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REVOLUTION AS A GAME
VIA ENGLISH SECTION OF THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL

The new revolutionary movement can be no more than the organisation of popular revolt into its most coherent, its richest, form—and there is no organisation to date which would not completely betray it. All previous political critiques of the repressive hierarchy engendered by the past revolulionary argument—that of Solidarity, for example—have completely missed the point: they were not focussed on precisely what it was that this hierarchy repressed and perverted in the form of passive militancy. In the context of radical "ethics" still bogged down in singularly distasteful forms of sub-Christian masochism, the ludic aspects of the revolution cannot be over-emphasised. Revolution is essentially a game and one plays it for the pleasure involved. Its dynamic is a subjective fury to live, not altruism. It is totally opposed to any form of self-sacrificial surbordination of oneself to a cause—to Progress, to the Proletariat, to Other People. Any such attitude is diametrically opposed to the revolutionary appreciation of reality: it is no more than an ideological extension of religion for the use of the "revolutionary" leaderships in justifying their own power and in repressing every sign of popular creativity.

      The game is the destruction of the sacred—whether it be the sanctity of Jesus or the sanctity of the electric mixer and the Wonder-loaf. Tragedy, said Lukàcs, is a game played in the sight of godlessness. The true form of godlessness will be the final achievement of revolution—the end of the illusory and all its forms, the beginning of real life and its direct self-consciousness.

      The revolutionary movement must be a game as much as the society it prefigures. Ends and means cannot be disassociated. We are concerned first and foremost with the construction of our own lives. Today this can only mean the total destruction of power. Thus, the crucial revolutionary problem is the creation of a praxis in which self-expression and social disruption are one and the same thing: of creating a style of self-realisation which can only spell ihe destruction of everything which blocks total realisation. From another point of view, this is the problem of creating the coherent social form of what is initially and remains essentially an individual and subjective revolt. Only Marx's original project, the creation of the total man, of an individual reappropriating the entire experience of the species, can supersede the individual-vs-society dualism by which hierarchical power holds itself together while it holds us apart. If it fails in this, then the new revolutionary movement will merely build an even more labyrinthine illusory community; or, alternatively, it will shatter into an isolated and ultimately self-destructive search for kicks. If it succeeds, then it will permeate society as a game that everyone can play. There is nothing left today that can withstand a coherent opposition once it established itself as such. Life and revolution will be invented together or not at all.

      All the real creativity of the time will grow from this movement and it is in this perspective that our own experiments will be made and should be understood. The end of this process will not merely be the long overdue end of this mad, disintegrating civilisation. It will be the end of prehistory itself. Man stands on the verge of the greatest breakthrough ever made in the human appropriation of nature. Man is the world of man and a new civilisation can only be based on man's free and experimental creation of his own world and his own creation. This creation will no longer accept any internal division or separation. Life will be the creation of life itself. The total will be confronted only with his ever-increasing appropriation of nature, of his own nature, finally elaborated, in all its beauty and terror, as our "worthy opponent" in a ludic conflict where everything is possible.

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