Chapter 2. INTENSE PLEASURE MEANS THE END OF EXCHANGE IN ALL ITS FORMS

1. In civilization based on trade, all change turns into exchange.

The history of civilized man has been only the history of the goods he produced, which self-destruct while destroying the producers. Barter is the starting point. It is set up with the agrarian economy and terminates in the industrial era. Its acutest crisis occurs at the point of maximum expansion and internal decay, which so rarefies life that it is business relations which have a human face. And this human face is what socialism hopes to give itself!

When individuals have left only the miserable production of their misery, a way out suggests itself — the demand for self-management. This time the final swindle will spill the beans on all the others that were swung before. If each stage of economic development runs with blood spilled to get reforms which only modify slavery, it signifies quite clearly that all struggles for freedom obey a law of business expansion. Social conquests have only ever ratified results obtained in advance. Their victories have always been those of trade. People thought they were fighting for justice, equality and liberty, but in fact they were fighting for economic imperialism, for the painful birth of a new business practice, the implantation of an agricultural system, the free circulation of goods, for industrial production, for the obligation to consume.

The above examples show change opening new doors on a world quite definitely circumscribed. How can an organization founded on the perpetual exchange of the life-force into work-force tolerate a change of life which is not just a new form of work?

Without individual emancipation, the engine in business’s drive to self-destruction is class struggle. The bourgeois-bureaucratic class and the proletariat are two objective abstractions in an identical alienation lived differently. They reveal the contradictory movement in the nineteenth century strengthening and enfeebling the commercial process.

The dominant class is the agent of commercial expansion. The proletariat, which aims to liquidate the bourgeoisie and dissolve itself as a class, is the destructive element in trade. But while working for the expansion of that trade, the dominant class works also at its decline. It behaves as a class condemned to impoverish the human element in itself. It has no way out but death, and, as such, it obeys to the letter the economic system’s path of development.

The proletariat itself need not necessarily end up as the a-human abstraction the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats turn into. But if it does renounce its aim to create a society based on the will to live and gives up attempting to destroy the economy, it will trap itself in the negative function of trade, as proletariat abstracting itself from itself. In this way it becomes the agent of business self-destruction, and works to renew trade and decay life, in pursuit of universal proletarianization.

In this sense the proletariat wages a suicidal struggle, and its project of a classless society is as attractive as a cemetary. The most vociferous defenders of the proletariat know it.

In the nineteenth century, however much it spat back out on the plate, the industrial and industrious mentality absorbed the militarism of the Ancient Regime, rigid with pride and servility. It fed on the diet with declining appetite as progress in commerce imposed it more heavily on the will to live — it is significant that each decisive step in the expansion of commerce was expressed by social melancholy and funereal taste, in the suicidal ardor of pointless slaughter. It is on the skids today, treating human beings only as something costing money, as capital; it differs from feudal or despotic prodigality by doing it cheaper. It conquered its democratic laurels with that political art which has now been reduced to capacity to govern; in other words, if you don’t pay it some attention, it will pay attention to you.

Politics is only ever jacobin, leninist, authoritarian. What else could it be, seeing that it is only economic understanding of human affairs, and that the exercise of power has passed from feudal pomp to State apparatus? It has long sown confusion by treating as identical those who know they are the proletariat and the politicized proletariat. Individuals are abstracted from their particular struggles for life and turned into pawns for the chess-board of imperialist economics. This way of looking at things — the economist attitude propagated in the name of lucidity — is why the timid attempts at anarchist self-management in Spain aborted and why the will to live has never been at the center of the seizure of consciousness.

We have only ever exchanged one kind of survival for another. The worst is taking place today under the politically popular slogan of ‘Changing life’.

2. The world upside-down can revert when exchange (the motor in the proletarianization process) can choose only between putting enjoyment first, as freedom to do what you will, or death.

Exchange is the shortest route between one trap and another. Long lines of steel cages with lonely occupants roll down the canyons of our city jungles. It takes a snarl up and a crash to wrench these creatures from their hypnotic fixations, and then they only show rage. Like a robot, the motorist is so enmeshed in the commodity he becomes part of it.

