the overcoming of marxism

 

Pre-paper clarifications … to avoid unnecessary misinterpretations.

 Axioms:

 1) Marx was a person working within an historical situation. 

2) marxism is a theoretical structure. 

3) revolutionary praxis is the activity, about which marxism is a theory … and within which it is to be judged as to its adequacy.

4) The necessity for revolutionary praxis is the basic axiom of this paper.

5) The value of a marxist dialectic, in its analysis of commodity production of Capital is central in revolutionary praxis for an understanding of what must be transformed

 but

 6) The sufficiency of marxism — or any theory in the classical sense — as the basis for revolutionary praxis is what is questioned: splinterisms within revolutionary movements (for example, into different kinds of hostile marxisms) is the natural bi-product of theory-fetishism — that is, the inability of persons and groups of persons to respond adequately to the demands of the quickly changing nature of existence.

 

Marx’s positive contribution to revolutionary struggle lies in his materialisation of idealistic and utopian schemes which, up to that point, had no critical objective basis. Hegel had shown that subjectivity was not static but dynamic and historical: Marx in turn transformed Hegel’s highly contemplative history into one that was sensual, material and directed towards active transformation. In particular, Marx’s theses on Feuerbach epitomised in aphoristic form, the central core of praxis as a subject-object dialectic, and his early manuscripts clearly show that this kind of materialisation of the Hegelian dialectic was no simple displacement of idealism by materialism, but a kind of synthesis and transformation: history was natural and nature historical.

However, Marx’s works and the materialistic conception of history have been taken out of their historical context as supra-historical truths: Marx became marxism and history, historicism. “Father Marx” became depersonalised and deified into a supreme authority about any topic historically available to him at his time, and even those that had not made their appearance. So wedded are certain kinds of revolutionary groups to marxism that they cannot distinguish between the content of revolution and one of its theoretical forms appearing in a certain situation… called “marxism”. Marx said he was not a “marxist” but a scientist and revolutionary, yet marxism is treated by many as if it were a universally correct approach whose essential perspective, although expressive of historical limitation and origination within a definitive context, is itself free of contradictions or dialectic movement. This theological approach is dangerously prevalent among those regarding themselves as contributing marxists (the heavies) — and I do not include in this category the strictly orthodox “marxists” often forming an entrenched nucleus within established communist parties: they are altogether too politically compromised to even be considered seriously as marxists of any colour for they have cut themselves off from the process of dynamic history. Unfortunately, this does include most of the novices from radical movements among youth all over the world who, in study groups and factory committees, eagerly accumulate marxist texts which then become the material, logical and psychological home base around which they mould and orient their thought and action, even if revisions or extensions are continually made.

As a result of such a “marxification”, the active immediacy of the historically happening present continually becomes subordinated to a highly mediated set of propositions essentially derived from previous experience, whose forms of structure increasingly serve as an unconscious conditioning grid of interpretation for whatever new happens, not realising the dialectic necessity of also regarding previous perspectives as “data” for new patterns still in the process of making their appearance. This is not to deny the importance and value of mediation and theory: it is indeed its affirmation as being an integral part of concrete sensual praxis. One cannot regard reflections of theory as mere abstractions at any time but must, rather, see reflective activity itself as a living material practice: it is never a question of simply “applying” abstract theory to concrete practice, but of relating one kind of human activity with other kinds, any one of which is literally ab-stract if isolated from the others.

History is thus not merely the emergence of new facts, but equally the co-emergence of new values and perspectives which are generalised into theoretical forms and patterns. To separate objectivity and history from its simultaneous co-appearance with interpretation, logic and subjectivity, is to mystify history into “once-and-for-all-givens” and dehumanise logic into idealistic patterns never given but only floating as mere “possibilities of relation”. Actuality and possibility, past and future become severed from their dynamic mutuality in an immanent present which is at once actual and possible, past and future, for it is a dynamic present in which any past structure is continually being redefined and transformed by the changing contexts within which it functions, and the future with its non-determinate possibilities is but an expression of the past in its state of yet making its appearance — that is, of yet disclosing the complex ramifications any one event has for the entire space-time structure it functions within. The present is not an abstract momentary “now” which severs an unchanging given and factual past, from an open, ungiven and only possible future: the present is the very process of events and objects “being-given” — and hence something which is neither given and fixed nor not given and abstract, but a dialectical gestalt within which such oppositions transform into, and relate to each other to express a living emergent totality and not an inert, mechanical set of things or concepts which can be manipulated “at will”, or which disclose a reality which is necessary and “without will”. In such a fragmented state it is impossible to co-relate economic (or biological) material necessity which seems to function without will, to political and ideological directives which appear to express a definite will set up to become realised. It is the old matter versus mind or body versus spirit gambit all over again. Such is the garbage that passes for most philosophy and political economy today in its highest and most sophisticated forms. Dialectical thinking and action have been reduced to ritual in the orthodox schools of “marxism”, and have been eliminated from the newer ones as being quaint but meaningless. It has been my experience to find practically no one who calls himself a marxist and who at the same time has any idea as to what dialectics as a living praxis means: no one of course has any inkling of what a dialectic logic or reasoning process would even look like. Such a situation is no crime in itself, but it becomes stupid, arrogant and dangerous when such persons do not even bother themselves with any thoroughly worked out reasons for the dismissal of dialectics, and at the same time institute a self-defeating attitude towards the paradoxical nature of a truly dynamic immediacy which contradicts their undialectical activity and pronouncements of theory.

Now the radical core of both revolutionary praxis and dialectics (which no matter how “limited” they were in their writing, neither Hegel nor Marx never lost complete sight of), lies precisely in the necessity of integrating all mediated and produced experience (“dead” labour called “capital” for example) within the context of immediate experience as on-going process (“live” labour). It is not that immediacy is “good” and mediation “bad”. Similarly, subjectivity (and not ego-identity) as a “field of presence” and objectivity or objectification as “localisations-within-presence” (which includes ego-identity as a localisation of subjectivity) are respectably neither good nor bad. To conceptually separate and thus categorise subjectivity or immediacy as an independent “existential”, “psychological” or “mystical” region existing in opposition to mediation and objectification in fact limits that “region” into but another kind of mediated and bounded product or “thing” — even if it is considered as functioning or “subsisting” on a different plane of existence. Subjectivity or immediacy, being the unbounded field within which and out of which bounded elements appear cannot, without distortion, be conceived or conceptualised in opposition to anything without destroying the very unbounded nature of immediacy or subjectivity. On the contrary, subjectivity as immediacy is revealed only through the very creating of forms, mediations and objectifications as trans-forms and self-mediations of and within a dynamic immediacy which is both source and sink of its own productions. Subjectivity and immediacy is the con-text, out of which texts continually take shape — creating a dynamic texture of reality which has no meaning if such subjectivity becomes undialectically localised into some predetermined essence, agent, class, individual, God, prime mover, Spirit or “course of history”. But then again to be a genuine revolutionary, is to take time seriously, and not just its partially determinate “trace” called memory (biologically speaking) or history (socially speaking). Reification, distortion, misperception, defence mechanisms, offensive reactions and exploitation all come about to the degree to which a distortion exists within any concrete subjectivity between immediacy as the non-localised field of reality that is yet to emerge into full presence, and its mediations as formed products, techniques and bounded structures which have already emerged, but which are still nevertheless in a state of appearing. It is really as simple as that: people know it intuitively, but professionals in any field tend to become trained out of it in due time, they “fall in love” with their own products!

In being a radical, therefore, I commit myself to the struggle against any transformation of conditional structures arising in time, into ahistorical and unconditional orientations called “truths” which repress and dominate conditional structures in their state of development. There must neither be an individualistic or private imposition of conditional structures by myself upon others, nor a collective and public counter-imposition of conditional structures upon myself. Dialectic living — within the social world of human relations — must thus conceive of liberation as a positive state of uninhibited subjectivity that really realises itself objectively as a person-to-person and face-to-face existence in which any one form of subjectivity or immediate presence realises itself through its contextual forms of co-subjectivity and co-presence: this makes intersubjectivity the very expression of what objectivity means: the non-existence of any form of monological self-contained “spirit” or “ego” regurgitating its dreams as a facade of reality. Subjectivity and immediacy is either a non-identifiable void and hence non-existent as any kind of object, or should it appear, it cannot be delimited into the sole possession of one mediated object (for example one ego-body or a collective ego-body such as the state) in opposition to its contextual bodies — and this includes the entire universe of interacting energy on all levels — natural and social. The very nature of subjectivity makes its existence intersubjective, interactive, and a mutual state of co-presence and co-determination — the most complex forms of subjectivity encountered to date being (apparently) the human being within his natural social world.

But once again, it is both the professional oppressors and the professional revolutionaries, by virtue of their self-importance, which fail to take such a complex and subtle dialectic of immediacy into direct account: complex theories, plans, accumulated structures, means, techniques, historical analyses of “facts and figures”, and a whole gamut of diversionary activity helps to disperse and sublimate the raw need disoriented, dehumanised and oppressed people have for their liberation — that is for their being able to express their objectivity positively as an intersubjective state of mutual response and response-ability. Professionals, theoreticians, and experts do not trust human immediacy and the spontaneous communality of organic co-immediacy which evolves in directions not necessarily in confirmation to their plans.

Now it is a commonplace truism that due to this complexity and subtlety of life and paradoxical (unlocalisable) immediacy — mediations, isolations, categorisations and divisions of labour and effort into self-consistent units are necessary. It is what scientists call “linearising” non-linear reality into separated variables. What is dangerous however, is their rationalisation into fixed and stabilised divisions and mediations which then subvert the dynamic of immediacy to those mediations or representatives of existence. The myth of consistency is the myth of not only the simpleton or liar, but of the defensive reactionary and offensive exploiter. Morality, dogma, “isms” of all kinds spring from the weakened person who cannot cope with the intricate complexity of paradoxical immediacy, and instead builds an elaborate schema of airtight dictions and contradictions into which the living tissues of experience become dissected. Purity is the sign of dishonesty, as is consistency or the need to orient all things into a uni-verse the sign of… fatigue. Which of course is not “bad”, for one must not in turn be forced to preach the necessity of being consistently inconsistent! Rather purity, singlemindedness of purpose, as well as tiredness, laziness, cowardice and sheer exhaustion are part and parcel of the nature of living immediacy and a complex state. What is reactionary, as Brecht so well put it, is to hide from it and hide it from others: rationalisation, schematisation, management, centralisation and thus imposition, repression and exploitation is the door to reaction and counter-revolution while any and all efforts to transcend such rationalisation is the dynamic of revolutionary praxis in a state of expressing itself.

