The Situationist International began its first issue in 1958 with the following critique of surrealism:
In a world that has not been transformed, surrealism succeeded. This success turns against surrealism, which expected nothing but the dominant social order's reversal.
According to this text, the formal advance of Breton's movement on modern society was now recovered by this same society without it's initial rebellious content. " . . . Revolution had not been done; all that constituted to surrealism a margin of freedom found itself covered up and used by the repressive world the surrealists had fought."
Such an analysis was necessary and was somehow in the wind. After Maurice Nadeau's History of Surrealism, the time had come for an objective check-up on the movement.
But this critique of surrealism we should today apply to the SI and say:
In a world that has not been essentially transformed, the SI succeeded. This success turns against the SI, which expected nothing but the dominant social order's reversal.
The SI carried enough illusions and myths around itself to appear as the compulsory reference point for critical theory.[1] It is not only a matter of going beyond the SI in the sense of the 12th issue's opening article ("We now know for sure a satisfying end to our activities: the SI will be overtaken," p. 34 ), but to break away with it insofar as the SI, though it remains an important movement in many fields (critique of spectacle, the notion of the role, urbanism, etc.), is in no way communist.
Our process won't be that of embittered old pro-situs burning quick what they have adored. The following theses wish to be the starting point of a reflection on the SI and today's possibilities (theoretical/practical) for the revolutionary movement. To us, those two sides are linked as theory became a hotchpotch constituted with the remnants of a so-called radicalism and a stoical and/or hateful moralism, as has been proved by the cretins from Mordicus: the "subversive" Canard Enchaine. [Translator's note: Canard Enchaine is a famous satirical weekly. Mordicus was a "radical" monthly with, among others, Serge Quadruppani.]
Times have changed. The situationists can't pretend anymore to the role of the cursed ones among May 68's actors whose word had been occulted by the left parties and the famous Cohn-Bendit. It got out of its purgatory to win an audience among teenagers, students looking for raison d'etre, and "blase" intellectuals.
The SI's merit was to break free from the cretinism of the sixties, from the grand causes dear to the eternal left and to Stalinists of all kinds. But what made its strength also shows its limits. In activism the SI only saw the alienated aspect -- an easy task given the many examples available -- without trying to find an actual organisational mode that would not transform them into an ordinary leftist cult. In that respect Khayati was almost the only one to raise the issue, [2] but to then remain confined in an abstract vision of the councils as "history's resolved riddle." Criticizing and going beyond art was supposed to represent a stage in the SI's activity. But Debord and his friends never really left this field of "art," assaulting it, in their time, mainly under ideological aspects: Goddard, the Nouveau Roman, Sartre, Arguments, etc.
Reference made to the AIT [translator's note: the International Workers Association] as a true revolutionary model by the SI at the time of its foundation had only a literary significance and did not square with a reality based on a specific communist perspective. The proletariat takes here a mythical form: used as a foil to all rebellions supposed to "act" in its name.
In 1905, Patrick de Laubier, in his book La Greve Generale[3] evokes the case of those two French trade unionists -- Pataud and Pouget -- who, tired of waiting for the revolution, wrote one of the rare workers utopia novels: Comment nous ferons la revolution [How we'll make the revolution]. Pelloutier also tried something of the kind: "Suppose an important general strike breaks out, quite peacefully at the start; suppose a desperate opposition by Capital, some disorder, possibly a few shots. Indignation spreads everywhere; another connected corporate body from the same city joins its efforts to the first, local industry becomes disorganized, the movement spreads, wins all corporate bodies in favor of general strike, and here are, almost without being aware of it, masses carried in the whirlwind [...] It is sure that the day it will break out, for whatever reason; nobody will be able to stop it."[4] Those examples have nothing to do anymore with Fourier's utopia but rather show the degeneration of consciousness living on the fantasmatic mode of the desired revolution. Theory takes itself as its own object and prophetizes: "Proletarian revolutions will be feasts or won't be at all"[5] or, again, "Revolutionary equality will without doubt be individual and collective."[6]
The notion of separation is fundamental in communist critique: separation of the producer from its product, separation of life-styles, which is the source of an atomisation of consciences. The Situationists only devoted themselves to the refusal of society, using provocative slogans. "Never work" could only be revived by a radical margin of the student milieu, which was questioning its condition in a university no longer adapted to the general evolution. To take advantage of grants and to praise theft amounted to locking oneself in a system based on day-by-day subsistence from which emerged only the most crafty and which stressed the split between those profiteers of the "breaks in the system" and the others who had to live everyday the compulsory submission of wage-earning.
Vaneigem developed from this theory of everyday life the bias of subjectivity and desire in the name of revolution, giving them an apparently shock-proof argument: "Revolution ceases as soon as you need to sacrifice for it."[7] But, once again, this notion is one-sided; it confirms Vaneigem's point of view but doesn't understand that history teaches precisely the opposite, that is, if we refer -- romanticism aside (how brave they were!) -- to the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917. Vaneigem's position is in the end nothing but the other side of the revolutionary failure lived by the activist. When the later transposes religious alienation for political activity, repeating the same defects, Vaneigem doesn't put forward anything other than a new version of Stirnerian egoism: "In others I'm only looking for me, my betterment and my realisation."[8]
Today, struggle in the name of subjectivity takes a form that Vaneigem didn't expect. It amounts to struggle for a freedom to consume: the right to own a walkman, the right to take drugs, the right to rock, etc.
