It is January. So important for the children. For us too. And now it is more January than ever.
So much tells us that it is December, the month of closure. That things are going downhill, that humanity is coming to an end, that there is no way out of the capitalist dynamic of death.
But tell that to your children, to their children, to the children of the world. Tell them they have no future. Impossible, of course. That is what is so wonderful about the title of this book. It does not permit us the self-indulgence of December-thinking; it pushes us forcefully into January.
January, the month of Janus, the god with two faces. One looks back, just like Benjamin’s angel, the angel of history: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” But Benjamin’s angel has only one face. It is true that he “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” but he is unable to, for the “storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Unlike Benjamin’s angel, Janus has another face. This one looks forward, to a world of possibility, a world that could be, that is not-yet. The first face holds us trapped in the past, in the ruins of history, in the downward spiral rushing us toward human self-annihilation, but the face that looks forward looks to a world of worlds to be created. Writing to our children and their children, and to ourselves, we must say, as Raoul does, “Let us stop scorning our ability to invent a new life.”
The critique of capitalism is shaken, pushed forward to the question of revolution. Closure is unacceptable. We cannot write to our children and say, “Tough, sorry, history is closed now, you’ve arrived too late, the only way is down.”
Now it is more January than ever. Never before has history looked so starkly in both directions at once: toward disaster and toward emancipation. Human self-annihilation is more firmly on the agenda than ever before. Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler could cause enormous destruction and despair, but they did not have the means at their disposal to seriously threaten the survival of humans on the earth. Now, there is a motley host of leaders who can achieve that effect simply by pressing a button and unleashing nuclear war. Now too, it has become clear that the cumulative effects of the way that we live are destroying the physical preconditions of human life, through climate change or contamination and exhaustion of the water supply. Now, at this moment, we are living through an upsurge of hatred against other people, a rise of fascism and racism and sexism that was quite unthinkable twenty years ago. The backward-looking, deadly face of Janus stands out so strongly that the other one fades in comparison.
Wonderful, then, are the opening words of this book: “You are privileged to have been born at a crucial moment in history. A period when everything is being transformed and nothing will ever be the same again…. One civilization is collapsing and another is being born. The misfortune of inheriting a planet in ruins is offset by the incomparable joy of witnessing the gradual advent of a society such as history has never known—save in the shape of the mad hope, embraced by thousands of generations, of some day leading a life at last freed from poverty, barbarism and fear…. Little by little a new society is emerging from the mist.” Here is the other face, the one that opens, the one that looks forward and creates. Here is the face that we must think and act and live.
We must all write letters to our children and the children of the world. The very idea of this book pushes us into a different way of thinking. We can all do it, and indeed it is difficult to come away from this book without thinking, “What would I have to say in this letter?” It cannot be a happy-happy-Disneyland letter. That would be profoundly dishonest. In some way it would have to start from, or at least have as a backdrop, the spiral of destruction in which the world is caught at the moment. But it absolutely cannot be a letter of closure, it has to say, “Go and change it, go and create this new society that is emerging from the mist.” But how?
But how? And the answer comes tumbling out of our mouths, from our pens, from our fingers: we do not know / in a million different ways. We have learnt a not-knowing. Perhaps that is one of the important things to be passed on to our children. It used to be that revolutionaries would know the way forward and explain it to the masses, spreading class consciousness, telling them what must be done. That failed, disastrously. And now we know that we do not know. Back to Socrates, at least in the sense of dialogue, but not in the sense of proving ourselves cleverer than our interlocutor. Rather, forward to the Zapatistas and their wonderful “preguntando caminamos” (asking, we walk). Our not-knowing does not lead to despair but to a collective discussion of how we go forward. And in the process, we realize that this asking is not a means to an end, that it is the end, an end that begins. In asking for the road forward we are already building the ways forward, creating a different politics, a different world: a world not of monologue but of dialogue, a world of mutual recognition. Instrumental politics reached its maximum expression in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, and it was a disaster. Now we must go asking.
But the asking is already more than an asking. It is an asking filled with experience. As we walk asking, we see a well-paved road stretching in front of us with a signpost pointing to Social Change, and at the entrance there are people pointing the way forward and calling, “This way, this way for social change! If you want to change the world and make it a better place, come this way!” And we say, “No, not that way! That is the road of telling, and asking cannot walk the road of telling.” Perhaps we do not know how to change the world radically, but we know that it is not through the State. Many have gone that way and have died trying to create a better world through the State, and all have returned either disillusioned or corrupted and cynical. The paths of radical change do not lie through the State, simply because the very existence of the State is so integrated into the reproduction of the capitalist system that it can do nothing other than try to reproduce that system. The road of the State takes us farther into the dynamic of death, destruction, annihilation.
We must make our own paths by walking on them. Or rather: we make our own paths by dancing on them. Perhaps “preguntando bailamos” instead of “preguntando caminamos”: asking, we dance. We dance our way forward, breaking the rhythms of our doing, breaking the logic, the grammar of everyday life. Because that is the key to revolution: breaking the rhythms, the grammar, the logic, the patterns of the daily process of capitalist reproduction. Or, as Raoul famously puts it in his Revolution of Everyday Life, “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints—such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
In the revolutionary tradition, revolutionary activity and everyday life were defined by their separation. The revolutionary militant proves his commitment by sacrificing the comforts of the home, by turning his (typically his) back on family and friends and going off like a priest to dedicate his life to militancy. Radicalness and everydayness seem to be polar opposites. Yet it is just the opposite. A militancy that reproduces the distinction between public and private creates its own superficiality: revolution becomes focused on the transformation of the public realm without touching the separation of public and private that is inherent to the reproduction of capitalism. The paradoxical result is that militancy then leads to a timid, half-hearted concept of radical change. The problem with the revolutions of the twentieth century was not that they were too radical, but that they were too timid, with a bravery trapped in a world of sacrifice and power. They did not go far enough.