Unfortunately within marxism, as well as in any “ism”, we always find the opposition between the purists and the pragmatists (or the orthodox and revisionist positions), neither of which know how to deal with living contradictions — that is, dictions and contradictions of fixated identity which are still perceived and conceived within the unfixed and fluid context in relation to which they function as identities made for the purpose of simplification, manipulation and technical control of a particular situation or structure. The purists want to deny them by an act of will and the pragmatists succumb to them through continual compromise… but in the meantime dictions and contradictions continue to accumulate into an inorganic capital of domination, for neither can see beyond the taking of positions of identity or concentrate on living one’s life as a continual trans-position and trans-formation process which is not dehumanised by conceiving it simply in terms of a conflict of fixed positions and counter-positions. Everyone is taking sides, making statements of position and sharpening arguments, (watch out you don’t become pinned down to one of those wishy-washy liberals!), but very few become that position, or “puts his money where his or her mouth is”: very few permit themselves in their direct and immediate bodily context of life and work, to be the reason and not only have or entertain a reason. Only by living one’s position can its transitivity be perceived. Marxism has become a disease! It is only for the weak or sick who do not know how to commit their own lives, and so either talk or direct other people’s lives according to their projected positions of identity. It has produced weak-hearted intellectuals and weak-minded activists, each being the abstract mirror image of the other, and hence each being what the other either intensely hates or eventually succumbs to. Very rarely has it produced either intellectuals or activists who know both the immediate and organic nature of their own human praxis, and its communal relation with the co-defining and co-immediate praxis of other living individuals and groups without first filtering this communal relation through a fixated perspective or “goal”. Instead of goals being a means for expressing human praxis, they become its end.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Marx as a scientist and a real human being who was dedicated in his efforts toward the liberation of humanity from oppression: marxism however is part of the problem and not its solution in any form. No one hardly comes up to the stature of a Marx, and so marxists can only parrot, distort, and rationalise his system to fit into alien historical conditions… rather than receive him as a human (a phrase rather distasteful to marxists today, since it sounds too religious or un-historical, but which, together with “naturalism”, Marx did not shirk from). One must receive his aphorisms on human activity, and scientific formulations about the models he made of political economy in order to develop them… not to worship and fetishise them into non-sense statements, programs, and calls to action. To be like Marx and to take him as a precedence means to know what precedence means dialectically: it means to be original and take a new step in direction… it means to act revolutionary in setting up a new idea and not to simply follow mechanically what was said. Marxists spend too much time reading text, but not apprehending the contexts within which texts become alive and which in turn can serve to give the direction and orientation needed for ascertaining relevant new directions — converting Marx into an integral part of a historical texture that is dynamic and truly scientific as well as human. But most marxist leadership does not know the subtlety of what it means to think (and not simply rationalise… they are too resentful and prone to guilt-complexes), or have the guts to directly feel their own sensual immediacy in human relation (it is too painful).

Now one of the reasons such a state exists today, is that for both Marx and his marxist followers (who could have helped transform the powerful and living core of what Marx intuited, into a meaningful insight for today), the central core of praxis as sensuous-human-activity tends to become replaced by the more manageable and simplistic one called “productivity, economic-forces and the material base”, with consciousness essentially as a reflection of and directional reaction upon that structure — that is, a super-structure. This, of course, unintentionally converts the super-structure into the main active-force — that is, the directional one loaded with political imperatives divorced from any direct responsibility for sensual existence or immediate reality (for example, Lenin, and the various forms of neo-leninisms prevalent today), and in turn makes the so-called structure a manure pile of mindless, sentimentalised masses that are entrenched in their misery and the subject matter for pity, guilt, political education and enforced ideological awakening, instead of being recognised as human centres of creative living and original thinking far more sensitive to the complexities of life than professional organisers who of necessity must be bound to the propagation of an essentially fixed idea or gestalt. Even if one praises “workers” for their successful struggles against exploitation, both the marxist and leninist position regard such struggles as only “local”, “parochial” and “trade unionist” until they are centrally linked and internationally coordinated into a consciously directed organisation which then and only then becomes the genuine vehicle for revolution.

The result of this separation of integral human activity into economic base and political super-structure (into necessity and will, past and future), is that the dialectic reality of Praxis becomes rationalised into a conditional structure of object production which is not in any way the equivalent to the praxis producing these objects or goals for object production: economic production presupposes already established plans and images that serve to direct activity along certain prescribed lines, while praxis refers to the ecological totality creating the images and directives set up for production as well as the objects produced. A marxist hence tends to become either an economic evolutionist (classical marxist) believing in the iron laws of necessity that work without will (the cunning of history) — for the images and directives of what human beings want, need and desire are already given and set, or a political interventionist (leninist-marxist) reading into everything which happens, and forcing out of all situations only those images and directives that are in accord to what he or she sees is necessary for the future to become liberated — directives and images not-present but in need of being forced into existence. In neither case is consciousness, the will, image formation, desire or subjectivity seen as an organic living and present process which is always in a state of being-formed and transformed, and hence in a continual feedback process with the necessity, objects, produced artifacts and world context to which and with which they are always being co-defining and co-re-defined. A marxist, like any professional with a capital “P” in any area of science or the humanities, falls victim to his own products, becomes seduced by his own desires, and hence cannot really exhibit genuine self-reflectivity or a genuine sense of humour. A marxist is an idealist caught in a materialist nightmare, and all that is left is… irony.

Consequently, we find that Marx himself focused on the psuedo-dialectics of a split “political economy” at the expense of integral or total living… living as the paradoxical trans-rational immediacy which is at once subjective (emotional, irrational, ideational, ethical, transcending) and objective — and furthermore is actively both of these without making one a simple reflection of the other. Marx’s insistence on treating almost exclusively those elements which could be “scientifically” or “rationally” articulated and organised precluded consideration of the larger non-rational rational domain of dynamic immediacy involving the material and functional presence of yet-to-be-formed and expressed desires and needs (as well as biological, sexual, psychological and para-psychological processes). It is this domain of dynamic immediacy as total interaction on many planes of existence out of which the mediated and more narrow, scientific, economic, political and technological ones emerge as but one kind of modality of awareness. Indeed both subjectivity and immediacy (for example, the immediacy of communal forms such as people’s councils or polis-bodies, soviets and grassroot collectives expressing intersubjective subjectivity but not mediated-technical groups — such as workers’ councils or political parties) become relegated to a derivatory position of being a “superstructure” of consciousness, rather than being recognised as precisely that which must underlie both objectifications called the working structure and the political, ideological superstructure for a society not to be degenerate. The political philosophers, instead, are still the “head” (or the organiser) while the working proletariat (or the organised) are the “heart” of the revolution. Such a reintroduction of the division of labour occurs not only in capitalist society, but in that ideology attempting to overcome it: marxism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and practically all marxist leaders were and are petty bourgeois intellectuals — and today, it is even worse, for most of these intellectual leaders (or those intellectuals who have made it up and out of the masses) feel guilty for not being one of the suffering masses: so they pretend that they are as exploited and as miserable as the masses, and by making all those not in power in a government part of the actual or potential proletariat that can rebel against those in power, they obscure both the inner contradictions within those that are in power and within those who are not, but are seeking power. And these contradictions are based precisely upon any division of labour or human activity which tends to form both within and between any two antagonistic groups — as but a further profligation of whatever alienation and domination already exists.

To take one important case. The working class as the exploited manual worker (and now the exploited white-collar worker, exploited woman or exploited minority class) may have been a good symbol at one time but it does not adequately account for the reality of social production and social creation which includes at all times, all and any energy, some of which is exploited and some of which is exploiting… some of which is dominated and organised and some of which is dominating and organising (that is, all leading vanguard groups). My god, how could anyone take seriously the obvious simplification (which scientists make in their tentative models) that only the hired workers produce value or contribute to active and form-producing labour and that the nasty old owners or owner-managers simply sit around and contribute nothing — neither them nor their political, military and police establishments. Exploiters, yes! Bastards and self-seeking individuals, double yes!! But useless, impotent and contributing nothing in the labour act? No. A thousand times no! It is not only muscle, but the brains necessary to organise, anticipate, manipulate and put together schemes of production, no matter how exploitative, which contribute directly to the finished product as a social reality. Why do you think that Russia, and now China in certain ways, are becoming an even more efficient system for exploitation? Active subjectivity has yet to claim the “ownership” of the true means of social creation and the total process of production which includes as commodities, any objectified structure, technique or goal to which subjectivity can become enslaved as a means for its continual production, accumulation and perfection. This includes the production of any kind of “structure”, such as economic systems, political parties (both those in an out of power), states, military organisations, religious and scientific hierarchies, socio-political techniques of control, medical-psychological-educational conditioning methods etc. To be free means to “own and control” all these means of production and not just the easily identifiable ones producing the economic goods of production. (Not seeing this, marxists have not in any significant way seen the re-creating of exploitative and dominating structures of political control and direction right within the heart of the so-called vanguard of revolution! Marxists regard neither the owners and directors of business nor the directors of political power as counting in value creation… it is only the ones who are directed and produce which count. What self-deluding and dangerous nonsense! Especially in contemporary society where the division of labour and technology has become so thorough, that the essential value of the commodities in a class society comes less and less from the “bottom”, but more and more from the “top” — that is, those who know how to pull pieces together into a saleable or usable system of commodities). Capital accumulation is not only an accumulation of a “hard-core” base, but equally well a systematic accumulation of a globally interlocked system of massive political control and brainwashing — with the marxists one of the most brainwashed… certainly much more than the active and alert bastards who control factories and political parties — no matter what party card they carry or ideology they mimic.

