The Alternative Future A Vision of Christian Marxism - Garaudy, Roger - 1974 - New York, Simon and Schuster - 9780671217501 - Anna's Archive

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AVision of Christian Marxism

ROGER byGAR AUDYw
Leonard Mayhe
Translated
The Alternative Future is “an appe
those who love the future; who
meaning and joy in creation through art,
religious faith, love, thought and revolu-
tion; and especially to the young who can
conceive and live a new kind of life.”
In his most dramatic and activist book,
this famous French Marxist philosopher—
a Communist leader as well as a man of
Christian faith—offers a stunning vision
of a world-in-change—and the most en-
lightening vision of personalism since
Camus.
Inspired, particularly, by the active re-
jection of the status quo by young people
—and by the humanist appeal of men of
faith, particularly the late Pope John
XXIII—Garaudy shows us how we can
truly stage a cultural revolution.
The Alternative Future is about the

“science and art of creating the future.”
It is a book of immense optimism that
holds out hope of coping with the incred-
ible rate of change that has distinguished
the twentieth century from the sixty cen-
turies that preceded it. Because, as
Garaudy points out, not since the devel-
opment of agriculture in the Neolithic
Age have there been such radical
changes as those that are occurring in
this second half of the 1900’s.
Young people, born at the dawn of the
New World, have challenged—and re-
jected—the prefabricated answers of the
previous generations. To which Garaudy
responds that we should be grateful to
(continued on ba
COP 1
OF AAN3057
GARAUDY»s ROGER. Cop a
THE ALTERNATIVE FUTURE$ A VISION OF
CHRISTIAN MARXISM. TRANSLATED BY
LEONARD MAYHEW, NEW YORK? SIMON AND
SCHUSTER 1974:
192 Pe 22: CMe.
THE
ALTERNATIVE
FUTURE
A Vision of Christian Marxism
by Roger Garaudy
translated by Leonard Mayhew
Simon and Schuster = New York

Copyright © Editions Robert Laffont, S.A. 1972
Translation copyright © 1974 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form
Published by Simon and Schuster
Rockefeller Center, 630 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10020
SBN‘671-21750-X
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-2343
Designed by Elizabeth Woll
Manufactured in the United States of America
By American Book-Stratford Press, Inc.
TOME AUTO NE 6 NT RES T0 n LO

Contents
1 The Challenge of the Young 7
2 Necessary Change 27
3 A Revolution for Today? 121
Conclusion VTT
Index 183
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7
The Challenge of the Young

The Alternative Future deals with both the immediate future—
that most important dimension of the present—and the longer-
range future which puts the present in perspective. It is about
the common task we all face of creating and constructing tomor-
row’s world.
The future is not already “there,” as was America before
Columbus. There are many possible futures, and this fact is the
source of our responsibility. Reflecting on the future involves
more than trying to predict what is going to happen. By facing
all possibilities, we attempt to foresee the consequences of pres-
ent decisions and to discern which initiatives are desirable.
The future need not be either a prolongation of our present
anxieties or their catastrophic aftermath, as it will be if we do
nothing to influence it. But it is not likely to satisfy our desires
and make our dreams come true, unless we take account of the
forces presently at work, how they relate, and the possible objec-
tives toward which they can be pushed.
The future has in fact begun. The withdrawal and rage of the
young remind us of this every day. To raise the right questions
about the future, we first have to question the young. Youth is
flooding this ancient earth like a tidal wave. In the United States
half the population is under 25; 25 million Frenchmen, half the
8 THE ALTERNATIVE FUTURE
total, are under 30. Half of China is under 21. Of the almost
4 billion human beings presently alive, 2 billion were born after
World War II. Every day our planet gains 150,000 inhabitants.
On all sides and in a great variety of ways, these young people
are withdrawing—in some instances, forming a countersociety
with its own unwritten laws, mores, and options differing from
those of the established order.
The universality of youth’s discontent rules out partial explana-
tions—“this is a revolt against the contradictions of capitalism
. a revolt against socialist bureaucracy and despotism ...
an outburst of nationalism and xenophobia in the Third World.”
The fact is that youth is rebelling everywhere—where it has been
encouraged, as in China’s cultural revolution, and where it has
been discouraged, as in France and elsewhere in 1968, and since.
And like it or not, this revolt embodies a radical indictment of
our “values” and institutions. It asks questions we cannot dodge.
There is no point in either demagogic praise or condemnation of
the young; we really must try to understand them. We must begin
by listening.
People react to the young today as many reacted to the work-
ing class at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some saw
them only as a threat: “The barbarians are camped within the
very walls of our cities.” Repression was all they could think of
and the resulting massacres stain the history of Europe. Never-
theless, the workers’ movement grew irresistibly. Others saw the
birth of a great revolution in those disorganized revolts. Since
1968, my reflections on the young have been most clarified by
Engels’ classic study The Condition of the English Working Class
published in 1845. Engels never idealizes the primitive methods
of the revolt. He simply testifies that industrialization created a
world where “only a dehumanized, degraded race, intellectually
and morally reduced to the level of brutes, and physically dis-
eased as well, could feel at home.” He describes the savage
competition among workers for jobs and wages, the dishonesty,
the alcoholism that was no longer a vice but a “natural phe-
THE CHALLENGE OF THE YOUNG 9
nomenon, the prostitution resulting from underpaid factory

servitude, so generally accepted that it was ironically called,
according to Engels, the “twelfth working hour.” The workers’
only choice was further degradation or revolt. The earliest forms
of revolt were extremely sterile: destruction of machines and
assassination. Engels, nevertheless, discerned in this primitive
chaos the first outlines of the workers’ movement that, twenty-
five years later with the Paris Commune, launched the “assault
on heaven.”
A century after Engels, the famous French worker-priests rec-
ognized the workers’ movement with respect and humility as one
of the most important spiritual forces of our time, “struggling to
create new human relationships, to transform both life and hu-
man beings, to establish a new step forward for humanity.”
Engels saw a world in the process of being born. The Chris-
tian faith shares this vision when it grasps the crucified Son of
Man as an invincible promise of resurrection—two dimensions
of a single reality. Only such a vision makes it possible to under-
stand what is dying and is being brought to life among the
young and through them. At a time when our egoistic wisdom
has so clearly failed, we must try to understand their divine
folly.
Because of my profession and my work as a militant, I have
had the privilege of meeting young people throughout the world:
students, from Moscow University to Berkeley and Stanford,
from the major Australian and Canadian universities; hippies in
San Francisco and Black Panthers; young Communists in Bel-
grade; the youth of Berlin, Milan, New Delhi, Jakarta, and Mex-
ico City; young Africans from Algiers and the Congo and radical
Japanese Zengakuren; young Israeli kibbutzniks and soldiers;
young farmers in the “liberated territories” between Cairo and
Alexandria and workers at Aswan in upper Egypt.
I want to share what this experience has taught me, not only
about my own children and students but about the meaning of
today’s history and the immediate future. Thinking about their
questions and challenges, their hopes and fury, their despair and
struggles, no matter how diverse or how profound the contrasts,
I have become convinced that we can today discern the future
that is being born. In the failure of our civilization, and of some
of our revolutions, I feel certain that a great alternative is being
worked out. The necessary condition is knowing how to hear,
over the shouting, what the young are denouncing and what
they are proclaiming.
Youth challenges us with a whole new set of problems. We
will never understand them if we try to reassure ourselves by
sticking to the same old clichés: “The young have always been
the same . .. we were young ourselves once . . . we also rebelled
against our parents .. ”
To feel what is going on we have to remember that someone
now seventy years old was born at the halfway point of human
history: as much has happened since his birth as happened in
the previous 6,000 years of recorded history. If he is unaware of
this, or takes it as simply a clever remark, so much the worse for
him; he risks belonging to another world from his grandchildren,
who were born in the middle of the same century as he. Be-
cause of the sudden acceleration in the rate of historical change,
they are pioneers of a civilization that will be mature by the end
of this century.
The sudden changes that began in the middle of the twentieth
century—epitomized by the development of the computer, atomic
energy, and television—are different in kind from those brought
about by the steam engine in the late eighteenth century or of the
printing press during the Renaissance. The only changes that
compare with those of our time were those that occurred between
the sixth and the third millennia when groups settled down and
began to engage in agriculture: the invention of writing, the
plow, the wheel, the sail, bronze, pottery, canals, and urban life.
A growth crisis of equal importance did not occur between the
end of the Neolithic Age and the mid-twentieth century.
Let us use a few points of reference to gauge this “change in
the rate of change.” First, the speed of mobility: The first rulers
of the Sumerian empire, the first Egyptian Pharaohs, and the
earliest hordes on the Mongolian steppes five or six millennia
ago moved just as quickly as Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon.
They were limited to the speed of their horses. In the nineteenth
century the steam engine only tripled or quadrupled that speed.
Only supersonic aircraft and manned rockets have brought about
a truly radical change.
An even more basic point of reference is the supply of food.
The proportion of the population that had to work in agriculture
in order to supply the cities with food changed only insignificantly
for thousands of years. At the beginning of the twentieth century
over 50 percent of the population, even in developed countries,
were still required. But in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury the proportion fell to 15 percent in France and 7 percent in
the United States.
Whereas the total production of goods and services (GNP)
varied only by 3 to 4 percent a century—or 20 to 30 percent after
the first industrial revolution—it now doubles every fifteen years,
so that a society is producing thirty-two times more when a per-
son reaches old age than it did when he was born.
The development of knowledge has been even more dramatic.
A famous UNESCO report points out that 90 percent of the
scientists who have lived since the beginnings of civilization are
alive at the present time. One of the world’s most important
specialists in educational television has written: “At the present
rate at which knowledge is developing, the sum of human
knowledge will be four times greater when a person leaves the
university than it was when he was born. When he is fifty years
old, 97 percent of what he knows will have been discovered
during his lifetime.”
The changes caused by television are comparable only to those
that followed the invention of the alphabet. It not only caused
quantitative change in the dissemination of culture—as did the
printing press—but brought about a qualitative change in the
content of culture. The time when the written word was the only
link between man and the world is over. It has become possible
to watch and listen to the entire world, to be simultaneously
present everywhere in the world without the use of sign or sym-
bol. Children and youth are thus put directly in contact with
events and ways of acting that have more influence on them than
their experience in family, church, or school.
In every area the “frontier-breaking speed” of civilization,
which had remained fairly constant for 6,000 years, abruptly
crossed a threshold in the middle of the twentieth century. To-
day’s youth were born at this moment of historic break with the
past. Their problems are not those of any earlier generation—not
even of ourselves at twenty years of age. How can we be sur-
prised that they reject out of hand our prefabricated answers,
our institutions and values? Instead of becoming indignant at
this rejection, it would be more useful to ask ourselves if our
answers are still valid in the face of new questions, if our in-
stitutions are ready for new tasks, if our “values” are still de-
fensible or have been bypassed by reality. We should be grateful
to the young and the violence of their reactions for showing us
that we must question the basic elements of our life style.
The most ancient institutions are those most radically ques-
tioned: family, church, school, state, the notion of work and
property, politics and morality, culture and the arts. Without
making any value judgments let us try to describe how all this
is conceived and felt by the young.
1. What the Young Denounce
Parents symbolize the inheritance of models of behavior. Thus,

the family is the first institution to be contested, the first to be
rebelled against. A poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion
(Institut frangais de lopinion publique) revealed the shocking
fact that 7 percent of those polled did not know whether their
parents were still alive.
Some 5,000 young men and women in technical schools and
students between the ages of fourteen and twenty were asked,
“Do you prefer to work during part of your vacation to earn
spending money or to ask your parents for it?” Of these, 85 per-
cent answered, “Prefer to work.” Their reasons included “Escape
from my family,” “Gain experience of a different environment,”
“Be free to spend the money as I please.”
In industrialized countries the family has progressively lost its
functions. It is no longer a working unit as in agricultural and
artisan societies, and technical and moral education take place
outside it. As a unit simply defined by shared living quarters and
consumption, the family no longer appears as a “value,” much
less as an authority, to today’s youth. The ancient cohesiveness
created by tradition, economics, and authority is felt as a form
of unjustified repression.
The divorce rate among the young (40 percent during the
first year of marriage in California universities) is only one more
aspect of the same phenomenon. Permanence in a couple’s re-
lationship and life-long fidelity in the midst of incessant change
in all other aspects of life seem anachronistic and impoverishing.
This generation considers jealousy a sign of greed rather than
love. The family has lost its privileged position. It is significant
that incest—a major scandal in all traditional societies from
Oedipus to the mid-twentieth century—can end up in Louis
Malle’s film Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur) in an
outburst of laughter.
Sex outside the traditionally sanctioned bonds of marriage is
out in the open. In the first half of the century, Freud had re-
vealed how sexual repression influences the organization of civ-
ilization. Total rejection of civilization must begin with rejection
of sexual taboos. The body revolts first; the spirit follows. It
would be absurd to blame the pill for sexual anarchy; it simply
unmasked the flimsiness of a “morality” based on fear of the

economic and social consequences of our acts. To a young man
or woman reaching twenty in 1972, the religious, moral, and
political polemics of a decade ago over birth control are as
meaningless as Byzantine disputes over the sex of angels.
When they refuse to be integrated into a system of production
and consumption that has no human ends, these young people
do not call for “an increase of soul” like Bergson; quite the con-
trary. Breaking out of societies ruled by abstract and dehuman-
ized demands—growth and technology for their own sakes—they
demand a body and the end of the body-soul dualism, symbol
and justification of all other dualist systems and of repression.
Young peoples’ aspirations to break with and move beyond the
system are clearest in their conflict with the university and
school system. Although 1968 was the high point of this protest
and these hopes, the crisis began earlier. Since the problem
has not yet been solved anywhere, it remains alive despite all the
deception and repression.
Teachers on every level can testify to escalating problems;
their task may sooner or later become completely impossible.
Not only the university but the entire school system is under
review. The young question the content and value of knowledge
and culture, the social role of education, and the structures of
the university and school system.
On these three levels, aspirations are often confused but the
basic thrust is unequivocal. We shall sketch the main lines of
this radical critique.
Youth’s arraignment of the content and value of what they are
formally taught begins with the suspicion that they are being
fed myths that maintain the status quo. The most frequent theme
in “radical” literature—whether from Nanterre and the Sorbonne
in 1968, Berlin, Tokyo, Columbia, Berkeley, Latin America, or
Italy—is that the information offered by the schools conceals
reality rather than revealing it.
The “human sciences” are a good example. The effort to cover

up every trace of contradiction in society is pushed to the ex-
treme. The sociology students at the University of Amsterdam
called a conference in 1968 on “Should Sociology Be Considered
a Human Science?” Judging by the way sociology, political eco-
nomics, and psychology are generally taught in universities, they
said, these subjects are not human sciences but simply poor rela-
tives of the natural sciences. In general, sociologists and psycholo-
gists observe human beings as they would a colony of rats,
simply to measure and “statistify” their behavior. The only differ-
ence they admit in human societies and individuals is a higher
degree of complexity. The so-called human sciences, the students
concluded, have the same methodology and object as the natural
sciences: to manipulate phenomena, in this case, those related
to human beings.
The young sociologists at Nanterre, both students and pro-
fessors, pointed out in their 1968 note on the social role of so-
ciology that the essential aim of industrial sociology is to adapt
the worker to his function; that political sociology mystified the
very notion of politics by concentrating research on electoral
preferences as if these were the real issues in politics; that so-
ciology applied to advertising was a technique to manipulate
people. They pointed out that even the police plan—code-named
“Project Camelot”—prepared by U.S. Secretary of Defense Mc-
Namara to be used against Latin American revolutionaries was
presented as a “program of sociological studies.”
Simultaneously, the young psychologists at the Sorbonne were
asking themselves an analogous question: “Should the psycholo-
gist be instrumental in promoting better ‘adaptation’ to a system
that is essentially alienating?”
It is no surprise that the 1968 movement in France began with
sociology, psychology, and philosophy students and teachers. In
these fields more than in any others, it became clear that hypo-
critical “scientific objectivity” was a cover for manipulative tech-
niques intended to aid corporate management to operate like

independent governments. Thus conceived, the human sciences
are an integrating tool of a repressive society.
The second accusation directed at the educational system is
that it destroys personality instead of developing it. It is clear
that the object of institutionalized education is to socialize the
child and thus prepare him to fulfill a function in the production
system or the state. There is a tendency to establish, first in
school and later in college, a hierarchy of jobs and roles and
to mold each individual to fit society’s needs. Is it surprising
then that today’s youth feel imprisoned in thousands of tiny
prefabricated pigeonholes?
What kind of knowledge is attested to by a diploma that
grants access to some tiny cubbyhole and accords one the right
to a certain salary and treatment? Or if it is a question of a
public function, becomes a credential to be exploited like a
patent of nobility? Such knowledge is not a personal activity but
a salable commodity. When social rank is measured by the
quantity of education consumed, knowledge operates like money.
Marx analyzed the alienation of the worker in the class society
and showed that turning commerce into a fetish is at the foun-
dation of this alienation. The alienation grows deeper and more
acute as the fetishism passes from merchandise into money and
then capital. Our young people are denouncing something sim-
ilar in terms of knowledge. This knowledge is also alienated,
that is, it is no longer human creative work but something ex-
ternal and superior to the individual, unconnected with his needs
and aspirations for personal fulfillment. To counter pedagogy
that integrates them into the logic of the system, youth demands
that research be carried out with them, even by them—but never
for them.
In all its (sometimes utopian) expressions, this demand rep-
resents a struggle against the dehumanization and alienation of
knowledge. Under the slogan “critical university,” there lies the
clear desire for education that does not cover up contradictions,
exploitation, and oppression but fosters the realization that the

present system is not the only possibility but that it is a very
limited situation that can be changed.
The third major grievance is that education side-steps prob-
lems that deal with ends. The young have demonstrated clearly
that they will not be integrated into a society whose purposes,
values, and meaning they oppose. They have refused to prepare
for war, spread pollution, to be the unquestioning servants of
growth for its own sake, to manipulate consumers. This is not a
Rousseauian rejection of technology; but it is a refusal to sub-
ordinate (or submerge) life in technology.
With their fierce “Why?” young people are asking a basic
question: How are we to move from manipulation to self-di-
rection? Indictment of the schools follows naturally from ques-
tioning the content of knowledge: If the body of knowledge
serves to preserve the status quo, what is the social function of
the institution that disseminates this knowledge? Essentially, the
institution is preoccupied with placing everyone in a specialized
pigeonhole, with getting every individual to contribute his ut-
most to production and increased productivity. “General cul-
ture”—under the successive guises of “religion,” the “humanities,”
and later the “human sciences’”—responds to repression rather
than productivity. Such a conception of culture masks, and
thereby perpetuates, a caste system.
Not without reason today’s youth are attracted to the Chinese
“cultural revolution” that fundamentally questioned the authority
of the mandarin, who for 2,000 years was simultaneously the
man of letters, landowner, and imperial official. Modern youth
in all countries share this insight into the connection between
cultivated tradition and social conservatism.
The indictment of the content of knowledge and its social role
leads naturally to an indictment of the structures of the school.
The most obvious aspect of the problem is the educational in-
stitution’s inability to meet present-day needs. For a long time
the universities functioned simply to produce people to man the
school system. The university ghetto has been so slow in adjust-

ing to reality that even today 80 percent of liberal arts students
will never work at the tasks for which they have supposedly been
prepared. Though not the worst aspect of the educational estab-
lishment, this lack of concern for the future of the students has
played an important part in bringing on student revolt.
The educational structure has the same dualist character as
all the other aspects of the repressive society and, like the po-
litical bureaucracy, clearly expresses the dualism between rulers
and ruled. The most obvious aspect of this structure—and the
one most often denounced by the young—is that the school and
university act as any other system of initiation rites. They have
the same objective: to integrate the young into society. The
priest and the mandarin play similar roles: As depositaries of
tradition and knowledge, they are in charge of setting limits and
supervising the selection process. The technique of the initiation
rite is disturbingly similar to that of sacral societies. Marx said,
“The examination is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism of
knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of
profane knowledge into sacred knowledge.” The rituals con-
nected with the process express the authoritarian character of
the system.
Everywhere, university and high school students make the
same demands. They ask to be treated as the subjects of the
education process, not its objects; for the right to dialogue with
an adviser rather than sit passively through a series of lectures;
to be judged by their aptitude for creativity rather than by a
system of values foreign to their concerns and needs; for per-
sonal participation in the artist’s creative act instead of commen-
taries on a text or artificial “dissertations.”
Here we touch on the heart of the matter: schooling is criti-
cized for its inappropriate concentration in the first years of life,
for lack of connection with real life or with personal problems,
for lack of concern with the body and its needs as well as with
creativity, and for exclusion of any passionate search for pur-
pose. This accusation of dualism against the school as an institu-

tion separated from life inevitably leads to political criticism.
The first realization we come to is that the mass of today’s
youth remains outside political parties; in fact, they remain out-
side every organization founded on the dualist principle of the
delegation of power—which is the alienation of power, whether
it is delegated to a “representative” in Congress, a party, a union,
or a church, This does not mean that the young are apolitical.
They reject the idea of a political arrangement based on a kind
of implicit delegation, politics carried out in their name by others
but without their participation. They reject both the idea and the
practice of “dualist” politics in which leaders bring the masses
their political consciousness and propose to think and decide
in their name.
The political behavior of the young, despite the diverse na-
tional circumstances under which it operates, has at least two
common basic characteristics. It has evolved essentially outside
traditional political organization, indicating a radical change in
how politics is conceived. In addition, real political change is
seen as primarily a change in the ends sought, not just in the
means employed, certainly not in some party or political force
proposing to achieve the conventional ends—economic growth
and higher levels of consumption—more effectively than another.
In the traditional conception of politics, the essence of revolu-
tion is the transfer of power from one group to another. Indi-
viduals delegate (and alienate) their power to structures that,
no matter how they vary, always have one common character-
istic: the dualism between the leaders and the led. The ruling
structure thinks and makes decisions in the name of all, while
actually excluding the vast majority from any real participation
in the decision-making process, above all from choosing which
aims are to be pursued. “Direct democracy” rejects this dualism.
These contradictions, rejections, and revolts of the young—and
the despair (in France 7,000 persons between seventeen and
twenty-five commit suicide each year )—reveal the depth of our
civilization’s crisis. Such phenomena help us grasp how vital it

has become to radically question our order, institutions, and
values, how urgent is the need to question the goals of our
society.
The choice is endless repression or radical change, a real al-
ternative to our politics and our civilization. This alternative
cannot be worked out for the young without their participation.
A ready-made future is unacceptable.
This preliminary reflection on the future has tried to under-
stand the criticism and to grasp the depth of the problem. Now
we must ask whether those countersocieties governed by un-
written laws into which an important—and often the most active
—segment of the young have seceded are preparing a new future.
This is a crucial juncture in our reflection on building the future,
because the negative aspects of the present system will not pro-
voke a truly effective revolt unless there exists some other possi-
bility, some other model. But a minority may be able to make a
breakthrough and reveal new perspectives by suggesting this
possible new model. At the outset of our research, therefore, we
must pull together as much evidence as possible about what the
young denounce and about what they proclaim.
2. What They Proclaim
The music and dance of the young are acall for free self-ex-
pression (not to be confused with the stale individualism of
earlier generations). These are the “counterculture’s” most typ-
ical forms, a protest against the formal intellectualism of official
education that holds the arts, their practice, and all creative self-
expression in contempt.
Without making any judgment about the value of this music
and dance, I find in it certain things that stand out: Music and
dance are no longer spectacles to be observed. Participation is
immediate. When the music begins, adults listen but the young
move as if celebrating a Dionysiac cult. The arts provide a way
to break out of the tight pattern of utilitarian activities. Pop art
expresses the desire to free objects from their functions. Even
if this is not art, it suggests a moral attitude toward life. It is
another affirmation that life and society can be different from
the present.
Music and dance are precisely arts that elude words and
conceptual discourse. The strictly aesthetic—that is, immediately
sensual—dimension of our relationship to the world, always con-
sidered secondary to intellectual activity by Western civilization,
is essential to non-Western peoples. This is one major reason for
youth’s attraction to India, Zen Buddhism, or even jazz based on
African sources.
Again, it is a question of ends. For Westerners, “to understand”
traditionally means an explanation in words. But this is an aes-
thetic misconception. It is easy to feel that one has understood
a canvas when the museum guide has described its subject—in
other words, everything in the painting except what is properly
painting. “I don’t understand Picasso, or modern art . . .” Why
would a painter feel the drive to paint if what he wished to
express could be conveyed in words? He would be better off as a
philosopher, historian, or preacher. These are two fundamentally
opposed conceptions of how to know the world. Real dialogue
between civilizations can be most beneficial in helping to recon-
cile this opposition and in preventing underestimation of either
the aesthetic or the logical dimensions of knowledge and culture,
either Hegelian rationalism or Lao-tse’s “Tao.”
It is no historical accident that the black struggle in the United
States was a determining influence in awakening the young; that
support of the Vietnamese people’s war of liberation is a com-
mon characteristic of the young of every nation; that African
dance, song, and art are increasingly popular; that India exerts
such fascination; that Yoga and Zen Buddhism are so “in”; that
the Chinese cultural revolution has aroused such intense reac-

tion; that the heroes of the young—Mao, Lumumba, Ché Gue-
vara, Angela Davis—all belong to the Third World.
On a grand scale, the colonial peoples, after centuries of op-
pression, struggle for the same causes as the young: They reject
being treated as objects. They demand to be recognized as them-
selves, and they oppose any attempt to file them into an alien,
oppressive, and repressive system.
Youth’s effort to rehabilitate the senses and to revitalize our
connection with the immediate promises a great deal for the
future, even though this effort sometimes involves artificial ex-
altation of the intensity of sense perceptions through drugs.
Drugs push aesthetic experience to the extreme. Baudelaire’s
praise of hashish and its hallucinogenic powers started a cult.
Marijuana sharpens the sensations of color, sound, and odor.
Mescaline and LSD produce similar results with higher risks.
This kind of euphoria creates illusions. Fifty years ago the sur-
realists felt that a poet’s automatic writing was creative. But
automatic writing by a mediocre talent produces mediocrities.
Poetry is not foreign territory that can be explored simply by
breaking down the gate. To be a Rimbaud demands more than
“a systematic disorganization of all the senses.” The use of drugs
to achieve liberation from one’s limitations or for fuller self-
expression is based on the myth of spontaneity.
Undeniably, spontaneity is an invaluable aid in banishing the
illusion that man can achieve authenticity and happiness from
an outside source. Spontaneity can fortify what is sensible and
immediate against the logic of a moribund system. It can pro-
claim a new kind of human relations. But spontaneity endlessly
evoked is not spontaneity but its exact opposite. Repetitions of
exaggerated sensation dull sensibility. The “trips” offered by
drugs carry the risk of psychic impoverishment and alienation.
Essentially, such “trips” are a way of rejecting and escaping an
intolerable society. The addict is not delinquent but ill, and his
illness is rooted in society.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE YOUNG _23
Having said that, simply to avoid hypocrisy we must remem-

ber that the young are not the only—or even the major—users of
the most harmful (and expensive) drugs, such as heroin. Those
who profit from this traffic, organized in powerful international
syndicates, are quite “mature.” If we want to punish the guilty,
we should certainly not begin with the young but with the sys-
tem that tolerates this traffic. Ultimately, the demand for a
means of escape from the world will cease when a world is
created that does not engender the desire to escape.
Now we must broach the problem of religion. Today’s youth
find religion more difficult than ever to take seriously because
consistently for a thousand years the churches in the West have
taught the worst kind of escapism and have furnished “spiritual”
justifications for every kind of dualism: body-soul, class, political
power.
It is not surprising that, of all time-honored institutions, the
churches are most torn by contention. The young reject all that
separates the churches from society, all that makes them alien
and superior. The focus of this defiance is the internal dualism
of church organization. There are many examples. The Catholic
Church is having great difficulty recruiting young men for the
priesthood and some religious orders have had to close their
_novitiates for lack of “vocations.” Even more telling is the grow-
ing demand for a real fusion of the church with the world and
its problems. The worker-priests who refused to separate faith
and labor, ministry and work, were the precursors of an irre-
versible movement. They insisted on recognizing all aspects of
the life of work. They were determined to share not only the
wretchedness of the workers’ lives but also their militant strug-
gle. Questioning the value of priestly celibacy is only one aspect
of this will to integrate the church fully into life and to experi-
ence faith within the dimensions of daily life rather than outside
them. The emphasis in the Catholic Church on the lay ministry
and the possibility of ordaining married men and women to the
priesthood is only one example of this general rejection of dual-
ism. Everyone may not agree with the radical Christians who
gathered in the Saint Yves auditorium and the Church of Saint
Severin during the crisis of June 1968: “We reject the scandalous
division of believers into the children and the ‘fathers, priests
and pastors. The priestly caste must be overthrown. We reject
all mandarins.” This statement, however, expresses in an extreme
form a profound and irreversible trend. The same trend is ex-
pressed in theology. More and more young Christians in Latin
America see a close connection between resurrection and insur-
rection. Significantly, there has been much serious discussion of
the “theology of revolution.” It is revealing that the trend in
Protestantism has passed rapidly from a “theology of reality”
inspired by Pastor Bonhoeffer to a “theology of revolution.”
In the Third World an important wing of all religions has
allied itself with the national liberation movements. This is
true of Catholicism in Latin America and of the prophetic and
messianic religions in Africa. It is true also of young Moslems,
as, for example, in Algeria, where Islam was allied with the war
of national liberation. Another example is the Vietnamese Bud-
dhist monks. Nothing impressed me more than listening in
Bangkok's Wat-pho temple to a young Buddhist monk (formed
by what was for so long the most dualist of religions, the one
most committed to turning man away from the earth). With
extraordinary militant fervor he spoke to me of turning not to
another world or the past but to the future in order to change
the world.
In the Christian churches today’s youth face a terrible burden
from the past: the dualism between body and soul epitomized
in its Platonic corollary of the immortality of the soul and the
tendency to view the body and sex as soiled, as Teilhard de
Chardin pointed out. This dualism is translated directly into
social and political life: Under the pretext of the primacy of
the “spiritual,” it breeds a marked preference for “order,” con-
sidered to be on the side of the “spirit,” as opposed to rebellion,
which smacks of chaos and “matter.” Opposing this tendency,
the basic orientation of the young radically expresses one of the

most profound elements of Christianity, an emphasis on what
theologians call eschatology, Christian hope.
If we move beyond theology to something that affects many
more than young Christians, there is a new way of experiencing
man’s relation to the world and to each other. For lack of a
better term, we shall call it “Dionysiac,” because, consciously
or not, Nietzsche’s vision inspires many of the developments
among today’s young people.
Apollo incarnates the ideal of classical Greek thought as the
master of reason, discipline, balance, the typical Greek wisdom
that condemns as inordinate (hubris) any attempt to transcend
human limitations. The epitome of the Apollonian art is the
architect, the artisan who builds everything according to rule
and respects the order willed by the gods.
The archetypical Dionysiac art, on the other hand, is dance.
Dance is the metaphor for life conceived not as a transcendent
order to be laboriously imitated but as a flux that passes through
us, beyond the capacity of words to express. It is a resurgence of
the primordial unity between man and nature. Historically it
has found expression whenever traditional limitations have been
transcended in mysticism and resolution, utopia and folly.
The old frigid Aristotelian god, the unmoved mover, is dead
and I seriously doubt that the young are among the mourners.
In this post-Marx, post-Nietzsche, post-Freud era, when the
substance of reality is evolution, when mass is energy, when to
be is to relate, the only god youth can conceive and experience
is the creative force at the heart of everything. God exists wher-
ever something new is coming to life—in artistic creation, scien-
tific discovery, love, or revolution. God is the contradiction of
entropy. Entropy, the universal law of the degradation of energy,
has already been defeated by life, even though precariously. A
new faith has taken over and, by challenging the forces of life
to reascend the heights, it gives life meaning, power, and re-
covery.
This attitude of the young suggests a new kind of bond among

men: We are united not only by our common task but by be-
longing to a common flux, to the same rising of the sap. This
attitude suggests a new attitude toward life, a metamorphosis of
destiny into poetry. “What would happen,” a student asked me,
“if we danced out our life instead of just constructing it?”
The young denounce every kind of dualism. The opposition
between body and soul, its most basic expression, epitomizes all
the others: the dualism between authority—residing in parents,
employer, “values,” religions, parties, ruling classes—and men
reduced to carrying out directions. Their “ends” are imposed on
them from outside, in morals and politics, in work as well as in
literature and the arts. Nothing is asked of them except integra-
tion into this system of ends created under historical conditions
entirely different from the present and unable, as a result, to an-
swer the questions or meet the needs of today.
The young proclaim the urgency of facing the problem of
ends. This is true even when their proclamation is confused,
anarchic, utopian—in a word, mythic. Indeed, there is a “myth”
of youth. But myths are never born in vain: They are created
when a profound human need emerges and the existing society
offers no means for its satisfaction. Myths prefigure what is to
come. They must be deciphered, but myths are always indi-
cators of transcendence. They must be read in order to under-
stand what they signify. This book is an attempt at such reading
and deciphering. A Buddhist proverb says: “When a finger
points to the moon, onlya fool looks at the finger.”
From this beginning we can build the future with the young.
They lack memory and hope. The real solution for our blind
and catastrophic drifting is achievement of a liberty beyond
conformity and revolt. We must strive with the young for a com-
mon history and shared hopes.
2
Necessary Change
1. Structural Change:
Capitalism, No;
Stalinist Technobureaucracy, No
By its very nature, capitalism lacks a concept of the relation

of human ends to the economy, or indeed to society in general.
The most important economic development, between the Renais-
sance and the twentieth century, was the development of the
mercantile economy. When the great land routes of communica-
tion within the Roman Empire were broken by the barbarian
invasions and, a few centuries later, by the Arab mastery over
the Mediterranean, Europe was reduced to a fragmented econ-
omy in which markets played only a subordinate, local role
hemmed in by the limited economic boundaries of the feudal
world. Human beings, land, and money were not subject to the
laws of the market. Noneconomic norms set by the political and
religious hierarchies regulated human labor and the ownership
of land, neither of which was commercially transferable. Traffic
in money, blocked by the prohibition of interest taking, which
was held to be equivalent to usury, could only be carried out
sporadically by those excluded from feudal society, those who

lived on its margins or in its pores, like the Jews.
When the defeat of the Turks paved the way for the reestab-
lishment of European commercial navigation in the Mediterra-
nean and the great discoveries opened up three continents for
pillage, the aristocracies of land and blood and the religious
prohibitions began to crumble. New forms of wealth and power
developed, quite distinct from landed property and feudal-sacral
authority. Wealth and power were no longer exclusively based
on nobility or ecclesiastical ordination but could be built on the
power and shrewdness of conquerors and traders.
These new world masters, the founders of the first colonial
“companies,” using whatever means they deemed necessary—the
extermination of the. population of an entire continent in Amer-
ica, the slave trade in Africa, the pillage of more advanced but
less well-armed civilizations in Asia—created, between the fif-
teenth and twentieth centuries, a previously unheard-of, world-
wide network of human relationships. For the first time in
history, the market was the world. Every religious, moral, or po-
litical obstacle to this universalization of the market was elim-
inated and the quest for profit became the single motive behind
every enterprise. What was new was not the marketplace but
the absolutism of the market that recognized no laws but its own
and subjected all other social relationships to itself. This essen-
tial characteristic of capitalism distinguishes it from all other
historical social systems. It reached its apogee in the late nine-
teenth and the early twentieth centuries.
With the help of major inventions in production techniques
and transportation—especially the steam engine—of progress in
communications ranging from the printing press to radio/tele-
vision, of a perfected system of credit and exchange—the Bank
and the Stock Exchange—in three centuries the capitalist econ-
omy created institutions able to bring absolutely everything into
open circulation on the market.
It began with money, by nullifying the religious prohibition
NECESSARY CHANGE 29
of usury and interest taking. Then came land, which struck a

