status quo. It operates precisely

upon the basis of this normality, upon the point of being of the situation, that which

makes its existence possible. We say that such point of being is inconsistent because it

cannot be taken into consideration by the statements that give any situation its apparent

veracity and meaning. In this way, inconsistency is absurd; it is a non-meaning

necessarily foreclosed by the consistency of the situation.

For this reason, from the perspective of a common sense or consensus, this truth is

unintelligible: it is not a fact that can be demonstrated but a reality that must be forced

through. Thus in Europe of the nineteenth century, for example, the fact that industrial

capitalism generated terrible social inequalities was an observation that anybody could

corroborate. It was a ‘serious matter’, a preoccupation detectable in all studies of that

society as well as in the novels of Dickens and Zola. But viewed in such terms, it could

only invoke a humanist principle of private or state assistance. This assistance, not

surprisingly, corresponded exactly to the logic of the system: the state or the charitable

organisations took care of maintaining alive and in good health, during the months of low

production, an enormous amount of labour power that could then be used whenever it

was once again desirable. Within the logic of the system, this misery could be inhuman

but it was not essentially unjust. The buying and selling of labour power took place

according to the laws of the free market. That is what Marx says in response to Proudhon:

capitalist exploitation is not theft because it fits perfectly within the canons of the

established legality of bourgeois democracy. The capitalist and the worker ‘freely’

exchange money for labour. However, it’s precisely here that Marx introduces the idea of

produces all commodities. For this reason, this structural injustice does not reflect a

failure or a partial dysfunction of capitalism: on the one hand it is perfectly consistent and

it leaves no room for reproach; on the other hand, this injustice is what establishes or

makes capitalism possible, it is its point of inconsistency, necessarily invisible to

capitalism itself.

Thus the free, just and rational rules of the market, the laws of supply and

demand, have their origin in an injustice, an alienation and an absurdity that are

unintelligible to the system, and which are, consequently, perfectly legal and consensual

even in the eyes of a large number of workers and trade unionists. This is why the point is

not so much that injustice sparks up rebellion, but rather that rebellion forces the

inconsistency of the system: it’s in light of the revolutionary political project that the

system reveals itself as unjust. When the militants of the black minority come to say that

a Black man can be a White man and a White man is not necessarily White --he can

become black, or part of a minority-- they force a situation not only at a point which

cannot be grasped and is absurd from the perspective of the logic of that same situation,

but also at the level of the foundation that explains both discrimination (‘they’re not like

us’, say certain Whites) and assimilation (‘we are like them’, reply certain Blacks).

From this perspective, in a situation, there is no sounding of alarms that call on

the citizenry to revolt against it: every individual is a being in situation, and despite

himself, is possessed by its presuppositions. In this respect, he plays as a destiny the roles

presented to him by the situation. The spectator-individual thus remains impotent in front

of the ‘world’, since he can only ask himself the questions that can be answered by the

common sense of his situation. The indignation or horror that he may feel when

confronted with a fact --that of poverty, for example, or discrimination-- do not generate

political action. The individual is always faced with ‘serious’ circumstances that lead him

to appeal to the knowledge of the administration or the intervention of the judge. The

individual asks himself how something could have happened, but never why. The

question of why leads to the point of being of the situation, to its foundation or its

condition of existence, to the blind spot or the nucleus that is obscured and inaccessible to

him. It’s not a coincidence, then, that post-modern ideology, in defending the consensus

and the existent legality as the framework of all politics, privileges the figure of the

individual. In the face of the old mass politics, the individual is seen as a nucleus of

rationality and lucidity.

