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Le Monde reported in August 1 977 that General Pinochet had done away with the DINA, his political police, in favor of a military police force. Things are getting simpler . . . This is truly the end of the reasonable democratic State that engages in a non-partisan process in which the unions and the most disparate, the least "socialized" groups, are called to play the primary role. We are heading toward an explosion of national production systems, toward union individuation as it exists in the United States, for example-human labor depending less on productivity than on the game of int^�rests in the manpower market. This, along with the breakdown of the unity of political action, allows for every imaginable maneuver, even the wildest and most fragmented, on the level of the very survival of the old political States. The end of democracy in Chile was thus foreseen and orchestrated by the CIA, and pressure was exerted on the highway systems by the truckers unions, telecommunications, etc.

But what should we think of the crisis situation in the old urban fortresses, in New York or Montreal? The union functions, relayed by mob associations, are entirely supplanting the administration and services of the old bourgeois employer. Order reigns in the Bronx thanks to the Mafia, which is itself becoming international, aiming now at a direct collaboration with the military class, as was revealed by a recent scandal that called into question the relations between the Israeli generals and members of international crime. Far from being a military political function that is becoming deterritorialized, losing interest in any form of sedentary fixation, whether national or otherwise, both the petty criminals and the large gangs are seeing their local cottage industry undergo serious revaluation.

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The military class, increasingly distanced from its bourgeois partner, abandons the street, the highway, those outmoded vectors, to the small and middle-sized business of the protection rackets. The city unions in New York are starting to replace their members' productive activity with simple crisis management, by becoming administrators and bankers.

In Italy, assassinations, abductions, crimes and incidents are on the rise. Financial interests are becoming inseparable from those of a multitude of little, so-called "revolutionary, " groups. Justice is in a quandary. They talk about "liberating the people" and extort millions from them. Public opinion is in an uproar about the mix, but this criminal power rising from the masses is really only a political demand returning to an uncontrolled condition because the old national ethology-social ideals-has become secondary and no longer mobilizes.

We can thus interpret the unexpected visits of political leaders such as Messrs. Marchais and Chevenement to the workers in their offices and factories not as a challenge to the bosses or- the government, but as unavowed attempts by the representatives of the devalued revolutionary ideologies to take the grass roots back in hand. While the Communist Party in Portugal completely failed in its opportunistic attempts with the military masters, the French Communist Party, once hesitant, seemed to approach the courageous

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Italian solution of Mr. Berlinguer, whose famous "historical compromise" really only means a final, desperate union of the traditional parties before the threat of pure and simple disappearance that weighs on them from both within and without.

While in France they try to keep the masses tied to outmoded strategic and' social convictions, the army is already deploying its personnel in key points of civilian activity and shadows the police in its surveillance tasks. The military proletariat's job is henceforth to police highways and airports, to collect garbage on public roads (where men like Democrat Abraham Beame, New York's "little mayor," was ridiculed) , as well as to provide telecommunications and assistance; to efect certain prestige operations such as the battle against pollution, campaigns for the defense of archeological sites or cancer research, the organization of numerous athletic and cultural displays (Celebration in the Tuileries, the army at the Children's Fair) ; and to accomplish important international enterprises, such as saving children in Biafra, setting up surgical units in areas devastated by natural cataclysms . . . even "rescuing" a group of hostages in Entebbe. In a threatening social universe, in which human societies are shown to be rife with criminal elements, the army seems to be a protective force, a refuge from the parade of subversive enterprises. The army continues to be greatly amused by the "anti-militarists"' lack of information about, and static analysis of, its dynamic power.

The army's answer to the ecological celebration in Larzac, the Melville tragedy, was Operation Demeter, "named for the Greek goddess who personified the Earth." Why did they have to call it "Demeter?" why did they present themselves as occupiers and dominators of the planet Earth? why did they violate and damage the fields?-unless the Larzac celebration had claimed, albeit inadvertently, to frustrate them in their primary function, the power to invade? Why was it that at that very moment the "friends of the earth" lost contact with their planet, and haven't even demonstrated any resistance? In any case, the terminology used by Jacques Isnard in the September 9, 1 977 issue of Le Monde gives us pause: "Between the end of the harvest and the opening of the hunting season, the land army organized, in the Beauce and Perche regions, its first true maneuver in open ground, in other words, away from the highways and roads, in a region of 2,000 square kilometers of farm land and prairies." They put' on.a "show maneuver" in order to maintain neighborly relations between the army and the civilian populations. The farmers, who remembered the army's help during the previous year's drought, accepted the Demeter exercise without, it seems, too much grumbling . . . "Goddess Demeter is with us," recognizes Colonel de Rochegonde, who commands the 2nd Motor Brigade. While another colonel states, "We are but the managers of national Security and, as such, we too are held accountable." "The army takes advantage of these maneuvers in open ground to lead, for example, ofensive reconnaissance missions fifty kilometers from its base, along with public relations operations in the Eureet-Loire department. " You do not enclose dromocrats in gulags or camps, not even in Larzac.