mortal blow against feudalism. Finally it was the turn of human
labor; man himself was turned into a commodity by the slave
trade and the establishment of the wage system. The labor
force was transformed into a commodity, subject like all others
to the laws of the market. Capitalism, Lenin said, is the mercan-
tile economy developed to the stage in which labor becomes a
marketable good.
Once money, land, and labor had been turned into marketable
commodities, governed by the laws of supply and demand, they
became so many cogs in the giant machine run by the jungle
law of private competition. In its purest form, “freedom” of the
market reflects the struggle among the various possessors of
wealth, Everything has its price in this blind battle of everyone
against everyone. Everything can be bought and sold. Nothing
escapes the meshes of this devil’s mill.
Capitalism is not simply an economic system. It necessarily
implies a social structure, a hierarchical social relationship in
which the minority who possess power dominate those who do
not own the means of production. It implies a political structure
that reflects this social and economic dependency. Finally, it is
a model of culture and civilization in which men are molded by
market demands, competition, and profit and are manipulated by
those who, along with capital, control most of the communica-
tions media (press, publishing, films, radio, television, advertis-
ing).
A society ruled by the blind law of competition among all
and profit for a few, in which investment is not a social but
solely a private enterprise, is devoid of any conscious governance
of its ends.
This is the first society in history not built on any plan for
civilization. It is a commonplace to say that since the Renaissance
“Western” society has been desacralized. This statement is,
however, erroneous. A sacralized society is one that accepts an
absolute end outside of and superior to the will of the individuals
who compose the society. In the Greek cities and Rome, religion
and public cult expressed society’s aim to respect the divine
order. With the fall of the Roman Empire the Church inherited
this function. Significantly, the title Pontifex Maximus (sovereign
pontiff) passed from Emperor to Pope. For more than a thousand
years, from Constantine to the Renaissance, Western societies
were founded on the certainty that there was an order willed by
God and that all personal and social virtues responded to the
demand to conform to this divine plan.
After the Renaissance, with the development of commerce
and, later, of industry, various facets of human life—economic,
then political, and eventually intellectual and moral—won au-
tonomy from this world view. Such a society is secularist in the
sense that religion has become a private affair. It is not, however,
desacralized, for it remains subject to an absolute end outside of
and superior to the will of the individuals who compose the
society, even though this end is no longer expressed in religious
terms. The economic success of individuals or corporate enter-
prises has become an end in itself.
Since technical development is the condition for expanding
the system, it becomes in its turn an end in itself. In the seven-
teenth century Descartes introduced the idea of “science that will
make us the masters and possessors of nature.” By the eighteenth
century, “progress” had become the equivalent of “Providence”
as an absolute norm for human action. Progress was defined as a
constant increase of production, consumption, profit, and effi-
ciency. Newer terms such as “growth” or “development” desig-
nate the same realities and myths and are based on the same
criteria.
John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the fundamental nature of
such a civilization in a joke: It is as if Saint Peter, deciding who
was to go to heaven or hell, asked this one question, “What did
you do to increase the gross national product?”
In such societies there is an absolute purpose—growth for its
own sake—but it is a purpose without purpose, or more exactly,
NECESSARY CHANGE 31
without a specifically human purpose. Competition between in-

dividuals, enterprises, and nations reaches the point that no one
is competent to make decisions about purposes but only about
the means to maximize profit or growth.
Absolute finality, alien and superior to the will of individuals,
remains. Instead of appearing openly as a transcendent divine
law, it is disguised as the immanence of some natural law. What
could have led us to such social and human disintegration? The
sovereignty of a marketplace that holds labor, land, and money
in its grip.
In making man’s ability to work a commodity, capitalism
perpetuates the dualism that characterizes every society founded
on the opposition between two basic classes: those who own the
means of production—formerly the slaveowner and feudal lord,
today the capitalist who owns machines and plant—and those
who do not own them and are subject to them, either by birth, as
with serfs and lords, or by selling their ability to work, as with
workers and employers. This dualism, this dependence of the
vast majority on an economically dominant minority, is flagrant.
The class struggle was not invented by revolutionaries. One
bishop wrote, “No worker has any guarantee of employment.
He can be laid off with no recourse and for any reason. Before
being hired, he is imperiously invited to confess his life story
and to reveal his convictions. He can be dismissed for motives
that are matters of conscience. Today, some say that class no
longer exists. I declare that there are at least two classes of
men: those who seek jobs that they can lose from day to day
and those who have the absolute power to hire and fire them.”
In official manuals of economic policy the word “exploitation”
has been banished as polemical and unscientific. No one denies
that the slaveowner exploited his slave, that is, he derived from
his labor more than he spent for his support. No one denies that
it was the same with the feudal lord and his serfs. If exploitation
is denied when it is a question of the modern worker, the ac-
cumulation of capital becomes unintelligible. As opposed to the
slave or serf, the worker is not legally bound to a particular

master, but a purely economic necessity—making a living—obliges
him to attach himself to someone who controls the means of
production and pays his wages. So long as this privileged class
survives, dependency will result, with the same implacable ne-
cessity that would make an absolute sovereign of someone who
owned a well in the desert along with the weapons to defend
his monopoly.
The exploitation of the wage earner has new forms today.
Even though the worker is generally no longer condemned to
the hunger and physical exhaustion of the nineteenth century,
he is still doubly alienated. As consumer he is alienated as a
result of his alienation as producer. The same system that bru-
talizes him and saps his strength by the duration and rhythm of
his work also conditions him to feel those needs that will bring
in a profit. Exploitation is not only the money stolen from the
worker but what is taken away from the quality of his life. Sci-
ence and technology have not liberated man.
The black or Chicano laborer in Los Angeles must own an
automobile. Completely inadequate public transportation com-
pels him to do so in order to get to work. For all practical pur-
poses, he goes into debt for his entire lifetime to buy and main-
tain a car. He must work overtime or at a faster rate to earn
the payments on his loan. The brutalization and destruction of
the quality of his life reaches the point where his only relaxation
is dozing in front of his television (also bought on credit),
watching a baseball game or spy movie, or leafing through a
pornographic magazine, or worse, seeking escape with drugs.
This is the American “high standard of living.”
We condemn not only the notion of the market but the ex-
istence of a salaried or wage-earning class that results from it.
Now, and even more so in the future, all necessary consumer
goods can be produced by a small number of workers on very
short work weeks. Lord Bowden recognized this novel situation
and used the example of the richest capitalist country: “The
NECESSARY CHANGE 33
economy of the U.S. is in an extraordinary situation: half the

active population suffices to meet the needs of the entire popu-
lation . . . so that the authorities are obliged to find employ-
ment for the other half.” Capitalism can survive only by multi-
plying useless or marginal employment (the army, middlemen,
).
parasites
In 1964 an American investigatory committee revealed that
38 million Americans lived in misery. Facing the forecast of
generalized automation, it concluded: “The traditional connec-
tion between work and income is being broken.”
It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a system in
which the income of both owners and workers is allocated by
private enterprises, while neither salaries nor prices reflect any
progress in the productivity of labor. It is impossible to maintain
a system in which the needs of an entire people depend on the
initiative of private financial and industrial conglomerates.
Contemporary development in the science and technology of
production demands that work, both manual and intellectual,
cease to he a commodity. |
By turning money into a commodity, allowing it to “procreate
without labor,” and by considering investment a private affair of
the Stock Exchange and speculators, three major consequences
follow from the principles of capitalist “free enterprise”:
(1) the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer
hands;
(2) a blind race for profit and growth for their own sakes;
(3) a sovereignty of money over all national activities in the
course of which all human “values” become economic and com-
mercial “values” in the stockbroker’s sense of the word [Trans.
note: the French for both “stocks” and “values” is “valeurs”] and,
like them, subject to bidding and selling.
The fundamental arguments of Marx’s Capital remain com-
pletely valid in this regard. We shall limit ourselves to showing
their influence on the quality of our daily lives.
The mechanisms by which capital is accumulated—whether by
corporations as nondistributed profits or reserves, or by indi-

viduals as dividends, profit sharing, interest, rent—make it pos-
sible to turn into private property everything that is indispens-
able to life, the essential means of production and exchange, and
enables a smaller and smaller group to monopolize this power.
This concentration is a universal phenomenon in the capitalist
world.
In its July 13, 1968, issue the English journal The Economist
summed up the opinion of the most “reliable” economists and
forecast that in twenty years, 300 international companies would
control the economic life of the capitalist world. The result is
fewer and fewer free options for more and more individuals.
A corollary of the blind race for profit and growth for their
own sakes is technology and science for their own sakes. The
sacred—but tacit—postulate of our societies that everything tech-
nologically possible is desirable is deadly.
Criteria of efficiency valid for business have been extended to
the entire society because of the overwhelming influence of cor-
porations over the State based on their expectation of eventually
being identified with it.
If the business corporation can define itself in terms of a tech-
nical end, the overall society cannot thus define itself without
creating a society of production and consumption for its own
sake, a society with no human purposes. Today, there exists a
flagrant contrast between the rationality of some individual
achievements and social irrationality. A nation’s problems cannot
be solved with methods valid for the management of a company.
If a nation is the equivalent of a corporation, we must ask what
is its product? Human beings, the very opposite of a product.
Scientific and technological research, nowadays the primary
precondition for wealth and power, has become an end in itself,
with little thought of its effect on man’s future. Development
does not mean the development of man but simply scientific and
technological development. Man is one of its instruments, not its
end. A telling example of this dehumanization is the practice of
NECESSARY CHANGE 35
classifying nations according to “per capita gross national prod-

uct,” with no account taken of distribution, employing a blind
standard linking the incomes of a Rockefeller and a black hustler
in Harlem, the income of the Emir of Kuwait and that of the
stevedores who load oil in Scuwaikh. This is why economists such
as Galbraith in the United States and Mishan in England have
begun to question treating the economy in purely economic terms
and measuring it by purely economic criteria, that is, growth for
its own sake.
Pierre Joliot-Curie and later Robert Oppenheimer experienced
this anguish, when they approached the problem of manufactur-
ing atomic bombs in other than purely technical terms. Science
cannot be an absolute. It gives us everything we desire but it
cannot tell us what to desire. “Formerly,” said Einstein, “one had
perfect aims but imperfect means. Today we have perfect means
and tremendous possibilities but confused goals.” It is a sign of
the times that at one of the greatest concentrations of “brain
power” in the United States, the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology, there was astrike calling for self-examination about the
meaning and purpose of the scientific research being carried out.
It is not self-evident that one must go to the moon or Mars
simply because it is technically possible, when the amount of
money invested in the enterprise (for the builders’ economic
profit, for political prestige, for reasons of military rivalry, with
science profiting only from the fallout) could, if used on Earth,
solve the problem of hunger and establish a balance between the
Third World and the developed countries.
It is not self-evident that making it possible for 150 business-
men a day to cross the Atlantic in three hours instead of seven
on the Concorde deserves priority, when the same investment and
technical research could humanize public transportation for an
entire metropolitan area.
These are questions, not answers. They are variations on one
single question: Because an exploit is technically possible, must
we rack our brains to find reasons to prove that it is necessary?
Rack our brains to prove it on the basis of the implicit postulates

of a society for which blind growth has become the unquestion-
able natural law of the system?
The extension of the sovereignty of money to all national
activities is a direct consequence of “free enterprise.” When the
sole aim of investments is profit making for the owners of capital,
without consideration of the needs of society, they contribute to
the disintegration of man, not to his advancement. In America
Galbraith has stressed the gap between private luxury and public
squalor, the wealth expended on satisfying private needs and the
penury in the expenditures to satisfy social needs. This gap exists
in all the capitalist countries.
The money spent on “juke boxes” in French bars is infinitely
greater than that contributed to cultural institutions. Production
and advertising budgets for tobacco far surpass the budget for
public health. When the “values” of the culture become com-
mercialized, they become a salable commodity and express the
alienating social relations of capitalist society, that is, the need to
compensate for all the frustrations of love or culture through
violence or escape. To cater to such needs we get gangster films,
outlaw “supermen” from Eddie Constantine to James Bond,
pornography, drugs, and inflated “idols,” singers, and stars of
film and television launched with the same advertising techniques
that create a market for deodorants with “sex appeal.”
Basic artistic exploration, on the other hand, must be done
‘alone or by small groups, and always without adequate support.
Such a system creates a deadly division between culture as com-
modity and culture as creation.
One of the most destructive consequences of this money mar-
ket, in which the investor's profit making is the sole criterion for
the choice of investments, is that an eminently profitable sector
like ordnance becomes a particularly attractive investment. The
private interests of the manufacturers and their financial backers
override the national interest; foreign policy and wars become
means to expand the monopolies. “What is good for General
NECESSARY CHANGE 37
Motors is good for the country,” said Secretary of Defense Wil-

son, who had been president of General Motors, unwittingly re-
vealing one of the basic determinants of American foreign policy
from Korea to Vietnam. In France, important economic interests
have succeeded in making the sale of arms one of the basic sup-
ports of French exporting.
While the manufacture of arms is a prime tool for expanding
the monopolies, the information industry—an industry designed
for mass manipulation—exerts a no less harmful influence. When
powerful financial interests own almost all newspapers, book
publishing houses, movie studios, weekly magazines, and broad-
casting networks and manage them according to the criteria of
profitability, a nation is delivered body and soul to conditioning
by permanent “psychological warfare,” capitalism’s finest art.
With this enormous power to manipulate the public and the
equally gigantic power conferred by control over information
through computers and data banks, the oligarchy that controls
the mass media and the electronic information systems can set
up a network of information and manipulation capable of keep-
ing the individual citizen under tighter control and more thor-
oughly subjugated than Stalin or Hitler were ever able to do.
When land was turned into a market commodity and nature
became something to exploit and to speculate in, more than land
—man’s whole vital environment—was delivered up to the lust of
capital, to “free enterprise” and the blind laws of the marketplace.
The most obvious example today is the problem of construc-
tion, urbanization, and the destruction of the environment, Build-
ing scandals are only an anecdotal and superficial aspect of the
problem, the tip of the iceberg. But no other scenario better
exemplifies the neocapitalist collusion between private firms and
the State: A “promoter” buys a piece of land on which construc-
tion is illegal; he then obtains from the government an “excep-
tion.” The value of the land increases 50 or 100 times.
Between 1960 and 1971, 100,000 “exceptions” of this kind were
obtained in France, which gives some idea of how much land
speculation is carried out by complicity between the monopolies

and the government. As masters of these lands the powerful
corporations can plunder nature at their will (37,500 acres of
forest were razed in a century in the Paris region alone), can
pollute the air and water by refusing to clean their waste prod-
ucts, and can sacrifice public space to private interests.
Right now, in the heart of Paris, at the very time when the
government is claiming to discourage private autos in the center
of the city by setting up parking meters on the sidewalks, it is
also thinking of encouraging automobile traffic through the city
by a new “expressway” along the left bank of the Seine. Why not
go all the way and fill in the river completely, raze the Bois de
Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, and even the Louvre? This
situation might seem contradictory from the viewpoint of the
public interest but it is perfectly logical to private enterprise:
business would become marvelously profitable simultaneously for
road builders and the makers of parking meters.
In the richest country in the world, the United States, President
Nixon, in his State of the Union message in January 1970, drew
this strange picture of a system of “free enterprise” that promised
to make us “masters and owners of nature”: “Never has a nation
seemed to have more and to draw less satisfaction from it. . .
70 percent of our population live in urban centers, paralyzed by
automobile traffic, suffocated by industrial pollution, poisoned by
their water, deafened by noise, and terrorized by crime.”
The threat is growing worldwide.
When man and nature are caught up in the devil’s mill—man
under the rubric of labor and nature under the rubric of land—all
organic forms of life disintegrate. Social life becomes nothing
more than the exploitation, without any limits but those imposed
by the market, of the workers physical and psychological
strength, the devastation of the environment, the felling of for-
ests, the pollution of bodies of water, the degradation of every
form of life from work to art—all subject to the same commerciali-
zation.
NECESSARY CHANGE 39
Our relationship to nature is out of control as are our relations

with our fellow men. Just one example: Trees absorb carbon
dioxide and produce the oxygen necessary for life. A daily news-
paper printing 200,000 copies consumes every day the annual
production of two and a half acres of forest; every trans-Atlantic
flight by a simple Boeing 707 uses the amount of oxygen produced
by two and a half acres of forest in a year. The accumulation of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the temperature to rise
—until now only 2 degrees per century for the oceans. At the
present rate, however, this temperature change will melt the ice
packs so rapidly that the level of the sea will rise more than thirty
feet by the beginning of the twenty-first century and bury under
the waves, like new Atlantises, New York, London, Le Havre,
Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Bordeaux—and along with them a
good number of the “masters and owners of nature.”
The disparity between our intentions and the consequences of
our acts is more and more dramatic. We cannot govern the forces
we create. Engels painted the following picture of this kind of
chaos: “In nature there are only unconscious and blind elements
that act against each other. On the other hand, in the history of
societies the only ones to act are men endowed with conscious-
ness, acting with reflection or passion in pursuit of determined
goals; nothing happens without conscious design and an intended
end... but only rarely is this intended design achieved; in
most cases the numerous goals that are pursued interdict and
contradict each other . . . the conflicts among innumerable wills
and individual actions create in the historic domain a situation
analogous to what happens in unconscious nature. The goals of
actions are intended but the results that actually follow these
actions have not been willed . . . innumerable forces oppose
each other . . . the result of which—the historic event—no one
has willed.”
The cataclysm of 1929, which destroyed the entire capitalist
world with its chain-reaction bankruptcies, its 70 million un-
employed, verified with sinister exactness what Marx predicted
in Capital: The whole economic mechanism of capitalism broke

down as a result of the “normal” interaction of the system’s laws
of development and its fundamental contradiction between the
tendency toward increased socialization of production and the
preservation of private appropriation of the wealth and power
created by collective labor. In a parallel fashion, what Marx pre-
dicted was verified by the contrary experience of the Soviet
Union. Only the country that had abolished the private owner-
ship of the means of production escaped the economic crisis.
In the same period it abolished unemployment and its five-year
plans guaranteed it rapid expansion and an exceptional growth
rate.
Despite the violence of this economic earthquake, capitalism
did not crumble. But the efforts to overcome the consequences
of anarchic production in a “free enterprise” economy required
partial renunciation of its basic principle: recognition of no other
laws but those of the market.
Noting the early economic successes of the Soviet Union, which
compensated in record time for a serious handicap of economic
and technical backwardness, the capitalist countries adopted
what the “liberal” economists had called “socialist” until then,
state intervention in the economy and economic planning.
However, in order to overcome its problems without threat to
private ownership of the means of production and the profit
motive, the capitalist state put itself in the service of the economy,
instead of subordinating the economy to the needs of the overall
society.
Policies based on the theories of Keynes—the physician who
saved capitalism after the 1929 crisis—had two objectives: to
maintain a high level of employment and to assure rapid growth.
The means were governmental expenditures to stimulate produc-
tion, taxation to finance these expenditures, and a policy of
monetary stability to counter inflation.
For thirty years, despite the bloody interlude of World War II,
this orthodox neocapitalism was maintained through thick and
NECESSARY CHANGE 41
thin. Economic growth was to resolve all problems: end poverty,

assure full employment, avoid inflation, improve housing, the
environment, and all the other aspects of life, produce the re-
sources necessary to aid the Third World (to keep it in the camp
of the “free world,” as Rostow bluntly explained in his “Anti-
Communist Manifesto”), and, finally, finance the space program
and enable man to reach the moon.
Of all these goals, only one was attained—the moon was reached
—because this enterprise was a by-product of the cold war. On all
other fronts, during the 1960s the great neo-Keynesian hope for a
capitalist system that would overcome its inherent contradictions
foundered.
First, it foundered through inflation: It became increasingly
clear that the attempt (eventually aborted) to maintain full
employment and a high growth rate inevitably produced rising
prices and inflation. All the wagers that purely economic meas-
ures could stem rising prices were invariably lost. Everywhere in
the capitalist world—in France, and in the United States on Aug-
ust 15, 1971—it became necessary to have recourse to the un-
imaginative and always ineffective method of freezing wages and
prices as in wartime.
A second indication of failure is the continual crisis of the
international monetary system. The very country that dominates
the capitalist world by its foreign investments, the United States,
has had the worst deficits in balance of payments. This is a direct
result of its basic policies. In the 1950s and 1960s the greatest
industrial power in the world devoted an enormous proportion
of its revenues to its military budget. Its constantly increasing
expenditures on arms, aimed at stimulating economic production
and maintaining the system, and its expenditures on wars, aimed
at ensuring the security of foreign investments, led to the de-
valuation of the dollar. Because of the worldwide economic
ascendancy of the United States, this action led to disturbances
in the economies of all the capitalist countries.
The third contradiction and failure had to do with “aid to the
Third World.” The gap between the underdeveloped and the rich
countries has not narrowed; it has, in fact, grown wider. Never
in the history of the world have so many human beings—in abso-
lute numbers—gone hungry: Two-thirds of humanity, 2.5 billion
people, suffer from undernourishment or malnutrition. There is
no demographic excuse for this. Since 1965 food production has
increased by 3 percent a year, while the population only grew at
a rate of 1.5 percent. The fundamental cause of the situation is
neocolonialism (the offspring of neocapitalism), which sets low
prices on the raw materials that Third World countries sell and
very high prices for the equipment they must buy. For example,
in 1972 it took three or four times as much sugar cane, peanut oil,
or coffee to buyatractor as it did in 1962. Under these conditions
what is called “aid to the Third World” is really assistance from
the poor countries to the rich. For each franc, dollar, pound
sterling or mark given to a Third World country so that it can
continue to make purchases in Europe or America, there is a
two- or three-franc, dollar, pound, or mark return to the “donor.”
In any case, $200 billion is spent annually on arms and a mere
$12 billion on aid to the underdeveloped countries—underdevel-
oped because of their heritage of ancient colonialism and modern
neocolonialism.
Why did the Keynesian “remedy” fail? The correctives applied
by neocapitalism made it possible to temporarily cover up some
of the economic contradictions in the system, but only at the cost
of aggravating its social and human contradictions. So today, the
crisis of capitalism is no longer the classic economic crisis—as in
1929—but a crisis of the whole model of capitalist civilization on
every level—economy, politics, culture. This new crisis occurred
because neocapitalism had to commit its political and cultural
superstructures to the effort to overcome its economic crises.
During the 1929-1933 crisis, the palliative for “overproduction”
(really, underconsumption by the masses who lacked the pur-
chasing power to match production) was destruction: while 70
million unemployed and their children went hungry, hundreds of
NECESSARY CHANGE 43
thousands of cows were slaughtered because there was no market

for their milk, wheat was burned, coffee was dumped into the sea.
But in the neocapitalist crisis, government intervention offered
a new way of solving market glut: mass production of the means
of destruction, armaments, was substituted for destruction of
surplus commodities. This solution has obvious advantages: Un-
like the production of consumer goods, this kind of production
does not run the risk of a market burdened with too many in-
solvent buyers. All by itself the State subsidizes, assists, and buys
these products, at the taxpayers’ expense. With its privileged
status, arms manufacture assures the monopolies of stable de-
mand. In addition, their expansion makes it possible to lower
unemployment.
Thus, all the means employed to stem the crisis only worsened
it. It is no longer only the capitalist market at stake, but the
political State and the national culture are directly implicated
(not only, as formerly, through pretended neutrality) in the
meshes of the devil’s mill.
The preconditions of growth have been turned into a model of
civilization. The present crisis is more than economic; it is a
crisis of this model of civilization involving every aspect of life.
Unlike earlier crises, this one has not been caused by malfunction-
ing of the capitalist economy; it results from its functioning.
Hitler’s fascism showed where suchacrisis could logically lead
and with all its consequences. In order to escape the dead end
into which the capitalist economy and institutions lead without
destroying capitalism itself, it is necessary to bend all the energies
of the State and the culture to the service and unlimited expan-
sion of the economic system.
This total restructuring in order to assure the economic growth
of a system able to function only with increasing State inter-
vention and continuing expansion of the monopolies is the very
definition of totalitarianism. Rescuing the economy by a policy
of expanding arms manufacture requires a foreign policy of
domination to justify it, a nationalist—that is, racist—ideology to
support this policy, manipulation of the masses to convince them

of this political religion, suppression of democratic liberties on
every level—economic, social, political, cultural—and the most
implacable repression of anyone who rejects integration into the
system.
The balance sheet of this first crisis of civilization makes it
possible to take its historic measure: The human sacrifices of the
Aztecs strangling 10,000 prisoners in a single day, the destruction
of Babylon or Carthage, Genghis Khan’s or Tamerlane’s pyramids
of thousands of human skulls—these are only piecework com-
pared to the wholesale slaughter of World War II and the mil-
lions dead in the crematoria of Auschwitz and the other extermi-
nation camps.
The crisis civilization is undergoing today, in which the same
basic logic is operating, could be even more murderous. Even
Nazism may seem inefficient now that the discovery of atomic
energy, missiles and computers, and the massive spread of tele-
vision have created tools of physical destruction and intellectual
manipulation beyond comparison with those that existed during
the black decade of 1933-1944.
The same mechanisms that led to that defeat of humanity are
still at work but with infinitely more powerful dynamics. The
capitalist system, for which the optimum performance of the
profit economy is an end in itself and growth is a mandate of the
natural law, can possess all the appearances and signs of “health,”
no matter what objectives are being pursued. The essential con-
sideration is that the engine of the automobile works; it does not
much matter where the car is headed.
To illustrate the model of this system, in which economic de-
velopment is confused with the development of man, we can use
a parable suggested by Mishan’s book The Cost of Growth—
“The Parable of the Devil’s Mill.” In a certain “highly developed”
country, the government has reaffirmed the right to bear arms, a
right precious to personal liberty. The arms industry sees an
unprecedented opportunity for prosperity. Competing producers
NECESSARY CHANGE ‘ 45
are involved in a lively contest of inventiveness and advertising.

They introduce to the free market an infinite variety of revolvers
and miniature grenades, from a highly luxurious model to the
most modest version for “everyday use,” from silencers that
guarantee discreet murder to a weapon for “dissuasion” whose
terrifying explosions make it possible to escape a possible attacker
without even aiming at a specific target. The consumer has com-
plete freedom of choice.
The market has become almost unlimited. What with the kind
of tensions created by the pace of work, traffic jams, attacks on
“the most sacred values,” erotic or financial stimuli, even the most
peaceful man and the most moderately desirable woman cannot
take a chance in the streets without one or two weapons and a
few cartridge clips. Besides, the high living standards that have
resulted from the economic expansion due to this economic
stimulus have made it possible for everyone to purchase a few
weapons.
Extraordinarily dynamic new industries have sprung up mak-
ing bulletproof vests, helmets, boots with metallic grids, impene-
trable masks, armored cars, bulletproof windows for automobiles,
and steel shutters for homes. The “boom” in the steel industry is
an index of the economic health of the country, the initiative of
its industrial promoters, the virtues of free enterprise, the perspi-
cacity of the government. In the midst of this refound prosperity,
everything “morose” has been banished.
Every sector of national activity has received a powerful
stimulus. It is a golden age for insurance, private clinics, and
pharmaceutical laboratories feverishly answering the continu-
ously increased demand for tranquilizers. Full employment is
guaranteed. There are unlimited job openings for the young.
Even the least qualified are assured of jobs that pay well and
demand only basic training, such as stretcher-bearers to collect
the wounded and dead.
The budget debate for this dynamically expansive national
economy quite properly points out that science has benefited from
the “fallout” of the private-armament industry. The rapid ex-

haustion of mineral resources occasioned research that led to the
discovery of highly resistant synthetic materials for the manu-
facture of protective shields, and so on. This led to corresponding
progress in the manufacture of bullets. As one of our most bril-
liant legislative orators stated on the occasion of that debate, the
spiral of progress is completely open-ended. In surgery, medicine,
and psychiatry, spectacular new insights are gained in the process
of curing hitherto unheard-of illnesses. The wearing of her-
metically sealed armor has led to new discoveries about anxiety
and aggressivity that change the direction of psychology.
What a remarkable renewal of culture and especially of the
“human” sciences! Positivist sociology sees an unlimited horizon
open up for the application of its methods. It plays a leading role
in coordinating interdisciplinary research on “pistology.” Statisti-
cians perfect the techniques of weighted extrapolation, calculating
the date when the volume and weight of the weapons will equal
that of the earth, with the same precision one of their illustrious
predecessors used in determining in what year demographic
growth would leave every individual only one square yard of
space on earth. In any case, modern demography has reversed
this trend by inventing the “logarithmic law” of extermination
that makes it possible to forecast the day when the last man,
holding his neighbor in his gunsights, will fire the last shot.
In this scientific framework, positivist “futurology” has become
the queen of the sciences, achieving the same theoretical rigor
as physics or linguistics. The “RAND Corporation” and its imi-
tators, which already have wide experience in strategic “game
theory,” continue to play their prestigious role as advisers and
prophets for the upper-echelon managers of the death industry.
A seeker—probably one of the most beautiful spirits of our age,
judging by his long-range predictions—has just proposed a new
style of architecture and urban planning, indeed of art in general,
corresponding to the needs of the “age of the hand gun”: curved
streets that would limit the range of bullets and a “revolution” of
NECESSARY CHANGE 47
forms based on this primordial exigency. Thus, thanks to the

internal cohesion of the system, a characteristic of all great
civilizations at their apogee, a new culture and classicism will
flourish.
The government points with legitimate pride to these perspec-
tives each time it gives an accounting of the expansion it has
stimulated: a higher growth rate than any other country, with all
its consequences—a solid currency, full employment, favorable
balance of payments, and a continuous conquest of new markets
for the export of arms, for the volume of domestic gun production
has made our prices eminently competitive. The per capita gross
national product has doubled in ten years. The economy shows
every sign of health and strength. All the dreams of a growth-
oriented economy have been fulfilled. In all justice, we can aspire
to world hegemony not only because of our wealth and power
but also because of our wisdom.
Such a system can solve none of the problems it has posed—
either by internal evolution or by reform. Neither can such a
system destroy itself. It was not toppled by the convulsions of the
1929 crisis or by the devastation of the war it caused.
The very bases of the capitalist system must be questioned.
Labor, land, and money must be freed from their present sub-
jection to the laws of the market and profitability:
Labor must be released so that salary arrangements will no
longer be a private contract between two unequal contracting
parties—one of whom, because he owns the means of production,
has power over the other, who does not own them.
Land must also be removed from the market so that no one
has the power to deprive acity of its lungs, that is, its green open
spaces; or to forbid access to the sea, a river, or a forest in the
name of private property; or to ravage and pollute the environ-
ment in the name of profit making.
Money can no longer be the object of speculation in the mar-
ket: first, because “free enterprise” has led to the very opposite,
monopoly, through the accumulation and concentration of capi-
tal; second, because investment must be controlled by the society

as a whole or else we will watch investments destroy man and his
natural environment.
This structural change, this triple transformation, which is the
beginning of socialism, implies a basic questioning of the very
principle of capitalism, the private ownership of the means of
production. Socialism is necessary for more than economic rea-
sons. It is needed to end a system that has come to contradict
the elementary conditions for organized social life, a system that
is leading to the disintegration of that life. Not in the distant
future, but within one more generation.
It is not a matter of abolishing the market but of preserving its
real values. For example, the consumer’s freedom could be saved
by leaving all consumer products on the market in order to
measure changes in demand and achieve decentralized planning
on the basis of free expression of needs rather than having a
central authority pretend to be able to define needs and the
allocation of resources. Centralization is effective only for getting
underdeveloped countries started. After that it becomes a brake
on development.
With labor, land, and money no longer completely subject to
the market, the present contradiction can be overcome. This is
the power of the monopolies to destroy the freedom of the con-
sumer as they destroy that of the worker. By manipulation and
the privileges of strength, the monopolies subordinate the market
to themselves by “reversing its direction,” as Galbraith says. Pro-
duction is not regulated by the marketplace, where needs are
expressed, but instead it subordinates the marketplace to itself
by creating those needs—even if they are artificial or unwhole-
some—whose satisfaction will be the most profitable for the pro-
ducer. The abolition of the market’s unlimited power to control
money, land, and labor will enable it to play a beneficial role,
subordinate to society instead of ruling it.
When the capitalist system succeeded in integrating all aspects
NECESSARY CHANGE 49
of social life into the defense and maintenance of its economic

regime, it created a problem that cannot be solved solely by eco-
nomic measures such as changing the status of property. The
problem requires putting an end to the integration of the whole
man into the economic exigencies of capitalism. As a conse-
quence, socialism cannot be conceived simply as an economic
system.
Marx’s definition of socialism as the transcendence of fully
developed capitalism included all its human dimensions and
avoided confusing the ends of socialism with its economic means,
changing the role of property. The confusion of ends and means
that led Stalin and his successors to proclaim that socialism had
been established when only one of its economic preconditions had
been fulfilled (but none of its conditions related to socialist de-
mocracy and the free development of cultural creativity) could
only happen in a country where capitalism had never achieved
the complete integration just described. Socialism cannot be de-
fined in terms of the solution of the contradictions of nineteenth-
century capitalism, nor of the contradictions of underdeveloped
capitalism as it existed in early twentieth-century Russia.
The first aim of socialism is to free the most deprived from the
burden of their physical needs, which limits their access to all
other liberties. But what Lenin and Mao had to create at the
cost of great sacrifice in underdeveloped countries—that is, the
technical and economic conditions sufficient to satisfy the basic
needs of everyone—already exists at the outset in our countries.
The problem of “pauperization” must also be posed differently.
I define “pauperization” of the workers not as an absolute diminu-
tion of their purchasing power or living standards, as was true in
France and England at the beginning of the nineteenth century
and in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century with the aboli-
tion of serfdom, but as a “growing alienation” of the worker.
Likewise, following the scientific and technological revolution,
the working class can no longer be defined as it was in the mid-
nineteenth century or in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth.