The SI's paradox is that it found a public in the same social category that it had mostly been trashing: students. Irony or truth in the end? So the workers didn't become dialecticians, but the events of May 68 were the historical chance the SI was able to grasp. At the outset of those events, the university still represented a field with obsolete rules (no boys in the girls' buildings), where possibilities for unrest -- as in the Strasbourg scandal -- could only bring on to their authors a ridiculous repression: exclusion from Nanterre's university for the Enrage Patrick Cheval, five years exclusion from all French high schools for Gerard Bigorgne. [9] The reaction of trade-union bureaucrats would have been much harsher had there been a Billiancourt scandal, for example. [Tr. note: In Billancourt huge Renault car factories were located.]. But whatever comes has to be enjoyed.
Students, at that specific moment, were in a privileged position: their degrees were not yet victims of the devaluation that would start in the Seventies. The students' claims didn't go beyond the field of morals and ideas, even before they were exploited by the left. Of course, May 68 was not merely a students' movement, but the student crisis undoubtedly played its part as a catalyst. And if students and pupils will have to show themselves again (as they did in November-December 1986), they won't be in such an "enthusiastic" mood as they were in 1968; they will be simply trying to defend their status and acquire a social recognition. Discontent is now being understood to be refusals of dead-end studies and of proletarisation that the sociologists foresaw long ago.
In 1968, the critique of society didn't go beyond an "anti-work" stage. As this critique has disappeared, young people's unrest is now explained in the media by the lack of jobs, by unemployment. In both cases, notions of work and wage-earning are not put into question and never really become the object of a sustained reflection. The communist movement is separated from the youth, who are not able to base their rebellion on anything other than diffuse violence.
The May crisis was predictable. It didn't break out after a sudden revolutionary uprising, even if the movement manifested controllable excesses in the more or less long-term. Denunciation of commodity society has never been the SI's monopoly. A serious analysis of cinema would easily show that many critical movies were conceived around 1968: Blow-up, The Trial, Macadam Cow-Boy, etc. Compared to them, Society of the spectacle seems quite laborious. All this is the reason why a study of May 68 has to go along with a study of its time, even in its spectacular aspects: music, fashion, ideas, etc. Thus would be explained the formation of Guevara's myth, symbol of the modern Robin Hood, the "true" fighter.
When Khayati notes that "the young people who revolt express a pure refusal with no consciousness of anything other than its nihilist refusal," [10] he goes back to an idealist conception, understanding the effect as a cause. In 1968, youth reacted more to French life's sclerosis incarnated in "Gaullism" than it could fix a real revolutionary perspective.
Facing a power that had no other answer than the bludgeon, May's rebellion had to happen sooner or later. The left has since been trying with more or less success to manage social jolts by creating manifold escape clauses like commissions, crisis offices, subsidies, mediators, etc.
Accordingly, power has become "subtler" in its totalitarianism, reducing for example the political offense to a common law offense for, as explains Loic Debray, "A lawful State [Etat de droit] can't allow a political prisoner status without recognizing in fact that it is no longer a lawful State." [11]
This "modern" management by capitalism of oppositions or crises requires that the communist movement stop fooling itself with revolutionary imagery as the situationists did, with dreams of hypothetical "proletarian feasts" which, by the way, never happened.
The pro-situ is the SI's bad dream; the unworthy shoot the SI never assumed because the pro-situ concentrated all that the SI did its best to avoid seeing. So Debord quickly repudiated those bad pupils with their pitiful hexagonal gesticulation: "Let's cease admiring us as if we were superior to our time." [12].
This swindle has pulled itself up to a revolutionary pretension without getting as a reward the only treatment it deserves: theory's trashcan. For who talks of "admiring" you, Debord?
Debord's critique of the spectacle never gave up a "spectacular" style for contemplative readers. Here we leave the dialectical analysis of capitalism to face a mythical monster, a kind of Gorgon -- the spectacle -- with its hypnotic look. And brave Debord appears as one of the rare few who have been able to confront it. From this titanesque fight, the reader can only withdraw on tiptoe. He is not strong enough. . . .
1. See the apologetic work of Pascal Dumontier, Les situationnistes et Mai 68, Gerard Lebovici Ed., 1990.
2. "The question of organisation will be the last judgment of the new revolutionary movement (...)" De la misere en milieu Etudiant, Champ libre Ed., 1976, p. 49.
3. Anthropos Ed., 1979.
4. Patrick de Laubier, op. cit., p. 53.
5. De la misere en milieu Etudiant, p. 56.
6. Raoul Vaneigem, Traite de savoir-vivre l'usage des jeunes generations, Gallimard Ed., 1977, p. 47.
7. Vaneigem, op. cit, p. 112.
8. Op. cit., p. 47.
9. Pascal Dumontier, op. cit., p. 108.
10. De la misere en milieu etudiant p. 29.
11. Paroles directes, Legitimite, Revolte et Revolution: autour d'Action directe, Acratie Ed., 1990, p. 59.
12. La Veritable Scission dans l'Internationale, Champ libre, 1972, p. 80.
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