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>From Peter Marshall's _Demanding the Impossible_
The Situationists
The other great important libertarian group which came to
prominence during the May-June events in France in 1968 were the
Situationists.
They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and
intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The
post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and
music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner
of the group who founded the magazine _Situationiste
Internationale_ in 1957. At first, they were principally
concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they
wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to
supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate
activities and to transform them into part of everyday life.
Like the Lettrists, they were against work and for complete
_divertissement_. Under capitalism, the creativity of most
people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been
divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The
Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution:
they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power,
and poetry and art to be made by all. Enough! they declared. To
hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an
eternal festival.
At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom
Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists
increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to
all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the
most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist
International, and had made several films, including _Hurlements
en faveur de Sade_ (1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal
_Socialisme on Barbarie_, the Situationists rediscovered the
history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period
of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain,
Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a
capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But
they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained
elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique
of the alienation of everyday life. They believed that the
revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist countries should be
led by an "enlarged proletariat" which would include the majority
of waged laborers. In addition, although they claimed to want
neither disciples nor a leadership, they remained an elitist
vanguard group who dealt with differences by expelling the
dissenting minority. They looked to a world-wide proletarian
revolution to bring about the maximum pleasure.
At the end of 1967, Guy Debord in _The Society of the Spectacle_
and Raoul Vaneigem in _The Revolution of Everyday Life_ presented
the most elaborate expositions of Situationist theory which had a
widespread influence in France during the 1968 student rebellion.
[NOTE: Anarchy magazine has been including a chapter per issue of
Vaneigem's book --currently up to chapter 16, "The Fascination of
Time". -- Ken] Many of the most famous slogans which were
scribbled on the walls of Paris were taken from their theses,
such as FREE THE PASSIONS, NEVER WORK, LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME.
Members of the Situationist International (SI) co-operated with
the _enrages_ from Nanterre University in the Occupations
COmmittee of the Sorbonne, an assembly held in permanent session.
On 17 May, the Committee sent the following telegram to the
Communist Party of the USSR:
SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL
POWER OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT
STOP HUMANITY WILL NOT BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAU-
CRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP
LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF
THE MAKHNOVSCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG
LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP
DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP
Groups of _enrages_ in Strasbourg, Nantes and Boudreaux were also
inspired by the Situationists and attempted to "organize chaos"
on the campuses. The active thinkers however never numbered
much more than a dozen.
In their analysis, the Situationists argued that capitalism had
turned all relationships transactional, and that life had been
reduced to a "spectacle". The spectacle is the key concept of
their theory. In many ways, they merely reworked Marx's view of
alienation, as developed in his early writings. The worker is
alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds
himself living in an alien world:
The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent
power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to
the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and
space of his world becomes foreign to him with the accumulation of
his alienated products....
The increasing division of labor and specialization have
transformed work into meaningless drudgery. "It is useless,"
Vaneigem observes, "to expect even a caricature of creativity
from a conveyor belt." What they added to Marx was the
recognition that in order to ensure continued economic growth,
capitalism has created "pseudo-needs" to increase consumption.
Instead of saying that consciousness was determined at the point
of production, they said it occurred at the point of consumption.
Modern capitalist society is a consumer society, a society of
"spectacular" commodity consumption. Having long been treated
with the utmost contempt as a producer, the worker is now
lavishly courted and seduced as a consumer.
At the same time, while modern technology has ended natural
alienation (the struggle for survival against nature), social
alienation in the form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has
continued. People are treated like passive objects, not active
subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the
spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing.
The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and
economic wealth, between what is and what could be. "Who wants a
world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of
starvation," Vaneigem asks, "entails the risk of dying of
boredom?"
The way out of the Situationists was not to wait for a distant
revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. To
transform the perception of the world and to change the structure
of society is the same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed
power relations and therefore transformed society. They
therefore tried to construct situations which disrupt the
ordinary and normal in order to jolt people out of their
customary ways of thinking and acting. [Hardly an original idea,
spanning from Leary-style LSD use to zen, etc. -- Ken.] In place
of petrified life, they sought the _derive_ (with its flow of
acts and encounters) and _detournement_ (rerouting events and
images). They supported vandalism, wildcat strikes and sabotage
as a way of destroying the manufactured spectacle and commodity
economy. Such gestures of refusal were considered signs of
creativity. The role of the SI was to make clear to the masses
what they were already implicitly doing. In this way, they
wished to act as catalysts within the revolutionary process.
Once the revolution was underway, the SI would disappear as a
group.
In place of the society of the spectacle, the Situationists
proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity
production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State.
Pseudo-needs would be replaced by real desires, and the economy
of profit become one of pleasure. The division of labor and the
antagonism between work and play would be overcome. It would be
a society founded on the love of free play, characterized by the
refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles.
Above all, they insisted that every individual should actively
and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every moment
of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because
they believed that all individuals should construct the
situations of their lives and release their own potential and
obtain their own pleasure.
As for the basic unit of the future society, they recommended
workers' councils by which they meant "sovereign rank-and-file
assemblies, in the enterprises and the neighborhoods". As with
the communes of the anarcho-communists, the councils would
practice a form of direct democracy and make and execute all the
key decisions affecting everyday life. Delegates would be
mandated and recallable. The councils would then federate
locally, nationally and internationally.
In their call for the "concrete transcendence of the State and of
every kind of alienating collectivity" and in their vision of
communist society the Situationists come closest to the
anarchists. They not only referred to Bakunin for their attack
on authoritarian structures and bureaucracy, but Debord argued
that "anarchism had led in 1936 [in Spain] to a social revolution
and to a rough sketch, the most advanced ever, of proletarian
power." The Situationists differ however from traditional
anarchism in their elitism as an exclusive group and in their
overriding concern with coherence of theory and practice. In
their narrow insistence on the proletariat as the sole
revolutionary class, they overlooked the revolutionary potential
of other social groups, especially the students. They also
denied that they were "spontaneists" like the 22 March Movement
and rejected the "ideology" of anarchism in so far as it was
allegedly another restrictive ideology imposed on the workers.
Despite the acuteness of their critique of modern capitalism, the
Situationists mistakenly took a temporary economic boom in post-
war France for a permanent trend in capitalist societies. Their
belief in economic abundance now seems wildly optimistic; not
only underproduction but also underconsumption continue in
advanced industrial societies. In many parts of the globe,
especially in the southern hemisphere, so-called "natural
alienation", let alone social alienation, has yet to be overcome.
Nevertheless, for all their weaknesses, the Situationists have
undoubtedly enriched anarchist theory by their critique of modern
culture, their celebration of creativity, and their stress on the
immediate transformation of everyday life. Although the SI group
disbanded in 1972 after bitter wrangling over tactics, their
ideas have continued to have widespread influence in anarchist
and feminist circles and inspired, at times almost subconsciously
it seemed, much of the style and content of punk rock.
DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
A history of Anarchism
Peter Marshall, 1992
Fontana Press
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
ISBN 0 00 686245 4