Firstly, because men are not free to choose one mode of production or another, because as every new generation enters life it finds productive forces and relations of production already existing as the result of the work of former generations, owing to which it is obliged at first to accept and adapt itself to everything it finds ready-made in the sphere of production in order to be able to produce material values.

Secondly, because, when improving one instrument of production or another, one clement of the productive forces or another, men do not realize, do not understand or stop to reflect what social results these improvements will lead to, but only think of their everyday interests, of lightening their labor and of securing some direct and tangible advantage for themselves.

When, gradually and gropingly, certain members of primitive communal society passed from the use of stone tools to the use of iron tools, they, of course, did not know and did not stop to reflect what social results this innovation would lead to; they did not understand or realize that the change to metal tools meant a revolution in production, that it would in the long run lead to the slave system. They simply wanted to lighten their labor and secure an immediate and tangible advantage; their conscious activity was confined within the narrow bounds of this everyday personal interest.

[...]

Up to a certain period the development of the productive forces and the changes in the realm of the relations of production proceed spontaneously independently of the will of men. But that is so only up to a certain moment, until the new and developing productive forces have reached a proper state of maturity After the new productive forces have matured, the existing relations of production and their upholders – the ruling classes – become that "insuperable" obstacle which can only be removed by the conscious action of the new classes, by the forcible acts of these classes, by revolution. Here there stands out in bold relief the tremendous role of new social ideas, of new political institutions, of a new political power, whose mission it is to abolish by force the old relations of production. Out of the conflict between the new productive forces and the old relations of production, out of the new economic demands of society, there arise new social ideas; the new ideas organize and mobilize the masses; the masses become welded into a new political army, create a new revolutionary power, and make use of it to abolish by force the old system of relations of production, and to firmly establish the new system. The spontaneous process of development yields place to the conscious actions of men, peaceful development to violent upheaval, evolution to revolution.

The second feature of production is that its changes and development always begin with changes and development of the productive forces, and in the first place, with changes and development of the instruments of production. Productive forces are therefore the most mobile and revolutionary element of productions. First the productive forces of society change and develop, and then, depending on these changes and in conformity with them, men's relations of production, their economic relations, change. This, however, does not mean that the relations of production do not influence the development of the productive forces and that the latter are not dependent on the former. While their development is dependent on the development of the productive forces, the relations of production in their turn react upon the development of the productive forces, accelerating or retarding it. In this connection it should be noted that the relations of production cannot for too long a time lag behind and be in a state of contradiction to the growth of the productive forces, inasmuch as the productive forces can develop in full measure only when the relations of production correspond to the character, the state of the productive forces and allow full scope for their development. Therefore, however much the relations of production may lag behind the development of the productive forces, they must, sooner or later, come into correspondence with – and actually do come into correspondence with – the level of development of the productive forces, the character of the productive forces. Otherwise we would have a fundamental violation of the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production within the system of production, a disruption of production as a whole, a crisis of production, a destruction of productive forces.

If historical science is to be a real science, it can no longer reduce the history of social development to the actions of kings and generals, to the actions of "conquerors" and "subjugators" of states, but must above all devote itself to the history of the producers of material values, the history of the laboring masses, the history of peoples.

It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. Matter is the subject of all changes.

We must not base our orientation on the strata of society which are no longer developing, even though they at present constitute the predominant force, but on those strata which are developing and have a future before them[.]

