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Title: Instructions for an Insurrection Author: Situationist International Date: 1960 Language: en Topics: situationist, insurrection Source: [[http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/321]]
If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously
because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared
from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social
transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more
ridiculous, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or
another. If the word "revolutionary" has been neutralized to the point
of being used in advertising to describe the slightest change in an
ever-changing commodity production, this is because the possibilities of
a central desirable change are no longer expressed anywhere. Today the
revolutionary project stands accused before the tribunal of history —
accused of having failed, of having simply engendered a new form of
alienation. This amounts to recognizing that the ruling society has
proved capable of defending itself, on all levels of reality, much
better than revolutionaries expected. Not that it has become more
tolerable. The point is simply that revolution has to be reinvented.
This poses a number of problems that will have to be theoretically and
practically overcome in the next few years. We can briefly mention a few
points that it is urgent to understand and resolve.
Of the tendencies toward regroupment that have appeared over the last
few years among various minorities of the workers movement in Europe,
only the most radical current is worth preserving: that centered on the
program of workers councils. Nor should we overlook the fact that a
number of confusionist elements are seeking to insinuate themselves into
this debate (see the recent accord among "leftist"
philosophico-sociological journals of different countries).
The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new
type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of
human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the
society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless
this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will
never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for
participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere
abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a
really new organization and for the organization of a really new
society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out
the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being
reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most
qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the
passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.
People's creativity and participation can only be awakened by a
collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived
experience. The only way to "arouse the masses" is to expose the
appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and the
present poverty of life. Without a critique of everyday life, a
revolutionary organization is a separated milieu, as conventional and
ultimately as passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized
terrain of modern leisure. Sociologists, such as Henri Raymond in his
study of Palinuro, have shown how in such places the spectacular
mechanism recreates, on the level of play, the dominant relations of the
society as a whole. But then they go on naĂŻvely to commend the
"multiplicity of human contacts," for example, without seeing that the
mere quantitative increase of these contacts leaves them just as insipid
and inauthentic as they are everywhere else. Even in the most
libertarian and antihierarchical revolutionary group, communication
between people is in no way guaranteed by a shared political program.
The sociologists naturally support efforts to reform everyday life, to
organize compensation for it in vacation time. But the revolutionary
project cannot accept the traditional notion of play, of a game limited
in space, in time and in qualitative depth. The revolutionary game — the
creation of life — is opposed to all memories of past games. To provide
a three-week break from the kind of life led during forty-nine weeks of
work, the holiday villages of Club Med draw on a shoddy Polynesian
ideology — a bit like the French Revolution presenting itself in the
guise of republican Rome, or like the revolutionaries of today who
define themselves principally in accordance with how well they fit the
Bolshevik or some other style of militant role. The revolution of
everyday life cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the
future.
The experience of the empty leisure produced by modern capitalism has
provided a critical correction to the Marxian notion of the extension of
leisure time: It is now clear that full freedom of time requires first
of all a transformation of work and the appropriation of this work in
view of goals, and under conditions, that are utterly different from
those of the forced labor that has prevailed until now (see the activity
of the groups that publish Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, Solidarity
in England[1] and Alternative in Belgium). But those who put all the
stress on the necessity of changing work itself, of rationalizing it and
of interesting people in it, and who pay no attention to the free
content of life (i.e. the development of a materially equipped creative
power beyond the traditional categories of work time and
rest-and-recreation time) run the risk of providing an ideological cover
for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of
greater efficiency and profitability without at all having called in
question the experience of this production or the necessity of this kind
of life. The free construction of the entire space-time of individual
life is a demand that will have to be defended against all sorts of
dreams of harmony in the minds of aspiring managers of social
reorganization.
The different moments of situationist activity until now can only be
understood in the perspective of a reappearance of revolution, a
revolution that will be social as well as cultural and whose field of
action will right from the start have to be broader than during any of
its previous endeavors. The SI does not want to recruit disciples or
partisans, but to bring together people capable of applying themselves
to this task in the years to come, by every means and without worrying
about labels. This means that we must reject not only the vestiges of
specialized artistic activity, but also those of specialized politics;
and particularly the post-Christian masochism characteristic of so many
intellectuals in this area. We don't claim to be developing a new
revolutionary program all by ourselves. We say that this program in the
process of formation will one day practically oppose the ruling reality,
and that we will participate in that opposition. Whatever may become of
us individually, the new revolutionary movement will not be formed
without taking into account what we have sought together; which could be
summed up as the passage from the old theory of limited permanent
revolution to a theory of generalized permanent revolution.