An Anthology of

Revolutionary Theory ofthe Late 60s

Guy Debord, Selections from Ch. 1 of Society of the Spectacle,

1967

The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse

about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the
epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The
fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals
the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature
with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle
is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural
development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form
which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the
limited sense of "mass media" which are its most glaring superficial
manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this
equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total
self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques
are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the
administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer
take place except through the intermediary of this power of
instantaneous communication, it is because this "communication" is
essentially unilateral. The concentration of "communication" is thus an
accumulation, in the hands of the existing system's administration, of the
means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The
generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern
State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the
product ofthe division ofsocial labor and the organ ofclass domination.

The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and
the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of
this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction
of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle,
whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle,
one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it.
The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this
separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an
irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.
The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated
object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in
the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more
he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less
he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of
the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his
own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them
to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the
spectacle is everywhere.
The worker does not produce himself; he produces an
independent power. The success of this production, its abundance,
returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time
and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of
his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map
which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us
show themselves to us in all their force.
The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete
manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion
of this specific industrial production. What grows with the economy in
motion for itselfcan only be the very alienation which was at its origin.
Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details
of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more
separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more
lie is separated from his life.
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it
becomes an image.

Rudi Dutschke, Selections from On Anti-authoritarianism, 1968

Using all the means at its disposal, the existing System strives to
prevent us from introducing those conditions in which men can live
creative lives without war, hunger, and repressive work. Every radical
opposition to this System must necessarily assume a global dimension
today. In the current historical period, the globalization of the
revolutionary forces is the most important task of those who are working
for the emancipation of the human race. The underprivileged in the
whole world constitute the historical mass base of liberation movements.
In them alone lies the subversive-explosive character of the international
revolution.
A new stage began in the 1960s with the revolutionary
upheavals in Algeria and Cuba and the unbroken struggle of the South
Vietnamese Liberation Front against the Diem dictatorship. Only the
latter achieved world-historical significance for the worldwide opposition
movement. The American aggression in Vietnam, too blatant and brutal
to be overlooked, took place at a time when imperialism's various
mechanisms for influence and control could no longer prevent the
victory of the revolutionary liberation forces in South Vietnam. [...] This
apparent contradiction dissolves once we understand that imperialism
had to recognize the ideology of coexistence, sponsored by the Soviet
Union, in order to stabilize a calm zone of the System, at least in middle
and Western Europe, and in order to cover its rear for the short-term
and effective destruction of the revolutionary movements of the Third
World. The historical guilt of the Soviet Union consists in its complete
failure to grasp this strategy of imperialism in a deep and fundamental
sense and to counter it in a subversive and revolutionary manner.
When, in the middle 1960s, Vietnam became a living issue for
us through lectures, discussions, films, and demonstrations, we
revolutionary socialists were able historically to sublimate, so to speak,
our guilt feelings over the existence of the Berlin Wall and of Stalinism in
the German Democratic Republic by propagating the specific difference
between seizing power through force, without, however, revolutionizing
the masses and the collectivization of the idea of social liberation in the
process ofrevolutions, as in Vietnam.
As students - although varying from faculty to faculty - we find
ourselves in an intermediate position in the total social reproduction
process. On the one hand, we are intellectually and educationally a
privileged fraction of the people, but actually this privilege signifies
nothing but frustration. Frustration because the student, especially the
politically committed student, day after day experiences critically, and
sometimes materially, the stupidity of the cliques of political hacks who
do the bidding of the irrational authorities. Moreover, these antiauthoritarian students have not yet assumed any materially secure