The increasing role of intellectual labor in production extends
this class far beyond manual laborers.
On the political level, we are no longer dealing with the “night
watchman State,” dear to nineteenth-century liberals, but with a
State integrated with the monopolies, a State that integrates all
national activities. Nor are we dealing, as in early twentieth-
century Russia, with a State that has never known a bourgeois
parliamentary regime, where the class with revolutionary aspira-
tions comprises only 3 percent of the population. In a highly de-
veloped Western country, socialist democracy cannot be the
negation of bourgeois democracy but the surpassing of its limita-
tions.
Socialism cannot be reduced to a simple change of the role of
property or to a simple transfer of political power. It demands a
new plan for civilization. Socialism cannot be simply conceived
as the satisfaction of the needs that capitalism has artificially
created through conditioning and then subsequently frustrated.
From the moment when capitalism became more than a simple
economic system and integrated all social and personal life with
its needs, socialism has had to take this new reality into account.
(How else can it speak of materialism, science, Marxism?)
Socialism must take the measure of this new problem and re-
spond to all its dimensions, both on the level of structures and
on the level of the dialectic unity of consciousness. Consciousness
of the mutilations and destructions involved in the development
of capitalism has led a growing number of men and women to
dream of a society that would aim production not at the profit
. of a few but at the needs of all—“of a socialist or communist
regime,” as Oscar Wilde wrote, “that would transform property
into public wealth, would substitute cooperation for competition,
and would transform society into a healthy organism . . . in
which man’s real achievement would not be to have but to be.”
Marx distinguished simple political emancipation (as achieved
NECESSARY CHANGE 51
in the French Revolution, for example) from human emancipa-

tion. The revolutions that have taken place since then demon-
strate that it is not enough merely to win “economic emancipa-
tion” in order to achieve human emancipation.
Today, a revolution cannot be defined simply in terms of
changing structures; it must include changing men. The essential
consideration is not the violence or legality behind the change but
its content and direction. The only authentic revolution is one
that will permit everyone to begin to live richer, more creative
lives.
Can this problem be solved by a Soviet-type socialist revolu-
tion, that is, through a change in the regime of property—the
private ownership of the means of production being changed to
nationalized ownership—and the transfer of power to a Commu-
nist Party? Without doubt, the abolition of the private ownership
of the means of production is a necessary condition for a con-
temporary revolution but it is not enough.
If the masses are not prepared for the tasks implied by such a
change, if they delegate and alienate their authority to leaders
to think and decide in their name, the conquest of power by a
party or a group of parties that achieves these nationalizations,
whatever their virtue, will not lead to socialist democracy. It will
not lead to self-determination of purposes or to self-management
of the means of production but to a new dualism. The leaders
will determine the objectives and will decide how increased yield
should be distributed.
Once again the accursed rule will be confirmed: Never, in all
the revolutions in history, in all the class struggles between the
oppressed and their rulers, have the oppressed classes come to
power. The revolution always ends with a third class coming
into power: The long struggle of slaves against their masters did
not end in victory for the slaves but in the establishment of
feudalism; the struggle of the serfs against their feudal lords did
not end in victory for the serfs but in victory for the bourgeoisie;
the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie did not end in
victory for the workers but, in the USSR, in victory for a techno-
bureaucracy.
The fact that increased yield is no longer calculated on the
basis of individual firms but on a national basis by the State does
not automatically assure popular utilization of this profit, nor
democratization of political life, nor remedying the alienation of
the workers. Nationalization makes it possible—and this is un-
deniable progress—to defend national independence and to carry
out real planning, that is, planning that is not determined by the
power relationships among the large private interest groups but
that is based instead on concern for the needs of the nation. In
this way, undeniable successes have been achieved in the USSR,
especially in public health and education.
But changing the juridical status of property does not end the
alienation of the workers if it only means passing from private
ownership to group ownership (cooperatives) or to State owner-
ship (nationalization). Nationalization is not socialization. The
difference is basic and is rooted in the delegation and alienation
of power by the basic producer to his leader. This process
counterfeits socialist democracy. Its essential principle is violated
by the system of delegating the power that belongs to every
citizen and thus alienating his autonomy, a process that has made
bourgeois democracy merely “formal.” It is further falsified when,
as under the Stalinist regime, the leaders identify themselves
with the working class but, in fact, substitute themselves for it.
Democracy is considered to operate as long as these leaders are
in power. .
The most typical example of this illusion is embodied in the
Soviet Constitution of 1936. When Stalin presented it to the
XVIIth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he
defined it as “logical democracy developed to the fullest.” He was
perfectly right; it is enough to read its text to recognize that it is
the most democratic constitution that has ever existed. Neverthe-
less, under this constitution and without violating it in the
NECESSARY CHANGE 53
slightest, it was possible to institute one of the most oppressive

dictatorships that history has ever known. The key to this enigma
is the postulate of identification and substitution. If, every time
we read “working class, workers, citizens,” we translate the words
into “the Party that represents them and is identified with them,”
and if we admit that the leadership represents this Party and is
identified with it, everything becomes clear.
The working class, the workers in general, the citizens, will be
invited to “participate” in defining national objectives, in the
choice of means, in controlling what is achieved—but only on the
basis of the options offered by the leadership and through the
leadership. In the Soviet conception of the State, “participation”
in “the definition of national objectives” means that, through
manipulation and conditioning by press, radio and television,
200 million Soviet citizens, in August 1968, “participated” in good
faith in the crime against Czechoslovakia, because they could not
doubt the two official lies: that the invading forces had been
called in by the representatives of the Czechoslovak people and
that they were welcomed enthusiastically. This is the kind of
“participation” that led American labor unions to support the
United States war of aggression in Vietnam.
So long as the objective of socialism is not the self-determina-
tion of social ends by the masses themselves and the kind of self-
direction that would put an end to the dualism of leaders and
their base (with the leaders bringing to their base its conscious-
ness “from above”), that is, for so long as the Soviet model is not
clearly repudiated, the different programs of the parties that call
themselves Communist will only be variations of this Soviet
model, more or less adapted to “national conditions” through
adding some ingredients of local parliamentary illusions. A revo-
lution following such a course would only transfer power without
associating the masses with the direction and exercise of this
power.
In L’homme imaginant, H. Laborit clearly defines the domina-
tion from which we have to liberate ourselves: “Domination is a
precise phenomenon. It is expressed in the proletariat’s inability

to govern its own destiny. All the essential decisions that concern
both individual and collective life are in the hands of others:
monopolies and economic pressure groups in the West and the
technocrats and bureaucrats of Eastern Europe. But these pres-
sure groups do not control even their own destinies. They are
caught up in the determinism of profit making for its own sake
or domination for its own sake, even more than in seeking gain
for themselves. The parliamentary regimes carry off this remark-
able piece of deceit when they appear to authorize the expression
of the will of the greatest number, while the greatest number,
intoxicated by managed information, ignorant of basic economic
and political facts, unconscious of how its value judgments are
determined, ignorant and unconscious of the game in which it is
a pawn, simply obeys. It obeys in the second degree, for it obeys
the determinism of the ruling class, which is itself ruled by its
own quite unconscious motivations.”
This does not mean that socialism and capitalism amount to
the same thing. Socialism’s authoritarianism is due to historic
reasons. Because it was first established in underdeveloped coun-
tries, the problems of building socialism were aggravated by the
problems of struggling against underdevelopment. This made it
necessary to catch up with and bypass the capitalist countries—
in the process being contaminated by their worship of economic
efficiency and thus confusing the means with the end—and led
also to extreme centralization of resources and power. This two-
fold deformation—the absence of human finality and authoritarian
dualism—is an essential characteristic of capitalism but only a
perversion of socialism. The conclusion is that a revolution today
cannot resemble the revolutions of the past. We have yet to create
a model for a contemporary revolution.
Like former revolutions, it must attack the established struc-
tures, as we have just seen. But, in order to attack the dualist
structures of the societies and revolutions of the past that never
gained the masses decision-making power, the new structure to
NECESSARY CHANGE. 55
be created must be a socialism of self-management, not following

Proudhon’s categories conceived in a world of small industry but
one that fits the conditions of a society characterized by massive
scientific and technological changes still to be mastered.
There are still some so tied to the past that they cannot move
beyond Proudhon in their conception of self-management, just
as they cannot conceive of a socialism that differs from Stalin’s.
Nevertheless, we are dealing with a very simple truth, one that
has become axiomatic. Marx said, “The liberation of the workers
will be accomplished by the workers themselves,” and a century
later, John XXIII wrote, “Those who are directly involved must
be the principal agents of their own advancement.”
This is a simple truth, as simple as understanding that self-
management cannot be achieved in a capitalist regime but only
under socialism. Self-management is another name for real social-
ism, which cannot be created for the people because it is social-
ism only when it is created by the people—not from “outside” or
“from the top down” but from within and from the bottom up.
This is the only way to overcome the dualism of class society.
A revolution that matches the scale of this age’s problems can-
not deal only with the choice of primary ends. This choice cannot
be made “from the top” by a few leaders. It must be the work
of all.
A revolutionary change 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, characterized
by stable settlement on the land and the development of agri-
culture, occasioned the formation of dualist societies: on the
social level, class separation between those who own the land
and those who work it, between masters and slaves; on the
technical level, division of intellectual from manual work; on the
political level, the dualism of rulers and ruled through the crea-
tion of the State and its bureaucracy; on the spiritual level, reli-
gions and philosophies to justify all these other dualisms.
Bureaucracy was born at the same moment as civilization and
characterizes every dualist society. The “institutional expression
of the alienation of the particular interest from the general inter-
est,” as Marx wrote, it provides a mask of anonymity for the

ruling powers. It constitutes the basis of political dualism. Tech-
nically, bureaucracy is a form of organization that promotes the
rationalization of collective activities through centralization, im-
personality, and the hierarchical arrangement of decision-making
agencies. Politically, bureaucracy is a system of government
marked by three fundamental characteristics: (1) the State
structure is constituted of officials who are appointed rather than
elected; (2) this hierarchically organized corps of officials de-
pends on a sovereign authority; (3) to the greatest possible de-
gree, such a form of government excludes participation by the
citizenry and is committed to controlling and integrating them.
Whether the political regime is divine-right monarchy, elective
monarchy, or a representative democracy, the dualist, alienated,
and repressive character of bureaucratic societies remains the
same. The fact that the Roman emperors were elected did not
lessen the despotism of the system. The election of the despot
does not bring democracy. In France, the centralized bureau-
cratic. structure of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, re-
modeled to serve new economic needs by the Jacobin revolution-
aries and later by the Emperor Napoleon, has remained the
fundamental administrative framework of the four republics that
followed. It survives essentially unchanged.
Especially during the nineteenth century, this bureaucratic
system was fostered throughout Europe by two influences. The
formation of national unities required political integration (the
Prussian bureaucracy is an outstanding example) and the in-
dustrial revolution required economic organization (the Taylor
system was for a long time the model in this area). These two
exemplary types of bureaucracy inspired Max Weber’s apologetic
theory that the success of the bureaucratic model, as a legal and
rational form of organization and control, was as inevitable as the
success of precision machinery and the assembly line.
The pessimistic view that increasing bureaucratization is in-
NECESSARY CHANGE 57
evitable, still held by the latter-day disciples of Weber, has, it

seems to me, two sources: a confusion of bureaucracy with tech-
nocracy, and an outdated conception of technocracy.
It is true that in the nineteenth century—in Europe simultane-
ously the great age of industrialization and of nationalism—
bureaucracy and technocracy mutually reinforced each other and
tended to become identified with each other as systems essential
to the achievement of national integration and economic ration-
ality. The vast scientific and technical changes of the second half
of the twentieth century have changed the nature of the problem.
A significant example is the basic changes imposed on how an
enterprise or a public administration is organized by the use of
the computer.*
What new forms of collaboration does the automatic processing
of information impose?
Every collective human activity, whether an industrial or com-
mercial enterprise, an army, or an administration, is a combination
of routines and decisions. (A routine task is executed by applying
instructions that leave nothing to chance. Decisions must be
made when the instructions do not operate as they were designed
to do, either because some unforeseen situation arises or the
problem posed has no precedent.) A decisive initiative increases
the system’s quantity of information, whereas routine continues
to operate so long as it does not encounter any uncertainty.
Since, with computerized processing of information, the ma-
chine replaces man in all routine operations and he intervenes
only when a decision is to be made—that is, when supplementary
information is needed in order to accomplish the overall project—
the entire chain of decisions and routines constitutes a system
of information circuits organizing a group of interdependent in-
dividuals. This network of exchanges and mutual dependence
constitutes an organizational model radically opposed to the
* See Max Rouquerol’s book, Ordinateur et décentralisation des décisions,

Entreprise moderne d’édition, 1968, to which the following reflections owe
a great deal.
bureaucratic model. The use of the computer runs counter to the

very principle of the one-directional bureaucratic hierarchy and
replaces it with a network of interdependence.
Since the computer handles routines with great speed and with-
out error, and collates and sorts out available information very
effectively, the speed at which decisions must be made is acceler-
ated. The computer makes it necessary to reach decisions more
rapidly. This requires decentralized decision making. Files will
simply pile up on the desks of the general management if they
attempt to monopolize decision making. Contrary to the bureau-
cratic pyramid, where everything comes down from the top, it
becomes necessary to decentralize decision making about day-to-
day functioning, control, and structure—that is, about all tactical
decisions—with only strategic decisions reserved to the general
management. ,
This implies a profound change in power relationships. The
combination of the two phenomena—increased interdependence
and accelerated decision making—leads to decentralization and
broad _ participation. For the sake of efficiency, it combats the
structures and methods of the bureaucratic model.
But the computer has a broader impact than the decentrali-
zation of decisions. All the elements of the decision network be-
come interdependent. Therefore, these decisions, whatever their
importance, have to be coordinated. This is quite different from
the delegation of authority. The superior must explain the reasons
for his choices. The subordinate decision maker must inform
his superior of the consequences of the decisions he makes, the
anomalies he perceives, and the changes he believes necessary.
Such dialogue is the “feedback” in the system.
The bureaucratic, mechanical model of organization, in which
every decision comes from above and has repercussions on every
level of execution, is now replaced by a cybernetic model that
requires the feedback of dialogue, coordination, and partici-
pation.
NECESSARY CHANGE - 59
New techniques and requirements like these run counter to the

bureaucratic style of management and government. They imply
continuous recycling of personnel with all that implies of changes
in staff and, indeed, in the very notion of staff. It establishes
clear responsibility, since the computer makes it impossible to
blame the one carrying out the decisions for mistakes. Teamwork
takes the place of omnipotence at the top. Dialogue, coordination,
participation, even disagreement, become a technical necessity.
Decisions become less a matter of arbitration than of stimulus.
This does not mean that these new techniques and requirements
will automatically free us from bureaucracy and dualism but the
main problem is to determine what must be done to realize the
computer's potential for humanizing working relations.
In the struggle against dualism, our economic and social or-
ganization, political institutions, and culture must change. We
have to redefine our relations with nature, science, techniques,
other human beings, and other cultures. We must face problems
left untouched since men emerged from the Neolithic era.
No philosophy, no political doctrine or party, no existing social
model can pose the problem on this level. A revolution with the
necessary scope must resolve two problems: how to discover new
ends to replace the finalities we have accepted since the Renais-
sance; and how to eliminate the dualism that has marked all
societies since the end of the Neolithic era and the birth of civili-
zation.
We shall demonstrate that self-management, far from corre-
sponding to an earlier stage of economic development, is the one
form of socialism that can fully respond to the changes required
by the computer, automation, and democratic social planning.
This book is an attempt to show how this socialism of self-
management can be established. Such a goal poses far more
complex problems than conventional transfers of power and the
revolutions of the past. First, we must face a major difficulty.
To reach a socialism and a liberty that are not bestowed from
“outside” but that are won by the people, structural change must
be accompanied by changed consciousness.
2. A Changed Consciousness:
“Religion, Opium of the People,” No
Positivist Atheism, No
The purpose of structural change by the people is not merely

the transfer of power and modification of the way property is
organized. Its goal is to establish socialism of self-management,
a socialism that will finish all dualisms. In so doing, it will create
conditions under which each individual will no longer have to
delegate andalienate his power. He will determine his own ends
and that will introduce self-management to society. This personal
participation of every individual requires a change of conscious-
ness. Self-management can never be achieved so long as the
masses are resigned to being directed and manipulated and to
accepting ends imposed “from outside.”
This change of consciousness is not the preface to inevitable
structure change; nor will it be its automatic consequence. It is
both necessary and possible to escape from a too commonly
accepted false dilemma: Either “change man and social structures
will automatically change” (twenty centuries of the failure of
Christian preaching have demonstrated the impotence of this
method) or “change social structures and automatically a new
man will be born” (a half-century of experience forces us to
recognize that the abolition of the private ownership of the means
of production and transfer of power to a Communist party are
not sufficient to achieve socialist democracy or to bring forth a
new man, a new culture, or a new civilization).
Marx posed the problem dialectically rather than mechanically
in his critique of the eighteenth-century French materialists:
Circumstances form man, but man makes circumstances.
To move beyond these symmetrical illusions—impotent spirit-
NECESSARY CHANGE 61
ualism or mechanistic materialism—we must realize two things:

On the one hand, objective conditions are not inert metaphysical
“givens” but rather the work of men, human projects achieved
historically and, consequently, historically modifiable. On the
other hand, consciousness is not passive reflection but an act. As
this particular project acts on these objective conditions, there is
constant give and take, a necessary unity and homogeneity be-
tween the ends pursued and the means utilized to attain them.
A purely “spiritual” action (postulating a dualism of soul and
body, consciousness and world, man and God) cannot change
the world. But neither can a purely technical revolution of struc-
tural change lead to making every man the builder of his own
history. Only the coalescence of all the struggles for self-manage-
ment can be an effective school of self-management.
The keystone of every system of self-management is the con-
stant interaction between the functioning of institutions and the
education of individuals by real participation in this functioning.
The dialectic unity of structural change and changing conscious-
ness is the very principle of self-management.
Rousseau’s major achievement in The Social Contract is that he
posed the problem of the educative function of democracy, that
is, of a regime based on every citizen’s participation in decision
making. Present-day “theoreticians” of “democracy,” who wish to
combat not only Marx but also Rousseau, are committed to en-
tirely changing the concept of democracy in order to remove its
essence, participation in decision making.
Ever since Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
appeared in 1943, democracy has been defined only as a technique
of government, subject, like all other such techniques, solely to
the criterion of efficiency. The principal adversary of what is
taken to be democracy in the twentieth century is no longer the
aristocracy, as for Rousseau and Robespierre, but popular par-
ticipation. A systematic opposition has been established between
democracy and organization on the assumed grounds that they
are mutually exclusive. On this basis, Michels formulates what he
calls “the iron-clad law of oligarchies.” Like Max Weber’s theory

of bureaucracy, oligarchy is presented as a necessary, inevitable
consequence of organization and efficiency. With these premises,
“democracy” is conceived on the model of the capitalist market
and the same virtues are assigned to it. The citizen, by analogy
with the consumer, must be able to choose among policies as he
chooses among products.
Thus, democracy is taken to exist when there is competition,
opposition, a plurality of parties, just as entrepreneurs compete
in the market. The citizen must choose among ready-made pro-
grams and he “participates” only when he votes for a representa-
tive or leader every few years. This negative and defensive notion
of democracy confuses it with representative systems. It is nega-
tive because the voter can only say “no” to his representative
after the fact, that is, at the next election. It is defensive because
the voter has only the right to react, never to act.
Within this framework, “participation” is reduced to a tech-
nique of persuasion. The voter is given the feeling of participa-
tion so that he will accept the decisions made by his leaders with-
out any involvement on his part.
The violent opposition today to both Marx and Rousseau is due
to their clear recognition of the distinction between democracy
and the representative system. They defined unalienated democ-
racy as effective participation in decision making.
To begin with, this implies that we must not be content with a
“formal” definition of democracy—equality defined simply as “one
man, one vote” and liberty as the right to alienate one’s powers
periodically by exercising this vote. Both Rousseau and Marx
stressed that certain economic conditions were a necessary
foundation for democracy. Rousseau specified “that no citizen
should be rich enough to be able to buy another and no citizen
so poor that he is forced to sell himself” (The Social Contract,
Book II, Chapter 11). He envisioned a democracy in which every-
one had at least some small property that guaranteed his inde-
pendence. In a later era the concentration of capital and the
NECESSARY CHANGE 63
proletarianization of millions made such a conception utopian.

Marx drew his own conclusions from the same concrete principle
—that money bestows freedom on those who possess it and lack of
it strips freedom from those who do not—and demonstrated that
only the socialization of the means of production could prevent
those who do not own them from dependency on those who do.
On this basis, real—not merely formal—democracy becomes
possible. Democracy is no longer merely a technique for organ-
izing centralized authority. It plays an educative role, since it
provides each citizen at the base with an apprenticeship in the
social act of decision making. Discussing early American democ-
racy, Tocqueville showed that direct participation in local institu-
tions was the school for truly active citizens. Under the present
conditions of our societies, this conception of local authority has
become as utopian an ideal as Rousseau’s ‘small property owner.
But the principle remains valid and must be implemented under
radically new conditions unless we are willing to abandon what,
according to Lenin and Marx, was and remains the chief charac-
teristic of communism: that every housewife can govern the
State, that every citizen must learn to think and act as a states-
man. This is the best definition of self-management.
This change of consciousness cannot be effected by preaching
or teaching but only by lived experience; no one learns to swim
from a book. Direct democracy must begin on the level of every
basic unit (work place, laboratory, university, neighborhood,
consumer cooperative, cultural center, and so on). There, each
individual must begin to participate personally, without any
intermediary, in decision making. Only through such personal
involvement at the base will a living link between private interest
and the public interest be forged.
Only in this way will active members of society be formed,
citizens who will demand information and education to match
the scale of the problems they are called on to weigh. Because
direct democracy is impractical on the highest levels, there must
be a method by which citizens can delegate authority without
alienation. They will not alienate power to a delegate to represent

them completely. The individual will delegate authority only
within specific contexts—for example, one representative as a
worker and another in terms of some other equally defined func-
tion, for example, as a consumer of some particular public service.
In each case he will be led to assess his social function and to
judge concretely and personally the one to whom he has dele-
gated authority.
Without doubt, self-management, being rooted in direct de-
mocracy at the base and allowing representation only function
by function, demands a radical restructuring of all institutions.
It is also the only way to ensure a real political formation for
each individual. Democracy cannot be created simply by re-
organizing institutions; it requires conditions that enable each
individual to act as a driving force within those institutions: As a
result, the individual will become aware both of his independ-
ence and his interdependence.
We shall define concretely, in the second half of this book,
both the immediate and long-term measures that will make it
possible to move in this direction. This form of social organiza-
tion is no more complicated than the present system.
In the present system, with its thousands of wheels within
wheels, individual responsibilities are blurred and a sense of
purpose disappears. The machinery is so opaque and sluggish
that it creates both the feeling of impotence and abdication and
real impotence and abdication. Everything happens “up there,”
far away where I can enter neither by thought nor by action.
Today, rage is building against this total alienation. The spring
of 1968 dramatized this fact—in Paris and Prague. In both cities
the rallying cries were the same: pseudo-participation, no; self-
management, yes. This change of attitude is not mere wishful
thinking. It is beginning to be felt even within those institutions
most rigidly structured by the past: the churches and the political
parties.
Until now, neither Christianity nor Marxism has succeeded in
NECESSARY CHANGE 65
fulfilling its promises. Insofar as Christianity proclaimed the
transcendent existence of an order willed by God and called on
man to recognize and accept this order, it deprived man of
responsibility for his own history, his own creation. Insofar as
Marxism remains tainted with mechanistic materialism and posi-
tivism, it does not allow man to escape fate and become the
creator of his own history.
New possibilities are being created today out of a twofold
crisis—a very healthy sign—within Christianity and Marxism.
Christians have been forced to rethink their faith and Marxists
have been forced to rethink their certitudes. Both have been
forced to distinguish what is fundamental from what is only a
_ cultural or institutional form picked up in the course of history;
they have been forced to reflect on the specific conditions under
which they exist in today’s world primarily by the impact of the
great changes that have taken place in our time.
The metamorphosis of the way life is lived affects everyone
now alive. It obliges us to question what we believed to be
principles but were only traditions, to take initiatives that used
to be heresies.
Three immensely important developments demand a profound
renewal and create the conditions for it: the end of colonialism,
the scientific and technological revolution, and the advent of
socialism and its subsequent perversions.
The Chinese revolution, Asian and African political independ-
ence, and the national-social liberation movements in Latin
America have gradually forced the West to shed the illusion of
being the only center of historical innovation and the sole creator
of values. Even as the past carries out desperate rear-guard
actions from Angola to Indochina and imposes neocolonialism
and unjust trade arrangements on the Third World, one stubborn
fact becomes increasingly clear. Development and aid for de-
velopment are not simply economic considerations. Even if aid
were doubled or tripled, the gap between the rich North and the
developing South would continue to grow wider. The basic error
is that Western civilization, as it has evolved from classical Greece
and the Renaissance, is the only model of development.
Starting from this premise, the countries of the Third World
are “aided” to pass through the stages of the Western brand of
development which is held to be exemplary. “Aiding” those coun-
tries to achieve, at the end of the twentieth century, Europe’s
early-nineteenth-century industrial revolution while the scientific
and technological revolution makes possible a dizzying accelera-
tion of Western development only broadens the gap between the
two worlds.
A fundamental rethinking of this problem indicates that cul-
tural development must precede economic development. In other
words, critical reflection on ends must dictate how the means are
to be organized.
A new basis for our relationship to the Third World and a
radical reorientation of the idea of “aid” require that we have
done with the illusion that the “West” is the center of things,
whereas in fact it has become “provincial.” The old colonialism
negated and destroyed all non-Western culture. It must not be
succeeded by a cultural paternalism that would be fatal for the
Third World and would impoverish our own cultures as well.
Only when we unhesitatingly accept that there are criteria of
development different from the Western criterion of economic
growth for its own sake, that such development is only one aspect
of man’s continuous creation of all his dimensions—economic
growth and the conception of meaning, values, and life purpose—
that all these criteria must be interior to each civilization, not
imposed by one civilization on another, only then will aid for
development cease being a one-way street. It can then be based
on an authentic dialogue among civilizations and become, in the
words of a great black poet, “the universal crossroads of giving
and receiving.”
This change will grow more -profound as it ushers in the “twi-
light of the gods,” the irreversible decline of the two giants of
the Western world, the United States and the Soviet Union.
NECESSARY CHANGE 67
The pretensions of the United States to world hegemony, main-

tained for almost thirty years, were definitively condemned when
the 1971 “decisions’—really, forced concessions—formalized the
failure and deceit of its “defense of the free world” (of which the
war in Vietnam is the most striking and sinister illustration). The
United States found it necessary to solicit negotiation with China
and to recognize the end of the dollar’s reign as the world
monetary standard.
The Soviet rulers’ pretension to be leaders of the “socialist
camp” and to embody the only model of authentic socialism were
dealt an irreversible setback when, no longer able to count on
their revolutionary influence or their ability to economically out-
class capitalism in peaceful competition or their ideological
prestige, they had to use tanks to impose their policies.
Since then two powers, Japan and China, have grown more
important. They offer portents of the future. The Japanese leaders’
servility toward the United States has led to political bankruptcy.
The only hope for real change in Japanese policies lies with the
opposition parties. Will they know how to “translate into Japa-
nese” Mao’s example and move Japan toward reconciliation with
China? If this happens, it will be the turning point of the century.
Japanese economic dynamism in tandem with the Chinese revo-
lution (despite its stop-and-start record, it presents the only
global alternative to the present crisis of civilization) could lead,
before the end of the century, to a historically unprecedented
political and cultural expansion of Sino-Japanese partnership
drawing along with it the Asian, African, and Latin American
“Third World.”
This “decline of the West” has nothing to do with a new
“yellow peril.” It points to the beginning of a new era of civiliza-
tion, a fresh move forward for civilization as it replaces the
Western model born of the Renaissance, capitalism, and colonial-
ism, now revealed as bankrupt and impotent to ensure the con-
tinuing development of man.
Even though this insight and the need for a “dialogue among
civilizations”—so decisive for the future—have not yet been fully

grasped much less acted upon to any degree, they constitute an
important new force in our immediate future. Quietly, they are
already changing the consciousness of clear-thinking Christians
and Marxists. Without being widely recognized, they are causing
profound change.
Even when unarticulated, this realization has led many Chris-
tians to question how they think about and experience their rela-
tionship to the world, and how they think about and experience
their faith. There are certain indicative stirrings: the Second
Vatican Council’s creation of a special commission for relations
with non-Christian religions; the World Council of Churches’
new openness to the religions of Asia and Africa and the increas-
ing importance accorded Latin America.
A primary characteristic of this movement is the recognition
of the value of pluralism. Following a high point in its history,
the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church is beginning to
dissociate its fundamental requirement of universality from the
forms that a long historical tradition gave it: the heritage of the
Roman Empire’s pretension to universal domination, the heritage
of the Renaissance Europeo-centrists that led the church to won-
der if the Amerindians had souls, the colonialist heritage that
perverted the very idea of “mission.”
This impressive and necessary turning point began with the
solemn affirmation that the church no longer aspired to conquer
and dominate the world but to be at its service and in constant
dialogue with it. Far from weakening Christianity, this confronta-
tion has led to the discovery of new depths. Seeing other cultures
and religions no longer as perversions or heresies but as sources
of real value has led many Christians, great theologians among
them, to question the specificity of their faith.
Christianity has in common with all religions—that is, faiths—
that it is bound to a historically determined civilization, institu- |
tions, and mores. Like all others, it is subject to the laws of
alienation. Over and above this dependence, relativity, and
NECESSARY CHANGE 69
alienation, what specificity does the Christian faith have as an

interpretation of existence? In other words, insofar as it is a par-
ticular way in which man relates himself to all other beings, a
way in which he stands and acts among them, what does Chris-
tianity have to say?
In every period, the Christian faith is necessarily expressed in
the language of a determining ideology, but this is not all it
amounts to, because faith is not an ideology but a way of living
in the world.
It is a sign of the times that a Christian philosopher, Paul
Ricoeur, discussing a system—organized religion—that has always
conceived God as a response to human needs—needs that are
always relative to a particular social structure and culture—can
ask whether religion is an alienation of faith. This question raises
the problem of the specific reality of faith in a new way.
From this point of view, there is a striking parallelism with the
recent evolution of Marxism in which the primary problem has
also been pluralism, specifically the plurality of models of social-
ism. A number of developments coming out of the Chinese revo-
lution have posed for Marxists a theoretical and practical problem
of such amplitude that they—at least those who have not blindly
accepted the lies about China spread by imperialists and the
Soviet leaders—have also come to distinguish what is fundamental
in their doctrine from what is derived from the historic conditions
under which it developed. When socialism for the first time was
established solidly and autonomously in a non-Western nation,
China, it reversed the “orthodox” method of coming to power by
basing itself primarily not on the working class in the industrial
centers but on the outlying peasant areas and encircling the cities.
Having come to power, the Chinese Communist Party chose its
own form of development completely outside the classic schema.
It now offers a global alternative to the capitalist way of life by
questioning the fundamental postulates of that civilization. This
new form of socialism led to a schism in the socialist world.
The difficulties of implanting “orthodox” Marxism in black
Africa and the Moslem world and its failure in Latin America
have led Marxists to ask whether there is really a single model
of socialist revolution and of socialism based solely on Western
traditions: German philosophy with Hegel, English political
economy with Ricardo, French socialism with Saint-Simon and
Fourier. This simplistic cultural schema has had to be revised in
order to face the root problem of establishing Marxism within the
structures and cultures of different peoples: the ancient and ad-
vanced cultures of the Chinese and the Moslems, the African
conceptions of the world and of life, or the cultural and religious
complexities of Latin America.
The resultant questioning moved beyond the dogmatic inter-
pretations of historical dialectics, the positivist interpretations of
the dialectics of nature, and the bureaucratic and authoritarian
perversions of Marxisms. It raised a fundamental problem: What
is essential in Marxism when we go beyond the institutional and
cultural forms it has picked up in the course of its history?
Science and technology are at the root of the second major

development that precipitated a change of consciousness among
Christians and Marxists.
Christians have finally and definitively rejected the “God of
the gaps” assigned to fill in the temporary lacunae of science and
the temporary limitations of technology with metaphysical hy-
potheses. They have also rejected the “God of alibis” charged
with making up for man’s active failures by “supernatural” inter-
ventions. It is significant that the Christian attempts to bring
about this progress were thought out over quite a long period but
became known and began to be accepted only during the 1950s.
These include the work of Teilhard de Chardin, with his full
confidence in science, and also the work of Pastor Bonhoeffer,
who did not seek God in the limitations of man’s powers or in his
failures but at the center of man, in his creativity and maturity.
For both, going to God was not a matter of turning one’s back on
the world but of accepting full responsibility for it. The Second
NECESSARY CHANGE 71
Vatican Council registered this progress like a seismograph by

recognizing “the autonomy of profane values” both in knowledge
and in action.
Marxists were more directly affected by this change, for Marx-
ism was born historically during the first industrial revolution
and still bears its profound imprint. From the Manuscripts of
1844 to Capital and to the end of his life, Marx never defined
socialism solely in economic terms. Marx’s conception of socialism
does not limit its objectives to making man areal actor in eco-
nomic life. For him, socialist economy is a means of liberating
man for the totality of his activities—scientific, artistic, spiritual.
Alienation cannot be reduced simply to its economic aspects.
If it were true that economic alienation is total alienation, how
could an economically alienated man combat his alienation?
In Capital Marx shows how capitalism leads the economy to
what he calls, in the language of German philosophy, “an inver-
sion of the relation between subject and object.” In terms of
economics, capitalism effectively subordinates subject to object,
man to commodity, money, and machine.
The mission of socialism is to reverse this arrangement, to give
primacy to the subject. It can succeed only by combating the
major alienation of the economy, from a base outside economics
and economic relationships from which it can fight a political and
theoretical battle. This means exerting pressure on the relatively
autonomous superstructures, especially politics, and also influ-
encing scientific thought, which is largely free of that structural
determinism.
To define Marxism as “economic determinism” destroys its
internal cohesion and makes it a vicious circle, a contradiction.
This is why Lenin fought so hard against this mechanistic inter-
pretation, which he called “economism.” But, when he theorized
exclusively on the basis of the historic experience of Russia under
the tsars (especially in the early stages of his thought, between
1902 and 1904, in What Is to Be Done?) he tended to emphasize
only Karl Kautsky’s thesis that socialist consciousness must be
brought to the working class “from outside.” A dogmatic interpre-

tation of this thesis that neglected Marxist analysis of the historic
conditions under which it was formulated and held it to be true
always and everywhere served to justify the authoritarian struc-
tures of the Party and the State as they set about achieving
socialism for the people, rather than through the people.
The scientific and technological revolution has made it possible
to recognize a historic transformation of the nature, culture, and
structures of the working class. It enables us to recognize the
formation around the working class of a new “historic bloc” in
which new social working conditions (including an increasingly
large sector of intellectual work) have inspired “from within”
new motivations and a cultivated spontaneity that can harmonize
the political and theoretical motivations formed “outside” the
economy, albeit in dialectical connection with it.
This is the basic source of an overwhelming change in Marxism,
a change in its economic theory, especially of the dogma of
“labor value” against which Marx warned in his Contribution to
the Critique of the Political Economy (Grundrisse), a change of
its political theory about the structure and mission of the Party
and State, and a change in its conception of culture.
The advent of socialism and its later perversions is the third
set of historic phenomena that has greatly influenced both Chris-
tian and Marxist consciousness.
The socialist October Revolution was acclaimed not only by
the working class throughout the world but also by the greatest
minds of the time, as the French Revolution had been acclaimed
by Goethe, Kant, and Hegel. Anatole France and Langevin, for
example, considered the October Revolution the “beginning of
hope.” Socialism ceased to be a beautiful dream and became a
reality that offered a real alternative to capitalism and war. The
role played by the Soviet Union in the liberation of Europe from
the Nazi nightmare later increased its attractiveness. This led
many Christians to realize how necessary it was to undo the all
too real pact that had long existed between their churches and
NECESSARY CHANGE 73
the ruling classes, established disorder, social conservatism, and

counterrevolution.
Even more profoundly, when many of them saw the effective-
ness of Marxism in overcoming underdevelopment and making
backward countries—like tsarist Russia and the China of the war-
lords—into major powers in record time, they understood that it
was necessary to distinguish between an atheistic metaphysic and
a technique of such social effectiveness. The continuing failure
of Christianity to effect social justice and to penetrate the Euro-
pean working class led these Christians to explore how to inte-
grate the historic contributions of Marxism with the perspective
of their faith.
As a result, they have demonstrated the necessity of a continu-
ing effort to integrate socialism’s historic, social, and militant
dimensions with their faith and thus bring about a radical change
in the policies of the church.
The crises of the Communist movement and the perversions of
its doctrine and practice then led these Christians to the threshold
of a new development. Christians who had too hastily conformed
their faith with a historically dated form of socialism (as had
been done formerly with “divine right” monarchy, clerical
fascism, or “Christian democracy”) came to realize the necessity
of conceiving the relationship between the church and politics in
a less simplistic manner.
Today, some think that the church has no more business work-
ing out social doctrines than it has constructing a particular
cosmology or theory of medicine. For the church to be independ-
ent of every established order it must not bind itself to any pro-
visional system or arrangement. Its mission belongs to another
order. This new conception of the church’s relationship with the
world does not question the necessity of commitment but insists
that it must be a commitment of Christians, not of an institutional
church.
For Marxists, the victory and prestige of the October Revolu-
tion and the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in the anti-
Nazi war have had contradictory effects. First of all, because of

its victories, the notions of revolution and socialism were identi-
fied with the Russian revolution and with Soviet socialism.
Despite Lenin’s warnings, Communists ceased to distinguish
what had universal validity in this revolution from what was
specifically Russian, what was a matter of principle from what
resulted from historical circumstance. For more than fifty years
Communists everywhere in the world theorized on the basis of
this contingent model as if it were universal and absolute.
Only after the consequences of this perversion were demon-
strated with shocking clarity, especially by the invasion of
Czechoslovakia and its “normalization”—the forcible imposition of
the Russian model on a country that it did not fit-did more and
more Communists raise the problem of the plurality of models
and rediscover what is fundamental in Marxism over and above
its historical incarnations and perversions. They were then able
to see that Marxism is not a catalog of economic laws or philo-
sophical principles, as Stalin taught, but a methodology for his-
toric initiative that makes it possible to discover and build, on
the basis of the specific contradictions of every epoch and coun-
try, a future that will transcend them.
Only through these parallel crises in Marxism and Christianity,
only through this mutual recognition of the contradictions and
confrontations of their past histories, can a new relationship de-
velop along with an awareness that their futures are necessarily
complementary.
If such a truly lucid realization sparks a common effort by both
groups to face the radical changes of our time, it will be possible
to move beyond the false dilemmas of the past: religion that is
the “opium of the people,” on the one hand, and positivist and
scientistic atheism, on the other.
In 1966, Archpriest Borovoj of the Moscow Patriarchate said to
the World Council of Churches: “Christianity is revolutionary
by its nature . . . but the historic churches have never been on
the side of revolution.”
NECESSARY CHANGE 75
Religion is an “opiate” whenever, in affirming that an eternal

life beyond history and beyond this life is what is essential, it
devalues the problems of this life and the struggles of history. It
is an opiate whenever it conceives the relation between man and
God as man encountering God only to make up for his own weak- -
ness or the failures of his thought and action, “at the limits” rather
than “at the center,” as Bonhoeffer wrote. It is an opiate when it
assumes the form of an ideology, a metaphysic, rather than an
act, a decision, a creative way of living. In sum, it is an opiate
whenever it consecrates political and social dualisms by conceiv-
ing the world in a dualist fashion, acting, in Nietzsche’s expres-
sion, as “a Platonism for the people.”
Even in early Christianity there was opposition between those
who were contented to prepare souls for the coming of the King-
dom of God through repentance and those who wished to prepare
for this coming by changing the world.
Starting with Saint Augustine, Christianity accepted the dual-
ist tradition of Greek thought, and starting with Constantine, it
adopted the Roman heritage by becoming astate religion. Many
then viewed the church as a prefiguration of the Kingdom of God
and those political and social regimes that it legitimized as em-
bodiments of the order willed by God. This twofold inheritance
—the dualism of Greek philosophy and Roman organization—is
the basis of the church’s conservatism.
But there has been another stubborn, minority tradition, often
accused of heresy, that attested that “the fundamental concepts
of the revolution are biblical concepts,” in the words of Pére Com-
blin.* The Exodus gives the first example of the desacralization
of authority by calling for civil disobedience against the Pharaoh;
the prophets of Israel, forbidding the Jews to idolize man-made
objects or institutions, teach rejection of the established order
and opposition to all alienations; in the New Testament Book of
Revelation of Saint John, the proclamation “Behold, I make all
* Joseph Comblin, Théologie de la Révolution.

