Collectively and in action,
change is its countenance.
Now it is as though nothing is more likely
to intensify all of our vitality than its proximity.
Something we are usually hardly aware of,
namely, that our own death is accompanied
by the potential immortality of the group
to which we belong, and in the final analysis,
of the species, moves now into the center of
our experience, that is, in collective violence.
And the result is that it is as though life
itself, the immortal life of the species,
nourishing, as at the way of the eternal,
dying of its individual members is
'surging upward’, as Fanon says, is
actualized in the practice of violence.
Now I think it would be wrong
to speak here of mere emotions.
It is after all one of the outstanding properties
of the human condition that finds here in it
adequate experience, that is, that individual
death is survived by the species, or the group.
In our context however, the point of the matter
is that these experiences, whose elementary
forms are not in doubt, have never found an
institutional political expression.
No body-politic I know of was ever founded
on the equality before death and its actualization
in violence.
It is undeniably true that the strong fraternal
sentiments engendered by collective violence
have mislead many good people into the hope
that a new community together with a new man
will arise out of it.
The hope is an illusion for the simple reason
that no human relationship is more transitory
than this kind of brotherhood, which can be
actualized only under conditions of immediate
danger to life and limb.
This, however, is but one side of the matter.
Fanon concludes his praising description
of the experience in the practice of violence
by remarking that in this kind of struggle,
the people realize that life is an unending contest,
that violence is an element of life.
Doesn’t it follow that praise of life and
praise of violence are the same?
Sorel, at any rate, thought along these
same lines already 60 years ago.
And long before Konrad Lorenz discovered the
life-promoting function of aggressiveness
in the animal kingdom, violence was praised
as a manifestation of the life-force,
and specifically of its creativity.
Sorel, inspired by Bergson’s ‘Elan Vital’,
aimed at a philosophy of creativity designed
for producers and polemically directed against
a consumer society and its intellectuals, even then;
that is, not against the bourgeoisie, not against
the capitalists in the old sense of the word.
And the reason why Sorel held on to his Marxian
faith, even though he hated the consumers,
consumer society and its intellectuals much
more than he hated the bourgeoisie; the reason was
that he believed the workers were the
producers, the only creative element in society.
And the trouble as he saw it was only that
the workers stubbornly refused to play the
revolutionary role as soon as they had reached
the satisfactory level of working and living conditions.
However that may be, there was something else
that become fully manifest only in the decades
after Sorel’s and Parito’s death and was
incomparably more disastrous for their view.
The enormous growth of productivity in the
modern world, is strictly speaking, by no means
a growth in the worker’s productivity.
It is exclusively due to the
development of technology.
And this depended neither on the working class
nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists.
Now to those who contemplate the immense change
of our everyday world, and compare it with
the development of our mental categories
to interpret the world, it seems as though
it's much easier to change the world
than our ways of thinking.
For we all know to what an extent this old
combination of violence, life, and creativity
has survived in the rebellious state
of mind of the new generation.
Their taste for violence again is accompanied
by glorification of life and it flagrantly
understands itself as a necessarily
violent negation of everything that
stands in the way of the will to live.
When Fanon is speaking of the creative madness
present in violent action, he is still thinking
along the lines of a tradition
which is at least 100 years old.
Now nothing, I think, is 
more dangerous theoretically
than this tradition of organic thought.
You saw it in all three.
You saw it in power as well as in
revolution and power in violence,
or in the concept of progress...in the concept
of power and in the concept of violence.
In the way these terms are understood today,
life and life’s elegit creativity are their
common denominator, so that the precedence
of violence is justified on the grounds of creativity.
So long as we talk about these matters in
non-political, biological terms, the glorifiers
of violence will have the great advantage to
appeal to the undeniable experiences inherent
in the practice of violent action.
The danger of being carried away by the deceptive
plausibility of such metaphors is particularly great
of course where racial issues are involved.
Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence
by definition, because it objects the natural
organic facts of white or black skin, which
no persuasion and no power could change.
All one can do when the chips are down
is to exterminate their bearers.
Violence in interracial struggle is always
murderous, but it is not irrational,
it is a logical and rational consequence of
racism, by which I do not mean some rather
vague prejudices on either side,
but an explicit ideological system.
Today’s violence, black riots and the much
greater potential of the white backlash,
are not or not yet manifestations of racist
ideologies and their murderous logic.
The riots, as has recently been stated, are
articulate protests against genuine grievances,
and much the same is true
for the backlash phenomena.
The greatest danger is rather
the other way around.
Since violence always needs justification,
an escalation of the violence in the streets
may bring about a truly
racist ideology to justify it,
in which case violence and riots may disappear
from the streets and be transformed into
the invisible terror of a police state.