The turn to the everyday is no retreat into the private. It is no lowering of expectations. Rather it is just the contrary, it is a dramatic intensification of what we mean by revolution. When Vaneigem says in this book, “So long as we have not overcome the body-mind division we shall remain in a pincer grip between abstract intelligence and the brutality of the survival instinct,” this goes far beyond what Lenin or Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg demanded of revolution. The overcoming of the mind-body divide is a matter of everyday practice, yet it breaks radically with the totality of existing social organization. Marx points us in the same direction when he says, in effect, at the very beginning of Capital, that so long as we continue to relate to one another by exchanging our products as commodities, we shall remain in a pincer grip that will take us to the annihilation of humanity. Or Adorno: “So long as we remain trapped within identity, we shall repeat Auschwitz over and over again.”
Three lightning flashes in the night that cut through the separation of public and private. Three variations on a theme, for it is clear that the practice-thought of identity is inseparable from the coagulation or fetishization of the flow of social relations inherent in the exchange of commodities, and that the separation of mind and body too is part of the commodification of human relations. Three simple statements that focus on everyday activity and resonate into all the nooks and crannies of human sociality. Three startlingly simple diagnoses of what is wrong with the world, three simple prescriptions for how to stop our collective self-destruction. Three simple rejections of the State, for, by its very existence, the State identifies, the State separates the mind from the body, and the State promotes the commodification of human intercourse. But this is no retreat into the private: it is a call for the construction of an alternative sociality. More, it is the recognition of a new sociality that is already in process, based on the overflowing of identity, the refusal of commodification, the breaking of the separation of mind and body. In a world based on the totalizing of these practices, this means a demoralizing, a breaking away, a dancing in the opposite direction, a creating of cracks in which the world that we want begins to flourish. Back to the opening words of the book: “You are privileged to have been born at a crucial moment in history. A period when everything is being transformed and nothing will ever be the same again…. One civilization is collapsing and another is being born.” This other world is—or better—these other worlds are being born in the cracks, in the subjunctive crevices of the not-yet. But will they thrive?
Revolutionary poetry. It is a matter of revolutionary poetries and their force, as Raoul told us in The Revolution of Everyday Life. Capitalism reproduces itself through the operation of its laws, the laws of capitalist development. Revolutionary poetries are the breaking of those laws, the rupturing of the rhythms of capital, the creating of a different time and space. These are poetries in which all concepts move in-against-and-beyond their identifying limits, their limiting identities, creating literary works of breathtaking beauty: Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” Marx’s Capital, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Bloch’s Principle of Hope, Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and his other works including this book, many of the communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, and Galeano, to mention just a few. The beauty of these works is significant because it reminds us that these cracks, these subjunctive crevices, for all the practical difficulties that they face, can thrive only if they are places-times of beauty, poles of attraction that draw people into them and out of the drudge of survival. If the cracks become places of self-sacrifice, they are already fading back into the world that surrounds them. “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star” (Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”): the same can be said of the many, many creations of a different sociality. Revolutionary poetries are not just a matter of words and concepts but are above all practical: they are the often hesitant, always contradictory, sometimes wrongheaded pushes toward a different world, a world worthy of our children and the children of the world-to-come.
Our hopes lie in the cracks in society, but these are cracks also inside us. The self-antagonism of this society reproduces itself inside us as a self-antagonism. The moving in-against-and-beyond capital is a moving in-against-and-beyond ourselves. Our poetry of word, thought, and action must reach in and touch our self-antagonism, reach in and find the opening of January where it seems that there is only the closure of December. Raoul makes a distinction between the proletarian and the plebeian: “The proletariat was conscious of the struggle to be waged against the exploitation of man by man. Plebeians by contrast possess only the animal’s survival instinct: their emotional blindness is governed by nothing save the power of the predator and the cunning of the prey.” Yes, but the proletarian and the plebeian exist inside all of us, just as the antagonism between life and survival is inside all of us. Revolutionary poetry, of word, thought, and action, is a reaching out to, a trying to touch, the proletarian inside the plebeian, the life hidden under the coat of survival. It is not principally the struggle of one group against the other, the proletarians against the plebeians, but the struggle in all we do to give strength to life in-against-and-beyond survival, to the proletarian in-against-and-beyond the plebeian. In these terrifying times in which the plebeian in Raoul’s sense is celebrating its orgies in east and west, it is more important than ever to think not in terms of identities (plebeians of the right against proletarians of the Left), but in terms of flows of anger which swirl between the proletarian and the plebeian: flows of anger of which our revolutionary poetry is an active part.
And now, dear reader, it is your turn. Close the book or, better, leave it open, pick up your pens, and write a letter to the children of the world to come. When I received the invitation to write this Afterword to Raoul Vaneigem’s book, I jumped up and down for joy: it is an honor beyond imagination. And now it is for you to continue. And you will see that to write for the children born and unborn is a different exercise, one that inevitably takes us into January.
My thanks to Edith González Cruz, Panagiotis Doulos, Katerina Nasioka, and Eloína Peláez for their comments on an earlier version.