Workers of all Countrymen, Unite!

Destroy the University- A contemporary crisis

1. The university cannot function, and we must thus prevent it from functioning so that this impossibility is made manifest. No reform of any kind can render this institution viable. We must thus combat reforms, in their effects and in their conception, not because they are dangerous, but because they are illusory. The crisis of the institution of the university goes beyond (as we will show) the realm of the university and involves the social and technical division of labor as a whole. And so, this crisis must come to a head.

The occasions and the ways of making it come to a head are subject to discussion. They are more or less good. But the discussion and the critique can only be carried out in a worthwhile fashion by those who recognize that the rejection of reformism is necessary, and its stakes global.

2. The open crisis in the university in France goes back to the beginning of the 1960’s, to the Fouchet Plan. When the majority of an age group strives to present itself for the baccalaureate and the majority of those with diplomas strive to enter the university, the mechanisms of social selection put in place by the bourgeoisie take a beating, its ideology and its institutions thrown into crisis.

The ideology of the academy is that of the equality of chances for social promotion though studies. This equality – and Bourdieu and Passeron have demonstrated this – has always been fictitious. Nevertheless, the mechanisms and criteria of academic selection in the past were sufficiently “objective” for their class and arbitrarys character to be masked; one was eliminated or chosen in function of a group of “aptitudes” and “competences” that were defined once and for all. Traditionally the left fought, not against class criteria of selection – which would have forced it to fight against selection itself and against the academic system as a whole – but for the right of everyone to enter the selection machine.

The contradictory character of this demand remained masked as long as the right was, in theory, recognized for all while, the practical possibility to use it was denied to the vast majority. From the moment when, with the assistance of the diffusion of knowledge, the majority strives to obtain the practical possibility to use a theoretical right, the contradiction is made clear; if the majority accedes to higher education the latter lose their selective character. The right to study and the right to social promotion can no longer go together; if, at best, everyone can in fact study, everyone cannot be promoted to privileged posts. The mechanisms of academic selection having been beaten down, society will either seek to put complementary mechanisms in place, or to restrict the right to study through administrative limitations.

3. These administrative limitations – numerous clausus, exams for university entry – are such delicate matters politically that the successive governments of the Fifth Republic have retreated before their application. In fact, the limitation ex ante of the number of students is the frank and brutal negation of a juridical principle and a social fiction, i.e., that the chance of social promotion through studies is equal for all and that the possibility to study is only limited by the aptitude for doing this.

Destroying this juridical fiction means exposing the illusory character of bourgeois freedoms, and above all means confronting, in the name of a technocratic rationality – study is expensive and it isn’t profitable when graduates can’t be “promoted” – the middle classes or those so- called, whose support the capitalist regime can only preserve by dangling before them the possibility of “social elevation” limited by merit alone. Numerus clausus, pre-selection, and entry exams for universities, by destroying the illusions of the meritocratic ideology, will raise up against the capitalist state the middle classes and will reveal their condition to them as a social fate; they are composed, not of potential bourgeois, which the chance of birth and fortune prevented from become real bourgeois, but of a riffraff of the needy and of subaltern workers fated to serve, and not equal, the bourgeoisie.

Politically – and this is the meaning of the Faure reform – the bourgeoisie must thus maintain the fiction of the chance of social promotion offered to all via the free access to studies. However, it is reality that takes on the task of putting the lie to this fiction; the access to studies is free, but the studies lead nowhere. The number of graduates devalorizes the diplomas. There are many called and few chosen: there are few posts. The numerical reduction that academic selection wasn’t able to carry out will be carried out by a selection at the point of hire.

While waiting for the “force of circumstances” to be understood, i.e., that parents point their children towards “good” professional school, which are yet to be created, giving them access to “good’ jobs rather than towards universities which they’ll leave jobless, the state keeps the universities open, but little by little removes the value (e.g. Vincennes) of the diplomas they grant. In short, they give the university enough rope so that in the end – they hope – it will hang itself. In the meanwhile, they send cops into the universities in order that, in setting them ablaze, their discredit might be established.

4. These contradictions in the bourgeois university are related to fundamental contradictions:

• The market value that has until now been recognized in diplomas rested on their rarity and on the rarity of aptitude for study. If the latter becomes general the bonus attached to the diploma must logically disappear and, with it, the hierarchical division of tasks.
• If the aptitude for study – consecrated or not by a diploma – tends to become generalized, it ceases to be able to serve as a criterion for selection: social stratification can no longer claim to be based on competency and merit. The right to studies and the right to promotion can no longer march hand in had.
• If studies no longer assure promotion, it will result in either one thing or the other; either
• they are considered a waste of time and a useless social charge, since they are profitable neither for those who do them nor for capitalist society; or
• they are considered as a non-functional general education which society can, after all, afford the luxury of. But in this case the affirmation of the inalienable right to studies has as its corollary that these studies, which open onto no career, must present to those who enter them – and who later will become employees, workers, or whatever – an intrinsic interest.