The source of all oppression, and the context for its elimination is the realm of active history-producing subjectivity… the source of all human manifestations. Active subjectivity always involves a fundamental insecurity of oneself as the maker of spontaneous acts which can outrun anticipation. This situation gives us both our hopes and fears, our dreams and flights of desperation. This root insecurity of human existence is the basis of human creation and destruction, human ex-pression or human sup-pression. This insecurity is an intrinsic part of a living open and non-bounded human being which as a human being cannot be secured by any religious revelation or social revolution as a possession of truth. Revolution is needed by humans to live in a state of self-responsibility for what they create out of and within this immediate, insecure and ever-changing reality of the world, and thus to destroy, upset and unmask those who offer the opium of security and total control — be it called state control, systems control, God control, self-control, mind control or what have you. The more one opts for control, the less responsive and active an organism becomes. The neutralisation of dialectic and paradoxical polarity and tension which is both creative and destructive, in order to erect a merely surviving and stabilised person, society or universe, is the idealism hiding under all non-dialectical awareness. Such neutralisation can take the form of either merging or cancelling out human opposites into “a-sexual” humanoid machines (the “brave new world” of a modern technocracy) or of separating opposites from each other — concentrating on merely preserving or projecting a fixed given image (for example, the conservatives and reactionaries of a given society, or the idealists, utopians functioning against them), or on merely destroying a fixed structure (for example, the destruction of “Capital”, work, the state etc)… the refusal to meet the immediate demands humans have of also knowing what is positive and creative. Revolution means the transcendence of any neutralisation of opposition and instead bringing about their integration, intercourse and generative properties: it means rebirth.

Subjectivity either recognises its earth-and-self shaking powers as creators of being, or it becomes carried along with the evolutionary karma of its objectified development. Subjectivity either chooses, or becomes chosen. Nothing is neutral… for long. The dialectic solution to any problem therefore quite literally lies in the dynamics of the problem: living the problem as an integral aspect of one’s own dynamic definition and destiny that is ever being-revealed — ceasing to objectify the problem into a merely “external obstacle” which one avoids or destroys. One must meet what meets us, such that in this mutuality of direct relation, trans-formation and transfusion is expressed, and not simply a static encounter which does not change anything, but only achieves a re-distribution of oppressive oppositions.

Revolution therefore means making one’s living the end, and any “end” or structure produced a means. Professionals, experts, technicians are always means… and if this is not recognised, it is the human being that gets the short end of the stick, or cattle prod. Revolution is not a special event or managed drama to state, but a total living process. Living with one’s family, persons at work, and all people you have actual sustained contact with (and not just books about people, and lectures to people in the form of masses and crowds) form the revolutionary front of one’s intersubjective existence. It is easier to talk about class struggle in categorical terms (Class Struggle) independent of its moment to moment manifestations. It is easier to act on a single line or set of lines that clearly maps out an easily recognised program to be for or against. It is easier to rap about productive forces, inevitable historical laws, or bourgeois mentality (now there is a favourite whipping horse projected upon others by any intelligentsia which is actually as bourgeois in its human relations with those it is the intelligentsia for, as many capitalist intelligentsia), and directing the world as a gigantic impersonal chess game — or war-game — putting oneself into the game and not thinking about yourself and others in any other capacity. After all revolution is a serious matter… it is easier (and more dangerous) to be a bore!

It is hard, however, to put into question and provoke thought and action in one’s own immediate living situation without a Party, theory or pet psychology standing above it instead of within it as a conditional structure, tool or means. We, in our actual context (as opposed to our idealised context obtained from intellectualisation about historical trends and world-wide situations not in direct relation to our lived day-to-day lives must become the source, together with other directly related groups of people, of communal living and working centres: we must set up social political people’s councils of direct intersubjective democracy and decision making, expressing our praxis through action and open-ended dialogue. Such organic spontaneous organisms have formed in the past (for example, the old Paris communes, early Russian soviets, Hungarian political and social councils during their short lived revolution and to many extents, early American religious communes and certain kinds of town-council systems — as well as other historical structures appearing and disappearing throughout the world, such as the Greek polis, and Hasidic communities contained elements of such organicity). And attempts at local levels are continually taking shape in all parts of the world, but many have not yet reached the level of self-consciousness necessary to know what their revolutionary role is while they are still functioning as seeds of new awareness within a world of old consciousness that continually works against their existence and proliferation. The essential point is to realise that a genuine revolutionary activity cannot centralise on Marx or any person, theory, class or party as an a priori given (let alone as an a posteriori given!), for no person or agent stands outside time and the dialectics of history as a predestined and hence objectified, secure agent of revolution. Revolution predestined and revolution betrayed!

And this consideration is perhaps the most crucial one to have in mind when it comes to an analysis of the existing radical organisations: marxist organisations which develop in particular contexts — such as women’s organisations, factory groups or white-collar groups — attempt a “unity of theory and practice” — that is, a unity between their programmes of action which are based upon certain perspectives of the prevailing capitalist-worker dynamics taking place, and the actual functioning of the various individuals as an intersubjective organisation that is non-repressive in its internal dynamics and appropriately responsive to the repressive society within which they exist. However this unity is not n organic one, stemming out of the life and activity of the group — that is, out of its intersubjective experience, within which any theoretical perspective or program of action takes shape as but a means of giving the actual existence of a more liberated group a more focused and efficient way of making itself felt present. Instead the individuals within the marxist group tend to see their group activity of intersubjective existence as but a means or vehicle for the fulfilment of a certain perspective — one that is marxist and hence exclusive of other competing ones. People and living situations on a local level are hence subordinated to the need to be consistent with what the intellectuals and professional organisers of the group have come to regard as the essential pattern of human relations present — no matter how much feedback and discussion there is between the makers of theory and the organisation of people embodying that theory: a marxist base is always a home-base for any expression, and as a result it cannot get out of the limitations that are of necessity inherent in making any one perspective — no matter how dynamic — central. It still amounts to subordinating the living-working process to a new orientation — instead of making the very essence of revolutionary process, the emergence of liberated living-working groups — that is, groups that on their local level take initiative and responsibility for the mutual decisions as subjects of as much of their activity in society as possible — and as a result subvert the power structures of society (that is, the institutionalised structures of political parties, educational systems, health and community welfare, production-centres, worker’s organisations etc) by actually challenging it with new forms of social existence instead of merely challenging it within the modality of the power structure itself — that is, with political calls to mass action and theoretical analyses which continually convert the actual living process into a means, and the program, cause or conquest of one’s enemy the end. A grand-style political war against power structures can only be “successful” to the degree to which those seeking power, have to become as organised and centralised as their adversary. Fighting one’s enemy using the same means ultimately converts fighters into but a counter-version of the enemy, for re-action and anger that has not been channelled into creative energy, merely tends to turn a master-slave power dynamics into an inverted form — with new masters and new slaves or followers. Marxists have not yet got the message of what the USSR means! The real challenge and fight is to undermine the actual life and social reality that exists at any point in the power structures of exploiting society, and the very exploitative nature of such power structures leaves many sensitive areas open to such a living and social revolution — a revolution not hemmed in by any preconceived notions and ideology as to what the economic or political structures first have to be before such a social organisation can come into existence! Marxism is still an idealistic dogma to the degree to which it subordinates the actual social intersubjective life to economic and political structures, or the so-called “structure” and “super-structure” of society, instead of seeing that in reality it is the other way around. One must first actually function as an expression of a healthy and integrated intersubjective organism to the best of one’s ability (despite and because of what limitations there are), and out of that reality the technical means — that is, the economic production process and political or coordinating system — will find their subordinate place as objectifications. Otherwise if one allows political directives and economic forces to be the foundation, then one’s actual social life will only become a means — producing heroes and people who dedicate and sacrifice their lives, but not creating anything revolutionary — anything that is a new form of life that can grow autonomously out of the womb of “Capital” as did capitalism first grow autonomously out of the womb of feudalism as a new form of social existence — undermining it from within — forced revolution from outside is thus un-marxist as well as un-dialectical! Only a healthy life and consciousness produces revolution: those who are merely sick and caught within diction and simple contradiction… those who are merely sick by being deprived or repressed or simply sick because they deprive or oppress, do not produce revolution, but only reinstate a repression through a master-slave dialectics of resentment replacing resentment — ad infinitum.

Revolution is a call for the end of contradiction and sickness! How many marxists have worried needlessly that the so-called free society they are opting for (if they bother to think about it) will be both free of contradiction — and hence free of… motion, desire and real change. It is not unlike the theologians who had invented the opium called heaven, where it was likewise difficult to imagine the life of an angel, or the life on a resurrected world without contradiction. But contradiction stands in dialectics as that which must be overcome — not to produce identity and stasis, but to awaken the real movement contradiction merely tends to hide, by making movement itself primary, and any product a means. This is what is meant by the “dynamics of immediacy”, or the “ethics of immediacy”. Contrary to both Marx and Hegel, it is not contradiction which gives rise to movement but contradiction which stagnates movement into fixed oppositions: it is only the transcendence of contradictions back into their state of fluid paradox, where every boundary is at once transitive and not simply positive or negative — which re-leases blocked motion into creative movement. It is only when a self-transforming dialogue between so-called opposites takes place in a face-to-face encounter in direct immediacy, that the rigidity of identity and possession inherent as a tendency within any subjectivity is vividly revealed to be the burdensome energy consuming mask under which all life wants to hide from the insecurities of fluid paradoxical reality: it is only when brought face-to-face with the self-contradiction of investing one’s living energy to create a cumbersome structure of defence or offence no longer capable of enjoying or directly experiencing its own energies, that a desire, and indeed a very subversive desire, for genuine change and revolution can be brought into being.

Marxism, capitalism, feudal monarchies, christianity and all religions, liberalism and “civilisation” in general… you name it: they all talk about what is “good” for the person “objectively” — and they never get to the very messy (and visceral) problem of DESIRE. This is, of course, why Nietzsche was right when he regarded the history of the next 200 years to be still caught up in the nihilisms which arises from the stagnant morality of perverted bourgeois-christian values when their unfounded absoluteness disintegrates. For when one leaves the safety of theoretical formulations, spiritual gymnastics, political programming or speechmaking — and one begins to meet with other people as actual persons (and not just representatives of an ideology or plan of action) then one is left with an abandoned body full of eros and desire, abandoned by the very absence in all theory of the very vital existence of such a subjective state called desire. Such an abandonment means that in practice revolutionaries and the oppressed can be as ruthless, power oriented and lust dominated as any person is, who has not sought to transform at the very root, the dichotomy between theoretical formulation and genuine personal existence. If this dichotomy is not transcended, then political theory can only be transformed into alienated personal action, and personal existence in turn categorised away within the theoretical structures that are now force-pumping evermore alienated political activity. Neither classes nor individuals make revolution. Neither a “political life” that subordinates the individual person, nor a private life that is isolated from political and social reality is revolutionary. Both are repressions of subjectivity and an example of social, subjective sickness. Sickness and contradiction only produces more sickness and contradiction.

