Where there is no spontaneity, nothing happens.
It is the spontaneity of a movement that permits it to rapidly acquire a form frankly revolutionary.
Autogestion is perhaps badly suited for growth; it’s an instrument of happiness.
The idea that insurrections resonate, emit a “world music,” gives a more sensory tonality to Marx’s old concept from The Communist Manifesto of a “world literature.” It also shifts the emphasis away from believing that the key problem in building alliances between social movements is a spatial one—i.e. a problem of how one movement somewhere connects with another movement somewhere else, how the gap between this place and that place is to be bridged. Arguably, the issue isn’t geographical at all; nor is it something that concerns “jumping scale”—like shifting from the local to the national, and then to international, thus matching the power of footloose multinational capital. Rather, what’s at stake is temporal, concerning not linear time but the rhythmic feature of organization, the rippling diffusion of a militant sensibility, of struggle, of general insurrection: it’s to do not so much with people connecting spatially as with the time they take to connect humanly, to feel the groove of insurrectional resonances around the world and around them—as, for example, when the Zapatistas won out in Chiapas, alliances were formed taking inspiration from this struggle, and various forms of activism were kick-started.
Alliances across the globe are forged through an emotional connection, through anger, pain, sympathy, admiration, etc., not because of some missing geography or spatial gap. These rhythms are sensual and affective, pre-conceptual in a certain sense, corporeal: they’re geographical only in the sense that bodies occupy a space somewhere. But how could they otherwise? Radical rhythms enter us spontaneously by a vibrational frequency, like music, like dance—poly-rhythmic, to be sure, since different struggles have their own frequency, but they nevertheless coexist and yearn at some point to harmonize. But this future harmony doesn’t have to equate to uniformity or mono-tonality: people hear the same music, yet sway a little differently and dance different steps depending on where they are. Though once enough people really hear the music, and once they start to really dance, no matter where you are you have to get up and start dancing yourself.
Another name for this slippery intuitive impulse might be mística, an abstract, emotional element that flows through disaffected peoples, through individuals and collectivities, “as the feeling of empowerment, love, and solidarity that serves as a mobilizing force by inspiring self-sacrifice, humility, and courage.”1 Mística is pre-cognitive praxis, mystic and deep, deriving as much from the heart as the head, a veritable “structure of feeling”2 that asserts itself symbolically, through folklore and oral vernacular, through spiritualism and poetry, through music and dance, through getting angry about the world, and doing something about it. It emanates from the “popular” layers of society, particularly of Latin American society, where it serves as the distinctive characteristic, even as a revolutionary watchword, of one of that continent’s largest and most effective social movements: the Movimento dos Tradalhadores Ruraís Sem Terra, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil, once described by Eric Hobsbawn as “probably the most ambitious social movement in contemporary Latin America.”3
Since the late 1970s, the MST has grown into a dynamic radical force. Under the agricultural modernization program of Brazil’s 1964–85 military regime, reenacting the barbarism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English Enclosure Laws, 30 million family and tenant farmers were kicked off the land. By the 1990s, the MST had consolidated itself, and its ranks began to swell even more in response to President Cardoso’s (1995–2002) neo-liberal policies: import tariffs were slashed from 32.2 percent to 14.2 percent while at the same time agribusiness received generous subsidies for its export trade, all of which left modest little smallholders at the mercy of the world market. Between 1995 and 1998, in Brazil’s drive for “global competitiveness,” as many as 400,000 farmers became severed from their earth and livelihood. Yet like the Mexican Zapatistas, the MST has successfully mobilized and organized a disparate mass of destitute farmers into a powerful and passionate agrarian army that has contested accumulation by dispossession, and retained and regained land through daring occupations and re-appropriations, risking life and limb in the process.4
The MST has resettled more than 400,000 families on 7 million hectares of farmland and is now one of the most vociferous opponents of Brazil’s stubborn (and institutionalized) colonial legacy of latifúndios as well as of global neo-liberal agribusiness as championed by the likes of the WTO. It’s also become a diehard promoter of food sovereignty and food security in an era of agrotoxins and transgenic seeds. In 1999, the MST participated in the “Battle of Seattle,” joining hands with other indigenous movements in the Global North as well as in the Global South, like the Confédération Paysanne and Via Campesina, and has been a regular trooper in helping host the good-guy World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and Belém. Meanwhile, it has steadily moved beyond a strictly national and defensive agenda—even beyond the idea of defending rural wage-labor itself—to affirm an offensive program of empowerment through access to land, and endorsing an alternative agricultural economy and an alternative world, one more eco-sensitive, autonomous, and convivial.