It is at this point that the contradiction of the university becomes clear. Against the selection system, the student movement had affirmed the inalienable right to studies. The logic of this demand (which remained petite bourgeoise insofar as it was a defense of the possibility of promotion for all) had led it to anti-hierarchical and egalitarian positions: in order for everyone to have the right to study it was necessary that studies, ceasing to be a class privilege, should also cease to confer the right to an privilege whatsoever. It had to be accepted that those with higher degrees should work with their hands, which led to putting in question and refusing the social division of labor, the technical division of labor which bears its imprint, and every form of the hierarchization of tasks.

But it was impossible to stop there, for the moment we accept that studies don’t lead to a career, we must redefine the nature of studies, their content and their meaning; since they don’t confer a “useful culture” they must confer a “rebellious culture;” since they don’t correspond to a demand of society’s, they must respond to the demand of those who make it and who intend to destroy that society, abolish that division of labor.

But the university is by nature incapable of responding to this demand; it isn’t functional either in relation to the demands of capitalist economy or in relation to the demands of those who want to overthrow capitalism; it dispenses neither a “useful culture” nor a “rebellious culture” (which, by definition, is not dispensed); it dispenses a university culture, i.e., a knowledge separated from any productive or militant practice. In short, it is a place where one can pass one’s time in neither a useful nor an interesting fashion. No kind of reform can change this situation. It can thus not be a question of reforming the university, but rather of destroying it in order to destroy all at once the culture separated from the people it incarnates (that of the mandarins) and the social stratification of which it after all remains the instrument

5. Such are the facts that the university guerrilla brings to light: it shortens the agony of a moribund institution and reveals the hypocrisy of the corporations that defend it. Can it be said that the leftist students will not be able to either put something else in its place or change society so that that other thing becomes viable? It is obvious: students cannot, on their own, either produce another culture or make the revolution. What they can do, however, is prevent the heightened crisis of bourgeois institutions, of the division of labor and the selection of “elites” from being masked. This is what they are doing (and is what all the partisans of order – of this order or of another, every bit as authoritarian and hierarchical – reproach them for). Alone they cannot go any farther; the effective destruction and even the contesting (and not only ideological) of the division of labor cannot be carried out in the universities; it can only be carried out in the factories and enterprises; it supposes the critical analysis of a productive organization whose apparent technical rationality is at one and the same time the objectification and mask of a political rationality, of a technique of domination. It supposes a practical knowledge of the process of production and the practical enterprise in order to change it; in order to submit it to the “associated producers,” to replace the hierarchical division by the voluntary division of labor.

It is only from the starting point of this effective critique of the division of labor that, in its turn, the critique can become effective of the education which, directly (in technical and professional schools) or indirectly, forms the managers, the enforcers, and the losers of capitalist production. The destruction of the university and class education is thus not only the affair of the taught alone; it is above all the affair of the working class if the capitalist division of labor, of which the school is the matrix, is to be surpassed.

The crisis of the bourgeois university and the working class revolt against the despotism of the factory confer an immediate relevance on the question of this surpassing. And if the conjunction between these two aspects of the same crisis – that of the division of labor – doesn’t arrive at the effective joining of the students and workers and a reciprocal critique of the methods of education and domination, the fault doesn’t lie with the student movement; it lies with the traditional organizations of the working class movement, who are doing everything possible to lock the students in the university ghetto in order to better control the workers’ demands. If the necessary violence of the student struggle thus tends to wear itself out in symbolic insurrections on the university level alone, it is not due to a perverse taste for objectless violence; it is because violence alone is capable of smashing, if only temporarily, the encirclement of the university ghetto and of posing a problem whose existence the reformists of all stripes prefer to ignore. This problem – that of the crisis of bourgeois institutions and ideology and the division of labor – is a political problem par excellence. It isn’t enough that the political parties refuse any political meaning or expression to student violence for it to be simple vandalism; it is a matter of a violence both political and politically necessary, if not sufficient.

Tactics and Ethics by George Lucas

For all parties and classes the position and significance of tactics in the field of political action differ greatly in accordance with the structure and historico-philosophical role peculiar to those parties and classes.

If we define tactics as a means by which politically active groups achieve their declared aims, as a link connecting ultimate objective with reality, fundamental differences arise, depending on whether the ultimate objective is categorized as a moment within the given social reality or as one that transcends it. The principal difference between the immanent and the transcendent ultimate objective is that the former accepts the existing legal order as a given principle which necessarily and normatively determines the scope of any action, whereas in the case of a socio-transcendent objective that legal order is seen as pure reality, as real power, to be taken into account for, at most, reasons of expediency. The ‘at most’ needs special emphasis, for an objective like that of the French Legitimist Restoration, namely the acknowledgment, in any sense whatever, of the legal order of the Revolution, was already tantamount to a compromise. Even this example, however, shows that the various transcendent objectives, conceived purely in terms of a sociology which is totally abstract and devoid of all values, are to be regarded as being on the same level.

