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\title{The Minimum Definition of Intelligence}
\date{May 6, 1974}
\author{For Ourselves Collective}
\subtitle{Theses on the Construction of One’s Own Self-theory}






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\section{Introduction}


This booklet is for people who are dissatisfied with their lives. If you are
happy with your present existence, we have no argument with you. However, if
you are tired of waiting for your life to change\dots{}



\begin{quote}


Tired of waiting for authentic community, love and adventure\dots{}\forcelinebreak 
Tired of waiting for the end of money and forced work\dots{}\forcelinebreak 
Tired of looking for new pastimes to pass the time\dots{}\forcelinebreak 
Tired of waiting for a lush, rich existence\dots{} Tired of waiting for a
situation in which you can realise all your desires\dots{}\forcelinebreak 
Tired of waiting for the end of all authorities, alienations, ideologies and moralities\dots{}\forcelinebreak 
\forcelinebreak 
\dots{}then we think you’ll find what follows to be quite handy.



\end{quote}

\section{I}


One of the great secrets of our miserable yet potentially marvellous time is
that thinking can be a pleasure. This is a manual for constructing your own
self-theory. Constructing your self-theory is a revolutionary pleasure, the
pleasure of constructing your self-theory of revolution.


Building your self-theory is a destructive\Slash{}constructive pleasure, because you
are building a theory-of-practice for the destructive\Slash{}constructive
transformation of this society.


Self-theory is a theory of adventure. It is as erotic and humorous as an
authentic revolution.


The alienation felt as a result of having had your thinking done for you by
the ideologies of our day, can lead to the search for the pleasurable negation
of that alienation: thinking for yourself. It is the pleasure of making your
mind your own.


Self-theory is the body of critical thought you construct for your own use.
You construct it and use it when you make an analysis of why your life is the
way it is, why the world is the way it is. (And ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ are
inseparable, since thought comes from subjective, emotive experience.) You
build your self-theory when you develop a theory of practice — a theory of how
to get what you desire for your life.


Theory will be either a practical theory — a theory of revolutionary practice
— or it will be nothing\dots{} nothing but an aquarium of ideas, a contemplative
interpretation of the world. The realm of ideals is the eternal waiting-room
of unrealised desire.


Those who assume (usually unconsciously) the impossibility of realising their
life’s desires, and of thus fighting for themselves, usually end up fighting
for an ideal or cause instead (i.e., the illusion of self-activity or
self-practice). Those who know that this is the acceptance of alienation will
now know that all ideals and causes are ideologies.

\section{II}


Whenever a system of ideas is structured with an abstraction at the centre —
assigning a role or duties to you for its sake — this system is an ideology.
An ideology is a system of false consciousness in which you no longer function
as the subject in your relation to the world.


The various forms of ideology are all structured around different
abstractions, yet they all serve the interests of a dominant (or aspiring
dominant) class by giving you a sense of purpose in your sacrifice, suffering
and submission.


Religious ideology is the oldest example, the fantastic projection called
‘God’ is the Supreme Subject of the cosmos, acting on every human being as
‘His’ subject.


In the ‘scientific’ and ‘democratic’ ideologies of bourgeois enterprise,
capital investment is the ‘productive’ subject directing world history — the
‘invisible hand’ guiding human development. The bourgeoisie had to attack and
weaken the power that religious ideology once held. It exposed the
mystification of the religious world in its technological investigation,
expanding the realm of things and methods out of which it could make a profit.


The various brands of Leninism are ‘revolutionary’ ideologies in which their
Party is the rightful subject to dictate world history, by leading its object
— the proletariat — to the goal of replacing the bourgeois apparatus with a
Leninist one.


