"Now with the welfare state, with the gradual accession of the whole proletariat to hitherto 'bourgeois' standards of comfort and leisure as, in mechanical succession, the problems of material survival are solved and as life, in an equally mechanical succession, becomes more and more disgusting, all revolt becomes essentially a revolt against the quality of experience. One knows very few people dying of hunger. But everyone one knows is dying of boredom"

Everyday existence has become a show, a spectacle observed by an audience. With the tools of conditioning (mass media, urban planning, rapid transport systems, etc) that audience, the new expanded proletariat, is kept in an almost constant state of passivity, isolation and non-creativity. "They say... They are planning... They are building..." Everyone has become a spectator of their own (in)activity. Despite all the images of satisfaction it presents, modern capitalism cannot hide the fact that it does not allow the fulfilment of real human desires.

What capitalist production creates is not goods to be used by those that need them but commodities for sale to those who can afford them. The purpose of commodity production is not the satisfaction of human needs but to reproduce and enlarge Capital. During work time the workers do not belong to themselves but someone else, they are not doing their own work but someone else's. This work does not directly satisfy a need but is the means of satisfying other needs. The worker is indifferent to the content of this alienated labour, so long as it pays a wage. The capitalist is indifferent to the specific properties of the product, so long as it sells. The only interest the capitalist has in peoples needs is how much they "need" to buy and how much they can be coerced, through propaganda and psychological conditioning, to "need" more.

"Free" time is the time for the passive consumption of commodities; cinemas, theme parks and night clubs the factories of leisure. The cultural spectacle is the most important commodity of all, the one that sells all the others. Its most glaring manifestation is the mass media but the spectacle and the social relation it nurtures is in no way dependant on this. The whole organization of modern society is designed to turn people into addicts of passive consumption. It is by no mistake that in the age of mass communications technology most of this "communication" is unilateral, that the consumers of communication have no way of replying. There can be no free use of time until the masses possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life.

Modern society - the society of the spectacle - is a world inverted, a society organized towards the needs of forced labour and the automatic circulation of commodities and against the needs of free creativity and the distribution of goods to fulfil peoples genuine needs and desires. Current social organization is based on the hierarchical division between directors and executants, spectacle and spectators: those who give orders and those who carry them out. Therefore the goal of the revolutionary project is the creation of a classless society, a world of masters without slaves; the society of generalized self-management.

It may seem absurd to talk of revolution but the alternatives are more absurd since they imply the acceptance of the existing order in one way or another. Reforms only seek minor changes in the current social system, not the transformation of the totality. Unlike capitalism, which was able to develop inside the feudal system since a segment of the bourgeois class already controlled the economy, a new society cannot be developed inside the present one since spectacle-commodity-capitalism has now colonized every aspect of life; any partial (and therefore failed) radical accomplishments gradually degrade into reformist opposition. It is not a matter of improving the present society, but of creating a new society; not of some partial success that would give rise to a new division, but of a thorough rejection of every new disguise of the old world.

For a practical revolution to occur without reproducing the mystifications, ideologies and dogma of the past it is necessary that revolutionary theory is recognized, lived and developed by the masses. Class society can only be superseded by the conscious practice of a social organization which negates hierarchical power. This organization can only come from the sole class capable of ending class society, the class who produce the material conditions which enchain them, the proletariat. This revolution demands more of its "men without qualities" than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men it delegated to carry out its tasks.

The traditional revolutionary movement was defeated by Stalinist "communism" in the east and reformist "socialism" in the west, but its most advanced moments (Russia 1905, Germany 1918-19, Italy 1920, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936-37, Hungary 1956, France 1968, Czechoslovakia 1968, Portugal 1974-75 and Poland 1980-81) have shown the form that revolution can take: the absolute power of the popular assemblies (a.k.a workers councils, anti-work councils, revolutionary assemblies, collectives....) - whose first project will be the abolition of forced labour. Not to be confused with "workers control" which seeks the self-management of the world as it already exists, the true movement for generalized self management seeks the qualitative transformation of all areas of life, not just work. This anti-hierarchical form of organization begins from the direct democracy of the popular assembly and federates internationally by means of strictly mandated immediately revocable delegates. In this way it avoids the possibility of the emergence of a new ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists.

The victory of the councils is not the end of the revolution but the beginning of it. An anti-hierarchical revolution would not solve all our problems it would simply eliminate some unnecessary ones freeing us to tackle more interesting problems. The only thing that stands in the way is peoples unawareness of their own collective power. Those who keep watching to see what comes next never affect what comes next. Better to make your own mistakes than to rely on the most "correct" leader. But there's no point blindly repeating the mistakes of the past. Within the context of this system "constructive alternatives" are traps. The point is to undermine the obstacles that prevent people from realizing their own creative potentials. Even if we have no guarantee of ultimate victory, the process is already a pleasure! You can begin anywhere. And you have to begin somewhere. Do you think you can learn to swim if you never go in the water?