For if the social order which is defined as the ultimate objective already existed in the past, if it were merely a question of reinstating a previous stage of development, then ignorance of the existing legal order represents only an apparent, and not a real, violation of the limits of the given legal orders: one real legal order confronts another real legal order, the continuity of development is not rigidly denied, and the most far-reaching aim amounts merely to cancelling an intermediate stage. Every essentially revolutionary objective, on the other hand, denies the moral raison d’êtreand the historico-philosophical appositeness of both present and past legal orders; how far — if at all — they are to be taken into account is therefore an exclusively tactical question.

Because, however, tactics free themselves in this way from the normal limits imposed by the legal order, some new practical criterion has to be discovered which will determine the tactical attitude. Since the concept of expediency is ambiguous, a corresponding distinction must be established between an immediate, concrete aim and an ultimate objective still remote from the ground of reality. For those classes and parties whose ultimate objective has in fact already been achieved, tactics will necessarily be determined by the attainability of the immediate and concrete aims; for them, the gulf which divides the immediate and the ultimate goal, the conflicts arising from this duality, simply do not exist. Tactics here assume the form of legal Realpolitik, and it is no mere chance that in those (exceptional) cases where a conflict of this kind does emerge as, for instance, in connection with war — these classes and parties practise the shallowest and most catastrophic form of Realpolitik.They have no choice, for the existence of their ultimate goal admits of no other course of action.

This contrast helps greatly to elucidate the tactics of the revolutionary classes and parties: their tactics are not determined by short-term immediately attainable advantages; indeed, they must sometimes reject such advantages as endangering what is truly important, the ultimate objective. But since the ultimate objective has been categorized, not as Utopia, but as reality which has to be achieved, positing it above and beyond the immediate advantage does not mean abstracting from reality or attempting to impose certain ideals on reality, but rather it entails the knowledge and transformation into action of those forces already at work within social reality — those forces, that is, which are directed towards the realization of the ultimate objective. Without this knowledge the tactics of every revolutionary class or party will vacillate aimlessly between a Realpolitik devoid of ideals and an ideology without real content. It was the lack of this knowledge which characterized the revolutionary struggle of the bourgeois class. An ideology of the ultimate goal existed even here, it is true, but it could not be organically integrated into the planning of concrete action; rather, it developed in a largely pragmatic way, in the creation of institutions which quickly became ends in themselves, thereby obscuring the ultimate objective itself and degrading it to the level of pure, already ineffectual ideology. The unique sociological significance of socialism is precisely that it provides a solution to this problem. For if the ultimate objective of socialism is utopian in the sense that it transcends the economic, legal and social limits of contemporary society and can only be realized through the destruction of that society, it is anything but utopian in the sense that its attainment would entail the absorption of ideas hovering outside or above society. The Marxist theory of class struggle, which in this respect is wholly derived from Hegel’s conceptual system, changes the transcendent objective into an immanent one; the class struggle of the proletariat is at once the objective itself and its realization. This process is not a means the significance and value of which can be judged by the standards of a goal which transcends it; it is rather a new elucidation of the utopian society, step by step, leap by leap, corresponding to the logic of history. This implies immersion in contemporary social reality. The ‘means’ are not alien to the goal (as was the case with the realization of bourgeois ideology); instead, they bring the goal closer to self-realization. It follows that there will be conceptually indeterminable transitional stages between the tactical means and the ultimate objective; it is never possible to know in advance which tactical step will succeed in achieving the ultimate objective itself.

This brings us to the decisive criterion of socialist tactics: the philosophy of history. The fact of the class struggle is nothing other than a sociological description and an elevation of events into laws which are effective in social reality; the meaning of the class struggle of the proletariat, however, goes beyond this fact. Essentially, of course, the meaning cannot be separated from the fact, but it is directed towards the emergence of a social order which differs from that of every previous society in that it no longer knows either oppressors or oppressed. In order that the epoch of economic dependence, which is an affront to human dignity, should come to an end, the blind power of economic forces must, as Marx says, be broken and replaced by a higher power which corresponds more exactly to the dignity of man.(Capital, Volume III)

Therefore, to weigh up and understand correctly the contemporary economic and social conjuncture, the true relations of power, is never more than to meet the prerequisites for correct socialist action, correct tactics. It does not in itself constitute a criterion of correctness. The only valid yardstick is whether the manner of the action in a given case serves to realize this goal, which is the essence of the socialist movement. Hence, since this ultimate objective is not served by qualitatively different means; since, rather, the means signify in themselves the progress towards that objective, all means by which this historico-philosophical process is raised to the conscious and real level are to be considered valid, whereas all means which mystify such consciousness — as for example acceptance of the legal order, of the continuity of ‘historical’ development, let alone the momentary material interests of the proletariat — are to be rejected. If ever there was a historical movement to which Realpolitik presents a baneful and ominous threat, it is that of socialism.

