Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/49

 titles, as means for acquiring the prevailing forms of social power, contemporary producers view the productive forces, not as means for the universal development of human capacities, but as means for earning money, as means for acquiring the fetish to which human capacities are sacrificed. Just as the early traders, bankers and outfitters demanded capitalist forms of social power from their own feudal lords, contemporary producers demand their own powers from their own States. However, just as the feudal authorities could not grant powers that did not in fact exist within feudalism, the State cannot grant the very powers whose negation is a precondition for its existence. Producers cannot acknowledge their power over the productive forces, even to themselves, since they still appear to themselves as free and law-abiding citizens of a representative democracy in which the public wielding of this power is illegal and immoral. They experience the appropriation of their own product as stealing and their direct regulation of production as sabotage, as criminal acts. They continue to internalize the authority of the class to which they estrange their productive power, and thus to reproduce the power of this class.

Yet even while they internalize the negation of their own power, producers continue to enlarge this power in a situation where the power of the authorities depends on the experience, imagination and ingenuity of the producers. With their consciousness cemented to the automobiles, suburban homes and Sunday outings of State and corporate clerical staffs, supporting the personified power of these officials materially as well as spiritually, condemning the criminality of rioting and stealing with an overly zealous devotion to private property, contemporary producers nevertheless accumulate productive forces that restrict and challenge the ruling temporal and spiritual powers. What develops under the hegemony of the dominant form of behavior, at the centers of production of Capital, is not a consciousness, an ideology, or even an organized revolutionary movement, but rather a practice, a form of social behavior that undermines the dominant form. Every act of theft and sabotage, every illegitimate expression of the producer's power, eats away the legitimacy of the dominant authorities. Self-denial continues to lie at the heart of self-realization, but the rise of the second is synchronous with the decline of the first.

Feudal rulers built their most sumptuous palaces, fought their most glorious wars, and completed the philosophical Summa of their natural and eternal order on the eve of its demise. Modern rulers realize their most spectacular technological feats, fight their greatest imperial wars, and reach the highest levels of their scientific understanding, precisely at the historical moment when the cranium of Capital becomes deranged. During the period of Capital's last expansion, the period when all the productive forces for which there is room in this social order are in the process of being completed, individuals begin to relate to each other and to the material environment without the mediation