The many other forms of the dominant ideologies can be seen daily. The rise of
the new religiomsyticisms serve the dominant structure of social relations in
a round about way. They provide a neat form in which the emptiness of daily
life may be obscured, and like drugs, make it easier to live with.
Volunteerism (shoulder to the wheel) and determinism (it’ll all work out)
prevent us from recognising our real place in the functioning of the world. In
avant-garde ideology, novelty in (and of) itself is what’s important. In
survivalism, subjectivity is preempted by fear through the invocation of the
image of an impending world catastrophe.


In accepting ideologies we accept an inversion of subject and object; things
take on a human power and will, while human beings have their place as things.
Ideology is upside-down theory. We further accept the separation between the
narrow reality of our daily life, and the image of a world totality that’s out
of our grasp. Ideology offers us only a voyeur’s relationship with the
totality.


In this separation, and this acceptance of sacrifice for the cause, every
ideology serves to protect the dominant social order. Authorities whose power
depends on separation must deny us our subjectivity in order to survive
themselves. Such denial comes in the form of demanding sacrifices for ‘the
common good’, ‘the national interest’, ‘the war effort’, ‘the revolution’\dots{}

\section{III}


We get rid of the blinders of ideology by constantly asking ourselves\dots{} How do
I feel?



\begin{quote}


Am I enjoying myself?\forcelinebreak 
How’s my life?\forcelinebreak 
Am I getting what I want?\forcelinebreak 
Why not?\forcelinebreak 
What’s keeping me from getting what I want?



\end{quote}


This is having consciousness of the commonplace, awareness of one’s everyday
routine. That Everyday Life — real life — exists, is a public secret that gets
less secret every day, as the poverty of daily life gets more and more
visible.

\section{IV}


The construction of self-theory is based on thinking for yourself, being fully
conscious of desires and their validity. It is the construction of radical
subjectivity.


Authentic ‘consciousness raising’ can only be the ‘raising’ of people’s
thinking to the level of positive (non-guilty) self-consciousness: developing
their basic subjectivity, free of ideology and imposed morality in all its
forms.


The essence of what many leftists, therapy-mongers, racism awareness trainers
and sisterisers term ‘consciousness raising’ is their practice of beating
people into unconsciousness with their ideological billyclubs.


The path from ideology (self-negation) to radical subjectivity
(self-affirmation) passes through Point Zero, the capital city of nihilism.
This is the windswept still point in social space and time\dots{} the social limbo
wherein which one recognises that the present is devoid of life; that there is
no life in one’s daily existence. A nihilist knows the difference between
surviving and living.


Nihilists go through a reversal or perspective on their life and the world.
Nothing is true for them but their desires, their will to be. They refuse all
ideology in their hatred for the miserable social relations in modern
capitalist-global society. From this reversed perspective they see with a
newly acquired clarity the upside-down world of reification\footnote{reification — the act of converting people, abstract concepts, etc. into things, i.e. commodities.}, the inversion
of subject and object, of abstract and concrete. It is the theatrical
landscape of fetishised commodities, mental projections, separations and
ideologies: art, God, city planning, ethics, smile buttons, radio stations
that say they love you and detergents that have compassion for your hands.


Daily conversation offers sedatives like: “You can’t always get what you
want”, “Life has its ups and downs”, and other dogmas of the secular religion
of survival. ‘Common sense’ is just the nonsense of common alienation. Every
day people are denied an authentic life and sold back its representation.


Nihilists constantly feel the urge to destroy the system which destroys them
each day. They cannot go on living as they are, their minds are on fire. Soon
enough they run up against the fact that they must come up with a coherent set
of tactics that will have a practical effect on the world.


But if a nihilist does not know of the historical possibility for the
transformation of the world, his or her subjective rage will coralise into a
role: the suicide, the solitary murderer, the street hoodlum vandal, the
neo-dadaist, the professional mental patient\dots{} all seeking compensation for a
life of dead time.


The nihilists’ mistake is that they do not realise that there are others who
are also nihilists. Consequently they assume that common communication and
participation in a project of self-realisation is impossible.