What is human in us is slowly turning to stone. Treat your heart as a motor, your skin like coach-work, and you can evaluate your movements in terms of mechanical jigs. Suddenly a man in the crowd stops, smacks himself on the forehead, and fires at random into the passersby, trying to drag as many toward death with him as he can.

Exchange paralyzes the living. The sensation of being caught like a rat in a trap is enough to set one seething with rage, the gnawing pangs of freedom skewered like a kebab on the prong of impotence. Emotional plague blinds one to everything except the shade of death.

Moments are rare when you don’t feel the cold hand of business clamped on your shoulder, and life trickling down the runnels of profit and power. Every step conceals a pitfall. If you escape the family you stumble into the couple, if you flee solitude you fall in with the group. From school we leap to the assembly-line, from barracks to political organization, from society to the cemetary. As you grow older and your roles get more complicated, your sacrifices turn into permanent renunciations; each step is no easier or cheaper. Commercial relations are responsible for every discomfort I feel.

Ah, but you say, people change, they grow up, change their ideas, improve with age, or fail to reach their potential, get quite the wrong idea about themselves, or maybe surpass themselves. Really they are just thrashing about. They escape from one trap and fall in another, struggling and squirming in their private Nessus’ shirt. What they are looking for is the person refusing to find it; when they curse the exile’s path they expel themselves again from life.

A society based on trade destroys itself with repressive measures which evoke explosive revolts. The soldier, the bureaucrat, and anyone with a little power to wield knows how the body’s musculature seizes up and blocks the welling of desire. They know well enough that the need to set an example and maintain a front double-bolts the padlocks on their diaphragm, that great gate of the will to live and let live of their libido.

Each time our ear is bent by social constraint — that rationalization of agreements that economics imposes on every group — a cop, a soldier, or a priest wakes up. If one is to judge by people’s ordinary behavior, these ancient reflexes are hardly less obvious among those who decry them the loudest.

When the body, stuffed unctiously into its shell, assumes the impassivity of the objects around it, the death dance twitches its arms and legs, and the flow of pleasure breaks up piecemeal, like a rash of boils, into scorn and hate and the tics of frustration. The moment it becomes aware of it the proletarianized body recognizes a fundamental repression which spawns all the others and which causes the ebb and flow of regulatory rage. The history of trade across the ages has reached its apogee under spot-lights: its very materiality reveals how the economy can only repress life.

When the psychoanalysts declared the body ineluctably mysterious, the process of commodity exchange had not yet reached its fullest state of development. Now we can see that it grows in fits and starts, and reveals in that perpetual motion of exchange an increasingly absurd mechanism for turning the world upside down, as if an iron lung or a force pump were to draw out of the body’s sexual energy the work-energy to repress it.

Whatever is repressed is inverted and creates its own opposition. Compelled endlessly to expand and renew itself, the process of producing goods for sale sheds whatever forms impede its development. In one of these changes, which might, variously, signal a burst of revolutionary activity or another fashionable contortion, psychoanalysis is born. While it does reveal the complexity of the conflict between ‘pleasure principle’ and social necessity, it masks the simple nature of exchange and dissimulates the new oppression in the rejection of the old. For though it denounces the morbid nature of repression it is only to encourage the sort of release which proves twice as profitable. It relieves the tension and fits you back in, at a profit.

The number of release mechanisms is equaled only by the number of frustrations, but, byzantine as they are, the psychoanalytical sciences agree at least on this elementary truth: they are all paying ventures both in money and power. Whether they write learned footnotes on the repressed sadism evident variously in the surgeon, housewife and mother, policeman and assassin, or whether they recognize sadism as a form of inverted pleasure, they cannot admit without repudiating themselves that the fundamental repression is the inversion of life due to the need to produce profit and prestige.

We are not less barbaric than the Mongol hordes, merely more bureaucratic, more democratically distributed, nearer to death seen as a hard-won exit... The racket is worn out. It’s moribund. They wheel out the old prohibitions, and break them, but increasingly verbal incontinence is enough: when too many people get worked up over crimes committed by the State, stories released about assaults on the police lower the temperature. The push-me/pull-you of conflicting emotions maintains the body’s effective blocks while wet dreams about the great break-through keep us below the low-water mark of impotence.

