Nicholson-Smith Donald - The revolution of everyday life: a new translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith with a [new] preface by the author

The Revolution of Everyday Life

Raoul Vaneigem

Originally published as Trait de savoir-vivre lusage des jeunes gnrations by ditions Gallimard (Paris). Copyright 1967 by ditions Gallimard.

Authors preface to the first French mass-market (Folio) edition copyright 1992 by ditions Gallimard.

An earlier version of this translation first published in 1983 by Rebel Press (London) and Left Bank Books (Seattle); second edition, 1994.

First PM Press edition, 2012.

All rights reserved

English translation copyright 2012 by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

The publication of this work has been facilitated by financial support from the French Community of Belgium.

Cet ouvrage publi dans le cadre du programme daide la publication bnficie du soutien du Ministre des Affaires Etrangres et du Service Culturel de lAmbassade de France reprsent aux Etats-Unis. This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

Published by:

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Cover illustration by Jean-Marie Pierret

Cover design by Franois Rabet

Interior design by briandesign

ISBN: 9781604866780

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912461

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

www.thomsonshore.com

Once again I am most grateful to Raoul Vaneigem for his unstinting help. My great thanks, too, to Jean-Marie Pierret and Franois Rabet for the cover art and cover design respectively, and to all at PM Press, especially for their patience. The eagle eyes of John McHale and Jim Brook must be credited for the elimination of many an error. I am indebted to T. J. Clark and Chris Winks for their encouragement. Mia Nadezhda Rublowska has contributed immeasurably to this new edition, and there is no way for me to thank her enough.

In memoriam Chris Gray (19422009), one of Raoul Vaneigems earliest translators (in the broadest sense of the word).

D. N.-S., June 2012

Long known as the New World, the United States of America is now viewed by Europeans as a paradoxically archaic country. Its technological achievements would warrant only admiration were they not belied by a mental stagnation that allows the icy waters of egotistical calculation to preside over an inhumanity cynically defended in the name of profit.

I am not speaking of the Americans themselves. It takes a repellent contempt and stupidity to place what are unique individuals under the abstract rubric of a national identity, no matter how prone those individuals may be to relinquishing their creative powers and embracing mass conformity. What I have in mind, rather, is the dismal succession of American administrations, all brought to power by plain old graft, which in their ever more risible arrogance care nothing for growing immiseration, know nothing of social solidarity, degrade the environment, destroy the earth for financial gain and, armed with an ignominiously clear conscience, promote a Calvinism that treats financial success as a divine dispensation.

Of course the Europeans, no less arrogant, have a grand old time pointing the finger at these would-be paragons of formal democracy who practise capital punishment, embrace the idiotic fad for creationism, tolerate a woefully inadequate social safety net that scorns workers rights and skimps on unemployment benefits and pensions, and cede immense power to the military and to barbarityin which last department they are indeed champions.

But so-called left-wing public opinion in France, as fond as it is of draping itself in the robes of the Revolution of 1789, even of the Paris Commune, and to citing those events as object lessons for others, has not only fallen over the years for every conceivable false vision of emancipationliberalism, socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castroismbut offers not the slightest objection to the reversal of progressive social gains: the slashing of social security and cultural budgets, the dismemberment of the health-care system, the reduction of education to a form of battery farming, and, in general, the growing impoverishment of existencesource of the despair from which the managers of economic collapse wring their last profits.

Ever since consumerism spread patronage everywhere and harnessed the lies of ideology to the needs of merchandising, the free-for-all of market democracy has obliterated any consciousness of the need to fight exploitation.

The crimes committed in the name of the liberation of the proletariat have helped in no small measure to spread a spirit of apathy and fatalism highly conducive to that suicidal impulse which, with or without religious buttressing, works for a universal and apocalyptic death. The plunder of existential and terrestrial resources carried on with impunity by state and private mafias fuels a creeping dread, a state of funk that is absurd inasmuch as Europeans no longer need to fear tanks in the streets or brutal and systematic police intrusion. This internalized terror is, quite simply, a fear of living, of autonomy, of self-creation.

But no matter how exhausted the life forces grow, a moment always comes when consciousness rouses itself, reasserting its rights and retrieving its outgoing exuberance. I have always wagered on a reversal of perspective which, razing a past dominated by contempt for human beings, will usher in a new society founded on the creative capacities of individuals and on an irrepressible desire to revel in oneself and in the world.

We are in the midst of a civilizational shift, one that the Occupations Movement of May 1968 in France illuminated in that it strove to accelerate it, thus hastening the collapse of consumer society and the emergence of a society committed to life.

Just as the agrarian economy of the ancien rgime was an atrophied formation fated, thanks to the Revolution of 1789, to be swept away by the surging free-market system, so the investment-driven and speculative capitalism whose crisis we are now witnessing is about to give way to a newly dynamic form driven by the production of green, nonpolluting kinds of energy, by an appeal to use-value, by organic farming, by a hurried makeover of the public sector and by a spurious ethical reform of trade.

We are confronted not by an economic crisis but by a crisis of the economy as such. Strife rages between two forces within the capitalist system, the one moribund, the other still young: on the one hand a system dating back thousands of years whose basis is the exploitation of nature and of human beings; on the other a rejigged version seeking to establish itself by investing in natural forces and making us pay very dear (once new means of production have been put in place) for things hitherto free: wind, sun, water, and the energy that resides in the plant world and in the earth itself.

The Trait de savoir-vivre made no prophecies. It merely pointed out what many people, blinded by the past, refused to see. It sought to show how the will to emancipation, reborn with each succeeding generation, might take advantage of the seismic convulsions which under the impact of consumerism were shaking a supposedly eternal authoritarian power to its very foundations. And it demonstrated the irreversibility of the break with patriarchal valueswith work, the exploitation of nature, exchange, predatory relationships, separation from the self, sacrifice, guilt, the renunciation of happiness, the fetishism of money and power, hierarchical authority, contempt for and fear of women, the corruption of childhood, intellectual pedigrees, military and police despotism, religion, ideology, and repression (and lethal ways of relieving repression).