positions in society and are still relatively far from power interests and
power positions. This temporary subversive position of the students by
itself engenders a dialectical identity between the immediate and the
historical interests of the producers. Hence, the vital needs and interests
in regard to peace, justice, and emancipation can best materialize in
these sociological positions. But students develop with real virulence only
when they become politicized in the anti-authoritarian struggle against
the bureaucracy within the milieu of their own university institution,
when they more resolutely engage in the political struggle for their
interests and needs. We must not forget the direct relationship of the
student producer to his educational milieu. His learning situation in the
university is determined by the dictatorship of examinations, rising in an
inflationary way, and by the dictatorship of professordom. In turn, the
professors are the servants of the State. The present day nationalization
of the whole society creates the basis for an understanding of the antistate and anti-institution struggle of the radical extraparliamentary
opposition.
The ruling class has undergone a deep transformation. For a
long time now it has no longer been identical with the nominal owners of
the means of production. Marx had already seen the dawn of a new
"class" of "industrial bureaucracy." This class cannot overcome the
fundamental contradiction of bourgeois capitalist society. Rather, it
brings it to a climax and ushers in its last phase, in which all capital
functions have been socialized and delegated to certain groups and
institutions. The more a ruling class is able to absorb the most impotent
men of the oppressed classes, the more solid and more dangerous is its
rule" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3). The development has gone beyond this
phase and has completed the repressive socialization of capital. Therein
lies the strength and the weakness of the system of late capitalism. In fact,
this development does not leave any groups outside the total context and
tries to dominate all through "a system of concessions within the
capitalistic framework" (Sering). This structural framework is guaranteed
by the "dull compulsion of conditions," the internalized norms and ideas
of bourgeois capitalistic society. But if a socially relevant fraction of the
underprivileged outside the circle of vested interests, where the national
product is distributed, bursts asunder this matter-of-course restriction of
interests and needs to the ruling framework, the whole system is called in
question. "Thus the breaching of false consciousness can provide the
Archimedean point for a more comprehensive emancipation-on an
infinitely small place to be sure but the chance for a change depends
upon the widening of such small places." (Herbert Marcuse, Repressive
Tolerance).
Our historically correct limitation of our action to the university
should not be made into a fetish. A revolutionary dialectic of the correct
transitions must regard the "long march through the institutions" as a

practical and critical action in all social spheres. It must set as its goal the
subversive-critical deepening of the contradictions, a process which has
been made possible in all institutions that participate in the organization
of day-to-day life. There no longer exists a sphere in our society which
would be exclusively privileged to express the interests of the whole
movement in its cultural revolutionary phase.
The old concepts of socialism must be critically suspended, not
destroyed and not preserved artificially. A new concept cannot yet be
realized. It can be worked out and brought into being only in the
practical struggle, in the constant mediation between reflection and
action, practice and theory. Today revolutionary science is possible only
within the anti-authoritarian movement, as a productive force for the
liberation of man from the uncomprehended and uncontrolled powers of
society and nature. Today we are not bound together by an abstract
theory of history but by an existential disgust in the presences of a society
which chatters about liberty and yet brutally oppresses the immediate
interest and needs of individuals and peoples fighting for their socialeconomic emancipation.
But let us not succumb to any illusions. The worldwide net of
organized repression, the continuity of power, will not be easily broken.
The new man of the twenty-first century (Guevara, Fanon) who
represents the preconditions of the new society, will be the product of a
long and painful struggle in which temporary upsurges will be followed
by unavoidable defeats. viewed in terms of classical revolutionary
theory, our cultural revolution is a transitional re-revolutionary phase in
which persons and groups still yield to various illusions, abstract ideas,
and utopian projects. It is a phase in which the abstract ideas, and
utopian projects. it is a phase in which the radical contradiction between
revolution and counterrevolution, between the ruling class in its new
form and the camp of the anti-authoritarian and underprivileged, has
not yet matured in a concrete and immediate sense. What in America is
already a clearly defined reality has a great significance for use, with
some modifications. This is no time for sober reflection but a time for
adjuration. The task of intellectuals is identical with that of the organizer
of the street, the conscientious objector, of the Diggers: to talk with the
people and not about the people. The literature that leaves a mark is
now the underground literature, the speeches of Malcolm X, the writings
ofFanon, the songs ofthe Rolling Stones and ofAretha Franklin.
All the rest sound like the Moynihan Report or a Time article which
aims to explain everything, understand nothing, and change nobody."
(A. Kopkind, From Nonviolence to Guerrilla Warfare, in VoltaireFlugschriften, No. 14 ). We still do not have a broad, continuous
underground literature, the dialogues of intellectuals with the people are
still missing, that is to say, from the standpoint of the real, immediate,
and historical interests of the people. There is the beginning of a

desertion campaign in the American occupation army, but there is no

organized desertion campaign in the Bundeswehr. We dare to attack
American imperialism, but we do not yet have the will to smash our own
power structure.
True revolutionary solidarity with the Vietnam revolutions
consists in the actual weakening of the centers of imperialism and in their
processual overthrow. The roots of our ineffectualness and resignation
thus far lay in our theory. The decisive precondition for the
revolutionizing ofthe masses is the revolutionizing ofrevolutionaries.

