from Guy Debord

To Robert Chasse and Tony Verlaan
5 December 1967

On the basis of the report by [Raoul] Vaneigem, we recognize Robert Chasse and Tony Verlaan as members of the SI.

We immediately draw the attention of these comrades to the following points:

1) We would like to keep a permanent record (copies to Paris and London) of all general questions. In maintaining this principle, and because of possible interferences in postal correspondence, it is naturally with London that you must coordinate all questions of translation or re-publication.

2) As you certainly know, our goal in America is to have a nucleus of situationists, clearly delimited from the rest, but maintaining the maximum number of contacts and dialogues with all the interesting currents of the new radical movement in formation. The ruptures must be limited to the minimum necessary. We understand that the particular circumstances of the formation of your group have obliged certain immediate ruptures. If it is probable that it is necessary to extend the ruptures in the anarchist milieu, we ask you to wait, to the greatest extent possible, for the passage of our next emissaries [to New York] to make a communal decision.

3) To the extent that the tactical question of the demonstrations [against the Vietnamese war] takes on a passionate meaning for certain Americans (enclosed is the letter from Morea[1] and our response), we estimate that our comrades must in general participate in the demonstrations that can have a certain significance (it isn't a question of appealing to the demonstrators or over-estimating them, but being present, there where the consciousness of the people can radicalize itself, so as to be capable of speaking to them as participants).

4) We demand the immediate destruction of all remaining copies of a) the translation of the Strasbourg comics,[2] and b) the translation of [On the] Poverty [of Student Life] entitled On the Poverty, because they are truly terrible.

5) We would immediately like to have fifty copies for London and ten copies for Paris of all that you have published so far.

For the Situationist International,
Guy Debord, Christopher Gray, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Rene Vienet

P.S. Addresses to use:

Paris: Alice Becker-Ho, 169, rue Saint-Jacques, Paris, 5th
London: Brenda Gravelle, 13 Redcliffe Road, London, S.W. 10

(Written on the letterhead of the Situationist International.)

[1] Ben Morea, founder of the bulleton Black Mask, November 1966.

[2] Translator: "The Return of the Durruti Column."


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



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