\section{V}


To have a ‘political’ orientation towards one’s life is just to know that you
can only change your life by changing the nature of life itself through
transformation of the world — and that transformation of the world requires
collective effort.


This project of collective self-realisation can properly be termed politics.
However, ‘politics’ has become a mystified, separated category of human
activity. Along with all the other socially enforced separations of human
activity, ‘politics’ has become just another interest. It even has its
specialists — be they politicians or politicos. It is possible to be
interested (or not) in football, stamp collecting, disco music or fashion.
What people see as ‘politics’ today is the social falsification of the project
of collective self-realisation — and that suits those in power just fine.


Collective self-realisation is the revolutionary project. It is the collective
seizure of the totality of nature and social relations and their
transformation according to conscious desire.


Authentic therapy is changing one’s life by changing the nature of social
life. Therapy must be social if it is to be of any real consequence. Social
therapy (the healing of society) and individual therapy (the healing of the
individual) are linked together: each requires the other, each is a necessary
part of the other.


For example: in spectacular society we are expected to repress our real
feelings and play a role. This is called ‘playing a part in society’. (How
revealing that phrase is!) Individuals put on character armour — a steel-like
suit of role playing is directly related to the end of social role playing.

\section{VI}


To think subjectively is to use your life — as it is now and as you want it to
be — as the centre of your thinking. This positive self-centring is
accomplished by the continuous assault on externals: all the false issues,
false conflicts, false problems, false identities and false dichotomies.


People are kept from analysing the totality of everyday existence by being
asked their opinion of every detail: all the spectacular trifles, phoney
controversies and false scandals. Are you for or against trades unions, cruise
missiles, identity cards\dots{} what’s your opinion of soft drugs, jogging, UFOs,
progressive taxation?


These are false issues. The only issue for us is how we live.


There is an old Jewish saying, “If you have only two alternatives, then choose
the third”. It offers a way of getting the subject to search for a new
perspective on the problem. We can give the lie to both sides of a false
conflict by taking our ‘third choice’ — to view the situation from the
perspective of radical subjectivity.


Being conscious of the third choice is refusing to choose between two
supposedly opposite, but really equal, polarities that try to define
themselves as the totality of a situation. In its simplest form, this
consciousness is expressed by the worker who is brought to trial for armed
robbery and asked, “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”. “I’m unemployed”, he
replies. A more theoretical but equally classic illustration is the refusal to
acknowledge any essential difference between the corporate-capitalist ruling
classes of the ‘West’ and the state-capitalist ruling classes of the ‘East’.
All we have to do is look at the basic social relations of production in the
USA and Europe on the one hand, and the USSR and China on the other, to see
that they are essentially the same: over there, as here, the vast majority go
to work for a wage or salary in exchange for giving up control over both the
means of production and what they produce (which is then sold back to them in
the form of commodities).


In the case of the ‘West’ the surplus value (i.e., that which is produced over
and above the value of the workers’ wages) is the property of the corporate
managements who keep up a show of domestic competition. In the ‘East’ the
surplus value is the property of the state bureaucracy, which does not permit
domestic competition but engages in international competition as furiously as
any other capitalist nation. Big difference.


An example of a false problem is that stupid conversational question, “What’s
your philosophy of life?”. It poses an abstract concept of ‘Life’ that,
despite the word’s constant appearance in conversation, has nothing to do with
real life, because it ignores the fact that ‘living’ is what we are doing at
the present moment.


In the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phoney social
identities, corresponding to their individual role in the Spectacle (in which
people contemplate and consume images of what life is, so that they will
forget how to live for themselves). These social identities can be ethnic
(‘Italian’), racial (‘Black’), organisational (‘Trade Unionist’), residential
(‘New Yorker’), sexual (‘Gay’), cultural (‘sports fan’), and so on: but all
are rooted in a common desire for affiliation, for belonging.


