TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Theocracy
Exclusive
theocracy
Inclusive
theocracy
Hierarchic
heteronomy
State-capitalist
heteronomy
State
heteronomy
Mercantile
and capitalist heteronomy
The
religious character of the commodity
The
commodity spectacle
Work
Mercantile
inclusivity
THEOCRACY
All known societies
have been and are theocratic. In all societies, humans have with their
social system a relation of circular implication and reciprocal inherency
- the humans make the system and the system makes the humans - but in a
theocracy the undeniable fabrication of the system by the humans is subordinated
to the fabrication of the humans by the autonomous system. The activity,
production, world, power, being of a theocratic society take a separate
transcendent form which it does not have the direction of but which dominates
it. Alienation presents itself as alienation of society to its institutions,
as autonomisation of the institutions with regard to society. Alienated
social activity excludes all autonomous, explicit and practical manifestation
of human will on any level whatsoever. Social institutions are a human
creation, but in a theocracy they are a blind creation. Although
all societies actually create themselves their institutions, organization
relationships - whether they know it or not - in an alienated society they
are not human undertakings but products of theocratic instances:
Hierarchy, master,
chief, ancients, heroes, king, state, leaders, bureaucracy, god, spirits,
religion, Reason, “the laws of the history”, gender, race, nation, tradition,
taboos, morals, spectacle, private property, commodity, money, capital.
Theocracies have been
and are exclusive or inclusive.
EXCLUSIVE
THEOCRACY
Exclusive or concentrated
theocracy is a total dictatorship of significations. Sacred alienation,
it officially and expressly incorporates in its institutions the undeniable
idea for the members of society that this institution is not a human creation,
that it was not created by humans, in any case not by the humans which
are there at the moment or then by superhuman human. Dominating in a obvious
way, it imposes an absolute, single and indisputable model; everything
that deviates from it is repressed, excluded, suppressed. Everyone must
conform to its rigid structure or disappear. The majority of history’s
societies have been exclusive.
INCLUSIVE
THEOCRACY
Inclusive or diffuse theocracy
is a dictatorship of significants. Profane alienation, it does not
openly and explicitly claim a transcendental, universal and absolute foundation
to the order it imposes. Appeared first once in ancient Greece then in
the modern Europe of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, theocratic inclusivity
dominates in a latent way, almost ashamed, by compromise, and proceeds
by explosion, parcellisation. Inclusive theocracy’s incredible capacity
to resorb, hijack, recuperate, everything that calls it into question is
a historically new phenomenon indissolubly related to the consequent historical
appearance of the project of autonomy and of - simultaneously - its inclusive
enemy-antidotes - state democracy and capitalism. Inclusive theocracy has
transformed the project of autonomy into ideology. Inclusive heteronomous
society builds its unity on conflict, false multiplicity, alienated
otherness and pseudo-individuality. The shown division is united whereas
the shown unity is divided. If modern theocracy is divided, it is to better
reign. It does not seek to impose its heteronomous order in a totalitarian
way by openly eliminating all that it denies but by diffusing itself everywhere,
especially in what it denies. Recuperation is one of its essential
characteristics. And that is why, where it is most advanced, the pseudo-democratic
state and capitalism, the diversity of commodities and of parties, are
the ideal forms through which can thrive this oppressive tolerance.
Diffuse theocracy needs
alienated
contestations and maintains them; this pseudo-other is the leaven
of the permissive repression on which it develops its reign. False
oppositions are an integral part of the modern theocratic system and have
only become increasingly vital to this order as it has become more and
more inclusively heteronomous.
HIERARCHIC
HETERONOMY
These societies have generally
been societies divided in classes, organized hierarchically, where the
dominant class is the representant on earth of this foreign power.
Knight and slave, patrician
and plebian, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
and serf, noble, priest and third state, bourgeois, bureaucrate and proletarian,
dominant and dominated, oppressor and oppressed, leader and executant,
rich and poor, possessor and dispossessed.
Class division is theocratic;
and in historical societies, alienation appears to be embodied by the class
structure and the domination by a minority; but in reality alienation exceeds
these features. The suppression of alienation obviously presupposes the
elimination of any domination by a particular class, but goes beyond this
aspect because alienation has existed in societies which did not have a
class structure, or even a significant social differentiation; and in theocracy
the dominant class itself is in situation of alienation: its institutions
do not have a relation of pure exteriority and instrumentality with it,
it cannot mystify, alienate, the remainder of society with its ideology
and “its” institutions without mystifying itself and being alienated itself
at the same time.