I was seeking a soul resembling mine, and I could not find it. I searched throughout the seven seas; my perseverance proved of no use. Yet I could not remain alone. I needed someone who'd approve of my nature; there had to be somebody out there with the same ideas as me. It was morning; the sun rose over the horizon, in all its splendour, and here rises before my eyes a young man as well, whose presence made flowers sprout in his wake. He approached me, and holding out his hand: "I have come to you who seek me. God bless this happy day." But I replied: "Begone! I never summoned you. I don't need your companionship..." It was evening; night was already drawing the darkness of her veil over nature. A beautiful woman, whose form I could barely make out, was also drawing the influence of her enchantment over me. She looked upon me with compassion, however she dared not speak to me. So I said: "Come closer, so I may see your face clearly, for at this distance the starlight is too faint for me to make out its features." Then, modestly, with her eyes lowered, she glided across the lawn's grass, coming to my side. As soon as I saw her: "I see that goodness and justice have found a home in your heart: we could never live together. You are now admiring my beauty, which has overwhelmed many a woman, but sooner or later, you'll regret ever having given your love to me, for you do not know my soul. Not that I would ever be unfaithful to you: to she who bares her heart to me with such abandon and trust, I bare mine back with equal trust and abandon, but get it into your head lest you ever forget it: Wolves and lambs look not on one another with bedroom eyes." So what was I waiting for, I who rejected in such disgust what was most beautiful in humanity! What I was waiting for, I really couldn't tell you. I haven't yet gotten into the habit of keeping a daily record of the phenomena that occur within my psyche, according to the practice recommended by philosophy. I sat on a cliff, by the sea. A ship had just set full sail to escape these waters: a minute speck had just appeared at the horizon, making gradual headway, driven on by gusts, and growing more powerful by the minute. The storm was about to swoop down on us, and already the sky was growing dark, overcast in a black almost as hideous as the human heart. The vessel, which was a great warship, had just cast all her anchors, in fear of being swept against the rocky coast. The wind roared with rage from all four points of the compass, tearing the sails to shreds. Crashes of thunder burst out amid flashes of lightning and could not drown out the sound of wailing to be heard from this house with no foundations, this teetering sepulcher. The rolling of these aqueous masses had not yet managed to shatter the anchor's chains, however their buffeting had opened up a way into the ship's ribs: a gaping breach, for the pumps could no longer bail out the masses of salt water beating down on the bridge like mountains of foam. The ship in distress fires her canons to sound the alarm; but she sinks, slowly... majestically. He who has never watched a ship sinking in the midst of a storm, with intermittent flashes of lightning between the deepest periods of darkness, while those on board are overwhelmed with that despair you know so well, knows nothing of life's ups and downs. Finally, a universal shriek of utter distress bursts from within the bowels of the ship, whilst the sea intensifies her fearsome onslaughts. It is that cry one hears when the limits of human capacity give in: we wrap ourselves up in the cloak of despair and leave our fate in the hands of God. We flock together like cornered sheep. The ship in distress fires her canons to sound the alarm; but she sinks, slowly... majestically. They've had the pumps running all day now. Futile efforts. Night has come, pitch-black and merciless, bringing the delightful show to its climax. Each soul onboard realizes that, once in the water, he won't be able to breathe, for, as far back as he can remember, he knows of no fish in his family tree; nevertheless he struggles to hold his breath for as long as possible, if only to prolong his life for another two or three seconds: that is the vengeful irony he aims at death... The ship in distress fires her canons to sound the alarm; but she sinks, slowly... majestically. He doesn't know that the ship, as it goes under, sets the ocean swells twisting and turning in a powerful circular motion, stirring up the benthonic mires into the turbid waters, and that a force from below, in counterattack to the tempest wreaking havoc above, drives the element to violent, jolting motions. Thus, despite the stores of courage he mustered in advance, the drowned-to-be, on second thought, ought to be delighted if he can prolong his life, swirling in the vortices of the abyss, even by the space of half a normal breath, for good measure. He will fail in his supreme desire to cheat death. The ship in distress fires her canons to sound the alarm; but she sinks, slowly... majestically. No wait, there's been a mistake. She's no longer firing, she's no longer sinking. The cockleshell is now completely engulfed! Good heavens! How could I continue to live, after experiencing such exquisite pleasures! I had just been granted the chance to witness the death agonies of many a fellow man. Minute by minute, I followed the episodes of their anguish. Now, the feature presentation was the bellowing of some old lady, brought to hysterics by fear. Now, the squeals of a suckling infant were drowning out the nautical orders. The ship was too distant for me to clearly perceive the groans brought on by blasts of wind, but through sheer willpower I zoomed in on it, and the optical illusion was complete. Every quarter of an hour, when a particularly stronger gust of wind, sounding its gloomy tones amid the cries of the terrified storm petrels, would break open the ship in another lengthwise crack, increasing the laments of those about to be offered as sacrifices to death, I would dig a sharp metal point deeper into my cheek and secretly think: "They are suffering still more!" At least this gave me grounds for comparison. From the shore, I shouted at them, hurling violent curses and threats. I felt that they could hear me! I could feel that my hatred and raving, soaring over the distances, were breaking the physical laws of sound and falling loud and clear onto their ears, deafened by the wrathful ocean's roars! I felt they ought to be thinking of me, unleashing their vengeance in impotent rage! Every now and then I would cast a glance up at the cities, sounds asleep on dry land, and seeing that nobody suspected a ship to be sinking a few miles from the shore, with birds of prey for a crown and empty-bellied creatures of the deep for a pedestal, I took courage, and regained hope: I could now be sure of their demise! There was no escape! Through an excess of precaution, I had gone fetch my double-barrelled shotgun, so that, should some survivor be tempted to swim up to the rocks to escape impending death, a bullet in the shoulder would shatter his arm, thus thwarting his plan. Just when the tempest was at its fiercest, I saw, at the surface, desperately struggling to keep afloat, a frenetic head, with hair standing on end. He was swallowing gallons of water and was tossed back into the briny deep, bobbing like a piece of cork. But in no time he surfaced again, mane dripping wet, and, eyes focused on the shore, he seemed to defy death. What admirable composure! On his brave and noble face, he bore a deep and gory wound, gashed open by the jagged point of some hidden reef. He must have been sixteen at the oldest, for you could just barely see, by the lightning flashes that lit up the night, the peach fuzz on his lip. And now he was no more than two hundred yards from the cliff, and I was getting a clear view of him. What courage! What indomitable spirit! How his steady head seemed to flout at fate, as he vigorously cleaved through the waves, prying open the grooves before him with effort!... I had made up my mind beforehand. I owed it to myself to keep my promise: the final hour had tolled for all; there could be no exceptions. That was my resolution, and nothing could change it... A sharp blast echoed, and the head sank right under, never to be seen again. From this murder I did not take as much pleasure as you might imagine, and precisely because I had already done more than my share of killing in life, I was doing it now only from sheer habit, so hard to break, and providing only mild enjoyment. Conscience becomes dulled, calloused. What pleasure could I feel at the death of this human being, when more than a hundred were about to present me with the spectacle of their final struggles against the waves, once the ship had been submerged? With this death, not even the thrill of danger aroused me, for human justice, cradled by the night's ghastly storm, was slumbering in the cottages a few steps from me. Now that the years hang heavy on my shoulders, I can speak this supreme and solemn truth with sincerity: I was never as cruel as it was later said among men, however sometimes their persistent spitefulness went on devastating for years on end. There was then no limits to my fury; I was possessed by fits of cruelty: my wild eyes would strike terror in anyone who dared come close enough to see them, provided they be of my race. If it was a horse or a dog, I would let it go by: did you head what I just said? Unfortunately, on the night of the storm, I was seized by one of my fits of wrath, my reason having abandoned me (for normally I would be just as cruel, only more discreet), and everything falling into my hands on that night had to perish. I am not saying this justifies my misdeeds. My fellow men are not the only ones to blame. I am merely making a statement of fact, as I await the last judgment, which makes me feel my throat constrict in anticipation... What do I care about the last judgment? My reason never abandons me, as I had claimed just to mislead you. And when I commit a murder, I know full well what I am doing: what else would I be wanting to do? Standing on the cliff, as the tempest flailed at my hair and trench coat, I ecstatically watched the full might of the thunderstorm relentlessly hammering at the ship under a starless sky. In a triumphant pose, I followed all the twists and turns of this drama, from the instant the vessel threw her anchors, until the moment she was swallowed up within that final shroud, that cloak which dragged everybody wrapped in it down into the bowels of the sea. But the cue for me to make my entrance in these scenes of nature in tumult was approaching. When the place where the ship had been struggling clearly showed that she had gone spend the rest of her days on the oceanic floor, then, some of those who had been carried off by the waves reappeared on the surface. They seized and grappled each other around the waist, in twos, in threes; this was the way not to save their lives, for their movements became hampered, and they went down like dumbbells... What is this horde of sea monsters ploughing through the waves at top speed? There are six of them, with sturdy fins that cut a passage through the heaving seas. Exercising the privileges of their higher rank on the food chain, the sharks soon make a great eggless omelette of all these wiggling human arms and legs on this far from dry continent. Blood mingles with the waters, and the waters mingle with blood. Their fierce eyes light up the bloodbath... But what is that other tumult of the waves, yonder, on the horizon? It looks like a waterspout coming this way! What strokes! Now I see what it is. An enormous female shark has come to partake of duck liver pâté and to eat cold stew meat. She is furious, for she arrives ravenous. A battle ensues between her and the sharks, to fight over the few palpitating limbs still dumbly floating here and there on the surface of the crimson cream. Left and right she snaps her jaws, delivering many a fatal wound. But three surviving sharks surround her, and she is forced to twist and turn in all directions to outmanoeuvre them. With an increasing emotion unbeknownst until now, the one-man audience follows this new kind of naval battle from his seat at the shore. His gaze is fastened on this courageous female shark, with jaws so mighty. He grits his teeth, raises his rifle, and, skilful as ever, he lodges his second bullet in the gill slit of one of the sharks, just as it rears its head above a wave. Two sharks remain, both showing even greater ferocity. From the top of the rock, the man with the briny saliva flings himself into the sea and swims towards the pleasantly coloured carpet, gripping his trusty steel knife. From now on the sharks each have one enemy to deal with. He closes in on his weary adversary, and, taking his time, buries his sharp blade in its belly. Meanwhile, the nimble-finned citadel easily disposes of the last opponent... Now the swimmer and the female shark saved by him confront each other. For minutes they stare fixedly into each other's eyes. They swim circling, keeping each other in sight, and each thinking: "I was wrong all along. Here is one more evil than I." Then in unison they glided underwater towards each other, in mutual admiration, the female shark slitting open the waves with her fins, Maldoror's arms thrashing the water; and they held their breaths, in deepest reverence, each one anxious to gaze for the first time upon his living image. Effortlessly, at only three yards apart, they suddenly fell upon one another like two magnets, in an embrace of dignity and gratitude, clasping each other tenderly as brother and sister. Carnal desire soon followed this display of affection. Like two leeches, a pair of nervous thighs gripped tightly against the monster's viscous flesh, and arms and fins wrapped around the objects of their desire, surrounding their bodies with love, while their breasts and bellies soon fused into one bluish-green mass reeking of sea-wrack, in the midst of the tempest still raging by the light of lightning; with the foamy waves for a wedding bed, borne on an undersea current as if in a cradle, rolling and rolling down into the bottomless ocean depths, they came together in a long, chaste, and hideous mating!... At last I had found somebody who was like me!... From now on I was no longer alone in life!... Her ideas were the same as mine!... I was face to face with my first love!

Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers in the process of their movement the only choice is: either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonism there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle socialst ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology

A class must be formed that has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal…, which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat

In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence — it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.

The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old ‘68 motto “Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a “realist,” one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears “possible” (or, as we usually out it, “feasible”).

Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others — in a way, the once fashionable and today forgotten Francis Fukuyama WAS right, global capitalism IS “the end of history.” A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints.

[It] is a purely didactic difference between form and content to see the material powers as content and the ideology as form...[because] the material force cannot be understood historically without form and the ideologies would, without the material force, remain the whims of individuals.

The aim of theory is not to raise our intellectual or academic reputation, but to open possibilities to understand the historical world and its processes, to gain directions for our praxis, and to change it if necessary.

One of the hardest lessons we had to learn was that revolutionary struggle is more scientific than emotional. I don't say we shouldn't feel anything, but decisions cannot be based upon love or hate. They have to be based upon objective circumstances and aim at what is rationally and unemotionally necessary.

You too can be rich. You too can be Michael Jordan. You too can be any of the wealthy black people running around not doing shit.

this first moment of world-reduction, of the destruction of the idols and the sweeping away of an old world in violence and pain, is itself the precondition for the reconstruction of something else. A first moment of absolute immanence is necessary, the blank slate of absolute peasant immanence or ignorance, before new and undreamed-of-sensations and feelings can come into being.

I don't know how radical you are or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.

The task of Communists is to expose the fallacies of the reactionaries and metaphysicians, to propagate the dialectics inherent in things, and so accelerate the transformation of things and achieve the goal of revolution.

Well, Zizek said, populism is inherently reformist, if not to say reactionary. Its fundamental fantasy is of an Intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system. Hence the problem is never the system, capitalism, but the oligarchy, this particular, lazy, exploitative bunch who happen to have control now. Once They are removed, everything will be alright... Hence populism always frame its project in terms of a series of demands addressed to the ruling elite. Antagonism is defused into a craving for recognition.

[...]

The error here is not simply the illusion that 'this particular leadership' are the problem, it is the idea that capitalism has any sort of leadership at all. The administrators' washing of hands which they claim are always tied is not merely an act of self-exculpation; it really is the case that they are the slaves of the remorseless machine of Capital. No-one driving.

An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St Peter comes to him and says, 'I'm afraid I can't let you in'. 'Who wants to get in?' the IRA man retorts. 'You've got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.'

Myth: Amerikan consumer debt is piling up.

Under capitalism, debt is actually a sign of the ability to pay as recognized by banks. Wealthier people have more debts. What is important is the net worth and physical standard of living. Even if credit card companies do make more money than ever, it does not prove anything unless the physical living standard, consumption of actual commodities declines and there is no proof of that.

Anxieties concerning debt are real, but most such concerns are bourgeois anxieties, the same ones Donald Trump has to have. Third World debts are smaller relatively speaking, but have a real effect on real proletarians.

In the Nazi worldview the superior being was a predator. This supposed recognition of "Nature's laws" is just capitalist culture with a biological wrapper. In life it isn't true. The lofty eagle isn't any more successful than mom sparrow. If anything, less so. If survival and dominance were everything, cockroaches might get olympic gold. Ecology is endless diversity, unending change, and development and interdependency of life forms that is complex beyond Man the Manager.

Political liberalism is pressed into service when a contradiction between oppressor and oppressed starts to percolate. If the contradiction itself is not too fundamental and the percolation has only just begun, then liberalism can maybe handle it. “Handling” here means doing just enough to simmer the percolation so the lid stays put while fending off those who might turn up the heat, and in the end doing nothing much of anything at all to change the oppressor-oppressed relationship. To this end, for instance, liberalism is equipped to, say, talk a good game while doing nothing. It’s that kind of oppressor’s tool.

I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on towards the discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countris of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in American combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weave a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. [...] I am the evil product of an evil soil.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid systems appears.

Grassy seat. – The relationship to parents is undergoing a sad, shadowy change. They have lost their awe through their economic powerlessness. Once we rebelled against their insistence on the reality principle, the sobriety which was always ready to recoil into the rage against those who do not renounce. Today however we find ourselves facing a presumably younger generation, which is in every one of its impulses unbearably more grown up than the parents ever were; which has renounced, before things ever came to a conflict, and which derives their authority from that, implacably authoritarian and unshakeable. Perhaps one always experienced the parental generation as harmless and disempowered, once the latter’s physical energy subsided, while one’s own generation seemed to be threatened by youth: in the antagonistic society, the relationship of the generations is also one of competition, behind which stands naked violence. Today however things are regressing to a condition which does not know the Oedipus complex, but only the slaying of the father. One of the most telling symbolic atrocities of the Nazis was the killing of the extremely old. Such a climate produces a belated and rueful understanding with one’s parents, similar to the one between condemned prisoners, disturbed only by the fear that we, ourselves powerless, may not be able to care for them some day as they cared for us, when they owned something. The violence which is inflicted on them makes us forget the violence they committed. Even their rationalizations, the once-hated lies with which they sought to justify their particular interest as the general one, show an inkling of the truth, the urge towards the reconciliation of conflicts, which the upbeat successor generation happily denies. Even the faded, inconsequential and self-doubting Spirit [Geist] of the elders is more approachable than the quick-witted stupidity of junior. Even the neurotic peculiarities and malformations of the older adults represent character, that which is humanly achieved, compared with pathic health, infantilism raised to a norm. One realizes in horror that when one previously clashed with one’s parents, because they represented the world, one was secretly the mouthpiece of a still worse world against the merely bad. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually only lead to deeper entanglement in such, and sometimes it seems as if the disastrous germ-cell of society, the family, is simultaneously the nourishing germ-cell of the uncompromising will for a different one. What disintegrates, along with the family – so long as the system continues – is not just the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which indeed oppressed the individual, but also strengthened the latter, if not indeed producing such. The end of the family cripples the counter-forces. The dawning collectivistic social order [Ordnung] is the mockery of one without class: it liquidates, along with the bourgeois, at the same time the utopia, which at one time drew nourishment from the mother’s love.