things new” indicates that faith is the act of participating in the

transformation of the world. All these instances indicate that the
world is not a ready-made reality but a continuing creation, that
we are responsible to work and struggle for its transformation,
that man is not determined by a nature given once and for all
but by a history made up of decisions, the creation of new pos-
sibilities, and by confrontations with the impossible.
For an example, this tradition passed through the prophetic
twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Floris, who considered the
“Holy Spirit” to be the power to create a new age both in the
church and in the world. This first “theology of history” exerted
a profound influence on the radical criticism of the early Fran-
ciscans and on all the movements of religious reform and social
revolution up to the sixteenth century, most notably on Jan Hus.
At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries it inspired Fichte and Hegel.
This tradition was also transmitted by Thomas Miinzer, the
first “theologian of revolution,” who in the sixteenth century
organized the armed uprising of the peasants in order to prepare
for the coming of the Kingdom of God. “In its basic principles,”
he wrote, “the faith enables us to accomplish impossible things.”
Engels saw him as one “who can be compared to the greatest
revolutionaries.” He added that “he was as far ahead of the social
and political relations of his time as his theology was ahead of the
religious conceptions of the epoch.” For Miinzer, the Kingdom
of God, whose coming must be prepared in combat, was a society
with neither serfs nor lords, without private property, without
any state or church authority higher than conscience. Marx rec-
ognized his revolutionary program as the most advanced the
world had known until the mid-nineteenth century.
What makes this tradition a source of revolutionary inspiration
is its conception of the world, of man and his faith, and of the
relation between man and the world. The world is always being
created anew. Each of us is a co-creator, responsible for victory
or defeat. This tradition does not make Christian hope an escape
NECESSARY CHANGE 77
that elevates man above this “vale of tears” but rather establishes
a tension between the experience of the real and what Kierke-
gaard called the “passion for the possible.” Such a faith is not an
opiate but a leaven for changing the world. Every blow struck
against such a faith is a blow struck against the revolution.
When I contend that radical change that matches the scale
of the problems of our age requires both a revolution that
changes structures and a religious transformation that changes
consciousness, I am not equating revolutionary action with some
kind of religious preaching. I mean that the revolutionary militant
must be aware of the role that faith plays at the very heart of his
action. Atheism is not the necessary basis of revolutionary action.
It is a historically false premise that philosophical materialism
and atheism have been intrinsically bound to revolutionary action.
Marx criticizes religion, not metaphysically but historically.
For him, religion is not only a reflection of man’s real distress but
a protest against it. (Sometimes this protest can lead to a practical
revolutionary struggle, as Engels shows in his study of the up-
rising of Thomas Münzer.) Marx does not simply criticize re-
ligion as ideology, as did the eighteenth-century French atheists,
but as an alienated human mentality to which he opposes his
revolutionary mentality.
His atheism is not metaphysical but methodological; it dis-
misses the “God of the gaps” and the “God of alibis.” Many Chris-
tians are today integrating this radical critique into their faith
as one of its most important elements, because they are aware
that “methodological atheism” may be the best defense of God’s
honor. Marx’s promethean scheme is based on the idea that “men
fashion their own history,” not arbitrarily but always under con-
ditions structured by the past.
Man’s history begins with work in its specifically human form,
action preceded by the awareness of its purpose. It thus includes
two elements that specifically differentiate it from natural evo-
lution: man’s creative act (with its aim) and its contrary, alien-
ation that resembles the determinisms of nature.
Marx’s contribution to the study of subjectivity is his dis-

covery of the tension between these two antithetical terms: crea-
tion and alienation. The philosophical perversion of Marxism
results from a false theory of knowledge, considered to be a
“reflection” of reality, and a distorted concept of liberty, resulting
from a positivist interpretation of the Hegelian formula: liberty
is necessity become conscious.
These conceptions are foreign to Marx’s thought. He fought
against such a conception of knowledge in his Theses on Feuer-
bach, by stressing with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel the active nature
of knowledge. He fought against such a conception of liberty
by defining it, in The Holy Family, as a “potency” and by re-
calling in 18-Brumaire and Capital that men fashion their own
history. Contrary to the positivism of his less gifted imitators and
in the spirit of Hegel, Marx viewed reality not only as something
“given” but as including everything that is possible.
The philosophical perversions of Marxism have supported its
political perversions. If there exist only one “given” reality and
one exact reflection of this reality, one man or a group of men can
be the depositories of this unique and absolute truth. They will
have unlimited authority, since they will bring people this truth
“from outside.” This is the “theoretical” basis for the single Party
and the despotic State.
On the other hand, Marx’s dialectics is based on a critical con-
ception of knowledge that considers it to be not a reflection but
an act by which we move toward a verifying experience with
hypotheses or models that are constantly open to revision. This
premise has two crucial consequences: (1) the subjective element
of revolutionary action is not only the “science” possessed by the
theoreticians and the leaders but includes the “historic initiative
of the masses,” not to be despised as “spontaneity”; (2) pluralism
—just as Barth said, “Everything I say about God is said by a
man,” a Marxist can never forget that “everything I say of nature
and history is said by a man.”
Without this critical and relativizing element theological and
NECESSARY CHANGE 79
revolutionary thought can only produce inquisitorial clericalism

and despotic Stalinism.
Revolutionary consciousness, like religious consciousness, does
not merely reflect a situation but protests against it, to use Marx’s
expression. But an objection arises: If revolutionary consciousness
is not simply produced by the situation, from what source does
it derive?
The study of subjectivity does not provide an escape from the
problem of transcendence. Transcendence is translated into
Hegelian or Marxist language as moving beyond the present
situation dialectically. But Marx does not accept Hegel’s notion
of an “absolute mind” that dwells in us. For a Marxist, transcen-
dence is never absolute; it means passing from one order to
another. For example, life transcends the physicochemical—man
is never simply the result of the circumstances in which he was
born and formed.
Marx is no imitator of Spinoza, enclosing himself in pure im-
manence. But, like Spinoza, he rejects all external finality. Man
creates his own meaning and freedom in this world. But he pre-
cisely creates them; he does not discover them already made.
Marx not only opposes the kind of dogmatic theology that sees
transcendence and immanence as opposites; he also disagrees
with Hegel’s philosophy of history and positivist evolutionism.
Transcendence and immanence are not opposites like the yes
and no of classical logic. They are dialectically bound to each
other in tension; they simultaneously exclude each other and
imply each other. Transcendence is the interior conflict of im-
manence. It belongs not to the order of being but of doing.
For a Marxist atheist, the nearest translation of the “presence
of God” is the experience of creation in all its forms, from scien-
tific discovery to artistic creation, from love to revolution. He will
not say, “God is there,” but “Something new is emerging in man’s
history and life.”
The idea that transcendence is located in the “beyond” places
it on the margin of human life.
The image of Christ is an example of active subjectivity that

is an endless outpouring of transcendence. In him, the God of
distant transcendence entered into the daily history of men. He
made him a breaker of idols and chains, a bypasser of boundaries,
one who destroyed taboos and placed himself beyond justice,
good, and evil in the name of a love that transcended all his-
torical limits. In the words of the Protestant theologian Roland
de Pury, Christ is the true man, the man who God alone could
be, his the only humanity unable to be inhuman.
Marxism can only be the authentic breaker of chains if it can
include this Christian insight, the divine element in man. The
revolutionary attitude, in politics as well as in art, needs transcen-
dence even more than realism.
No “objective” contradiction can by itself engender a revolu-
tion. Marx, and Lenin after him, showed that misery does not
automatically engender a movement to overthrow the system
that caused it. That requires a revolutionary plan that demon-
strates that another order, one that responds to the profound de-
sires of the masses, is possible.
No so-called “scientific” demonstration can establish the neces-
sity of this new possibility. Analyzing the contradictions of
capitalism in Capital, Marx proves that the internal development
of the system leads it to its own destruction. But he does not
describe the society that will be born out of this self-destruction.
Whenever he discusses the society of the future, he makes no
pretense of using a scientific method. To convey what he antici-
pates in the future he employs the Hegelian dialectic of negation
of the negation and another based on the inspired projections of
the utopians.
The most typical example of his use of the Hegelian schema of
negation of the negation is ina youthful work, Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right. His certitude of the eventual emancipation
of the working class is expressed in this way: “It is necessary to
form a class united by radical bonds . . . a social group universal
because of its universal sufferings . . . one that can no longer
NECESSARY CHANGE 81
relate to any human claim but that of being human, a group

opposed to all the principles of the political system, not only to
its consequences ..., a group that cannot emancipate itself
without liberating itself from every other social group and, conse-
quently, cannot free itself without emancipating them all, a group
that, in a word, represents complete human ruin and is incapable
of reconquering its identity without a complete reconquest of all
that is human. Social decomposition embodied in a particular
class is the proletariat.” ,
The historic mission of the proletariat, the reconquest of the
total man, is here based on the Hegelian dialectic that is the heir
of the Christian dialectic of crucifixion and resurrection. Jaurés
stressed this theme: “Just as the infinite self-abasement of God
was the condition for the infinite aggrandizement of man, so also,
in Marxist dialectics, the proletariat, the modern savior, must be
abased to the very nadir of historic and social nothingness in
order to raise up all humanity along with itself.”
In Capital, in his economic analysis of the mechanisms that
lead the system to its final decomposition, Marx preserved the
Hegelian structure. Capitalist production, the negation of prop-
erty based on labor alone, engenders its own negation. “This is
the negation of the negation,” wrote Marx, The consequence of
this is a new dialectical reversal of the relation between object
and subject (machine and man) and the transition from aliena-
tion (of which the fetishism of merchandise is a particular ex-
ample) to the fulfillment of the “total man.” We are here very
close to the theme of the transition from having to being in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Moving beyond the actual momentum of capitalist society to
explore possible futures, Marx refers to the anticipations of earlier
utopians. In Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism, Engels
enumerates them: Thomas Miinzer; the English “levelers,” Mor-
elly and Mably; Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, whom he considers
the “founders of socialism.” He adds: “The immaturity of capital-
ism and the immaturity of the class situation was matched by the
immaturity of theory. The solution of social problems remained

hidden within existing economic relationships. It had to come out
of someone’s brain, . . . A new and better social system had to
be invented and communicated to society by propaganda and,
when possible, through instructive experiences.”
Far from ridiculing or despising these anticipations as “foolish,”
Engels wrote that “we prefer to acclaim the germs of ideas of
genius and the ideas of genius [Engels’ emphasis] that break
through the fantasy of their expression and to which the philis-
tines are blind.” Marx drew on these projections to imagine the
future: the concept of the classless and stateless society in Thomas
Miinzer, Fourier’s concept of the State, and Owen's idea of the
fulfillment of man, the theories of work, and of polytechnical
education, and so on.
Marx, who never wished to establish a “system,” did not always
connect the philosophy of his youth with the economic analyses
of Capital and the models for the future demanded by his militant
activities. When Marx’s successors used doctrine to build and
strengthen their parties and states, Marxism grew impoverished.
In the historic context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, they wished to exploit to the maximum the current
prestige accorded to “science,” but in its contemporary, positivist
sense. By the time of Kautsky, Marxism had become simply a
catalog of economic laws that make it possible to form extrapola-
tions based on present facts. Kantian dualism—a world of phe-
nomena subject to mechanical determinism and a purely sub-
jective moral world unconnected with the real—was substituted
for Hegelian dialectics.
In the name of dialectical materialism, Stalin combined a posi-
tivist concept of the natural sciences with a philosophy ofhistory
that bases its certainty of the victory of socialism on a kind of
laicized theology, that is, on the knowledge of the most general
laws of nature, thought, and history.
On the basis of such a vision, the perversions that usually
afflict churches flourished: dogmatism and clericalism, apologetics
NECESSARY CHANGE 83
and conservative self-satisfaction. Faith, the genesis of all revolu-

tionary action, was not recognized for what it is beneath all the
warped forms that were imposed on it—sectarian fanaticism, per-
sonality cult, dogmatic certitude of possessing the total and defini-
tive truth, and the inevitable inquisition.
If revolutionaries do not wish to perpetuate these depraved
conceptions of history and the future, notions that sterilize and
paralyze revolutionary action, they must become aware of the
dynamism and potential of the faith that is in them.
The true alternative to a religion that is the opium of the people
is not positivist atheism, because positivism is not only a world
without God but a world without man. The true alternative is a
militant and creative faith to which the real is not only what is
but includes all the future possibilities that appear impossible to
one who does not have the ability to hope.
Ernst Bloch deserves the credit for rediscovering the essential
foundation of all living Marxism—what he calls “the principle of
hope.” The revolution is not primarily a science, a philosophy, or
an ideology; like faith, it is basically a way of acting. To refuse
to acknowledge the postulates of the revolution is to cut oneself
off from its source. One does not become a revolutionary simply
because one is wretched or because someone has “scientifically”
demonstrated the necessity of socialism. Firsthand experience of
wretchedness and a capability for scientific thought are very
useful to a revolutionary, but neither his misery nor his science
makes him a revolutionary.
At the genesis of all revolutionary action lies an act of faith:
the certainty that the world can be transformed, that man has
the power to create something new, and that each of us is per-
sonally responsible for this transformation. For Ernst Bloch, the
certitude that reality is not only what is but what is coming to
life out of the vast sea of possibilities is a legacy of religion—what
he calls a “metareligion.”
In The Theology of Hope, Jurgen Moltmann responds to this
insight: Experience would have no grounds if it were not an-
chored in faith, and this is faith in the resurrection. To have faith

is to hope. That means perceiving the possibilities beyond the im-
mediate reality. “Man’s hope is God’s flesh,” wrote Barbusse.
Revelation does not reveal Being, in the sense in which Greek
philosophy from Parmenides to Plato understood it. Revelation
reveals what is not—or, more precisely, what is not yet. It is not
contemplation but a call, a promise.
The “word” of the Bible and Gospel is not truth in the Aristo-
telian sense, the conformity between the object and the mind.
Between the word of God and reality there is contradiction. Faith
in this word engenders not resignation but impatience and con-
flict with the world. It wrenches one away from what is given.
The prophetic moments of life are the decisions by which we
stand against present idolatries and alienations. A truly human
life is made up of such decisions.
Man is constituted not by his nature but by his never-to-be-
finished history. We can never be satisfied. Faith can never be a
justification of history; it must open up new history and thus keep
history, open.
Christ’s life is an example of decisions bearing, not on some
particular aspect of the social order or of personal life, but exclu-
sively on the problem of goals. Jesus is not a revolutionary seeking
to change structures like the Zealots of Bar Kokba. Neither is he
a preacher of repentance like John the Baptist, who sought solely
to influence conscience. He is the full human being whose every
action teaches us to look to ultimate objectives. We know nothing
of God except through the intervention and call of such a man.
For Moltmann the death and resurrection of Christ are even
more revealing of the profound meaning of his and every life.
The resurrection is not a cellular, physiological phenomenon, a
return from death to mortal life through natural reanimation. It is
not a historic fact that can be reconstructed on the basis of
“objective” testimony. It is not situated within the series of facts
and laws of naturalist or historical positivism. If it were, it would
NECESSARY CHANGE 85
have no significance. What would be the significance of rebegin-

ninga life that again had death as its end?
The resurrection is not a “fact” in the positivist sense of the
term. It is a creative act, an affirmation of the impossible through
which history opens the future to all possibilities. It means that
our future cannot be just one more fact, something that flows
from the data of the past. This intrusion of the totally unexpected,
which is not the continuation of any precedent, brings home the
realization that man is not born to die but to begin.
To be Christian is not to believe that the resurrection is “real”
(in the sense of positivist history and science); it means believing
that it is possible. It does not mean inserting the resurrection into
the perspective of history but rather perceiving history within the
perspective of the resurrection. The resurrection takes place every
day.
Belief in the resurrection is not adherence to a dogma. It is
the act of participating in unfettered creation, for the resurrection
reveals a new and radical liberty that the Greco-Roman world
knew nothing about. Liberty is no longer only the awareness of
necessity, as it had been from Heraclitus to the Stoics, but partici-
pation in the act of creation. This faith is the beginning of liberty.
To have faith, if I correctly interpret the Christian image, is to
perceive that the resurrection and the crucifixion are identified.
To affirm the paradox of God’s presence in Jesus crucified—in the
depths of wretchedness and impotence, abandoned by God—
liberates man from the illusion of power and possession. God is
not the Roman Emperor or the Greeks’ man of beauty and
strength. Faith is not a promise of power. It is the conviction that
it is possible to create a qualitatively new future only if one
identifies himself with those who are the most naked and down-
trodden, only if one ties one’s fate to theirs to the point that it is
impossible to conceive any real victory but theirs.
This love is the hope of resurrection, for love exists only when
a human being is irreplaceable for us and we are ready to give up
our own life for him. When we are really prepared to make this
gift for the least of men, God is in us. He is the power to trans-
form the world.
Throughout my life I have asked myself if I was a Christian.
For forty years I answered no, because the question was framed
incorrectly, as if Christian faith were incompatible with life as a
militant. I am sure now that they are one and that my faith as a
militant would have no foundation without that faith.
Now I hesitate to say yes for quite different reasons. Such a
faith appears to me so explosive that it would be vanity to claim
it before having proved it by an action that matches its power.
Such verification can come only at the end of life, not in its midst
before having fully achieved one’s part in creation.
I do not think reaching this realization a private event. In vari-
ous ways millions are asking themselves this question at this
crucial moment in history. It is a sign of the times, an element
of our culture and of the crisis of our civilization. The needed
change will take place simultaneously on the level of structures
and on the level of consciousness. It will not be only sociopolitical
revolution and the actualization of faith; it will also be cultural
revolution.
3. A Change in the Course of Civilization:

A Cultural Revolution
Lenin poses the problem of cultural revolution with particular

clarity in his article “On Cooperation” (1923). This text, one of
his last writings, is his real “testament”—much more so than the
document usually given the name, which is only concerned with
persons and the choice of leaders, particularly Stalin. In this study
of the cooperative system, Lenin clarified the essence of socialism
by stressing three major ideas. ;
First, the greatest threat is the bureaucratization of the system:
“Our administrative structure is worth absolutely nothing; we
NECESSARY CHANGE 87
have inherited it entirely from the past.” Here Lenin undertakes

his last battle—against the bureaucracy. Since 1920 he had been
denouncing this deformation that, at best, can lead to the creation
of socialism for the people but never to its formation by the peo-
ple, which contradicts the very essence of socialism.
Second, for Lenin the remedy is the organization of the work-
ers. Since Russia was still agrarian, he insists particularly on the
peasant cooperative, as he insisted in the cities on “worker con-
trol.” In both cases the direction is the same: no socialism will be
authentic unless the workers themselves manage their enterprise.
This is the definition of self-management. “Cooperative participa-
tion coincides perfectly with socialism.”
Third, he adds, “But this condition requires such a degree of
culture . . . that this generalized organization of cooperatives is
impossible without a true cultural revolution.” He concludes that
it is necessary “that we achieve this cultural revolution in order to
become afully socialist country.”
For Lenin socialism is not simply the abolition of the private
ownership of the means of production. Socialism cannot be really
achieved without ending the bureaucracy, this “inheritance from
the past.” This is possible only through cooperative organization
in which the workers themselves manage their enterprises. In its
turn, this self-management is only possible if the workers possess
the high level of culture which results from a cultural revolution.
Socialism is not simply socialization of property but socialization
of ownership, power, and knowledge.
The problem of cultural revolution is particularly acute in
China, where for 2,000 years the mandarin held a tight grip on
these three arms of domination.
Most of the leaders of the Paris Commune, disciples of Proud-
hon, considered their two essential tasks to be self-management
and federalism in order to break the deep-rooted national tradi-
tion of bureaucratic centralization passed from the monarchy to
the Jacobins and to Napoleon. A third of a century after Lenin,
Mao Tse-tung perceived a new peril: a bureaucracy of Party
functionaries possessing political power, Marxist expertise, and

control over the distribution of economic gains—once again the
three attributes of the ancient dualisms that set leaders and the
masses in opposition. To counter the rise of new mandarins, he
risked destroying the Party apparatus in the Cultural Revolution.
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, most Chinese
Communist Party officials and the president of the republic, Liu
Shao-chi, drew their inspiration from the Soviet model. They
accepted as dogma the absolute priority of heavy industry (pro-
duction of the means of production) over light industry (produc-
tion of consumer goods), the necessity of giant enterprises, the
use of material stimuli for the workers (bonuses, etc. ), the West-
ern and, eventually, the Soviet conception of growth, that is, the
continuous escalation of consumption and comfort as the values
to be given priority. |
In 1966 Mao Tse-tung launched the Chinese people on an
attack against the Party structure and its conception of socialism.
As Marx had said it was not possible to “reform” the bourgeois
State but that its “structure had to be broken” if the bureaucratic
dualism of rulers and ruled was to be ended, so Mao thought that
the bureaucratic sclerosis of the Party could not simply be “cor-
rected.” The structures of Party and State had to be dismantled.
Eighty percent of the political and administrative officials were
changed, not by liquidating former leaders but by sending them
back to work in production. This struggle against the bureaucracy
made it possible to thin out the Party administrations and “com-
missions” that duplicated the functions of the government.
The special privileges of those in authority—special apartments,
automobiles, commissaries—were ended. The principle of rotation
was established for officials so that they would periodically re-
establish contact with the workers by working with them in pro-
duction for at least two months a year.
The Chinese Communists are constructing a model of develop-
ment that is a radical alternative to the model prevailing in both
Western and Soviet civilization. In contrast to the fever for
NECESSARY CHANGE 89
growth and competition, there are cities without banks, without

advertising, without drugs and alcohol, without private cars.
Shanghai is no longer a world center for opium and prostitution;
public transit has become more important than private auto-
mobiles.
This is something quite different from the consequences of
underdevelopment; often in underdeveloped countries general-
ized misery exists side by side with “Western” luxury for a small
class. What we are discussing is a fundamental human option
that will demand further cultural revolutions so that the socialist
way of life will continue to differ from all others both in aims and
means.
What means were employed to create new social relationships?
First, the management of enterprises was taken out of the hands
of the centralized State, the Party structure, and the technocrats
and was entrusted to “revolutionary committees,” the majority of
whose members are workers, engineers, and technicians.
Like every system of self-management, this requires a constant
effort to raise the culture of the workers, not only to increase their
technical knowledge but also to strengthen their realization of
their responsibility for the future. Increasing production does not
depend on material incentives but on the development of the
“subjective element” of revolutionary action, the faith that moves
mountains. Of course, it is easy to be ironic about the undeniable
personality cult of Mao, the dogmatic indoctrination through the
“little red book,” the factional disputes within the Party and the
not very democratic methods employed to resolve them. But
the problem was how to communicate to 800 million people
within a few years a confidence that man can change the world
by his own power and to give them a sense of personal respon-
sibility for this change—taking into consideration that most of
these people were unlettered and untrained after thousands of
years of oppression. The choice was either to use the means at
hand or renounce the task, that is, forfeit the opportunity to open
up a new path for human history.
The storm raged on a scale that matched the immensity of the

country, and a new China emerged from the three-year upheaval.
The goal of the people taking over the management of everything
was maintained.
Even the material results were positive: the figures given by
Chou En-lai—18 billion tons of steel, 20 billion tons of oil, not
counting the scientific successes that astounded the world—indi-
cated a success that was all the more striking since for over ten
years China had received no aid from the capitalist or Soviet
blocs. They produced in addition an example of successful social-
ist agriculture—a rare achievement up to that point.
Another important aspect of the Cultural Revolution has been
the discovery of new methods to form leadership personnel. This
entailed not only a gigantic effort to eliminate illiteracy—100 mil-
lion children now attend primary schools—but also the abolition
of direct entrance into the university. The former system was
completely eradicated by shutting down all higher education for
almost four years. Whatever difficulties that may have created,
the Cultural Revolution not only radically changed the content of
education but instituted a system in which, on finishing secondary
schooling, every child without exception is sent to work in a
factory or in the country for at least three years. Only the person
with this worker or peasant experience can have access to higher
education, which no longer depends on birth or money but on the
choice of his working comrades.
I have sketched some characteristic traits of the Chinese Cul-
tural Revolution not to suggest that it be imitated, since the
problems of countries differ profoundly, but because it is the
single historic example of an attempt to develop new objectives
and new means for cultural change and to conceive a new direc-
tion for civilization.
For centuries, the ends and content of our culture were deter-
mined by the basic principles propounded by the church. In the
sacral societies of the European Middle Ages, the church defined
the “order willed by God” and all public and private virtues
NECESSARY CHANGE 91
stemmed from the observance of this order. With the Renais-

sance, the church’s role was taken over by the “humanities.” This
was a return to the sources. As already recalled, the Christian
church, since Saint Augustine, had integrated into itself the dual-
ism of Greek philosophy and, since the Emperor Constantine, the
inheritance of the Roman organization of the State. After ten
centuries of domination by the church, the “humanities” estab-
lished a return to the two sources of this domination: Greek
dualism and Roman order.
One can find in Cicero the basic principle of discrimination
between manual workers and political leaders: “The manual arts
are charged with what we derive from the things and animals
that we use; it is reserved to the wisdom and virtue of great men
to direct human activity toward the increase of the common good”
(Treatise on Duties, II, 5).
The lesson was not forgotten. In the course of the debates of
the extraparliamentary commission designated by de Falloux to
complete the repression of the June 1848 Revolution with an
education law, Adolphe Thiers, the most sinister politician France
has known, made this pronouncement about the teaching of
Latin: “I prefer that someone spend three years talking to a child
about Scipio and Cato rather than about triangles and squares;
when religion is weak in a country, morality must be supported
by the great examples of the past.”
The sense of class it instilled and the repressive significance of
this teaching of Latin were fully evident to the politicians who
imposed it. This was not the struggle of the Renaissance human-
ists against the sacral values of the past but the victorious bour-
geoisie defending their conception of order. Latin was an ideal
instrument for the formation of political “elites.” The Roman
soldiers, colonizers, and jurists produced a literature and an art
in their own measure, without the least element of subversive
creativity. One can easily draw from these texts rules and stand-
ards with which to fashion notables, men of order, officials of the
law and admirers of strength, and sophists as well, ready to prove
either side of any argument. These are not texts to disturb a man
or to lead him to affirm his transcendence. Once the solid Latin
tradition has been thoroughly assimilated, we can rest assured
that imagination will never come to power.
During the last ten years, the “human sciences” have taken
over an analogous role from the “humanities.” In general, they
tend to communicate a sense of necessary order, even fatality.
This leads to a sense that any effort to transform the system
radically is foolish. Existing social institutions cannot be trans-
cended. I will give two examples:
The official treatises on political economics banish as “polemi-
cal and unscientific” the very word “exploitation” and gloss over
any trace of contradiction. In more or less mathematical formulas
they describe economic “mechanisms” in such a way that eco-
nomic power seems to result from the objective laws of technical
development.
Sociology also contributes “repressive concepts.” One of the
most typical is the development of Max Weber’s theses on
bureaucracy. Starting with the role played by the Prussian
bureaucracy in the establishment of German national unity and
with the role of the Taylor system in promoting the productivity
of American industry, Weber presents the bureaucratic organiza-
tion as a higher form of rationality, a kind of destiny for every
society that seeks efficiency.
More than any particular thesis, the method of these “human
sciences” is the best guarantee of the established order. The
method is positivist; it defines science as the observation of a
certain number of “facts” and the determination of the constant
relations among these facts. Even in the natural sciences, this
conception has long been superseded. No “fact” has any meaning
by itself but only relative to the theory that gives it meaning,
whether it verifies the theory or weakens it.
In the human sciences, positivism is even more fatal. A human
fact is not a datum; it is what has been done by a man or a group
of men. It is not an object but an achieved project. This implies
NECESSARY CHANGE 93
that other projects were possible and that the accomplishment of

this particular one among all the possibilities was not inevitable
like the fall of a rock drawn by gravity or a chemical chain
reaction. In the human sciences, positivism is the school of fatal-
ism. By locking thought within the category of the given, it locks
man within the established order.
The very terms “sociology,” “psychology,” and now “futurology”
create confusion by implying that these are sciences in the same
sense as biology or physiology. This is the legacy of Saint-Simon’s
original positivism. According to him, the “science of man” must
be built on the model of the natural sciences. It must, he said, be
given a positive character “by basing it on observation and treat-
ing it according to the method used in the other branches of
physics.” Auguste Comte codified “the authentic spirit of posi-
tivism” on the basis of what he significantly called “the general
dogma of the invariability of natural laws.”
Marcuse’s thought has played a crucial role in the revolt against
this repressive culture and this positivist science, as “one-dimen-
sional” as the society it expresses and protects. Applying the basic
concepts of Marx but under new historic conditions, Marcuse
recalled the revolutionary significance of dialectics by stressing its
two major characteristics:
1. “Thought,” said Hegel, “is essentially the negation of the
given before us.” Dialectic is the opposite of positivism. Its
point of departure is not what is “positive” (given) in reality,
but what is “negative,” that is, everything that is not the im-
mediate sensible appearance, the totality of relations that
bind one thing to what is other than itself, the network of
relationships that give it meaning within a whole. This is
how Marx analyzed the “commodity,” not as a thing, immedi-
ately perceived, but as a relation between men. For a prod-
uct of work to become a commodity, there must be aseller
and a buyer, that is, a set of social relations leading men to
view their products in the context of a market. It has not
always been this way and it will not always be this way.
Likewise, private property is not just a fact. It can be de-

fined and understood only as the negation of the collective
appropriation of nature by men, that is, not as an invariable
datum but as a changing reality, born at a particular moment
of historic development and condemned to die at another
stage of that development.
2. The possible is part of the real. In the human sciences,
positivism mutilates this essential dimension of reality. Seeing
only facts frozen into “data,” it fails to recognize that men
fashion their own history, even though not arbitrarily but
always within conditions structured by the past. Positivism
has a strange way of posing problems: “What will happen if
we abstract from all human intervention, if we do nothing
to change the course of events?” Opposed to the world with-
out man that positivism pretends to describe “objectively,”
the young feel an intense aspiration for a culture that will
help us to conceive and achieve those possibilities that come
from our own efforts and action.
Because of the institutional forms that it has taken in Eastern

Europe, even Marxism has not been spared positivist contamina-
tion. Dialectic has been changed into its opposite. Instead of a
method of critical detachment from the given, an instrument to
search out and create new possibilities, it has become apologet-
ics, an ideology of justification. To consider human history
as a particular case of a “dialectic of nature,” obedient to “natu-
ral” laws (the extreme case toward which an alienated society
tends) is simply a laicized theology of Providence. Within this
perspective man again becomes “one-dimensional.” This explains
the repugnance that the youth of the socialist countries feel to-
ward the obligatory teaching of a hollow “dialectical materialism”
that has become the State religion. From Warsaw to Prague,
wherever they have been able to express themselves, the youth
movements have borne tragic witness to this fact.
In the Third World the dissatisfaction of the young is aggra-
NECESSARY CHANGE 95
vated by the fact that the universities have been designed on the
Western model. Besides the fact that this is an erroneous concep-
tion of knowledge, the postulate that there is only one possible
model for civilized life has led to the destruction of those cultures
formed outside the West, that is, all that do not accept the
supreme objective of technical efficiency and growth for its own
sake. It would be wrong to accuse these young people of national-
ism and “provincial” obscurantism. They do not reject technology
but the subordination of all human objectives to the Western
conception of technology for its own sake. The importation of
this conception—as they have learned from cruel experience—
makes it impossible to overcome underdevelopment and the
widening gap between their countries and the West. Their de-
mands are not particularist. Instead of so-called “aid” that moves
in only one direction and widens the development gap, they
demand an authentic “dialogue between civilizations.”
If culture today can no longer be formed as in the past—not by
the sacral, nor the “humanities,” nor the “human sciences”—what
can furnish a foundation for a “general culture” that responds to
the needs of our time? This general culture will not foster accept-
ance of a given order but prepare man for increasingly rapid
change in his life. It will emphasize not the assimilation of
knowledge and systematized morality but critical intelligence and
creativity. This general culture will no longer belong to a privi-
leged few. Everyone will have access to it so that everyone will
have the training and information necessary to take part con-
sciously and creatively in society’s initiatives and decisions.
The three principal concerns of this general culture must be
the organization of information, aesthetics, and prediction and
planning for the future.
The organization of information can liberate culture from the
task of accumulating knowledge in order to develop in man the
one thing that is specifically human—the ability to ask questions
and to determine his goals.
The memories of computers, rather than the memories of men,
will be loaded down with all this knowledge, so that every child,
every person, will have at his disposal all the accumulated culture
of mankind simply by being “plugged in” to it. They will be
taught to dialogue with the computer. Such teaching will have to
begin very early. In Palo Alto, California, quite young children
learn to read by playing and to do arithmetic by tapping on a key-
board. A few years later, it is possible to introduce the child to
the “data bank” that stores not only the knowledge of the past
but the continuously burgeoning discoveries of the present, which
are far beyond the grasp of any individual intelligence. The
ancient, hitherto inaccessible dream of total, universal knowledge
now becomes possible in an unexpected form. The encyclopedic
memory, master of all the knowledge of its time, is no longer
Aristotle’s or Leonardo’s but the collective memory of a machine
whose only talent is the capacity to absorb, to classify, and to
arrange.
Besides, questioning the computer is the best school of concrete
logic. Questions must be couched with the greatest rigor; the
vagueness and empty phraseology of the old “rhetoric” are ruled
out.
Relieved of the burden of trying to retain the vast sum of avail-
able knowledge that can now be totally mobilized in a moment
and with this highly developed art of posing questions, man—
every man—can devote his energies to the truly human task of
making decisions and planning his actions, because he has at his
disposal this marvelous auxiliary. But the computer only frees us
from the repetitive and mechanical tasks of thought. It takes care
of the tasks of acquiring scientific information and techniques,
the means man uses to construct himself. Using these, creation
and the choice of objectives must be worked at in freedom.
Aesthetics can be the second foundation of education only if it
consists not of metaphysical and abstract speculation on the
“beautiful” but instead is an apprenticeship in creative activity.
Aesthetics must here be understood as the science and art of
experiencing and reliving, through works of art, the specifically
NECESSARY CHANGE 97
human act by which man transcends his own definition, his past,
his limitations, his alienations through creative work and his-
torical initiative, Aesthetics repeatedly calls forth those moments
when man, through rebellion or prayer, love, heroism or creation,
crosses a new threshold of humanity. It teaches us both to pro-
duce and to. grasp the emergence of the new. Through contact
with the great works of man, it is an initiation to the art of
inventing.
The purpose of aesthetic education is not to provide an escape
from technological civilization, nor to furnish a countervailing
influence to scientific education. It is an even more important
component of education than scientific and technical education,
just as the discovery of goals precedes and governs the search for
appropriate means.
The major problem of education today is not how to train man
to compete with the computer but to teach him to manage it
and assign its objectives. Submerged in a plethora of powerful
tools we need more than ever an art of inventing. The primary
virtue to be cultivated is imagination. Without imagination our
culture would become simply functional, accepting already given
ends and using the computer to discover effective means. The
only nonalienated use of the computer is not as a labor-saving
robot but as an intermediary between the mass of information
and the creative imagination. Contrary to the nineteenth-century
machine that made man its servant and tool, the twentieth-
century machine can liberate man from every task but the posing
of problems and the choice of ends.
Authentic aesthetic education is that kind of cultivation of the
imagination that alone can make possible the right use of the
computer. Authentic aesthetic education is also the cultivation of
the senses that have become atrophied in our Western tradition
as a result of the exclusive emphasis on logic and discursive rea-
soning.
Aesthetics was turned into a parasite by metaphysical treatises
on abstractions like “the beautiful,” by long-winded commen-
taries on the “classical masterpiece,” and by the scientific pre-

tensions of the measurers of sensation. This history reproduced
the three stages of ancient culture: Platonic mysticism, Greco-
Latin “humanism” with its eternal models, and the positivist con-
ceptions of the human sciences. Aesthetics must now rediscover
its primary meaning: the immediate, sensible contact (aisthesis)
with nature as distinct from a logical, mediate, intellectual rela-
tionship.
Counter to the great rationalism of Socrates, Leibniz, or Hegel
and the petty rationalism of Auguste Comte (for whom the only
thing that has meaning or even real existence is what can be re-
duced to reason, concepts, discourse) the “dialogue between
civilizations” with non-Western cultures will help us to grasp
the aesthetic component of our approach to life and its dignity,
and to see that it is not inferior to the logical component. In the
Western tradition, the aesthetic component is considered resid-
ual. No room is left, for example, for what Taoism calls “non-
knowing,” which is in reality a nonmediated knowing, the act or.
contemplation through which we coincide with the movement of
being. Ever since Socrates, as Nietzsche has shown, we have
underestimated the importance of what escapes the grasp of our
purely intellectual processes, our hypotheses, deductions, verifi-
cations, the dialectic of our concepts and our language. Aesthetic
experience will help us to discern the major realities that escape
this framework. An example: After I have analyzed a painting,
it is not possible to prove that it is beautiful and should move
you. At most I can lead you to the point where you and you
alone will experience what I could not say. That is even more
evident for other art forms like music or dance. The chorus of
the primitive Greek tragedy sang and danced in order to express
and communicate what the words or mime could not express
and communicate. The anguish of death, desire, love, the faith
that makes the believer or militant revolutionary joyfully accept
sacrifice, the emotion felt at the beauty of nature or of a human
being all remain irreducible to concepts.
NECESSARY CHANGE 99
This is not a sign of failure; utilitarian actions, techniques, and

the objects that they construct can be explained through con-
cepts and language, as can the movement of stars and atoms. But
to express a vital experience, any specifically human act that
transcends daily knowledge or practice, transcends this language.
This is the message of dance or music, painting or poetry, the
message of an art whose task, as Paul Klee said, is to “make the
invisible visible.”
To overcome our dualism and reconcile the aesthetic with the
logical, we may need missionaries from the Orient. The question
is worth asking the way Nietzsche asked it. When Socrates stated
as a supreme law that to know the good is to be virtuous, and his
successors concluded, for example, that to be beautiful every-
thing must be reasonable, had we not begun our mutilation and
decadence? Do we not have to accept, a century after it was
written, the prophetic promise of Nietzsche: “Believe with me
in the Dionysiac life and in the rebirth of tragedy... . You
will accompany the procession of Dionysus from the Indies to
Greece.”
In this way we will strike a blessedly sacrilegious blow against
2,000 years of Western counternature and outrages against hu-
manity. The time has come to reaffirm the rights of Dionysus the
dancer against Apollo the sculptor and artisan. Is not Zorba the
Greek a saint for our time who shows us that there are crucial
things that only dance can express? Is not aesthetics, as Gorki
suggested, the ethics of the future?
Prediction and planning will be the third foundation of a cul-
ture oriented toward not the past but the future. Instruction in
this skill will be at least as important as courses in history—on
condition that it too is free of positivism. If planning and predic-
tion deal only with “facts” considered as given rather than as
achieved human projects, it will be only an inside-out version of
false history. It will be limited to extrapolating the future from
the past, asking what is going to happen, without taking into
consideration the myriad possibilities of human choice. It will
just catalog, with exaggerated pessimism or naïve optimism, the