Benno Ohnesorg, German university student, Berlin, 1967

Paris, May 1968

Members of the Internationale Situationniste, Selections from

On the Poverty ofStudent Life, 1966

We might very well say, and no one would disagree with us, that
the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart
from the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is usually attacked from
the wrong point of view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling
ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true revolutionary, yet a
revolutionary critique of the student situation is currently taboo on the
official Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism repress
the obvious--that what is wrong with the students is also what is wrong
with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind
enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia (from Les Temps Modernes to
L'Express) prostrates itselfbefore the so-called "rise ofthe student" and the
declining bureaucracies of the Left (from the "Communist" party to the
Stalinist National Union of Students) bids noisily for his moral and
material support.
Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue.
The surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or
economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false
categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve
what is most needed--a view of modern society as a whole. Fourier
denounced their error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws to
the basic assumptions of the science ("porter rgulirement sur les
questions primordiales"). Everything is said about our society except
what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles--the commodity and
the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, and the
details consign the totality to oblivion.
Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role
in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a
provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in
market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of
initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies
with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social
reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status
and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey
from one to the other is a mechanical event "in the future." Meanwhile,
he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation
group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a
mystic trance.
"There is no student problem." Student passivity is only the most
obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social life
has been subdued by a similar imperialism.
The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps
upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the

University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence,

apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful systems
of social control: the family and the State. He is their well-behaved and
grateful child, and like the submissive child he is overeager to please. He
celebrates all the values and mystifications of the system, devouring them
with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast. Once, the old illusions had
to be imposed on an aristocracy of labour; the petits cadres-to-be ingest
them willingly under the guise ofculture.
The student's old-fashioned poverty, however, does put him at a
potential advantage--if only he could see it. He does have marginal
freedoms, a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian
control of the spectacle. His flexible working-hours permit him adventure
and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares
him to death: he feels safer in the straight-jacketed space-time of lecture
hall and weekly "essay." He is quite happy with this open prison
organized for his "benefit", and, though not constrained, as are most
people, to separate work and leisure, he does so of his own accord-hypocritically proclaiming all the while his contempt for assiduity and
grey men. He embraces every available contradiction and then mutters
darkly about the "difficulties of communication" from the uterine
warmth ofhis religious, artistic or political clique.
Driven by his freely-chosen depression, he submits himself to the
subsidiary police force of psychiatrists set up by the avant-garde of
repression. The university mental health clinics are run by the student
mutual organization, which sees this institution as a grand victory for
student unionism and social progress. Like the Aztecs who ran to greet
Cortes's sharpshooters, and then wondered what made the thunder and
why men fell down, the students flock to the psycho-police stations with
their "problems".
The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate,
phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the
cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple.
Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of
Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as
an admiring spectator. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He
peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers from
the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his element:
he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market research: a
conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational preference for
Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice against Brand Y
(Sartre, perhaps).
He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen the latest happening.
He discovers "modernity" as fast as the market can produce its ersatz
version of long outmoded (though once important) ideas; for him, every
rehash is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he

eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and "difficult"

texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an
atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock them off. But no:
conspicuous consumers always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so
he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them vicariously through the
gaze ofhis friends. He is an other-directed voyeur.
The Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers' movement,
and so are the workers themselves, though more confusedly. But the
students continue blithely to organize demonstrations which mobilize
students and students only. This is political false consciousness in its
virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the universities a happy
hunting ground for the manipulators of the declining bureaucratic
organizations. For them, it is child's play to program the student's
political options. Occasionally there are deviationary tendencies and
cries of "Independence!" but after a period of token resistance the
dissidents are reincorporated into a status quo which they have never
really radically opposed.
The student, if he rebels at all, must first rebel against his studies,
though the necessity of this initial move is felt less spontaneously by him
than by the worker, who intuitively identifies his work with his total
condition. At the same time, since the student is a product of modern
society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his extreme alienation can only be
fought through the struggle against this whole society. It is clear that the
university can in no circumstances become the battlefield; the student,
insofar as he defines himself as such, manufactures a pseudo-value which
must become an obstacle to any clear consciousness of the reality of his
dispossession. The best criticism of student life is the behavior of the rest
of youth, who have already started to revolt. Their rebellion has become
one ofthe signs ofa fresh struggle against modern society.
The revolt of youth was the first burst of anger at the persistent
realities of the new world--the boredom of everyday existence, the dead
life which is still the essential product of modern capitalism, in spite of all
its modernizations. A small section of youth is able to refuse that society
and its products, but without any idea that this society can be
superseded. They opt for a nihilist present. Yet the destruction of
capitalism is once again a real issue, an event in history, a process which
has already begun. Dissident youth must achieve the coherence of a
critical theory, and the practical organization ofthat coherence.

Selections from Lacan - Atlas discussion, 1972

Atlas: "I'd just like to add that I specifically chose this moment to
intervene and that the composite body which up to fifty years ago could
be called 'culture' - that is, people expressing in fragmented ways what
they feel - is now a lie, and can only be called a 'spectacle', the backdrop
of which is tied to, and serves as a link between all alienated individual
activities. If all the people here now were to join together and, freely and
authentically, wanted to communicate, it'd be on a different basis, with a
different perspective. Of course, this can't be expected of students who
by definition will one day become the managers of our system, with their
justifications and who are also the public who with a guilty conscience
will pick up the remains of the avant-garde and the decaying 'spectacle'.
That's why I chose this precise moment to have some fun to be like those
guys who express themselves authentically. I didn't do it to annoy you
but I did choose this particular moment."
Lacan: "So... let's see what we can do. By expressing yourself in this way
in front of this audience which is more than ready to hear these
revolutionary statements what was it exactly that you wanted to do?"
Atlas: "That's the question which parents, priests, ideologists,
beaurocrats, and the cops always ask the growing number of people who
act like me. My answer is, I want to do just one thing - make revolution.
It's obvious that at the stage we've reached at this moment one of our
main targets will be exactly these moments when people like you are
bringing to people like these justification for their miserable lives."

Angela Davis, Selections from Prison Interviews, 1972

The court system in this country is increasingly becoming a

powerful instrument of repression. It is being used to crush the struggle
for the liberation of oppressed people and not only to crush the conscious
revolutionary but to break the rebellious spirit of black people, Chicanos
and Puerto Ricans in general. And I think that one of the best methods
of radicalizing an individual today is to have him spend a day in court
witnessing the way we are unceasingly railroaded into the jails and
prisons. Therefore we cannot expect justice from a repressive judicial
system and i'm sure that an exclusively legalistic approach to my defense
would be fatal. Oppressed people must demonstrate in an organized
fashion to the ruling class that we are prepared to use every means at our
disposal to gain freedom and justice for our people.
One can't really be a true revolutionary without being cognizant
of the need to link up forces all over the world battling with imperialism.
My trips abroad most of which were undertaken for purposes involving
my university studies, contributed a great deal to my own political
development. In Paris in 1962 experiences which were transmitted to
me by partisans of the Algerian struggle provided a stark contrast to our
civil rights struggle in the United States. The increasingly aggressive
posture being assumed by the Algerians gave me a concrete idea of the
general direction in which our own movement should be heading; that is,
if we were really serious about total change. As for the French
themselves, they conveyed to me the idea, free from abstraction, that
repression was a universal phenomenon wherever there were people
struggling for freedom and justice. In a number of demonstrations, I
personally felt the cutting streams of water from the firehoses manned by
French police. And of course my Algerian acquaintances were
incessantly subjected to police harassment.
My trip to Germany, inspired by a desire to learn more about
the philosophical tradition out of which Marxism arose, taught me one
basic fact. Marx was right when he said in the 11th of the Feuerbach
theses that philosophers as philosophers have simply interpreted the
world and that the point, however, is to change it.
This I experienced by witnessing and participating in the student
movement growing conscious of itself, growing conscious of the need to
break away from the mentors - the very philosophers who had stimulated
the students to comprehend the nature of Marxism - and begin to act, to
act directly. This action took the form of increasingly militant
demonstrations against U.S. imperialism, its aggression in Vietnam, its
flunkies in West Germany and also the form of moving to organize the
dispossessed at a grassroots level and the attempt to involve labor. It was
my involvement in the demonstrative political activity led by German
SDS (Socialist Students League) which made me realize that I had to