The Communist Party must be the primary incarnation of the realm of freedom; above all, the spirit of comradeliness, of true solidarity, and of self-sacrifice must govern everything it does. If it cannot achieve this, or if it does not at least exert itself seriously to put such ideals into practice, the Communist Party will no longer be distinguishable from the other parties, except by virtue of its programme. There is even the danger that this unbridgeable gulf which separates it programmatically from the opportunists and the waverers will gradually become obscured, with the result that it could soon be nothing more than the ‘extreme left wing’ of the ‘workers’ parties’. That in turn would present a further, more immediate danger (already posed in accentuated form by the rhetorical recognition of the Third International by the parties of the centre): namely, that the qualitative distinction between the communists and the other parties would degenerate into a merely quantitative one and in time even disappear altogether. The less a Communist Party puts its ideals into practice both organizationally and spiritually, the less able it will be, not only to counter effectively this widespread inclination to compromise, but also to educate the unconscious but really revolutionary elements (syndicalists, anarchists) to become true communists.

Lack of raw materials, internal struggles and organizational difficulties count as excuses in their view only for capitalist states; their line is that a proletarian social order ought to mean the internal external transformation of all conditions, an all-round improvement in the situation, from the very first moment that that order is born. Genuine revolutionaries, and above all Lenin, distinguish themselves from such petty-bourgeois utopianism by their lack of illusions. They know what can be expected, not only of an economy ruined in the World War, but also – and above all – of human beings who, under capitalism, h been spiritually corrupted and depraved and indoctrinated with egoism. However, freedom from illusions never leads the true revolutionary to lose heart or to despair; his understanding of the situation as it really is serves rather to strengthen his faith in the world-historical mission of the proletariat. This faith can never be shaken, no matter how long it takes to realize it, no matter how often it is beset by adverse circumstances. It accepts all these disruptions and obstructions, but never allows them to distract him from his goal and the indications of its imminence.

"Mexico," grabbing the young statistician's arm.
"Eh?" Roger interuppted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hayworth in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean back. . . .
"Mexico, I think I am hallucinating."
"Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?"
"Mexico, I see . . . I see . . . . What do you mean, what am I seeing, you nit? It's what I'm hearing."
"Well, what are you hearing, then." A touch of peevishness to Roger now.
"Right now I'm hearing you, saying, 'What are you hearing, then.' And I don't like it!"
"Why not."
"Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still much prefer it to the sound of your voice."

In a society where political factions were not wooing the other side for sexual lifestyle votes, pornography would decrease. That's another way of saying that pornography eroticizes power by creating good sex and bad sex--a basis for faction. There is no solution to pornography within imperialism, because there is no way to eliminate profits from the entertainment industry and pandering for votes in the politician business. As long as there is a possible gain from talking about good sex and bad sex, there will be entertainers and politicians taking advantage. To crush pornography requires a monolithic political will--a friendly unity that is difficult to envision right now.

The elimination of the two party system and the profit-run economy will take most of the wind out of the sails of pornography. Without sickly competitive pluralism, pornography cannot flourish. If there were not imperialist factions, the imperialists would not have bothered with Monica Lewinsky. Ultimately, we cannot expect pornography to disappear in class society. The best we can do is restrict pornography under the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations, while we work on eliminating the underlying causes of political faction formation in the formation of classes. When money, state power and the various forms of power coming to bear on sex are gone, pornography may also be gone. If not we will have to keep refining our theory of the patriarchy and gender aristocracy until we get it right.

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Slang is the secret language adopted by desire to express itself in the face of repression[.]

Going from success to success, until 1968 modern society was convinced it was loved. It has since had to abandon these dreams; it prefers to be feared. It knows full well that "its innocent air has gone forever."

So it is that thousands of plots in favor of the established order tangle and clash almost everywhere, as the overlap of secret networks and secret issues or activities grows ever more dense along with their rapid integration into every sector of economics, politics and culture. In all areas of social life the degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and security activities gets greater and greater. The plot having thickened to the point where it is almost out in the open, each part of it now starts to interfere with, or worry, the others, for all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without really knowing why, are colliding by chance yet not identifying each other with any certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate aims can barely be suspected and almost never understood. So that while no one can be sure he is not being tricked or manipulated, it is rare for the string-puller to know he has succeeded. And in any case, to be on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has chosen the right strategic perspective. Tactical successes can thus lead great powers down dangerous roads.

In a certain sense the coherence of spectacular society proves revolutionaries right, since it is evident that one cannot reform the most trifling detail without taking the whole thing apart. But at the same time this coherence has eliminated every organized revolutionary tendency by eliminating those social terrains where it had more or less effectively been able to find expression: from trade unions to newspapers, towns to books. In a single movement, it has been possible to illuminate the incompetence and thoughtlessness of which this tendency was quite naturally the bearer. And on an individual level, the reigning coherence is quite capable of eliminating, or buying off such exceptions as may arise.

The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate, phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple. Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as an admiring spectator. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his element: he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market research: a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).

Impervious to real passions, he seeks titillation in the battles between his anaemic gods, the stars of a vacuous heaven: AIthusser -- Garaudy-Barthes -- Picard -- Lefebvre -- Levi-Strauss -- Halliday-deChardin -- Brassens... and between their rival theologies, designed like all theologies to mask the real problems by creating false ones: humanism -- existentialism -- scientism -- structuralism -- cyberneticism -- new criticism -- dialectics-of-naturism -- meta-philosophism...

He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen the latest happening. He discovers "modernity" as fast as the market can produce its ersatz version of long outmoded (though once important) ideas; for him, every rehash is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and "difficult" texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock them off. But no: conspicuous consumers always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them vicariously through the gaze of his friends. He is an other-directed voyeur.

A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline of the universities and the automatic nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The university has become a society for the propagation of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the rhythm of the production line; without exception, university teachers are cretins, men who would get the bird from any audience of schoolboys.

Anyone with less than ninety per cent of their time at their disposal is a slave.