Obviously being ‘black’ is a lot more real as an identification than being a
‘sports fan’, but beyond a certain point these identities only serve to mask
our real position in society. Again, the only issue for us is how we live.
Concretely, this means understanding the reasons for the nature of one’s life
in one’s relation to society as a whole. To do this one has to shed all the
false identities, the partial associations, and begin with oneself as the
centre. From here we can examine the material basis of life, stripped of all
mystification.


For example: suppose I want a cup of coffee from the machine at work. First of
all, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the
coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantations and in the refineries,
the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have all the workers who made
the different parts of the machine and assembled it. Then the ones who
extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, drilled the oil and
refined it. Then all the workers who transported the raw materials and parts
over three continents and two oceans. Then the clerks, typists and
communications workers who co-ordinate the production and transportation.
Finally you have all the workers who produce all the other things necessary
for the others to survive. That gives me a direct material relationship to
several million people: in fact, to the immense majority of the world’s
population. They produce my life: and I help to produce theirs. In this light,
all partial group identities and special interests fade into insignificance.
Imagine the potential enrichment of one’s life that is presently locked up in
the frustrated creativity of those millions of workers, held back by obsolete
and exhausting methods of production, strangled by alienation, warped by the
insane rationale of capital accumulation! Here we begin to discover a real
social identity: in people all over the world who are fighting to win back
their lives, we find ourselves.


We are constantly being asked to choose between two sides in a false conflict.
Governments, charities and propagandists of all kinds are fond of presenting
us with choices that are no choice at all (e.g. the Central Electricity
Generating Board presented its nuclear programme with the slogan ‘Nuclear Age
or Stone Age’. The CEGB would like us to believe that these are the only two
alternatives — we have the illusion of choice, but as long as they control the
choices we perceive as available to us, they also control the outcome).


The new moralists love to tell those in the rich West how they will ‘have to
make sacrifices’, how they ‘exploit the starving children of the Third World’.
The choice we are given is between sacrificial altruism or narrow
individualism. (Charities cash in on the resulting guilt by offering us a
feeling of having done something, in exchange for a coin in the collecting
tin.) Yes, by living in the rich West we do exploit the poor of the Third
World — but not personally, not deliberately. We can make some changes in our
life, boycott, make sacrifices, but the effects are marginal. We become aware
of the false conflict we are being presented with when we realise that under
this global social system we, as individuals, are as locked in our global role
as ‘exploiters’ as others are in their global role as the exploited. We have a
role in society, but little or no power to do anything about it. We reject the
false choice of ‘sacrifice or selfishness’ by calling for the destruction of
the global social system whose existence forces that decision upon us. It
isn’t a case of tinkering with the system, of offering token sacrifices or
calling for ‘a little less selfishness’. Charities and reformers never break
out of the terrain of the false choice.


Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the present situation
constantly drag us back to their false choices — that is, any choice which
keeps their power intact. With myths like ‘If we shared it all out there
wouldn’t be enough to go round’, they attempt to deny the existence of any
other choices and to hide from us the fact that the material preconditions for
social revolution already exist.

\section{VII}


Any journey towards self-demystification must avoid those two quagmires of
lost thought — absolutism and cynicism; twin swamps that camouflage themselves
as meadows of subjectivity.


Absolutism is the total acceptance or rejection of all components of
particular ideologies, spectacles and reifications. An absolutist cannot see
any other choice than complete acceptance or complete rejection .


The absolutist wanders along the shelves of the ideological supermarket
looking for the ideal commodity, and then buys it — lock, stock and barrel.
But the ideological supermarket — like any supermarket — is fit only for
looting. It is more productive for us if we can move along the shelves, rip
open the packets, take out what looks authentic and useful, and dump the rest.


Cynicism is a reaction to a world dominated by ideology and morality. Faced
with conflicting ideologies the cynic says: “a plague on both your houses”.
The cynic is as much a consumer as the absolutist, but one who has given up
hope of ever finding the ideal commodity.

