OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY
 The systems of ideas adopted by militants vary among the different organisations, but they are all undermined by the need to mask both the nature of the activities they conceal, and their separation from the masses. So at the heart of militant ideologies one always finds a separation between objectivity and subjectivity, conceived in a mechanical and a-historic manner. Even if he does not deny that his activity has subjective motivations, the militant who devotes himself to the service of the people refuses to attach any importance to them. In any event what is subjective must be eliminated, in favour of what is objective. Refusing to be driven by his desires, the militant is reduced to invoking historical necessity, considered as something external to the world of desires. Thanks to « scientific socialism », the congealed form of a degenerated marxism, he believes he has the power to discover the direction of history, and to adapt himself to it. He gets drunk on concepts whose significance escapes him : productive forces, relations of production, law of value, dictatorship of the proletariat etc. It all enables him to reassure himself about the seriousness of his agitation. Setting himself outside of « his critique » of the world, he condemns himself to understand nothing of its movement. The passion which he does not manage to put into his everyday life, he displaces into his imaginary participation in the « world revolutionary spectacle ». The earth is reduced to the level of a punch and judy show, where the nasty and nice, the imperialists and anti-imperialists clash. He compensates for the mediocrity of his existence by identifying with the stars of this planetary circus. The height of ridiculousness was reached with the worship of « CHE ». Nutty economist, pitiable strategist, but a good looking guy, at least Guavara would have the consolation of seeing his Hollywood-style talents rewarded. A record in poster sales. What is subjectivity, other than the residue of objectivity, which a society based on commodity reproduction cannot integrate ? The subjectivity of the artist objectifies itself in the work of art. For the worker who is separated from the means of production and from the organisation of his own production, subjectivity remains a state of mania, of fantasy... he is made objective by the grace of capital, and even becomes capital. Revolutionary activity like the world it prefigures goes beyond the separation between objectivity and subjectivity. It objectifies subjectivity, and subjectively invests the objective world. The proletarian revolution is the irruption of subjectivity ! It is not a question of falling back on the myth of a « real human nature », or of the « eternal essence » of man, repressed by Society, and which would seek to return for all to see. But if the form and goal of our desires vary, they cannot be reduced to the need to consume this or that product. Historically determined by the evolution and necessities of commodity production, subjectivity by no means yields to the needs of consumption or production. Commodities must constantly adapt in order to co-opt the desires of consumers. But they still remain unable to satisfy the will to live by completely and directly achieving our desires. Shop windows, the avant-garde of commercial provocation, increasingly undergo a critique by paving stone ! Those who refuse to take account of the reality of THEIR OWN desires in the name of « Materialist Thought » risk not seeing the weight of Our desires land in their face. Militants and their ideologists, and even university undergraduates, are less and less capable of understanding their own time and of being consistent with history. Incapable of secreting a thought that's the slightest bit modern, they are reduced to searching the dustbin of history to co-opt ideologies which have long since given evidence of their failure : anarchism, leninism, trotskyism... To render this more digestible they season it with a little badly understood maoism or castroism. They invoke the name of the workers movement, but confuse its history with the construction of state capitalism in Russia, or the peasant-bureaucratic epic of the « long march » in China. They claim to be marxists, but don't understand that the marxist project for the abolition of wage labour, commodity production and the state is inseparable from the seizure of power by the proletariat. « Marxist » thinkers are increasingly incapable of taking up the analysis of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism which Marx began. They bog themselves down on the terrain of bourgeois political economy, while endlessly repeating stupidities about the law of value, work, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the realisation of surplus-value. In spite of their pretensions, they do not understand the progress of modern capitalism. Believing themselves obliged to use a marxist vocabulary, for which they don't possess the instructions for use, they cut themselves off from those few possibilities for analysis that still remain within political economy. Their « researches » are not worth those which the first disciples of Keynes produced. |