One has communicated to me your letter of 18 November [1971], addressed to Rene Riesel, in which you ask for an option on an Italian translation of the collection of the journal Internationale Situationniste, reprinted in its original French by Mr Van Gennep of Amsterdam.
It turns out that Editions Feltrinelli has already published, on its own initiative, in December 1967 -- that is to say, when there began in the universities and high school of Turin and Milan an agitation that since then has fortunately spread among the workers of Italy -- the translation of a situationist pamphlet that you titled Della miseria nell'ambiente studentesca. The several thousand copies that were printed sold-out in a dozen days and, in an event little-known in the history of publishing, a second printing was never made, despite the orders for hundreds of copies placed by diverse Italian revolutionary groups, and despite the promises that your House lavished upon them. This was a form of censorship exercised by Editions Feltrinelli's master-thinkers of the moment.
By becoming a Trotskyist, Feltrinelli, a Stalinist reptile, has obviously not changed his role as subaltern policeman of the bureaucracy. We are thus astonished by the impudence of your current request. Your attempts at delayed intellectual modernization do not redeem you in anyone's estimation. We formally refuse you the right to publish all or part of any text by the SI.
In the expectation of your expropriation, I ask you to please transmit the assurance of my scorn to your patron.
For the SI,(Registered letter.)
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 3, 1965-1968. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! September 2005.)