\section{VIII}


The process of dialectical thinking is constructive thinking, a process of
continually synthesising one’s current body of self-theory with new
observations and appropriations; a resolution of the contradictions between
the previous body of theory and new theoretical elements. The resulting
synthesis is thus not some quantitative summation of the previous and the new,
but their qualitative supersession, a new totality.


This synthetic \Slash{} dialectic method of constructing a theory is counter to the
eclectic style which just collects a rag-bag of its favourite bits from
favourite ideologies without ever confronting the resulting contradictions.
Modern examples include libertarian capitalism, christian marxism and
liberalism in general.


If we are continually conscious of how we want to live, we can critically
appropriate from anything in the construction of our self-theory: ideologies,
culture critics, technocratic experts, sociological studies, mystics and so
forth. All the rubbish of the old world can be scavenged for useful material
by those who desire to reconstruct it.

\section{IX}


The nature of modern society, its global and capitalist unity, indicates to us
the necessity of making our self-theory a unitary critique. By this we mean a
critique of all geographic areas where various forms of socio-economic
domination exist (i.e. both the capitalism of the ‘free’ world and the
state-capitalism of the ‘communist’ world), as well as a critique of all
alienations (sexual poverty, enforced survival, urbanism, etc.). In other
words, a critique of the totality of daily existence everywhere, from the
perspective of the totality of one’s desires.


Ranged against this project are all the politicians and bureaucrats, preachers
and gurus, city planners and policemen, reformers and militants, central
committees and censors, corporate managers and union leaders, male
supremacists and feminist ideologues, psyche-sociologists and conservation
capitalists who work to subordinate individual desire to a reified ‘common
good’ that has supposedly designated them as its representatives. They are all
forces of the old world, all bosses, priests and creeps who have something to
lose if people extend the game of seizing back their minds into seizing back
their lives.


Revolutionary theory and revolutionary ideology are enemies — and both know
it.

\section{X}


By now it should be obvious that self-demystification and the construction of
our own revolutionary theory doesn’t eradicate our alienation: ‘the world’
(capital and the Spectacle) goes on, reproducing itself every day.


Although this booklet had the construction of self-theory as its focus, we
never intended to imply that revolutionary theory can exist separate from
revolutionary practice. In order to be consequential, effectively to
reconstruct the world, practice must seek its theory, and theory must be
realised in practice. The revolutionary prospect of disalienation and the
transformation of social relations requires that one’s theory be nothing other
than a theory of practice, of what we do and how we live. Otherwise theory
will degenerate into an impotent contemplation of the world, and ultimately
into survival ideology — a projected mental fogbank, a static body of reified
thought, of intellectual armour, that acts as a buffer between the daily world
and oneself. And if revolutionary practice is not the practice of
revolutionary theory, it degenerates into altruistic militantism,
‘revolutionary’ activity as one’s social duty.


We don’t strive for a coherent theory purely as an end in itself. For us, the
practical use value of coherence is that having a coherent self-theory makes
it easier for someone to think. As an example, it’s easier to get a handle on
future developments in social control if you have a coherent understanding of
modern social control ideologies and techniques up to the present.


Having a coherent theory makes it easier to conceive of the theoretical
practice for realising your desires for your life.

\section{XI}


In the process of constructing self-theory, the last ideologies that have to
be wrestled with and determinedly pinned down are the ones that most closely
resemble revolutionary theory. These final mystifications are a) situationism
and b) councilism.


The Situationist International (1958–1971) was an international revolutionary
organisation that made an immense contribution to revolutionary theory.
Situationist theory is a body of critical theory that can be appropriated into
one’s self-theory, and nothing more. Anything more is the ideological
misappropriation known as situationism.


