Chapter 7. IF YOU WANT A CLASSLESS SOCIETY FREE YOURSELF

1. The will-to-power is the will-to-live upside-down.

The individual discovered! On the brink of extinction! The individual is the bourgeoisie’s finest conquest: as inhuman conditions draw to a close we catch the first glimpse of a real humanity. Flowering into consciousness in the social euphoria which everywhere succeeded monolithic regimes, whether tribal, feudal, despotic or monarchic, see them now, lifted out of the spooky corners of religion and raised to the misery of the Enlightened Ones, as humble followers of the Triponeme of Nazareth, the Tenia of Mecca and the Buddhist itch-mite Acarus. They’ve blown out the fart of God rumbling in their bellies and struck a more decorous pose, as citizen, producer, thinker, militant, as responsible prole.

That is how the abstract individual is born: out of the concretization of commercialism, swept along by the currents of the time, and progressively excreted into materialism. With his head squeezed in the forceps of ideology, the ever-present separation between economics and life cuts to the bone. The compartmentalization of his inner world reproduces the fragmentation of society, and illusions about his power here lifts him to the heaven of consumer goods. But his increasing proletarianization shows him really to be in Hell.

If he asserts his individuality and irreducible subjectivity, it remains abstraction, the shadow exchange-value casts everywhere. The ‘individual’ of ideology has no substance to draw on except his inability to live, which does nothing either for the mythological power of the gods or for the real power of the State.

Most people in the pre-industrial era enjoyed a relative but real autonomy despite the social abstraction which denied them any. Under the bureaucratic and bourgeois class, however, we scarcely even have abstract autonomy which is the autonomous circulation of consumer goods waxing as life itself wanes.

Work has spread like a running sore all over the world. It has turned us all into its proletariat, and so everyone roots to become individual again. But the era of condottieres has passed. The Fascists, along with Stalin and other strident militants have shot the little men scuffling in the bottom drawers of their mediocrity for reasons to justify their identification with a people, a leader, or a cause. The economic reflex is so strongly developed that ‘Important Matters’ are now, as everyone knows very well, merely publicity stunts to pass off some State package deal.

When States function like monopolies and their bosses like shop assistants at the sales, what price will you give the will to power when that power is spread between so many million bureaucratic ants, each with his own ball of dung and each on the heap?

Even as a bauble dangled insolently before people’s impotent nullity, it still cannot conceal what it has always been: life reduced to competitive economics. The law of the strongest and fittest ruling the world has not changed: it has simply evolved, like work, exchange and guilt, and become intellectualized. If shrewd intelligence is gradually superseding brute force it still retains the rationale of the strongest, for it expressed the tyranny of exchange value .

Intellectualism is a lie which strikes the individual whose life it turns into a series of images and ideas-smoke; and it strikes at society, whose culture it reduces to system. Avatars of proletarian emancipation know this running denunciation inside out. For in sacrificing their autonomy, haven’t the proles paid twice over the odds? They gave up whatever life they had left to cling harder to their remnants of power — all those monkey-tricks the will to power has to offer, such as pater familias, the macho stance, militant hero, gang-leader. They confused the need to coordinate struggles with the idea of power, which means that a ruling faction gets to sacrifice everyone else. Over and over again. Busy choosing heads, the revolution leaves its body behind at factories and on barricades. Middlemen continue to operate efficiently at the expense of liberty.

People turn cruel when their will to live turns into will to power. The arts of enjoyment develop only unalloyed pleasure, whereas power feeds on the ceaseless frustration of false needs. Which is why cruelty is now the normal viciousness of the ordinary man.

Under bureaucracy the will to power manifests as string-pulling rivalries, underhand scheming by committee-men, machiavellism at the porters’ lodge. In the new commercial societies the mirror, mirror on the wall shows whiz-kids with a few tricks, fishing in troubled water, and those with private schemes for survival, everywhere. So dies the spirit of a civilization of traveling salesmen who take their wares wherever their wares take them.

While the petty nastinesses of survival maintain our illusion of living, the old workers’ movement has collapsed and thrown us back on ourselves to confront us with a choice: either we fade out into intellectuality which is only will to power on its last legs, or we strengthen our will to live, and set pleasure free.

History is responding favorably to this nascent autonomy. It was never lack of organization made revolution stumble but the inability of individuals to kick out any organization inimical to the life they wanted to live. Proletarians’ low level of confidence in their ability to abolish the proletariat is simply the effect of intellectual work: every day you can watch it eating parts of your life away.

Thinking we can do nothing on our own has delivered us trussed into the clutches of the old world. But the moment we feel that state power cannot dam the rising flood of individual pleasures, each individual’s determination will unite: and the dam will burst.

2. Our choice of society comes from each individual choosing between death and the unlimited expansion of our desire for life.

