For Ourselves

The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything is a book published in 1974 by an American situationist collective called "For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management". Post-left anarchist Bob Black describes it in its preface as an "audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right."

Its authors say "The positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence." It is highly influenced by the work of Max Stirner. A reprinting of the work in the eighties was done by Loompanics Unlimited with the involvement of Bob Black who also wrote the preface to it.

"Narrow greed is a holdover from times of natural scarcity. Its desires are represented to itself in the form of commodities, power, sex(-objects), and even more abstractly, as money and as images. We are told in a thousand ways that only these few things are worth having - by rulers who work to insure that these are the only things available (to be bought). The survival of the narrow greed in a world of potential plenty is propagated in the form of ideology by those very people who control access to these things. Ultimately, in our daily lives, we suffer the humiliation of being forced accomplices in the maintenance of this "scarcity," this poverty of choices.--Introduction, (6.).”

"Narrow egoism, the ideology of self-gratification and self-realization, and the practice of exclusive self-gratification and self-realization becomes, at a certain stage in its development, a fetter upon self-realization and a fetter upon selfgratification. It becomes the main limit and obstacle to its own goals. It becomes a barrier to itself.--Ch III, (59.)”

"We conceive the realized social individual, "communist man," as having for his property - that is, for the object of his appropriation - his whole society, the totality of his social life. All of society is wealth for him. His intercourse with his society - i.e., his living relations with the rest of the social individuals and their objectification - is in its totality the appropriation of social life. Productive activity becomes a form of individual consumption just as consumption itself is a form of (self) production.--Introduction, (11.)”

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