Rooted in its own brand of Paulo Freirean liberation theology, the MST uses fabled mística in its marxiant process of “concientization,” of becoming critically conscious through participation, through learning with and from others, through wrestling free of the straightjacket of received ideas, through thinking for yourself and discovering yourself within a community of other selves. A mística of resistance comes about through teaching and books, but it’s really a pedagogy of “deschooling”: imagination isn’t bludgeoned by rote learning and grade obsessions, nor is teaching used to promote service and prompt servility; rather it poses questions, shrugs off alienation, and fosters a spirituality that’s animalistic and ritualistic. Powerful mística emotions animate MST marches and rallies, rebellions, and riots, which are tightly organized yet spontaneous and felt as well, a creation of the moment as much as the mind, the moment of indignation: candles, seeds, machetes, and flags are incorporated into rituals of singing, poetry readings, and theatrics. As one MST activist put it, mística combines “dream with the political. Others on the left criticize us because mística is viewed as idealism, ritualistic ... But without mística we cannot be militants. We get nourished from this, and if you cannot feel emotion with the lonas pretas, with the children in school, with the MST’s flag, then why continue?”5
“Mística touches you inside,” says another rank-and-filer. “It touches our lives because it shows the mystery of struggling, of dreaming, of having hope, of the world that is out there. So through the mística we receive our life, our reality, our dreams and our history. And the místicas give us enthusiasm, give us courage.”6 Mística “gives us impulse,” says someone else:
It’s something you don’t explain; you feel it. We inherited a lot from theory, but in the MST it is enriched in the collectivity. Why is it that these people who live under lona preta stay smiling, singing and happy? It’s because of mística. In school, we create mística, a necessity to study more, a way of making struggle happen. There’s the mística of acting out the mystical act, where we remember martyrs through poetry or in marches—and there’s the mística that you live day-to-day ... The general sense of authenticity of mística is due to the fact that it has not been institutionalized. We realize that if you allow mística to become formal, it dies out. No one receives orders to be emotional; you get emotional because you are motivated as a result of something.7
Mística is as political and as personal as what the Spanish poet Frederico García Lorca once labeled duende, a militant poetic and a poetics of militancy that makes things possible even when they’re impossible, even when you think that all is lost, that everybody is dead and buried; it’s a deep song Marxism that yearns to find its wildest and most sensual voice against all odds. No geographical map will ever help anyone find duende or mística. No bourgeois or ruling-class elite can ever know duende or mística because they have too much to lose, because they aren’t desperate enough, because, as Marx says, they’re happy in their alienation. No bourgeois or ruling-class elite can ever have duende and mística either, because each, as Lorca says, burns in the blood like a poultice of broken glass; each rejects geometry and rationality, each leans on human pain. The great artists of the south of Spain, especially of Andalusia, whether they sing or dance or bullfight, all know that nothing comes unless the duende comes, just as in radical politics, or Magical Marxism. A lot of post-industrial capitalist society has killed duende, neutered it, doused its flames, destroyed it, stolen its feeling. A life of wealth and abundance for some perversely materializes into nothingness for everyone, into a life of too much work or not enough, into a reality devoid of real sensuality and guts, a hyper-commodified air-conditioned nightmare. Yet, like the force of mística, “the duende’s arrival,” Lorca says, “always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle.”8
In a remarkable essay penned at the turn of the nineteenth century, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth reflects upon a series of poems he’d bundled together under the rubric, Lyrical Ballads. In this essay, Wordsworth tried as best and as honestly as he could to give some “rational” explanation for his verse, to pinpoint “objectively” the expressive powers that propel an emotional force into words. Of course, Wordsworth never mentions politics and his sentiments are explicitly addressed to other poets and lovers of literature. But in ways never foreseen, and never intended, he nonetheless gives us a brilliant insight into the link between feeling and thinking, sentiment and language, imagination and composition, and in so doing shows how expressive human powers are in fact the basic ingredients of a politics as well as a poetics. Indeed, in almost every place that Wordsworth mentions “poems” and “poetry,” we might just as easily replace them with “politics” and “the political.” “The principal object proposed in these Poems,” Wordsworth says early on, “was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination.”9
Reality is the starting point of Wordsworth’s poetry, just as it must be for any politics; yet imagination does special things to color the real, and poetic ideas (and ideals) can in “a state of excitement” transform this reality into a new expressive and enlightened form, conveying unelaborated elemental sentiment in pointedly elaborate ways, for all to read, for all to feel. Because, above all else, Wordsworth reckons that it is feeling which gives importance to any action and situation, and not the action or the situation that gives meaning to the feeling. All fine poetry is, says Wordsworth, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”;10 likewise for all fine radical politics.
True, poems of real value and merit have usually been produced through long reflection and endless conscious revision; in all fine poetry, again as in all fine politics, feelings are modified and directed by thoughts, by mental reconstitution. But these thoughts are usually themselves the representatives of past feelings, and what poetry does “is bind together this passion and knowledge”; it thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions, says Wordsworth, passions connected to our
moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements, and the appearance of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow.11
Poetic thought thus gives shape to latent human passions, guides the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and translates these emotions into touching empathetic sentiment. The successful poem, like successful politics, straddles the thought–feeling divide, collapses it somehow, binds each together without reducing one to the other. It’s a poetic and political verse in which men are speaking to other men, women to other women, “in spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs; in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed.”12 Poetry, says Wordsworth, “binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time.” Poetry, as such, uses composition to hone words and shape sentences much like organizing helps craft and direct a politics of rage. Composition retouches powerful feeling, gives it coloring and poetic form; organizing harnesses spontaneous overflowing energy and drafts a political meter, a Marxist mística, “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”13
Wordsworth didn’t know he was sketching out a field manual for duende and mística users; nor did he know he was anticipating the profane illumination Walter Benjamin later discovered in his own magical experimental Marxism. Yet both Benjamin and Wordsworth concur that human passions and the human mind are capable of being excited without the application of artificial stimulant. Himself no stranger to the land of artificial paradises, Benjamin once wrote of his dabbling with hashish and quest for heightened forms of radical consciousness. During one hashish trip, he recounts of how “an incomprehensible gaiety came over me.” “Events took place in such a way,” Benjamin says, “that the appearance of things touched me with a magic wand, and I sank into a dream of them.”14 But the trance had its dark side. In fact, reflecting upon this state the next day, Benjamin knew that the hashish awakened nothing truly illuminating. During the trace, he became “an enraptured prose-being in the highest power.” Yet the problem was that, if anything, he’d become a little too enraptured: in that heady state, the act of creation came a little bit too easily; it was a phony magic.
In the end, the hashish trance “cuts itself off from everyday reality with fine, prismatic edges.”15 The real magic lies much closer to home, in the “profane illumination,” in “a materialist, anthropological inspiration,” to which hashish, opium, or whatever else gives but an “introductory lesson”—and a “dangerous one” at that. Benjamin was adamant that “we penetrate the mysterious side of the mysterious only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”16 The profane illumination was, then, just that: an earthly not heavenly illumination, inspired by everyday struggle and toil, by tales of ordinary doings imbued with a bit of duende, with the force of mística, with a grubby magic that stems from the human heart and human mind, and which invariably explodes on some street or in some jungle not terribly far away. In its most intoxicating, ecstatic radical form, it might spontaneously combust into a dangerous subversive politics, maybe into a truly revolutionary act.
