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it shows how powerless people are when they are subject to economic
and military structures utterly beyond their reach. Isn't this the same
thing we see in an extreme form in the Soviet Union: a brutal dis–
junction of the central military, political, and economic apparatus
from lived experience, whether that is embodied in intellectual and
artistic expression, religious
experi~nce,
national consciousness in this
multimttional state, or sufferings compounded by repression.
Wherever the power of industrial societies asserts itself, the most fun–
damental conflict is between the centralized structures and what I
propose to call the territories-meaning by that both experience
lived collectively and desire for democratIc control. The national
idea thus takes on an entirely new meaning: it doesn't mean wishing
back the national state of Richelieu or Peter the Great but involves
instead a struggle against a crumbling away of democracy which suits
the large power structures only too well.
It
means calling forth new
forms of collective control over the instruments of economic and
military power.
No one can be content to assert his identity, whether as an
individual or as a member of a community , without being con–
cerned about the monsters that dominate the history of our planet .
It
is unacceptable today to limit our demands to the cultural crisis ,
when political, economic , and military power have never been more
concentrated, nor demonstrated more brutally their capacity for
crushing peoples than in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. There is not
an important social movement today which does not seek to restore
to the communities themselves control over the decisions that govern
their lives . We still live with a sense of powerlessness-sometimes
resigned , sometimes in complicity-in the face of the frigid monsters
holding the weapons and the money . The gravest crisis experienced
by our privileged societies is the collective loss of historical respon–
sibility. Like domestic pets subject to masters who feed them better
and better and teach them to dance, the peoples of the affluent
world are no longer attracted by the vision of building a future . The
intellectual rationalizations that conceal this loss of hope hardly
matter. Historical movement conceived only as strategy or technical
program without meaning or direction is the very essence of
