from Guy Debord

To Noir et Rouge[1]
28 April [19]66
Dear Comrade:

I have sent you issues #8, 9 and 10 of our journal.

Obviously, there's no question of measuring the weight in paper of these publications as commodities. Moreover, it is you who lose in the exchange, because the appearance of our publications is extremely spaced out. Our first exchange was actually interrupted when we changed our post office box.

As a first point, I can say to you that we have a great sympathy for the principal anarchist manifestations in history (with the exception of Proudhon, whose acceptance by the anarchist tradition -- which also accepts Ravachol and Bonnot -- we do not understand). But, on the other hand, if we approve very little of the "Marxist currents" that have existed, we have the greatest interest in Marx and his theoretical method.

The general goals of anarchy are those of any imaginable revolutionary movement in modern society (but even Lenin could say this one day in passing). The Spanish movement is, without doubt, the one that most developed a programme that concretized these goals. But, more immediately, the critique of the State is the anarchist contribution that is obviously victorious in theory against "Marxism"!

But our approval can not extend to the methods of action employed against the State up to the present (here the Spanish movement also displayed a clear insufficiency). Still more, we reject the central role, which is accepted in anarchism, of an ideology as a positive revolutionary value.

This isn't the difficulty of more precisely citing the diverse anarchist "museum values" (which derive from this ideology); Maurice Joyeux[2] and others. We know that Black and Red makes an effort so as to shake off this dust and envision the most precise critique of the modern world.

What do you yourselves think of the several points concerning such a critique that we have foregrounded in I.S. [Internationale Situationniste]?

Quite cordially,
Guy Debord

[1] [Black and Red, the] organ of the G.A.A.R. (Anarchist Groups of Revolutionary Action), led by Lagant and formed in 1956 after the collapse of the Libertarian Communist Federation, itself issued from the split from the French Anarchist Federation in 1953.

[2] Maurice Joyeux, member of the Louise Michel Group of the Anarchist Federation (F.A.), of which, in 1953, it was one of the reconstructors, around the Monde Libertaire [Libertarian World] and the Association for the Study and Diffusion of Rationalist Philosophies.


(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 3, 1965-1968. Footnotes by Alice Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! August 2005.)



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