That means concretely that every gesture of solidarity with the existing order is fraught with such danger. Deriving though they may well do from true inner conviction, our insistent protests that such and such a gesture of solidarity indicates only a momentary, immediate community of interests, nothing more than a provisional alliance for the attainment of a concrete goal, nevertheless do not obviate the danger that the feeling of solidarity will take root in that form of consciousness which necessarily obscures the world-historical consciousness, the awakening of humanity to self-consciousness. The class struggle of the proletariat is not merely a class struggle (if it were, it would indeed be governed simply byRealpolitik), but a means whereby humanity liberates itself, a means to the true beginning of human history. Every compromise made obscures precisely this aspect of the struggle and is therefore — despite all its possible, short-term (but extremely problematical) advantages — fatal to the achievement of this true ultimate objective. As long as the present social order persists, the ruling classes remain in a position to compensate, openly or covertly, for whatever economic or political advantages have been won in this fashion. Such ‘compensatory’ measures effectively worsen the conditions for the continuation of the struggle, since obviously the compromise will weaken the mood of resistance. Tactical deviations within socialism are therefore of more fundamental significance than is the case with other historical movements. The sense of world history determines the tactical criteria, and it is before history that he who does not deviate for reasons of expediency from the narrow, steep path of correct action prescribed by the philosophy of history which alone leads to the goal, undertakes responsibility for all his deeds.

It seems to follow from the above that we have also discovered the answer to the ethical problem; that adherence to the correct tactics is in itself ethical. But it is at this point that the dangerous aspects of the Hegelian legacy in Marxism become apparent. Hegel’s system is devoid of ethics; in his work ethics are supplanted by the system of material, spiritual and social goods in which his social philosophy culminates. Essentially Marxism has taken over this form of ethics (as we see, for example, in Kautsky’s book [Ethics and the Materialist conception of History]) merely positing other ‘values’ than the Hegelian ones, and without raising the question as to whether or not the quest for socially correct ‘values’, socially correct goals — irrespective of the inner motives of the action — is thereby in itself ethical, although it is clear that the question of ethics can only proceed from these socially correct goals. People who deny the ethical ramifications which arise at this point also deny their ethical possibility, and come into conflict with the most primitive, universal psychological facts: conscience and the sense of responsibility. What all such people are concerned with is not primarily what a person did or wanted (that is governed by the norms of social and political action), but whether what he did or wanted and why he did it or wanted it was objectively correct or false. This question of the whys and wherefores, however, can only arise in individual cases, it has no meaning except in relation to the individual, in sharp contrast to the tactical question of objective correctness, the unambiguous resolution of which is only to be found in the collective action of groups of human beings. Therefore we may state the question which confronts us in these terms: ‘How do conscience and the sense of responsibility of the individual relate to the problem of tactically correct collective action?’

It is most important at this juncture to establish a mutual dependence, precisely because the two types of action being related are essentially independent of each other. On the one hand, the question whether any given tactical decision is right or wrong is independent of the question whether or not the decision was determined by moral motives on the part of those who act in accordance with it. On the other hand, an action that springs from the purest ethical source can, from a tactical point of view, be completely mistaken. This independence of each other, however, is more apparent than real. For — as we shall see later — once the purely ethically motivated action of the individual brings him into the field of politics, even its objective (historico-philosophical) correctness or incorrectness can no longer be a matter of ethical indifference. Moreover, by virtue of the historico-philosophical orientation of socialist tactics, a collective action must arise in that one individual will (once the many individual wills have been aggregated) and the governing historico-philosophical consciousness must express itself in him — particularly since the necessary rejection of the immediate advantage in the interest of the ultimate objective would otherwise be impossible. The problem can now be posed in the following terms: what ethical considerations inspire in the individual the decision that the necessary historico-philosophical consciousness he possesses can be transformed into correct political action, i.e. component of a collective will, and can also determine that action?

To re-emphasize the point: ethics relate to the individual and the necessary consequence of this relationship is that the individual’s conscience and sense of responsibility are confronted with the postulate that he must act as if on his action or inaction depended the changing of the world’s destiny, the approach of which is inevitably helped or hindered by the tactics he is about to adopt. (For in the realm of ethics there is no neutrality and no impartiality; even he who is unwilling to act must be able to account to this conscience for his inactivity.) Everyone who at the present time opts for communism is therefore obliged to bear the same individual responsibility for each and every human being who dies for him in the struggle, as if he himself had killed them all. But all those who ally themselves to the other side, the defence of capitalism, must bear the same individual responsibility for the destruction entailed in the new imperialist revanchist wars which are surely imminent, and for the future oppression of the nationalities and classes. From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility. He whose decision does not arise from such considerations — no matter how highly developed a creature he may otherwise be exists in ethical terms at a primitive, unconscious, instinctual level.