Repetition breeds the emotional plague. The sensation of being paralyzed in turn paralyzes; fleeing from the trap reproduces the trap; the race for change guarantees that nothing will change. Worry, stress, fear, shame, contempt, aggression, will to power are all born of a repressed will to live, itself repressive. You get worn out if you feel you have always got to conform, play your part, do your duty, or accept the way things are.

These emotional squalls which gust round us like an unhealthy fog were once grist-to-the-mill for tribunes, orators, and others subscribing to power. Their grocer-style shamanism drew heavily upon illusory hopes of a sudden upheaval, the coming of the Kingdom of the Just. But the anger they aroused in the crowds was not life bubbling up, so much as an animal tearing at a chain. This form of getting your kicks is the same as getting the insults you worked full quota for at fantastic reductions in the bargain basement. Locking up the body in fraudulent emancipations, mob anger tears down the prisons only to erect new ones.

Tear-jerking politicians with a quiver in their voice now merely make us laugh, the more so because you can’t hide the misery in society under the blanket of grandiose nationalist (or internationalist) ideology any more. Fascism and Stalinism base their appeal for change on the we-must-tighten-our-belts syndrome, or self-destructive hysteria. As a result the emotions you can call on to encourage self-repression are narrow indeed. And hero-worship and leadership cults go bust through a short-fall in mystery and razzamatazz. When you know for certain that every moment is like every other moment, that everywhere’s the same, that all adventures can be repeated indefinitely, that wherever you swim it is the same waters of profit, under the same sun of goods-for-sale — you can grok it: boredom is what exchange is all about, its distinguishing state of consciousness. Emotional plague is a variant of suicide in which you feel you merely die faster if you struggle and anyway there’s no change to look forward to.

Death has no more alibis. How can you deepen despair or survive more?...

Dance-time is here, folks, the artistic ballet of fucking it up, and shaking the old world to the ground.

History showed us over ten years ago the perfect way to topple our trade-based civilizations in their final self-destructive phase. I’ll say it again: one trick is enough: free your pleasures, individually and collectively.

3. History will not turn the corner until each of us has.

I am no-one’s representative and I have no programs to push. Why should I get involved in the mayhem of buying and selling? You might think all those struggles between warring tribes or between one religious mob and another pretty pointless, and think much the same of political chicanery, rival factions, and family feuds. Yet you still spoil for a fight and shout a lot when it comes down to ensuring things are done the way you like them to be.

Threatened relationships, groups, communities mean nothing to me if they mean supporting your friends at the expense of your neighbors, and when an expression of friendship involves signing mutual aggression-defense pacts, when the pleasures of drinking, lovemaking, talking and having a meal are paid for according to the dominant code of exchange, when you never get anything for nothing, when natural sympathies and antipathies wince each time they fail to concord with some radical theory, and when value judgments carefully overlook the fact they are based on a world inverted.

Don’t expect binding agreements, in fact expect nothing. I am no standard to go by, no way of measuring your conscience, no qualified judge of success or failure. I don’t figure in your calculations; don’t count on me, or on being on my side.

I don’t claim to escape all the traps set by exchange. However, if your laws, and judges, law and order, licensing and financial services, your rules, your roles and conventions force me from time to time to go against my wishes, I know how to look and listen, speak, act and be present without taking anything in or giving anything out.

Watch out that you don’t confuse a refusal to trade with the avoidance of traps through some ivory tower isolation. The garden I wish to tend is the one in which grow my life-long pleasures, it cannot be cultivated till it embraces the whole planet.

As far as the rest goes, it isn’t because I don’t want to get involved that I keep out of your mud-slinging polemics, competitive reflexes, crimes, and expensive pleasures. I simply aspire to utter gratuitousness, utterly useless personal pleasure. From this will to increase my enjoyment, whatever it consists of and however idle or passionate, I raise my spontaneous self-defense against being proletarianized by exchange.

