Written in 1967, by Raoul Vaneigem, the book, The Revolution of Everyday Life, is still as relevant today as it was when written all those years ago. For those who haven't read it, this short extract might prompt you in that direction.
Chapter 25
"You're Fucking Around With Us? - Not For Long!"
In
Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port Talbot,
Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness of refusal
generates passionate break-outs from the factories of collective
illusion, the revolution of everyday life is under way. The struggle
intensifies as misery becomes universal. What for years were reasons for
fighting specific issues - hunger, restrictions, boredom, illness,
anxiety, isolation, deceit - now reveal misery's fundamental
rationality, its omnipresent emptiness, its appalling oppressive
abstraction. For this misery, the world of hierarchical power, the world
of the State, of sacrifice, exchange and the quantitative - the
commodity as will and representation of the world - is held responsible
by those moving towards an entirely new society that is still to be
invented and yet is already among us. All over the globe, revolutionary praxis,
like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative into positive,
lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of rebellion to
ink in the map of its triumph.
