If the action led by the SI had not involved several consequences that were publically scandalous and threatening, it is beyond doubt that no French publication would have reviewed our recent books. Which was naively confessed by Francois Chatelet in Le Nouvel Observateur for 3 January 1969: "Confronted with similar works, the first sentiment is to purely and simply exclude them, let them have the absolute point of view where they place themselves in the absolute, exactly, in the non-relative, in the non-related." But as a result of letting us have the non-related, the organizers of the conspiracy of silence have, after several years, seen this strange "absolute" fall upon their heads and show itself as not being distinct from current history, from which they are absolutely separated; without being able to prevent this "old mole" from making its way towards the day.[2] Representative of the others, Chatelet accumulates in his article all of the untimely confessions of the state of mind of the scoundrels of his kind. Evoking the incidents at Strasbourg [in 1966], this prophet -- five months before May [1968] -- played at being reassured and deceived his imbecilic readers, as was his custom: "For a brief moment, this was the rage; one feared the contagion (...) All would return (...) to order." He indicates that Debord and Vaneigem, providing "a denunciation that one can only take or leave as a whole," are consequently disqualified and "discourage all critique in advance," because "they hold it is obvious that any contestation of what they say emanates from a thought that stupidly pays tribute to 'power' and 'spectacle.'" It is certain that discouraging the critique made by the miserable intellectual generation that prostituted itself for Stalinism, Arguments-ism,[3] and the philosophic thought of L'Express and Le Nouvel Observateur, is one of our goals. It isn't because one criticizes us that one is stupidly spectacular and crawls obsequiously before the existing powers; on the contrary, it is because Chatelet has momentarily rallied Stalinism towards 1956, and because he is the valet of the spectacle in several more lucrative trades, that he criticizes us so stupidily. Chatelet finds that, because we bear a radical but "abstract" negation, we remain "in the empirical," and even "without concept." The word is hard. But who said it? One nevertheless knows that, as soon as the wine of critique is diluted by dirty water, a hundred mediocre books are quickly saluted as highly conceptual by Chatelet and all the other castrates of the concept, who would like the unfortunate readers of Le Nouvel Observateur to believe that they have it. And moreover this ex-Stalinist, who obviously combatted "the Communism of 1848," sums himself up in this phrase, which is perhaps the most maladroit phrase that a cretin has ever applied to us. With aim of diminishing us, but also, as with the other cuckolded Argument-ists of Stalinism, with the aim of depreciating the old demand for a proletarian revolution -- which he believed had been exorcised forever, buried by Stalinism and the Express -- Chatelet advances that, although one can all the same pick out these books and the existence of the SI as "symptoms," "as a little glimmer that vaguely darts from Copenhagen to New York," "situationism is not the spectre that haunts industrial society, no more than Communism was the spectre that haunted Europe in 1848." It is we who emphasize this completely unintentional homage. Everyone will easily understand that we have already found ourselves "deceived" as much as Marx was, and not as much as Chatelet.

If the anger of the pretentious experts who were contradicted by the event was already strong before the occupations movement, it became really grandiouse afterwards. Pierre Vianson-Ponte, in Le Monde on 25 January 1969, furiously pushing Vienet's book aside with a dishonesty that was extraordinary, even for the editors of this newspaper, only saw in it "practically unreadable prose, a limitless pretension and a limitless thirst for publicity (...) They quite smoothly conclude that the May revolt (...) announced the global revolution, no less." Vianson-Ponte is an idiot, no less. He begins his article with this sentence, "Formerly, revolutionaries erected barricades or took power. They didn't have time to write their history and they generally didn't have the taste for it." It is difficult to go further into pompous error. Revolutionaries, among the worst and the best tendencies, have always written a lot, and no one asks themselves why, except Vianson-Ponte, who is simply ignorant of the fact. Must one tell him that, in the single year of 1871, there appeared in Geneva and Brussels a dozen important books written by survivors of the Commune (Gustave Lefrancais, Study of the Communalist Movement in Paris; Benoit Malon, The Third Defeat of the French Proletariat; Lissagaray, The Eight Days of May Behind the Barricades; Georges Janneret, Paris during the Revolutionary Commune, etc., without even mentioning [Marx's] The Civil War in France). But Vianson-Ponte wants blood. Automatically adopting the thesis of the police, according to whom there were very few deaths, he reproaches us with this wretched result: "The revolutionaries of May 1968, thank God, are alive (...) Now they write. A lot. The hand that pulled up paving stones also knows the pen." We flatter ourselves that this passage from the pen to the paving stone, and back again, is the beginning of the supercession of the separation between manual and intellectual work. But doesn't the imprudent necrophage understand that his ill-advised irony can be read as an appeal, next time, for a more bloody police and military repression? And, if it comes, isn't it obvious that several of those who have tried to deny the seriousness of the movement of 1968 by arguing that there weren't enough deaths themselves risk being in the first rank of the inevitable victims of spontaneous reprisals? In 1962, we wrote, in I.S. #7, page 19: "The surprising thing is rather that all of the specialists of public-opinion polls are unaware of the close proximity of this precise anger that rises everywhere. They will all be astonished at one day seeing the architects rounded up and hung in the streets of Sarcelles." Because of its strength, which comes from the unfinished but already crushed participation of the proletarian masses, the May movement was mild. But if, one day, there are more bloody confrontations, urbanists and journalists (who already speak of Red Fascism due to several blows the Stalinist Badia recently received at Vincennes) will be in great peril.

