The journal Internationale Situationniste is the expression of an international group of theoreticians who, in the last few years, have undertaken a radical critique of modern society: a critique of what it really is and a critique of all of its aspects.

According to the situationists, a universally dominant social model, which tends towards totalitarian self-regulation, is only apparently combatted by false contestations permanently posed on its own terrain, by illusions that, on the contrary, reinforce this model. Bureaucratic pseudo-socialism is only the most grandiose of these disguises of the old hierarchical world of alienated labor. The development of capitalist concentration, and the diversification of its function at the global level, have produced the forced consumption of the abundance of commodities, as well as the control of the economy and all of life by bureaucrats, through their possession of the State; or direct or indirect colonialism. Quite far from being the definitive response to the incessant revolutionary crises of the historical era begun two centuries ago, this system has now entered into a new crisis: from Berkeley to Varsovie, from the Asturians to Kivu, it is refuted and combatted.

The situationists believe that the indivisible perspective of this struggle is the actual abolition of all of class society, commodity production and the salariat: the supercession of art and all cultural acquisitions, put in play in the free creation of everyday life, thus realized; the direct fusion of revolutionary theory and practice in an experimental activity that excludes all petrification into "ideologies," which are the authorities of specialization always in the service of the specialization of authority.

The factors that pose this historical problem are the rapid expansion and modernization of fundamental contradictions at the interior of the existing system; between this system and human desires. The forces that have an interest in resolving these contradictions, and that are the only ones with the capacity to do so, are all of the workers who have no power over the use of their own lives and no control of the fantastic accumulation of the material possibilities that they produce. The democracy of Workers' Councils, deciding everything by themselves, is the already-begun model of this resolution. The movement of this new proletariat to constitute itself as a class, without the mediation of any management, is the intelligence of a world without intelligence. The situationists declare that they do not have interests separate from those of this movement in its entirety. They do not establish particular principles on which they would like to model a movement that is real, that is actually producing itself before our eyes. In the struggles that are beginning in several countries and on diverse questions, the situationists put forth the totality of the problem, its coherence, its theoretical and thus practical unification. Finally, in the diverse phases that traverse this general struggle, they constantly represent the interests of the total movement.

(Written in French by Guy Debord, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith and printed at the end of the English version of "Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Society" and on the poster version The Class Struggles in Algeria. This translation from the French by NOT BORED!)