Creativity is the basis of generalized self-management and abolishes work and hierarchy. If you live cut off from yourself and from others you probably lack all intelligence except commercial consciousness — what intelligence is for, a factory for capital to work in. But pleasure unstinted is a continuous link between individuals and the group; it will put an end to consumer goods, throughout that saturated empire’s social and corporate existence.

I am beginning hesitantly to throw off the role assigned me by society, by myself and the machine crushing me. Bosses, the authorities, the stars of the show and fifty-seven other varieties of ‘leaders of men’ get greeted already with catcalls and laughs. But life is still caught and trapped in roles if you spit on hierarchy but persist in treating women as objects, denounce the spectacle but strut for your mates, put down passivity but nonetheless hide in your neurotic shell. The mobster who worries endlessly how he might end up a tramp makes power’s daily charade an unfailing source of laughs. You must have met him, overwhelmed with work and overproduction, who comes on heavy with you before you get heavy with him, or makes you feel guilty so that you do not catch him out and who terrorizes lest you should make him tremble. He is a man condemned to the lyric mode, stuck with greatness and humility, force and feebleness, success and failure; men like him feel obliged, quite gratuitously, to prove they are still ‘alive’.

The authority an individual lays claim to corresponds to the number of humiliations experienced; his taste for power compensates for his inability to enjoy himself. Anyway, how can you enjoy yourself patronizing people? That is work, every moment guarding against losing face, in case you lose your life. People like that richly deserve retirement to the bitter pleasures the old world’s servants are given. The reward for virtue is disenchantment closing your account with a flash in the brain — the fleshpots you pay for are not worth it.

The small-time prosecutor you try to suppress jumps up in glee when brashly you declare that one must be autonomous. Have you not felt yet that your lack of autonomy, your inability to formulate and do what you think, is part and parcel with your continuous self-deprecation, with your self-programming that distorts you with effort, leads you to obey on command, comply with the needs of earning a living and meeting your obligations and promises, and respecting the proper channels?

How much easier to widen your vision and let yourself go, beyond caring what other people might or might not think of you, till you strike the old world out of your life in the same way as you have undertaken to hunt it out of its daily existence. When you let passion have its way you show more lucidity than any lessons on tactics or strategy could. Here is where you see most clearly that autonomy has nothing in common with the snobbery that says that you are to the extent that you own; nor with the sort of individualism which demands alienation like an inalienable right; with this cuckoo-in-the-nest self, at once greedy and exclusive, oscillating between megalomania and self-denigration as if the forces for and against were equal and impotent.

But how irritating never to be able to lay hands on this self, say the others. Just when you think you have got him convinced, he side-slips. You cannot catch him, share confidences with him. With a distracted air he will agree with you, and then change his mind. But then of what interest are they to me, these shadows posted to catch me out in my desires, to register my profile, judge me, understand and govern me. But if what you are doing is satisfying your pleasure, you do not mind what I think about it. It will not alter your conviction that we do not have to know each other to recognize a common will.

Intense pleasure in oneself is the basis for universal self-management and abolishes fault. If the desire to be unhappy, beaten, oppressed, ruled, humiliated does exist, it is only the inversion of the desire to live happily, caressed, sovereign and free. Business imperialism is just the self dilated taken the wrong way and turned against it.

The curse that was drummed into us: “Alone you are powerless, without society you are nothing” is dead. We no longer agree that solitude is the same as moral banishment, rejection by the community, a rupture of the social contract, being the black sheep and the scape-goat. Outside the Church, political party, family, group and law, clan terrorism has again loudly declared that there is no salvation; we know that hope reserved for the flock is from now on less profitable than the spectacular despair of the excluded, the dissident, the heresiarch and the solitary.

The real sorrow of solitude, far from the feeling of being alone with oneself, comes from having to submit to the worst company, the interiorized presence of others, which is the law of the clan. How can one feel alone when still haunted by one’s double as citizen, militant, leader, intellectual, repressed individual? Someone alienated knows solitude only from the dark side of himself, in the terror of attachment to what keeps him from intense pleasure. Finding himself exiled from his own life astonishes him less at first sight than being suddenly severed from what enslaved him. He had such a strong belief in his separation that being separated from that too kills him.

Have alienated individuals, strong in their communities of nations, political parties, armies and class, ever managed to steer history any better than the lonely idiot, except through the switchpoints of trade? What is the difference between men in a herd and men on their own if they are punished by the economy alike? And what does it matter being barred from a family which condemns one to exile from oneself?

The reversal of perspective opposes solitude by default with a solitude of abundance, a plenitude of desire, an increase in life and consciousness of it which is the very spontaneity of autonomy.

Solitude chosen rejects the world of solitude imposed. It teaches me to live, neither better nor worse than you, but without comparisons. To be born is to grant oneself the inalienable privilege of realizing all one’s life’s desires. I learn to discover them by myself, to redeem them from their inverted form, and actualize them. I am learning not to repress a single one.