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The Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defense spent six months in collaboration with advertising experts setting up a three-year campaign (at a cost of sixty million francs) aimed at sensitizing the public to the notion of defense and protection, using every means of information at their disposal to change the army's image (Le Monde, May 9, 1 975).

Joel le Theule, Gaullist deputy and chairman of the Finance Committee, thus has reason to worry, in his notes on "the military budget for 1 977- 1 982," about "the absence of numerical information on the use of funds"; for this fuzziness allows no appreciation of the shifts in our defense policies. The army insists on regaining its autonomy of action, on redefining itself as a public service able to assume in �· safe and orderly fashion the greatest number-even the totality-of civil and military defense tasks, again increasing the communal and industrial undertakings of its parallel initiatives. We can thus see just how far military unionism, advocated by the Communist League, the Unified Socialist Parry or the C.F.D.T. in the name of petty demands, finally enters into the army's social scheme. It is, moreover, revealing to see the creation of the first union branch in the 1 9th Army Engineering Corps, thus demonstrating that this body still remains at the forefront of military revolutionary thought!

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Balzac, visiting the Wagram battlefield after 1 830 in hopes of expanding his social analysis, already asked himself the question of the veritable te_;ritory of historiality, the strategic theatre that, thanks to the advance of the media (the use of the telegraph, for example) , had suddenly become global-external and internal events henceforth able to interact almost immediately. This temporal limitation come from the battlefield had been answered by the new "secret police," which Balzac considers the most important social revolution of his time-the moment when, after the long period of ostensible and bloody repression exerted against the civilian populations by the Revolution's "army of the interior," military violence stops being necessarily visible only from afar, by the soldier's uniform, and comes to rest on refined systems of surveillance and denunciation.

These first attempts at penetration, clandestine "invasion" of the social corpus, had, as we saw, a specific aim: exploitation by the armed forces of the nation's raw potential (its industrial, economic, demographic, cultural, scientific, political and moral capabilities) . Since then, social penetration has been linked to the dizzying evolution of military penetration techniques; each vehicular advance erases a distinction between the army and civilization.

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Fascism, defining itself in Germany as Ostkolonisation, in other words the institution of a colonial situation on the European continent that claims to s ubvert existing socio-political groups , in fact reveals to us the great two-way movement of dromocratic totalitarianism between metropoles and colonies. Mapped out during the unprecedented logistical efort of die First World War, this movement will bring about the singular unity of Western civilization in the 1 920s, "the incorporation of colonial action in national life as a solution to the · serious problems that human evolution will later impose on the world," as Albert Sarraut, French colonial minister, declared in 1 92 1 .

To understand dromocratic society and its establishment, it is no doubt more useful to read The Black Code of the Colonial Pact than any other so-called sociological work. "We must not, " wrote Colbert, "constitute in the colonies a constant civilization . " The ancient legislation that will subsist in our colonies until 1 84 8 considers the negro to be forniture; 1 the black slave is first of all a movable commodity. His legal existence is solely a function of his movable/furniture quality, of the transportation he is subjected to. The vogue of Black American jazz after 1 9 1 4, the frenzied gesticulation revealed by the first American sound film that colored the face of a white actor and bent him to the rhythm of the movable slave, reminds us of that country's dominant culture today, and of James Baldwin's profound reflection: "Tomorrow you will all be negroes!"

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In fact, from the beginning, the American system has not had a measure of comparison between the value of the messages delivered and the efort necessary for their transmission. More so than with the content of the message, the means of its mediatization appear as instruments of primary necessity in the United States, first of all in their naval relation to metropolitain Europe, to the Africa that supplies its manpower, then for the constitution of a certain State centralism over a vast territory in which, in order to govern, one must first penetrate and then communicate.

The media are the privileged instruments of the Union. They alone are able to control the social chaos of American pan-humanity; they are the guarantors of a certain civic cohesion, and thus of civil security itself. Inversely, as in the ancient colonial model, American democracy will make no real eforts to integrate its ethnic minorities, its factions, into a constant civilization, into a truly community-oriented way of life. For segregation is what sanctions the system's hegemony of the media, on which rests the nature of the American State's authority.