From Le Bon to Freud and beyond, the man of the masses was conceived as

someone who, like a hypnotized person or a zombie, nullifies his reflexive individuality

in order to obey the orders of the Party, the Führer or the church, and thus finds himself

capable of committing the worst types of barbarism. But why should it be assumed that

individuals cease to be individuals when they come together? Why should it be assumed

that man thinks when he is alone but not when he is in a group? It’s believed that if a

multitude acts together in a uniform way, it’s because each individual has abandoned

‘his’ will, ‘his’ own choice, in order to submit himself to the decision of an Other. Often

this Other is characterized by an impersonal ‘One’ to which the individual delegates his

reflection and volition. But in fact it’s the other way around: the individual as an

autonomous entity, meaning someone who determines his own rules of behavior, is an

illusion. There is nothing left but a ‘one says’, ‘one sees’, ‘one does’: when the individual

talks, his voice emits discourses written elsewhere; if his eyes can see, it’s always

someone else’s sight; if he acts, it’s because he is interpreting a role that has been

assigned to him. The individual constitutes himself as such, on the basis of his

identification with a dominant model. Therefore, in contrast to what many authors have

thought, there is no such thing as a non-alienated, authentic individual, free beyond the

social masquerade. There is no critical nucleus in the individual. On the contrary: by

seeing himself as an autonomous and indivisible unity, he negates the fact that he is a

being in situation, that he is constituted of languages, values, beliefs or myths that he has

neither created nor does he dominate.

If we can think of the situation as a theatre play, the individual in it always plays a

role. Hence the illusion of invisibility, of continuity in time emerges: he is always the

same because in the same situation he repeats the same role. But in fact, being always in

situation, he is someone else every time there is a change in the situation: a discontinuity

in time. When the ideologues of postmodernity privilege individuality, they do so based

on a right to mobility, a right to the conservation of religious or political beliefs, a right to

read and write what we like, to live as we will, etc. In this way they think they are

responding to all kinds of fundamentalisms, when in fact they are only recuperating the

integration of the individual, his destiny, since in order to constitute himself as

individuality, he must interpret a pre-established role. The individual does not exist

outside the situation that constitutes him, and he cannot claim any freedom if he does not

transform, if he does not question, this situation. Hence, there is no freedom of thought

that is not linked to a practice of transformation of the status quo, and there is no radical

action that does not return to the point of inconsistency of the situation. To privilege the

struggle for free thought by itself, as if human freedom were located there, is an

individualist illusion of the ‘beautiful souls’.

Far from endangering the rights acquired through historical struggles, this critique

of the individual allows us to think in terms of civic rights. If individuals can act and

think without restrictions, it’s thanks to the conquest of these civic rights. These were the

invention of a revolutionary project that responded to a historically determined

conception of man; it was not, however, the unveiling of the 'free’ nature of the

individual.

When we speak of the subject, one must not confound this concept with the idea

of a “subjectivity” understood as the nucleus of individual or collective experiences, even

though an individual or a collective may constitute itself, eventually, as a political subject

(and also an artistic, scientific, or loving subject, as conceived by the philosopher Alain

Badiou). Indeed, an individual or a collective constitutes itself as subject when it enters

into a relation, through thought or practice, with a truth of the situation, the point of nonconsistency

upon which it is founded, that point of being that is the condition of its

possibility.

Let us repeat it: it’s because this subject’s action cannot be anticipated by the

situation, or it cannot be “negotiated” in conformity with its legality, that he or she

incarnates a free act. In this way, with the idea of restricted action, we are attempting to

define a politics that cannot be confounded simply with State management. Indeed, the

classic definition of politics --the one we find in any dictionary-- identifies the concept

with the “art of governing the republic”, meaning the ability, the knowledge or the

technique to manage public affairs or problems. For this reason, the idea of politics

remained inescapably linked to the idea of the State. However, one must not confound the

State with a simple institution or organization. In a larger definition, we should think of

“state” as the normal state of any situation. From this perspective, any “negotiable”

action, any corporate or partial social claim that proves to be manageable or solvable

within an established legality, is part of this static definition of politics, even if the action

involves the use of illegal measures to obtain what is demanded. This is why the great

challenge today is to think politics in a way that removes the issue of power from the

central position it currently occupies.