come home to wage the fight among my own people, black people.
My decision to join the Communist party emanated from my
belief that the only true path of liberation for Black people is the one that
leads towards a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this
country and all its manifold institutional appendages which insure its
ability to exploit the masses and enslave Black people. Convinced of the
need to employ Marxist-Leninist principles in the struggle for liberation,
I joined the Che-Lumumba Club, which is a militant, all-black collective
of the Communist party in Los Angeles committed to the task of
rendering Marxism-Leninism relevant to Black people. But mindful of
the fact that once we as Black people set out to destroy the capitalist
system we would be heading in a suicidal direction if we attempted to go
at it alone. The whole question of allies was crucial. And furthermore
aside from students, we need important allies at the point of production.
I do not feel that all white workers are going to be inveterate
conservatives. Black leadership in working class struggles is needed to
radicalize necessary sectors ofthe working class.
And we should never forget that fascist tactics have been
employed against Black people, Black communities, for centuries. Fascist
tactics of repression should, however, not be confused with fascism. To
do so would be to obfuscate the nature of our struggle today - for once
we have acknowledged the existence of a mature fascism our struggle
takes on a purely defensive character and virtually all of our energies are
concentrated on the task of defending ourselves from the onslaught of
oppression, for the circumstances surrounding our existence have so
degenerated that we have lost all possibility of movement; that the only
alternative for organizing is the clandestine type. Conditions in this
country have not yet deteriorated to that level, We still retain a slight
degree of flexibility. Therefore, we must continue to make use of the
legal channels to which we have access which of course does not mean
that we operate exclusively on the legal plane. At this point, the
underground movement has its role to play also, The important thing is
to realize that we must do everything in our power to consolidate and
solidify a mass movement devoted to struggling not only against
repression but with the positive idea of socialism as its goal. This means,
ofcourse, that we assume an offensive rather than a defensive posture.

Herbert Marcuse, Selections from Repressive Tolerance, 1965

Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination ofviolence, and the

reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and
animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of
a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is
perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a
global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against
subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and
communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres,
violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced, and defended by
democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people
subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as
necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Tolerance is extended to
policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be
tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of
creating an existence without fear and misery.
This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority
against which authentic liberals protested. The political locus of
tolerance has changed: while it is more or less quietly and constitutionally
withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with
respect to established policies. Tolerance is turned from an active into a
passive state, from practice to non-practice: laissez-faire the constituted
authorities. It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn
tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted
authorities.
Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as
good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence
or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of
children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of
destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of
special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright
deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not
distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters
tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and
suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and
psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency;
they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed
and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs--the mature
delinquency ofa whole civilization.
In the interplay of theory and practice, true and false solutions
become distinguishable--never with the evidence of necessity, never as
the positive, only with the certainty of a reasoned and reasonable chance,
and with the persuasive force of the negative. For the true positive is the
society of the future and therefore beyond definition arid determination,