It turns out that, in several dozen articles, one feels obliged to speak of our books in France; an almost equal number of slightly more honest and informed articles have appeared in the foreign press. There were even some praises, of which is it useless to say more.[4] A general contradiction weighs upon the totality of these critiques. Several of the authors who think they've found several striking truths in our books are in fact devoid of the simplest political and theoretical knowledge that would allow them to truly understand what our books are about, to consider each one in the totality of what it enunciates. An exemplary case is that of the critic Henri-Charles Tauxe, in the Swiss newspaper La Gazette Litteraire for 13 January 1968, who concludes his analysis -- in which, in any case, he honestly sought to explain the content of the book about which he was writing -- with this interrogation: "One can certainly ask oneself a certain number of questions on the perspectives opened by Debord and ask oneself in particular if the concept of revolution has meaning today." On the other hand, those of our critics who know well the problems addressed in these books have been inclined to distort them with a bad faith that is narrowly dependant on the particular positions and rostrums [tribunes] from which they express themselves.[5] So as to not risk boring repetition, we will limit ourselves to picking out three typical attitudes, each one manifesting itself with respect to one of our books. In order, there's a university Marxist, a psychoanalyst, and a ultra-leftist militant. We will touch upon their principal motivations in passing.

In the early 1950s, Claude Lefort was a revolutionary and one of the principal theorists of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie -- which we stated in Internationale Situationniste #10 had sunk to vulgar "Argument-ist" questioning and was thus bound to disappear: it confirmed this for us by disappearing a month or two later. By that time, Lefort had already been separated from it for years, having been in the forefront of the opposition to any form of revolutionary organization, which he denounced as fatally doomed to bureaucratization. Since this distressing discovery he has consoled himself by taking up a banal academic career and writing in La Quinzaine Litteraire. In the 1 February 1968 issue of that periodical, this steady but very cultivated man critiques The Society of the Spectacle. At first, he recognizes some merit in it. The use of Marxian methodology, and even detournement, has not escaped him, although he doesn't go as far as finding Hegel in it as well. But this book nevertheless seems academically unbearable to him for the following reason:

Debord readily admits that he found, at the 221st thesis, that he had said quite enough, and that he never wanted to say anything other than what is precisely said in this book: it is only a question of "untiringly" describing what the spectacle is and how it can be overthrown. That "this idea is reflected in all the others," this is exactly what we consider to be the characteristic of a dialectical book. Such a book does not have to "advance," like a doctoral dissertation on Machiavelli, toward the approval of a jury and the attainment of a diploma (and, as Marx put it in the "Afterword" to the second German edition of Capital, regarding the manner in which the "procedure of presentation" of the dialectical method can be seen, "The mirage can make it seem as if it is an a priori construction.") The Society of the Spectacle does not hide its a priori engagement, nor does it attempt to derive its conclusions from academic argumentation; it is only written to show the concrete, coherent field of application of a thesis that already existed at the outset, a thesis derived from the investigation that revolutionary critique has made of modern capitalism. Thus, the essential, for us, is that it is a book that lacks nothing but one or more revolutions. Which it didn't lack for long. But Lefort, having lost all interest in this kind of theory and practice, finds that the book is itself a closed world: "One would have expected this book to be an assault on its adversaries, but in fact this great deployment of discourse has no other aim than a parade. We recognize in it a certain beauty: the speech [parole] is flawless. Since any question that does not have an automatic response has been banished from the very first lines, it is true that one would search in vain for any fault." The misinterpretation is total: Lefort sees a sort of Mallarmean purity in a book which, as a negative of spectacular society -- in which also, but in an inverse manner, any question that does not have an automatic response is banished at every moment -- , finally seeks nothing other than to overthrow the existing relation of forces in the factories and the streets.