Today, the State as a site of effective power which should, by force or vote, be

occupied by a politically revolutionary party becomes a formidable illusion, simply

because the point upon which a situation is founded and given legitimacy is not

something that depends on the State. The latter only over-codifies a reality for which it is

more an effect than the cause. To some extent, this is something that was known to

Marxists, yet they thought that a change in legislation and in the ideological apparatus of

the State would favour the revolutionary transformation of society. (Towards the end of

his life, however, Lenin became aware of the error: “We have painted the tsarist State in

red”.) Thus, in soviet Russia and in other States, a series of deployments of bourgeois

State power were not only painted in red but were also brought to the highest level of

barbarism: the medicalization of subjectivity, media alienation, normalization, racial

discrimination and worker despoliation. It sufficed to add the adjective “revolutionary” to

this barbarism for the victims to accept it in the name of the future good. Even when

many of these old revolutionaries speak today of their projects for a society of the future,

we can clearly see to what extent they continue to be prisoners of the assumptions that

underlie present situations. In their projects, there is also a state-based, managerial

conception of politics (they want to be ready in case they attain power). It goes back to

good order, rational society, just distribution, and truly free relations between human

beings. It goes back to good barbarism against the bad one, the paradoxical idea of a

liberating master and the imperative of a world “the way it should be.”

We could say that restricted political action and the philosophy of the situation

make an appeal to a liberating humility: we can only speak, and this is already quite

difficult, of the situation in which we live. Yet it’s not only a matter of humility, it’s also

a critical position: any knowledge regarding an ulterior situation that it would be

necessary to attain cannot be but a vain speculation, given that there is no knowledge

capable of shedding the assumptions of the situation in which it is born. Which is why the

philosophy of revolt does not aspire to any knowledge at all. Rather, it aspires to a truth, a

relation with the being of the situation, this hole, this opacity hidden within established

knowledge, because the situation, far from rendering action provincial, leads us to the

thought of a concrete universal.

The challenge of our time is to think of and invent a new liberating praxis. A

praxis that implies the formation of a myriad of concrete minority organisations and

experiences, not as a means of achieving majority status at some point in the future, but

as a way to invent and create a life and a politics based on freedom. To renounce majority

status is not the standard of failure or impotence. By representing dominant images and

structures, the majority is the most impotent from the point of view of freedom. It’s

mutually exclusive realities: nobody is more impotent than a master filled with the power

to change life. Conceived and structured in terms of taking State power --either through

violence or by means of elections-- the party ends up being, today, the very image of this

impotence. Notably, this is due to the assumption that sustains the party, which is, as we

have seen, that power is what founds a situation, and that it must be located in the State.

Under the pretext of unifying the multiplicity of minority struggles into a global strategy -

-whether it is at the national or the world scale-- the party is an organization that

separates minorities from their situations in order to transform them into an “alternative”

majority.

Therefore, together with messianic time, what must be questioned is the party, the

everyday practice, all the work and the concrete experience gathered by the grassroots

organisations, themselves built equally out of failures and mistakes, are crossed out by

the “abstract” slogans of the party. And this is simply because, for the party, the global

strategy and the occupation of power become priorities over concrete and restricted

actions, always with the illusion that, once power is taken over, things will, in their

totality, change. However, there cannot be a solution of continuity between (minority)

politics --i.e., power-to-do-- and (majority) management --i.e., power-over. Even if these

are structurally condemned to exist side by side, we must break with the illusion that it’s

necessary to reach majority status in order to conduct a politics of the minority.

A multiplicity of libertarian groups and collectives --linked in each case to a

However, the non-totalisation or non-submission of this multiplicity to the “impotent”

power of the Party does not imply that the exchange of experiences between these groups

is not desirable or even indispensable. The moment is difficult, the challenge is large, but

fidelity to two centuries of revolutionary struggles allows us to preserve the same

impulse, the same desire on which these were inspired. Instead of crying over the ruins of

the old revolutionary edifice, one must consider that this fragmentation, this dispersion

and this non-totality are precisely the necessary conditions for a new revolutionary power

to free itself from the totalitarian myth of messianic progressivism.

September 1995