future technological developments that will provide man with
new means to satisfy unchangeable needs and ideals.
What if, on the contrary, such forecasting asks, “What de-
cisions must we make to direct the course of events?”
Most works of “futurology” or science fiction give us many
details about the technical means that will be available in twenty
or thirty years to satisfy our needs and desires, but they seldom
ask what our needs and desires will be at that stage.
The most famous of the futuristic novels, such as Huxley’s
Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, are not creative utopias.
They merely extrapolate what will be the catastrophic drift of
our world if we continue on the present course, that is, if no
human choice or decision about our objectives intervenes.
The most typical example of this positivist “futurology” is
Herman Kahn’s The Year 2000. In the opening pages of the book
he enumerates his postulates, which are those of the policies of
the American government at the time he was writing. Everything
unfolds on the implicit principle of a human nature unchange-
able in its needs and desires.
The greatest problem of prediction and planning arises be-
cause it is carried out too close to the centers of decision making,
whether in business, land management enterprises, planning or-
ganizations, or national defense agencies.
Such situations impose biases from the outset: in businesses,
forecasting becomes the servant of long-term marketing; in land
management, the “probable scenario” for France in the year
2000, in the words of the man in charge of the project, “starts
from the present situation and simulates the evolutionary pro-
cesses inherent in it by adopting as an assumption the perma-
nence of the political and productive systems now in force”; the
preface to the work of the planning commission, “Group 857,”
states: “The group considered: that it was not its business to
speak about major national options involving the entire country:
foreign policy, military power, or structural preferences”; in na-
NECESSARY CHANGE 101
tional defense, the “military forecast” is based on “game theory”

through which an advance “strategy,” a set of conditional deci-
sions in terms of the various possible situations and their ramifi-
cations, is established.
Conceived in this way, so-called “research into the future” can
only be, as Robert Jungk said, a colonization of the future by the
present and a preventive war against the future to keep it from
developing with any radical novelty.
Prediction and planning will play a more important place in
our future general culture than the study of history does now.
In order to be a real invention of the future that uses understand-
ing of the past only as a springboard, it will have to consist pri-
marily of reflection on aims, not simply of technological fore-
casts of what tools will be available. Its real problem will be
what the consequences of such and such a decision are going
to be.
If prediction and planning are to build culture rather than
serve as a tool of manipulation, they must not be at the service
of any corporate management, any general staff, or any govern-
ment. Only in this way will such insight into the future be able
to train us in the science and art of inventing—on the basis of
present contradictions—those future possibilities that can resolve
them.
Because we live in planetary interdependence and because we
must think out our human objectives, such prediction and plan-
ning for the future cannot admit any criterion dictated by par-
ticular advantage. It must be global.
Its working hypothesis is that human history (both the past
and the history that is coming to be) must be considered:
= not as an amalgam of objects, as in the positivist concep-
tion of the human sciences, which borrow their methods
from the natural sciences;
= nor as a collectivity of subjects, cut off from reality and
history as in the existentialist conceptions;
= but as a world made up of projects, not individual projects
but historic projects, attempts to overcome the objective

contradictions of each particular epoch.
Historic reality, in the past and in the future, comes into

being out of a vast sea of possibilities. But there is no symmetry
between insight into the future and history, that is, between the
future and the past. The past is where things are irrevocably
done, the place of finished projects, frozen and crystallized into
facts, where one, and only one, possibility has triumphed. In
retrospect, it appears to us as the sphere of necessity. But the
future is the home of what remains to be done, the home of a
plurality of possibilities for which we are responsible. It is the
locus of freedom. Between the closed past and the open future,
the present is the time of decision, the time of man.
The future is not an already written script in which we have
only to play our roles. It is a work that we have to create. Here
we rediscover the fundamentals of Marxism. The essential legacy
of Marx is not Marxism but insight into the future, a science and
art of inventing the future, not catalogs and decalogs of eco-
nomic laws, philosophic laws, and dialectical categories. These
are its dogmatic and positivist perversions.
Starting from the data of the paleontology of his time Marx
proposes the thesis in Capital—a thesis not weakened but rather
confirmed by recent work—that what specifically distinguishes
human work from the work of the bee, ant, beaver, or monkey is
that it is preceded by an awareness of its aims and thus makes
possible the use of tools. In the evolution of nature and life, man
is characterized by the emergence of the project. Taking up a
formula of Vico’s, Marx recalls that the fundamental difference
between the evolution of nature and the history of man is that
man fashions his own history—not arbitrarily but under condi-
tions structured by the past.
When, with the earliest civilization and the settlement on the
land that accompanied it, there appeared the division between
labor and private ownership of the means of production, the one
possessing the means of production deprived the one who did

not possess them (the slave, serf, proletariat) both of the product
of his labor and of the choice of the objectives and the tools of
his labor. These choices were the privileged property of the
owner of the means of production. From that time on, labor and
the man who performed it were alienated, deprived of what
gives them truly human character: the awareness and choice of
ends.
The object of the present class struggle is to end this dualism
and to escape from the alienation that results from it, to recon-
quer for man—for every man—the chance to be a man, to choose
his own ends.
This is, essentially, the socialist proposition of Marx. In our
time, this basic human proposition, which could rally the im-
mense majority of mankind, encounters two obstacles: the coali-
tion of privilege that it indicts and the perversions of those sys-
tems that claim to be socialist but that are a caricature of the
idea.
In addition to being essential if we are to escape catastrophe,
this socialist program is also possible at the present stage of sci-
entific and technological development. The essence of every edu-
cation concerned with insight into the future is to help every
human being to be aware of both this necessity and this possi-
bility.
The methods used for such an education are determined by
the objective it pursues. The problem is particularly acute in the
Third World, where colonialism has systematically treated the
indigenous population as an object, denying the native culture
any value and imposing on it an education designed to supply
a docile work force useful to the colonial homeland.
As a result, there has been developed in the Third World,
notably by Paulo Freire in Brazil, a “pedagogy of the oppressed,”
a pedagogy that is a “practice of freedom.” It has universal
validity. For Freire, trying to resolve the problem of adult illit-
eracy in the Andes, the teaching of reading must involve becom-
ing aware of oppression and discovering in one’s own needs and

as yet indistinct desires the way to the historic effort that will
lead to liberation.
Contrary to any pedagogy that would tend to integrate men
into the logic of the existing system with its contradictions and
the dislocations that result from them, Freire sees to it first that
the very first words read—chosen from among the most common
terms, those most intimately bound to daily miseries—also begin
to interpret social reality. They do not designate inescapable
“facts” but ask questions. Learning to read is learning to see the
world not as a closed, inevitable, and exitless world but as a situ-
ation that limits and oppresses man, a situation that can be
changed.
This way of learning changes not only one’s attitude toward
the world but also one’s attitude toward oneself. The learner
comes to realize that the world around us is not an unchangeable
“given” to which one can only resign and adapt oneself, as if it
were a matter of relating one object to another, but that it pre-
sents a task. In the process, the learner grasps himself as an
incomplete being, forging and creating himself along with the
world.
Such pedagogy cannot bring knowledge from “outside,” like
propaganda. It can only be a dialogue. It cannot be conceived
for the oppressed person but only with him and by him, on the
basis of his own motivations. He cannot be treated as the object
of teaching; he is the subject. At this point, pedagogy and politics
join: “Every work done for the masses must start from their
needs,” wrote Mao Tse-tung. To counter every tendency to
despise the “spontaneity” of the masses or their historic initiative
and to pretend to bring them awareness from “outside,” he adds:
“We must teach the masses clearly what we have learned from
them confusedly.”
Dualist politics always ot a dualist pedagogy that
establishes opposition between the one taught and the teacher,
like that between the one ruled and the ruler, the slave and the
master. Therefore, every revolution not founded on respect for

the historic initiative of the masses (Marx valued their historic
initiative above all, Lenin said), every revolution not founded
on permanent dialogue with it, will necessarily lead to a new
dualism between the leader who thinks and the mass who carry
out orders. It will lead to a new alienation and a new servitude.
The essence of a liberating pedagogy—and politics—is to assist
men, who are overwhelmed by reality and experience their needs
quite simply, to emerge from this reality by becoming aware of
the causes of their needs and of the possibility of changing this
reality to make it respond more and more to human needs.
This is a crucial element of such pedagogy and such politics.
The worst consequence of slavery is that the slave tends to inter-
nalize his oppressor. The colonizer was aware of his objective.
In the Bulletin de l'enseignement des indigènes de l'Académie
dalger (cited by Grignon in L'Ordre des choses) we read: “Will
we be able to lead the natives, still so close to brute matter, to
understand and practice our pure, elevated, and demanding
morality? .. . It is necessary to ‘internalize’ our civilization, make
it sink into the native soul.”
What will revolution be? Will it consist, in our capitalist so-
cieties, in giving everybody what only the middle classes now
enjoy?
Liberation begins with the slave’s desire and struggle to be-
come a man. But at the outset, because the slave has no other
model, to be a man means to be a master, that is, an oppressor.
Or it means to be middle class, adopting middle-class values from
automobiles to art.
Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, like Mao Tse-tung’s conception of
socialism, leads the oppressed to become aware that their own
life is unbearable because of oppression and that the life of their
oppressors is unacceptable because of its perversions and lack of
meaning. Marx stresses that it is all one and the same alienation,
but from this alienation the oppressor reaps enjoyment and the
oppressed reap torment.
Pedagogy, like the practice of liberty, is not limited to teach-

ing literacy. It has to operate on many levels, so that the student
in Paris, like the illiterate in the Andes, may become aware of
himself on his own terms. The cultural formation he is now re-
ceiving is a form of colonization, and when it has achieved its
purpose, it has taught him, as the master taught his slave, to
internalize his masters, making him incapable of conceiving any
other human arrangement but the present system.
That Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and Mao’s politics—distinct from
every other because they do not aim simply at the possessive
acquisition of knowledge and power—were both formed in the
Third World is no historic accident. A pedagogy and apolitics
that set themselves the task of charting a new course for civiliza-
tion were formed not in the West but in Latin America and Asia,
for the same reasons that the revitalization of painting, music,
and dance has been nourished by Africa and Asia. Countries that
colonialism had deprived of their own culture, history, and per-
sonality demand that they no longer be treated as manipulable
objects. They insist on their right to become the subjects of their
own history, to change their world and themselves as they see
fit, to invent and create their own future. This explains the legiti-
mate attraction felt by our youth for the Orient, Africa, and Latin
America as they fashion new futures.
Only a break with the one-sided intellectualist tradition of
Western culture—unquestioned since Socrates and reinforced
since the Renaissance—-can enable pedagogy and politics (only
distinguished because of the ancient dualisms of our societies) to
work out all their prophetic, utopian, and scientific implications.
The prophetic dimension is as necessary an element of peda-
gogy as it is of revolutionary action. I do not mean some “ani-
mist” projection of a divine plan or a cosmic/historic drama in
which man simply plays the role assigned him. The prophetic
dimension is essential to every attempt to invent the future that
requires more than simple extrapolation from the past and pres-
ent. It must include an element of breaking away, of standing at
a distance from the present model of development, of becoming

aware of man’s transcendence relative to his own history.
The prophets of Israel did not predict the future. Free of any
unconditional acceptance of a given order or the prejudices that
perpetuate it, they looked with insight at the present. They
fought idolatry—that is, respect, worship, or service given to
objects or man-made institutions as if they had absolute value.
Today, we would call that fighting alienation.
The prophetic spirit relativizes all values, forbidding us to
accept as finished, completed, what is finite—that is, created to
meet particular needs—and is thus insufficient in relation to the
infinite. This prophetic dimension of breaking away, which al-
ways starts out as taking the side of the absurd and the impos-
sible, is indispensable to real progress of any kind. The future of
man is never simply the prolongation of his past.
No pedagogy or politics can be liberating without this rela-
tivization of institutions and values that forbids us to uncondi-
tionally accept any established order or to be prematurely satis-
fied with the results of any revolution—for example, by buying
prematurely the illusion that socialism has already been achieved.
Only this prophetic breaking away creates the space needed to
guarantee that the invention of the future is not sterilized by
positivist extrapolation but rather is based on a creatively imag-
ined new course of civilization. This gives the undertaking its
utopian dimension.
The utopian element is necessary for global prediction and
planning, just as it is for pedagogy and revolutionary politics.
A utopia is not born just anytime; only at a turning point of his-
tory.
The birth of capitalism and the sudden broadening of man’s
horizons by the great discoveries during the Renaissance directly
influenced Thomas More to situate his Utopia (1516) in Cuba,
Campanella his City of the Sun (1623) in Peru, and Bacon to
write The New Atlantis.
Utopia grew out of the analysis of a social crisis. At the begin-
ning of his book, More gives a penetrating analysis of the trans-

formation of England from an agricultural and feudal country
into an industrial and capitalist country and of the birthpangs of
the new system. Explicitly or implicitly, it is the same with all
utopias. Generally, they are more interesting for what they con-
demn than for what they predict. Often, in fact, they do not pro-
pose any constructive solution for the evils they criticize, and
suggest either a return to the past or a romantic future that is
simply the obverse of the present. ;
The utopias of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies (the period preceding and immediately following the
French Revolution) see the contradictions of triumphant capi-
talism but they cannot attack it in the name of any real historic
force (the working class, for example, was not yet an autonomous
historic force). They invoke religion, morality, nature, or abstract
reason as criteria to condemn the old order and as models on
which to conceive the future.
When utopias are worked out from the viewpoint of emerging
historic forces, they may not propose concrete answers but they
do raise real problems: the quest for a just social order, for an
ideal of the happy and fulfilled life, for a man who is noble and
free,
The last optimistic utopia was created at the end of the nine-
teenth century by William Morris in his News from Nowhere.
An admirer of Marx and afriend of Engels, he portrays a socialist
future in which every man is a creator and a poet.
Today there is a resurgence of the utopian among the young.
In itself this is a perfectly healthy phenomenon whose causes
are easily discernible. The young are opposed to the very princi-
ple of capitalist society, but they also see that the historical
forms that socialism has taken do not correspond to its objectives.
This legitimate reaction of the young was expressed in 1968.
When the students of the Sorbonne wrote on the walls of Paris,
“Power to the imagination,” they were declaring that logic and
extrapolations and combinations of the already known were in-
sufficient to invent the future. Confusedly indeed, but with a

magnificent hope, they were calling for a breakthrough of cre-
ative imagination, for laboratories of the imaginative. Our gov-
ernment, our political parties, and our universities needed them.
The imagination as utopia is not irrationality; nor is it the
chaotic interplay of images. It is the disposition of the spirit to
refuse to be locked into set categories or to conceive the future as
a prolongation or a combination of the elements of the past.
The creative imagination is not content to extrapolate on the
basis of the present; it works to open up as yet unexplored paths
by a process that is the opposite of positivism. It starts from the
goal to be reached and deduces step by step the conditions for
realizing it, the means that are to be used, and the stages to be
passed through.
The fruitfulness of this approach has been demonstrated in
science, morality, and art. The cosmology of Copernicus could
not be deduced from that of Ptolemy, nor could Descartes’ phys-
ics be deduced from that of the Aristotelians, nor Einstein’s from
that of Newton. Cubist painting could not be deduced from the
styles that had held sway since the Renaissance. Neither could
the teaching of Christ be deduced from the Greek conception
of the world. The French Revolution marked a radical break with
the social order of the past and Marx’s socialism was never just
the generalized distribution of capitalist property or bourgeois
democracy. Each was “wholly other” relative to the past—the
negation of the negation. No truly overwhelming change that
inaugurates a new era, in any area whatever, is simply the pro-
jection into the future of already existing truths, values, or rules.
The principal obstacle to the creative imagination is the posi-
tivist, dogmatic, and alienated conception of “data” or “facts” as
eternal and unchangeable realities. Classical perspective, as
worked out by the painters of the Renaissance, is not a natural
and necessary given but merely one convention among others,
one that has been questioned and replaced by other conventions.
Euclid’s geometry is not an eternal structuring of space, as Kant
thought it to be; if it remains on the whole valid for our experi-

ence, it is no longer so in terms of the cosmos or of the atom.
In each epoch, reason itself, as Bachelard has shown, is only a
provisional statement of the accumulated conquests of rationality.
Thus, from science to aesthetics and from morality to politics,
the essential condition for creativity is awareness that what cus-
tom and order have taught us to consider as eternal norms of
knowledge and action are in reality human creations that can be
rejected and replaced in the course of man’s continuous creation
of himself.
To defend the rights of the imagination means fighting all
forms of alienation: positivism, self-defined artistic “realism”
and indeed all political, moral, or religious dogmatisms.
Any exploration into the future worthy of the name begins
with questioning its own postulates. It is the art of discovering
those sometimes almost imperceptible “signs” that announce
fundamental change. It has often been pointed out that twenti-
eth-century science, from relativity to quantum physics, has been
shaken to its very foundations as a result of grasping almost im-
perceptible phenomena: the velocity experiment of Michelson,
the displacement of mercury perihelion, the radioactivity of dead
bodies. So, also, in social life seemingly minor disturbances may
herald profound revolution.
By definition, there can be no sure method for invention. But
imagination and creativity can be stimulated by removing the
obstacles, the prejudices and alienations of positivism and dog-
matism, and even more so by avoiding the pitfall of training only
“specialists.” The essential consideration is initiation to the great
creations of the spirit in every domain, from science to aesthetics.
A sufficiently broad and synthetic view of history and contempo-
rary developments in the sciences and arts makes it possible to
understand the cross-fertilization not only between disciplines
with common boundaries—biology and chemistry, for example—
but also between fields that do not have an obvious relationship.
A particular concept of electronics or an innovative musical form
may possibly suggest structural hypotheses for the manage-

ment of an enterprise.
When the surrealist poets studied the mechanisms of imagina-
tive creation—the suspension of “rational” control in automatic
writing or the use of the “objective accident” through the en-
counter of independent causal series—they anticipated certain
methods of exploration into the future and of all interdisciplinary
research. These enrich the reflection of a researcher by taking
advantage of the unexpected impact of a discovery in some abso-
lutely unrelated field. Cybernetics has made respectable, as a
tool of research and discovery, reasoning by analogy and meta-
phor, which was for so long restricted to poetry.
This does not at all demean the scientific dimension. As Yves
Barel said, prediction and planning for the future are a combina-
tion of utopian imagination and scientific verification. The very
definition of this new science is that the prophetic break becomes
operational, the utopian imagination submits to experimental
verification.
It is important here to avoid a common misunderstanding of
the term “science.” When the philosophers of whom Marx is the
disciple and direct heir use the term—when Fichte, for example,
speaks of the “doctrine of science” or Hegel speaks of the “sci-
ence of logic,” or when Marx himself speaks of “scientific social-
ism”—they do not mean “science” in the positivist sense, as if it
were possible to describe and predict the course of nature or
history without taking account of man and his actions. By “sci-
ence” they mean thought that is aware of its postulates. Thought
that is not aware of the postulates that underlie it is not science
but scientism or positivism.
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx emphasized the “active”
dimension of knowledge. As opposed to the eighteenth-century
French mechanistic materialists, he refused to consider knowl-
edge as a “reflection” of a reality given once and for all. He
viewed knowledge as an act, a project. Twentieth-century epis-
temology has verified this concept.
Science that is in a state of becoming—not completed science,

already organized into manuals—does not proceed from com-
pleted “facts” to laws with which to organize the facts and then
on to theories with which to systematize the laws. As Bachelard
has shown, science proceeds in the opposite manner. It never
begins with a “given” and an apprehension of that “given” but
with an act that implies initiative, risk, and assumptions. It deals
with the so-called “given” with hypotheses, theories, and models
that experimentation may either destroy or provisionally confirm.
From preliminary gropings to experimental tests, it builds its
facts and laws, until it is forced to undo them and rebuild them
according to another model. This continues in an endless dialec-
tic.
Changing the structures, methods, and content of education is
an integral part of the cultural revolution, crucial to its basic
objectives. Preparation for a socialism of self-management de-
mands the elimination of dualism in education as everywhere
else. It requires ending the dualist structures of the school that
perpetuate all other dualisms, especially the opposition between
manual and intellectual work that is so intimately connected with
the dualism between rulers and subjects. This is one of the major
problems of the cultural revolution.
In general, we view manual work as manipulating things and
intellectual work as manipulating people, or things through
people.
In Durkheim’s study of the evolution of pedagogy in France,
he noted that classical education has been emphasized at the
expense of the physical sciences.
The primacy accorded the manipulation of individuals is ex-
pressed brutally in the hierarchy of the firm. Giving orders is
much better compensated than technical competence. If a worker
becomes a shop supervisor, his salary is significantly increased,
not because he has mastered a superior skill but because he has
acquired the power of coercion. In its simplest form, this is the
prototype of the notions of social hierarchy that a cultural revo-

lution must see as its number-one enemy.
The full implications of changing the structures of education
become clear only in this context. In a highly developed society,
where the number of “intellectuals” (in the broadest sense of
the word) is large, the problem cannot be resolved simply by
sending them periodically to work in the fields or factories, as in
China.
To suppress the dualism between intellectual and manual
work, school and real life, hierarchy and technique, requires a
radical transformation of the school and university system. The
goal is not simply educational reform. It is cultural revolution.
In a society whose major obligation is to evaluate and regulate
the dizzying changes taking place, the notion of any kind of cre-
dential acquired once and for all at the beginning of life is out-
moded. Permanent education must be more than a lengthening
of the years spent in school. The whole system has to be re-
thought and restructured in terms of the new need for educa-
tion that recurs throughout an entire lifetime.
If our aim is to combat the dualisms that cause alienation and
to prepare every person to determine his own goals and to man-
age his life in society for himself, the school cannot be either a
culture museum, proposing models from the past, or a culture
machine, manufacturing the production specialists needed for the
short run. The purpose of education is to form persons able not
only to keep society functioning but to renew all the forms of
social life and activity. Its aim is to form “complete human be-
ings”—responsible creators in a specific sector of production,
capable of reflection on the ends of the whole society, and con-
scious participants in the new course of civilization.
This analysis does not seek to work out a detailed program to
reform education that could then be imparted to society “from
the top” and “from outside” but to pose the problem of the cul-
tural revolution in terms of the conditions of our countries. We
are not trying to patch up the institution but to figure out how
the cards can be redealt by redefining education as we earlier
tried to redefine politics and religion.
No administrative measure or prefabricated program will re-
solve this problem. Of its nature, it demands bold but methodi-
cal experimentation and cooperation among all the interested
parties: teachers, students, high school pupils, parents, unions,
and management, as well as all manual and intellectual workers,
artists, and researchers. This is not a discrete problem; the school
must be integrated into society.
What will the major elements of this change be?
The first step is to reexamine the school as an institution sepa-
rate from the rest of life, one that operates only at the beginning
of one’s lifetime. ;
This reexamination will seem less radical if we recall that the
school as a separate institution, in which specialists in the trans-
mission of knowledge were supposed to prepare individuals for
different social activities in isolated slots in professional life, is a
recent creation, dating from the industrial revolution and the
rise of the bourgeoisie. Until then, except for the “clerk” and the
“elite” formed in church schools, peasant learned from peasant,
soldier from soldier, artisan from artisan. The creation of the
school and its opening to an increasing number of activities and
pupils constitute an important historical victory for the middle
class, like the creation of legislatures and the extension of suf-
frage. In every area, the middle classes have invented new forms
of dualism based on wealth and knowledge to replace the former
dualisms based on birth and the will of God.
The most typical example is technical education. As early as
the first half of the nineteenth century, Auguste Blanqui, in his
book Capital et travail, analyzed the “plan of the professional
schools” and exposed “the fixed idea of incarcerating the worker
in his trade and, by so doing, restoring the caste system.”
Another function of technical education is to perpetuate dual-
ism by turning out the kind of middle ranks that the established
order needs—what have been called “elite rejects.” They will

never advance beyond being workers but they will have a quasi-
professional training and attitude that make them a “working-
class aristocracy,” a corps of noncommissioned officers of indus-
try.
This criminal paradox continues into higher education. There
is a constant lengthening of years spent in study that leads no-
where. It is as if the only aim were to delay as long as possible
the entrance of the young into the workforce and maturity. This
is one way to camouflage the real number of unemployed: force
a mass of youth to remain students by condemning them, as an
Italian labor leader has said, to “unproductive forced labor.”
Campuses thus become a nursery for young people we do not
know what to do with. They, in turn, become exasperated by an
education that is alien to life and by the lack of outlets.
It is increasingly absurd to try to place the entire training pe-
riod of a person at the beginning of his life while the continuous
metamorphosis of our societies—their technology, institutions,
and the fund of knowledge—demands more and more frequent
recycling. Education must be spread over the whole span of
active life. This implies that, as early as possible, the young must
have contact with social life, social reality, with production and
management.
In a society where knowledge will increasingly be the princi-
pal productive force, the primary place to acquire it is where it
is engendered, renewed and developed: in firms, laboratories,
management organizations, centers of research. The functions of
the school, to a large degree, must be apportioned among vari-
ous other sectors of society.
The recurrent movement between practical work and theoreti-
cal work must operate in both directions. For example, it is
indispensable that the working day be shortened and that several
weeks of retraining and culture be organized each year for all
workers. This is both a technical necessity for expansion—and
therefore companies must pay workers for these weeks at the
same rate as for working weeks or apprenticeship training—and

a political necessity as we move toward self-management. Public
monies must be contributed to this training.
So that these periods of study may not become simply a tool
of the owners to prepare personnel for the short-term needs of
business and thus once again mutilate the culture, it is important
that the orientation, management, and execution of this educa-
tion, so intimately connected with every phase of social activity,
be under the tripartite control of the workers, employers, and
educational institutions. This tripartite control will have to deter-
mine the content of the education, which must include technical
retraining, management training and information, and above all
“general culture” as we earlier defined it—a systematic approach
to information, aesthetics, and prediction and planning for the
future. The instruction will also be tripartite: teachers will be
chosen from the engineers or officials of firms, or by them; from
labor organizations, or by them; and from educators, researchers,
scientists, artists.
Naturally, the organization will be set up at the outset along
lines of co-management with the goal of moving toward self-
management ultimately. The school-university system will have
to adapt itself to these new conditions. This is an absolute neces-
sity.
Technical education can play a pilot role here. When tech-
nology is changing at an increasingly rapid rate and tools and
plants become outmoded more and more quickly, is it realistic to
try to artificially recreate in a school the actual conditions of pro-
duction in a factory? Even investments on a par with that of the
entire industrial sector would never close the gap between the
schools and reality. The students would still have to be trained
on outdated machines. It is important that the major part of the
initiation to real work take place ‘in the surroundings where work
takes place. This should be done under the same tripartite con-
trol that we have just described for the training of adults. It
means new tasks and obligations for business, but business will
profit from them in the long run. The same is true for intellec-
tuals, this is the only way they will be kept in contact with real
practice. The additional burdens on the workers, their delegates,
and unions will provide the only path to self-management. It is
the only path to the end of educational compartmentalization
and social segregation. The structures of the schools will have to
be entirely renovated.
The first step should be to delay entrance to primary school by
one year, since learning to read, for example, is much easier at
seven than at six. Besides, this arrangement would make possible
a major development of nursery school and kindergarten, which
are the decisive point of departure for all further education.
Maximum time and opportunity could be accorded all those
activities that give a child facility in self-expression and per-
sonal creativity: dance, music, drawing, bodily expression, man-
ual arts, and so on.
Following that, for nine years, from seven to sixteen, there
would be a single school where the child could go as far as he
chose and make his own options, without getting bogged down
in the many dead ends of which vocational education is the
prime example.
This system also presupposes a single class of teacher, all with
at least four years of higher education, whether they teach in a
nursery school, a secondary school, or a university. It is also un-
derstood that at every level nonuniversity personnel would be
called in—engineers, union leaders, skilled workers, artists, re-
searchers, and so on.
All the students will have to work part-time in one of the
branches of social activity, as is presently the case, albeit not
sufficiently so, in the internship of medical or engineering stu-
dents. In this way we will gradually break down the walls of
the university ghetto and end its artificial separation from every-
day life, which is ultimately so harmful. This will be all the more
effective since the workers will be converging from the opposite

direction, thanks to the shorter workday and the annually re-
curring weeks of retraining and cultural initiation.
Industry will definitely not be handicapped by its new re-
sponsibilities. Highly skilled and cultured workers, conscious of
the aims and management methods of their firms, will be trained
and retrained. Besides, present-day plant and equipment costs
are such that the profitability of a firm is less affected by wages
than by whether plant and equipment are being put to maximum
use.
Finally, in terms of modernizing teaching methods, this system
would provide an opportunity to increase the schools produc-
tivity by making available to them the technological CES
of the most advanced enterprises.
Marrying education with systematized information and pre-
paring computerized teaching of all disciplines that can be so
formalized—teaching languages has so far been the most suc-
cessful example—would achieve an enormous saving of time
and thus provide more opportunity for reflection on the future
objectives of society and for the creative practice of the arts.
Television will play a crucial role. UNESCO surveys tell us
that, in the developed countries, children spend between 500
and 1,000 hours a year before the TV screen, which, if we take
account of school vacations and holidays, represents about the
same amount of time they spend in school. The same surveys re-
veal that children learn from television up to ten years old; after
thirteen, only backward children continue to benefit from tele-
vision. This means that the average TV program is on the intel-
lectual level of an eleven- or twelve-year-old.
At present, television presents no “open window on the world”
but a false and mediocre image of life. By sixteen years old, our
young television watcher has witnessed, for example, between
6,000 and 7,000 murders. Massive airing of stereotyped behavior
is organized by conscienceless and irresponsible producers, the
so-called “responsible” managers of television. Producers and
productions that battle for humanized television are usually

forced out of the field.
At present, television poses more problems than it resolves. But
it has the potential to resolve the problems it poses.
It would solve nothing to set up educational or cultural chan-
nels that would broadcast, with little adaptation, a televised ver-
sion of present educational courses. This would only further
manipulate the viewer and exacerbate the dualism between the
teacher and the one passively receiving the teaching. The major
problem is how to create a means of feedback that would make
it possible for the spectator to react and actively participate.
Closed-circuit and cable television systems within a city or
region already make it technically possible for the student-viewer
to ask questions and for the one giving the demonstration to in-
terrupt his broadcast to answer. Magnetic tape, which can free
the student from being merely a passive receiver of what is pro-
jected, by giving him the means to become aparticipant in the
discussion and even the producer of the film, may foster a new
kind of creative expression, radically different from the verbal,
verbose lectures of the past.
But fundamental renewal will not come from modernization of
the techniques of teaching. It will come only from a change of
structures, methods, and content. It will come from the cultural
revolution we have been discussing, the change of institutions
and consciousness that will enable all to participate autono-
mously in working for shared goals and in social self-direction on
every level—economics, politics, culture.
These are the major dimensions of a revolution for today.
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À Revolution for Today?
1. Who Will Carry It Out? The New Historic Bloc
A revolution whose objective is a socialism of self-manage-

ment, not just a simple transfer of power that perpetuates the
dualism between rulers and ruled under new forms, must see to
it that the means do not contradict the ends. The revolution must
be majoritarian, that is, consciously willed by the majority of a
nation.
This does not mean that such a revolution excludes a priori
all violence but simply that it need not include violence. It can-
not be based on just any chance surprise move whereby a mi-
nority grasps power in the midst of a crisis. However, if the
majority within a nation were committed to achieving self-
directive socialism and a minority attempted to perpetuate or
restore its privileges through force of arms or foreign interven-
tion (as has happened in many counterrevolutions of the past),
there would be a strict duty to repress such an attempt. The
means to be used could not exclude violence under pain of be-
traying the future. We cannot say in advance that such a revolu-
tion would be peaceful because that would not depend on us
but on those who would oppose society’s choice. We can say that
we will not begin the violence; this kind of revolution does not
need violence to succeed. It would only have recourse to violence

to defend itself against the armed aggression of a minority op-
posed to the conscious choice of the majority.
To say that this revolution must be the will of the majority—or
else deny its very principles—is not to say that it must use par-
liamentary means. Democratic legislative bodies long ago ceased
to be the primary instruments of power and therefore cannot be
the determining instrument of revolution or radical change.
Sticking simply to the question of who will carry out this revo-
lution, and taking for granted that the move to self-management
must itself be “self-managed,” we must ask what social groups
will form the foundation of this majority.
The new historic bloc that will usher in the revolutionary
future is not any presently existing “populist alliance.” Such an
alliance can put together an electoral coalition by combining
promises to all those groups with grievances (even when they
contradict each other) against the capitalist monopolies: the
workers, or small farmers, or small shopkeepers crushed by the
“giants.”
The grievances and demands of these various groups contra-
dict each other. The demands of the traditional middle classes—
small farm owners, artisans, shopkeepers—are based on nostalgia
for a preindustrial, liberal capitalism. Such a turning back is a
historical impossibility. On the other hand, the grievances and
demands of the workers, technicians, and a great many intellec-
tuals are based on the anomalous nature of present-day capi-
talism, on the fact that we have moved to a social organization in
which the essential productive force is less land or machines
than knowledge. It has become increasingly unbearable and de-
structive to allow this knowledge to be directed and exploited by
capitalist owners.
Such a “populist alliance” cannot lead to revolution or historic
change but only to an illegitimate electoral coalition. If these
contradictory promises win at the polls, there are three possible
scenarios:
A REVOLUTION FOR TODAY? 123
= either the coalition will break up because the factions that

objectively belong, even precariously, with the bourgeoisie
will desert the alliance and join the opposite side, as hap-
pened in France to the Popular Front in 1938 and to the
three-party coalition right after the Liberation;
" or, after a time, practical experience will reveal the inher-
ent contradictions and the objective impotence of the coali-
tion. In reality, it is impossible to fulfill all the promises that
would have to be made. It would be impossible to finance
them. The melding of contradictory options makes it impos-
sible to construct a viable system. In this case, there will be
such disorder and such enormous deception that a fascist
coup d état will be entirely possible;
= or, finally, and this is the least likely possibility, sufficient
control over the governmental apparatus will have been at-
tained that it will be possible to turn against those allies who
made the electoral majority possible and a coherent system
will be constructed in opposition to them, following one of
the dualist models of which the past supplies so many exam-
ples.
Whichever hypothesis one chooses, the populist alliance, pro-

gram, and strategy will never lead to socialism.
This does not mean that we can stand by while the middle
classes are crushed by the giant corporations. But it is dishonest
to promise to defend them effectively and to maintain them in
their present situation. No one can honestly promise to maintain
economic activities condemned to disappear not only by monopo-
listic capitalism but by the technical development of production
and exchange. It is pure demagoguery to promise to maintain
the small farmer on his plot of land or the shopkeeper in his
small business. The real problem—and the only real solution—for
these middle classes in historical decline is to figure out how to
reconvert them, how to integrate them into the new economy and
the new society. It is dishonest simply to keep a hold on this con-
stituency, to lead them to believe it possible to continue to spend

millions in subsidies and various kinds of aid to prolong the
agony of enterprises that are no longer viable. These millions
should be used to assist these groups to change, to utilize their
experience, knowledge, and initiative in the expanding sectors of
national activity. Even if the necessary retraining, long-term re-
cycling, and stipends spent to teach them other professions cost
as much as or more than the old subsidies, this will be prepara-
tion for the future instead of an obstacle placed in its path.
The notion of a “new historic bloc” differs radically from the
“populist alliance.” It is no longer a matter of compromises
among parties or heterogeneous social groups to achieve an elec-
toral coalition, a legislative majority, or a governmental mandate
but of defining those forces potentially capable of achieving a
radical historical change.
Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Communist theoretician and
militant who forged the concept of the “new historic bloc,” dis-
tinguished three elements within it. They can orient our analysis
in the right direction, even though we are working under con-
ditions profoundly different from Italy during the 1920s. In using
Gramsci, Marx, Lenin, or Mao as points of reference, we cannot
repeat their formulas in the name of an “orthodoxy” whose real
name is dogmatism. Our task is to utilize their methods and do,
for our countries and time, what they did for theirs. We must
extend their analyses by rethinking them in today’s radically new
conditions and reflect on their experiences while making all the
necessary transpositions.
Gramsci always connected the notion of “historic bloc” with a
polemical argument against outdated schemas of social analysis
and against mechanistic conceptions of historic materialism that
lead to a denial or underestimation of the role of “political initia-
tive.”
In each period, the definition of the historic bloc demands:
1. A future-oriented, scientific analysis of the new relations
between the “base and the superstructure” and, as Gramsci
said in his Notes on Machiavelli, of the new form of “unity

between nature and spirit.”
2. A corresponding analysis of the classes and social groups
that “must be absorbed in order to put together without in-
ternal compromise the new, homogeneous economic and
political historic bloc,” which alone is capable of carrying
out an authentic revolution.
3. “The adequate initiative” that will make this bloc aware
of its unity and its power to achieve a new future.
This concept is important, first, because it demands that we

shed outdated social schemas and foreign models, as if a late-
twentieth-century revolution had only to resolve the contradic-
tions of nineteenth-century capitalism or of early-twentieth-cen-
tury underdeveloped countries like Russia. Second, it is important
because it makes it possible to set up not a provisional, con-
tingent, tactical coalition but an alliance objectively built on a
new relation between a society’s economic base and its political
superstructures.
The French Revolution of 1789 is an illustration of this con-
cept. Before 1789, the bourgeoisie already controlled the emerg-
ing economic forces: industry, commerce, and banking. Its revo-
lution formed a “new historic bloc,” both by creating political
superstructures that corresponded to the new economic base
rather than to the old structures of feudal landed property, and
by forming alliances capable of breaking the old superstructures
and creating new ones. The bourgeoisie allied themselves with
the peasantry to abolish the vestiges of the feudal regime and
with the urban artisans and workers crushed by the old system.
The revolutionary alliance split when a faction of the bourgeoisie
ceased to defend the common causes that had cemented the
bloc. This particularism led to a real break and, ultimately, to the
monarchical restorations. When the bourgeoisie again wanted
political power in 1830, they did not establish a real historic
bloc but rather a deceitful coalition with the workers of Paris
that achieved the “Three Glorious Weeks.” Immediately, they

turned against the workers and their own ambitions. This illus-
trates briefly the difference between an objective historic bloc
built on a shared historic aim and an intrinsically deceitful coali-
tion among forces with fundamentally divergent interests and
aspirations.
How are we to frame the problem of the new historic bloc in
today’s circumstances?
The phenomenon that has basically changed the relation be-
tween “the base and the superstructure” is the integration of
science into the resources of production. This forces us to re-
think some of the fundamental categories of Marxist analysis.
Rosa Luxemburg was the first to see that the growth of tech-
nology and science “unbalanced” the economic schemas of Marx’s
Capital, particularly because of the constant increase in produc-
tivity that resulted from the development of technology, that is,
from the insertion of intellectual labor into machines. The limi-
tations of Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis are due to the historic limi-
tations of the capitalism of her day. But the emphasis that she
places on the subversive character of the technological phenome-
non in terms of what Capital calls “expanded reproduction”
(what we call growth) points the reflections of Marxist econo-
mists in the direction already broached in Marx’s Critique of the
Political Economy. This approach enables those who wish to
employ Marx’s basic method to refine their own analysis and
methodology and to develop their Marxism creatively by eco-
nomic analysis that takes into account the profound contempo-
rary changes in the forces of production.
The modern transformation of the forces of production and the
scientific and technological revolution of our time gradually
force us to revise the theories of value, increased yield, produc-
tive labor, and exploitation. This necessarily leads to a revised
analysis of class relations, the class struggle, the strategy and
tactics of a socialist revolution, and the very conception of the
model of achievable socialism.
It is absolutely necessary to radically rethink the concept of

exploitation. Marx—and this theme was energetically taken up
by Rosa Luxemburg in her work on “capitalist accumulation”—
never said that the exploitation of the working class was simply
that their wages were low and their standard of living wretched
but, much more importantly, that the increase of social wealth—
the result of the manual and intellectual labor of all workers—
takes the form, in a capitalist regime, of private property.
But today, with the tremendous development of science and
technology in production, this fundamental aspect of exploita-
tion is even more striking. We are not dealing simply with the
direct exploitation of an individual worker but with the private
expropriation of the collective work of the entire society.
This fundamental remark had already been made by Marx in
Capital but only “in passing,” that is, without the economic
analysis that such a proposition demands. More than a hundred
years ago, this phenomenon was not sufficiently significant to
exert a determining influence on economic analysis.
“There is a distinction to be made,” Marx wrote, “between gen-
eral work and collective work. Both have their role in produc-
tion, and they are reciprocally dependent, but they also have
their differences. General work is the totality of scientific work,
all the discoveries, the inventions. It depends partly on the co-
operation of those now living, partly on the utilization of the
work of our forebears. Collective work supposes the direct coop-
eration of individuals” (Capital, Vol. 6).
This raises a fundamental theoretical problem: What is the
contemporary role of science in increased productivity, since
invention is no longer predominantly the work of former genera-
tions but of living researchers?
For Marx, the value of a piece of merchandise was to be
measured by the amount of working time socially necessary to
produce it. Capitalism’s market economy, in which labor has
become a commodity, explains the creation of increased yield
by the fact that a wage earner creates more “value” (in the
thing produced) than is necessary to sustain and reproduce his

ability to work. His wage enables him to feed, clothe, and shelter
himself, raise his children, and so on. It follows from this that
only “living work” produces increased yield; the machines “dead
work” only transmits in the form of amortization the value that
is “crystallized” in it.
Because of the growing role science plays in production, the
problem today is to know whether it only operates as “dead
work,” crystallized in machines, or whether it operates as “living
work” in the same way as the labor of the worker.
For many scientific workers, Marx has already answered the
question: “Manual work and intellectual work are indissolubly
joined. . . . From the moment that the individual product is
transformed into a social product, i.e., the product of a collective
worker, the various members of whom participate to different
degrees—more or less immediately, or even not at all—in the
manipulation of matter, the definitions of productive work and of
theproductive worker must necessarily be broadened. . . . To be
productive, it is no longer necessary to set one’s own hand to the
work; it is enough to be a part of the collective worker” (Capital,
Vol. 2).
In the final volume of Capital he added: “These workers [un-
skilled laborers, blue-collar workers, engineers who work pri-
marily with their brains, etc.] as collective producers form one
living machine. If we consider the entire process of production,
they reproduce the capitalist’s money as capital. . . . Relative to
capital each is a wage-earner, a productive worker in the spe-
cific sense of the word.”
Today, the role of intellectual work in production is far
greater than it was in Marx’s time, as indicated by the enormous
scientific and technological investments of the most advanced
industries. For example, in certain oil refineries, an entirely auto-
mated unit worth millions functions with as few as six workers.
Is it still possible to measure the increased yield thus realized
exclusively on the basis of the “living” work of these six workers?
This is not an exception but rather a quite typical example.