After this global refusal, Lefort still wants to be a Marxist regarding a detail, in order to recall that this is his specialty, the reason that he gets space in intellectual periodicals. Here he begins to falsify, in order to give himself the opportunity to introduce a pedantic appeal to things that are well-known. He solemnly announces that Debord has changed "the commodity into the spectacle," a transformation that is "full of consequences." He heavily summarizes what Marx says about the commodity, then falsely charges Debord with having said that "the production of phantasmagoria commands that of commodities," whereas in fact the exact opposite is clearly stated in The Society of the Spectacle, notably in the second chapter, in which the spectacle is defined as only a moment of the development of commodity production. Lefort can thus pleasantly conclude that "according to Debord, all history is futile"! He also diagnoses: "Strange child of Marx, Debord is intoxicated by the famous analysis devoted to the fetishism of commodities." We will not get into a debate about the best ways to become intoxicated, which is a question that academics know little about. But we will note that history returned, and that its return surprised Lefort more than us in May. It is thus that one can see, in the "bacchanals of the truth in which no one remains sober" (Hegel), the crowds -- already the crowds -- intoxicated by the discovery of the commodity and the spectacle as realities of pseudo-life to be destroyed.[6] And Lefort, in Le Monde for 5 April 1969 -- always late, even where what he knows is concerned, but all the same not as late as February 1968 -- goes as far as writing that it isn't necessary, like "the bourgeois observers," to cloud over the reappearance of Trotskyist relics on the left of the Stalinist machine, because henceforth "conditions are right to allow a critique of the bureaucratic universe and to found an analysis in new terms of the modern mechanisms of exploitation and oppression. (...) With the May movement, with the initiatives that have inspired the young workers, something new pronounces itself that has nothing to do with the intervention of heros: an opposition that still hasn't named itself, but defies all of the established authorities in such a manner that one can not confuse it with movements of the past." Better late than never! Only in February 1968 -- as one saw -- the "conditions" were already right, although Lefort would have liked to have ignored them; today, he still doesn't know what this opposition calls itself.

