A Revolution of Space

By Denmark Trace

In the Mahabharata, Arjuna demonstrates his wisdom by observing that desires are created by the objects of desire themselves. Here again we approach the importance of the external to what we perceive to be internal.

Observation of natural communities teaches us the self-sufficiency of every situation in which cooperation is allowed rather than planned, a result of necessity rather than design. When people are given room to act autonomously, there is no need to 'save', 'educate' or 'organize' them. They are able to respond appropriately to the conditions present.

The Liberation of Desire

To want what one has is to have what one wants. To have what one wants is to be without desire. Desire can be understood as a mediation between the self and the object of desire, as an alienation. In unalienated life, wants correspond to conditions and so can be immediately fulfilled: an ever-present potential for need is resolved by an ever-present potential for fulfillment.

Desire is created by the object of desire itself: objects that are fundamentally ephemeral cannot ever be had, and so create a longing, an attempt to reach outside the present. We will bring about an end to over-consumption not by placing contrived limitations on desire but by neutralizing those artificial influences that create desire in the first place, reintroducing ourselves into direct contact with necessity. A culture of discipline cannot produce free minds. It simply limits, stultifies makes attitudes and behaviors narrow, small, oppressive, predictable. Establishing moral codes or discussing 'good and evil' is pointless because hurtful, destructive behaviors result not from lack of morality or lack of discipline but from lack of fulfillment.

Desire can only be dissolved in a solution of fulfillment: the solution is direct experience.

Creating Space (The Freedom of Necessity)

Though temporary changes in attitudes and behaviors can often be induced by coercion or persuasion, the effects of such techniques have proven extremely unpredictable and are hardly in keeping with a respect for individual autonomy. Changes must usually be perceived as self-generated if they are to last. In any case, any propaganda in which we engage will certainly fail to produce large-scale effects because it is competing with the most sophisticated techniques of persuasion and the most advanced methods of distribution ever developed. Instead of competing for influence, we must open up space in which autonomous action can arise, in which people can make their own lives.

Alternative ways of life are unlikely to be widely sought until there is a catastrophic failure of existing patterns. Only infrastructural collapse will create the opportunity to start over. When artificial influences are neutralized, there will remain one criterion upon which to base one's actions: necessity. Though liberation is often portrayed as an escape from necessities, it is in fact our alienation from our own needs that cages us. To liberate ourselves we must reconnect with each situation as it is. Freedom is not the ability to act as one wishes regardless of circumstances; freedom is the ability to act according to conditions. So long as the material apparatuses that support mediation remain in place, this magical practicality will continue to elude us.

Without Faces

Our revolution does not replace what it destroys: it is not a process of substitution but a destruction of the apparatuses that make coercion possible. It is not an expression of 'the will of the people', nor is it vanguardist. Popular will is created by the very institutions, techniques and technologies against which we revolt. Capital does not depend on our consent, it creates our consent. On the other hand, revolutionaries tend to reinscribe existing patterns of mediation and domination by playing savior, and the activist minority is as much in need of liberation as 'the people', from whom activists too often distance themselves.

A vanguardist whether revolutionary or reformist re-educates, motivates, and organizes large masses to be used in realizing that vanguard's agenda, which inevitably turns out to be the substitution of a new system of coercion and exploitation for the current one: parliaments for monarchs, bureaucrats for aristocrats, international governments for national ones. A vanguard must at least appear to have popular support because it must be able to legitimize its exercise of control over that population after the revolution.

However, because our aim is to destroy coercion in total, we can have a revolution without revolutionaries. There is no need to be manipulated by public opinion nor to manipulate it. As we strip away the layers of domestication and mediation in our shared landscape, we create more space for wildness in the biotic community, and in the human community as well. We can create opportunities for communities and individuals to provide for their own needs in unmediated, unideologized, free cooperation.