Levinson (Capital, Inflation and Multinationals, 1971: London),
the secretary of the International Federation of Chemical Work-
ers, shows that 65 percent of the corporate investments in the
Western world are for “rationalization” and technical innovation.
The role of scientific research and technical creation in the
enlarged reproduction of capital today has grown so important
that it profoundly modifies Marx’s initial model of the formation
of value and increased yield. Marx himself foresaw this impor-
tant change. At the same time that he was working out his theory
of value, based on the notion of the working time socially neces-
sary to produce a piece of merchandise, he defined (Critique of
_ the Political Economy, Vol. 2) the historic moment when this
theory of value would no longer be applicable: “To the degree
that large industry develops, the creation of wealth depends less
and less on the duration of working time and the quantity of
labor utilized and more and more on the power of the mechani-
cal agents set in action during the time of work. The enormous
efficiency of these agents has no relation to the work immedi-
ately involved in their productivity. It depends rather on the
level of science and technological progress, or rather on the ap-
plication of this science to production. . . . With this drastic
change, neither the duration of the utilized labor nor the direct
work carried out by the individual worker is the principal basis
of production and wealth. . . . When direct labor has ceased to
be the principal source of wealth, the duration of work ceases
and must cease to be the measure of wealth, and exchange value
ceases to be the measure of use value.”
Taking up the analysis at the point where Marx left it, we
must ask in our turn whether, at the present level of scientific
and technical input into production, we have not reached the
point where the distinction between “dead work” and “living
work” and, consequently, between absolute increased yield (ex-
tracted from living work) and relative increased yield (made
possible by technical progress) has become a pointless exercise.
When Marx distinguished “general work,” that is, “all scien-

tific work, discoveries, inventions” from “the collective work of
living men,” he added, “The two categories have their place in
the process of production; they are mutually dependent.”
In today’s capitalism, this thesis of Marx finds the verification
that it could not have in his time. If Marx could say then that
“The general [scientific] work . . . depends partly on cooperation
with living men, partly on the utilization of the work of our fore-
bears,” this distinction (at a time when a UNESCO report points
out that 90 percent of the scientists who have ever lived are
now alive) becomes so slight that almost all “general” (scientific)
work is an integral part of “collective” (living) work.
As Serge Moscovici pointed out in his study “The Human His-
tory of Nature,” the development of productive forces, since the
Renaissance and the beginning of capitalism, cannot be traced
on a continuous straight line. The increase of productivity and
the shortening of the duration of human work express a deeper
historical development. A qualitative change has taken place. A
new dimension of human work has emerged now that the
basic worker is no longer the engineer directly involved in pro-
duction but the scientist and researcher.
How does the development of contemporary capitalism con-
ceal this phenomenon? In the nineteenth and during the first half
of the twentieth century, science and technical innovation were
essentially concentrated in the production of the means of pro-
duction (the primary sector), particularly in creating machines,
such as the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combus-
tion engine. But after what Galbraith calls the “reversal of the
current” took place, that is, when producers were no longer gov-
erned by market demand but manipulate the market in order to
create new needs or new ways to satisfy existing needs, research
and the creation of new consumer goods became the moving
force and the essential condition behind the enlargement of
capitalist production. Because of the constant innovation de-
manded of it, the massive scientific and technical input into the
secondary sector (the production of consumer goods) assumed
such importance that it profoundly modified the cycle of capi-
talist development. Marx’s classic analysis of economic “crises”
(completely valid until the great crisis of 1929) stressed devel-
opmental contrast between the two sectors. This is another point
on which his schema must be rethought unless we wish to con-
tinue repeating that “the crisis of capitalism is becoming more
and more acute” without seeing that the crisis has taken on a new
form that is no longer purely economic.
For the moment, the point is only that a new problem is posed
by this new role of technical innovation in the production of con-
sumer goods. This must not hide from us an even more impor-
tant phenomenon: It is increasingly clear that the technicians
and researchers doing studies or working in applied research
laboratories are part of the “collective worker,” that they perform
“living labor” and directly create increased yield.
Over and above such applied research, on the level of basic
research, where science is not directly involved in production but
in conceiving and developing new forms of production, the role
of science is less immediately apparent. Is it, on this level also,
“living labor” that creates increased yield?
The question is further complicated by the fact that this work
is not generally carried out by the corporations. The cost of basic
‘research is so enormous, the investment so risky and only amor-
tizable over the long haul, that the industrial firms—except for a
few giants in advanced fields—avoid taking such risks.
Essentially, it is the State that takes responsibility for these
investments and risks. Thus, the creation of increased yield takes
on a new political dimension. By adding its activities to a pro-
duction cycle overwhelmed by the radical change in the ele-
ments of production, the State contributes to the formation of a
new increased yield, especially by making scientific and technical
investments. In this way, the phenomenon of the enlarged repro-
duction of capital—growth—moves further and further beyond

the classical, purely economic, categories of market, value, and
increased yield.
Today it is as if science, having become an authentic element
of production, had carried out “a subversion of the famous di-
vision that separated department number one, the production of
the means of production, from department number two, the
production of consumer goods.” The scientific and technical sec-
tor of the economy has taken “the place of heavy industry in a
new social distribution of tasks, for it is the laboratory where
new productive forces are prepared.”*
Continuous scientific input and generalized innovation con-
stantly nourish the entire economy. Marx himself began to ana-
lyze this new phenomenon that “upsets” his schemas when he
wrote that the production of wealth “depends much more on
the level of science and on the progress of technology, or rather
on the application of this science to production . . .”
Indeed, “the application of this science to production” or “the
power of the mechanical agents put to work during the time
of work” is an activity of the “collective worker.” At this stage
of production value and absolute increased yield are created;
the members of the collective worker “reproduce the capitalist’s
money as capital,” wrote Marx.
But if one integrates into the production of this wealth the
“level of science and of technological progress,” it is difficult to
argue that only “the application of science” by the members of
the collective worker produces absolute increased yield, while
the invention of this science would be “dead work,” an obstacle
to increased profits because it constantly increased the organic
composition of capital.
What is taking place in fact implies that investment in the
complex (intellectual) working force is an increasingly impor-
tant condition for the creation of wealth. The complex work of
* Serge Moscovici, article in L’homme et la société, July-August-Septem-
ber 1969, p. 86.
the modern scientific worker, either utilizing technology and

making it operative (as a follow-up) or inventing it (as a
source), constitutes a new opportunity for the growth of the
contemporary capitalist system.
Starting from “a tendency toward absolute development of the
forces of production, and taking no account of value and in-
creased yield” (Capital, Vol. 6), one could not today conclude
that the law of the downward tendency of the profit rate will
grow more critical almost automatically. Nor could one continue
to consider science as “dead work” that only increases the or-
ganic composition of work.
For over twenty years, the economists of the Cambridge school
have analyzed the connections between the evaluation of capital
and the profit rate.* Here is something to awaken a Marxist from
his dogmatic slumbers. It appears that increasing the organic
composition of capital (the ratio of machines to men) may not
affect the rate of profits. Marx’s schema about the downward
trend of profit rates is thus directly questioned.
The integration of science, research activity, and invention into
production today has reached the point where this form of work
can no longer be included within the notion in Marx's initial
schema of “dead work” that only “transmits” value without cre-
ating it and, consequently, does not contribute to the formation
of increased yield. This is the principal reason why contemporary
capitalism differs substantially from the theoretical model set
up by Marx a century ago, at an earlier stage of development.
The future of the system cannot be predicted on the basis of that
model.
To give an example: the fundamental contradictions of capi-
talism embodied, as Marx showed, in the development of pro-
ductive forces can no longer be reduced to purely economic
contradictions. The law of the downward trend of the rate of
profit by itself no longer condemns the entire system to death.
* See especially Joan Robinson, “The Relevance of Economic Theory,”
Monthly Review, January 1971.
The political intervention of the State, largely occasioned by

the integration of science and research into production, with the
increasing importance of long-term investments beyond the
means of most corporations, has brought forth new, even more
profound, contradictions that are not purely economic:
= The contradiction between the possibilities made available
by technical progress and the waste or destruction of these
possibilities by a system lacking any other purpose than its
own economic development, with no concern for human
development.
= The contradiction between the satisfaction of even the
most artificial needs of the privileged and the failure to
satisfy social needs.
= The contradiction due to the increasing complexity of the
scientific organization of corporations: effective management
is increasingly separate from ownership of the means of pro-
duction, even while the parasitic privileges attached to own-
ership continue in force.
= The nascent contradiction between the increasing de-
pendence of technical progress on the culture and initiative
of a growing number of workers and the unconditional
obedience to the individual or collective owner of the means
of production that continues to be demanded of them.
® Finally, the contradiction from which all the others follow:
While the scientific and technical revolution increasingly
makes knowledge and creativity the decisive forces in pro-
duction, this knowledge and creation, which represent the
labor and genius of all mankind—not only the collective work
of society throughout its history but today essentially the
living work and creation of all workers, manual and intel-
lectual—is being appropriated by the giant monopolies with
the connivance of the State.
This fundamental contradiction is the objective base of the

new historic bloc of workers who, far from flourishing on the
margins of the modern productive process, are its living tissue.

Their becoming aware of themselves and of their situation will
herald the most important human victory ever.
All the hesitations and confusions regarding this new historic
bloc are rooted in the lack of an analysis of the overwhelming
impact that the dizzying development of the forces of production
due to the scientific and technical revolution has had during the
second half of the twentieth century.
Simply to evoke this revolution and not follow out its reper-
cussions throughout the economic and social system, that is, to
minimize the role of the development of the forces of production
and only see the relationships within production, leaves one
necessarily a captive of the concepts of the last century. If one
declares that “the limits between productive and unproductive
workers appear less rigid” and asks whether a particular worker
is “more or less connected . . . with productive work,” one poses
a false problem. One has failed to analyze the new dimensions
of the act of human work. The same is true if one attempts to
separate engineers and technicians from the working class and
sees them as the only possible agents of a revolution from which
the working class would be disqualified.
The engineer’s situation is full of contradictions. Professionally,
he is both a wage earner and often a manager, relaying the own-
ers’ authority to his subordinates and, by that very fact, in con-
flict with them. His personal status is likewise complex. His living
standards, his culture and education, his personal and family
relationships very often move him closer to the way of life of the
bourgeoisie than to that of the proletariat. This means that he
experiences capitalist exploitation and alienation differently from
the working class. Although grievances about salary, working
hours, retirement and job security concern him, they do not have
the same immediate urgency as for blue-collar workers, especially
those on the bottom of the economic scale, who are excluded
from consumption.
On the other hand, the rapid numerical increase of such engi-
neers has moved most of them further and further from the cen-
ters of decision making (the ownership or general management).
While they have to be consulted about the means of maximizing
production, they are not consulted about the ends pursued by the
firm. Their experience of capitalist alienation is not being ex-
cluded from consumption but being excluded from decision
making.
They sense the contradictions between two kinds of rationality.
They are subject to the capitalist rationality that subordinates
technology to its own ends: profit for some and blind growth.
With such an end in view, rationality means producing what is
most profitable and then creating, through conditioning, manipu-
lation, and advertising, artificial needs to move the products.
They also have a concept of a rationality that is properly tech-
nical and human. This would direct technology toward the satis-
faction of the needs of all and toward growth that would foster
the betterment of the individual and all men by placing a pri-
ority on collective needs in culture, health, the environment, and
sO on.
There is a movement afoot among an increasing number of
such workers not to share the owners’ allergy toward unions and
to form unions of their own. This move goes beyond engineers,
salaried employees, and technicians and is reaching teachers and
government officials, who tend, in the way they organize and
conduct their struggle, to move closer to the workers and their
unions.
To raise the problem of the historic bloc is not, consequently,
to identify intellectuals with the working class. It means pri-
marily that we do not make the mistake of seeing the connection
between the traditional working class and intellectuals in the
same light as the relation between the working class and farmers
or between the working class and the lower middle class. The
basic reason is that, except for professionals who are often self-
employed, most intellectuals are not part of the management
class.
They do not own the means of production; they produce in-

creased yield for those who do own them. More importantly, as
opposed to the traditional middle classes, which are in decline to
the degree that science and technology develop, these intellec-
tuals are not survivors of the past. On the contrary, scientific and
technical progress creates them, not capitalist production but the
development of productive forces. Their numbers increase at a
dizzying rate under all economic and social regimes.
This does not mean that one can integrate intellectuals en bloc
into the working class—not only for the sociological reasons
we have mentioned but also because, in the headquarters of
the economy—the corporate general managements—high-ranking
technocrats are members of the ruling class. But an increasing
number of intellectuals who participate in the enlarged repro-
duction of capital tend also to participate in the creation of in-
creased yield.
The groups who apply the new forms of wealth to production
(formerly land, later capital, today, increasingly, knowledge, sci-
entific training, and information) form, with the working class,
the new historic bloc. This class is also changing because, in
order to master the new technology, general culture has become
a more and more important part of professional skill.
Nowadays, as Marx predicted, manual work is less and less
productive. In rethinking the theory of value (and all its conse-
quences) will “orthodox” Marxists continue to be so desperately
turned toward the past that they will talk as if, in a completely
automatized plant, the “dispatcher” makes the whole thing work?
Will they try to measure value by the working time socially
necessary to press a button?
Even if they do, development will continue without them. The
forces that will introduce the future will not be a populist alliance
formed by political compromise but, following the example of the
Spanish Communist Party, a union between the forces of labor
and culture. The problem of unity will have a solid theoretical
base. It will mean unity among all the forces who are developing
along with the economy itself and who have reasons in common
for destroying the capitalist structure.
If we move now from theoretical analysis to concrete reality,
‘ we can ascertain that statistics verify our working hypotheses.
Between 1921 and 1968, the proportion of farmers in France
declined from 45 percent to 15 percent of the active population.
In developed countries, this trend is irreversible. France is actu-
ally behind. In West Germany, farmers comprise only 14 percent,
and in the United States they are only 7 percent, of the work-
force.
Overall, the working class (except for miners and textile work-
ers whose numerical decrease since 1954 has been as rapid as
that of farmers) remains stable. From 1962 to 1968, the number
of workers rose, in France, from 7,060,000 to 7,688,000, an in-
crease of 9 percent, slightly less than the increase in the general
population. Workers currently represent 37 percent of the active
population and, according to the most likely predictions, the
proportion will be about the same in 1980.
The numerical increase of skilled workers is dizzying: using
an index of 100 for 1954, technicians and draftsmen moved to
275 in 1968, with a projection of 500 for 1980. In the same period,
engineers went from 100 to 170; teachers, from 100 to 200. From
1962 to 1968, high-level administrative staff rose from 766,000 to
993,000; middle-level staff, from 1.5 million to 2 million. There
were 172,000 students in 1962, 558,000 in 1967, and almost
700,000 today.
To sum up (leaving aside students), for every 100 Frenchmen
today, there are 37 workers, 19 salaried intellectuals, 18 employees
in the “tertiary” (service) sector, 14 farmers, 8 artisans and mer-
chants, and 4 miscellaneous (professionals, managers, and so on).
These trends are similar throughout the developed world.
Only the first three categories show no decline; the second and
third are expanding rapidly. At present, the first three include
almost three-quarters of the active population. They represent, in
essence, the potential components of the new historic bloc. The
problem now is to ensure their recognition of the basic aspirations

and interests that unite them and of the historic role that is theirs:
to accelerate the radical social, political, and cultural changes
that will make it possible to direct to the service of man the
gigantic productive forces available to us. The “subjective” ele-
ment of the revolution now plays a decisive role—cultural, eco-
nomic, and political revolution can only be accomplished by the
new historic bloc.
Failure to recognize the existence and development of the ob-
jective bases of this new historic bloc—and the consequent failure
to contribute to its recognition of the decisive role it must play to
bring about historic change and revolution—will deprive socialism
of any real future.
2. How Will Today’s Revolution Be Carried Out?

From Workers’ Councils to the National Strike
What is the right method for achieving socialism of self-

management? To determine intermediate objectives, the various
intervening stages must be clearly defined. Therefore, let us work
backward, beginning with the end.
1. Self-direction is, by definition, impossible under capital-
ism. However, it is a model of socialism that differs radically
from Soviet bureaucratic centralism.
2. How will the break, that is, the passage from capitalism to
socialism, take place? By storming the Bastille or the Winter
Palace, as advocated by today’s proponents of “revolution at
the point of a gun”? Through the electoral victory of a coali-
tion of the left with a program of broadened democratic
liberties that opens the way to socialism, as proposed by
those who cannot imagine working outside the democratic
process? Or will the manual and intellectual workers decide
to do something other than delegate their authority either to
an activist minority leading an armed struggle in their name
or to professional political leaders who promise to bring them

democracy and socialism and ask only to be elected—and they
will do the rest?
Without ruling out political education, electoral victory,
or the eventual necessity of violent response to the armed
aggression of the minority trying to regain its privileges by
force, the basic action must take place where the worker has
real power. Not in the streets, where he has, at best, infinitely
fewer weapons than the forces of repression. Nor in the
voting booth, where he is given the illusion of being a citizen
one day every couple of years when he delivers a blank
check to a political representative to think and make de-
cisions in his name.
The principal battle must take place where the worker. has
the real power to halt production in an enterprise, a govern-
mental administration, or a laboratory. It will be successful
if he coordinates his efforts with other categories of workers
and thus forces the companies, universities, civil services,
and research centers to operate, not according to the norms
of the owners and the government bureaucracy, but accord-
ing to norms that move toward what we have defined as self-
management. This is the route of the national strike.
3. But a national strike that marks a qualitative change in
the struggle (a May 1968 that would be successful this time)
demands careful preparation. Lack of preparation—not
simply the wild gestures of a few and the bankruptcy of the
political parties—led to the failure of May-June 1968.
For a national strike to be successful the “historic bloc” must

be aware of itself and of its role. In each firm or unit of work
there must be created the conditions needed for mobilization and
for the personal involvement of each individual. The workers,
manual or intellectual, must not be content to delegate authority
and power to.a leader but must consider themselves responsible
for the work of the workers’ council that will be the prime mover
of the second stage, the general strike. After victory it will be

responsible for self-management.
These are the three essential elements of this route toward
socialism of self-management.
«= The creation of new forms of daily struggle against capital-
ism and the articulation of the demands that will pave the
way for the formation of workers’ councils.
= Preparation of the conditions for a successful national
strike when the movement is sufficiently mature.
« All these preparatory phases must be oriented, in methods
and means, toward the goal that gives them meaning: social-
ism of self-management.
A. The Preparatory Stage: Toward Workers’ Councils
The essential task is to structure the working class and the

new historic bloc in the workplace and not to delegate political
tasks to a specifically political outside organization. The dualism
that separates the “political sphere” from daily work must be
abolished. The political dimension—the organization of the entire
network of social relations—begins with the organization of work
in the enterprise; otherwise, it becomes an isolated, autonomous
function, exterior and foreign to labor, and leads either to re-
pression or manipulation.
Liberation cannot be “bestowed” or delivered from “outside”
by political parties and the legislature and government that be-
long to them. It will happen in the workplace or not at all.
If the workers accept the autonomy of the political function
they will never control the State. If they do not prepare for future
workers’ councils, they will never control their firms.
This is no easy task; it is not a battle that can be won in ad-
vance. When men have for centuries been directed and manipu-
lated by class regimes, governments, the military, managers,
legislatures, and political parties, it is no simple matter to stimu-
late initiative at the base of society so that every one will partici-
pate actively, effectively, wholeheartedly in the invention and

achievement of the future.
Nevertheless, this is the essential task of our time. That is why
we call for beginning this long march toward a socialism of self-
management, this long march toward the reconquest of hope.
As we showed in our definition of the new historic bloc, the
unity necessary to reach this objective cannot be a populist
alliance. It must come from the self-awareness and united action
of the collective worker, who includes both manual and intel-
lectual workers.
Why cannot this unity be achieved by a coalition of political
parties? The birth of political parties was connected with the
creation of legislatures and parties are structured in their dualist
image. The individual is invited to delegate, and thus alienate,
his power, in the legislature to an elected representative; in the
parties to a leader.
The creation of parliaments marked important historical prog-
ress, the victory over feudalism. In the face of essentially feudal,
highly centralized monarchical power, the bourgeoisie, whose
economic resources were dispersed throughout the country in
competition with each other, succeeded in finding a common
denominator in a parliament that enabled it to fight the feudal
and monarchical Old Regime.
The middle class made the parliament the instrument of its
own aims, at first through the system of registration in which only
the property owner was a citizen, and later, when universal
suffrage became inevitable, through the manipulation of public
opinion. In this way, the representative bodies have been able to
remain for more than a century and a half, in Marx’s expression,
the central administration for the common interests of the bour-
geoisie. Each important element of the bourgeoisie had its own
party, a kind of little parliament. Power relationships were trans-
lated into legislative majorities and governments to express them.
The bourgeoisie maintained a semblance of unity in order to
oppose the return of a feudalism that would contest the new
system of land ownership instituted by the French Revolution and

the “industrial liberties,” so long as this threat remained.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, after the Paris
Commune and the institution of the Third Republic, new prob-
lems appeared. The new threat was the increasing importance of
the working class that could no longer simply be crushed peri-
odically by armed force, as in June 1848 and May 1871, but now
had to be integrated and tamed. On this new front, the parliament
proved itself effective. A large radical party was formed that
ruled French political life for a long time and carried out the
historic tasks of the bourgeoisie: struggle against the vestiges of
the Old Regime and clericalism by the lay laws of Jules Ferry
and Combes; imperialist expansion and colonialism also under
Jules Ferry; protectionism under Méline, and so on.
At the end of the century, the rise of the working class received
direction from the creation of socialist parties that were essen-
tially reformist. Socialism, they believed, could only come into
existence out of the complete development of capitalism. Hence,
the appropriate mission of these parties was to let the system
develop, that is, to become its “loyal managers,” as Léon Blum
was to say later. Thus, at best, these socialist parties—like all
parties in the bourgeois parliaments—acted as pressure groups to
obtain the best possible working conditions for the working class
—shorter work hours, social welfare laws, recognition of broader
union rights—all the while supporting the colonial, imperialist,
and even the war policies of the bourgeoisie. The struggle of
Jaurés against colonialism and war ended with his assassination
in 1914. From then on, the socialist party supported the wars and
colonialism of the regime without reserve, including the invasion
of Suez against Egypt and the Algerian war.
The 1914 war and the October Revolution, in Russia, led to
rebellion against this integration and to the birth, in 1920, in
France, of a new kind of party that was authentically proletarian
and had its roots in the struggle against war. It resolutely
opposed imperialist and colonial undertakings, as demonstrated
by its opposition to the wars in Morocco and Indochina. To the

opportunistic reformism of the socialist parties it opposed a tactic
of “class against class” which temporarily isolated it but alone
enabled it to break with the tendency toward integration into the
system. In solidarity with the first socialist revolution, it adopted
as its primary organizational basis the twenty-one conditions that
Lenin had worked out at the Third International when he
thought that socialism could triumph in a backward country like
Russia only if it were supported by victorious revolutions in
major advanced countries. These revolutions would be possible
only if the proletariat of these countries based its forms of organi-
zation on those of the Bolshevik Party, which had long been
clandestine and had triumphed only through armed struggle.
For over forty years, the French Communist Party tried to
combine two forms of organization: one, a small group of pro-
fessional revolutionaries ready at any moment to go underground,
and the other, an organization geared to a policy that could rally
the entire working class and unite all progressive forces around it.
On both levels, a number of important successes were achieved.
Being, for example, the only party in France able to become a
clandestine organization at any moment enabled the Communist
Party to exercise a crucial role in the resistance to the Nazi occu-
pation. Even more so, the permanent determination of the Party,
under the leadership of Maurice Thorez, to rise to the level of
national leadership produced a generation of heroic’ militants,
animated both by the self-abnegation of the “Party spirit” and by
a desire for national independence that was crucial to the exist-
ence of a revolutionary future.
Quite legitimate prestige accrued to it from the extraordinary
role played by its militant members during the most difficult hours
of the struggle against fascism and from the personal integrity of
its members, who have never been touched by the corruption
traditional in the parliamentary institutions. The Party has re-
mained unbreakable (while all the other groups around it dis-
integrated one by one over a thirty-year period) but impotent.
Its impotence results from the isolation to which it is condemned

because it continues to consider as the only valid socialist model
one that would impose the leadership of the Soviet Union. It has
persisted in this policy, despite the failures of this leadership:
Stalin’s reign of terror and the excommunication of Yugoslavia;
the excommunication of China, the crushing of the uprising in
Hungary, the intervention in Czechoslovakia and its alignment
with the Soviet model through “normalization,” and repression in
Poland; the absence of socialist democracy, indeed of any democ-
racy, and the political repression of culture in the Soviet Union
itself.
So long as the French Communist Party continues to consider
this “normalization” as “normal,” the principal cause of its isola-
tion and impotence will remain. In an effort to break out of this
isolation, it has affirmed again and again that it has no ambitions
except within the framework of the parliamentary system. Its
governmental program mixes traditional elements of the Soviet
model (nationalizations and State ownership, but not self-man-
agement) and traditional elements of bourgeois parliamentarian-
ism (a combination of contradictory promises and demands with
the single purpose of putting together the coalition that is con-
sidered a panacea) without any analysis of the new capitalist
contradictions of our time or of the conditions needed to over-
come them.
The “deadlock” of French politics results from the impotence
of the party in power to resolve the nation’s problems and the
impotence of the opposition parties to offer any credible alterna-
tives.
As long as strategy and tactics are based on the myth of the
“populist alliance,” the most that could be achieved would be a
purely negative majority. No problem can be solved by a “coali-
tion of Nays.” This is even more true if such a “coalition’s” only
instrument is the parliament, which, for a long time, has not had
any power over a State machinery that has become completely
independent.
In any case, Marx and Lenin demonstrated that it contradicts

the very nature of socialism to utilize this State machinery. As for
constructing a substitute on the same dualist lines (as in the
Soviet technobureaucracy), that amounts to perpetuating the old
system, changing only the managing personnel.
This is the basic reason why revolutions that have followed the
classical typology have been unable to create socialism of self-
management.
The new kind of uprising we are trying to conceive cannot be
a systematic struggle against all political parties (such struggles
have always been led by the worst party of all, the fascists).
Neither does it mean a systematic struggle against the Communist
Party; anticommunism has never served anything but reaction.
We do not underestimate, much less deny, that the revolution-
ary struggle must include a political element. But it is necessary
to combat the dualist structures of the political parties. Raising
political consciousness cannot be brought about by substituting
oneself, for the masses and manipulating them by slogans.
Each individual in his own place—whatever party, church, or
union he may belong to, as well as those who belong to no party
or union and are unbelievers—must count himself personally re-
sponsible for creating this new model of democracy within every
group that seeks to build socialism.
The unity of the new historic bloc transcends the old party
divisions. Maurice Thorez, long ago, considered the concepts of
“right” and “left” outdated. The opposition today is between those
who are trying to back into the future and those who are aware
of real movement and try to give it direction.
In contrast to the so-called “populist alliance,” the unity of the
historic bloc, of the “collective worker,” will be formed in the
working place. In accomplishing this, the unions will play a far
more important part than the political parties.
There are already two encouraging signs: The real power
broker now is the unions, more than the parliament, because they
exercise real authority. In addition, it is a sign of the times that
within a few months of each other, the two most representative

union confederations, the CGT and the CFDT, have announced
plans for the move to socialism. Leaving aside their content,
the fact itself has capital importance. It marks the beginning of the
end of another fatal dualism: the radical distinction between the
unions, limited to economic demands, and the parties that attempt
to bring from “outside” purely political solutions to problems that
first appear on the level of work and then develop without any
discontinuity on every level of social life.
It must be clear that, at the end of the twentieth century, the
relation between economics and politics cannot be conceived as
it was at its beginning, At the time of the Charter of Amiens, with
capitalism at a much more primitive stage of evolution, the unions
could still be limited to the struggle within companies for better
terms for the workers’ sale of their labor, while the working-class
parties had the strictly political task of fighting a State that con-
sidered the workforce a commodity.
Today, not only is the State by far the largest employer in
France (through the nationalized corporations and the civil
service) but the interpenetration of the military, the large corpo-
rations and the State is such that every struggle, even simply for
improved wages and hours, is a struggle against the State, a
political struggle. Demands made inastrike are political because,
when they question the authority of the company, they also ques-
tion that of the State. The strikes of 1968 furnished numerous
examples.
The only important consideration is that the unions not base
their methods on the dualist parliamentary model in their nego-
tiations with employers and the State.
Ordinarily, a strike committee includes representatives of all
the unions and also of the nonunionized workers. But when they
return to the daily routine, they revert to the system of delegated
power and matters are handed over to the union leaders. The
problem is to maintain in the daily struggle both the unity of the
unions and the suppression of dualism. The “worker council,” in
its simplest form, means that unity among the unions and be-
tween union and nonunion workers is maintained in daily labor
just as the strike committee maintains it during crises.
For the worker council to play a central role in abolishing the
ancient dualisms, for it to become the instrument by which revolu-
tionary consciousness is not brought from “outside” but emerges
from the struggle, it must be conceived in such a way that it
prepares the workers for heightened consciousness. This demands
two necessary preconditions: (1) unity within the union, which
is the only way to eliminate the intrusion of political parties
attempting to impose political orientations from “outside” (this
will also present the workers with an image of their oneness and
will encourage their desire to achieve it); (2) awareness of the
unity of the collective worker, the historic bloc (this cannot be
created by propaganda or preaching but only by concrete de-
mands that express the future direction of the movement).
What kinds of demands will these be? First of all, there can be
no question of renouncing “quantitative” demands that bear on
wages, work schedules, working hours, vacations, retirement, and
so on. Without continuing struggle for these demands, as Marx
pointed out, the living conditions of the working class would be
so depressed at this point that no further struggle would be
possible.
But these struggles themselves cannot be effective and lead to
lasting victories against capitalism unless we are aware of their
limitations. They are simply defensive. The owners and the State
can always annul the benefits of a wage increase by devaluation,
as happened after the Matignon agreements following the 1936
strikes and after the Grenelle accords following the 1968 strikes.
Besides, even when the union wins the greatest possible victory
in terms of its quantitative demands, as in the General Motors
strikes in the United States, basing wage increases on productivity
can lock the struggle and its results within the system without
threatening its principles at all.
What kinds of demands will contribute to awareness of the

objective: the abolition of capitalism and the creation of socialism
of self-management? We will not try to enumerate them exhaust-
ively but only to indicate a direction and to suggest priorities.
The first condition for any real liberation of the working class,
Marx said, is to shorten the duration of work. To agree to a price
for excessively long work or unhealthy and brutalizing working
conditions is to accept integration.
The second condition is the struggle against the capitalist di-
vision of labor, which results not from technical demands but
from the desire to maintain and increase the authority and control
of the owners. The victory won by the Italian ironworkers of
“Italsider” in 1970 is a good example. They obtained the sup-
pression of cost analysis by working function. This most advanced
form of the “scientific organization of work” serves not technology
but the power of the owners. It also makes it possible to differ-
entiate wages to the point that general demands for large groups
are very difficult to formulate. The division of labor, as it is con-
ceived and practiced in the contemporary capitalist enterprise, is
not a consequence of the development of productive forces. It ex-
presses the will to perpetuate domination, exploitation, and divi-
sion of the working class. Our objective must be to reorganize
work, to restore its specifically human character—its finality and
the elements of personal initiative, thought, and responsibility.
It is likewise important to emphasize a whole group of demands
that bear on the workers’ access to information and training.
After the “hot autumn” of 1969 at Fiat and other companies, the
Italian metalworkers won the right to one hour a month, at full
pay, in the plant and on company time, to be devoted to union
educational programs. This is an exemplary and consequential
victory. When the workers in large plants, who generally live far
from work, leave to go home at quitting time, they leave their
delegates or their union leaders to act as their intermediaries with
management. Gatherings such as those won by the Italian workers
make it possible for each worker to assume his responsibilities, to
participate in decision making, and to begin direct democracy.