Revolution must come out of those tissues which are still healthy and living — wherever they are active and hiding — by making an appeal to them as living tissue and not as tissue to be sacrificed and made sick. Furthermore curing sickness is not primarily done with drugs — not with a catatonic retreat from contradiction — or surgery — the paranoidal counter-attack both of which only deform and make one more sick. Drugs and surgery are useful when it is a question of survival: similarly, it may be necessary for survival to kill, attack and defend — but don’t call it revolution. Call it survival and we have no argument here.

Revolution can only come to the degree to which one wants to actively live and to be open, and not simply kill, attack or defend. It is only those who know what living tissue is… it is only those who know what a good-life means (not dismissing such a notion as “utopian nonsense”) that can help convert a battle for survival into a revolution which transcends the usual techniques necessary to carry out a “rat-race” of survival. A good life, indeed, has nothing to do with grand utopian plans for a glorious future… and attempting to dismiss such plans as not being relevant now (but only “after” the “revolution”!) only reveals that these people still do not know what revolution is, for they are surreptitiously dreaming and deluding themselves about the good-life-to-come, and not the life that needs to be expressed now: only life will give birth to life: sickness of any major proportion can only lead to degeneracy, and most professionals having to do with sickness, or good and evil — that is, revolutionary politicians, psycho-analysts, priests or any of the so-called “men-of-god”, “men of morality” and their academic apologists and power-hungry beneficiaries are all obsessed with sickness, filth, revenge, punishment, conquest, destruction, psychosis, neurosis, death, blood and hate. They do not know that a good life is a free life, which is not necessarily at the same time a life free of pain or a life full of goods — or even a life of liberty in which one is not hemmed in, such as when one is confined to a hospital or living within a repressive society which limits one’s actions. They do not know that a free life is a life that is directed towards the expression of all its creations and products (under whatever conditions of liberty or restraint — for example, as in the French underground during World War II) as a self-creation and self-enjoyment of the dynamic immediacy which is ever present as the source and sink of whatever identifications emerge. Such an “ethics of immediacy” is present as the very condition that one is, no matter in how much restraint, pain and sickness, still alive and an organism which is in an active relation with its dynamic context… and hence an organism that can be cured.

Health and a good life is not a quiescent passive enjoyment of the senses or an escape or boredom — such as those who live in sickness with their expressed or hidden plans for heaven and utopia (or marijuana) imagine, in the heat of their pained existence, to be the solution. A healthy life wants, needs and desires to continually becoming healthier, deeper and richer… it seeks to “overcome itself” by being at one with the ever-transcending dynamics of immediacy which knows no final product or goal. Those, however, who are sick and in pain, imagine such a healthy life that is ever expanding only in terms of the ever-expanding pain and insecurity it could bring. Not being able to face an unbounded possibility of terror, and existential anxiety which the dynamics of immediacy does not exclude, they equally cannot imagine the possibility that life in its turn is directed towards an unbounded surge for its self-transcendence and self-creation into newer dimensions not even visible.

So the sick become myopic and talk only about short plans — plans for survival — means for getting just a little more. They also talk about sudden changes into a complete opposite state at a certain point, in which all of a sudden the whole state of transformation will appear. The sick think only in terms of contradicting identities called parts or wholes, but never in terms of a dynamic totality which is immediate — here and now, and for that very reason, in a continual state of becoming-itself through all mediations, negations and contradictions — should they arise. The sick, being small, are victims of “hubris”, thinking for a moment, or for a whole life time, that they can own, possess or “solve” the secrets of their life, instead of living it, or ground its “freedom” upon the accumulation of “necessary” objective actions, attacks, theoretical structures and plans, defences, protection, security, wealth or what-have-you. The sick do not experiment… with themselves as part of the experiment, for you must let go and live directly within the non-protective immediacy of a self-becoming but also self-negating life. The sick do not have a genuine sense of humour — a sense of perspective for true novelty: they need security too much and a well-defined identification of their particular cause or way of life.

But the sick, in existing, are still alive and hence an example of some kind of health — perhaps a very deep health buried deep within. And those who are healthy are continuously subject to becoming sick: only a truly healthy person will not linearise sickness and health into a new fanaticism, converting health itself into an accomplished state. Indeed it is only the truly healthy who know how to deal with sicknesses which can continually emerge — and how to overcome the sickness not as a victory to be celebrated as a triumph, but as what it means for one to get on with… living: sickness, disease, repression, exploitation, anger and violence which destroy life must be understood with exacting objectivity and with uninhibited compassion — but not with anger or pity. Sickness of any kind is not just an “external” enemy, but comes right out of the depths of what-ever is living. Revolution on the social level is the only response to sickness on that plane by recognising the “enemy” to be a battle all people have within themselves — within the struggle of subjectivity against falling victim to its own creations and becoming a means to be consumed, instead of an end, even if some are more caught up in that sickness than others, and hence subjected to a power structure that makes them unreceptive to being an active part of the transformation process. The revolutionary is the healthy man — the passionate one full of Eros, and the compassionate one full of Logos.

For the revolutionary, revolutionary consciousness and praxis is, consequently, not one which can be formulated on a theoretical-reflective level as a goal, to which one then responds with “techniques” and criteria of “efficiency” by acting out a solution or means to that goal. Every goal or end, coming as it must from a focused perspective, raises but another problem, namely that of relating the means used, to the end it is supposed to achieve… which if taken seriously and focused upon as another (secondary) end must in turn have its means… and so on and so on… revolution or genuine transformation can so easily give birth to the hell of Hegel’s “bad infinity” and a technocracy of inhuman existence.

The dialectical, paradoxical solution of any problem, however, quite literally lies in the dynamics of the problem itself: it lies in living the problem in all of its human dimensions as simultaneously as possible, and thus in direct contact with all of the contradictions that have emerged and then become repressed precisely by the institutionalised divisions of attention consciousness has dissected the dynamics of subjectivity into. A problem ceases to be “a problem” and becomes an expression of one’s life praxis and immanent telos when it no longer fractures subjectivity into self-contradictory moments, but instead becomes an integral expression of the very life-dynamics of that subjectivity: that to which one offers one’s life in a full and open way is a destiny freedom chooses and not any longer a fate hanging or oppressing an arbitrary isolated will. It is one thing to have “a problem” which unsettles one’s entire being for one has not yet chosen himself as a freedom-actualising, revolutionary subject. Such a situation can either lead to its dissolution — that is, into unconsciousness of the problem, or its resolution — that is, the redefinition of one’s being as a revolutionary subject for whom the entire world is the locale and “testing ground” of his revolutionary spirit, with no particular problem or objectification unsettling his decision to act as a subject — that is as long as the revolutionary subject can maintain and persist in his decision to act as a subject… to persist when all objective rationalisations predict a “probability of success” indistinguishably close to zero. That is the real test.

Revolutionary consciousness is therefore paradoxical-dialectical consciousness in that any attempt to bring about revolution as a delimited goal to be achieved and not as an immanent living process merely reproduces the problem one is attempting to solve — namely how to make one’s living a totalising process within which any goal or object of production is always and only a conditional structure and means, no matter how pressing and important any particular goal of the moment or the future may be. Revolution means making one’s actual living the end, and any goal or so-called “end” a means. It is hence a radicalising stance in opposition to simple linear evolution in which goals and objects of production or realisation (including revolution) become the end,… and one’s life a means. Yes one must sacrifice oneself for revolution... but it is not the fullness of one’s life, but rather one’s fetishes, one’s projections and one’s pro-jections which must be sacrificed and which in turn have made one’s life a sacrifice to the achievement or realisation of something which is itself only a conditional product or realisation of a moment in time: such indeed makes life meaningless, for now the creative, non-bounded and hence immanently-transcending activity of life-energy has been allowed to atrophy... and for what end? Suicide! Beware of anyone (including yourself) who asks you to sell out or commit to enslavement the very “thing” you want to save or liberate: dialectical living is not contradictory living in which one dies of “A” in order to get “notA”... in which one opts for production-oriented existence and efficiency of technique in order to achieve ecologically balanced existence which subordinates technique; in which one opts for centralisation of organisation in order to achieve the abolition of a centralised state. Dialectical living is rather paradoxical-living in which both “A and notA” are grasped as two sides of any one activity — namely the activity of life which has the capacity to create and actualise these damn distinctions in the first place, and a life which must continually relate to opposite alternatives of any one act of objectification, delineation or boundedness, even as it strives, asymmetrically, to actualise into explicit and independent being one of the opposites, by making the other implicit and dependent (as, for example, subjectivity versus objectifications, or immediacy versus mediations, which are dual, paradoxical and symmetrical expressions of mutual opposition only within a dynamic of immediacy and subjectivity, and not the other way around). Dialectical opposites are at once symmetrical and asymmetric! Dialectical-paradoxical living means returning to the essential simplicity of integral life, out of which but within which all opposition must be met... as the “self-opposition” of a dynamic immediacy continually ex-pressing itself through its own transformations. Understanding this rhythmic self-relating dynamics of life is a first step to revolutionary praxis… but living it with the totality of one’s being, within which understanding or knowledge have been transformed into the wisdom of “right action” must be the immanent-Telos (but not projected goal) of any genuine-understanding-in-the-process-of-its-continual-self-realisation.