For those who newly discover it, SI theory has a way of seeming like ‘the
answer I’ve been searching for for years’, the answer to the riddle of one’s
dead life. But that’s exactly when a new alertness and self-possession become
necessary. Situationism can be quite the complete survival ideology, a defence
mechanism against the wear and tear of daily life. Included in the ideology is
the spectacular commodity-role of being ‘a situationist’, i.e. a radical jade
and ardent esoteric.


Councilism (aka ‘Workers’ Control’, ‘Syndicalism’) offers ‘self-management’
as a replacement for the capitalist system of production.


Real self-management is the direct management (unmediated by any separate
leadership) of social production, distribution and communication by workers
and their communities. The movement for self-management has appeared again and
again all over the world in the course of social revolution. Russia in 1905
and 1917–21, Spain in 1936–7, Hungary in 1956, Algeria in 1960, Chile in 1972
and Portugal in 1975. The form of organisation most often created in the
practice of self-management has been workers’ councils: sovereign general
assemblies of the producers and neighbourhoods that elect mandated delegates
to co-ordinate their activities. The delegates are not representatives, but
carry out decisions already made by their assemblies. Delegates can be
recalled at any time, should the general assembly feel that its decisions are
not being rigorously carried out.


Councilism is this historical practice and theory of self-management turned
into an ideology. Whereas the participants in these uprisings lived a critique
of the social totality, beginning with a critique of wage labour, of the
commodity economy and exchange value, councilism makes a partial critique: it
seeks not the self-managed, continuous and qualitative transformation of the
whole world, but the static, quantitive self-management of the world as it is.
The economy thus remains a separate realm cut off from the rest of daily life
and dominating it. On the other hand a movement for generalised
self-management seeks the transformation of all sectors of social life and all
social relations (production, sexuality, housing, services, communications,
etc.), councilism thinks that a self-managed economy is all that matters. It
misses, literally, the whole point: subjectivity and the desire to transform
the whole of life. The problem with workers’ control is that all it controls
is work.


The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down. Spontaneous
rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not sufficient. An
authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement in which all the
mystifications of the past are being consciously swept away.

\section{Post-notes}


This booklet is part of the collective self-theory of the members of our
organization. It is the statement of what we call our meta-theory, our theory
of the practice of theory-making.


The preparation and dissemination of The Minimum Definition of Intelligence is
undertaken for the same reason we do everything else we do: because we want to
catalyze a social revolution that will transform the present static layout of
alienation into a moving landscape of realized dreams. We know we can only
create the lives that we want in the process of everyone else creating the
lives that they want. We are revolutionaries because our desires require a
social revolution for their realization.


The world can only be turned right-side-up by the conscious collective
activity of those who construct a theory of why it is upside-down. Spontaneous
rebellion and insurrectionary subjectivity alone are not sufficient. An
authentic revolution can only occur in a practical movement in which all the
mystifications of the past are consciously being swept away.

\section{Appendix: Preamble to the Founding Agreements}


We have woken up to discover that our lives are becoming unliveable. From
boring, meaningless jobs to the humiliation of waiting endlessly in lines, at
desks and counters to receive our share of survival, from prison-like schools
to repetitious, mindless “entertainment,” from desolate and crime-ridden
streets to the stifling isolation of home, our days are a treadmill on which
we run faster and faster just to keep in the same place.


Like the immense majority of the population, we have no control over the use
to which our lives are put: we are people who have nothing to sell but our
capacity to work. We have come together because we can no longer tolerate the
way we are forced to exist, we can no longer tolerate being squeezed dry of
our energies, being used up and thrown away, only to create a world that grows
more alien and ugly every day.


The system of Capital, whether in its “Western” private-corporate or “Eastern”
state-bureaucratic form, was brutal and exploitative even during its ascent:
now, where it is in decay, it poisons air and water, produces goods and
services of deteriorating quality, and is less and less able to employ us even
to its own advantage. Its logic of accumulation and competition leads
inexorably toward its own collapse. Even as it links all the people of the
world together in one vast network of production and consumption, it isolates
us from each other; even as it stimulates greater and greater advances in
technology and productive power, it finds itself incapable of putting them to
use: even as it multiplies the possibilities for human self-realization, we
find ourselves strangled in layers of guilt, fear and self-contempt.