STATE-CAPITALIST
HETERONOMY
Theocratic inclusion has built itself
on, in and by an expansion of the fragmentation and cohesion deficit of
the instances of class domination and alienation in general as well as
of the global social articulation. The separation between "politics" and
"economy" - the state-commodity world - is one of its major products. This
scission is by no means a characteristic common to all societies or intrinsic
to human nature, but a social articulation created by and indissociable
of the emergence of bureaucratic -capitalism as well as of the correlative
and consequent historical appearance of the project of autonomy, of which
it is the decisive ideological-imaginary and practical resorption apparatus.
Political "freedoms" and "free" trade are the ideological facades of the
modern world’s secular transcendences. The profane heavens of the state
and the commodity are the fictions ensuring the social system’s pseudo-immanence.
The illusion of an autoproclamed intrinsic need - tautological or fallaciously
"natural" or "rational" need - for this fractionation and the actually
fragmented reality, fabricate and generate the system’s contestations which
cannot think outside of it and which only reinforce its profound unity
with each fragmentary attack.
STATE
HETERONOMY
The state separates
political practice from human experience, political life from everyday
life. Contemporary "politics" is titillating in that it continues to do
all it can to move people away from the direction of their affairs while
complaining about their "apathy". The sky of the state produces this new
race of men: the bureaucratic class which, under the pretext of an abstract
and imaginary general interest of which the state would be the fiction,
only pursues and reproduces the particular interest which is the ultimate
goal of the state, it's own. The state is the supreme capitalist company,
the one which allows all the others. The specialization of power is the
oldest separation. Separation between a minority which possesses the world
and a majority which is submitted to it. The state, being the most archaic
current form of this separation, is one of its first forms which must be
destroyed. The liquidation of all forms of state will find its achievement
in the generalized self-management, ensured by the direct democracy
of the federated antitheocratic
counsels in the horizontality of a world to which each one will be
able to give its legitimate disproportion.
MERCANTILE
AND CAPITALIST HETERONOMY
Human beings, their various products
or activities are incommensurable. The shoe-maker or the shoe are not equal
or proportional, respectively, to the prostitute or the sexual act. Time
- in hours, minutes, seconds - is measurable and comparable - one hour
is equal to one hour; “work time” - the shoe-maker’s or the prostitute’s
- or the time of any human activity - such as the time taken to extract
a nasal dejection - is measurable and comparable with any other work time
or duration of human activity; but from this tautology one cannot deduce
a commensurability of human beings, of their needs, products or activities;
nor a just form of distribution of social appropriation, nor ideal of social
organization. Lived time - that of human activity - human needs or capacities
are not reducible to measurable time. They can be “sufficiently in practice”
but many “things” can be socially instituted and function “sufficiently
in practice” - to treat other human beings like things, for example.
But quantitative distribution
- or appropriation - is not therefore an alienation “in itself”; i.e. considered
abstractedly as a possibility or possible proposal of distribution of areas
of social appropriation (consumption-production) limited in their range
and time; and not considered effectively and social-historically. Quantitative
distribution “in itself” - to exchange a pair of shoes against a sexual
act “in itself”, for example - is not an alienation owing to the fact that
it subjects social relations to an abstraction based on arithmetic equality
or proportionality, or on another form of quantitative ratio such as a
the transmutation of a quantity of common equivalent - and not of universal
equivalent - in a “commodity” in order to convert it again into another
quantity of common equivalent - a transaction “similar” to a capitalist
exchange.
Quantitative distribution
- and subsequently mercantile and capitalist exchange which are forms of
it - are not natural - or “real” - like a tree or gravitation for example,
but a tree or gravitation are not social exchanges. Social relations are
only tritely natural; they are not as specifically social-historic. The
question of autonomy and alienation does not have anything to do with degrees
of naturalness or artificiality contained in social relations. Quantitative
distribution cannot have a transcendental base either; no metaphysical
coagulation is of any help to found the distribution of social appropriation
in an equitable - non alienating - way. In truth, this question - like
all questions - cannot be founded absolutely. There is no natural, “real”
or metaphysical law on which could be founded human exchanges or relations.