This purely formal and ethical definition of individual action, however, does not clarify sufficiently the relationship between tactics and ethics. When the individual who makes an ethical decision within himself then follows or rejects a particular tactical course, he moves onto a special level of action, that of politics, and the distinctiveness of his action entails — from the standpoint of pure ethics — the consequence that he must know under what circumstances and how he acts.

The concept of ‘knowledge’ thereby introduced into the argument requires further clarification. On the one hand, ‘knowledge’ is by no means to be taken as total understanding of the actual political situation and all its possible consequences; nor, on the other hand, can it be regarded as the result of purely subjective deliberations, where, that is, the individual concerned acts ‘to the best of his ability and in good faith’. If the former were the case, every human action would be impossible from the outset; if the latter, the way would be clear for extreme levity and frivolity and every moral standard would become illusory. Since, though, the individual’s seriousness and sense of responsibility constitute a moral standard for every deed, implying that the individual concerned could know the consequences of his deeds, the question arises whether or not, in the light of this knowledge, he could answer for these consequences to his conscience. This objective possibility admittedly varies according to the individual and from case to case, but essentially, both for the individual and from case to case, it is always determinable. Even now, for every socialist, the actual historico-philosophical pressure of the social ideal of socialism determines both the content of the objective possibilities for realizing that ideal and also the very fact that the criterion of possibility should itself be possible. For every socialist, then, morally correct action is related fundamentally to the correct perception of the given historico-philosophical situation, which in turn is only feasible through the efforts of every individual to make this self-consciousness conscious for himself. The first unavoidable prerequisite for this is the formation of class consciousness. In order for correct action to become an authentic, correct regulator, class consciousness must raise itself above the level of the merely given; it must remember its world-historical mission and its sense of responsibility. For the class interest the attainment of which makes up the content of class-conscious action coincides neither with the sum of the personal interests of the individuals belonging to the class nor with the immediate short-term interests of the class as a collective entity. The class interests which will bring socialism about and the class-consciousness in which they find expression signify a world-historical mission — and hence, too, the objective possibility mentioned above implies the question: has the historical moment already arrived which leads — or rather leaps from the stage of steady approach to that of true realization?

Every individual must, however, be aware that, by the very nature of the matter, we can talk only in terms of a possibility. We cannot conceive of a human science which could say for society, with the accuracy and certainty that characterizes the astronomer’s prediction of the appearance of a comet: today the time has come for the realization of the principles of socialism. Likewise, there exists no science which could say: today the time is not yet ripe, we must wait, it will come tomorrow or in another two years. Science, knowledge, can indicate only possibilities — and it is only in the realm of the possible that moral, responsible action, truly human action, is itself possible. For the individual who seizes this possibility, however, there is, if he is a socialist, no choice and no hesitation.

This is not by any means to suggest that action which arises in this fashion must necessarily be morally faultless and unexceptionable. It is not the task of ethics to invent prescriptions for correct action, nor to iron out or deny the insuperable, tragic conflicts of human destiny. On the contrary: ethical self-awareness makes it quite clear that there are situations — tragic situations — in which it is impossible to act without burdening oneself with guilt. But at the same time it teaches us that, even faced with the choice of two ways of incurring guilt, we should still find that there is a standard attaching to correct and incorrect action. This standard we call sacrifice. And just as the individual who chooses between two forms of guilt finally makes the correct choice when he sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea, so it also takes strength to assess this sacrifice in terms of the collective action. In the latter case, however, the idea represents an imperative of the world-historical situation, a historico-philosophical mission. In one of his novels, Ropschin (Boris Savinkov^[1]), the leader of the terrorist group during the Russian Revolution from 1904 to 19o6, put the problem of individual terror in the following terms:

murder is not allowed, it is an absolute and unpardonable sin; it ‘may’ not, but yet it ‘must’ be committed. Elsewhere in the same book he sees, not the justification (that is impossible) but the ultimate moral basis of the terrorist’s act as the sacrifice for his brethren, not only of his life, but also of his purity, his morals, his very soul. In other words, only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly — and tragically — moral. To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel’s Judith: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me — who am I to be able to escape it?’

A Must-Read for all the Radicals

On the Edge of Civilization

I have lived life wrongly. I lived in a world of ecstasy; in a world where people are judged by the clothes they wear. I have lived in a society of bigots; bigots who won’t in any way are willing to admit that they live in a world so befouled by senseless achievements, so stagnated in the filth of what they perceive as sustainable development, in a world so rotten by the decaying corpses of dead aspirations and a world burning in the fire of greed, come about by the loss of faith in the minds of the people and the taking over of money and power in its place. Yes, they have forgotten their Gods, damned their religions and became the instruments of evil. Yet they have cloaked themselves with false imagery of God. They seem to think that they respect God, that the God is the very reason for their existence, and that they bow their heads to show that they fear God’s might but in reality, they bow for naught but their own pleasures, their own self interests. The people in the society bow their heads as a bribe to God to hear their prayers and heed them. They never cease, from their pathetic excuse of a life, to take a moment out, and realize for once, what the ideals of religion truly are. Yes, their lives are pathetic. The people seem to think their lives are too different than the dogs and the beasts that roam the Earth without purpose when in truth they are the dogs, they are the beasts because they have no purpose, because they have let their purpose been taken over by something as imprudent and shallow as money.