The debate about feelings and thought and about spontaneity and organization has a long and checkered history within classical Marxism. In 1904 it brought Rosa Luxemburg to blows with Lenin, just as it had earlier divided Marx and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin within the First International Working Men’s Association (1864–76). Lenin belittled spontaneity, insisting it was a “subjective element” that couldn’t congeal into a fully blown “objective factor.” In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, he wrote that the “spontaneous development of the workers’ movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology.”17 He reckoned a “socialist consciousness” could only be brought to the people from the outside. By itself, the working class is only capable of a restrictive, “pure-and-simple trade union consciousness.” As a result, the working class needed a Party, led by an elite vanguard, by dedicated intellectuals who would make revolution their calling, who would purge the movement of its spontaneity, dictate a tight, tactical program of action, especially “to rebellious students ... to discontented religious sectaries, to indignant school teachers, etc.” Lenin, in short, was leery of mística, of a wilder, more emotive politics of rage, of spontaneous militancy.
The Marxist-Leninist campaign against spontaneity, waged in the name of science, in the name of insurrection viewed as technique, as organization, has had a catastrophic effect on looser, populist protesting, throwing the subjective, breathing baby out with the stagnant, objective bathwater. Indeed, certain strains of Marxism followed Lenin’s edict that spontaneity was devoid of value, that is, was essentially irrational, unscientific, against the flow of historical necessity and revolutionary capacity. Spontaneity lacked the military discipline Lenin wanted, lacked his centralist take on organization, regressed into “tailism,” with the tail wagging the dog, the masses steering the Party, in a “slavish kowtowing before spontaneity.”
Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, had little sympathy with Lenin’s “ultra-centralist tendency,” rejecting his contempt for nonaligned working-class activism, for the “objectivity” of the Party. Different progressive and working-class federations, Luxemburg wrote in her pamphlet Leninism or Marxism?, needed a “liberty of action.”18 That way they could better “develop their revolutionary initiative and utilize all the resources of a situation.” Lenin’s line was “full of the sterile spirit of overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit.”19 Luxemburg is more generous, more sensitive to the ups and downs of struggle in the course of which an organization emanates and grows, unpredictably pell-mell. Social democracy, she says, isn’t just “invented”; it’s “the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.”20
Needless to say, a movement might not immediately recognize itself within its struggle, within its campaign, given that people often become aware of themselves, objectively, as it were, as activists within a broader movement, only during the course of struggle. They invariably define themselves through their opposite, through encountering a “ruling class,” their Other, through agents and institutions who are different from them, who have power and wealth and authority, and whose interests are different from theirs, somehow against theirs. Affinity and affiliation (whether formal or not) becomes acknowledged en route, not a priori. There aren’t any precisely prescribed set of revolutionary tactics, no tactical recipe books. An “air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment” is, for Luxemburg, mindlessly sectarian. The unconscious comes forth before the conscious; the movement, she says, advances “spontaneously by leaps and bounds. To attempt to bind the initiative ... to surround it with barbed wire, is to render it incapable of accomplishing the tremendous tasks of the hour.”21
Luxemburg should be on the reading lists of altermondialistes everywhere; ditto for every Marxist’s. Killing spontaneous upsurge without trying to understand it, to guide it towards a coherent practice, to shape it through “composition” (in the Wordsworthian sense) and nourish a tactics that might overcome it at the right moment—neither too early nor too late—is the desperate sign of dogmatism. As Henri Lefebvre said, reflecting upon May 1968, without spontaneity nothing happens, nothing progresses; there simply is no movement, no movement that moves, nothing that has life. “For all forms of power, consequently, spontaneity is the enemy.”22 Always and everywhere spontaneity expresses itself as a subjectivity against objectivity, as a refusal to be integrated into a duff system, as an emotional release, as a state of vivid sensation, as a catharsis to domination and exploitation, to marginalization and oppression, as a moment of truth—or perhaps of delusion.
Not every spontaneous upsurge is progressive, as Weimar Germany attests; ditto Britain’s “pro-hunt” rallies and in the US the recent corporate-lobbyist-inspired anti-Obama “tea parties,” championed by Fox News and our old friend Glenn Beck. So, too, was one of staunchest advocates of spontaneity a free-marketeer—Friedrich von Hayek, Margaret Thatcher’s bedside read. For Hayek, the “free” price system is an unconscious invention that produces its own “spontaneous order,” something resulting from human action, he says, but not from human design. Many things, however, separate Hayek’s radical (conservative) spontaneity from its progressive counterpart. To begin with, the spontaneity Hayek recognized arose out of social institutions organized around a market of “free individuals” asserting their “moral” right; yet, as Marx repeatedly insisted, this is a kind of freedom—“free trade,” “free exchange,” etc.—which is really a freedom for the relatively few at the expense of the many. Indeed, it’s a freedom that militates against any autonomous action that isn’t cast within the confines of a market situation, that isn’t based upon exchange, money, and value relations. It’s an “anarchy” of unregulated markets that produces despotism in the workplace, and in daily life. It’s a Hobbesian race for the bottom-line wherein the only prevailing authority is the authority of competition, the coercion exerted by reciprocal capitalist interests. Meanwhile, Hayek also maintains that these spontaneous, anarchic markets produce an ordered rational system that tends towards equilibrium. Even on its own terms this notion is ridiculous, given the perennial breakdowns and crises of global capitalism.
From a left libertarian standpoint, on the other hand, spontaneous non-statist activity is affirmed because it wants to rid itself of the market system, because it wants to replace it with something more genuinely autonomous and communitarian. This sort of spontaneity frequently explodes in the arenas of society not occupied by institutions, such as forgotten or feared spaces of everyday life, like peripheral quartiers and banlieues, like inner cities and ghettoes, like jungles and favelas and assorted shantytowns the world over. Not so long ago Mike Davis pondered on the possibility of spontaneous combustion in the mega-cities of the Global South:
Perhaps there’s a tipping point at which the pollution, congestion, greed and violence of everyday urban life [in the developing world] will finally overwhelm the ad hoc civilities and survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old rural world there were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed directly to social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at which the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust.23
By 2020, 2 billion people will inhabit favelas and slums scattered around the edge of the world’s biggest cities. A vast global banlieue is in the making in which landless peasants and ex-proletarians occupy not rural hinterlands but the periphery of the world-city, ruralizing the urban as much as urbanizing the countryside. Meanwhile, a global ruling class is shaping its core, at the center, “Haussmannizing” nodes of wealth and information, knowledge and power, creating a feudal dependency within urban life everywhere. Who knows whether those 2 billion dispossessed will ever want to demarginalize themselves in a giant spontaneous street uprising. Will the globalization of communication open everything up to “the eyes of the global poor”—to adapt Baudelaire’s poem—inspiring indignation and organization as well as awe (with their “big saucer eyes”)? Tens of thousands of poor landless Latinos have already helped reinvent the urban labor movement in California; militancy in South African townships brought down Apartheid; millions took to streets in Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, São Paulo and Buenos Aires, when East Asian and Latin American economies went into meltdown during 1997; revolts against IMF shock therapy programs have regularly left many developing world capitals smoldering as the most vulnerable connect global neo-liberalism with their own local street.