Revolution and dialectics thus means bringing all contradictions to the light of day, which are always contradictions of the evolutionary process of objective development which continually and in so many subtly different ways tends to heighten specialisation and compartmentalisation as ends in themselves for the sake of the efficiency with which specified and thus delimited goals of evolution are achieved. Revolution cannot in any way be the result of evolution, but must reverse wherever and whenever possible its linearity and thus fulfil the objectifications and material productions that evolution has developed out of the creativity of immanent subjectivity by returning to that subjectivity as that which is both the telos of evolution and the origin of evolution: revolution is ever waiting to be the fruition of the potential means for living created by the productive forces of evolution, but such fruition does not come automatically, naturally or of necessity: it must be forged and created and this is the price one pays by not being only a factor within natural evolution. So-called “natural-automatic-evolution” which is simply conscious of itself, consciousness which is simply evolutionary (as, for example, the evolution of capital and the techniques of control) is a contradiction-in-terms, for consciousness is the re-volutionary act or spark setting into motion the reversal and hence realisation of development and thus is not to be confused with academic, passive or repetitive “consciousness”, that is, reflective image consciousness which merely reproduces in mirror form that which has already been created and hence is impotent to create or transform. It can only classify and accumulate. Revolution is the radicalisation (going-to-the-root) of evolution: revolution literally means re-volution and the immanent circle from subjectivity, through objectification is, to and for subjectivity… and consequently an objective subjectivity also manifesting itself in space as inter-subjectivity (from subjectivity, through its creations, to and for subjectivity existing objectively in relation with any co-initiating subjectivity).

Revolution also means bringing out (edu-cating) all suppressed feelings and thoughts which arise from linear evolution and its accumulating contradictions so that they can once again function as immediate elements one can respond to. It means turning one’s life inside out. It means destroying the accumulating and only automatically functioning past as an organic capital which continually dictates and manipulates a person’s living energy for the sake of dead and past experience, by integrating this past with the present. Revolution is a transformation of the time process itself — of the accumulating Karma of one’s objectifying existence which would simply continue to cause us to re-enact, ever more efficiently, the dramas and traumas of the past: revolution means overcoming the falsified and mythical separation between the past as The Given and co-ordinating essence of things, and the future as the irrational Not Given and hence ex-istence of things: it is experiencing the reality of time as that which is continually being-given, in which the present and the immanently new is ever transforming the past — which itself was a previous present — into a future or new-past of and within the context of the ever-changing but immanent-present. Real movement is always and only movement from present to present, and revolution is the rejuvenation and recall of any cut-off and alienated past that separates into isolated moments, any one present from another. Revolution is achieving genuine continuity of all presents as an immanent presence, within which any complexity of differentiation or objectification serves to enrich this content rather than repress it. Any repressed continuity of presence or subjectivity will only tend to erupt as impulsive, irrational, subjectivity destroying the (compulsive) rational world order (or rational world movement and revolution) of externally ordered discontinuity — called objectivity: that is why it is objectivity which appears to the alienated being as rational-order and hence a rational continuity of existence, while subjectivity or emotion or feeling a disruption of that rationalised continuity. But that is the lie which revolution must literally up-root by being the ever-present call to genuine immanent subjectivity which is not irrational but trans-rational and the foundation of rationality.

Further, revolution is the trans-formation process itself, within which evolution is only a formation process, and consequently it is neither the destruction of the past (which the purists like to think they do, when in fact the past is only suppressed) nor the preservation or succumbing to the past (which the pragmatists, professional revolutionaries, and “realists” want — for the past or any recently acquired past is always there and it must have its claim on the new and as yet uncivilised and uncultivated barbaric present). Revolution is hence the genuine redemption of the past, by the present… such that the future no longer acts as a repetition and projection of the past, but instead melts into the continuity of presence as a living present which can fully extend its energy and power into all directions of time: the radical immanent transitivity of time, and the transcendence of time into a continuity of presence are identical. It is time to radicalise marxism and return it to its right path — namely to the job of materialising the utopia the idealists and anarchists have been pointing to, and to stop futzing about for ideas and critiques in the carcass of capitalism, political economy, and all this metaphysical propensity to categorise all things into a misleading terminology dealing with “objective” necessity and “historical forces”. It is time for marxism to stop hiding behind the mask of Hegel and issue forth some real materialist dialectic. It is time for a real living and working unity of both the idealising and materialising forces of humanity, for man is dialectically both at once. Finally it is time to re-study the dialectics of evolution and revolution, seeing how they oppose, yet complement and complete each other by the inverse ways in which evolution involves the objectification of subjectivity out of dynamic immediacy while revolution means the re-subjectification of objectivity back into a state of creative dynamic immediacy — how evolution is the development of necessity (and technology), while revolution is the manifestation of freedom — how in effect evolution is an outward “yang” modality of expansion and development while revolution and return (radicalising back to the root) is an inward “yin” modality of completion and perfection, without which evolution becomes self alienated from its immanent immediate totality. One can even co-relate the ever expanding evolutionary yang like forces with the rational, “masculinisation” of society, and revolution with the holistic and immediate oriented yin like forces of “re-feminisation” and hence with the demolishing of the “feminine mystique” as the dark, maternal womb of non-structured irrational forces to which one in times of distress wants to return, but against which one continually has to fight in order to maintain the ever progressive development of rationality, order and structure. One has to transcend the “spectacular society” which deals only with large-scale dramatic and abstract movements, and balance these with the power of intimacy, direct, sensual contact and the need to experience vulnerability and openness and not escape from the vulnerability of one’s subjective presence back into the safer realms of the fast, the large, the gigantic, and the overpowering, for all are in their unbalanced extreme but signs of impotency and alienation. One gets so used to thinking in large-scale historical, geographical movements that the creative generating power of active, individual and intersubjective immediacy becomes eclipsed: one allows oneself to be faked out of being significant “just” by virtue of his sheer but genuine presence, which is actually the hardest thing to maintain without becoming “locked in” to an instrumental attitude toward the world and oneself.

A critical re-examination of the meaning of evolution and revolution, or objectification and re-subjectification, however, means that the materialism or “nature” which marxists pay such great lip service to, must also be re-studied, for it is not at all the way they characterise it. Nature, as we now understand in a much clearer way, is not just an awesome monster of alien forces (as Marx describes it in his German Ideology) — void of exhibiting genuine relation, and against which primitive man merely saw himself as a pitiful fate-ridden plaything. Such a perspective would naturally give justification for looking toward nature is something to conquer and put under rational control — to force it to do man’s bidding. As one would a horse, or a woman... or as the white man did to the primitive cultures it met and “civilised”. However humans emerged and still emerge out of nature as part of nature, and in ecological relation with nature. Natural religion was not just an expression and sublimation of fear (which it was in very profound ways), but it also was a positive and joyful manifestation of the intimate and erotic relation human beings have in relation to nature. Natural, organic subjectivity precedes rationalising production-oriented subjectivity with its heightened instrumentality that seeks to dominate and exploit nature and therefore man as part of nature, producing use value and exchange value out of her bowels. The whole notion of tools that have become detached from their origin as an expression of the interaction process between human beings and their co-determining environment — and the whole notion of rationally controlled instruments being employed by humans as a means for their ideationally formed needs — is completely blind to the way in which these “detached” tools and instruments, being material and not some neutralised “plastic”, and having their own intrinsic logic of relations, in turn forces humans to become their means: technological man. There is simply nothing which can only be present as a means, for it in turn has its own modality of presence, and hence it likewise can function as a field of subjectivity, subjecting its context to its power.

A genuine revolutionary praxis must, therefore, be one which restores natural material subjectivity in balance with productive instrumental subjectivity; it must recognise the whole universe to consist of various levels of creative emergence. Natural subjectivity includes libidinal energy, sexual relatedness, and deeper than that, it is an expression of all material forms insofar as they are not merely localised as passive inertia-bound particles, but expressive of resonant field-states of energy continually interweaving the physical universe with organic (non-linear) patterns and rhythms of self-organising movement. Just as, on a conscious-cultural level, praxis is a basic intersubjective field condition resulting in the production and localisation of humanised objects as expressions of intersubjective communion and communication, on a free-conscious level (or, if you will, on a co-functional level in relation with the emerging dynamics of human interaction), interacting field-energy likewise expresses itself through its manifestation of particles of mass, serving to expand the depth and scope of its modality of interaction. In both cases, objectification of subjectivity (localisation of generative power-fields) is a crystallisation process, with the difference being that human subjectivity has evolved a highly localised, focal, retentive network of self-organising feedback structures in the form of an ego-ego dynamics of mutual-self-development or mutual-self-destruction. This means that on the human level, time becomes expressed as cultural-history, each succeeding generation of evolving subjectivity developing its potentialities by means of an ever-increasing feedback process between its steadily increasing past (stored or “dead” energy, information, habits and products) and its ever-changing present (live energy and power). It also means that human subjectivity, through this past-present dynamics, can project the future in terms of value judgements and ethical codes based upon the type of relation each culture is expressing through its particular kind of past-to-present dynamics.

However, Marx, Freud, Hegel, Nietzsche and many of the intellectuals of the 19th century viewed the world from a “masculine-urban-western-white man’s” perspective, even if some of their most profound insights transcend these limitations. Thus nature, non-centralised rural areas, and “femininity” were regarded as a lower order of existence from the centralised and “rationalised” world of masculine resourcefulness and conceptualisation. Marx was for the centralisation of the autonomous street sections created during the Paris commune, and against their existence as direct revolutionary forms of a new kind of social existence, attacking domination and centralisation (but not coordination and mutual responsibility) and growing out of the very womb of the old social forms. Lenin, in turn, was against the anarchists in their insistence for regarding the Soviets and other such people’s councils (as opposed to the more technical workers’ councils, or parliamentary parties, both of which are co-optable into hierarchical systems of domination) as the true ground for revolutionary society. Both Marx and Lenin concentrated upon the political act as a transfer of power from one hierarchical structure to another — and hence from one kind of capital accumulation and system-production to another. As Ellul in “The Technological Society” points out in thousands of fascinating ways, (even if one does not agree with his perspectives) any kind of technique which becomes an end instead of a means, by becoming separated as a structure from that which it structures, merely becomes integrated into a self-accumulating and self-directing structure of oppression and thus a new form of “capital” accumulation and exploitation, and not its transformation. (See Jacques Ellul[1]: a must for any marxist who wants to transcend one-dimensional political economy and come to grips with the real problem: production and ownership not only of physical goods in a pre-20th century fashion, but the production of whole systems-of-relations on all dimensions of life — right down into the production and control of one’s feelings and thoughts. Production includes political-organisation and intellectual generation as but another commodity and not simply as a social phenomenon of class consciousness or super-structure reflection that is part of a directing and decision-making process outside of production and hence as a process not for sale. Unless the so-called “state-capitalism” of the USSR for example, is not thoroughly examined as being an intrinsic part of both the history of capitalism and marxism, and not just a local peculiarity irrelevant for a self-understanding of what in fact marxism has aided in giving birth to, then even more drastic mistakes of judgement will be made by those marxists who are genuinely trying to be revolutionary, but have not seen the absolute and dialectic necessity for viewing their own history in a self-reflective manner.)