Besides, at such gatherings not only do the representatives of
various unions meet (which has greatly advanced labor unity in
Italy) but everyone attends, union and nonunion workers in-
cluded. The objective is to inform and consult with all the workers
on all important questions.
In France in 1968, the workers of some companies won this
right. It would be very important to mount an effective campaign
to generalize it throughout all companies.
À new stage is reached when these assemblies can examine the
books of the company and, consequently, not only gather in-
formation for demands but take a step toward worker control.
The German unions have won this right from the owners.
At a time when recycling and permanent education are becom-
ing a technical necessity for expansion and when general culture
plays an increasingly important role in professional qualification,
it is important to study a basic demand: a month of recycling and
cultural formation every year, over and above vacations and paid
for by the owners at the same rate as daily work. The purpose
will be not only to acquire the new skills demanded by technical
progress but also to acquire the general culture that will make it
possible to deal with the problems of ends and to participate
wholeheartedly in decision making. Indeed, to ensure that this
retraining is not limited to serving the short-range purposes of the
owners but responds to long-range human needs in the context of
contemporary scientific and technical changes, it will be necessary
to organize a tripartite control and direction of these courses (as
we showed earlier in terms of the cultural revolution).
This demand for permanent training in the workplace will
unite the struggle in the plant against the dehumanization of
work with the struggle in the school and university against an
educational system that turns out the type of person that the
capitalist hierarchy calls for when it deprives work of its specifi-
cally human dimension.
In the same context, the creation of a new television channel

geared to offer a renewed general culture as we have defined it
(a system of information, aesthetics, and planning for the future)
will be demanded by workers and students who will be working
together in the training courses.
We repeat that these are only very general indications to sug-
gest the kind of demand that must be emphasized. This approach
can foster the subjective conditions for a prerevolutionary situa-
tion that will never result simply from objective contradictions.
This will be transformed into a revolutionary situation if the
masses of the workers become aware not only of their exploitation
but also of the objectives they must achieve in order to end it.
B. Making the Break:

Revolutionary Situation and National Strike.
What Is a Revolutionary Situation Today?
Lenin defined a “revolutionary situation” in terms of the spe-

cific historic conditions of the October Revolution. The most note-
worthy characteristic of his definition is that it reverses the model
conceived by Marx. For Marx, the socialist revolution meant
transcending the contradictions of a fully matured capitalist
system. But in 1917, the first successful socialist revolution was
carried out in an economically and technically backward country
where capitalism had not reached such maturity. As a result, the
basic contradiction between capital and labor was not sufficiently
acute to create the objective conditions for a revolution. Revolu-
tion was only possible through a combination of many contra-
dictions. In Russia, a country where the peasantry constituted
the overwhelming majority, primary contradictions pertained to
the agrarian regime. Russia’s defeat in World War I revealed the
overall impotence of the regime. It made the conflagration of
1917 possible. Lenin’s concrete analysis and daring strategy upset
the canons of “classic,” “orthodox” (actually, dogmatic) Marxism.
Lenin brought off a proletarian revolution oriented toward social-

ism with peasants who wanted nothing more than a bourgeois
revolution for “land and liberty.”
In a country like contemporary France, the revolution cannot
be combinational—that is, made possible by a contingent combi-
nation of contradictions brought together into a single whole—
nor, consequently, can it be based on a single incident—that is,
achieved in one cataclysmic act. It has to be a continuous, inter-
mittent process.
In the conditions that prevail in France, where capitalism has
reached real maturity—that is, where typically capitalist relation-
ships govern not only the national economy, including agriculture,
but all forms of national activity, the State and its structure, the
university and school system, science and research—the essential
problem is not to watch for the moment when an extraordinary
conjunction of heterogeneous contradictions will create a revolu-
tionary situation but to prepare the way for such a moment.
Spontaneity is not the opposite of consciousness; it is conscious-
ness that is still confused. Taking this attitude toward “sponta-
neity” makes it possible to avoid the gamble on the enlightened
despotism of a dogmatic interpretation of “consciousness brought
to the masses from outside.” This formula of Kautsky was
adopted by Lenin in 1902 working in a country where the work-
ing class was a tiny minority and the majority of the population
was illiterate. The dogmatic generalization and application of
this formula, as if it were valid always and everywhere, is an
essential characteristic of Stalinism and of the “orthodoxy” of
most Communist parties. Getting rid of such a conception of the
relation between “spontaneity” and “consciousness” and the
organizational forms characteristic of social bureaucracy that
result from it is one of the fundamental subjective conditions of a
revolutionary situation.
The failure to understand the profound significance of the crisis
of Spring 1968, when France erupted, is a typical example of the
harm done by this conception. Critical—and self-critical—reflec-
tion on the 1968 crisis is indispensable for defining a “revolution-

ary situation” and the means to achieve it.
What Is a National Strike?
In the line of analysis that we have sketched so far, the princi-

pal locus for the decisive struggle is the workplace, not the streets
or the parliament. Three successive stages and forms of this
struggle can be distinguished:
1. According to the Sorelian myth of the “general strike,” all
the working class has to do is fold their arms in order to
bring down the State and the bourgeois regime. Historic ex-
perience in various capitalist countries has demonstrated that
important results can be obtained in this way: economic re-
sults, like the shortening of the working day; political results,
like the extension of universal suffrage (Austria in 1905 and
later Belgium); even military effectiveness in support of a
revolutionary action (France at the 1944 Liberation and
Cuba at the time of the liberation of Havana).
But today the limitations of such action are evident—not
only because the working class would be isolated but because
technical progress makes it possible to keep many companies
and services operating with a small number of technicians.
2. The Popular Front strikes in 1936 marked a new stage:
The workers were not contented to stop work; they occupied
the plants. It was a favorable situation because the govern-
ment had just been formed by the Popular Front and was
more accessible to the unions than the government in power
in 1968. It must be stated quite clearly—and this is why, al-
though we point out its limitations, we still rejoice at even
minimal progress toward unity on the “left”—that a govern-
ment formed by such a majority would also be more open
to the workers. In such an eventuality, the workers should
have no illusions about the cohesiveness and effectiveness of
such a government, should not allow themselves to be immo-
bilized by their victory, but should realize that the workplace

remains the essential locus of the struggle. The preparatory
stages for the move to socialism—worker councils, worker
control, temporary sharing of power—could never be left to a
political coalition.
3. The 1968 strikes set off by the student uprising marked a
new stage—a faulty but real prefiguration of an authentic
“national strike.” The national strike—not the only form of
struggle to be undertaken but the principal form geared to
the establishment of socialism of self-direction—is primarily
distinguished from the old “general strike” by its extent. It
involves many social groups over and above the working
class. Engineers and technicians participated in far greater
numbers than in the past. Civil service workers associated
themselves with it. Students occupied universities. The
movement had such wide support that there was evidence of
hesitation and even division within the repressive arms of the
State: the army, the police, and the courts. For several weeks,
the personnel of the television network refused to play their
usual role as manipulators of public opinion; such resistance
was also evidenced in the arts and the press.
But such a strike is also distinguished from the old “general
strike” by its content. The specific contribution of the students
was the political dimension; they questioned not only a particular
administration but the regime, and indeed the whole system of
civilization. Moreover, the students—sporadically and confusedly,
it is true—tried to operate the university faculties outside the
classic norms, programs, and hierarchical structure of the uni-
versity. They raised fundamental questions about the goals of
education and society.
The personnel at certain research centers, especially at the
National Center for Scientific Research and at the Atomic Energy
Commission, raised the possibility of giving research a new direc-
tion: to serve the advancement of man instead of his manipula-
tion.
Something with tremendous significance for the future was

attempted in some corporations. The workers not only showed,
through work stoppages and the occupation of the plants, that
they could paralyze production and the other national activities
but also that they could operate them according to norms differ-
ent from those of the owners and the State.
This is the major condition for creating a revolutionary situa-
tion. No other form of action is excluded—from street demonstra-
tions to parliamentary election campaigns—on condition that
everything is subordinated to the national strike that will inflict
the decisive blow.
Clearly the State may react violently, but this is not a problem
special to the national strike. Every attempt at revolutionary
change—through insurrection, parliamentary politics, or strikes—
runs this risk. But repression is more easily mounted against an
armed insurrection, when the balance of power is overwhelm-
ingly on the side of the authorities with their tanks, helicopters,
and myriad other weapons against a few small arms. Repression
is also easier against a parliamentary majority with no control
over a State structure that would refuse to obey it.
A national strike with the broad support of 1968 would be the
most difficult move for the authorities to defeat. It would be easy
for them to surround and “take” the Capitol. It would be much
more difficult to simultaneously “take” all the plants, administra-
tive offices, laboratories, and research centers of the country in-
volved in the national strike, and still more difficult to operate
them with police or soldiers. The national strike is the revolution-
ary form that gives repression the least opportunity.
The major way to prepare for the victory of such a strike is to
raise the political and technical consciousness of the entire work-
ing class and the new historic bloc, and to forge the unity of the
“collective worker,” not only unity within the unions but between
the workers and the majority of engineers and technicians.
Moreover, at the time of a national strike, the movement would
have to structure itself nationally very rapidly so that a federation
of worker councils and working units could make general de-

cisions for the movement itself rather than their being made by a
political organism outside it.
The first measures to be taken would be the socialization of the
major means of production, transport, credit, and information and
the legalization and generalization of self-management in the
corporations and in all national activities.
By its very nature, self-management cannot be imposed or
“programed” in advance. It will not be established all at once.
By definition, socialism is not a closed system, created once and
for all, that automatically reproduces itself. It is a continuing
creation. Otherwise, class. differences will reappear as they did in
the Soviet Union and all the countries of the East. Mao Tse-tung
rightly stressed that one “cultural revolution” would not be
enough to stem the tendencies to class differentiation; it will take
two or three to reach this socialist goal.
Consequently, the institutions needed for self-management
cannot be defined in advance. Clarifying its principles and
demonstrating that it is possible will help define what we have
called “norms different from those of the owners and the State
they control.”
3. What Kind of Socialism? “A Society in Which the

Free Development of Each Individual Is the
Condition for the Free Development of All’
Self-management is the very opposite of dualism and the ab-

sence of ends that are truly human.
1. It indicts both the principle of capitalism—the private
ownership of the means of production—and its consequences
—the power that results from this form of ownership. There
can be no self-management so long as there is private owner-
ship of the means of production.
2. It indicts all forms of bureaucracy and hierarchy: both
those of capitalism and those that flow from a centralized

and authoritarian conception of “socialism,” which is dis-
tinguished from capitalism because increased yield is appro-
priated by the State rather than by corporations but does not
abolish the wage system and alienation of the worker.
3. It indicts the principle of delegated power, a characteris-
tic both of parliamentary bourgeois democracy and of bureau-
cratic “socialism” in which the militants delegate and alienate
power to a leader who makes decisions for them.
Self-management is the battle cry against all forms of integra-
tion into imposed systems. This is why it is a nightmare both for
Western capitalism and for the technobureaucracies of the East.
In 1968 the former unloosed its police against the Paris students
and the latter its tanks against the workers of Prague. This re-
peated what happened in the past when the nobles, to defend
their privileges against the French Revolution, armed themselves
at Coblenz to invade France, and when the capitalist countries
formed an alliance in 1917 to put down the October Revolution,
the beginning of hope.
A “holy alliance” has been formed against self-management;
the owners call it utopia and the bureaucrats “empty talk.”
Self-management embodies the demand to move beyond the
limits imposed on the free development of every man by the
unholy trinity of ownership, power, and knowledge. This alliance
is the source of all dualisms and oppressions. Those who own the
means of production hold the real levers of authority and turn
knowledge into a privilege andajustification of their wealth and
power.
The principle of self-management is democracy as defined by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract: the autonomy of
each individual and his full participation in common decisions.
This principle has never been developed by bourgeois democracy,
which has remained simply “formal” for two reasons: First, it
does not extend to economic life, where the owner of the means
of production still reigns as monarch; second, even on the level of
political life, it perpetuates the power of the owner class behind

the juridical fiction of the sovereignty of the people. Through the
system of delegated power that characterizes parliamentary insti-
tutions, as Rousseau notes, the citizen “alienates” his power to a
professional politician. Thus, it always remains possible for the
owner class to dispose of power either through a blatantly limited
franchise or, even within the context of universal suffrage,
through the manipulation of public opinion by the instruments of
information and education that it controls. This can also be
accomplished by corrupting elected officials and economic pres-
sures on them.
Socialism cannot be achieved by simple extension to economic
life of the formal democracy that exists in political life. Authentic
socialism cannot be formed for the people, only by the people.
It can only be a socialism of self-management. In any other
hypothesis, Bakunin’s sinister prediction would be verified: “The
despotism of a minority is all the more dangerous when it appears
to express the seeming will of the people.”
In ‘order to avoid all abstraction and utopian ideas in our
examination, we shall not define “ideal” self-management. We
shall simply study it in terms of its historical context.
Production cooperatives constitute the prehistory of self-man-
agement. Marx saw them as a prefiguration of socialism.
Recalling that exploitation, that is, the private expropriation of
the increased yield of collective labor, has frequently been pre-
sented as the income due to the owner of capital, Marx pointed
out in Capital (Vol. 7) that, since the mid-nineteenth century,
management has been separated from the ownership of capital.
“In the production cooperative, where the manager is recom-
pensed by the workers, instead of representing capital in his re-
lationship to them, it is proven that the capitalist has become
superfluous as an agent of production.” Thus, the authority of the
owner is demystified without lessening the need for technical
competence. Marx added ironically: “An orchestra leader does
not need to be the owner of the instruments; the salary of the
other musicians is no concern of his and has nothing to do with

his function as conductor.”
Speaking of the production cooperative movement in his
“Inaugural Address to the Congress of the International” (Oc-
tober 21, 1864), Marx stressed “the value of these great social
experiments . . . Not by arguments but by action they proved
that the large-scale production needed for modern life can be
carried out without the class of masters that employs the class of
operatives; that the means of work can be fruitful without being
monopolized or distorted into means of dominating and exploiting
the workers.” While praising this great example, Marx also noted
its limits:
1. In a capitalist regime, the production cooperative may
“reproduce the defects of the system,” that is, the members
of the proprietary societies may exploit the work of wage
earners who are not members of the cooperative.
2. The worst danger, according to Marx, is the intervention
of the capitalist State, which, under the pretext of aiding the
cooperatives with subsidies, places it under its own control
and integrates it into the system. In his polemic against Las-
salle’s “State capitalism,” Marx harshly criticized the “Gotha
Program” (1875) of the German Socialist Party, which de-
manded State aid for the cooperatives. He wrote at the time
that the cooperative societies “have no value except insofar as
they are autonomous creations of the workers not protected
by the government or by the bourgeoisie.
3. Finally, it would be an illusion to believe that one can in
this way create islands of socialism in a capitalist system.
Socialism cannot be achieved piecemeal. “For the working
masses to be liberated,” Marx declared in his “Inaugural Ad-
dress of 1866,” “cooperation must exist throughout the na-
tion.” Such a national cooperative system governing all
production is socialism of self-management. It is communism
as Marx conceived it on the model of the Paris Commune,
which had decided to operate by worker self-management
the firms abandoned by their owners. Marx wrote: “If co-

operative production is not to remain a sham and a trap, if it
is to replace the capitalist system, if united cooperative as-
sociations are to govern national production according to a
common plan, taking it under their own control and ending
the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions that are the
fate of capitalist production, what would that be, gentlemen,
but communism, a very achievable communism?” (Civil
War in France.)
Despite the neo-Stalinist exegesis of the texts, self-management
is far from being “empty talk”; it is the primary aim of Marxism.
The Paris Commune was the first historical attempt to put it into
practice. The entire State apparatus was in Versailles, along with
the owners. Paris was empty of the owner class and professional
politicians. Whereas the parliamentary system of delegated power
put the government, as Marx noted, “under the direct control of
the ruling class,” the Commune created a government “for the
people and by the people” without the mediation of any parlia-
ment or party.
The followers of Proudhon dominated the Central Committee
of the Commune, constituting two-thirds of the membership.
Except for the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, which
was inspired by the Blanquist minority, all the measures insti-
tuted by the Central Committee were in the spirit of Proudhon:
direct democracy, not a transfer but the distribution of authority;
economic self-management; political federalism.
To anyone who does not read the history of the Commune as a
Stalinist (that is, does not confuse the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat with the dictatorship of a party that claims to identify itself
with the proletariat), the Paris Commune was the first rough
draft of “socialist democracy.” The dictatorship of the proletariat
is the form that socialist democracy must take in the face of
counterrevolutionary aggression from outside or from within. The
Vendée and Coblenz made the Jacobin dictatorship necessary, as
the Versailles government and Bismarck made the Commune
dictatorship necessary and as counterrevolution and foreign inter-

vention made the Bolshevik dictatorship necessary.
The thought of Lenin on self-management must also be de-
mystified and freed from fifty years of Stalinist exegesis that re-
duced Leninism to the pure centralism of What Is to Be Done?,
written in 1902 in the midst of a clandestine struggle that de-
manded military discipline. It is remarkable that in What Is to
Be Done?, which has been presented as the bible of “democratic
centralism,” the expression “democratic centralism” does not once
appear. There is a basic reason for this. Under the specific con-
ditions of the struggle of that period, Lenin stressed only the
necessity of centralism as such and the theory of revolutionary
. consciousness brought in from “outside,” which he explicitly bor-
rowed from Kautsky.
But when the revolutionary movement was unified in 1917,
Lenin himself enthusiastically welcomed the initiative of popular
“spontaneity.”
During the 1905 revolution, as Lenin stressed (and this is
what led him to change the viewpoint that he had expressed
three years earlier in What Is to Be Done?), the soviets were
spontaneous creations of the workers of Petrograd. The spring
of 1917 also saw spontaneously formed factory committees and
soviets (councils of workers, soldiers, peasants).
A few days before taking power, the first pan-Russian confer-
ence of the factory committees (October 17-22, 1917) pro-
claimed: “The introduction of worker control guarantees the
interests of the entire people much better than the isolated aris-
tocratic judgment of the owners guided by considerations of
material or political profit. . . . Only worker control of the capi-
talist enterprises, based on awareness of their objectives and
social importance, will create conditions that will favor establish-
ment of secure self-management.”
In this way the workers themselves indicated the stages of the
march toward socialism: For as long as capitalism continues,
worker control must be pushed further and further in terms of
power struggle, in order to prepare for self-management after

the taking of power and the abolition of capitalism.
In the early days of the October Revolution (November 14,
1917) Lenin published the decree legalizing worker control.
This kind of control differs completely from management in the
hands of the owners. The owner has, indeed, ceased to be an
absolute monarch and has become a constitutional monarch.
Lenin fully ratified the spontaneous initiative of the workers.
He declared to the IIIrd Congress of the Soviets (January 11,
1918): “In introducing worker control, we knew that it could
not be immediately extended to all Russia, but we wished to
show that we recognized only one course, that of changes origi-
nating from the base, where the workers themselves work out the
new principles of the economic system. This will take consider-
able time” (Lenin, Works, Vol. 26).
Lenin constantly returned to this theme: “Only he who relies
on the experience and instinct of the laboring masses is a socialist
in practice” (Works, Vol. 25).
“The workers must move to the organization of worker control
. .. socialism cannot be created by orders from the top. It is the
opposite of official and bureaucratic automatism. Living, creative
socialism is the work of the masses of the people themselves”
(Circular of the Council of People’s Commissars, January 5,
1918).
In his April 1917 pamphlet, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in
Our Revolution,” he joyfully saluted the new Paris Commune
taking root in Russia: “See what is coming to life among us at
the present time based on the initiatives of the masses of the
people who are spontaneously creating democracy in their own
way” (Works, Vol. 24).
The revolution was making it possible to move from worker
control to worker management. But that would have required a
high development of the productive forces, that is, a numerous
and educated working class. Lacking this, the revolution could
not triumph without the aid of the proletariat of the advanced
countries. The October Revolution had neither this internal base

nor the support of victorious revolutions in Western Europe.
Lenin, the founder of the first socialist democracy since the
Paris Commune, did not delude himself. In January 1921, in the
discussions on unions, he exclaimed: “Comrade Trotsky speaks
of a worker State. But that is an abstraction! It was normal for us
to speak of a worker State in 1917; but today . . . in fact, our
State is not a worker State but a worker-peasant State; that is
the first thing. . . . But that is not all... . Our State is a worker
State with bureaucratic deformations. . . . Our State is such today
that the totally organized proletariat must defend themselves
and we must use these worker organizations to defend the work-
ers against their State and to get the workers to defend our
State” (Works, Vol. 32).
At the end of his life, Lenin fought against these bureaucratic
deformations: “The low level of culture causes the soviets, which
according to their program are organs of government by the
workers, to be in reality organs of government for the workers,
carried out by the advanced segment of the proletariat, not by
the laboring masses” (Works, Vol. 29). The very year of his
death, he wrote in one of his last texts: “Our worst internal
enemy is the bureaucrat, the Communist who occupies a respon-
sible position in the Soviet institutions” (Works, Vol. 23).
Self-management demands a numerous working class, and
Russia in 1917 was overwhelmingly peasant; the working class
represented less than 3 percent of the population. Self-manage-
ment demands a high level of cuiture. In uncultivated tsarist
Russia, as Lenin stressed, the low cultural level led to bureauc-
racy. The extermination of the most aware elements of the work-
ing class, who fought in the first ranks on all fronts against
foreign intervention and counterrevolution, led to a paradoxical
dictatorship of the proletariat with almost no proletariat, a dic-
tatorship carried out in the name of the proletariat by a party of
professionals. In the struggle against famine, invasion, and under-
development, this party was led to an extreme centralization of
resources and power. Thus died self-management. Its death, in

Russia, was a drama of underdevelopment.
At almost the same time, the fight for worker councils was led
in Italy by Antonio Gramsci, a man who was, in this regard, one
of the most creative Marxists after Lenin.
Aware that the class struggle is won or lost not in a parliament
but on the site of exploitation and resistance to exploitation, that
is, in the workplace, the Italian workers strove to create struc-
tures, the worker councils, that would prepare for future “sovi-
ets.” At the Bologna Convention in February 1919 it was pro-
posed to replace the parliament of professional politicians with
a constituent assembly of producers from the base councils.
In December 1919, the Mazzoni textile factories were occu-
pied. The worker council decided to continue the work without
the owners and according to its own rules. This was one of the
first attempts in the West at self-management. The failure of the
attempt is a failure of reformism pursuing the illusory goal of
creating socialism in an isolated corporation with workers who
lacked organizational experience.
Gramsci considered the experience of the councils a superior
form of organization of the proletariat. For two years, in Ordine
nuovo, following the major methodology of creative Marxism, he
strove to articulate what the workers had spontaneously created.
He traced the path to future victory by emphasizing that the
working class must prepare itself for management and mastery
of the techniques of organizing production in order to accom-
plish its historic task.
The obstacles to socialism of self-management were, in Russia,
underdevelopment and, in Italy, reformism.
But this fundamental aim of Marxism, long submerged and
stifled by Stalinism and neo-Stalinism—the self-management of a
socialized and planned economy—reappeared at each crisis of
Stalinism. In Yugoslavia in 1948, in Hungary in 1956, in Czecho-
slovakia and Poland in 1968 and 1970, the major rallying cry
of the workers against bureaucratic centralism was invariably

“worker councils!” It is likewise significant that all the attempts
at “economic reform” by the technobureaucracies in the face of
the failure of their centralism move in the same direction: to re-
verse the tendency to identify the State with society. Self-
management is today the aim of all struggles for socialism, East
and West.
Attempts to implement self-management after the abolition of
the private ownership of the means of production have consis-
tently had to cope with the most unfavorable circumstances.
Yugoslavia since 1950 is a notable example. The problems of con-
structing self-management socialism were complicated by the
problems of underdevelopment. The country was handicapped
from the outset by the backwardness of its former capitalist
regime. In addition, the traces of Stalinism in its Communist
Party and State constituted (and still do) an obstacle to the
development of self-management. This is aggravated by the en-
couragement and outside support received by the elements that
express this tendency. Finally, the multinational character of the
Yugoslav State and the extreme inequality among different
groups (between rich Slovenia and the “internal Third World”
of Herzegovina, for example) create grave problems and danger-
ous tensions.
It is all the more impressive that, even in such adversity, the
system of self-management has been able to function and has
even been able to respond to some of the perennial objections of
its detractors. It is significant that all the objections are a priori
and similar to those raised by the enemies of the French Revo-
lution against the principle of democracy and by the enemies of
socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Are the workers capable of managing the companies? Will
the ticket puncher at the Austerlitz station be able to make a
decision about constructing a monorail? Will he be able to decide
between immediate wage increases and long-term investments?
This is exactly the way the French aristocrats felt at Coblenz

when the common people, considered to be eternal minors, dared
to take public affairs in hand and to” ‘institute” the nation.
It is normal that the ruling class should reason in this way and
think that only the “masters” know anything. It is less under-
standable that men who claim to be socialists and communists
should use the same arguments.
These foolish questions confuse technical competence with
the hierarchy that is a result not of technical needs but of au-
thority derived from ownership of the means of production and
delegated to variously ranked rulers. The word “hierarchy” by
its very etymology associates the two ideas of ruling and the
sacred. Technical competence and the organization of work have
nothing in common with this twofold combination of the despotic
and the sacral. In discussing the cooperatives, we have already
seen how Karl Marx demythologized this notion of hierarchy
with his parable of the orchestra leader.
A: second confusion arises from an overly narrow conception
of the working class. Self-management of a company means par-
ticipation in decision making by all who work there, excluding
only the parasitic elements who appropriate the profits and dis-
pose of them as they wish without regard to workers or engi-
neers.
In a self-managed company, there is a management, there are
engineers, there is organization of work. But the manager is
recompensed for his technical competence, not because he
possesses capital, The engineers fulfill their role as technicians,
not as surrogates for the absolute authority of the owner. Work
is organized on the basis of technical necessities, not out of a
concern for domination that dictates breaking up work into the
maximum number of functions and the multiplication of super-
visors. |
There is a third confusion to be removed. It is not true that the
fragmentation of working operations, which empties them of all
human significance and makes the man an appendage of the ma-
chine, is a technical necessity for maximum productivity. It does

make it possible to obtain maximum obedience and control, to
divide the workers by tying wages to working titles and posi-
tions and subdividing categories ad infinitum so that each worker
has a different wage from his neighbor and there exists no com-
mon denominator to unify their demands. But these methods
flow from the long-outdated Taylor system and correspond to a
bypassed stage of technology and management.
Methods that exploit the physical and nervous strength of the
worker and exclude worker control to the greatest degree pos-
sible are not designed to maximize productivity.
Even in capitalist companies, simply out of concern for in-
creased productivity, owners not stubbornly bound to the past
take account of recent findings of “ergonomy” (the scientific
study of work and the conditions for its maximal effectiveness)
and have renounced Taylorism. It has been proved that output
is increased when external control pressures are removed and the
collective worker is given the opportunity to organize his own
work, set his hours and work rhythms, and care for the plant.
This results when tasks are organized in such a way that indi-
viduals or groups have some meaningful responsibilities. It hap-
pens when supervisors and foremen are abolished and the en-
gineers and technicians, instead of exercising unquestioned
authority, put their competence at the disposal of the workers in a
common effort to resolve technical problems. After an initial pe-
riod of working out such a system, it made possible a 20 percent
increase in productivity at the artificial-textile plant of ICI in
England.
The Volvo and Saab companies in Sweden have begun to
question the assembly-line system and to experiment with new
methods. Semiautonomous groups of workers who complete en-
tire elements of the automobiles may eventually replace the
assembly line, at least partially.
A report to the symposium on technology and the humaniza-
tion of work at the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, December 22,

1971, indicated that such change is symptomatic of the present
preoccupations of industrialists and sociologists of work. These
preoccupations have been occasioned by the demoralization of
the modern worker caused by outdated methods. He is discon-
tented with his working conditions and manifests this discontent
by high rates of absenteeism, hostility toward plant authorities,
and even sabotage. His discontent is caused both by the monot-
ony of mechanized work and by the prevailing human relations
between workers and supervisory staff.
In this regard, Michael Maccoby of the Institute for Policy
Studies, Washington, D.C., has stated: “Ways of working and
living styles that were formerly accepted are increasingly con-
sidered oppressive by young workers in factories, offices and
laboratories.” The trend is to “team work” in order to give the
workers greater control over their work.
Clearly, this is not self-management. But it demonstrates, even
within the context of capitalism, that making a robot out of the
worker and destroying his skills is not, at the present stage of
the development of productive forces, a technical necessity.
There is no technical objection to the creation of the technical
conditions for self-management.
From the simple viewpoint of productivity, it is more profitable
to adapt the job to the man rather than the man to the job. In
terms of management, the introduction of the computer implies,
as we have shown, the decentralization of decision making.
At the present stage of the development of science and tech-
nology in production, only self-management can bring out the
full implications of the logic of systematized information and the
research of ergonomy.
When factory councils were introduced in China, on the basis
of political and ideological as well as technical necessities, re-
sults were extremely positive. In an era when innovation is be-
coming the principal source of wealth, it is progressively less
productive to use man only as a machine of bone, muscle, and
nerves without mobilizing his intelligence and initiative. Not only

does self-management put this intelligence and initiative to work,
it is its best stimulus and school.
This is not simply theory. Experience proves it. In Yugoslavia,
since the introduction of the first law on worker councils on
June 30, 1950, and the progressive introduction of self-manage-
ment in all areas of social activity (schools and universities,
radio-television, and so on), and also in Czechoslovakia, where
embryonic forms of self-management were introduced in 1966
with the first measures of economic reform and where, from Janu-
ary to August 1968, the renewal of socialism was expressed in
the formation and official recognition of worker councils, an
identical phenomenon appeared. In the elections for worker
councils, the workers chose not the same militants who had been
most active in the defense of their demands but a great number
of engineers and technicians—sometimes a majority of 70 percent
in the worker councils. In the short run, this is undoubtedly a
negative element; the base workers realized that they did not
yet possess sufficient experience of technology and the organiza-
tion of work. The composition of the worker councils will be
more balanced as the working class reaches higher levels of tech-
nical competence and culture.
At the same time, this phenomenon has very positive aspects.
First of all, it heralds a new relationship between workers and
technicians, a retreat from “workerism” and the beginning of
mutual trust. In addition, this choice expresses the workers’ sense
of responsibility, their concern for the long-range interests of the
enterprise over immediate satisfactions, their determination not
to sacrifice investment for the future to imprudent wage in-
creases. Self-management becomes the school for self-manage-
ment. Elected by the workers to the council and subject to recall
at any moment, the engineers and technicians must inform, ex-
plain, and convince. This is the best education for participation
in decision making, all the more so because the workers have the
right not only to demand that the various possible options and
their consequences be explained to them but also they can call

on experts outside the enterprise to present contradictory argu-
ments. In this way decisions are made with, but not exclusively
by, specialists.
This is all the more important when it is a matter of major
decisions concerned with the ultimate goals of an enterprise. On
this level, the opinion of the base workers or the consumers is
at least as important as that of the specialist or the industrial and
political leader. And their competence is just as valid.
Self-management does not imply in any way a demagogic
claim that everyone has all the answers. What it does require is
that, at every level of decision making, all those who have to
carry out the decisions and have to live with their consequences
be involved in the process.
Within a company, for example, there are at least three levels
of decisions:
1. Personnel problems: hiring, wages, promotion, retraining.
All these problems, under self-management socialism, can
be solved by direct democracy on the shop level. In large
companies, they can be solved by delegates from the shops
chosen according to general rules valid for all without dis-
crimination.
2. Problems of work organization. These can be handled
in the same way. As we have shown, we must distinguish
between technical competence and hierarchy, between what
results from the real technical demands of productivity and
what is the vestige of the former authority of the owners
and has been transposed into the technobureaucracy that
claims to be socialist.
3. Problems of management: choosing objectives, invest-
ment, setting prices, market relationships. Here we are deal-
ing with the goals of the enterprise: profit for its own sake
or power for its own sake? Or satisfying the needs of the
entire society? Should priority be assigned to individual or
collective needs?
The answers to these questions are relevant not only to the

entire personnel of the firm, or to the production and manage-
ment specialists, but also to those who represent the general eco-
nomic planning and to the consumer.
Just to list a few of these concrete problems—extension and
modernization of public transportation, highways, telephone,
telegraph and mail service, housing construction—suffices to
make clear the superiority of self-management over capitalism
and Stalinist centralism. Under capitalism decisions are made in
terms of the interests of the major privately owned corporations.
Under Stalinist bureaucratic centralism options are chosen at the
top and the workers are manipulated to identify their own inter-
ests with those that have been chosen by “omniscient” leaders.
As Lenin wrote: “The only ones who can object to this are
those who, far from really representing the working class, are far
from real life . . . who sleep on a pillow under which they have
carefully hid a well-thumbed book which no one else ever sees
and which serves as a guide and manual in their effort to implant
official socialism. But the intelligence of millions of creators pro-
vides something infinitely superior to the most gifted individual
insights” (Works, Vol. 26).
A second set of objections bears not on the capacity of the
workers to manage their companies, but on the possible. problem
that the particularity of each enterprise and their collective ego-
isms may make it impossible to formulate general plans.
This problem is more serious but it is not exclusive to socialism
of self-management. It is a problem for every modern developed
society, whatever kind of regime it may have: how to reconcile
the scientific demands of planning with the demands of democ-
racy.
There are three basic solutions to the problem. Two have al-
ready been discussed. The first I call the “animal,” prehuman
model: capitalism. Here the law of the jungle still prevails, al-
though in refined, even mathematical, forms. Large companies
devour small ones. The largest of all exert such a determinative
influence on economic planning that in reality the plan reflects

the power relations among them exclusively. At this point
“econometrics” employs its mathematical formulations to dis-
semble those jungle relationships. Thus, urban development is
anarchic, cancerous, the preserve of land speculators. The estab-
lishment of technological institutes, like the routes of super-
highways, depends on the appetites and power of various lobbies
or special-interest groups. We could add many more examples.
The second model is bureaucratic centralization, the Stalinist
model that survives in neo-Stalinism. All directives emanate from
the top and are transmitted through a series of bureaucratic re-
lay stations and controls. This system has proved effective so
long as pervasive penury guarantees that even blind quantitative
production growth will cause no major socioeconomic disloca-
tion. Since the economy lacks everything, everything can be
absorbed. Once this stage has been passed, the pretense of de-
termining needs from the top is revealed as illusory. The same
centralization that had made impetuous growth possible now
becorhes an obstacle to growth. Unsold inventories mount up,
matériel rusts from disuse, urgent needs are not met. Then fol-
low absenteeism at plants, irresponsibility in management, waste
in the national economy, bureaucratic stifling of initiative. Only
advanced sectors of production, privileged for reasons of national
defense or prestige, remain competitive, while agriculture con-
tinues to vegetate and consumer needs are sacrificed. When pro-
tests are raised against these methods, the answer is repression.
Internally, writers and artists are accused of nourishing oppo-
sition instead of serving integration (this is called the “ideologi-
cal struggle for the purity of Marxism-Leninism”). In foreign
relations, neighboring countries, stifled by the Soviet model of
bureaucratic centralization, are accused of being instruments’
of
world counterrevolution, as in the case of Czechoslovakia. (This
is called the “solidarity of the proletarian internationalism.”
Peaceful coexistence is accepted in relations with the capitalist
countries but not with other socialist countries. )
Corrections are made spasmodically. Economic reform is be-

gun by granting relative autonomy not to the enterprises but to
their hand-picked managers. At the time of the disturbances in
Poland, the Soviet plan was hastily revised on the eve of the
XXIVth Congress in order to make some concessions to con-
sumer needs.
The least that can be said is that the harmonious balance be-
tween planning and democracy is achieved neither by capitalism
nor Stalinism.
Another model can be based on the principles of socialism of
self-management. Because every worker at the base participates
in determining the goals of each unit of work—in contrast to
capitalism, where the anarchy of private interests cannot be sur-
mounted, and to Stalinism, where everything is decided “from
outside” and “at the top’—planning is done not only at the sum-
mit but at the base.
Gradually, various elements of the economy combine to co-
ordinate and reciprocally connect their objectives and activities.
The producers in one enterprise take part, as consumers, in the
decisions of other enterprises. In this way there is established a
network of economic entities that regulate themselves and each
other. In place of the capitalist “jungle” model and the mechani-
cal model of technobureaucracy, there can be substituted a
cybernetic model based on the socialist self-management of
enterprises and of all social activity. The central planning orga-
nisms are not abolished nor even weakened. But they will not be
in the hands of a few technocrats acting for the private interests
they represent along with a few government officials who are
also technocrats, with the whole operation outside any control
from the base, as in a capitalist regime. Nor will they be in the
hands of a few bureaucrats who are simple transmitters for the
Party and State leadership, who are also exempt from control
from the base. The central planning organisms of a socialist self-
managed society emanate directly from the worker councils of
all units of work: companies, services, universities, laboratories,
research centers. In addition, they owe a permanent accounting