I cast myself away from the society, not because I’m too weak for it, but because I’m too strong for it. If I get on my terms with them, they will come to the point of extinction. If I so much as reveal my ideals to them, my way of life to them, my philosophies to them, their heads will eviscerate from their bodies and they will die a painful death. They will watch in horror, as their brain breaks out from their skull, trickles down like red lava from their face and drop by drop meets the ground on which they stand. Their minds will erupt like a volcanic explosion because my knowledge and my intellect is too great a power for them to wield. The society has made itself weak, pregnable to degeneration. They have focused so hard on surviving that they have forgotten the meaning of living. And now it is all that they’re good for, to survive, like rats and cockroaches. They have, against all odds of nature, actually reversed the dogma and took themselves years back on the path to evolution. They did so by enslaving themselves voluntarily under the lust for power, and the craving for what they believe to be happiness. They see happiness in fine houses, hotel dinners, vacations to exotic retreats, clothing of the most fashionable trends, and most of all, to have power over other men. This is what they perceive happiness as, nothing more and nothing less.

Yes, I am a man who wears ordinary clothes no different from a street vendor, a bus driver or a servant but my back is firm and straight in these clothes. Yes, I wear old and worn out sandals on my feet but I walk on my feet with those sandals while the people around me walk on their knees even though they have the most expensive and most exclusive shoes on their feet. But I am as happy in my ordinary clothes and my worn out sandals as any man in a suit and Italian boots will never be. People think just because I threw my future away and I don’t care about power, don’t care about money that I am weak when au contraire I am stronger than the whole society. While the whole society is just a slave to the much bigger system, I mock the system. The system hates me; it despises my freedom and my independence. It wants me to be a slave under him like the rest of the people in the society. That is why it uses society as an instrument to hurt me, to insult me, to besmirch my wise philosophies, to diminish and slay my morale. It uses the people I love the most, people I trust to convince me psychologically that I am weak, that I am going in the wrong direction. Sometimes the system succeeds in breaking me and these are times I feel sad. But my feud with the system is not just a battle; it’s a never ending war. It is never-ending because neither will the system die nor I. My body may wither after some years but it is said that a man actually dies twice. Once is when his soul leaves his body and the other is when his name is said for the last time in the world. The death of the latter kind will never happen to me. I do not care if I fall as long as there is someone else to pick up the flag and keep the fight going on.

The society is a curse on the world, to the other living beings of the world and upon itself. It is so consumed by greed and hedonism that it destroys the world it’s in, the other beings around it and in this manner, they also destroy themselves. This is the world I live in, where right and wrong are just words of mouth. Potentially, the society is starkly wrong. It is everything the dictionary defines as evil and malicious. The people in the society come under the definition of scavengers, who snatch what they can get out of the little miserable lives they have and then die trying to give their sons a better future. They do not know that the only thing they are giving to their sons is a disease, because living in the society, in itself is a disease, a disease of which I am cured. I may suffer from ailments like cough and cold every now and then but I thank heavens that I am free from the disease that plagues all men and women. This is not supposed to be the state. It has become the state because you let it be. You let yourselves be shacked like sub-humans and gave away, your minds away, your thoughts away, your dreams away, your lives away to cross the finish line in the race of life. What, in the end, was the purpose of this race? Why did you choose to run when you could have walked, wandered off and discovered the greener pastures of life, the unknown terrains filled with breathtaking and momentous secrets, mystifying secrets that would have teased the innate thirst for knowledge in humans? What made the society run like animal right from the instant each of them take birth in this world? It’s because society is full of animals. No matter how much it evolves, it will always be animalistic, gory. It will never come to my expectations. The society is so weak because it lives in a contradiction. Mankind thinks they are the most powerful beings on Earth when they are clearly the most degenerative and self-damaging. It is this contradiction that makes mankind so weak. They fail to accept their shortcomings.