Once they erupt, and certainly if they spread, power and its media quickly brandish spontaneous uprisings “riots,” émeutes, and their participants are dismissed as “scum,” as dangerous anarchists, as unreasonable disturbers of the peace and the “moderate” social order. Institutions, above all, fear the untamed street and try to cordon it off, try to repress its spontaneity, to separate different factions of protesters in the street; they try to quell the apparent disorder and seek to reaffirm order, in the name of the law. From street level, from below, contestation can spread to institutional areas above. Spontaneous contestation can unveil power, can bring it out into the open, out of its mirrored-glass offices and black-car motorcades, out of its private country clubs, its conference rooms and seminar centers. Especially since Seattle, streets have become explicitly politicized, filling the void left by institutional politics, bringing globalization home to roost, somewhere, at some moment. Therein lies the strength of spontaneous street contestation; therein also lies its weakness: the weakness of localism, of symbolism, of “partial practice,” of an impulsive nihilism.
And yet, the explosion of street politics and spontaneity in Seattle, in Washington, in New York, in Davos, Switzerland (where the World Economic Forum meets annually), as well as in Quebec City (April 2001, where tear gas and water cannons met those protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks) and at numerous G8 summits, in the banlieue of French big cities (November 2005), in Greece (December 2008), has led to the rebirth within radicalism of the phenomenon of violence. Violence is connected with spontaneity and with contestation—“with forces,” Lefebvre says, “that are in search of orientation and can exist only by exerting themselves.”24 Violence is largely unavoidable in radical struggle: breaking things up, making nonsense out of meaning (and meaning out of nonsense), throwing bricks through Starbucks windows, driving tractors into McDonald’s, burning cars, daubing graffiti on walls—all are justifiable responses to state repression and corporate injustice, to the “latent violence” of power. Hence they are legitimate forms of “counter-violence.” In this sense, violence expresses what Lefebvre calls a “lag” (retard) between “peaceful coexistence” and “stagnating social relations,” symptomatic of “new contradictions super-imposed on older contradictions that were veiled, blurred, reduced, but never resolved.”25
Lefebvre sees a certain political purchase in destructive behavior, in senseless acts of beauty—so long as they don’t degenerate into “the ontology of unconditional spontaneity,” into “the metaphysics of violence.” Reliance only on violence leads, he says, to a “rebirth of a tragic consciousness,” antithetical to the dialectic of becoming. Consequently, serious concern with contestation, spontaneity, and violence, requires at the same time a serious delineation of spontaneity and violence, done with the aid of theory “which pure spontaneity tends to ignore.”26 Frequently, spontaneous protest is summarily denounced as idiotic, juvenile, naive, and this not only by the right-wing. But “immature” young people can teach grown-ups a thing or two about mature life and politics. If anything, “maturity” in politics may be as much a stumbling block as a solution. Often “maturity” spells certitude, and a leftist certitude translates into either dogmatism or cynicism, into an endorsement of the messianic powers of the proletariat, and nothing else but. Such a vision tends to move from the relative towards the absolute, into an invocation of the authority of the founders, into a purity and a posteriorism that deigns to no contamination in the meanwhile. Here left-wing cynics seem happy to revel in analyzing and criticizing the increasingly bankrupt capitalist system; the worse it gets, the more crisis ridden it becomes, the better it is for them, the more depressed they can be, the more inspired they are in their theorizing and apocalyptic prognostications. This is a perverse certitude. On the other hand, incertitude and false hopes can spell nihilism and a delusional optimism that can lurch towards absolute violence, to vain and unorganized activism, to a lot of people getting hurt on the street, especially young people.
Someone like Lefebvre was cunning in his adoption of a utopian position somewhere in between, a position he labels “cultivated spontaneity.”27 Cultivated spontaneity centers on concrete problems that are practical and theoretical, and which require both sobriety and exuberance in resolving them, diligent organizing mixed with mad raving ideals, method as well as mística. It means, too, an “unceasing critical analysis of absolute politics and the ideologies elaborated by specialized political machines,”28 whether on the left or the right. Cultivated spontaneity today would be neither dogmatism nor nihilism, but something else entirely different again: it would be a form of contestation as scathing of the bourgeois system as the romantic dandies of Stendhal’s time, yet more experimental in its extravagant subjectivity, more battle-trained in its magical imagination. It would be an activism that is somehow at once classical and post-modern, a new retro-Marxism: angrier and more realistic than the generation that gave us surrealism, yet more humorous and breezier than Lefebvre’s own generation of earnest tie-wearing communists and labor movement affiliates.
“It requires courage to be a romantic,” Stendhal claimed, “because one must take risks.”29 Any new millennium romanticism of spontaneous combusters would similarly scour the future and take risks. It would march ahead of the game, exit from us, scanning the horizon in the far distance. Its presence would suggest a new attitude drifting in the breeze, and if we look hard enough this presence can be seen and felt: in the revolts, insubordinations, protests, abstentions, spontaneous rebellions that are indeed around us today. What the romantics saw around them in Stendhal’s day, and what any “new romantic” sees now, is a world governed by constraints and inanities, and these need to be blasted away, brushed aside, dynamited. A new romanticism would be affirmed, is being affirmed, by disparate and desperate elements of society: young people, political rebels, exiles, intellectuals, deskilled, unemployed and/or downsized workers, self-selected downshifters, déclassé deviants, half-crazed debauchees, misfits, successive and abortive geniuses, dandies and perhaps even a few snobs. This ragged, motley array of people would live out, is living out, within the ruins of everyday bourgeois society their ideal solutions to bourgeois society, challenging its moral order, devouring society from within as it seeks to reinvent the world from without, using all its powers of symbolism and imagination, all its raging powers of numbers.