Violence, being instrumental by nature,
is rational to the extent that it is effective
in reaching the end which must justify it.
And since when we act we never know with any
amount of certainty the eventual consequences
of what we are doing, violence can remain
rational so long as it pursues short-term goals.
Violence does not promote causes, but it
can indeed serve to dramatize grievances
and to bring them to public attention.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, whose name some of you
will know, once remarked in a debate we had in
New York, "violence is sometimes needed
for the voice of moderation to be heard".
And I think this is a very witty, not only
witty, but a quite profound witticism.
And indeed, violence, contrary to what its
prophets try to tell us, is much rather the
weapon of reformists than of revolutionists.
France would not have received the most radical
reform bill since Napoleon to change the education
system without the riots of the French students.
And no one would have dreamt of yielding to
reforms of Colombia University without
the riots during the spring term.
Still, the danger of the practice, even if it moves
consciously within a non-extremist framework
of short-term goals, will always be
that the means might overwhelm the end.
If goals are not achieved rapidly, its only
result will be that the whole climate of the
country has become more violent, and that
the eventual defeat will bring about conditions
considerably worse than those existing before.
Finally, the greater the bureaucratization of public
life, the greater will be the attraction of violence.
In a fully developed bureaucracy, there's
nobody left with whom one could argue,
to whom one could present grievances, on
whom the pressures of power could be exerted.
The crucial feature in the student’s rebellions
around the world is that they are directed
everywhere against the ruling bureaucracy.
The dissentient resistors in the east demand
free speech and thought as preliminary
conditions for political action.
The rebels in the west live under conditions
where these preliminaries seem no longer
to open the channels for action, that is,
for the meaningful exercise of freedom.
The transformation of government into administration,
of republics into bureaucracies, and the disastrous
shrinkage of the public realm that went with
it, have a long and complicated history; and
this process has been considerably accelerated
during the last hundred years through the rise
of party bureaucracies.
What makes man a political
being is his faculty to act.
It enables him to get together with his peers,
to act in concert, and to reach out for goals
and enterprise which would never enter
his mind, let alone the desires of his heart,
had he not been given this gift
to embark upon something new.
To act and to begin are not the same,
but they are closely interconnected.
All the properties of creativity ascribed to
life in manifestations of power and violence
actually belong to the faculty of action in general.
And I think it can be shown that no other
human ability has suffered to such an extent
by the progress of the modern age.
For progress, as we have come to understand
it, means growth: the relentless process
of more and more, bigger and bigger.
The bigger a country becomes in terms of 
population, objects and possessions, the greater
will be the need for administration, and with it,
the anonymous power of the administration.
Pavel Kohout, a Czech author writing in the
heyday of the Czech experiment with freedom,
defined a free citizen as a citizen co-ruler.
He meant nothing else but the participatory
democracy of which we have heard so much.
Kohout added that, what the world, as it is
today, stands in greatest need of, may well be
a new example, if the next thousand years are
not to become an era of super civilized monkeys.
Now this new example we may indeed stand
in need of, will hardly be brought about
by the practice of violence,
although I'm inclined to think that much
of its present glorification is due to
the severe frustration of the faculty
of action in the modern world.
It's simply true that the riots in the ghettos and
the rebellions on the campuses, it has been said,
make people feel they are acting
together in a way they rarely can.
We don’t know if these occurrences are the
beginnings of something new, the new example,
or the death pangs of a faculty
that mankind is about to lose.
As things stand today when we see how the superpowers are bogged down under the
monstrous weight of their own bigness, it looks as though the new example will have a chance to rise,
if at all, in a small country of a small well
defined sector in the mass-societies of
the large powers.
For the disintegration processes, which have
become so manifest in recent years, have crept
into everything designed to serve mass society.
All public service are afflicted with it:
schools and police, mail and transportation,
traffic on the highways and in the big cities.
Bigness itself is afflicted with vulnerability.
And while none can say with any assurance
where and when the breaking point will be reached,
we can observe, almost to the point of
measuring it, how strength and resiliency
are insidiously seeping from our
institutions, drop by drop, as it were.
And the same is true I think for the various
party systems, all of which were supposed
to serve the political needs of modern mass-societies
in order to make representative government possible
where direct democracy would
not do, because, as John Selden said,
"the room will not hold all”.
Now, I could add, but this is too far away
from your own experiences, the recent rise
of nationalism everywhere, which is usually
understood as a world-wide swing to the Right,
but evidently also a swing away from
bigness and centralized government.
Again, we do not know where these developments
will lead us, but we can see how cracks in
the power structure of all but the small
countries are opening and widening.
And we know, or should know, that every decrease
of power is an open invitation to violence,
if only because those who hold power
and feel it slipping from their hands,
have always found it difficult to resist the temptation
to substitute violence for it. Thank you.
