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.
deoxy > philosophos