The only equitable exchange - or just foundation to the distribution of
social appropriation - is autonomous exchange; that which is instituted
in an autonomous and explicit way; and which does not harm autonomy.
An autonomous society could
- and probably would - in an autonomous way, democratically institute forms
of quantitative distribution for areas of appropriation explicitly limited
in their range and time.
Mercantile and capitalist
quantitative distribution is an alienation because, as mercantile and capitalist,
it is not instituted in an autonomous way and - as an effective form of
social appropriation - it obstructs all autonomous human activity; it is
an alienation as a tacitly universal movement - an automatic, irrevocable
and systematic regulation of social relations; as a block to social, collective
and individual autonomous appropriation; and as an implicit form of class
domination partly disguised by an arithmetic pseudo-neutrality.
The
religious character of the commodity
Our commodity society
is the realization of religion on earth. In religion, as in the commodity,
man projects his own powers outside of him and loses himself in a fantastic
world which he has himself created, but which dominates him like a foreign
power, completely independent and detached from the individuals. If
religion's ambition was the colonization of each aspect of life, the world
still appeared too much as what it is, the product of relations between
individuals, whereas the separated world of the commodity, quite superior,
has succeded in completely alienating these relations into relations between
things. Religion limited its range by over-preoccupying itself too much
with qualitative details and has been exceeded by the commodity quantitative,
the form which can contain all contents. Merchant tautology materially
builds the religious illusion and produces real miracles by transforming
time into money, men into goods, life into calculation. If long ago churches
were the only places of contemplation, it is now reality in its whole which
is molded to be contemplated. The Christians have left way to the spectators
and economists are the worthy heirs of the priests, their jargon having
nothing to envy, in mystification, the Latin of their counterparts of yester-year.
The capital has drowned the abrupt character of the old hierarchical antagonisms
in its commodity solution: radical egalitarianism in the contemplation
of its spectacle. Thus it is the most terrestrial and daily life which
has become opaque and unbreathable.
The
commodity spectacle
In the capitalist society,
the worker does not produce himself, he produces an independent power,
the capital. The success of this production, its abundance, returns
to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and
space of his world becomes foreign to him with the accumulation
of his alienated products. The image of his world develops independently
from him in the form of an autonomous movement of images. The modern proletarian,
elevated to the rank of consumer, is thus reduced to the state of spectator
of his dispossession. The choice in consumption and the diversity of the
goods to be consumed are never but a choice in the state of dispossession
and the consumption of a diversity of alienations. Where the real world
changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and the efficient
motivations of hypnotic behaviors. The alienation of the spectator in favor
of the contemplated object founds this empire of the modern passivity.
There cannot be freedom outside of activity, but all activity is denied.
Thus the famous “liberation of work” and the development of leisure are
only an illusion. Nothing in the activity stolen in work can be restored
in the submission to its result. In consumption, what is required is to
take part more deeply in the dispossession of all aspects of one's
life
Work
If capitalism is the
accomplished form of the division of labor, work is already the
division of life. As they are forced to sell themselves to the owners of
the material means of their life in order to buy their survival from these
same owners, the workers are, behind the democratic dressing-up, the property
of these owners. The workers are commodities which have but a shadow of
a choice on their life. And the unemployed are only the mass of unsold
goods. The fear of unemployment is one of the main attractions of the spectacle
which aims at rendering desirable, or presenting as impossible to circumvent,
their alienation to the masses. The owners thus keep them busy claiming
slavery for all so as to prevent them from abolishing their enslavement.
But because unemployment contradicts the self-justifications - right with
work, work-ethic - which society has given to the wage system, base of
the enslavement to capital, the false enemies
and the accomplices of the commodity dictatorship simultaneously endeavor
to minimize the seditious consequences it could cause by pataphysical measures
- deceleration of automation, reduction of work-time de travail, charity.
The real problem of our time, against which it is necessary to fight, is
not unemployment but commodity enslavement. We do not want jobs but the
free use of life.
MERCANTILE
INCLUSIVITY
Each given commodity fights for
itself, cannot recognize the others, claims to impose itself everywhere
as if it were the only one. The become-world of the commodity is the become-commodity
of the world. By a trick of mercantile reason, the particular of
the commodity wears out in struggle, while the commodity form goes towards
its absolute realization.
The project of abolishing all alienation and exploitation is none other than that of making impossible everything that exists independently of individuals, to replace theocratic will by individual will.
