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1. Grant McDonagh on December 12, 2009 3:16 am

   This is from a Situ/punk polemical zine I produced with others in 1978 in Wellington New Zealand (& from a literary autobiographical non-fiction novel I’m currently revising called Grace Notes)

   “Kat 2 contained this short treatise;

   Production Of The Means To Relate

   Though Class conflict is general it has never been satisfactorily explained as the fundamental fact of life in New Zealand. The essence of class division is utter seperation, just as revolutionary society is in essence unitary. If a revolutionary critique is to be lived it must tend to the construction of the utmost honesty and communication in the struggle to destroy hierarchy and patriarchy, a struggle for which all workers are now objectively preparing.

   The repression that has met all the great moments of proletarian contestation is now embodied in the desires of no objective social mileau. None can deny that spectacular commodity society is now very near the absolute management that cyberneticians and other structuralists have dreamed of for decades. Conditioned sperateness and rge characterologicaL stasis in which it is anchored remains general , a skeleton supporting the carcuss that hangs over us all – the counter-revolution.

   Free relations must begin in the lived. It is now and in our own everyday lives that we must begin to produce the classless relations that supercede the relations imposed on us by power. Only the self-managed construction of ones’ own life provides a playground for the “ life without dead time and the indulgence of untrammelled desire” that supercedes the general pleasure-anxiety. A theory of permanent and total contestation is enseperable from a practise that begins the collective construction of all desires.

   The supercession of class division between a handful of friends as between classes in general , cannot include sacrifice, rather it means the provision of goods and skills to those who are at present without them.

   The repression that has met all the great moments of proletarian contestation is now embodied in the desires of no objective social mileau. None can deny
   That spectacular-commodity society is now very near the absolute management that cyberneticians and other structuralists have dreamed of for decades. Conditioned seperateness and the characterological stasis in which it is anchored remains general, a skeleton supporting the carcuss that hangs over all of us, the counter-revolution.

   We are the last class, though in general our ideas are hopelessly bourgeois, it is our passions and the desires they impel into the world that are truly proletarian. We must trust them and act on them however unruly, crude and/or violent they may appear at first. The proletariate is, to extend Lukacs’ definition, ‘the class of passionate consciousness’ . The Mongrel smashing jugs at the Tiger is being more generally radical that any hundred intellectuals producing brilliant but limp explanations of that anger. From now on all would-be rasicals should earn their patches with a little radical practise. Freedom lies beyond the boundaries of the socially permitted. It also lies in a new kind of love, a love that refuses to be shackled, a love that arms itself, a love that demands everything at the minimum ( see 151 thesis 7).

   Freedom from bourgeois conditioning begins when we start listening to, experiencing and loving each other. It also begins where we take control over the organisation of our own lives (work coops, food coops, communal living) as much as from breaking with old structures that oppress us like work and families. The fetishism of bourgeois origin that says that workers are necessarily inarticulate, unintelligent poor and uneducated had better be disposed of soon as well. It is the use these qualities are put to that defines their social significance . The proletariate is the race of the future, the survival of the human race depends on our ability to construct something new and better in the wreckage of spectacular commodity society.

   Situationists have often been accused of a certain megalomania, a flamboyancy and intellectual arrogance by those who secretly envy the apparent ease one has in relating in a truly proletarian manner. Personally I couldn’t give a fuck about such cretins. I’ve already staked all I have and all I am in the great gamble that is history.

   My impotence, ignorance and the failure that still permeates my life is for me the validation of a critical method that promises full participation in the creation of a directly lived history. No more bullshit! We’re all of us well past the point where we have to worry about survival. Now let’s get some life together among these ruins.
   Grant McDonagh
   26-4-78. “