We sink lower still with Andre Stephane's Contestatory University (Payot, 1969), the thirteenth chapter of which is a critique of Vaneigem's book. The publisher announces that "Stephane" is the pseudonym of "two psychoanalysts." There could just as well have been twenty-two of them or the work could have been done by an IBM machine programmed to do psychoanalysis, given their parodic "orthodox Freudianism" and their ineptitude, which reaches astronomical levels [orbites circumluninaires]. Because the authors are psychoanalysts, Vaneigem must be crazy. He is paranoid; this is why he so perfectly expressed in advance the May movement and diverse, unfortunate tendencies in all of modern society. It's only a matter of fantasies, deliria, refusals of the objectal world and the Oedipal problem, fusional narcissism, exhibitionism, sadistic impulses, etc. They crown their monument of foolishness by professing to "admire the book as a work of art." But this book has fallen into bad hands: the May movement horrified our psychiatrists by the blind violence that it deployed, its inhuman terrorism, its nihilist cruelty and its explicit goal of destroying civilization and perhaps even the planet. When they hear the word "festival," they reach for their electrodes; they insist, sadly but imperatively, that one get back to what's serious, not doubting for a moment that they themselves represent the seriousness of psychoanalysis and social life, and that they can write about all of it without making people laugh. Even the people who had the stupidity to be the clients of this Laurel and Hardy of mental medicine have felt less depressed and dissociated after May, and have told them so.[7] Fearing the loss of a fraction of their income (after having trembled in fear of losing everything in May, when our untimely absolutism threatened the existence of the commodity and money), our socially connected ravers wrote, "This was very clear with respect to certain patients who seemed to consider that, if the Revolution (an old desire that they had abandonned) was possible, everything becomes possible; it is no longer necessary to renounce anything. . . " These people would be the shame of psychoanalysis if there remained some dignity in this distressing profession; if the work of Freud had not been fragmented by its recuperation into bourgeois society over the last thirty years. But these mental defects, when they -- pressed by hate, fear and the desire to maintain their profitable little prestige -- chance to treat a question in a book of which the basis is obviously political, how does it go? Here, our sages and reasonable defenders of "real" society -- and of the principle that all goes for the best in the best of possible societies -- reveal the extent of their stupidity.[8] For them, it is beyond question that the May movement, which they analyze with such fine perspicacity, was only a student movement (the police dogs in the detection of the irrational have not for a moment found it abnormal or inexplicable that a simple outburst of student vandalism paralyzed the economy and the State of a great industrial country). Moreover, according to them, all of the students were rich, lived well in abundance and comfort, and had no discernable reason for rational dissatisfaction: they participated, without notable counterpart, in all of the benefits of a society that is happy and has never been less repressive. Thus, it could be demonstrated that socio-economic happiness, which the May revolters manifestly knew in its pure state, revealed in metaphysical terms the intimate misery of the people who have an absolute thirst for "infantile desire," whose immaturity renders them incapable of profiting from "the benefits" of modern society. Which is a detail that, for the pedants, translates as "an impossibilty of investing libidinally in the external world for conflictual reasons.[9] The most marvelous festivals would not distract someone who bears boredom in himself, this failure in the economy of libido."

Reading Stephane, one is obliged to understand that what they call "the most marvelous festivals" must be for them something like the illumination in "Sound and Light" of the Pyramid at Cheops. Their judgment of the automobile suffices to reveal the correctly sublimated infantilism of these "true adults," monogamous people and voters: this admirable plaything has adequately replaced their little electric trains in the epoch in which they favorably liquidated their Oedipus complexes to the general satisfaction of their respectable families. Quoting here (page 215) several ironic phrases from Vaneigem on the current pseudo-satisfaction of social needs ("The Communards were killed down to the last one so that you, too, could buy a Philips high-fidelity stereophonic system"), they reject with indignation the paranoiac point of view and frankly profess that the Communards were quite content with knowing that their sacrifice assured their descendants the housing-units of Sarcelles and the television broadcasts of Guy Lux. They decide: "It is truly necessary [for the infantile personality] to counter-invest materiality for it not to understand that buying an automobile can constitute a goal in itself, provisional, at best, and that this acquisition is the same as procuring a great joy." It is truly necessary [for these psychoanalysts] to counter-invest the slightest trace of rational thought, so as to make themselves the unilateral poets of this "great joy," at the moment when the specialists of scientific examination, even if parceled[10] and socially disarmed, are denouncing in all domains the dangers of the proliferation of the star-commodity (destruction of the urban milieu, etc.), and when even those who are the most alienated by the "possession" of an automobile do not cease to complain about the precise conditions that continually deteriorate the "great joy" that this purchase supposedly, publically, guaranteed to them (of course, this malaise still doesn't go as far as understanding that this deterioration is not caused by the particular failures of the public powers, but quite simply by the obligatory multiplication of this pseudo-well-being to the point of total congestion). Finally, our two psychiatrists are only precise, sincere, and realistic about a single point. In a note on page 99, they denounce several people, "so-called psychoanalysts and Freudians," who -- after a debate on payments for psychoanalysts -- at the College of Medicine, wanted to put in question the very necessity of payment itself. "Therefore, to those who know the effects of the transference, it appears clear that the money one pays an analyst guarantees what we can schematically call 'autonomy' (once the patient has paid the analyst, 'he owes him nothing')." The psychoanalyst has obviously never been at pains to enunciate a beautiful psychoanalytic justification for the necessity of paying. But if those who profit so as to consume more and live less are happy to psychoanalyze Marxists, then they will not forget that the simplest Marxist critique reveals, with the greatest accuracy, their deep-psychology [psychologie des profondeurs] (to adopt here their [punning] verbal style of analysis, it is not for nothing that the people say "he has quickly put the dough in his pocket [sa profonde]"), their economy and their investments. Thus, here is the origin of Stephane's book: their money was threatened. What delirium have they treated that was worse? In the memory of psychiatry, one has never seen a mode of production die! One begins, however, to feel the dread.