The interworld is the no-man's land of subjectivity. Its borders tremble with the fundamental cruelty of cop and rebel, oppression and the poetry of revolt. Halfway between its recuperation by the spectacle and its revolutionary use, the dreamer's extra-space-time spawns monstrous creations after the image of his own desires and that of power. The increasing poverty of daily life has turned into a sort of public amenity suitable for every kind of investigation, an open battlefield between creative spontaneity and what corrupts it. As a faithful explorer of the mind, Artaud sums up perfectly this evenly-matched struggle: "My unconscious is only mine in dreams, but are the forms I see there going to come to birth or are they some foul abortion I've spewed up? The subconscious is shaped by the premises of my interior will, but I'm not really sure who reigns there; I don't believe it's me, but rather a flood of conflicting desires which, I don't know why, think in me and do nothing but struggle endlessly for total possession over me. But I re-encounter every one of these perverse desires, whose temptations treat me with such temerity, in the preconscious - only this time all my conscious wits are about me, and although the perverse desires break in waves over me, the important thing is that I feel myself there... I feel therefore that if I travelled upstream, I ought to emerge in my preconscious at the point where I could see myself evolve and desire." Further on, Artaud says: "Peyote led me there."

The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction and mediation. This is no more than the inversion and perversion of an equally threefold unitary project. The new society, as it develops underground, chaotically, is moving towards a total honesty - a transparency - between individuals: an honesty promoting the participation of each individual in the self-realisation of everyone else. Creativity, love and play stand in the same relation to true life as the need to eat and the need to find shelter stand in relation to survival (1). Attempts to realise oneself can only be based on creativity (2). Attempts to communicate can only be based on love (4). Attempts to participate can only be based on play (6). Separated from one another these three projects merely strengthen the repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity is the presence - which can be seen in almost everyone - of the same desire to create a truly passionate life (3). The erotic is the spontaneous coherence fusing attempts to enrich lived experience (5).

[I]ssue-politics, partial refusal and piecemeal demands are the very thing that blocks transcendence. The worst inhumanity is never anything but a wish for emancipation that has settled for compromise and fossilized beneath the strata of successive sacrifices. Liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism have each built new prisons under the sign of liberty. The left fights for an increase in comfort within alienation, skillfully furthering this impoverished aim by evoking the barricades, the red flag and the finest revolutionary moments of the past. In this way once-radical impulses are doubly betrayed, twice renounced: first they are ossified, then dug up and used as a carrot. "Revolution" is doing pretty well everywhere: worker-priests, priest-junkies, communist generals, red potentates, trade unionists on the board of directors.... Radical chic harmonizes perfectly with a society that can sell Watney's Red Barrel beer under the slogan "The Red Revolution is Coming." Not that all this is without risk for the system. The endless caricaturing of the most deeply felt revolutionary desires can produce a backlash in the shape of a resurgence of such feelings, purified in reaction to their universal prostitution. There is no such thing as lost allusions.

O look at Napoleon's pretty children! Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Thiers, Alphonse XIII, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. Franco, Salazar, Nasser, Mao, de Gaulle... ubiquitous Ubus in the four corners of the world spawning more and more cretinous miscarriages. Yesterday they still brandished their twigs of authority like Olympian thunderbolts; today the apes of power glean no more from the social scene than a little dubious respect. Certainly, the absurdity of a Franco is still lethal - no-one would dream of forgetting it - but one should always remember that the stupidity of power will be a deadlier killer than stupidity in power.

One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by "reversal of perspective"; and he told the following story. Two brothers deeply attached to one another had a strange habit. They marked the nature of the day's events with pebbles a white one for each happy moment and a black one for each moment of misfortune or displeasure. But when, at the end of the day, they compared the contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the other only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man famed for his wisdom. "You don't talk to one another enough" said the wise man, "Both of you must give the reasons for your choice, and discover its causes". From then on they did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained faithful to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been about thirty there were hardly more than seven or eight. After a short while they went to see the wise man again. Both looked extremely miserable. "Not so long ago," said one, "my jar was filled with pebbles the colour of the night. My despair was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but what these eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable that I cannot go on like this." And the other said: "Every day I piled up white pebbles.. Today there are only seven or eight, but these obsess me to the point that I cannot recall these moments of happiness without immediately wanting to relive them more intensely and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments me". The wise man smiled as he listened to them. "Excellent. Things are shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can, ask yourselves why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses so much passion in you." When the two brothers next saw the wise man it was to say "We asked ourselves the question but we could not find the answer. So we asked the whole village. You can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening. squatting in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part. They say a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value." The old man didn't conceal his pleasure. "Everything is developing as I foresaw. Don't worry. Soon the question will no longer be asked: it has lost its importance, and perhaps one day you will no longer believe you ever asked it." Shortly afterwards the old man's predictions were confirmed in the following way: a great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of a troubled night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the elders and chieftains, impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of the palisade.

Once the assassins of the established order lose their faith in the myth, or, in other words, in the God who legalizes their crimes, the machinery of death is turned against its devisers. Revolution was the bourgeoisie's finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help it take its leap into oblivion. It is easy to see why bourgeois thought, strung up as it is on a rope of radicalism of its own manufacture, clings with the energy of desperation to every reformist solution, to anything that can prolong its life, even though its own weight must inevitably drag it down to its doom. Fascism is in a way a consistent response to this hopeless predicament. It is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world down with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but a sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation.

It furthermore occurred to me that, basically, anarchy is in fact the only political position that is actually possible. I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation—that it is a capitalist or a communist situation.

No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion, fulfill a wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way my mind does spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished actions, not the future of the human race or the state of the world in the year 2000. I could not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, "for others." I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration. The apolitical violence of the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable goods displayed in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a concrete confirmation of the fact that the individual's self-realization depends on the application of the principle of "every man for himself," though this has to be understood in collective terms--and above all in radical terms.

The fight is unfair. Words serve power better than they do men; they serve it more faithfully than most men do, and more scrupulously than the other mediations (space, time, technology...) Hypostatised transcendence always depends on language and is developed in a system of signs and symbols, such as words, dance, ritual, music, sculpture and building. When a half-completed action, suddenly obstructed, tries to continue in a form which it hopes will eventually allow it to finish and realise itself -- like a generator transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy which will be reconverted into mechanical energy by a motor miles away -- at this moment language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot, robs it of its substance, abstracts it. It always has categories ready to condemn to incomprehensibility and nonsense anything which they can't contain, or summon into existence-for-power that which slumbers in nothingness because it has no place as yet in the system of Order. The repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.