The appropriation of people and things does not disgust me as a manifestation of injustice or as the basis of class society. Rather because it sets limits to my desires, imprisoning them, terrorizing them, and transforming them into pieces of property. Those who ‘don’t want to get involved’, because ‘it’s not my affair’, and ‘none of my business’, are like the guardians of a tomb. They condemn racism, jealously, greed, property, hierarchy only as a form of exorcism to alleviate their inability to stand on their own two feet without inciting comparison or soliciting approval. If you are awake to pleasure without limits, what price mother-country and frontiers, masters and slaves, gain and loss? Sexual exuberance is its own high, carrying enough impetus in its space and time to break whatever hems it in.

The exhaustion of exchange leads to global change. Survival pleasures work for the survival of the system which produces them. The misery they bring expresses the unbearable boredom which generalized exchange, omnipresent business, and the cancerization of life by the economy leads to.

In eras where trade scarcely moved as a result of religious occultation, the voyage and the adventure chiseled themselves into the art of constructing a destiny for oneself aided by or in spite of the gods. Pleasures and trials punctuated life on its way towards its inevitable conclusion, towards death sought as a challenge or fled from through trickery. The hard knocks of existence paid the price of the right of passage leading from this vale of tears to another world, paradisical and infernal, true mythic fresco of our survival pleasures now demystified.

Death no long watches at the window of the after-life. Instead it siphons life away and hardens off our bodies till they reach the condition of goods for sale.

Why should we bother to get out of bed? The same pleasures rule in every clime, forbidden and inverted. Nevertheless, the need for movement persists, though surrounded by a growing pile of punctured illusions. If you go out on Sundays to admire the forest set behind its concrete curtains, cross the oceans or among pygmies who subsist on barter and hospitality, console yourself for the inhumanity of industrialized tribes, you end up feeling so strongly that you have lived celluloid life a million times through the same movies that you have nothing left but a passion to alter everything. Here and now.

Why flee until time or geography or social security checks run out, when all around us the will to create a society in which life changes according to our passions is growing? Desire once mobile will bring about strange mutations: for though lovers swear undying vows that cannot be bought and sold there is quite a variety of forms that love can take, as they are finding out; and individual architecture will be quick to rise upon the ruins of buildings which were paid for. We know the pleasure of matching a house to every fantasy, dream, or childhood memory.

The taste of metamorphosis is born of a disgust with roles. Fashion, propriety, prices, what is in and what is out of date, the singular and the banal have always imposed on sartorial art a code of representation scarcely compatible with the fantastic desire to transform ourselves. Now that the spectacle has become so impoverished, in addition to the misery of clothes being uniforms showing position in the hierarchy, as in the past, roles expressed by dress are now compacted to functions in some socio-bureaucratic ‘organogram’.

Blue work-denim clothes directors, women writers and laborers alike. Interchangeability brings home the lesson that everyone has his price, whether worth it or not, in the market of daily life. So, at the stock exchange where life is lost, a fall in price has the same value as a gain. If money makes for happiness or unhappiness, it is only the happiness or unhappiness of commodities.

Profitability is what makes the Emperor’s nakedness appear like new clothes. What good are disguises? We keep them to hide some trifling liberty, some furtive peccadillo, some small job-lot in debauch which acquires us kudos when we admit to it. All roles are out-worn. Although they look human, their frequent patching lets the functional bone structure poke through, as bodily mechanism reproducing the economic mechanism which has been humanized.

There was a time when a policeman had a chance to recover some remnant of humanity when he stripped off his uniform. But when that uniform is the muscular cuirass of the torso, so that the functions of the boss, slave and star are how the proletarianization of the body manifests, and when the exchange of life into social forms operates directly through osmosis of sensation and the glaciation of those forms into the opposite of what they set out as, what can we hope from emancipation except a sudden unleashing of the will to live, or the multiplicity of desires patiently returned to life?

You accuse children of inconstancy and inconsistency because they are slow to acquire the metallic skin which serves you as protective packaging, and which adapts perfectly to the range displayed on the social shelving systems. And yet, do you not long to smash these rusty breastplates to pieces? However much they assure you of some sort of glory, it is at life’s expense. Will you not find in the child you have been what you would have liked to have been, and what it is really possible to become once the social form which reduces us to its basic function of producing has been abolished?

