Anonymous Comrade writes

Mastering Everyday Life:

Worker's Autonomy in a Situationist Context

Plus a few digressions about how resistance could take shape.

Suggestions in the form of pronouncements.

A parallel, and in general more in depth discussion of this type of thing can be found at:
http://www.Notbored.org/councils.html

The idea, or at least one of the ideas, behind worker's autonomy is that at some point in the capitalist system actual work has to be done by people who have some sort of knowledge of how the system works.Society is not yet so alienated that it's the machines versus us. Real workers still figure in in a real way in the process of production and distribution. All of society in Capitalism tends to alienate the worker from control of his work, alienate the worker from the inner workings of the society he lives in, so that ideally a person goes to a job where he does a mindless task all day, then goes to a supermarket after work, and then relaxes in his anonymous apartment in his anonymous neighborhood watching processed media on his TV. But the Spectacle is more porous than that. Workers' autonomy consists, in part, in having the work process mastered enough so that people can actually take control of their jobs and proceed to manage it themselves--proceeding from the work knowledge. At some crucial points work knowledge and the foundation of the spectacle come together, and knowledge of how things work becomes a power base from which to assert ones’ rights against the spectacle itself. Taking back everyday life from alienation, both at work and at home/free time, can proceed from taking those opportunities in the spectacle when life isn't totally mediated, when people actually matter, and working them open so that the non-mediated part of life gets a little bigger. Force the spectacle to negotiate with YOUR real life instead of letting it dictate it's terms to you. After all, the Spectacle did come from somewhere: no matter how distorted an image it is it’s ultimately a reflection of real life.

There's a parallel with this in legal history. Laws aren't science. The legal system is largely a product of continued negotiations between the powerful and the powerless to determine what is and is not permissable. But the laws themselves are only abstract, they only exist in people's minds....so without anything material backing them up it's easier to push open legal potentials and fight for a redefinition of the Law as a whole. But Laws are then acted upon and interpreted by the dominant culture of society itself. Because of this Laws can be considered the foundation of a part of the Spectacle, and legal wrangling a cousin of the struggle for Workers’ autonomy. Society as a whole can itself be considered as operating in a way parallel to the drama of the law as established by struggle and the law as interpreted by dominant society, in that the lines of demarcation between the greater Spectacle and real work in this capitalist system is also largely abstract and located in people's minds as a product of struggle and negotiation. This is where the idea of culture comes in. Material situations open up potentialities for people to change society, but society itself lags behind the material change in it's cultural component, taken in it’s most expansive sense, but the material has already produced something new....this means that the change leading to a non-capitalist society has to first proceed from cultural negotiations. Indeed it has to. Cultural negotiations between real life, as denoted by both the mechanics of private living and work, and the Spectacular aspects of capitalism open up a new door to more concrete changes later on. The negotiation at work, in the community, and at home, which might take the form of a forced legal-type negotiation--with one party asserting by direct action the rights of the non-Spectacular life over the mediated life, if succesful, can then lead to opportunities for more concrete changes in the way work and everyday life proceed. Which can eventually lead to serious systemic change. But points of resistance in real life, not in cyberspace, (although it is a good support resource), but in actual living and in actual militant protest, have to be identified both by individuals and groups, and exploited at some level first for any of that to happen. Someone has start doing something--and it doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be illegal, it just has to open up work and life--which hitherto is assumed to be closed to change--to negotiation. After that deeper change can be planned, but it has to start on some level, no matter how petty or abstract. Local battles fought again and again to establish a right in a particular place, to keep that right, and to expand the reach of that right in real life have been the motor and base of social change--but it had to start somewhere. Think Rosa Parks. Resistance that goes on long enough does become de facto permanent. Once a permanent platform has been established, so to speak, it can then be used as a launching pad for further progressive projects aimed at deeper social change. Unions, consumer groups, alternative spaces, as well as rights established by protest and widely supported by the community can all serve this role.

But I’d argue that for groups to open up the space for social change there have to be individuals who have resisted in their everyday life in some way, and who by constant resistance have built up an understanding of how resistance and change, negotiation, works on a basic, simple level. Their experience can serve as the spark that gets people who haven’t built up a culture of resistance involved, at which point the individual who threw off the first sparks can step back and let the newly empowered individuals go their own way. But that’s a digression.

What has been missing in anti-consumerism campaigns has been the reality component. The Spectacle is still an artificial entity, after all, which is produced by work itself--no matter how alienated people may be from the process of production. I believe that anti-consumerism campaigns which combined pro-work and pro-real life aspects, which provided people with a guide to how these issues correspond to real life--and what to do about it, would be more succesful than simply advertising criticism. After all, people can’t live on the Spectacle. They live on work. And if you want to destroy the Spectacle you have a responsability to have something to advance in it’s place. How about Workers’ Democracy? Anti-advertising and consumerist projects have also been crippled by their decontextualization of the ads they criticize. This perpetuates the illusion of a Spectacle. Any worker centered anti-consumerist campaign would have to bring the companies, the products, their effect on people, what people do to get them, who makes them, what the CEOs make, etc... back into the real world of physical geography.

Resistance in general is based on reality, which corresponds to a reality where there really are workers and bosses, work, life etc...so the cause of reality against the spectacle is also the cause of the reality of work and of the advancement of the class struggle against the managers and owners. If one starts from reality instead of mediation through party or State the conclusion follows that the resistance to the Spectacle, and through it Capitalism, has to be done by the working class itself, in a way in which resistance will provide all the teaching and education in the process of struggle that people need. The bourgeois leftists will have to step aside once the Workers start to organize themselves. Indeed, a component of the struggle within the Anti-Capitalist movement today seems to be revolving around the death of the old and the birth of the new.