So to come to the jazz “mystique.” Does the hipster with his green beret, black glasses, and embouchure whisker, the band rat with her Theda Bara makeup and dirty feet in Jesus sandals, the amateur dope fiends with their adulterated marijuana, the Beat Generation, do these people represent “jazz as a way of life”? God forbid! Marx said of Bakunin that he suffered from furor aristocraticus. The hipster is the furious square. The Beat novelists and poets and their camp followers are debauched Puritans. They agree with the most hostile critics of jazz, or for that matter with the most chauvinistic slanderers of the American Negro. They just like it that way. In their utter ignorance they embrace the false image which their enemies the squares have painted.

As Charles Mingus once said to me, “We didn’t evolve the new forms of modern jazz in dirty cellars full of dope peddlers. We worked it out in people’s homes, which we didn’t call ‘pads’ either. And our families stood around and listened and approved.”

[re On the Road, Jack Kerouac]

These innocents dash madly back and forth across the country, but they aren’t even very good at hitchhiking. Any self-respecting pickpocket has been further around the pot looking for the handle than they have been from home. They are hep — jazz excites them — but the lucid, orderly lyricism of Lester Young sounds “wild, crazy, frantic, man!” and in a neighborhood Negro club, full of ship scalers and lady welders relaxing on Saturday night, they behave as if they were witnessing a jungle orgy. On the other hand, they are not in revolt against the society which has produced them. Their talk is not of either the yogi or the commissar, but of corny entertainers, ham TV programs and the advertised virtues of the latest cars. Their values are those of the most conformist members of the middle class they despise, but enormously hypertrophied. They are demoralized and unsuccessful little Babbitts. This novel should demonstrate once and for all that the hipster is the furious square.

And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say "We will breathe later", and most do not die, because they are already dead.

I read in Gouy's Histoire de France: "The slightest insult to the King meant immediate death". In the American Constitution: "The people are sovereign".

While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies contradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their system of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.

Man, “the negative being who is solely to the extent that he suppresses Being,” is one with time. Man’s appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the development of the universe. “History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man” (Marx). Conversely, this “natural history” has no real existence other than through the process of human history, the only vantage point from which one can take in that historical totality (like the modern telescope whose power enables one to look back in time at the receding nebulas at the periphery of the universe). History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true within historical consciousness.

I cannot remember ever having taken any trouble -- no trace of struggle can be discovered in my life, I am the opposite of an heroic nature. To 'want' something, to 'strive' after something, to have a 'goal', a 'wish' in view -- I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future -- a distant future! -- as upon a smooth sea: it is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest that anything should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am . . . But that is how I have always lived, I have harbored no desire. Someone who after his forty-fourth year can say he has never striven after honors, after women, after money! -- Not that I could not have had them . . .

In my own country I am in a far-off land.
I am strong but have no force or power
I win all yet remain a loser
At break of day I say goodnight
When I lie down I have a great fear of falling.

Many pale eyes were straining to look at Chagataev, trying not to close from weakness and indifference. Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism. His nation needed oblivion – until the wind chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space. Chagataev turned away from everyone: all his actions, all his hopes had proved senseless…Did there remain in his nation even a small soul, something he could work with in order to bring about general happiness? Or had everything there been so worn away by suffering that even imagination, the intelligence of the poor, had entirely died? Chagataev knew from childhood memory, and from his education in Moscow, that any exploitation of a human being begins with the distortion of their soul, with getting a soul so used to death that it can be subjugated; without this subjugation, a slave is not a slave. And this forced mutilation of the soul continues, growing more and more violent, until reason in the slave turns to mad and empty mindlessness. The class struggle begins with the victory of the oppressors over the “holy sprit” confined within the slave: blasphemy against the master’s beliefs – against the master’s soul, the master’s god – goes unpardoned, while the slave’s own soul is ground down in falsehood and destructive labour.

Revolution is not a choice between capitalism and socialism. It is a choice between the violent overthrow of the existing order or our extermination by that order. Is that clear enough? Do we need a little sugar with that?

"You just arrive in a place," said the painter, "and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you've already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they've all been studied. Now they just get handled. Objects, the harmonic range of invention, completely unappreciated, no more truck with variation, deepening, gradation. You just try to work out the big connections. Suddenly you look into the macro-structure of the world, and you discover it: a vast ornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications--you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism. No merit to it. I say 'tree,' and I see huge forests. I say 'river,' and I see every river. I say 'house,' and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say snow,' and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing. Where it takes art is to think small as well as big, to be present on every scale ..."

"The man who gets to the top of the tree is forced to realize there is not top and no tree. I was your age when I first grasped that nothing is worth the least effort. It both calmed me and unsettled me. Now it frightens me." He referred to his condition as "expeditions into the jungle of solitude. It's like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks," he said.

How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can't be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It's something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he'll have walled himself up. Then, once he can't see out anymore, because he can't breathe anymore, he'll be persuasive: because he'll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.

"Their excuses have been noted. Their sexuality can be sniffed. One can feel what they think and what they want, these people, sense what forbidden things they are continually contriving. Their beds are under the window or in the doorway, or they don't even bother with beds: they go from atrocity to atrocity ... The men treat the women like pieces of tenderized meat, and vice versa, now one, now the other, depending on their respective imbecility. The primitive is everywhere. Some behave as if by prior arrangement, others seem to come to it naturally ... their too-tight trousers and skirts seem to drive them wild. The evenings go on and on: it's all too much. A few yards here or there, in or out, so as not to have to freeze ... Their mouths are taciturn, the rest goes wild ... day dawns, and you don't know which way is up. Sex is what does for them all. Sex, the disease that kills by its nature. Sooner or later, it will kill off even the deepest intimacy ... it brings about the conversion of one into the other, of good into evil, from here to there, from high to low. Godless, because ruination appears first ... the moral becomes immoral (a model of universal decline). The forked tongue of nature, you might say. The way the workers go around here, "he said, "they live for sex, like most people, like all people ... they live to the end of their days in a continual wild process against modesty and time and vice versa: ruination. Time sends them on their way to unchastity with a slap. Some are more accomplished at concealing it than others. With the canny ones, you only realize when they're all done. But it's for nothing. All of them live a sex life, and not a life."

"Childhood is all the same. Only to one person, it will seem ordinary, to a second benign, and to a third satanic."

"Nature is bloody," he said, "but bloodiest toward her own finest, most remarkable, and choicest gifts. She grinds them down without battin an eyelid."

Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there is no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures--whether associated with rich food, tobacco, alcohol, or drugs--were only derisory and desperate compensations, mini-suicides that did not have the courage to speak their name, attempts to speed up the destruction of a body that no longer had access to the one real pleasure. Thus human life was organized in a terribly simple fashion, and for twenty years or so, in my scripts and sketches, I had pussyfooted around a reality that I could have expressed in just a few sentences. Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witnesses--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown onto the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that had replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.