of their activities, of the reasons and criteria that determined
their choices, of the different possible options and their conse-
quences. Only in this way will the plan, on which everybody's
future depends, be everybody’s business.
Does this mean that, in the model conceived according to
these principles, there will be no more contradictions or ten-
sions? Not at all. What is new is that they will be neither ignored
nor resolved in a unilateral and authoritarian fashion.
The demand for this development in our time is so strong that
even those who oppose it are obliged to pretend to begin to
satisfy it. In the West these pretenses sometimes take the form
of governmental double-talk about “participation” that would
affect neither the profits nor the authority of the owners. In the
East they take the form of efforts to “reform the economy” and
to “democratize” the system.
When worker councils and ultimately self-management are
the horizon of the struggle for socialism, the crucial consideration
is the necessity of a constant effort to train and inform the work-
ers to prepare them for control of production and social activity.
Every other policy moves by slogans, propaganda, and manipu-
lation. This was expressed by the strikers at Rhodiaceta in Lyons,
as reported in a film by Chris Marker: “We cannot fight only
through the unions and politics; we must also fight on the level
of culture and the development of personality and intelligence.
Because, if you want to take over a trust like Rhone-Poulenc and
you are uneducated, it isn’t possible. If tomorrow you have to
take over the shop, you have to know how to do it.”
By its very principles, self-management cannot be programed
in advance, The theoretician cannot pretend to prepare a future
for those whom he calls to self-management.
What is indispensable at present is to illuminate the goal, to
show that it is possible to attain it, and to reflect on the inter-
mediate steps that will create the conditions for victory.
This is the problem of all authentic democracy: to raise the
consciousness of general interest on the part of autonomous cen-

ters of judgment and decision. Such a conception does not deny
the necessity of an avant-garde; it does reject an avant-garde that
arrogates leadership to itself.
The road to self-management requires self-awareness not au-
thoritarianism. An idea that sets the goal of making the worker
the subject of all rights cannot use means and methods that con-
tradict this end.
The role of the avant-garde is to nourish, to perceive initiatives
and to stimulate them, to coordinate, to assist in the raising of
consciousness, to theoretically work out long-range necessities,
to make self-management a conscious project. It is less a matter
of leadership than of pedagogy. Self-management is both a peda-
gogy of revolution and a pedagogical revolution.
Conclusion
This book is a commitment for the writer—and for the reader. A
dream of twenty years’ standing impelled me to write this book.
In my life, it represents both rupture and achievement, uprooting
and the sowing of new seed.
I have abandoned none of my hopes. But they have been ful-
filled in a way I did not expect. The goal remains the same; the
means have changed. How could that not be true when the world
has changed more in these last few years than it had done over
many centuries?
It is an overwhelming experience when a man who has pro-
fessed himself an atheist for many years discovers that there has
always been a Christian inside him. It is overwhelming to accept
responsibility for such a hope.
After thirty-seven years as a Party militant and twenty years
as one of its leaders, after finding the meaning and beauty of
life there, it is agonizing to have to doubt the very conception of
this Party precisely in order to hold on to the hope that it brought
to life.
This book was written in agony, hope, and passion . . . without
any spirit of polemics . . . to help others face a dead end... and
to suggest a possible future.
Everything that I have said about this task shows how deeply
178 CONCLUSION
I am convinced that it cannot be the task of a single person. No

one is more aware of how incomplete this book is than the au-
thor.
But history is moving at such a dizzying pace that it does not
allow us to delay speaking until we have the aesthetic satisfaction
of presenting a perfect system. The day it was published, it
would die, bypassed by events.
We have less need of systems—they only make dead history
out of the present—than of shared reflection that goads us for-
ward, and of tools and weapons to invent and create the future.
A tool has value only because of the one who uses it. That is why
this book commits the reader.
Inspired by the rage and hopes of the young, it speaks first to
them. That includes both the young in age and the young in
heart and mind—those who believe that man’s life is not merely
something to accept or curse but is the raw material of new be-
ginnings and new creation.
A reader may reject this book as pretentious and utopian and
think this judgment pays his debt to the future.
Some may criticize my weaknesses and shortcomings (they
are legion) and stop there, making no effort to correct them and
move the question forward.
Others will blame the book for not being a “program,” for-
getting what Marx said, [that] even to predict the “recipes of the
cafeterias of the future would be arrogant.” One of its major
themes is that the future must be the work of all, invented and
fashioned by all.
Some will find here an echo of questions and searching that
they already bear deep within themselves. As a consequence of
reading this book, they will perhaps feel responsible for translat-
ing their thoughts and those of this book into action. Our hands
are already clasped; we have something to say to each other—
something to do together. Everything, after all, remains to be
done.
First, we must make an inventory of real needs. In 1880, Marx
CONCLUSION 179
prepared a questionnaire, a “Worker Inquiry,” because he would

not pretend to be a leader so identified with the masses that he
could define their demands and program and speak definitively
in their name. He focused on those new aspirations constantly
coming to the fore. (Such an attitude on the part of politicians
and labor leaders would have been fortunate in 1968. They might
have perceived the new needs expressed by the movement and
might not have been contented with pleading an outdated case.)
Marx's questionnaire shows that he wished to make the economy
a living science, enriched by the daily experience of every worker,
rooted in that experience and evolving into a shared task. He laid
no claim to ready-made answers—only questions. He called for
personal reflection by everyone. He addressed not “the masses”
but the workers one by one. On that foundation we can gradually
move toward theory. This is the only way to construct a “pro-
gram’ that conforms to the radical changes of our own time and
the new needs that they bring to light.
Everyone can contribute to this process, wherever he is .
in his workshop, office, university, laboratory . . . union, party,
church.
Every individual can suggest how to coordinate all these indi-
vidual efforts so that each may be nourished by the experience,
plans, and efforts of all the others. This is how each individual
can become a creative source of the future. Let us repeat here
what we said at the beginning: It is not a matter of creating a
party but a spirit. This spirit will transform the parties, unions,
churches, because it expresses a profound need.
To coordinate rather than subordinate . . . to awaken rather
than command: this is the kind of human relationship still to be
invented. This is everybody’s business. Until now, organization
has been confused with delegated power and the despotism of
the few.
It will not be easy to swim against the current of centuries-old
politics. Many will make fun of the very idea.
We will be accused of substituting prophecy and utopianism
180 CONCLUSION
for science. It will be a good sign if we anger the “realists” and

the positivists of all stripes. It will be a sign that we have not
surrendered to the pressures of yesterday and today, that we
insist that the possible is part of the real, that any “human”
science or politics that takes no account of this dimension of
social reality is not science but scientism, not politics but
empiricism.
We will be accused of substituting messianism and quixotic
romance for the sacrosanct “organization.” It will be a good sign
if we anger the men who are part of the structures and the
manipulators on all sides. It will be a sign that we have not sur-
rendered to economic or political “stage managing,” which takes
man for “a puppet produced by the structures.” It will mean that
we maintain that, if man does not keep his “distance” from every
institution, if he abdicates his right to historic initiative, organi-
zation will cease to serve man and seek to enslave him.
We will be accused of substituting an anarchist-syndicalist
mythology for politics. It will be a good sign if we anger all those
who believe politics is the art of speaking for others. That will be
a sign that we have not surrendered to the structures of delegated
power and that we intend to change the very concept of politics—
that we intend to make it a science and art to create the condi-
tions in which the individual can participate in determining so-
ciety’s ends and in the self-management of all social activities.
Politics will be a science. For example, the economists who
want to push the project further will construct (like Doctor
Quesnay in his “Tableau economique de la France” a few years
before the French Revolution) a two-sided model that includes
both present reality and future possibilities. This model will first
have to rigorously set forth the present sources of national rev-
enue and its distribution among the various social groups of the
nation. In contrast, it will also have to construct a possible model
that delineates the potential sources of national revenue that
would result from a reorganization of economic and social struc-
tures and of production focused not on profit for the few but on
CONCLUSION 181
the needs of all, eliminating the parasites, waste, and antiprogres-

sive elements of a system based on profit and blind growth for
their own sake.
I am not unaware of the difficulties. But only such a model
will make it possible to avoid the demagoguery that juxtaposes
demands and desires without demonstrating how to finance and
satisfy them. Only such a model will furnish a believable and
accessible image of democratic planning and of distribution of
national revenue defined by placing an absolute priority on
human investment. Such a task requires the participation and
good will of thousands of specialists and militant researchers.
It must be combined with a permanent inquiry at the base into
new and evolving needs.
Politics is also an art. Knowing and leading others to know is
not enough; one must appeal and awaken. Anyone with any
means of expressing himself—the creative artist, the journalist,
indeed anyone with the desire to communicate his faith in a
human future—can contribute to this task.
This book will achieve its purpose if it helps even a few to
become conscious of the present impasse and the possibility of
escaping it, and of their personal responsibility to bring this
about.
This awakening of consciousness is a flame to be kindled. It
will be extinguished if it is not nourished. It can become a blaze
if a few, from the outset, feel impelled to carry it forward.
Becoming aware of the impasse means realizing that, if we
abandon ourselves to the catastrophic drifting of the present, in
thirty years’ time man and his environment will have disinte-
grated. There will be no opportunity to live—only to survive, like
shipwrecked sailors or wanderers lost in a jungle.
To be aware of what is possible is not the same as believing
that some magical formula outside ourselves will save us without
our personal participation. There is no such thing as passive
liberation; we exercise our freedom in the struggle for freedom.
If we do not exercise it now, we shall never receive it from others.
182 CONCLUSION
A revolutionary’s constant temptation is to allow the demands

of the struggle for liberation to lead him to corrupt or destroy the
very liberty for which he fights. One cannot first conquer power
and change structures by any and all means, and then, from the
height of the conquered power, bestow liberty. Suggesting means
in harmony with the end to be pursued has been one of the
principal preoccupations of this book.
Men do not fashion their history arbitrarily; they build it under
conditions structured by the past. But, nevertheless, they do
fashion their history. Structures condition men, but men create
and transform structures. In this tragic dialectic, everything
passes through men, their wills and decisions.
To recall this at this time of urgent and vital decision was the
major goal of this demanding book.
Certainly it would be easier, in preaching socialism, to have a
concrete point of reference, to be able to say “the goal is accessi-
ble, since it has already been attained in such and such a place.”
Anyone who talks about a model of society that has to be created
is invariably treated as a utopian. That is how the aristocrats
reasoned before 1789 and how the bourgeoisie thought before
the October Revolution: “It has never been seen; it exists no-
where. Therefore, it is impossible.”
The revolutionaries surprised such forecasts. “They did not
know it was impossible, so they did it.”
Index
Advertising, 15 Aristotle, 25, 84, 96, 109
and commercialized values, 36 Arms manufacture, 43-47
Aesthetics Arts, as creative self-expression,
and creation, 96-97 20-21
vs. logic, 21-22, 98-99 Asia, 106
Africa, 70, 106 colonization of, 28
art in, 21 Augustine, Saint, 75, 91
religion in, 24 Auschwitz (concentration camp), 44
slave trade in, 28 Austria, 153
Agriculture, 10, 11, 138 Authoritarianism
Alcoholism, in nineteenth century, in education, 18
8-9 socialist, 54
Alexander the Great, 11 Automatic writing, 22
Algeria, Moslems in, 24 Aztecs, 44
Algerian war, 143
Alienation
and commercialized values, 36 Bachelard, Gaston, 110, 112
vs. creation, 77-78 Bacon, Francis, 107
vs. creative imagination, 110 Bakunin, Mikhail, 158
and knowledge, 16-17 Barbusse, Henri, 84
and oppression, 105 Barel, Yves, 111
of power, 19 Barth, Karl, 78
and religion, 68-69 Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, 22
and socialism, 71 Belgium, 153
of working class, 32, 49-50, 52 Bergson, Henri, 14
Alphabet, invention of, 11 Birth control, and sexual morality,
Amerindians, 68 13-14
Amiens, Charter of, 147 Bismarck, Otto von, 160
Apollo, 99 Blanqui, Auguste, 114
Apollonian art, 25 Blanquists, 160
Arabs, 27 Bloch, Ernst, 83
184 INDEX
Blue-collar workers, 135 Catholic Church

Blum, Léon, 143 in Latin America, 24
Body-soul dualism, 14, 24-26 recruitment policies, 23-24
Bolsheviks (Soviet Union), 144, 161 and universality, 68
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 24, 70, 75 Cato, 91
Borovoj, Archpriest, 74 Centralization, vs. decentralization,
Bourgeoisie
and feudalism, 51-52, 142-43 Children
and French Revolution, 125-26 education of, 117
See also Middle class and television, 118
Bowden, Lord, 32, 33 China, 67, 73, 113, 145, 168
Brave New World (Huxley ), 100 Communist Party, 69
Brazil, education in, 103-4 education in, 90
Buddhism, 21, 24 youth in, 8
Bureaucracy, 92 Chinese Cultural Revolution, 17, 22,
and dualism, 55-56 69, 87-90
and technocracy, 57 Chou En-lai, 90
vs. self-management, 156-57 Christ, 80, 84-85, 109
and socialism, 86-88 Christianity, 60
Business corporation, vs. nation, 34 and dualism, 24-25, 75
and end of colonialism, 68-69
in Latin America, 24
Caesar, Julius, 11 vs. Marxism, 65
Cambridge school economists, 133 and science and technology, 70-71
Campanella, Tommaso, 107 and socialism, 72—73
Capital Church
accumulation of, 33-34 and culture, 90-91
and profit rate, 133 and society, 23-24
Capital (Marx), 33-34, 40, 71, 78, Cicero, 91
80, 81, 102, 126, 127, 128, 133, Circumstances, and man, 60
158-59 City of the Sun (Campanella), 107
Capital et travail (Blanqui), 114 Civilization, and sexual repression,
Capitalism 13-14
and class struggle, 31 Civil War in France (Marx), 160
compared with socialism, 54 Class society, and dualism, 54-55
contemporary vs. Marxian model, Class struggle, and capitalism, 31
133 Coexistence, peaceful, 172
defined by Lenin, 29 Colonialism
and ends, 27, 44 end of, 65-70
and marginal employment, 33 See also Third World
and negation of negation, 81 Combes, Emile, 143
and new historic bloc, 134-35 Comblin, Joseph, 75, 75n
and 1929 cataclysm, 39-40, 42-43 Commercialization
vs. self-management, 156, 171-72 and alienation, 36
and subordination of man, 71 and social life, 38
and universalization of market, Communism, and Soviet Union,
28-29 73-74
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democ- Communist Party
racy (Schumpeter), 61 in China, 69
INDEX 185
Communist Party (cont.) Cybernetics, 111

in France, 143-45 Czechoslovakia, 53, 145, 164, 169,
in Spain, 137 172
Competition, and capitalism, 29
Computer, 97
and information, 57-59 Dance
and knowledge, 95-96 as creative self-expression, 20-21
Comte, Auguste, 93, 98 and Dionysiac art, 25
Condition of the English Working Davis, Angela, 22
Class, The (Engels), 8-9 Decentralization
Consciousness, 181 vs. centralization, 48
and end of colonialism, 65-70 of decision making, 57-59
and individual participation, 60- Decision making, 19
64 decentralization of, 57-59
and science and technology, 70-72 and democracy, 61-64
and self-management, 175 and self-management, 169-70
and socialism, 50 Delegated power, 160
and spontaneity, 152 vs. self-management, 157
Constantine, Eddie, 36 Democracy
Constantine, Emperor, 30, 75, 91 and avant-garde, 175
Consumer goods, production of, 130- and decision making, 61-64
132 and self-management, 157-58
Contribution to the Critique of the Descartes, René, 30, 109
Political Economy (Marx), 72 Dialectic
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 109 and apologetics, 95
Cost of Growth, The (Mishan), 44- vs. positivism, 93
45 Division of labor, and working class,
Creation 149
and aesthetics, 96-97 Divorce rate, among young, 13
vs. alienation, 77-78 Drugs, and perception, 22-23
and God, 79 Dualism
and liberty, 85 and bureaucracy, 55-56
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of and class society, 54-55
Right (Marx), 80-81 and education, 18-19, 112—14
Critique of the Political Economy and religion, 75
(Marx), 126, 129 and revolution, 59
Crucifixion, and resurrection, 85 See also Body-soul dualism
Cuba, 153 Durkheim, Emile, 112
Cultural and economic development,
66
Cultural revolution Eastern Europe, 94
and education, 112-13 Economic antPhilosophical Manu-
and self-management, 87-90 scripts of 1844 (Marx), 71, 81
Culture Economic growth, 30-31
as commodity or creation, 36 and arms manufacture, 43-47
and church, 90-91 and culture, 66
and economic growth, 66 and Keynes theories, 40-41
repression vs. productivity, 17 Economic success, as end, 30
and self-management, 163 Education
and television, 11-12, 151 and aesthetics, 96-99
186 INDEX
Education (cont.) Feudalism, 27-29

of children, 117 and bourgeoisie, 51-52, 142-43
and cultural revolution, 112-13 Fichte, Johann, 76, 78, 111
and dualism, 18-19, 112-14 Films, and violence or escape, 36
and ends, 17 Food supply, 11
and information, 95-96 vs. population growth, 42
as initiation rite, 18 Foreign policy, and private interests,
and planning, 99-102 36-37
and science, 111-12 Fourier, François, 70, 81, 82
and society, 14-16 France, 9, 49, 77, 111, 123
and television, 118-19 agriculture in, 11
vocational, 117 arms export, 37
See also Higher education; School; bourgeoisie in, 142-43
Technical education bureaucracy in, 56
Egypt, 11, 75, 143 Communist Party, 143-45
18-Brumaire (Marx), 78 education in, 112
Einstein, Albert, 35, 109 1848 revolution, 91
Emancipation, human vs, political, land speculation in, 37-38
50-51 1968 crisis, 15-16, 24, 147, 152-57
Employment, 33 Paris Commune, 9, 87, 143, 159-
and arms manufacture, 45 160
Ends Popular Front strikes (1936), 153
of capitalism, 27, 44 socialism in, 70
and individuals, 29-30 suicide in, 19
and means, 19, 35 Third Republic, 143
and revolution, 59 wage and price freeze, 41
science and technology as, 34-35 workers in, 138, 148, 150
vs. words, 21 youth in, 7-8
Engels, Friedrich, 76, 77, 81-82 See also French Revolution
on intentions vs. consequences, 39 France, Anatole, 72
on workers movement, 8-9 Franciscans, 76
England, 49 Freedom, and money, 63
political economy, 70
Free enterprise
and money, 36
entropy, vs. God, 25
and nature, 38
Euclid, 109 Freire, Paulo, 103-4, 105, 106
Europe, 27, 28, 56, 72, 90 French Revolution (1789), 51, 72,
See also Eastern Europe 108-9, 143, 157, 165-66, 180
Exploitation, of working class, 31- Freud, Sigmund, 13.
32,37
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 30, 35, 36,

Faith 48, 130
and resurrection, 84-86 General Motors strikes, 36-37, 148
and revolutionary action, 77, 83 General strike, and working class,
Falloux, Alfred, Comte de, 91 153-54
Family, and rebellion of youth, 12— Genghis Khan, 44
13 Germany
Ferry, Jules, 143 national unity in, 92
Fetishism, and alienation, 16 philosophy in, 70
INDEX 187
Germany (cont.) Imagination, creative, 108-9

Socialist Party, 159 vs. alienation, 110
workers in, 150 Immanence, and transcendence, 79—
See also Nazism; West Germany 80
GNP, 11, 35 India, 21
God Individual, and society, 29-30, 179-
and creation, 79 180
vs. entropy, 25 Indochina war, 144
and human needs, 69 See also Vietnam
as internal power, 85-86 Industrialization
and man, 75-76 and dehumanization, 8-9
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 72 and family, 13
Gorki, Maxim, 99 Inflation, and capitalism, 41
Government Information
and economy, 40-43 and computer, 57-59
See also State and manipulation, 37
Gramsci, Antonio, 124-25, 164 organization of, 95-96
Greeks, 66, 85, 109 and reality, 14
cities, 30 Italy, 124
philosophy, 25, 75, 84, 91 Bologna Convention (1919), 164
tragedy, 98 workers in, 149-50
Grenelle accords, 148 Intellectuals, and working class,
Guevara, Ernesto (Ché), 22 135-37
Intellectual work, in production, 128
Invention, and imagination, 97
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 70, Investment, and profit making, 36-37
72, 76, 78, 79, 93, 98, 111 Israel, prophets of, 75, 107
dialectic of, 80-81, 82
rationalism of, 21
Heraclitus, 85 Jacobins, 56, 87, 160
Hierarchy Japan, 67
vs. self-management, 156-57 Jaurès, Jean Léon, 81, 143
and technical competence, 166 Jesus, see Christ
Jews, 28, 75
Higher education, and unemploy- Joachim of Floris, 76
ment, 115 John the Baptist, 84
History John XXIII, Pope, 55
and faith, 84-85 Joliot-Curie, Pierre, 35
and man, 182 Jung, Robert, 101
and possibility, 101-2
rate of change, 10-12
Hitler, Adolf, 37, 43 Kahn, Herman, 100
Holy Family, The (Marx), 78 Kant, Immanuel, 72, 78, 109
Humanities, and culture, 91-92 dualism of, 82
Human sciences Kautsky, Karl, 71-72, 82, 152, 161
and positivism, 92-94 Keynes, John Maynard, 40-42
and repressive society, 15-16 Kierkegaard, Séren, 77
Hungary, 145, 164 Klee, Paul, 99
Hus, Jan, 76 Knowledge
Huxley, Aldous, 100 as action, 78, 111
188 INDEX
Knowledge (cont.) Man

and alienation, 16-17 and capitalism, 71
and computer, 95-96 and God, 75-76
and history, 182
Management, and self-management,
Labor 170
exploitation of, 31-32 Mao Tse-tung, 22, 49, 67, 89, 104,
living, 131 105, 106, 124, 156
and market, 29, 47 on bureaucracy, 87-88
and ownership of production, Marcuse, Herbert, 93
102-3 Marker, Chris, 174
Laborit, H., 53-54 Market, universalization of, 28-29
Land, 27, 29 Marketplace, and production, 48
and market, 47 Marx, Karl, 18, 50-51, 60-63, 76,
speculation in, 37-38 88, 93, 102-3, 105, 109, 111,
Lao-tse, 21 124, 126, 146, 148, 149, 166
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 159 on alienation, 16, 55-56
Latin, and sense of class, 91-92 on capitalism, 40
Latin America, 70, 106 on cooperative production, 160
religion in, 24 on economic crises, 131
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 98 on human needs, 179
Lenin, Nikolai, 49, 63, 74, 80, 105, on negation of negation, 80-81
124, 146, 152, 171 on profit rate, 133
definition of capitalism, 29 on religion, 77
and “economism,” 71 on socialism, 49, 71, 73-74, 151
on revolutionary situation, 151 on subjectivity, 78-79
on self-management, 161 theory of value, 129, 137
on socialism, 86-87 on work and workers, 127-30, 132
twenty-one conditions, 144 Marxism
on worker control, 162 vs. Christianity, 65
on worker State, 163 and colonialism, 69-70
Leonardo da Vinci, 96 in Eastern Europe, 94
L’homme imaginant (Laborit), 53- perversions of, 82-83
and pluralism, 69
Liberty and science and technology, 71-72
and creation, 85 Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
and reality, 78 ogy strike, 35
Liu Shao-chi, 88 Mass media, and manipulation, 37
Means, and ends, 19, 35
Logic, vs. aesthetics, 21-22, 98-99
Mediterranean Sea, 27, 28
Louis XIV, King of France, 56 Méline, Jules, 143
Lumumba, Patrice, 22 Michels, Robert, 61-62
Luxemburg, Rosa, 126, 127 Michelson, Albert, 110
Middle class, 105, 137
decline of, 122-24
Maccaby, Michael, 168 and dualism, 114
McNamara, Robert S., 15 See also Bourgeoisie
Mafignon agreements, 148 Mishan, E. J., 35, 44
Magnetic tape, and instruction, 119 Moltmann, Jurgen, 83-84
Malle, Louis, 13 Monetary system, international, 41
INDEX 189
Money 1984 (Orwell), 100

as commodity, 33 Nixon, Richard M., 38
and freedom, 63 Notes on Machiavelli (Gramsci), 125
and free enterprise, 36
and market, 47-48
traffic in, 27-29 October Revolution (Soviet Union),
Mongolian hordes, 11 72, 73, 143, 151, 157, 162-63
Monopolies, 36 Oedipus, 13
and arms manufacture, 43 Oppenheimer, Robert, 35
and government, 37-38 Oppression, and alienation, 105
and production, 48 Orwell, George, 100
More, Thomas, 107-8 Overproduction, and surplus
Morris, William, 108 commodities, 42-43
Moscovici, Serge, 130, 132n Owen, Robert, 81, 82
Moslems, 24, 70
Miinzer, Thomas, 76, 77, 81, 82
Murmur of the Heart (film), 13 Paris Commune (France), 9, 87,
Music, as self-expression, 20-21 143, 159-60
Myths Parliaments, creation of, 142
and status quo, 14 Parmenides, 84
and transcendence, 26 Personality, and education, 16
Personnel, and self-management,
170
Napoleon I, 11, 56, 87 Planning, and prediction, 99-102
National interest, vs. private inter- Plato, 84
ests, 34-37 Pluralism, 78
Nationalization, and planning, 52 Poland, 145, 164, 173
National strike Politics, 19
and general strike, 154 as art, 181
and new historic bloc, 140-41 and education, 104-5
and repression, 155 as science, 180-81
Natural sciences, and human Popular Front (France), 153
sciences, 15 Population growth, vs. food supply,
Nature, and man, 38-39 42
Nazism, 43, 44, 72 Populist alliances, 122-23
Negation, of negation, 80-81 vs. new historic bloc, 124
Neocapitalism, 42-43 Positivism, and human sciences, 92-
Neocolonialism, 42 94
Neolithic Age, 10, 59 Possibility
Neo-Stalinism, 164, 172 and history, 101-2
New Atlantis, The (Bacon), 107 and reality, 94
New historic bloc, 124-25, 136-39 Power, alienation of, 19
and capitalism, 134-35 Printing press, and change, 10, 11
and national strike, 140-41 Private interests, vs. national
vs. populist alliance, 124 interest, 34-37
News from Nowhere (Morris), 108 Private property, 94, 127
Newton, Isaac, 109 Production
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 25, cooperative, 158-60
75, 98, 99 and marketplace, 48
1929 cataclysm, 39-40, 42-43 ownership of, and labor, 102-3
190 INDEX
Production (cont.) Revolution (cont.)

and revolutionary action, 89 and production, 89
and science and technology, 126- and religion, 24
133, 167-68 and violence, 121-22
Productivity, vs. repression, 17 See also New historic bloc; Na-
Profit making, and investment, 36-37 tional strike; Workers’ councils
Profit rate, and capital, 133 Revolutionary situation, 151-53, 155
“Project Camelot,” 15 Ricardo, David, 70
Proletariat, 80-81 Ricoeur, Paul, 69
dictatorship of, and socialist Rimbaud, Arthur, 22
democracy, 160 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 61
See also Working class Robinson, Joan, 133n
Prophetic dimension, of education, Roman Empire, 27, 30, 56, 68, 75,
106-7 85, 91
Prostitution, in nineteenth century, 9 Rostow, Walt W., 41
Protestantism, 24 Rouquerol, Max, 57n
Proudhon, Piérre Joseph, 55, 87, 160 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61, 62, 63,
Prussia, 56, 92 157-58
Ptolemy, 109 Ruling class, and domination, 53-54
Pury, Roland de, 80
Quesnay, Francois, 180 Saint-Simon, Claude de, 70, 81, 93

School
and society, 114-15
“RAND Corporation,” 46 and youth, 14
Rationalism See also Education
and aesthetics, 98 Schumpeter, Joseph, 61
capitalist vs. technical, 136 Science, 30
Reality and arms manufacture, 45-46
and information, 14 and Christianity, 70-71
and truth, 78 and education, 111-12
Religion, 23-25, 77 as end, 34-35
and alienation, 68-69 and Marxism, 71-72
and dualism, 75 and production, 126-33
See also Church; God Scipio, 91
Renaissance, 30, 66, 68, 91, 106, 107, Second Vatican Council, 68, 70-71
109 É Self-direction, and socialism, 139
Repression Self-expression, creative, 20-21
and human sciences, 15-16 Self-management
and national strike, 155 vs. capitalism, 156, 171-72
vs. productivity, 17 and consciousness, 175
vs. radical change, 20 and cultural revolution, 87-90
sexual, 13-14 and decision making, 169-70
Research, and value, 131, 132 and democracy, 157-58
Resurrection, 9 and Marxism, 160
and faith, 84-86 socialism of, 55, 59, 60-64, 141
Revolution, 19, 51 vs. Stalinism, 171, 172-73
and dualism, 59 and working class, 161-67
and faith, 77, 83 and worker councils, 169-70, 173-
and populist alliances, 122-23 174 ,
INDEX 191
Sex, and youth, 13-14 Suez, invasion of, 143

Slavery, and liberation, 105 Sumerian empire, 11
Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 61, Surrealism, 22, 111
62, 157-58
Socialism
and alienation, 71 Tamerlane, 44
Près of, 47-48 Taoism, 21, 98
and bureaucracy, 86-88 Taylor system, 56, 92, 167
compared with capitalism, 54 Technical education, 116-17
and consciousness, 50, 71-72 and dualism, 114-15
defined by Marx, 49 Technocracy, and bureaucracy, 57
of self-management, 55, 59, 60- Technology, 17, 34-35
64, 141 and Christianity, 70-71
and working class, 71-72, 143 and Marxism, 71-72
Society, and individual, 29-30, 179- and production, 126-33
180 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 24, 70
Socrates, 98, 99, 106 Television
Sorelian myth, 153 and culture, 11-12, 151
Soviet Union, 40, 49, 50, 71, 72, 87, and education, 118-19
88, 125, 143, 145, 163, 164 Theology of Hope, The (Molt-
Bolsheviks, 144, 161 mann), 83-85
as bureaucracy, 52-55, 139, 146, Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 78,
172-73 111
class differences in, 156 Thiers, Adolphe, 91
Constitution of 1936, 52-53 Third International, 144
decline of, 66-67 Third World, 22, 67, 106
October Revolution, 72, 73, 143, aid to, 41-42, 65-66
151, 157, 162-63 education in, 103-4
in World War I, 151 religion in, 24
in World War II, 73-74 Thorez, Maurice, 144, 146
See also Stalinism Tocqueville, Alexis de, 63
Spain, Communist Party in, 137 Totalitarianism, 43-44
Spinoza, Baruch, 79 Transcendence
Spontaneity and immanence, 79-80
and consciousness, 152
and myths, 26
myth of, 22 Treatise on Duties (Cicero), 91
Stalin, Josef, 37, 49, 52, 55, 74, 82,
86, 145
Trotsky, Leon, 163
Stalinism, 152, 160, 161, 164, 165, Truth
171-73 in Aristotelian sense, 84
State and reality, 78
and cooperatives, 159 Turks, 28
and science and technology, 131,
134
Soviet conception of, 53 Underdeveloped countries, 49, 89
See also Government aid to, 41-42, 65-66
Steam engine, 10, 11, 28 Unemployment, 115
Stoics, 85 and arms manufacture, 43
Students, 18 Unions, and workers’ councils, 146-
and national strike, 154 148
192 INDEX
United States Work (cont.)

agriculture in, 11, 138 manual and intellectual, 115-16,
colonization of, 28 128
decline of, 66-67 and self-management, 170
devaluation of dollar, 41 See also Labor
foreign policy, 36-37 Workers’ councils, 141-46
standard of living, 32-33 and self-management, 168-69,
and Vietnam, 53 173-74
workers in, 149 and unions, 147-48
Utopia (More), 107-8 Working class
Utopian element, in education, 107— alienation of, 32, 49-50, 52
and division of labor, 149
Utopian Socialism and Scientific So- exploitation of, 31-32, 127
cialism (Engels), 81-82 and general strike, 153-54
and intellectuals, 135-37
and living conditions, 148
Value, theory of (Marx), 129, 137 as percent of population, 138
Vico, Giovanni, 102 and self-management, 161-67
Vietnam, 21, 53, 67 and socialism, 71-72, 87, 143
Buddhism in, 24 Works (Lenin), 162, 171
Violence World, as creation, 76—77
and films, 36 World Council of Churches, 68
and revolution, 121-22
Year 2000, The (Kahn), 100

Wealth, and complex work, 132-33 Yugoslavia, 145, 164, 165, 169
Weber, Max, 62, 92 Youth
apologetic theory, 56-57 in China, 8
Western civilization, 29-30, 95 and ends, 17-20, 26
aesthetics in, 98-99 and family, 12-13
decline of, 66-67
intellectual tradition, 106 and religion, 23-25
West Germany, farmers in, 138 in Third World, 94-95
What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 71- and underdeveloped countries,
72, 161 21-22, 106
Wilde, Oscar, 50 in United States, 7
Wilson, Charles E., 37 and university, 14
Work and utopian element, 108-9
as commodity, 33 See also Students
complex, 132-33
“dead” vs. “living,” 128, 129
general vs. collective, 127, 130- Zealots of Bar Kokba, 84
132 Zen Buddhism, 21
= from front flap)
them for making us think about our life
style, and question whether the future
that is projected by the ecologists, poli-
ticians, and sociologists is inevitable.
Whether we shall simply stand and wait
for it, or whether we can make our own
future so that man will not be over-
whelmed by the technology he has
created.
Garaudy proposes a cultural transfor-

mation that he calls self-management;
and he draws equally on Marx and the
modern liberal and humanist philoso-
phers. The new revolutionaries reject
“systems” and confirm these humanist
Marxist and Judeo-Christian principles
in an utterly personal way.
| The future we will all share, come what
may, is not simply sitting out there, wait-
| ing to be discovered—as America was
before Columbus. It must be an act of our
own creation.
Jacket design by Bob Korn

Our society is splitting apart. Profound movement that goes well
beyond the potential of conventional instruments of change is the
only answer. To resolve the crisis we need more than a revolution.
We must change not only the structures of property and power, but
our culture—the ways we think about education and religion. We
_need a new definition of life. |
It is not a matter of finding new answers to old problems; we
have to reframe the questions. But asking the right questions does
not mean inverting ideological positions. It means that we must
reconsider our common problems. It involves changing the ways
in which we think about politics, not just whom, or what party, we
vote for. ¥ :
Each of us must invent the future; there is no “ready-to-wear”
politics. The task demands far more of us than giving up what we
own; it means giving what we are—the poets within, our creative
imagination.
The Alternative Future does not suggest a program. It aims to
create not a new party but a new spirit, not utopia but practical
approaches that face up to the dimensions of contemporary prob-
lems. The older generation must listen without prejudice to what
the young say, what they denounce and what they prociaim, so
that we are not isolated from each other but are able to share our
insights and experiences. |
So, we appeal to those who love the future: who find meaning
and joy in creation through art, religious faith, love, thought and
revolution; and especially to the young who can conceive and live
a new kind of life.
There are a thousand dead ends but only one alternative to
chaos. We shall not be spared the cost of revolution; radical
change is already under way. It is a matter of finding ways to
direct it consciously.
The choice is not between an older order and sudden change.
It is between convulsive revolution and constructive revolution.
21750

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WIM

LLEY LIBRARY SYSTEM

AVision of Christian Marxism

The Alternative Future is about the

Simon and Schuster = New York

TOME AUTO NE 6 NT RES T0 n LO

1 The Challenge of the Young 7

3 A Revolution for Today? 121

Pa) af. aay Le CE

The Challenge of the Young

nomenon, the prostitution resulting from underpaid factory

1. What the Young Denounce

Parents symbolize the inheritance of models of behavior. Thus,

unmasked the flimsiness of a “morality” based on fear of the

The “human sciences” are a good example. The effort to cover

niques intended to aid corporate management to operate like

exploitation, and oppression but fosters the realization that the

school system. The university ghetto has been so slow in adjust-

pose. This accusation of dualism against the school as an institu-

civilization’s crisis. Such phenomena help us grasp how vital it

2. What They Proclaim

the Chinese cultural revolution has aroused such intense reac-

Having said that, simply to avoid hypocrisy we must remem-

the basic orientation of the young radically expresses one of the

This attitude of the young suggests a new kind of bond among

By its very nature, capitalism lacks a concept of the relation

sporadically by those excluded from feudal society, those who

of usury and interest taking. Then came land, which struck a

without a specifically human purpose. Competition between in-

slave or serf, the worker is not legally bound to a particular

economy of the U.S. is in an extraordinary situation: half the

corporations as nondistributed profits or reserves, or by indi-

classifying nations according to “per capita gross national prod-

Rack our brains to prove it on the basis of the implicit postulates

Motors is good for the country,” said Secretary of Defense Wil-

speculation is carried out by complicity between the monopolies

Our relationship to nature is out of control as are our relations

in Capital: The whole economic mechanism of capitalism broke

thin. Economic growth was to resolve all problems: end poverty,

thousands of cows were slaughtered because there was no market

support this policy, manipulation of the masses to convince them

are involved in a lively contest of inventiveness and advertising.

the “fallout” of the private-armament industry. The rapid ex-

forms based on this primordial exigency. Thus, thanks to the

tal; second, because investment must be controlled by the society

of social life into the defense and maintenance of its economic

nineteenth century or in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth.

in the French Revolution, for example) from human emancipa-

slightest, it was possible to institute one of the most oppressive

precise phenomenon. It is expressed in the proletariat’s inability

be created must be a socialism of self-management, not following

est,” as Marx wrote, it provides a mask of anonymity for the

evitable, still held by the latter-day disciples of Weber, has, it

* See Max Rouquerol’s book, Ordinateur et décentralisation des décisions,

bureaucratic model. The use of the computer runs counter to the

New techniques and requirements like these run counter to the

The purpose of structural change by the people is not merely

ualism or mechanistic materialism—we must realize two things:

calls “the iron-clad law of oligarchies.” Like Max Weber’s theory

proletarianization of millions made such a conception utopian.

alienation. They will not alienate power to a delegate to represent

The pretensions of the United States to world hegemony, main-

civilizations”—so decisive for the future—have not yet been fully