A revolutionary organization must constitute an integral critique of society, that is, it must make a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated social life while refusing to compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the world. In the organization’s struggle with class society, the combattants themselves are the fundamental weapons: a revolutionary organization must thus see to it that the dominant society’s conditions of separation and hierarchy are not reproduced within itself. It must constantly struggle against its deformation by the ruling spectacle. The only limit to participation in its total democracy is that each of its members must have recognized and appropriated the coherence of the organization’s critique—a coherence that must be demonstrated both in the critical theory as such and in the relation between that theory and practical activity.

• life
• society
• power
• struggle
• weapons
• activity
• theory
• separation
• hierarchy

“The long-sought political form through which the working class could carry out its own economic liberation” has taken on a clear shape in this century, in the form of revolutionary workers councils which assume all decisionmaking and executive powers and which federate with each other by means of delegates who are answerable to their base and revocable at any moment. The councils that have actually emerged have as yet provided no more than a rough hint of their possibilities because they have immediately been opposed and defeated by class society’s various defensive forces, among which their own false consciousness must often be included. As Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting for the power of workers councils “poses problems” rather than providing a solution. But it is precisely within this form of social organization that the problems of proletarian revolution can find their real solution. This is the terrain where the objective preconditions of historical consciousness are brought together—the terrain where active direct communication is realized, marking the end of specialization, hierarchy and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions into “conditions of unity.” In this process proletarian subjects can emerge from their struggle against their contemplative position; their consciousness is equal to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves because this consciousness has become inseparable from coherent intervention in history.

• society
• other
• power
• unity
• consciousness
• struggle
• history
• communication
• separation
• transformation
• shape
• hierarchy
• revolution

...the attempted reformation of Judaism by Jesus can be construed as a necessarily new religion for conscious men rather than bicameral men. Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and penance are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is 'within' not in extenso. But even the history of Christianity does not and cannot remain true to its originator. The development of the Christian Church returns again and again to this same longing for bicameral absolutes, away from the difficult inner kingdoms of agape to an external hierarchy reaching through a cloud of miracle and infallibility to an archaic authorization in an extended heaven.

• religion
• desire
• sin
• sacrifice
• christianity
• consciousness
• heaven
• behavior
• history
• jesus
• authorization
• community
• hierarchy
• metaphor

Except for signifying potential group danger, primate signals rarely apply to events outside the group, such as the presence of food or water. They are totally within group affairs and are not evolved to give environmental information in the way human languages are. Now this is what we start with. Within a specific ecology, for most species, it is this communication system that limits the size of the group. Baboons are able to achieve groups as high as eighty or more because they have a strict geographical structure as they move about on the open plains, with dominant hierarchies being maintained within each circle of the group. But in general the usual primate group does not exceed thirty or forty, a limit determined by the communication necessary for the dominance hierarchy to work. In gorillas, for example, the dominant male, usually the largest silver-backed male, together with all the females and young, occupies the central core of each group of about twenty, the other males tending to be peripheral. The diameter of a group at any given moment rarely exceeds 200 feet, as every animal remains attentive to the movements of others in the dense forest environment. The group moves when the dominant male stands motionless with his legs spread and faces a certain direction. The other members of the group then crowd around him, and the troop moves off on its leisurely day’s journey of about a third of a mile. The important thing here is that the complex channels of communication are open between the top of the dominance hierarchy and all the rest. There is no reason to think that early man from the beginning of the genus Homo two million years ago lived any differently.

• reason
• work
• structure
• communication
• danger
• behavior
• dominance
• environment
• food
• hierarchy

At any point on the Earth, there is as much west of you as there is east.  I have discovered along the way that at every position in the whole hierarchy of beings there is as much above as below, and thus that there are standpoints from which every position is as much a failure as it is a success.

• bigger fish
• zen
• hierarchy
• rhizome