Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/50

 of personifications. Things begin to fall apart. New forms through which producers reappropriate fragments of estranged productive power appear with increasing frequency, and forms of appropriating the entire productive apparatus begin to appear. While the consciousness of producers remains cemented to personified power, the reappropriation of estranged productive powers increasingly turns the personifications of these estranged powers into hollow shells. It is not in the consciousness of the producers that the potentialities of the productive forces are reflected, but only in their social practice. The only potentialities reflected by consciousness are the potentialities of the productive forces that have been historically realized: Capital and the State. What cannot be reflected by consciousness is what happens when individuals reappropriate their self-powers, when they cease to estrange the power of community to the State and productive power to Capital. It can at most be known what can no longer happen. It can no longer appear to individuals that personifications of their own estranged powers animate social activity. As soon as they cease to internalize the power of the personifications, human beings remove the legitimacy of Authority and simultaneously rid themselves of their own powerlessness. The cement that holds together the social relations begins to crack. The power to shape the environment in which human beings live and the activities in which they engage, the power to decide what is done with the productive forces, is removed from the offices that personify the power of community and the power of productive forces. The attempt of individuals to realize their self-powers to the level made possible by contemporary productive forces moves outside the boundaries of the modern model of revolutionary activity; it moves outside the boundaries of personified power. The continually changing response to continually developing productive forces moves without pre-determined forms of social activity toward chaos, without well-ordered and regularized forms of social power toward anarchy.