At the end of 1966, Rector Bayen of Strasbourg declared to the press that we should be dealt with by psychiatrists. The following year, he saw the abolition of the "University Psychological Aid Centers" of Strasbourg and Nantes and, eighteen months later, the abolition of all of what he knew as his amiable university world and a great number of his hierarchical superiors. With this critique of Vaneigem, one sees the tardy arrival of the psychiatrists with whom one threatened us. Quite probably they have disappointed those who expected the definitive solution to the situationist problem.

Rene Vienet's book has not had the honors of psychiatry, but has been critiqued in an article in issue #2 of International Revolution (Address: Toulouse), the journal of an ultra-leftist, anti-Trotskyist and non-Bordigist group that is hardly disengaged from Leninism and always aims at reconstituting the wise leadership of a true "party of the proletariat," which nevertheless promises to remain democratic the day it comes into existence. The ideas of this group smell a little too dusty to be interesting [enough] to discuss here. Since it is a question of people who have revolutionary intentions, we will content ourselves with revealing several of their specific falsifications. This practice is, in our opinion, much more incompatible with the activity of a revolutionary organization than the simple affirmation of erroneous theories, which are always susceptible of being discussed and rectified. Moreover, those who believe they have the right to falsify texts so as to defend their theses ipso facto confess that their theses are otherwise indefensible.

This critic declares himself disappointed with the book "all the more because the several months' time taken for recollection offered better possibilities." Although this book only appeared at the end of October 1968, it is clearly indicated in the introduction (p. 8) that it was completed on 26 July [1968]. Immediately handed over to the publisher, this book needed no corrections; only two short notes were added, pp. 20 and 209, and are explicitly dated October; they concern Czechoslovakia and Mexico, developements [only] known after July.

One reproaches this book for "yielding to current fashion" -- that is to say, in fact, to our own style, since this book adopted the same sort of presentation as the old issues of Internationale Situationniste -- because it includes photos and comics (and one also reproaches the situationists for scorning "the great infantile mass of workers" by aiming to divert them, like the capitalist press and cinema). One remarks severely that "it is above all the action of the Enrages and the situationists that is described," only to immediately add, "as the title moreover announces." Vienet estimated that all of it would constitute precious documentation for understanding May and principally for those who will have to act in future crises of the same type (and it is with the same goal that we have reprised this question [elsewhere] in this issue [of Internationale Situationniste]). If this experience appears useful to certain people and negligible to others, that will go according to what they think and what they actually are. But what is certain is the fact that, for many people, this specific documentation would have been hidden (or known fragmentarily and falsely) without this book. The title says well what the book is about.

Without going so far as to insinuate that there is the slightest false detail in this report, our censor estimates that Vienet has given too large a place to our action, imagined to have been "preponderant." He writes that, "Restored to its just proportions, the place occupied by the situationists was certainly inferior to that of numerous other groups and groupuscules, in any case not superior." We don't really know where the "certainty" of his comparison [balance] comes from, as if it were a question of weighing the [number of] more or less heavy paving-stones that each group carried to the same edifice and from the same direction. The C.R.S. [riot police], and even the Maoists, certainly had a larger "place," a greater weight, in the crisis than we had. The question is knowing on which side[11] the ones and the others weighed. If it is only a question of the revolutionary current, a great number of unorganized workers obviously had a weight that was so determinant that no other group could even be mentioned, but this tendency didn't consciouly become master of its own action. If it is only a question -- since our crtitique appears more interested in a kind of race between the "groups," and perhaps he is thinking of his own? -- of groups that had clearly revolutionary positions, one knows very well that they weren't so "numerous"! And, if so, it would then be necessary to say which groups were involved and what they did, instead of leaving all this is a mysterious state and [arbitrarily] claiming that the precise action taken by the SI was, with respect to these unknown groups, "certainly inferior," and then -- it's a bit different -- "not superior."