This is one reason for the survival of old racism among the good citizens of the "land of the free;" and we will note as well that the great internal and external upheavals in the United States will be linked directly to dromological events, to the very techniques of penetration and transmission-from the delayed radio message of Pearl Harbor to the afair of the Watergate microphones or the Kennedy assassination: we could draw up a list. Citizen Kane, the most accomplished product of American civic culture {later baptized "pop-culture!" ) , is less William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who served as Orson Welles' model, than Howard Hughes, the invisible citizen. Hearst still delivered information; Hughes was content to speculate indiferently on whatever delivered it. He singlehandedly constituted the most radical critique of Fuller's and MacLuhan's global theories. This completely desocialized man, who vanished from the earth, who avoided human contact for fear of germs, who was terrified by the very breath of his rare visitors, nonetheless thought only of the media, from the aerospace industry to the cinema, from gasoline to airfields, from casinos to the star system, from the design of Jane Russell's bra to that of a bomber. His existence could be considered exemplary. Hughes cared only about that which passes in transit. His life rebounded fro� one vector to another, as has, for two hundred years, the power of the American nation he adored. Nothing else interested him. He died in the open sky, in an airplane.

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In the same way, American commercial methods triumphed in Europe in 1 9 1 4 thanks to the unforeseen logistical dimensions taken by the conflict. The United States was to win on the continent one of the first gasoline wars, putting the French market in the hands of Standard Oil, driving back our army which had gone to the front with 400 tanker trucks while the Americans owned more than 20,000. Once more, the market was created not by the object of consumption but by its vector of delivery!

Once peace was resto red, it is interesting to see America retreat from the European market, notably from France, where the company representatives were unable to efectively implant their products, "having committed gross psychological errors in their advertising campaigns." To speak plainly, European culture still victoriously resists American cultural overthrow. We will see totalitarian governments try to install comparable vectors. But, being-all-too often tangled up in elitist culture and used to giving more importance to the message than to the vehicle, they will have difficulty, using ideological propaganda, in attaining the perfect logistical eficiency of the American patriotic "short-cut."

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Later, after total war-in other words after the extensive destruction of the European nations' identity (total war, like colonial war, aiming at the annihilation of constant civilizations)-we see the evacu^�tion of American stocks toward Europe. But here again, we haven't suficiently analyzed this flow of instruments and objects brought over by the liberty ships. We must still apply aesthetic, functional and other meanings to this world of giant cars; to the plethora of household objects in gleaming kitchens in which, significantly, nothing is cooked but sandwiches and canned foods; to the whole spectacle of a "thoughtless objectivity that makes the very concept of consciousness meaningless;" to the clandestine interference in the ordinary vectors of exchange and communication by the technological codes that result from production systems.

Technologies of body and soul are thus strangely complexified in American pop-culture. The body without soul is, as we saw, a body assisted by technical prostheses. And since we're talking about America, we would do well to remember that the word "comfort" comes from the old French assistance: a reference to the old social bestiary of bodies seized in motion, left along the road. Unleashed in the 1 920s, the de-neutralization of the media paves the way for what has been called "the war of the domestic market, " a massive ideological campaign addressed directly to the family puzzle that it claims to put together, even to reinvent, as an "infinite receptacle for consumer goods."2 This campaign will very quickly become a veritable animal domestication of the American citizen.

Significantly, the American government will not deem it necessary to establish a veritable welfare system on its own territory. It is convinced at the time that the promotion of a paternalistic and humanitarian comfort civilization will perfectly replace social aid through the technical assistance of bodies, from the household robot to the company psychiatrist or the latest model of car. Not unlike the way this country today nurtures a romantic taste for the revived bionic bodies of fascistic futurism, human bodies in which certain organs have been replaced by technological grafts, enabling these new heroes of surgical science to accomplish superhuman physical exploits.

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But the politics of comfort was superseded by that of social standing. Everyone suddenly found himself'exP.osed to the scrutiny of his neighbors, compared with the ldentikit portrait of the ideal American consumer: a model of civic-mindedness whose gestures, quirks and attitudes toward life were henceforth broadcast without reprieve by the radio, the press, television and the cinema, and buried under commercial messages. Its political counterpart is the McCarthy period, a time of blacklisting, of anti-American witch hunts, of artists and intellectuals on trial-the same artists and intellectuals who were again designated in 1 975 by the Trilateral Commission as a threat to democracy by their ability to constitute demobilized and irredeemable margins.

I n fact, American-style (social) security implies the population's cultural underdevelopment. lt'is remarkable to see modern democratic States bragging about their silent majorities. In its way, the silence of the American people has become just as oppressive as that of the Russian people; social standing has become a step toward the invention of the proletarian policeman.

The hierarchy of high speeds of penetration and assault made and unmade the specter of the proletarian as if in a lap-dissolvethat mutation that begins with the all-too clear social distribution commanded by the Convention, then continues with the cloudier look of Marx and Engels, who are unable to see the mythic figure of the Worker, even in the rich deposit of industrial proletarianization that is England in the nineteenth century. Engels cannot find his specimen, his neanderthal of historical evolution . . . 3 Only in June 1 848 will the image finally take shape, in the streets of Paris, on a theatre of civil War "as populated as that of the Battle of Leipzig," where thirty to forty thousand men are thrown into combat.

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