The idea that one has to make one’s opinion triumph is the hallmark of economist conduct. Trade is always pulling the strings of competitive struggle. But returning to self makes a complete mockery of the victories gained by appearances. I have nothing to prove, I am no example to follow and I could not care less for your competition. May this at least keep from me the malady which threatens autonomy’s first steps. Keep me from the disenchantment of the man who longs for an answering echo to his actions and who to the desert protests: “Is there no one among you intelligent enough to see what I am attempting, only the ridiculous fury of praise and censure?” For everything will be given to the one expecting nothing in return.

I wish to make myself proof against what harms me by becoming more and more aware of what I want. The ivory tower is only a piece on power’s chess-board. It is not a matter of going back into oneself but of going towards oneself without looking back. Whatever despair you manage to drive me to, I refuse to despair of life. Nothing satisfies me, and when your necessity presents itself as law, I feel only like overthrowing it. I have too many follies to excite me to be content with wisdom.

Desire lived intensely always materializes, and the wings of time bring round a day when one’s thinking dissolves in spontaneous action. Not a thing alive lives alone when resolved to think for itself.

Autonomy bases universal self-management on the harmonization and emancipation of individual desires. All power relations involve a contempt for self, a lack hastily compensated for, the inversion in which each of us sees himself from the outside.

Separation is to the death reflex what difference is to life. The greater the affirmation of each existence as an aggregate of specific desires, the more separation tends to be dissolved. Our era hardly gets it wrong: while people are reduced to the anonymity of objects and rigged out in an abstract individuality, we have never heard so much talk about specificity.

Intellectualized difference is the last separation in a world which has never tolerated difference when lived authentically. In this world the roles we assume to live through the day involve such a loss of life, such repression and so much frustration that the compensatory occasions to let off steam are compelled to reproduce and renew more and more rapidly all the old racism of politics, esthetics, geography, eroticism and cooking, which, in a succession of fashions, condemn and rehabilitate jew and black, red man, white man, the good, bad, beautiful and the ugly, the normal person and the freak. And the self-styled revolutionaries take good care to escape these classifications by having their exclusions and adherences, traitors and stars, reprimands, certificates for radicalism and people’s prisons.

The complementary product opposes the absurd sound and fury of the world with its characterological humanist tolerance. This is like deciding the personalities of snails by their shells, the spontaneous admission that “I’m like that, it can’t be helped”. As if specificity could be confused with the particularity of character, which is the muscular straight-jacket developed by repressing desires and a vulgar holdall of roles.

Now that the history of trade reveals that it is the history of individual expansion inverted, are we going to recognize the specific nature of life’s desires and admit that each being is unique and irreducible by comparison, measurement or definition?

They are still waiting for you to show enough signs of individuality to be sold and enough uniformity to be salable; so that, being nothing in yourself, you may fluctuate according to the vagaries of social supply and demand.

To live not as character dictates but in the exuberance of desire, what a terrifying prospect! If you are reckoned pleasant to be with, handsome and intelligent, do you live better? If opinion pronounces you idiotic, ugly and disgusting, do you live any worse? In the affirmative case you do have to worry about other people since you exist through them and belong to them, and need them to seduce, oppress, obey and flee yourself. Otherwise, let the prefabricated image of your good or bad reputation run about and fall to quarreling. You will no longer need to lie to yourself when you no longer care what you appear to be, or strike a pose for the family and for history, or tremble in front of this reflection which is only your extraneous representation.

Does opinion run prisons and death-squads? When we begin to demolish the prisons inside us and destroy the killers of super-ego lying in ambush, the ones outside will fall like the Bastille. You arrive at totality only by having no more doubts.

I only am what I am by making myself so for my own pleasure. You are in such a hurry to explain me you want an autopsy. No one is more curious about me than I am. Perhaps your tender solicitude helps me to see more clearly, but I am the only person who can let light through the shadows.

Nothing pleases me more than to see people and passions harmonizing in me and around me. I long for affinities which without rupturing link and separate again in accord with the capricious rhythm of desire, and which, in the freest possible way, escape the somber manias of the will to power. And without the frustration reflex ever sinking its talons into me out of bitterness because someone I love is not there.

Everyone may keep his likes and dislikes, and what he agrees and disagrees with, to himself, or they can change them, I do not care, so long as luxuriance in life holds sway — and not death which sets a beacon on every separation. And if old inhibitions have formed one or other of my choices, do not oblige me to lift them. They have filled me with neither hate nor anxiety nor lack, emotions which your orders and incitements could well provoke.

Harmony outside an irreducible autonomy is not possible. O my will, grant me a multitude of desires and the pleasure of realizing them all! And may revolution be ours as surely as it is mine.