From a moment a child is born, he is taught that he can have anything in the world if he wishes so. This promise, which is unconditional to him at the beginning, becomes conditional as he grows. He is promised to have all the pleasures of a fine living if he works hard enough for it. It is in this stage that he starts to compromise on whatever he can get. If not the finest grades, one step down, if not the finest education, one step down. Then, the status quo changes and he is forced to work hard because if he doesn’t, he cannot even get the bare minimum. And after it’s too late, he realizes that he has become just another hamster in a wheel, a wheel which he has to run in for life and after his death, his children will take up his place. He realizes that he is just another cog in the machinery of the system. Yes, you are dominated by the evil of system. But it is not a devil with a face, or even a form. The devil of system is a cipher. We created this demon. We created him by organizing ourselves structurally. We humans lost faith in chaos, forgetting the fact that it was chaos in the first place that created the wonder of Universe and in it our world, Earth. There was no system involved in the creation of universe. It was just a matter of chance. To render this demon to an end, we have to leave everything to chance and stop the madness that the society calls ‘sophistication’. But the society, the civilization or mankind is too engulfed by mindless bliss to understand de facto. We keep guards and appoint ministers to defend humanity but as the old Latin proverb goes Quis Custodiet ipsos custodies meaning who will guard the guard themselves? The problem lies in human obsession with power and it will end when mankind will see power for the last time. This will be the power that decimates mankind leaving no survivors whatsoever.

 I am the prophet of mankind. I have made my prophecy and given my solution. It is on their best interest should they choose to prevail or die in their ignorance and vanity. The society has always been vain. It has always made the wrong choice, glorifying the wrong kind of people and giving power to the wrong kind of ideology. Mankind still thinks it is developing, gaining more power, becoming more and more prosperous and happy. I say to the mankind, “Rats, live you bliss for your time is near!” I won’t break the bubble of their unconsciousness for I would seem profoundly rude in doing so. As Dostoevsky said, ‘Let the world go to hell, I’ll have my cup of tea’. I don’t have hops for the survival of the society. I don’t have fears or care for the calamity that it faces. It has failed to rise to something good and now it will sink into the ground just because it couldn’t adapt itself to the freedom of the skies, it couldn’t adapt and grow wings to save itself from the order of the system. I have. Mankind doesn’t know how to live in freedom. If we are given freedom, we fight among each other and then equivocate for order. We can’t live in both freedom and harmony. For harmony, we need discipline and discipline is an arrested freedom. And an arrested freedom is the worst kind of slavery. And that is what humankind is going through right now. They are enslaved in the worst of forms. They actually think they are free when it is imminent their hands are tied by fate, by order, by discipline. Chaos has no place in their lives. Chaos is how I live. Anarchy is how I live. Anarchy doesn’t mean violence of the highest form. Anarchy means tranquility of the highest form. And when one lives in tranquility, it gives him chance to propagate his true self and enlighten his soul through philosophy, literature, ethics, religion and sociology among other things. These are subjects mankind never chose to invest in deeply. It always used ‘an easy way around’. It used scientific technology for its development without having the right intellect to handle technology. This ignorance proved technology to be a complete blunder rather than a boon.

In my ordinary clothes and old worn out sandals, I shall sit on an old wooden armchair, flex my legs a little, calmly put my hands behind my back and take my place on the edge of the cliff. This is the cliff from which mankind will take the leap. Where? Will it take the leap to an even higher form of intelligence? It would have if mankind showed intelligence in the first place. But all it has shown is tomfoolery. Contrary to what the popular belief is, the world is not cruel, it is mankind that has made the world this way. We have ourselves to blame. You have your society to blame but I don’t. I am cast astray from it. I have been what society would call ‘ambitionless’ because my only goal was to seek knowledge without seeking its fruits. I am also called ‘directionless’ because I fail to see through the eyes of the shackled society. They call me an ‘outlaw’ for I fail to see the point of the endless laws, guidelines and rules that dictate what I have to do and what I don’t have to. They called me ‘deranged’ as I live in a world of my own free from the vice and profligacy of mankind. I am none of those things yet I am all of those things. But what I am or am not is not in question where I stand because I stand at the tip of the cliff. This is the moment of judgment of mankind, the moment of truth. Naturally, human would chose to lie; even at this stage, as lying is innate in human character. So their judgment is done. This is a not done by a jury and I have no part in it. I am not the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the appellant or the executioner. If I was anything, I was a partner in crime, when I was lost in the tribe of humanity. But now I have found a way out of it and by doing so, I have saved myself. This is my biography. I am a man standing on the edge of civilization whereas others have taken the leap and have fallen to the endless ever darkening abyss. I have wings of freedom and even though I had no tutor of flight or a launch pad, I have learned to fly and I fly away.                          

A Note About Indian Naxalism

 Maoists VS Indian Defense

Any nation, state or territory at the helm of a civil revolution in the modern era faces the threat of inclusion of the armed forces along with the law and order forces for the desecration of revolutionary insurrectionists. India is at the helm of such civil revolution and faces a similar strategic dilemma. One may think that this would be of stifling and demoralizing for the insurrectionists to enter into a struggle with the nation’s armed forces. One might think that the insurrectionists, being small in number and primitive in strategies would easily submerse to a nation’s fully fledged air, naval and army support. What this piece of article brings to light is the outcome of a ‘state of war’ between the armed forces of India and the communist regimes dominant in Eastern and South Eastern parts of India.