Thus, in order to prevent any revolution from merely re-forming an oppressive accumulation of a more complex nature, actual human-to-human praxis constituting active people into genuine states of intersubjective communality is first needed... in order to radicalise the decision-making process underlying the heart of class-fractured societies — that is, societies in which institutionalised divisions of labour have become the basis for alienating the techniques and control of production, and of life, from the products produced and the people utilising these “goods and services” as means for their human existence... which includes more than mere physical survival: a benevolent dictatorship scientifically run and administered to submissive people could achieve such an end far easier. As Martin Buber says, “... of the three modes of thinking in public matters — the economic, social and political, Marx exercised the first with methodological mastery, devoted himself with passion to the third, but absurd as it may sound in the ears of the unqualified marxist — only very seldom did he come into more intimate contact with the second, and it never became a deciding factor for him.”[2]

I, as a subject, am an element of an organic-ecological intersubjectivity of energy-fields, patterns and rhythms always present on any level of material existence: anything having direct presence to and with that which is in turn directly present, functions as an open-system or “energy-source”, is active, and cannot be de-limited into a mere passive object of delimited existence... such is the nature of subjectivity. Human subjectivity brings into existence a system of ego consciousness and thus a history of personal and cultural-social development. The dialectic of such an explicit and singular subject-to-subject process is the essential content of revolutionary activity, as opposed to the more common “subject-to-object” (or self-to-world) modality characteristic of linear, non-dialectic approaches in which one element (the subject) is merely active and its complement (the object) is simply passive or reactive.

Objectivity, properly understood, functions as the localising, transitive and mediating means through which any one form of presence, immediacy or subjectivity realises itself as a direct process of relation to and with its co-determining states of presence, or forms of subjectivity. All subjectivity relates to subjectivity through objectifications... as a singular process... just as any state of temporal presence becomes negated not into the past as a given, but self-negated into a new form of presence through the past as the mediating content of-and-within a dynamic present which is ever producing and transforming structures into view. Alienation exists only to the extent to which the past, objectifications and derived and produced structures (such as a projected “future”) appear as the orientation or “telos” of a subject, instead of subjectivity itself as an intrinsic intersubjectivity and functional as a dynamic present-to-present state of being. Any one subject couldn’t even ex-ist without contextual state of subjectivity or presence with which it is an expression of the self-mediation of subjectivity into intersubjectivity (making objectivity and mediation the middle transitive term). Too many marxists view dialectics mechanically — that is, they forget that physical-biological human beings are in their very material-emotional (and hence neurological, psychological, chemical etc) makeup, already expressive of an on-going intersubjective process. Neither separated singular individuals nor a collection of individuals called a singular group exists as an actual fact: intersubjectivity cannot reduce collective and social phenomena to pre-existing personal ones, nor derive personal psychological phenomena from already-developed social activities. Both the personal and political, the individual and collective mutually develop in co-immediacy and co-mediation, the very notion of a human biological gene already expressing some kind of social process as its context of origination, and the very existence of common social interests already expressive of the individual particulars through which such a common interest is possible, and hence also subject to.

It is only non-dialectical and non-revolutionary perspectives which bring into play the alienating abstraction of reductionism: here the dynamic, objective and mutual “I and Thou” relation of direct-contact and intercourse which actually exists between any one human and his or her contexts of other beings, (a contact which does not necessarily mean approval) becomes reduced to the typical “Self versus Other” mechanics in which already-determined self-enclosed subjectivities face each other in ambiguity: how can elements which are intrinsically different also display a real communality of positive or negative relation without contradiction? An “I and Thou” relation on the social level is not a passive “love act” of submission, but rather requires the utmost of strength in order to bring into full realisation... since it requires that each subject perceives the other subject in his or her actual state of contextual relationship with the other without confusing the products, images and projections created as a means for relation to become instead the end... converting a human contact into an ideological one in which the subjective source or process of all products becomes eclipsed from view. All one then perceives is the validation or invalidation of his or her own already-formed images of what the other is doing — and hence puts one into a disadvantageous position vis-a-vis the reality of what is actually going on: self-delusion as well as other-delusion spring mutually from the disassociation of genuine social intercourse. To be a revolutionary is to first regard all and any subjectivity with careful respect and regard, for it is only subjectivity as the creative agency which is the source for both suppression or liberation, and not the fetishised objects (for example, commodities in the form of goods, plans, theories or any mediating techniques) which are always and only the means. Beyond exchange value (and money) as the active symbol of alienated, fetishised objectivity, lies use-value as the object itself... but behind both objectifications lies human value, that is, the actual intersubjective “I and Thou” dialogue for which these objectifications came into existence in the first place! The task of the revolutionary is hence to re-evoke genuine contact, intercourse and dialogue between persons held responsible for their products and creations... an existential dialogue in which the language utilised is one’s whole bodily being and not a mere outpouring of alienated fragments in the form of detached intellectualisations, or nearsighted programmes of action taken without perspective... that is, without the perspective of knowing how it is going to be received by actual subjects and not hypothetical images one has about these subjects. Good and evil, friends and enemies must be received... only then will the walls one creates to protect the root insecurity of an open and receptive subjectivity be understood as the true basis of fear, enclosure, defence, attack and domination. Only then can there exist the possibility that no new reaction-formation will form to simply replace one form of wall or identity accumulation by another more efficient one. Genuine love or compassion is the hardest of all — far simpler than mere sympathy or antipathy (pity or anger) — for it is based upon existential empathy, and an attempt to transform the self-contradiction any subjectivity gets into by his or her degeneration into an objectified and alienated subjectivity: one simply does not have the time or power to love enough, and to recognise hate or anger and pity as frustrated love. But without recognising that genuine human value is intersubjective, dialogical and based upon the need humans have of being-received as true responsive subjects, revolution automatically degenerates into a war of attack and survival: genuine transformation beyond hate and anger means that social revolution and person-to-person relations must have the education (bringing out) of love and compassion as the ever-present telos guiding it where-ever possible, and not to rationalise it away as unnecessary when one finds it impossible to bring about in any particular situation. (Such, indeed was Che Guevara’s notion of revolution — despite his limitations.) Love, as revolution, is beyond the alternatives of merely accepting (conforming to) or rejecting (rebelling from) an objectified person or given position: it is living and learning to live with what meets you in such a way that the unbounded immediacy present between elements-of-relation can become liberated from given or fixated images and ideology, thereby permitting a creative intercourse to emerge from the dynamic nature of subjectivity, instead of a destructive and exploitative intercourse when one only becomes “screwed”.

We now have both the basis for a critique of standard marxist “class analysis” and out of the various different kinds of critique that are possible, the basis for reconstructing a dialectical “trans-marxist” class analysis based upon the revolutionary nature of “subject-to-subject” dialectics developed above: instead of merely being a vague principle of social existence, the very nature of what a singular subject to subject dialectic implies when it comes to social organisations can now be spelled out in concrete terms. Thus, without a living awareness of the singular and irreducible nature of intersubjectivity (that is, intersubjectivity is not a systems-structure either imposed upon or derived from the individual subjectivity), struggles for liberation from subjective domination can always convert the dialectical and complementary relation between subject and object, into a contradictory one... in which one form of subject known as the “self” or the individual person, comes into automatic conflict with its own counter-form known as the “other” or the collective public: intersubjective texture has been severed into text versus context. As a result class-formation based upon the “self” as an exclusive individualism with a private ownership of the means of production will only tend to be in conflict and alternate with class formation based upon the “other” as an exclusive collectivism with the public ownership of the means of production under the leadership of political professionals and their intelligentsia — that is, those whose responsibility it is to prevent any form of private ownership or interests from appearing because they regard themselves as the legitimate embodiment of the “popular will”. Both, however, are but different forms of structured capital accumulation (dead and past labour) in the fear of the genuine opposite: living labour in immediacy and direct presentness.

In the Russian revolution Lenin’s drive toward professionalism and technocracy in order to avoid individualistic degeneracy, resulted in a centralised ownership of the means of communist directorship. Against Russian type centralisation, Dubchek in Czechoslovakia started the foundation for an individualistic counter-version of a class society in order to destroy massive centralisation that had become totalitarian. Both are examples of how subjectivity or freedom, caught in the historically developing complexities of liberation and negation, by-passed the truly revolutionary praxis of subject-to-subject organic reconstitution based directly and immediately on a network of mutually co-ordinated councils of political action: in neither case was the party system (either the single or multiple form) seem to be itself a capitalist product based upon hierarchical organisation separating leaders from the led. (The Hungarian revolution, however, did, as we already indicated, set up a countrywide network of people’s councils of all levels of life and work, including a federation or council of councils without a centralistic hierarchy being substituted for co-ordination, or individualistic degeneracy being substituted for the autonomy of the functioning subjectivities that were expressing their needs for intersubjective recognition. However Russian invasion and domination soon put an end to that.)

Self and Other, private and public, or individual and collective, when not seen as two sides of a simultaneous paradoxical state of intersubjectivity, become reduced to modes of subject-object domination. Individualism, with its exclusive emphasis on privatism and profit will make the public-collective domain its object of class domination. Collectivism with its exclusive emphasis on coherent monism and indoctrination, will make the private individual domain, the object of its domination. These oppressive poles mask their own degeneracy, by pointing to the inhuman forms of the other side, only to help reconstitute but another version of class society. Collectivism sees the liberalism of individualism leading to adventuristic fascism if left “unchecked”, while individualism sees the equalitarianism attempted by collectivism as leading to totalitarianism. Both are at once correct and incorrect.

A third form of class society is tending to come into existence today which comprises and compromises both forms, but transcends neither version, and which may become the ultimate form of de-humanisation and hence “the answer” to the inadequacies of the other two... if no genuine human revolution ever succeeds in taking place. This is the mutual objectification of both Self and Other: the state of pure technocracy (and it corresponds to what Nietzsche called, the “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra). In a pure technocracy, all subjects, are atomised into specialised roles whose logic of relation is external and governed by a centralising logic working on the basis of maximising the efficiency of all atomic parts: everything is in a systems part-to-part relation, including any objectifiable representative of the whole. Any particular end is used as but another means in the wheel of an unending search for better and better methods, means and formulations of production: the aim of such a technocracy is the total elimination of the insecurity of subjective presence. Total behaviourism and conditioning, without anything truly conscious operating as an open end that is not itself mediated and taken “into account”: such is the ideal of a technocracy.