3. Autonomy has only one imperative, which is to destroy every other one. Expansion of the self will foment the international revolution.

Individual realization knows its limits and recognizes none. Reversing perspective dissipates the corrosive haze of work and constraint in everyone. There is nobody who escapes the economic stranglehold through trickery, cheek or violence, who does not feel inclined to create himself, give birth to himself, and change his life from day to day. Creation lived daily as rebirth is simply the impulse to enjoy oneself gradually untying the straight-jacket of our repressed desires.

Our slightest moments have had death preached at them for so long that anything connected with preaching — inciting people to live, for a start — looks like death. I would like to be my own citadel, impregnable but open to those who increase its strength, and welcoming to the traveler en route to himself. The castles of autonomy will manage to bring down the authority of the State in ruins. “Desire’s wild horses will drink pure water from riverbanks of towns overrun with flowers”.

Universal self-management has no need of agitators, and can do without those conspirators whom the bureaucrats in power love denouncing everywhere simply because they see their own tyranny reassuringly reflected in them. It has no need of party or organization. As for you corpses who claim to govern us, your suspicions of mysterious plots are vain as are your attacks on the instigators of the disorders; you wail in vain over a violence which only your presence perpetuates. Once again, the evidence will rub your nose in your impotence. In the street, on the very doorstep of your misgivings, individuals of the nascent autonomy are gradually emerging out of the poisoned fog of trade. They are ready to risk their nothing to gain everything, to strike where you least expect them, to answer only for themselves; the only mandate they carry is their subjectivity, and their footsteps are beginning to sound on the hollow boards of your death-stricken civilization.

The rotting history of the economy opens into the history of what individuals can be. The backwardness of life vis-a-vis the will to live is due to the head still concealing the presence of a new style. I do not live the reversal of perspective enough, for my impatience causes me to wait for what is already within me. Why look where there is nothing for what there is plenty of? Let me be content just to gather what I like and weave it in to what makes me passionate. For passion has the eyes of pleasure, it sets everything on fire and reduces to ashes only what stands in the way of its desires.

I do not wish to deprive myself of anything — I cannot ever have enough. How could the old world ever satisfy me? In every social disturbance, in every riot, I get the chance on a much wider scale than my everyday life, further to smash what is tying freedom down. The life-line travels through subjective abundance, love without limits, setting fire to banks, sabotaging the economy, the end of the State and the root and branch destruction of business relationships.

l want to fight to be human, too human ever to be human enough.

Life’s best defense is utter freedom. Pleasure unstinted is the ultimate weapon of individual emancipation. It is an irony of history that as commercial alienation reaches the brink, pleasure is in everyone’s reach.

No intermediaries, no politicians, no agitators, no doctors, no popular champions, nor force outside ourselves — we shall mold history in accord with our desires and set necessity free.

You do not save yourself alone? I was never lost, but if my well-being depended on others rather than on myself I would quite truthfully never be saved. If we do not start with individual independence we will not end with any either. But if we do not agree to achieve it why bleat support for it in the first place?

Only yesterday we were stuck with suicidal outbreaks of rage, but each individual’s struggle mutates as it goes through changes of outlook and perspective. Energy expended in the race for power and profit catches up with itself and laughs to see such a glut of joblessness, inflation, economic decay, break-down of authority, revolution managed by those who know radicalism when they see it. So off goes energy down paths of enjoyment and immediate gratification.

I do not claim it wins without a fight. Naivity does not mean hoping that some magistrate, shopkeeper, flatfoot or killer will suddenly choose to have a good time rather than smash you to make up for his impotence. Expecting an adder not to bite is scarcely asking the impossible, but you do not automatically assume it.

Not a day goes by without my feeling aggressive or being provoked to a fight. Commerce attacks me by forcing me to pay and the bank by forcing me to count, while laws and authority deny my desires their liberty. However it is no longer a violent explosion of rage but the steadier violence by-passing them which will sweep laws, banks and commerce away.

With attractive ease as the most natural thing in the world, our common desire for autonomy will bring us together to stop paying, working, following orders, giving up what we want, growing old, feeling shame or familiarity with fear. We will act instead on the pulse of pleasure, and live in love and creativity.

Nature knows no other laws than those the economy has credited it with, full of animal cruelty and scourges of earth and sky. Those laws will be annulled throughout society as the will to live confronts your death reflexes and defeats them. The struggle against a hostile nature can now resolve into the help nature gives your pleasures as a gift, which is yours and rooted in life. This development of human civilization is in fact its highest achievement.

Too bad if the taste for pleasure is a fine source of error. We will never make as many mistakes as the amount of blood spilled by intellectuals of past revolutions testifies to and which is etched on their hearts. I prefer spontaneous mistakes to truth imposed. Rather the creator feeling his way than the coherence of a leader.

The essential has been said. The important thing is to do it.

8 January 1979.