But it is \emph{we ourselves} — our strength, our intelligence, our creativity, our
passions-that are the greatest productive power of all. It is we who produce
and reproduce the world as it is, in the image of Capital; it is we who
reinforce in each other the conditioning of family, school, church and media,
the conditioning that keeps us slaves. When we decide together to end our
misery, to take our lives into our own hands, we can recreate the world the
way we want it. The technical resources and worldwide productive network
developed under the old system give us the means: the crisis and continuing
collapse of that system give us the chance and the urgent need.


The ruling ideologies of the world superpowers, with their interlocking sets
of lies, offer us only the false choice of “Communism” versus “Capitalism”.
But in the history of revolution during this century (Russia, 1905; Germany,
1919–20; Spain, 1936–37; Hungary, 1956) we have discovered the general form
through which we can take back power over our own lives: workers’councils. At
their highest moments these councils were popular assemblies in workplaces and
communities, joined together by means of strictly mandated delegates who
carried out decisions \emph{already made} by their assemblies and who could be
recalled by them at any time. The councils organized their nwn defense and
restarted production under their own management. By now, through a system of
councils at the local, regional, and global level, using modern
telecommunications and data processing, we can coordinate and plan world
production as well as be free to shape our own immediate environment. Any
compromise with bureaucracy and official heirarchy, anything short of the
total power of workers’ councils, can only reproduce misery and alienation in
a new form, as a good look at the so-called “Communist” countries will show.
For this reason, no political party can represent the revolutionary movement
or seize power “on its behalf”, since this would be simply a change of ruling
classes, not their abolition. The plan of the freely associated producers is
in absolute opposition to the dictatorial Plan of state and corporate
production. \emph{Only all of us together can decide what is best for us}.


For these reasons, we call upon you and upon all the hundreds of millions like
you and us, to join us in the revolutionary transformation of every aspect of
life. We want to abolish the system of wage and salaried labor, of commodity
exchange-value and of profit, of corporate and bureaucratic power. We want to
decide the nature and conditions of everything we do, to manage all social
life collectively and democratically. We want to end the division of mental
from manual work and of “free” time from work time, by bringing into play all
our abilities for enjoyable creative activity. We want the whole world to be
our conscious self-creation, so that our days are full of wonder, learning,
and pleasure. \emph{Nothing less}.


In setting down this minimum program, we are not trying to impose an ideal on
reality, nor are we alone in wanting what we want. Our ideas are already in
everyone’s minds, consciously or unconsciously, because they are nothing but
an expression of the \emph{real movement} that exists all over the planet. But in
order to win, this movement must know itself, its aims, \emph{and its enemies}, as
never before.


We do not speak for this movement, but for ourselves as of it. We recognize no
Cause over and above ourselves. But our selves are already \emph{social}: the whole
human race produces the life of each one of its members, now more than ever
before. Our aim is simply to make this process conscious for the first time,
to give to the production of human life the imaginative intensity of a work at
art.


It is in this spirit that we call upon you to organize, as we are doing, where
you work and where you live, to begin planning the way we can run society
together, to defend yourselves against the deepening misery that is being
imposed on all of us. We call upon you to assault actively the lies, the
self-deceptions born of fear, that keep everyone frozen in place while the
world is falling apart around us. We call upon you to link up with us and with
others who are doing the same thing. Above all, we call upon you to take
yourselves and your desires seriously, to realize your own power to master
your own lives.


It’s now or never. If we are to have a future, we ourselves must be that
future.


\textbf{FOR OURSELVES!}


February 16, 1974



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For Ourselves Collective

The Minimum Definition of Intelligence

Theses on the Construction of One’s Own Self-theory

May 6, 1974


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