In fact, the journal IR reproaches the situationists for having said for several years that a new departure for the revolutionary proletarian movement was to be expected from a modern critique of the new conditions of oppression and the new contradictions these conditions bring to light. For IR, there is nothing fundamentally new in capitalism, and thus in its critique; the occupations movement presented no new character; the concepts of "spectacle" and "survival," the critique of the commodity attaining a stage of abundant production, etc., are only empty words. One sees that these postulates are inseparably linked.

If the situationists were merely obsessed with intellectual innovation, International Revolution, which knows everything about the proletarian revolution since 1920 or 1930, would attach no importance to them. What shocks our critic is that we showed at the same time that this novelty of capitalism and, corollarily, the novelties of its negation, also re-found the ancient truth of the once-vanquished proletarain revolution. Here IR is very unhappy, because it wants to possess this old truth without any mixtures of novelty, whether that novelty arises in reality or in the theory of the SI or anyone else, it doesn't matter. Here the fakery begins. One extracts a certain number of phrases from pages 13 and 14 of Vienet's book, recalling the basic banalities of the unfinished revolution, and then one tags them with professorial notes, in the margins, as if written in red: "It is truly fortunate true that the SI 'easily' proves what all of the workers and all of the revolutionaries know"; "here is a discovery!"; "obviously," etc. But the extracts in question are cleverly chosen -- if one dares to say so. For example, this one is quoted literally: "The SI knows well (...) that the emancipation of the workers everywhere and always collides with the bureaucratic organizations." What are the precise words suppressed by this opportune ellipsis?[12] Here is the exact phrase: "The SI knows well, as much as the workers deprived of speech, that the emancipation of the workers everywhere and always collides against the bureaucratic organizations." The obviousness [evidence] of IR's procedure is as great as the long-standing obviousness [l'evidence ancienne] of the class struggle, of which this group seems to dream itself the exclusive owner, and which Vienet explicitly recalls in response to "so many commentators" who can speak in books and newspapers and who "agree that it [May 1968] was unforeseeable."

Always so as to deny that the SI has said in advance some truth about the proximity of a new epoch in the revolutionary movement, IR, which does not at all want this period to be new, ironically asks how the SI can thus claim to have foreseen this crisis; and why it was necessary to wait exactly fifty years after the defeat of the Russian Revolution [until 1967]. "Why not thirty or seventy?" our critic asks flatly. The answer is simple. Even putting aside the fact that the SI saw closely enough the incline of certain elements of the crisis (and, for example, [radical student actions in] Strasbourg, Turin, Nanterre), we did not foresee the date, but the content.

The International Revolution group can be in total disagreement with us when it comes to judging the content of the occupations movement, as it is more generally in disagreement with the comprehension of its epoch and thus with the forms of practical action that other revolutionaries have already begun to recapture. But if we scorn the International Revolution group and do not want contact with it, this is not because of the content of its slightly stale theoretical science, but because of the petit-bureaucratic style that it is led, without problem, to adopt in order to defend this content. Thus the form and content of its perspectives are in accord with each other, both dating from the same sad years.

But modern history has created the eyes that know how to read us.

[1] In Ken Knabb's "masperized" translation, in which one-third of the text is dropped out and replaced by ellipses, Comment on ne comprehend pas des livres situationnistes is rendered as How not to understand situationist books. In any case, the books in question are Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Raoul Vaneigem's Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations (1967), and Rene Vienet's Enrages and Situationists in the Occupations Movement (1968).

[2] The rest of this paragraph and the entirety of the one that follows it are dropped out of Ken Knabb's version.

[3] Argumentisme, which is a reference to the journal Arguments, which the SI boycotted in the early 1960s.

[4] Begin passage dropped out by Ken Knabb.

[5] End passage dropped out by Ken Knabb.

[6] The rest of this paragraph is dropped out of Ken Knabb's version.

[7] Begin passage dropped out by Ken Knabb.

[8] End passage dropped out by Ken Knabb.

[9] The rest of this paragraph and the entirety of the one that follows it are dropped out of Ken Knabb's version.

[10] The French parcellaire can also be taken to mean "partial."

[11] The French sens can also be translated as sense, meaning or direction.

[12] Here the reader will appreciate the context for our insistence on translating this text in its entirety.

(Unattributed; probably written by Guy Debord. Published in Internationale Situationniste #12, September 1969. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! February 2006.)