Some might even feel appalled by the mere notion of using such a harsh and strong instrument as the Indian army on such a localized and ‘petty’ problem. These people fail to see the bigger picture. These people fail to see that while the Indian Army has only a short history of one or two minor wars fought, the ideology with which these Maoist rebels fight has gone through and been tested in the crucible some of the most gruesome wars over the years. They fail to see that even though the Indian Defense might be high on ammunition, soldiers, strategy experts and military generals, they still fall short to the legendary history of communist struggle. The Bolshevik revolution carved the great Soviet Union from the Tsarist Empire. Out of this struggle, the ideology of communism was born. For obvious reasons, we only take the notion of communist struggle in this article as communism as a whole is too great of a subject to be contained in a single article. People from every walk of life joined under the leadership of Lenin and took to the streets united by the comradeship of communism. Their feeling of power came from their feeling of unity. Communism gave them that unity. Communism was a promise to a better life for them.

Then there was the Cuban revolution, where young revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and the great Che Guevara took the Red flag to fight off the dictatorship of Julio Batista. This was a time when the spirit of communism was tested with a nation’s army. This struggle brought to attention the structural composition of a ‘communist guerilla’ band. They were similar to the ferocious tribal warriors like the Apache in their approach. A regular guerilla band did not have the hierarchical structure of an average platoon. The guerilla band generally had one leader who was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. They fought shoulder to shoulder without any prejudice like comrades and this gave them the freedom to use their intellect in the course of warfare. Simultaneously, another revolutionary struggle was going on in China under Mao Zedong. He was nothing more than a community organizing guerilla fighter who had a small band of just over 600 soldiers. He used them to fight against the imperialist forces that prevailed in his country. As the struggle was going on in China, Japanese forces sought to invade China and it was then that Mao came into power. People willfully volunteered to fight under the communist regime of Mao Zedong. The Japanese forces were equipped with modernized weaponry they got from the axis powers like Germany whereas Chinese People’s Republic army of Mao Zedong had to makeshift with weapons sabotaged from the enemy. Same was the case in the Cuban revolution where the guerillas sabotaged the dictator’s regime and used their weapons along with custom made weapons of their own.

In both these cases, it was neither the size of the army nor the power of the army that mattered; it was the spirit of revolution ignited in their hearts and the communist ideology that inspired them. And against all odds, these communist guerilla regimes emerged victorious, by defeating a conventional army.

If that is not evidence enough in favor of these communist guerillas, the Vietnam War is the burning example of how a regime of unconventional communist guerillas defeated a superpower that the world still fears. Under the leadership of communist demagogue Ho Chi Minh who was as learned and scholarly as he was cunning in the art of war. He resisted all the tactics of US, the chemical bombings of Agent Orange, the ‘divide and rule’ policy between the North and the South Vietnam and even the conventional warfare that killed tens of thousands of Vietcong soldiers. He openly declared to the US army that ‘You can kill ten of our men for every one of yours and even at those odds, you will lose and we will win’. And win they did. They used an unconventional system of underground tunnels, jungle warfare and emasculation of the enemy forces through pitfalls, bamboo blockades and booby traps. They beat the most glorified army of the world with nothing but bamboo sticks and weapons sabotaged by the enemy and improvised for better concealment and productivity. The Vietcong boasted of shooting down jet planes with just one round of rifle bullets.

What the government of India and the Indian army has to understand that this is not your average fundamentalist or segregationist insurgency. They are fighting for the right reason which is equality between the rich and the poor, something that is becoming rarer and rarer in this political aristocracy we call democracy. They fight because they have seen development become destruction; democracy become hypocrisy and equality become a joke at the hands of rich landowners, corrupt politicians and foreign capitalists. Due to this, they have the local support. The government also needs to understand that each and every rebel or Leftist has ten times the intellect and knowledge as any of the army’s soldier, General or Lieutenant because they have chosen to raise arms only after acquainting themselves through the widest literature and philosophy of communism, Leftism, radicalism, socialism and strategic politics. Every communist leader has left some substantial literature for the future generation to take inspiration from, like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Goldman, Stalin, Mao, Che, Kamenev and many others. They were men of the highest intellect and scholastic abilities. All that, added to the impeccable knowledge of the terrain in which these communist rebels fight makes them a force to be reckoned with. They have the legacy of jungle warfare and survival tactics left to them by revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Pol Pot. Granted that the Defense has the technological prowess to wage a far superior war on communist insurgency but these Leftists have acclimated themselves to operate under complete radio silence and electronic immobility through analogue tactics, hand gestures, clandestine cells, pre-planned assimilations and individualist tactics. A conventional army is not enough to defeat the Maoists. Even if the Maoists are defeated, their legacy will not die. Because you can kill people, you can even erase their ideals from the minds of the people in due course of time, kill their ideology but what you can’t kill is history. And history shows us all that whenever the Red flag with the sickle and hammer rose among the struggling masses, it had begot change.