All spontaneous transgressions take a devastating revenge on the constraints of the language of power. Speech (in its broadest sense) manifests itself as a primary freedom, what we might also call a primal freedom. When protest and critique is outlawed, silenced or pilloried in the press, when it is banished from the street, agitation and indignation will spark angry contestation; and soon an explosion of unfettered speech and action may be unleashed. We’ve already glimpsed such spontaneous contestation erupting on our streets, voicing indignation and agitation, coalescing around many different agendas, expressed by many different groups, pitched around many different issues: canceling Third World debt, banning child and sweatshop labor, ridding cars from our cities, keeping city life vital, shutting down the World Bank and the IMF, taming unfettered globalization, changing the world and changing life. Participation has shown and will doubtless continue to show its indignation. A re-energized militancy and spontaneity has reared its head, just a little. This contestation has posed unflinching questions while grappling for answers, while dreaming about alternatives. Equally, it has shown an amazing capacity to politicize people, particularly young people, those disgruntled with ballet-box posturing and who care about our fragile democracy and sacked society.
Some protagonists, like Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights organization, comprise nomadic gadflies, young activists who travel up and down America and all over the world. They spread the anti-corporate word at hitherto unprecedented decibels, mixing painstaking planning with spontaneous militancy, clearheaded analysis with touchy-feely utopianism. Indeed, the whole ontological raison d’être of Global Exchange is organizing: politicking and proselytizing, conducting teach-ins and speak-outs, staging demos and boycotts and masterminding blitzes, everywhere. Their ideas and ideals address the big black hole that capitalist consumerism bequeaths young, intelligent people today. Global Exchange is also a prime mover in the umbrella group, DAN, the Direct Action Network, whose ethos is non-violent protest. DAN détourns high-tech media, too, working it for its own radical ends, coordinating on the Internet, initiating guerrilla action, radicalizing fellow-traveling affinity groups, like the Ruckus Society, which affirms a politics of pleasure, having fun while it gets deadly serious, performing street theater and musical happenings, dance soirées and educational seminars.
Many cities across the globe have been disrupted and re-appropriated by another dynamic spontaneous presence: Reclaim the Streets (RTS). Over recent years, RTS demos have shutdown streets in Manhattan (at Astor Place, in the East Village and around Times Square), in Sydney, in north, south and central London, in Helsinki, in Prague and other European capitals. In the middle of major traffic thoroughfares, crowds have danced and shouted and partied—revolutionaries, students, workers, activists, and malcontents. In their “Festivals of Love and Life,” they’ve brought cars to a standstill and defended pedestrians’ and bikers’ right to the city. RTS has rediscovered a “new romantic” oomph, “transforming stretches of asphalt into a place where people can gather without cars, without shopping malls, without permission from the state, to develop the seeds of the future in the present society.” So said one RTS banner posted not very long ago on an East Village wall. Such prankster politics enacts lampoon, pulls tongues and raises the finger, voices satire at a rather sober and stern enemy. Turning people on has meant turning them off party-political smokescreens. Participants know the revolution will never be televised.
And yet those participants have nonetheless “profited” from new corporate communication technologies, turning them against their antagonists, using them as spontaneous radical weapons much like Colonel Buendia had in his long democratic crusades in One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Get the boys ready,” the colonel had said to Gerineldo Márquez. “We’re going to war.” “With what weapons?” Márquez asks. “With theirs,” says the colonel (p. 89). Foremost here is the cell-phone, now a redoubtable weapon for communicating sur place, on the spot, spontaneously; young people raised in the culture of cell-phones no longer make appointments or arrangements weeks in advance like my 40-something generation did and still do; by calling around, by passing the message on, they organize themselves in the heat of the moment and in the heat of the movement; like bourgeois production, they arrange rendezvous just-in-time. So, too, in politics: new technology has collapsed space and diminished the time of organizing, of rounding up troops or shifting them elsewhere, of supplying reinforcements when and where needed, of dodging heavy police presences: all that is now unprecedentedly aided by cell-phones and text messaging. Now, spontaneity can be managed and orchestrated—media staged, as it were; and via mobile calls and text messages protesters can give each other continuous and almost instantaneous updates about routes, street closures and police actions.
Cell-phones coordinated a lot of the activism and “swarming tactics” on the streets of Seattle in 1999, and were crucial weapons in outsmarting the centralized police radio system; more recently, cell-phones and mobile technologies have been able to dodge “security bubbles” and exclusion zones cropping up in the world’s big cities. At the back end of 2003, mobile messaging pioneered the “Chase Bush” campaign in London; text messages, emails, and images were sent out to all activists and anti-war campaigners trying to spoil the Blairite PR and disrupt the state-managed party. Regular SMS updates, as well as on-location reports about Bush’s appearances and movements, were circulated among participants, frequently young people who see themselves as “second generation Smart Mobbers.”30 Text messages sent from cell-phones have likewise enabled activists to communicate and organize themselves at assorted World Economic Forum (WEF) summits, and in July 2004 a so-called “TXTMob” was at the center of spontaneous rallies disrupting both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Boston and New York.