Eneug II

world world world world
and the face grave
cloud against the evening

de morituris nihil nisi

and the face crumbling shyly
too late to darken the sky
blushing away into the evening
shuddering away like a gaffe

veronica mundi
veronica munda
give us a wipe for the love of Jesus

sweating like Judas
tired of dying
tired of policemen
feet in marmalade
sweating profusely
heart in marmalade
smoke more fruit
the old heart the old heart
breaking outside congress
doch I assure thee
lying on the O'Connell Bridge
goggling at the tulips of the evening
the green tulips
shining round the corner like an anthrax
shining on Gunness's barges

the overtone the face
too late to brighten the sky
doch doch I assure thee

The Oedpial situation in the zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn money bags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their songs, still trapped inside intertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail ..... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Hartle and Gell-Mann already establish that the cognitive functioning of the IGUSes (Information Gathering and Utilizing Systems) presupposes conditions of stability and the mutual exclusion of sequences of events. For an IGUS observer, whether natural or artificial, only one branch of universe can be endowed with a real existence; if this conclusion does not exclude in any way the possibility of other branches of the universe, it forbids any access to them to a given observer: to use the quite mysterious but synthetic expression of Gell-Mann, "On every branch, only this branch is preserved." The very presence of a community of observers, even reduced to two IGUESes, was thus proof of the existence of a reality.

For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment; undoubtedly love, like pity, according to Nietzsche, had never been anything but a fiction invented by the weak to make the strong feel guilty, to introduce limits to their natural freedom and ferocity. Women had been weak, in particular at the moment of giving birth, early on they had needed to live under the guardianship of a powerful protector, and to this end they had invented love, but now they had become strong, they were independent and free, and they had given up inspiring or indeed feeling a sentiment that no longer had any concrete justification. The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished. What I was feeling ,these young people could not feel, nor even exactly understand and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable, as if it were something ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times. They had succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done, what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together, no more than the pieces of a broken cup can be reassembled, they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free.

Ah to know for sure that this thing has no end, this thing, this thing, this farrago of silence and words, of silence that is not silence and barely murmured words. Or to know it's life still, a form of life, ordained to end, as others ended and will end, till life ends, in all its forms. Words, mine was never more than that, than his pell-mell babel of silence and words, my viewless form described as ended, or to come, or still in progress, depending on the words, the moments, long may it last in that singular way. . . . It's because I haven't hit on the right ones, the killers, haven't yet heaved them up from that heart-burning glut of words, with what words shall I name my unnamable words?

Even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, if I can put it this way, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. Cut again and the grass grows faster than ever. A very comforting law of nature.

[attributed to an anonymous Iranian]

The alarm clock placed by his pillow, undaunted by the humming of the fan, was marking off time with a dull tocking. The clock was a sardonic embellishment to his daily life, for he had never once used to it wake him. His consciousness flowed on, day and night, like a murmuring brook; he was long used at night to maintaining himself transparent like crystal within it, and the alarm clock was the friend, the Sancho Panza, that turned the custom into a comedy on his behalf. The cheap sound of its mechanism was a splendid source of comfort: it made a farce of any continuity in him.

The human mind, he explained, developed by the creation and progressive chemical reinforcement of neural networks of variable length, from two to fifty neurons, if not more. As a human brain contained several billion neurons, the number of combinations, and therefore of possible circuits, was staggering--it went way beyond, for example, the number of molecules in the universe.

The number of circuits used varied greatly from one individual to the next, which sufficed, according to him, to explain the countless gradations between idiocy and genius. But, even more remarkably, a frequently used neuronal circuit became, as a result of ionic accumulations, easier and easier to use--there was, in short, progressive self-reinforcement, and that applied to everything: ideas, addictions, and moods. The phenomenon was proven for individual psychological reactions as well as for social relations: to conscientize mental blocks only reinforced them; trying to settle a conflict between two people generally made it insoluble. Knowall then launched a pitiless attack on Freudian theory, which was not only based on no consistent physiological foundations, but also led to dramatic results that were directly contrary to the chosen goal. On the screen behind him, the succession of diagrams that had punctuated his speech stopped and was replaced by a brief and poignant documentary devoted to the mental--and sometimes unbearable--sufferings of Vietnam veterans. They couldn't forget, had nightmares every night, could no longer even drive or cross the street without assistance, they lived constantly in fear and it seemed impossible for them to readapt to a normal social life. It focused then on the case of a stooped, wrinkled man who had only a thin crown of disheveled red hair and who seemed to be truly reduced to a wreck: he trembled constantly, could no longer leave his house, and was in need of permanent medical asssistance; and he suffered, suffered without end. In the cupboard of his dining room he kept a little jar, filled with oil from Vietnam; every time he opened the cupboard and took out the jar, he broke down in tears.

"Stop," said Knowall. "Stop." The image froze on the close-up of the old man in tears. "Stupidity," continued Knowall. "Completed and utter stupidity. The first thing this man should do is take his bottle of Vietnamese soil and throw it out the window. Every time he opens the cupboard, every time he takes out the bottle--and sometimes he does it up to fifty times a day--he reinforces the neuro-circuit, and condemns himself to suffer a little more. Similarly, every time that we dwell on the past, that we return to a painful episode--and this is more or less what psychoanalysis boils down to--we increase the chances of reproducing it. Instead of advancing, we bury ourselves. Whenever we experience sadness, disappointment, something that prevents us from living, we must start by moving out, burning photos, avoiding talking to anyone about it. Repressed memories disappear; this can take some time, but they disappear in the end. The circuit deactivates itself."

The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words, for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now, in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

He's surrounded by untalented people, as we all are. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people...
- Valentine, this is the last time ...
- Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing. Their only difficulty is that is they have a spark of wit or wisdom themselves, they're given no credit. The curse of cleverness. Now wait, Brown. Stop. Stop there where you are and relax for a moment. We still have some business to straighten out. He needs to talk or he'll come to pieces, isn't that what you told me before he got here? Well let him talk, he's said some very interesting things. But don't let him talk to himself, that's all he's been doing, that's all he does when he talks to you and you don't listen, he knows you don't. Let him talk, then, but listen to him. He may not say anything clever, but that's just as well. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. He paused.
- Come, my dear fellow. If you don't say anything I shan't be able to use you in this novel, the one in which Brown figures so monumentally since everyone thinks he's honest because he doesn't know how to be clever.

- Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

-Esther it isn't the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you've done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there's nothing you can do about them if they aren't done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that's happened and go over it alone. I mean I'm never really sure who I am until night, he added.

-And do you know the worst thing? she went on. -Do you know the hardest thing of all? The waiting. A woman is always waiting. She's ... always waiting.

-Listen ... , he said. He'd withdrawn his hand on the table top automatically. -That's what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering, he went on, abruptly working his hand in the air as though to shape it there, -the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework, ... in a pattern that doesn't pretend to any other level but it's own, do you know what I mean? He barely glanced at her to see if she did.
-It's the privacy, the exquisite sense of privacy about it, he said speaking more rapidly, -it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant. That what sentimentalizing invades and corrupts, that's what we've lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that's ... the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that's why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern ...