while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted. But the
experience and understanding of the existent society may well be capable
of identifying what is not conducive to a free and rational society, what
impedes and distorts the possibilities of its creation. Freedom is
liberation, a specific historical process in theory and practice, and as such
it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood.
The danger of 'destructive tolerance' (Baudelaire), of 'benevolent
neutrality' toward art has been recognized: the market, which absorbs
equally well (although with often quite sudden fluctuations) art, anti-art,
and non-art, all possible conflicting styles, schools, forms, provides a
'complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss' in which the radical impact of
art, the protest of art against the established reality is swallowed up.
However, censorship of art and literature is regressive under all
circumstances. The authentic oeuvre is not and cannot be a prop of
oppression, and pseudo-art (which can be such a prop) is not art. Art
stands against history, withstands history which has been the history of
oppression, for art subjects reality to laws other than the established ones:
to the laws of the Form which creates a different reality--negation of the
established one even where art depicts the established reality. But in its
struggle with history, art subjects itself to history: history enters the
definition of art and enters into the distinction between art and pseudoart. Thus it happens that what was once art becomes pseudo-art.
Previous forms, styles, and qualities, previous modes of protest and
refusal cannot be recaptured in or against a different society. There are
cases where an authentic oeuvre carries a regressive political message-Dostoevski is a case in point. But then, the message is canceled by the
oeuvre itself: the regressive political content is absorbed, aufgehoben in
the artistic form: in the work as literature.
With all the qualifications of a hypothesis based on an 'open'
historical record, it seems that the violence emanating from the rebellion
of the oppressed classes broke the historical continuum of injustice,
cruelty, and silence for a brief moment, brief but explosive enough to
achieve an increase in the scope of freedom and justice, and a better and
more equitable distribution of misery and oppression in a new social
system--in one word: progress in civilization. The English civil wars, the
French Revolution, the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions may
illustrate the hypothesis. In contrast, the one historical change from one
social system to another, marking the beginning of a new period in
civilization, which was not sparked and driven by an effective movement
'from below', namely, the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West,
brought about a long period of regression for long centuries, until a new,
higher period of civilization was painfully born in the violence of the
heretic revolts of the thirteenth century and in the peasant and laborer
revolts ofthe fourteenth century.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against

movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to
the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as
well as of word. The traditional criterion of clear and present danger
seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the
situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: 'fire'. It is a
situation in which the total catastrophe could be triggered off any
moment, not only by a technical error, but also by a rational
miscalculation of risks, or by a rash speech of one of the leaders. In past
and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders
were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the
propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on
the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could
have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had
been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign,
mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World
War.
Education offers still another example of spurious, abstract
tolerance in the guise of concreteness and truth: it is epitomized in the
concept of self-actualization. From the permissiveness of all sorts of
license to the child, to the constant psychological concern with the
personal problems of the student, a large-scale movement is under way
against the evils of repression and the need for being oneself. Frequently
brushed aside is the question as to what has to be repressed before one
can be a self, oneself. The individual potential is first a negative one, a
portion of the potential of his society: of aggression, guilt feeling,
ignorance, resentment, cruelty which vitiate his life instincts. If the
identity of the self is to be more than the immediate realization of this
potential (undesirable for the individual as a human being), then it
requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation. This
process involves at each stage (to use the ridiculed terms which here
reveal their succinct concreteness) the negation of the negation,
mediation of the immediate, and identity is no more and no less than this
process. 'Alienation' is the constant and essential element of identity, the
objective side of the subject--and not, as it is made to appear today, a
disease, a psychological condition. Freud well knew the difference
between progressive and regressive, liberating and destructive repression.
The publicity of self-actualization promotes the removal of the one and
the other, it promotes existence in that immediacy which, in a repressive
society, is (to use another Hegelian term) bad immediacy (schlechte
Unmittelbarkeit). It isolates the individual from the one dimension where
he could 'find himself': from his political existence, which is at the core of
his entire existence. Instead, it encourages non-conformity and letting-go
in ways which leave the real engines of repression in the society entirely
intact, which even strengthen these engines by substituting the

satisfactions of private, and personal rebellion for a more than private

and personal, and therefore more authentic, opposition. The
desublimation involved in this sort of self-actualization is itself repressive
inasmuch as it weakens the necessity and the power of the intellect, the
catalytic force of that unhappy consciousness which does not revel in the
archetypal personal release of frustration - hopeless resurgence of the Id
which will sooner or later succumb to the omnipresent rationality of the
administered world - but which recognizes the horror of the whole in the
most private frustration and actualizes itselfin this recognition.

Berlin, 1967