Democratism against Subversion, and vice versa
As we mentioned in La Banquise ( no. 4 ) the next revolutionary wave will be confronted with the question of what to do with the innumerable files which modern technology stores in its computer memories. One can well imagine the Council of Greater Paris ( or of Sofia Antipolis, or wherever ) voting, democratically and according to majority, to put them in cold storage while deciding what to do with them. Let's hope that a band of « uncontrollables » takes the happy initiative of burning them double quick. The idea that within a revolutionary movement one must count hands, or even that one could, makes no sense. To yield to this idea is to place oneself at the mercy of the democratist illusion according to which the collective will is the simple addition of sovereign individual wills, whereas in reality it is always the result of a complex play of reciprocal influences. When deliberative proceedings are constituted ( a council, a parliament or a coordination ) the principal question is not the procedures by which the will of all the participants can best express itself, but the relation between the process of debate and the action to be carried out, a question which cannot be dissociated from the nature of the action itself. If a situation is sufficiently rich in possibilities, one can well conceive of a minority undertaking its own action alongside the majority, and that the result of their actions then leads a good part of the majority to join the minority, or else shows the minority that it was mistaken. If possibilities are limited, the majority may consider that the action of the minority will endanger the action of the majority. A relation of force will then be posed. The triumph of the democratist illusion would, in the first case ( an « open » situation ) lead the minority to do nothing out of respect for procedure -- and the movement as a whole would lose the opportunity for a qualitative leap. In the second case ( a « closed » situation ) the democratist illusion could serve the minority if it was composed of scheming politicians ( trotskyists, for example, have acquired a long experience of manipulating assemblies through the opportunist use of voting ), veiling the relation of force established by the mass by superimposing on it the image of procedures which « are always right », an image which on occasion ( see above ) will do a disservice to the movement. While one must not reduce everything to the « organisation question », the question of organisation is posed by all activity. Retaining control of what they do is always the primary concern of those who break with the dominant forms of representation and delegation. But the multiplication of control procedures guarantees nothing : it only succeeds in multiplying the opportunities for manipulation. The « elected and instantly revocable delegates » are either a fiction in the service of a new bureaucracy in formation, or a reality which in practise is constantly menaced and susceptible to any kind of accommodation. A movement which spent all its time electing and revoking would quickly be defeated, while delegates who were revocable but never ever revoked would finish up by being indistinguishable from parliamentary deputies ! Between these two extremes is space for a whole series of forms of organisation, of delegation and of interchange. But no form will ever guarantee the nature of a movement. Within a movement the role of a revolutionary is to act in line with the most radical tendencies... when there are any. The fact that a movement emerges from the rank and file and organises itself doesn't in our opinion constitute a sufficient criteria for intervening in it. For example, faced with the rank and file prison officers movement in the autumn of 1988, the only response would have been to invite them to disappear after destroying their instruments of work ! In other words there is nothing else that they could have done for us not to continue regarding them as enemies. Acting in a radical way means seeking to have an influence on the movement by adopting the most appropriate form for the action, that is, a form which doesn't risk becoming autonomous and imposing its own dynamic, and therefore neither a democratic form ( see above ) nor a dictatorial one. Only archeo-leninists still believe that the dictatorship of a party or a State can produce anything beyond itself, and only the infra-leninists still imagine that « councils » could exercise a dictatorship without turning into a State. Acting in a radical way, means seeking to influence a movement not by coercion or illusionism but through subversion. It is a question of creating situations which make it difficult to return to the previous state of affairs, and of starting to modify, however slightly, the conditions of existence of those touched by the movement -- both within it and outside it. At the time of the recent strikes in the postal sorting offices, some postmen put forward the idea of delivering the mail for free. If only one post office had done it -- for example by stamping all the letters without charge -- it would have made an impact from which the whole movement would have benefited and the shock waves of which would have spread throughout society : the action of a minority would have had infinitely more weight, for themselves as well as for the others, than a hundred thousand votes in the assemblies.
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