This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour ... what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original ... Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates ... you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart ...

But I don't get pissed, y'all don't even see through the mist
How the fuck can I be white, I don't even exist
I get a clean shave, bathe, go to a rave
Die from an overdose and dig myself up out of my grave
My middle finger won't go down, how do I wave?

His characters sing of lost paradises and unforgettable hopes, and the song is one of cruelty and greed; exploitation, cheating, lies. The deceived sing of their deception, learn its causes and regain the truths of their dreams.

[ref Brecht]

— But this one there's no name it's, they use computers. He brandished a flyer carrying a man's face eradicated by punched holes and numbers.
— They use, they call it coded anonymity, where they can make more meaningful evaluations of qualifi...
— What do you need to put your anonymity in code for?
— Respecting the dignity of the private individ...
— Nobody knows who you are anyway.

There is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible, incredible, so monstrous a chimera, so prodigious and strange, that [melancholy men] will not fear, feign, suspect and imagine unto themselves. Lod. Vives said in a jest of a silly country fellow that killed his ass for drinking up the moon: ut lunam mundo redderet, you truly may say of them in earnest; they will act, concieve all extremes, contrarieties, and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties.

- Vulgarity, cupidity, and power. Is that what frightens you? Is that all you see around you, and you think it was different then? Flanders in the fifteenth century, do you think it was all like the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb? What about the paintings we've never seen? the trash that's disappeared? Just because we have a few masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces? What about the pictures we've never seen, and never will see? that were as bad as anything that's ever been done. And your precious van Eyck, do you think he didn't live up to his neck in a loud vulgar court? In a world where everything was done for the same reasons everything's done now? for vanity and avarice and lust? and the boundless egoism of these Chancellor Rolins? Do you think they knew the difference between what was bizarre and what was beautiful? that their vulgar ostentation didn't stifle beauty everywhere, everywhere? the way it's doing today? Yes, damn it, listen to me now, and swear by all that's ugly! Do you think any painter did anything but hire himself out? These fine altarpieces, do you think they glorified anyone but the vulgar having men who commissioned them? Do you think a van Eyck didn't curse having to whore away his genius, to waste his genius, to waste his talents on all sorts of vulgar celebrations, at the mercy of people he hated?

Blood flowed over his broken tooth. He'd turned away, but swung about again unable to stop. - Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn't watching. Maybe He doesn't see. Oh, this pious cult of Middle Ages! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it. Your ... detail, he commenced to falter a little, - your Bouts, was there ever a worse bourgeois than your Dierick Bouts? and his damned details? Talk to me of separate consciousness, being looked at by God, and then swear by all that's ugly! Talk to me about your precious van Eycks, and be proud to be as wrong as they were, as wrong as everyone around them was, as wrong as he was. And Basil Valentine flung out a hand to the broken hulk on the floor, toward which he backed the retreating figure before him. -Separation, he said in a voice near a whisper, - all of it cluttered with separation, everything in its own vain shell, everything separate withdrawn from everything else. Being looked at by God! Is there separation in God!

The 9/11 Truth movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America's ruling class. In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life. It completely misunderstands the nature of American government -- fails to see that the old maxim about "the business of America is business" is absolutely true, that the federal government in this country is really just a lo-rent time-share property seasonally occupied by this or that clan of financial interests, each of which takes its 4-year turn at the helm tinkering with the tax laws and regulatory code and the rates at the Fed in the way it thinks will best keep the money train rolling.

The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal. That is the whole purpose of the racket of government. Another other use of it would be a terrible investment, and the financial class in this country didn't get to where it is by betting on the ability of a president whose lips move when he reads to blow up two Manhattan skyscrapers in broad daylight without getting caught.

But according to 9/11 Truth lore, the financial patrons of democratic government were game for exactly that sort of gamble. According to the movement, the Powers That Be in the year 2000 spent $200 million electing George Bush and Dick Cheney because they were insufficiently impressed with the docility of the American population. What was needed, apparently, was a mass distraction, a gruesome mass murder that would whip the American population into a war frenzy. The same people who had managed in the 2000 election to sell billionaire petro-royalist George Bush as an ordinary down-to-earth ranch hand apparently so completely lacked confidence in their own propaganda skills that they resorted to ordering a mass murder on American soil as a way of cajoling America to go to war against a second-rate tyrant like Saddam Hussein. As if getting America to support going to war even against innocent countries had ever been hard before!

The truly sad thing about the 9/11 Truth movement is that it's based upon the wildly erroneous proposition that our leaders would ever be frightened enough of public opinion to feel the need to pull off this kind of stunt before acting in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq. At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they've spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while middle America's jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of The People.

What you call dreaming is very real for the warrior.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

The so called "Russian Soul" can be also explained by origins of the Russian people. Proverbial slowness of Finns ("hot finish lads!") can be seen as phenomenon of Russian soul. Enigmatical Russian Soul is simply Russian man, uncertain, slow to decide, hesitating, never sure of itself, never sure of its own decision. Forest man with a milky skin, with thin blond hair. Not a Slav, but a Finn, Finn, Finn! And don't accuse me of racism. Happily we have Turks and all sorts of Mongols amongst us. But the sick from alcoholism urban Russian Europeans are descendants of native Urgo-Finns and their tribes. They have shadowy mysterious souls because for hundred generations their ancestors were living by the river banks in the forests. They like to get drunk and to weep. Of too many trees, of too much of river's water the Russian Soul is created.

[I]f once you're started in living, you're born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean, and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it's possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? ... how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it's possible and pretend to avoid it? Or ... to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.

- You listen to me. I've just taken a lot from you. I've taken a lot from people just like you. Just like you. That's tough, isn't it, just like you, that this town is loaded with people just like you, the world is loaded with people just like you. The honest men who are too good to fit anywhere. You're one of the people, aren't you. Look at your hands, have you ever had a callus? You don't get them lifting glasses. Who are you, to be so bitter? Have you ever done one day of work?
- Look
- And now I understand. And you talk to me about life, about real life, about human misery, Benny went on. He was not speaking loudly, nor fast, still the cold but vehement and level tone of his voice drew several people to turn around, and listen and watch. The other sat his ground with a patient sneer. - I offered you work, and you were too good for it. We buy stuff from guys like you all the time, writing under pen names to protect names that are never going to be published anywhere else, but they keep thinking they'll make it, what they want to do, but never quite manage, and they keep on doing what they're too good for. It's a joke. It's a joke, Benny repeated, and it was now that his voice began to rise.
-I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal, . . . spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard. Benny started to laugh.

The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation--similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks--and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.

Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.