I. The coming revolution will oppose bourgeois totality with a communist totality

During the transition from the feudal to the bourgeois epoch, not only the structure of ownership was involved but, in the course of this process, all aspects of life of former societies changed. The bourgeois revolutionaries did not win by criticizing this or that aspect of the Ancien Régime, but by developing a new bourgeois philosophy of the state, a bourgeois morality, a bourgeois art, a bourgeois science, a bourgeois ideal of love, a bourgeois family, in short: an entire bourgeois world.
Current society is not only marked by capitalism, but colonised down to its smallest details by the capitalist order. Therefore, the task of communist or anarchist revolutionaries will be no less total. From child education to urban planning, from the production of knowledge to agriculture, from language to sexuality, new communist ideas must be developed and anarchistic practices experimented with; otherwise the state, wage labour, money etc. won’t be abolished. The task of today’s revolutionaries is even more extensive than their bourgeois predecessors’, as the latter, regardless of all their innovations, only replaced one form of domination and exploitation by another, while the former strive to end all forms of oppression of humans by humans.
Furthermore, the emerging bourgeoisie had the advantage of already having gradually accumulated considerable economic power in the womb of the old order, so they could already begin the eventual conquest of political power from a firm foundation. The protagonists of the coming revolution don’t have such a power base within the old society. They will take over the means of production only in the process of the great cataclysm and only from that moment on, can they begin the real transformation of the world according to their ideas. While it is absolutely necessary that a revolutionary movement in the process of formation has to begin to shape a communist totality in the here and now, it must never be forgotten that the actual revolution itself will mark a qualitative turning point in this process. Any individual reform of daily life can at the most only bring a foretaste of liberated life, as long as the current relations of ownership and power remain throughout the whole of society. Realistically, these are only more or less successful attempts to solve some problems of the immediate present and therefore even a possible foretaste must be seen on a more idealistic level – for example in the sense of a partial connectivity that arises when you celebrate or eat together, share certain negative assumptions, where you gather at some points or mutually assist in situations of danger. The content of immediate counter-tendencies or rather modifications of the current forms of everyday life will be completely replaced through a comprehensive revolutionizing of the society. Nevertheless, experimentation with new forms of behaviour and relationships is absolutely essential, because in order to overthrow the prevailing conditions in their entirety, it requires the free association of people who want to liberate themselves and who have to start somewhere.
Current critics of the existing order have not got very far with this. The social body which was once pathetically called „the party“, or, in a somewhat laxer mode, „the movement“ and which today is called at most, an „association“, disintegrated into a thousand fragments which are completely unable to associate. To speak of people who liberate themselves is also only possible in exceptional cases, for even those who claim to want a free world restrict themselves to forms of political groupings or, the scene and therefore let their potential wither; a potentiality that often remains slumbering in individuals as independently thinking and acting human beings. Of course these defects don’t relate exclusively to radical critics of the society; neither are they the result of their personal failure. We assume as known that the inability to associate, the lack of individuality etc. have cogent reasons to be searched for in the general social forms of the epoch. In this essay, however, we won’t care much about these reasons – firstly, because this is not our intent, and secondly, because the reference to such social causes is often used as an excuse, when people don’t want to change themselves.
During recent years, we have tried – together with some others – to change course trying out new forms of discussion and association beyond factions and group pressures in club für sich. This has failed. A summary of this tiny experiment you can read about elsewhere. In this text, we want to present some thoughts which evolved in the context of this attempt, concerning the misery of the radical milieu. And we want here to at least rudimentarily sketch out some ideas about how this could be remedied. It should be noted, that despite coming from a practical movement, in the last decade we’ve mostly hung around in theoretical circles. If therefore, in the following, discussion meetings or magazine projects are mentioned but not, for example, organizing demonstrations or acts of sabotage, this does not mean that we are privileging certain forms of action over others, but that we are writing about the things we know best, mainly meaning the radical scene in Germany and Austria. In other countries the problems might be partly different, especially in countries where a profound disturbance of power is heralded with impressive outbursts, as in Spain or Greece.