According to the New York Times, “TXTMob works like an Internet mailing list for cell-phones and is the brainchild of a young man who goes by the pseudonym John Henry. He’s a member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a group of artists, programmers and others who say their mission is to develop technologies that serve the social and human need for self-determination.” The software used by all registered TXTMobbers isn’t intended for everyday mobile socializing: “It was created as a tool political activists could use to organize their work, from staff meetings to street protests. Most of the people using it are on the left: of the 142 public groups listed on the TXTMob site, the largest are dedicated to protesting the Bush administration, the Republican Party or the state of the world in general.” At the “Critical Mass” anti-Republican rally in New York, TXTMob bikers organized themselves by dispatching messages to alert one another of route changes to avert traffic snarls. One young female participant, thumbing through her TXTMob messages, said the system kept her safe during the ride: “It told me where the cops were and where I could rest.”31
IT and mobile media-inspired activism might even be ushering in a new “Fifth International,” a qualitatively different form of left organizing and politicking from yesteryear’s internationals, from those traditionally pioneered by party-based socialists and rank-and-file unionists. The current “informatized and globalized capitalism,” writes Peter Waterman, the coiner of the “Fifth International” thesis, is a capitalism very different in form and content from that pervading during the era of the “International Working Men’s Associations”; today, modes of solidarity and styles of praxis require other means and incorporate new nonaffiliated and non-aligned protagonists.32 According to Waterman:
The new internationalisms are communication internationalisms, in a number of interrelated senses: a) their privileged terrain is that of communication; b) they are concerned to create new common global understandings and communities by both the provision of otherwise repressed and unavailable information and the creation of new emancipatory meanings or understandings; c) their internal cohesion and external influence is more a matter of communication than organization.33
A newly forming, looser coterie of smart and concerned citizens, spanning the entire globe and dialoguing in many different languages, are thus finding their collective lingua franca in the growing array of informational technology acronyms like SMS, PDA, GPS, GPL, XML, etc., etc. And they’re drawing upon their dazzling expertise to create an anarcho-communist subculture of politically minded “hackers” and virtual radicals whose activism and communication sometimes does come home to roost in bites as well as bytes.34 In one of his last books, L’immatériel, André Gorz propels these hackers and their “hacker ethnic” into the forefront of a potentially revolutionary vanguard, into an anti-statist “postindustrial neo-proletariat” and “dissidents of a numeric capitalism.”35 In the informational economy of immateriality, Gorz glimpses those who are bidding adieu to the working class, and good riddance, too, he says, because at the same time this is bidding farewell to capitalist work and money relations, to profit motives and competition exigencies, to scarcity and monopoly. “With the development of the Web and of the ‘Free Software’ movement,” Gorz writes, “this neo-proletariat has become the geometric site towards which and from where all radical contestation of global and financial capitalism disseminates.”36
The ranks of this neo-proletariat are expanding as we speak, either by free will or by default, by the increasing obsolescence of human labor, by the continued implementation of machines and new technology in the process of capitalist production. The value base of our economy is more and more founded upon a materiality that is in reality immaterial, that has decoupled the link between employing labor and making money; indeed, it has decoupled itself from the essential basis of Marx’s labor theory of value, too, together with any hope of a return to a full-employment economy. Capitalism has outlived its lame promise of wealth for everyone, a decent job for everyone—outlived it long ago. All of which brings new threats as well as new possibilities; all of which, as Marx knew, is “pregnant with its contrary.” Yet it is those people who voluntarily align themselves with this non-aligned neo-proletariat who perhaps hold the key, who are perhaps the new agents with a world-historical anti-capitalist mission; in fact, these people, says Gorz, “are the principal future actors of an anti-productivist, anti-statist cultural mutation.”37
Gorz cites at length the late German Social Democrat and technology analyst, Peter Glotz, who reckoned the real novelty of this immaterial economy lies in the radicality of its self-appointed neo-proletariat, “because they’ve refused the culture of the nanosecond. More and more these youth are refusing to climb the social ladder,” preferring to reverse what Sarkozy once thought: opting for more free time rather than more money.38 As Glotz explains further:
they want to transform their work from full-time to part-time because they want to clear away the time-served work ethic ... The more that numeric [informational] capitalism spreads its grip on our lives, the greater will become the number of downshifters and voluntary déclassé. From them a new conception of the world will surge. The struggle that pits the numeric proletariat against the capitalist business elite won’t have at stake questions about technology and economics, but two differing principal and passionate conceptions of life. The whole social ethic of modern capitalism is now in question.39
Net activism and deliberate downshifting is a contra-capitalism germinating within actually existing capitalism, an auto-organization negating the system from within as it invents an alternative community from without. The means, the actors, and the weapons are now all different from the past. Still, this anarcho-communism nascent within virtual activism, dramatized and amplified by the hacker and free software network, “is but a sketch of another possible world,” as Gorz admits; its promise is that it
diffuses within the social body of society and somehow catalyzes a recomposition of that society. Only if this social body carries within it a coalition of a certain type is global change possible. Revolutions are made—when they are made—by an alliance of the most oppressed with those who are most conscious of their own alienation and that of others. It’s this alliance that’s emerging in the manifold movement for ‘another world’, for another globalization. Different constituents animate this alliance: academics, economists, writers, artists, scientists linked to and radicalized by oppositional unions, post-industrial neo-proletarians, cultural minorities, landless peasants, the unemployed and the partly-employed.40
Experiments in other modes of life are being explored within this new community, in the interstices of a society whose monopoly and centralization of the means of production have reached a point at which they are incompatible with the socialization of labor. This capitalist integument is leaking air—deflating from within, not bursting asunder. New technology has created ever more complex and diverse divisions of labor, and, historically, capital has appropriated this as a source of relative surplus value. Technology’s prowess, Marx says, rests in its ability “to increase the productive power of the individual, by means of cooperation,” by creating a new productive power, “which is intrinsically a collective one.”41 But this cuts both ways, because this collective and cooperative power, hastened as it is by globalization and informatization, also opens up new potentialities for revolt and resistance—and Marx knows it. The “unavoidable antagonism,” he says, is that “as the number of cooperative workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital.”42 And it’s an unavoidable antagonism that’s broadening the terrain for any neo-proletariat, for creating an expanded and more concentrated geopolitical network for a different kind of cooperation, for new powers of desire and imagination, for radical mística, for collective sharing rather than private appropriation, for self-unfolding rather than wholesale degradation.