Socialism, as opposed to both collectivism and individualism, or communism and capitalism, in today’s context, appears to many “middle-of-the-roaders” as a perfection of what either side only partially understood. This triadic division of class society reflects itself, in many but not all ways (fortunately) in the division into the First World, Second World and Third World. The leaders of these tend increasingly to be defined, respectively, by the three major powers — the US, Russia and China. First-world individualistic capitalism is in direct opposition to Third-world communism, the first dominated by private economic investitures of power, and the other by powerful, self-defining political intelligentsia, indoctrinating and “spiritualising” the collective masses into a uniform state of thought (that is, Mao’s thought). Now the compromising Second-world form of exploitation includes both individualistic efficiency-oriented techniques (for example, the Russian Stakhanovite movement, and the stress placed upon competitive Socialism), and collective organisation techniques — integrating its economy more and more towards the technological ideal of a “perfect machine” not concerned with either private individualism and profit, or with collective-political equalitarianism: Russia, although far from having reached such a “perfected state”, is developing into a highly stratified society in which each and every individual has his or her task and place. (And the whole world, insofar as it is becoming an international-power-structure of economic-political “detente”, is also moving into this convergence of technological systems.) An interesting dynamic is developing between China and the US as extremes and Russia as the pragmatic middle-man directed by technicians — not by private economic interests or public political will. Ironically by neutralising all active will and interest stemming from subjectivity, Russia also stands in opposition to both the US and China, because in the latter two, the notion of subjective will and creativity is still important, although expressed in opposing directions (consider the corresponding personality “types” of a Mao, Nixon and Brezhnev!)

The simplistic exhibition of a non-linear class dynamics (that is, one that regards class formation based not only upon the production of economic goods, with the political functioning as its social manifestation, but one which regards many lines of both conflicting and coordinating class formations) obviously takes into consideration only the broad-global forms of “class struggle”, for only three species have been identified. There are, however, so many variations between the range covered by the above three, that it would take a country by country, historical analysis of their particular forms of development in order to uncover the more subtle variations. Indeed, according to a genuine dialectical non-linear analysis, there is no fixed limit to the number of species over which a range of variations can appear, for human-natural intercourse is continually breeding newer forms of patterns yet to make their impact felt on a larger observable and conceptualisable scale.

Now for the sake of completeness (but not consistency!) it is imperative to mention a modality of action which seeks to transcend all objectifying class formations — but does so only by completely masking them, and hence only temporarily, for faces hidden too long from view have a nasty habit of making sudden reappearances. First and Third World consciousness are subject-subject modalities reduced to subject-object oppression in opposite directions: the first is individual subjectivity subordinating collectivity into an object, while the third is its inverse. Second world consciousness then entails a mutual subordination of both individual and collective subjectivities into a system of total subordination: subject-subject appears as an object-object “systems-structure” with all subjectivity repressed. Now a fourth subject-subject relation can appear as the abstract opposite to the completely objectified world of technocracy. This is the completely subjectified world in which any objectification is seen as a danger, and hence avoided, repressed, or dismantled, rather than integrated into a dynamic subject-through-object-to-subject relation.

This position is simple anarchy (or various forms of simplified existentialism and mysticism), and appears throughout all class societies as pure rebellion: the subject wants to relate directly to the subject (humanity, God, or the Cosmos) without the objectifying process which is the condition for intersubjectivity to be real and not just the dreamworld or Maya of a self-schizophrenic consciousness. It seeks to rebel through a complete state of subjectivity that knows only abstract unity, totality, oneness: the “flower people” who love all upon contact without knowing who or what they are really loving is an example... but only one of its variations. Such an abstract subjectivity becomes anti-rationalistic rather than creatively trans-rational... it cannot understand the necessary but transitive forms of structure or differentiation which give subjectivity real uniqueness and not only universality. It cannot comprehend that the universal, immediacy or subjectivity as such is a true void, and thus only manifests itself through localisations which relate to and mirror back the entire universal field of existence — it’s context — relative to its own particular state of being, therefore making it now it’s context. As a result, time-as-memory and history, negativity, and unresolved localisations in the form of detached contradictions still pile up for the anarchistic consciousness, since it cannot give expression to a genuine subject through object to subject relation, and in the last analysis does not permit a real subject to even appear: appearance and intersubjectivity always involves actualisation through some kind of form which then always brings with it the insecurity of “good versus evil” — that is, the temptation of being captivated and subjected by that form as an end, converting the subject instead into a means. (This, incidentally, is the real radical base of Marx’s analysis of the fetishistic nature of the commodity: goods which are produced for use by human beings become detached from their human producers making the producers the means, and the commodities the end.

Thus anarchy’s objectification, when it finally does come out of hiding, is violence and destruction, which brings to bear the latent contradictions that have not been overcome. If one cannot define objectifications away, then a simple resort to direct killing might be the only other alternative. This fourth position could appropriately be called zero-world consciousness (both in terms of the non-worldly or non-objective nature of its contents of consciousness, and in order to logically have a sequence of 0, 1, 2, and three worlds in mutual opposition). Thus Zero world consciousness is in abstract (non-dialectical) opposition to Second world consciousness (as was First and Third World consciousness each the abstract opposite of the other): the opposite of the serious technician is the irrational anarchist. The first seeks protection in logic and control denying the existence of non-bounded consciousness (for example, Skinner: “Beyond Freedom And Dignity”), while the latter seeks refuge in chaos and a total absence of control, differentiation, logic and science.

Now contrary to these four main forms of oppressive self to self relation, which have either objectified one form of the self against the other, objectified both terms together, or repressed objectification altogether, there exists a fifth form which is both the trans-form of these four de-limiting forms, and the only genuine revolutionary modality of human existence. What we shall now be doing, is bringing the four partial perspectives of human reality into mutual relation in the form of a simultaneous gestalt or “matrix” of relations, in which both the limited nature of the four forms is perceived and at the same time the revolutionary totality, when it is seen that these four “types” of human oppression cover the whole possible range of oppression, relative to the terms employed. As indicated earlier, a genuine dialectical logic of relations — that which I call “The Dialectic Matrix” — cannot be the limited to any specified number of types, but that does not prevent one from viewing the unlocalisable totality of active subjectivity relative to, and through the lens of any particular state of organisation which active subjectivity has and is creating, provided that that state is complete — that is, capable of itself being seen as a singular and integral member of higher or lower order structures of objectification not yet evolved or discovered thus functioning within an open-ended state of subjectivity and immediacy. In this particular case, we shall be presenting a two-dimensional matrix in the form of a square with two sets of opposites, creating nine terms: other dimensions are possible — for example, a three-dimensional cubic matrix with three sets of opposites creating 27 terms.[3]^, [4]

What the four forms of human relations discussed all have in common, making them continually alternate as reforms of accumulation but not transforms of liberation, is the delimitation of subjectivity into fixated either-or-modalities of expression, preventing subjectivity from automatically appearing as a dynamic intersubjectivity not bounded into a preconceived state, giving rise to oppression. In the simplest logical terms possible, the dialectical nature of subjectivity is reduced to being either an independent or dependent variable — either an active dominating one which only determines, wills and touches, but is itself indeterminate and untouchable... or a passive receptive one which can only be-touched, determined and conditioned but which cannot express non-conditionality, creativity and indeterminacy. (Fortunately such a separation of dialectically mutual opposites, like the active and receptive, into self-contained isolates is not dissimilar to the way in which the so-called active-male principle and the receptive-female principle become degenerated into the ideology that the man must be exclusively active and hence dominating, and the female exclusively receptive and hence passive — not recognising that each dialectic opposite expresses both sides of a singular co-relation, in one case both relative to the gestalt of one member, and in the other case both relative to the gestalt of its counter-member. This neither reduces each to the other into a neutral, a-sexual glob nor separates them into hyper-exploitative sexual opposites having nothing in common: they are genuine opposites in a state of intersubjective intercourse.)

In such a case of delimitation into active versus receptive subjectivity, the subject cannot be perceived as a trans-active one which touches as he is touched, and becomes touched as he touches. In no case is the subject at once a transmitter and receiver — that is, in no case is the subject an open “system” called a trans-ceiver and transformer... in no case does the subject express himself to be a state of transition instead of a simple “ego” or identity that must either be asserted or denied, conformed to or rebelled against as a given. There can be no genuine intercourse, meeting, dialogue or real change... there can be no revolution beyond the given, but only the steady or not so steady evolution of the given into simpler or more complex forms of adaptation.

Consequently First World consciousness regards only the individual subject as immediate and independent — reducing the collective subject or the Other into a mediated dependent variable. In direct contrast, Third World consciousness makes the collective subject the immediate and independent variable, reducing individual subjectivity to a mediated and derivatory one. Then Second World consciousness makes both individual and collective subjectivity into dependent ones, such that no subjectivity is genuinely independent and immediate — that is, either uncontrollable, spontaneous and thus truly responsible for its action. Only the system is real, and operates automatically. Finally Zero World consciousness makes both individual and collective consciousness into immediate forms of presence with no mediation or dependence capable of expressing itself into a visible although transient structure of relations: one is all and all is one, and one either is “with it” in “one’s blood” or completely left in the dark as to how to meet it.

