Saturday, June 6, 2009

26

they will stop worrying about the precondition of consciousness.
It is within the political-economic figure of the imposition of work
and its negation, which is comfort, that pro-revolutionaries could
make a contribution to their workplace struggles. The struggle is
against the maximization of productivity and for the maximization
of rest, if workers could win their struggle in these terms then they
will have broken up the basic mechanism for the capitalist system.

The struggle of the body for rest is not the revolution, it is merely
the crisis of capital. A crisis because it brings the massed,
accumulated, fossilize acts of the past and the
sedimenting/accumulating dead acts of the present, along with the
possible conditions for the future, together in collision and in this
standstill all value ceases to be enforced, leaving the world in a
kind of zero hour/zero place where everything is contestable (when
the traffic stopped last September during the Fuel Protests, a man
on a bicycle passed me and said, 'I can hear the birds singing' - we
have heard what economic collapse sounds like). When industry
stops everything in society, otherwise absolutely determined by it,
floats free from its gravity. In this particular crisis of capital all hell
breaks loose; then comes the time for organization, you can call
that consciousness if you want. We don't care.

2) The question of consciousness is central because of the ease
by which it is defined and this counterfeited. The proximity of
consciousness to ideology is undeniable, a change in conditions
renders a truth false. Because this is what we are talking about
isn't it? Truth and Falsity, consciousness and ideology?

Our position is simple: all consciousness is in fact, by a roundabout
route, ideology. Consciousness is the appearance in thought of
the forms and content of objective conditions. We know that
objective conditions are capitalist and are anti-human, therefore it
would be naive to place any faith in the transformative properties of
consciousness if it fails so easily under the command of, and
exploitation by, the owners of material conditions.

Everything that appears (even the struggle against capital) is
mediated through infinite filters, nothing political has a direct
relation to the base. The truth and values that pro-revolutionaries
assert are equally subject to the distorting pressures of the

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