What defines is necessarily odious. So often you have attempted to peg me down on your pinboards, hoping to seize me by one end, any end, by my name, registration number, profession, nationality, salary, reputation, some story of getting me on to your chessboard. But autonomy based on the freeing of intense pleasure cocks a snook at classifications and the confusion and indifference which corresponds to them. It shakes itself and takes a dust bath amid the thousand facets which make up the irreducible singularity of an individual, his desires and his passions, from the instant he is resolved to live instead of to fear. Roles have been the last market-oriented inversion of the metamorphosis to come.

We have planned too frequently on not having enough and not enough on having plenty. If love is blind, it’s just that it sees nothing through power’s eyes. Do not expect love to judge or govern for it ignores the relationship of exchange. Sufficient unto itself. As sexuality’s horn of plenty, love is the finest expression of the will to live in this world where castration is rife, and it is the strongest element of our splendid savagery.

If, nevertheless, lovers who yesterday adored each other suddenly split from each other in hatred and contempt, it is quite unreasonable to seek some eternal law of decline, some fatality of tiredness. It actually comes about through the chain of exchange which ages passion, wears out the heart’s enthusiasm, weakens impulses, causes love to stoop and leaves desire dozing on the pillows of habit.

A passing tiredness is enough, a despondency in the will to live, whose sinusoidal rhythm differs in every person. But even when you rest from love, in some deep silence, passion still wells in anyone who can keep his appetite whetted. However, instead of remaining avid for every feeling until the heart of satiety is reached, we find lovers appealing to duty, demanding proofs, seeking for a return on their affection. Norms are installed which must be scrupulously respected, scatterbrained thoughtlessness is banned, while clumsiness, incongruities and fantasy become occasions for reproaches and sanctions. If they don’t set about making the change to rediscover themselves, they’ll have to borrow the crutches of a society which has generously sawn off their legs. Cold reason sees off the delirium of abundance and returns to argue the part of things. This is the invidious time when debts are claimed and must be paid, when rights mutually agreed to are exacted as duties paying interest and when an exchange of kisses parallels the exchange of gifts by those whose prestige is threatened.

In order mutually to appropriate each other and to measure each other’s affection for the other, people end up persuading themselves that “their eyes are opened”, that qualities offered are only on loan, that generosity is badly repaid, and that the attraction was in no way justified. Love complains of having spent all its funds, while regrets draw up a bankruptcy statement, passion goes to the bottom, affection turns to trade and friendship to denunciation. But it is a sensible arrangement and a private affair, a family affair, a thing between partners, a frank exchange.

How can you live in a world in which you pay for everything? The few great pleasures you have left to offer and to be offered you, you try to exchange, tot up and estimate, weigh for their relative merits.

In their efforts to make the revolution and dispense with the shabby dealings and dubious habits of the bourgeoisie, some people have dug up and praised ancient modes of exchange, as though they were not as repellent as any other. They call for the splendidly gratuitous potlatch where the giver received his return in terms of power, gratitude and ascendancy, for the presents he handed out prodigally to all around him! And then for the brotherhood of blood, mutual aid, or the ideology of solidarity. Are not gifts always linked to sacrifice, that loan at interest with which religion has always stifled freely-given gifts?

Only when you get satisfaction from ripping off the State, the boss, or a shopkeeper do you not get the general veto on free availability given you in your change. When will we recognize that it is all ours, when can we agree that the only reason for being protected against the wear and tear of life’s pleasures is an economic one?

I look for no more amusements to console me in life’s absence. What deficiency prompts one to do is botched from the start; for it is misery only which allows itself to be bought and sold.

Put a price on something and you kill it. Something catches your eye? Why not break whatever forbids you having it free? Can you hear it, all you greengrocers, the word in the street, warning you: “If you ask him to pay, he’ll smash the shop”?

To drink, insatiably thirsty, at the “cup of life” is the best guarantee of its never running dry. Children know it they take everything as if it were an unlooked-for present. Lively senses make their world live, long before the economic imperative starts totting the bills run up by life; before they learn about reciprocity; before they set out to deserve their presents, demand their due, be rewarded for winning, or punished for a depreciation, or thank those who remove one by one the charms of an existence without opposition.