However the fifth position is actually a trans-position, for it recognises the paradoxical, dialectical nature of subjectivity of simultaneously being active and receptive — and hence an ever re-appearing turning point through which structures of objectivity arise and disappear — are produced and consumed — within and among an intersubjective state of dialogue, intercourse and creation. Thus the fifth trans-position expresses a trans-world consciousness (and not simply still another world), in that subjectivity is now lived in its fully paradoxical way of being at once itself and itself as a modality of transformation and relation without first defining the existence or non-existence of some kind of delimited world to which it is bound. The fifth position makes subjectivity itself into a “transitive variable” — that is, one that is neither positive and independent, or negative and dependent, but both as the two absolutely distinct sides of a singular inseparable state of transition and relation that is neither reducible into two separated things, or reducible into one indistinct state. Subjectivity is neither pure being or pure becoming — it is neither pure presence as a “here”, or pure negation into something other than here called a “there” or goal: subjectivity is continually becoming-itself as it moves from present to present since its being is nothing other than its becoming, as it is becoming: it is the dynamic present. Subjectivity is ever turning to itself as it moves beyond itself... it needs and completes itself through its objective existence as intersubjective reality. Genuine “subject to subject through object intersubjectivity” grasped as a singular movement requires both the autonomy of subjectivity (that is, each person, small functioning group or living centre), and the voluntary association and coordination of these autonomous subjectivities in which the richness of their various unique and distinct experiences within their inseparable universal gestalt can be shared and realised by means of a genuine subject to subject dialogue. Taken as a whole, this would be the praxis of anarcho-communalism, for the combined principles of individual autonomy and collective coordination (as opposed to the antagonistic principles of individual “license” and collective centralisation) express both the notion of an-arche (the absence of a state of external order) and the complementary notion of commun-alism (the presence of an intrinsic and hence organic and living state of co-ordination). Human society, dialectically expressed in its fullest terms, would be constituted out of levels of federated autonomous living and working units or councils... a true “brotherhood of man” and at the same time the real antithesis of the totally objectified — that is, atomised and centralised technocracy in which merely the system is real. Only by creating a community of communities in which direct democracy on different levels governs the intra and inter-subjective states of all functions of social existence (for example, living conditions, work, public services) on the basis of a responsibility of action founded within the living and working context out of which it becomes delegated into responsive political existence, can exploitative hierarchical societies of atomised functions become transformed. Then, any coordination of autonomous communities into a higher community of communities will not automatically mean giving that coordinating community or centre the priorities of initiatives for action — the initiatives for deciding the needs and desires of the essential units of subjectivity constituting the body of a society. The “higher” a community of communities becomes within a non-linear society, and the broader its coordinating functions develop, the weaker its initiation function must become insofar as its purpose lies in the second-order (or n-th order) initiatives of coordinating the primary initiatives and not establishing them. The so-called “brain” or any “centre of centres” is then but only one member of a whole body of centres, wherein initiative for action must be distributed, integrating by feedback, the so-called “super-ego” rationality of coordination with its complementary “sub-ego” spontaneous, non-rational, emotive-power of initiation, across the whole of society as a fully developed “ego” or process of self-reflexivity, instead of identifying these two functions into one structure of domination separated from the diversity of society as a whole, or divided into competing structures of domination, separated from the integral function of society as a whole.

Then, and only then, can the experts, technicians and men of learning that require vast systems of interlocking institutions, be made responsible to these communities and not usurp the power of a living organism for the parasitic ends which in turn convert the organism into a means… To date, however, such rebellions and reconstitutions into organic forms — which did occur throughout history and are still forming (for example, the town councils, people’s councils, co-operatives, living and working communes, grass-root ad-hoc committees for community action)… such forms have tended to either dissipate or reform into other versions of repression by their absorption into either existing or newly developing hierarchical structures. But this is not to say that a “critical-mass” or a “critical-energy” crisis cannot occur, in which the whole thrust of what we now take for granted will crumble at the very basis of its contradictions. This means that the institutionalised-identity-systems which continually repress subjectivity finally challenge the subjectivities which have created this monster in an open battle in which the issues can no longer be pasted over by the accummulated patch-work of worn-out ideology our identity-systems manufacture to hide the myth of consistency from their own creators. Then people will become aware of the self-contradiction their identified lives actually are, and it is only such self-contradiction as opposed to fate or so-called external contradictions, which can become the motive power for transformation, re-revealing the paradoxical base upon which contradictions and identities grow: human beings will become conscious of their power for creating good and evil, and not merely become the victims of their own creations that have taken on an alien shape divorced from the power of subjectivity.

Instead of Nietzsche’s “last man”, we can now explicate the social setting for his “over-man” — that is, human relations built out of direct voluntary contact, for the purposes of continually expressing oneself and overcoming oneself through the vastness and richness of the relations possible when they are built on strictly mutual and non-possessive forms of association in which technique and form or anything produced is never permitted to become severed from the human subjects and content for which and by which they have arisen. That which is your outgoing Freedom, and that which is your incoming Destiny, are thus a unified open-system that is at once both — that is, a transformer and transfuser of mutual creation: your being is the activity of creation. And this very emergence, at whatever level and form, of such an organic society out of the cracks and crevices of the exploitative mechanical one that is at present globally interlocked in its various types, constitutes revolutionary praxis — for it is nothing but the very nature of life expressing itself as an end, and not just another schema, plan or technique having no life — but rather searching to create still another organisation of destruction and/or conformity, converting life once again into a means. Humans of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your experts — your professionals — and all those who do not trust in the power of subjectivity and immediacy, but must meet it indirectly, in a cowardly way, and with self-protecting images. Only within a human to human organic society as a “true polis” can professional technique and expertise finally be utilised for what it is meant to be: a means and only a means. But are you going to recognise yourself as such a centre of out-going subjectivity, whose outgoing is to meet itself in and through other such centres… or to what degree have we become so conditioned to function only as reaction mechanisms, and identity accumulators, capable of giving only two mechanical answers, yes or no, true or false, 0 or 1 as computers are programmed? To what degree is one prepared to take time seriously, and hence consider oneself as truly revolutionary and creative and not just an already-determined sub identity within a universe that is an already-given super-identity? — not realising that any part only develops with its context in mutual interaction: part and whole, self and other, individual and collective need each other to be what they are, and as they express what they are, they then at the same time give birth — through dialogue and intercourse — to new worlds, new horizons, new values. Now is the time to start, for now, the present and whatever is directly in experience is the subjectivity and source that is seeking its realisation. Life then comes into its own by being what it is, and not merely de-vitalised into functioning as static image formations of attack and defence, or systems of production and consumption.

In conclusion one can state that a revolutionary finally ceases to value and measure subjectivity or any “fight” to “save” subjectivity in terms of production and consumption, and hence in terms of the forms or techniques of objectification which always breed alienated, image imposing, dominating and exploiting humans who set themselves apart from their own subjectivity as well as the intersubjective gestalt within which they take concrete existence. Subjectivity ceases to be conceived in terms of what is given or taken in the first place. Rather subjectivity is recognised to be subjectivity to the degree to which it thinks and acts in terms of receiving-and-being-received — that is, in terms of the creative openness that characterises human acts of awareness called recognition, without which production and consumption on any level (the smallest nail or the most magnificent ideal) would be but a blind and meaningless exchange of objects. The world of “I-it” (subject-object) exists only within the context of the world of “I-Thou” (subject-subject), as does human value transcend both exchange and use-value.

Living in a world of receptivity, is to live in a world full of eyes, ears, noses, mouths and skins…it is a highly charged state of sensual subjectivity where all objects are the perceivable signs and symbols of subjectivity in its state of addressing and be-ing-addressed, evoking response and response-ability. The more one can learn to listen and receive — the more one can become quiet in one’s presence, the more he or she can perceive, transform and act upon. That is, respond in an appropriate and swift way to the situation and not simply re-act with an already-conditioned response based upon one’s appropriated experience in the form of abstract, static image formation taken out of context. Subjectivity “as such” is abstract and empty — there is no “God”; Objectivity “as such” is abstract and blind — there are no self-contained “things” or “images”. Concrete subjectivity, however, is a state or field of presence, whose very nature fulfils itself through whatever becomes made present, and hence human beings are concrete forms of subjectivity that have reached a highly complex state of existence, who must come to recognise their paradoxical nature of being essentially immediate and unbounded, but existentially mediated and bounded — in such a way that two alternatives present themselves — the so-called cutting edge of “good and evil”. Degeneration, alienation and a pathology of fear, protection and violence comes about to the degree to which our existentially bounded natures of being and acting as one among others become eclipsed from the unbounded immediacy of presence which is their energy source and sink: the world looks like a machine or formal scheme of boundaries and identities that have become emasculated. Generation, re-generation, revolution, love and a healthy life of open dialogue, intercourse and transformation comes about only to the degree to which conditioned, mediated and bounded existence is actually integrated within the non-negatable state of open immediacy and subjectivity on as many levels of existence as possible (for example, in one’s thinking, feeling, acting, ways of relation, diet, physical presence, political decision making, scientific work, artistic creations etc). Then and only then will our subjective essence not get caught or trapped within an alienated, objective existence — an objectified existence that is not transitive, but static. Rather, will this very existence of an infinity of forms, beings, selves, and societies be the very means of making our subjective essence real: reality is the integration of existence within essence, objectifications within subjectivity, and hence reality is the singular, complex and organic state of intrinsic intersubjectivity we have been explicating in this essay. But there is no final reality — no final completed and hence bounded and objectified end or teleology, for illusion, un-reality and fixations of identity coming from alienation and degeneration are always possible and an example of such an illusion is conceiving revolution or reality as a final state in the first place. Reality, revolution, love and communion — “the good” — and illusion, reaction, fear and isolation — “evil”, — are the two paradoxical possibilities of our paradoxical nature. The one lives in the dynamic present — as a present to present, and subject to subject process of continuous self-renewal, while the other lurks in the static products of the present called “the past” or a “projected future”… it is the very denial and inversion of the present — making it appear as a momentary unreal “now” that just comes and goes: it views the present or any objective boundary as a line separating that which is on either side, with the line “itself” as non-existent, rather than living that present and now or any boundary as the very transition state of intercourse and relation integrating whatever appears on either side, and from that, intercourse and integration, generating newer forms of the present — that is, that which is yet become present.

Revolution is a life directed towards and lived in the immanent present that is dynamic wherein everything past, formulated and objectified must stand the test of existence. Everything else is an evasion and can only begin to be transformed by its honest and direct experience as an evasion (a simplification, a “rounding out” of un-wanted variables etc). Revolution is not a path to an end-state — a final Utopia. Indeed Utopia is not a place or a what to begin with. It is rather one’s life, as an ever-present beginning-state — it is the very how and why of life itself… it is the path… The Tao.

Revolution is living the fully present, despite and through all evasions, mediation and reactions. It means being in phase with time itself, it means being where you are.

You can recognise the revolutionary by the receptivity of his presence… by the directness in his eyes: the revolutionary is there to draw you and himself out in the act of meeting.