A society beyond the narrow confines of wage-labor, money, and exchange lies at the heart of the Oekonux project, a German list-serve that discusses the revolutionary possibility of Free Software and an Open Source economy.43 The founder, Stefan Merten, says that Oekonux and its sister magazine Krisis offer contemporary readings of Marx in the light of the new information economy and transformations in work relations:44
A number of people on the Oekonux mailing list have built upon Krisis’ theories and carried them onto new ground. On the list, among other things, we try to interpret Marx in the context of Free Software. It’s very interesting that much of what Marx said about the final development of capitalism can be seen in Free Software. In a sense, part of our work is trying to re-think Marx from a contemporary perspective, and interpret current capitalism as containing a germ form of a new society.45
The fundamental basis of a capitalist economy, of a society based on the profit motive, on exchange value and money relations, is scarcity—the active creation and perpetuation of scarcity. The digital economy, as peddled by the likes of Microsoft, is all about domination and monopoly, about closing things off for non-payers; it’s an informational industry that privately accumulates capital at the same time as it feverishly protects its intellectual property rights. A Free Software society is the veritable nemesis of that. After all, free software, like all digital information, is in essence infinitely reproducible, and at extremely low cost, and thus isn’t in any sense a scarce good. Contrary to intellectual property rights (IPR) people, the Free Software movement, which offers downloadable software at zero price, goes out of its way to prevent commercial monopolization and scarcity creation. And as an anti-business ethic this can be far-reaching. As Merten says:
For most Free Software producers, there’s no other reason than their own desire to develop that software. So the development of Free Software is based on the self-unfolding (from the German term ‘Selbstentfaltung’, similar but not completely the same as ‘self-development’) of the single individual. This form of non-alienated production results in better software because the use of the product is the first and foremost aim of the developer—there simply is no profit that can be maximized. The self-unfolding of the single person is present in the process of production, and the self-unfolding of the many is ensued by the availability of high quality Free Software.46
When information is given away rather than sold for a fee this is potentially radical; society becomes more open and less hidden; power can’t as easily conceal its doings, its manipulations; radical organizations and NGOs can obtain and share data and dirt on corporate machinations and maneuverings. New forms of cooperation can promote alternative forms of self-organization and self-managed associations. Open information and free access to informational tools can help develop new “tools of conviviality,” and maybe even transcend the industrial model of production in which people really can flourish because of technological change.47 The Free Software movement describes their normative society beyond capitalism as a “GPL society”—a General Public License society, a society in which Marx’s “general intellect” prevails, a society without commercial copyright, a copyleft society that no longer tolerates socially produced scarcity or secret state and corporate conniving, and no longer functions through exchange value and money, nor through labor exploitation.48
Marx was one of the first modern philosophers to recognize the tremendous potential of new technology to transform nature and to create mass abundance, to make life fruitful and work less onerous. For him, inside every labor-saving machine, within every example of wide-scale human cooperation, lay glimmers of a future utopia. But under capitalist social relations, this radiant dream remains merely a pipedream, “another driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production”;49 another method, that is, to achieve value-added. The “free-gift” of collective labor mobilizing ever more sophisticated machines within ever more detailed divisions of labor and modes of “cooperative” work metamorphoses into an intricate sundering, into deadening alienation. What could be light and engaging work suddenly becomes heavy and repetitious, “disturbing the intensity and flow of a man’s vital forces, which find recreation and delight in change of activity.”50
The GPL society, by contrast, is a society in which work and the notion of “worker” undergoes radical transformation, radical rethinking. Work here would permit a common self-unfolding, like it does in a hobby or in art. Today’s work-society develops by rendering more and more people obsolescent in relation to the production process. If “freed from the chains of capitalism,” Stefan Merten thinks, “this development would mean freedom from more and more necessities, making room for more processes of self-unfolding—be it productive processes like Free Software or non-productive ones like many hobbies. So contrary to capitalism, in which increasing automation always destroys the workplaces for people and thus their means of life, in a GPL society maximum automation would be an important aim for the whole society.” For Merten,
Free Software surpasses the older forms of self-unfolding in several ways and that’s what makes it interesting on the level of social change:
a) Most products of self-unfolding are results of outmoded forms of production, like craftwork. Free Software is produced using the most advanced means of production humanity has available.
b) Most forms of self-unfolding may be useful for some persons, but this use is relatively limited. Free Software, however, delivers goods that are useful for a large number of persons—virtually everybody with a computer.
c) Most products of self-unfolding are fruits of one individual. Free Software depends upon collaborative work—it is usually developed by international teams and with help from the users of the product.
d) Most products of self-unfolding have been pushed away once the same product becomes available on the market. By contrast, Free Software has already started to push away software developed for maximizing profit.51
The Free Software movement is, according to another protagonist, Pekka Himanen, “hacking capitalism,” and, in contradistinction to Max Weber’s protestant work ethic, offers a new social ethic to boot: “the hacker ethic.” This ethic recovers a more intimate relationship to work, of which the principal motivations are pleasure, play and passion.52 For Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), work is an end in itself, a finality, a natural calling, something bestowed upon us by God who insists that we live to work rather than work to live: I have a job rather than I do work. It’s a possession rather than a simple act. It follows that anything deemed “non-work” (read: “non-waged work”) is assimilated as laziness or idleness, as a waste of one’s time, as something morally reprehensible. It’s a work ethic that persists today in our own work-obsessed society, cutting deep into our culture, especially into Anglo-Saxon culture, and appropriated by capital as its God-given business ethic. It also leads to problems of self-worth and self-esteem for all those who don’t or can’t work. That’s why unemployment is seen as a curse rather than a potential blessing; socially, it’s seen as a personal failing, as being inactive, not just inactive in terms of capital valorization, but in terms of oneself: you’re an unproductive self.53
The hacker ethic opposes this Weberian ideology, and is immanently subversive in its hack stance, not just in the actual activity of programming and designing free software, like Linux or OpenOffice, but also in its different philosophy of life and lifestyle philosophy. “In the hacker version of flexible time,” Himanen says, “different sequences of life, like work, family, friends and hobbies, etc., are mixed with a certain malleability to the degree that work never occupies a central place.”54 The work of Linux is directly cooperative and voluntary; its organizational structure is horizontal not vertical, and its focus is on sharing information and innovation, not patenting it; there’s a total absence of private appropriation of common goods, and often an absence of a “salary of dependence.”55 Himanen emphasizes the great diversity among hackers, from hacker-journalists and hacker-artisans, to hacker-artists, hacker-screenwriters, and hacker-activists (“hacktivists”). Some “war-driving” hackers, equipped with basic wireless antenna, pass through neighborhoods in their cars trawling the airwaves for free broadband access points and for open wi-fi networks; they note them down and later store them on online databases for free use to everybody within range. All hackers are exploring new directions for human–technology relations; all, too, permit us to better understand, and come to terms with, the kinds of mutations and possibilities opening up around work relations and projects of self-unfolding—particularly as contemporary capitalism continues its own unfolding, its steady coming apart at the seams.