That is how passionate souls live who have rediscovered the child inside themselves. Lovers give and take everything from each other and hold nothing back. They give it to the one who offers the most without hoping for anything in return. This way love grows ever stronger, and finds fresh pleasure even when languid and exhausted. Measureless, priceless, peerless is its intensity; and brimming with love those whose infinite thirst for pleasure can never be satisfied.

If some chance encounter offers me your love and my love to you, do not belittle the harmony of our desires by terming it exchange. There is no exchange except in dubious transactions. To love, do I need to be loved? Have I learned so well to love myself so little? If you are not filled with your own desires you have nothing to give. The attitude of ‘you gave me a present so I’ll give you one’ will lead you gently into boredom, tiredness and death.

I am capable of anything when I am not waiting for anything or obliged to do anything. Whatever it is you are asking me for you are likely to find me without. I have more to offer those who are not hoping I will give them anything.

It is a matter of taking it all, in fact, and giving it all away, without verifying if portions are equal, or the scale of values similar without comparisons or weighing the pros and cons, the rights against the duties, the truths and the lies. Arrange it so that you always have something to offer instead of always demanding.

As for my apparently unrealizable desires, a thousand reasons would not make me give them up. I wish to keep every passion in me present and lively. One day you may very well find the way to accomplish them, whereas renunciation perishes everything it touches.

To say yes to life is no longer a dream imprisoned in endless sleep awaiting one millenarian night. The economic priority is ceding to the primacy of desires for life. Slowly now, then faster, round me, round every individual in search of autonomy, whirls the collective life-force’s shuttlecock, weaving the old world’s winding sheet.

And if death should intervene? It is not important, I do not want to know.

4. Free action by individuals is waiting for the chance to clear the way for universal free activity.

You do not pay for happiness; you tear it from the society selling it. In the midst of the sweetest pleasures we are still so conditioned to expect the handle flying back, the next ratchet where misfortune’s wheel gets stuck, the next bill to pay, that the adventure already includes the unhappy ending to all acts of subversion. However, the spirit of defeat and despair is chewing its own tail today, like every other vicious circle in trade. The passion for destruction has ceased to be creative, and is no more than a substitute for it.

The industrial societies have led us into the depths of despair; free activity, gratuitousness, leads us on out. When cashiers on strike cause customers to drop their roles and help them take and give away the goods freely, when workers start distributing the stockpile, when people stop paying for rent, electricity bills, and transport, when looting ceases merely to be sudden, sporadic and irrational and plays in the joyful distribution of abundance, it is clear that proletarianization demands to be rooted out and liquidated.

But then the free fall into gratuity is part of working-class tradition. If I were to draw a geographical and temporal map of the will to live as it directly concerns how our society and my life are evolving, I would, alongside the traps set for me, underline the moments of lived intensity as places sheltered from the radiation of commerce, places where I have succeeded in annihilating the economic hydra during moments of pleasure. I would ink in the towns of Prat Llobregat that were burning money one morning in 1932, the Catalan and Aragonese collectives trying out universal self-management from 1936 onwards, and the instances of refusing to pay which fresh innocence is multiplying everywhere. I also would gouge in bureaucracy’s victories, and areas infested by the ruling class, spots where police and bankers like to nest, and places flattened by rapidly increasing proletarianization. The map would reveal how giving freely and intense pleasure develop around a person’s needs, and, in spite of the deadly shadows cast by profit and power, what a unique effect these two elements have on his life.

Setting fire to commissariats and barracks, prisons, tax-offices, banks, money and factories brings me less pleasure than the change in understanding profiled by these acts, namely breaking what prevents us enjoying everything, and tolerating no check on pleasure. Sudden outbursts of destructiveness have had their day. they now simply reflect homage to this death-ridden society by would-be suicides, or alms that the old dowager of leftist good works gives to the poor of her parish.

Giving as universal practice is central to setting intense pleasure free and will cause business civilization to perish. Red dawns I find less significant than the spark of life which sets them blazing.