Classical Marxism has a hard time accepting the rogue nature of non-aligned spontaneity, of hacker ethics, of a striving for post-capitalist autogestion. Classical Marxism seems incapable of seeing any of this as the legitimate doings of a class-conscious working class, thus as anything progressive. The working class remains decisive, we hear, the only force capable of changing society. It’s time to break with this kind of thinking, to break the links in the chain of Marxism’s Promethean moorings; it’s time Marxism let itself drift more loosely, let itself float amongst the floating relative surplus population that capitalism has “set free.” It’s time for it to let itself lose from its structural and productivist foundation and fight with new weapons and new techniques for a materialism that’s immaterial, for a laborism that’s work-shy. Marxism has the software as well as the hardware needed to engineer new forms of cooperation and solidarity, new forms of spontaneous activism and self-management spanning the world, in the global village that informational technology has somehow spawn.
A smaller world remains to be won. Old debates about the role of the state in some transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat” now appear intellectually quaint and organizationally irrelevant. Since there’s little hint that the shop floor continues to inspire any radicalism other than defensive union posturing, and since the class Marx hailed as revolutionary has been unmade and rendered partyless, “taking power” through traditional worker syndicalism, through a party vanguard, is both theoretically meaningless and practically impotent. What’s up for grabs is something much more ambitious and potentially more rewarding: an autogestion of life, a spontaneous subjectivation from the standpoint of social reproduction, within everyday life, within civil society. Subjectivation means that people construct their own objective structures to life, that their agency and even their wishful thinking drive them forward, compel them to act, have them strive for collective autonomy. Emotional and virtual bonds somehow gel them together; the two elements aren’t mutually exclusive in arousing states of vivid sensation. For Henri Lefebvre, who has spilt much ink exploring the theme of autogestion, “the principle contradiction that autogestion introduces and stimulates is its own contradiction with the state. In essence, autogestion calls the state into question as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations. Once aimed at ground level, in a fissure, this humble plant comes to threaten the huge state edifice.”56
Yet when Lefebvre talked (in 1966) about the state as a “constraining force,” he was identifying a state that existed in the halcyon days of “Fordism,” an interventionist state whose administrative apparatus thrust itself into the general management of everyday life. Thus it was a paternalistic state that constrained ordinary people as it went about its business of ensuring the reproductive needs of capital. Nowadays, however, this state has largely withered away, though not in the Marxist sense of the term. It has withered away from the social needs of people, re-channeling its “post-Fordist” paternalism unashamedly in the direction of capital. Historically, the traditional reflex rank-and-file response was to demand that the state look after the interests of the working class. So, instead of freeing itself from state domination, overthrowing the state or taking it over, the working class became passively dependent upon it. So much so that when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan foisted themselves center stage, the left faced an awkward dilemma with its thinking about the New Right state, foundering both politically and theoretically, trapped between the rock and the hard place.57
The backing away of the state from its “duties” of social protection and a de-bureaucratization of social life might have been seen as an opportunity as much as a threat, as a potential cue to exploring new activities more self-organized, more autonomous; to self-divest from work without falling into the right’s ideological trap of personal responsibility and possessive individualism. But this liberation never took place—was unable to take place in the absence of the requisite political space (or imagination). As such, touting autogestion in the regime of Fordism and touting it under today’s neo-liberal regime is a tale of two different autogestions, highlighting the worst and best of times for its potential enactment. Does autogestion challenge corporate-state power or does it subsidize it through its own self-reliance? Does it give power a break or try to break power? Does autogestion signal a new form of social solidarity or is it a symptom of the decomposition of solidarity? Whatever the response here, it’s clear that autogestion cannot be all or nothing from the outset; it doesn’t have to be global or everywhere before it can be anywhere. Autogestion has to germinate somewhere, somehow, and frequently a seed is scattered spontaneously. By expressing itself, asserting itself, by growing and blooming, by defining the conditions of its own survival, autogestion necessarily magnifies and amplifies the problems of the society that opposes it. In any place or moment in which autogestion manifests itself spontaneously it always carries within itself the possibility of radicalization and generalization.
Alternative communitarian forms, virtual communities, and self-organized solidarities already exist on the social (and sometimes spatial) margins of our social system while they embody a politics that’s invariably in the thick of things, invariably center stage. Under autogestion, individual groups freely associate without any preexisting social basis or homogeneous class interest. Often these groups have no other political ethic than an anti-capitalist/anti-corporate ethic—it’s that which defines their progressive self-identity and their autonomy. They reflect a human condition that writers like Gorz label “post-Marxist.” The human condition “post-Marxist” is precisely the condition confronting any conception of Magical Marxism. It’s the condition in which Marxists reinvent the agents of history, give another sense to Marx’s thesis of historical development—though we need to do so with a twist. To be sure, we Marxists now have to pursue this grand historical drama independently of any single social class capable of realizing it, of making history, or of ending “pre-history” (as Marx was wont to say). This political agenda has no class interest to invoke, no rusty anchorage to keep it fixed, no crutch to prop it up. Its inspiration is itself and its goal is to give sense to the future, to pave its way, to explore new narrow trails towards its realization in present social relations. If this politics draws upon the past—past myths, struggles, heroes, martyrs, and ancient rituals—it does so only as a strategic device that helps better frame the contradictions of the present conjuncture, contradictions that reveal the future. If the Zapatistas invoke Zapata and the great Mexican revolutionaries of the early twentieth century, and if their practice of everyday life is “traditional,” their politics and spirit nevertheless remain rooted in the twenty-first century: they remain both autonomous and high-tech.
All forms of effective autogestion need to deploy some transcendent criteria, need to pose questions about the nature of individual and social transcendence. One contests using tools—intellectual software and practical hardware—that have the potential to overcome existing conditions of society, that propose an alternative to those conditions; otherwise one’s contestation invariably falls back not so much on a conformism (or reformism) as on utilitarianism, and utilitarianism is always in danger of being reincorporated within the system, of being reabsorbed. In this sense, contestation isn’t a technique but a paradigm that imagines the world differently, that makes its magic a practical realism, a realism in which public goods become new civic tools, and a General Public License (GPL) society also denotes a Global Pleasure Land. It is a paradigm posed against societal oppression as well as for a libertarian society; a paradigm in which pain and pleasure don’t necessarily manifest themselves as unhealthily schizophrenic.