SITUATIONISTS AND THE 1£�CH, MAY 1968

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1902593383

Published by AK Press/Dark Star

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©This anthology is copyright AK Press/Dark Star 2001

Design by Billy Hunt en tant qu'intelligence de la pratique huma· qui doit etre i reconnue et vccuc _par les masses.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Fredy Perlman (1934- 1985)

"Having little, being much."

C:ONT£NiS

Foreword

1 On The Poverty of Student Life 9 Menibers of the lnternationale Situationniste and Students of Strasbourg

2 Our Goals & Methods 29 Situationist International

3 Totality For kids Raoul Vaneigem

4 Paris May 1968 Solidarity

5 The De cline & Fall of the "Spectacular" Commodity-Economy GuyDebord

6 Documents 105 Situationist International

7 Further reading 117

Afterward Foreword

This anthology brings together the and in May 1967 it was widely distrib­ three most widely translated, distrib­ uted around the Nanterre campus by uted and influential pamphlets of the Anarchists. November of that year saw Situationist International available in the publication of Debord's Society of the sixties. We have also included an the Spectacle and December the publi­ eyewitness account of the May Events cation of Vaneigem's Revolution of by a member of Solidarity published in Everyday Life. June 1968. (Dark Star would like to What we hope this Anthology will point out that although Solidarity does offer the reader is not only a concise not possess the current 'kudos' or introduction to the ideas of the media/cultural interest possessed by Situationists but also an insight into the Situationists, politically they are what Situationist material was readily deserving of more recognition and available in the late sixties. For the research). non-French speaking person with an To briefly sketch in some historical interest in radical politics the chances context, both The Poverty of Student are that their encounter with and Life (also known as Ten Days That knowledge of the Situationists would Shook The University), and Paris: May be derived from these three pam­ 1968 were conceived as pamphlets. phlets. lt is worth emphasising that The Totality for Kids and The Decline although we recall seeing a duplicated And Fall of The Spectacular translation of Society of th e Spectacle Commodity Economy were translated it was not until Black & Red published from articles in the Situationist their translation in 1970 that the book International journal. The Totality for became generally available. Likewise, Kids, written by Raoul Vaneigem, orig­ although an edition of Revolution Of inally appeared in two parts in Issue Everyday Life was translated by John No 7 (April 1962) and Issue No 8 Fullerton and Paul Sieveking and pub­ Oanuary 1963). The Decline and Fall of lished by Practical Paradise in 1972 (in The Spectacular Commodity Economy, an edition whose unique selling point ­

written by Guy Debord, originally to utilise a commercial phrase - appeared in Issue No 10 (March 1966). seemed to be the book's ability to fall The Poverty of Student Life, probably to pieces in pamphlet-size chunks!), it the most famous or infamous of these was not until Donald Nicholson­ pamphlets, was originally distributed Smith's translation published by Rebel by AFGES students on 22 November Press in 1983 that the title became 1966. lt was reissued in March 1967 widely available. If we recall that Chris Gray's seminal Anthology was not street, the seminaries and military bar­ published until 1974 the significance racks, pure young people who refuse of these three pamphlets in arousing to knuckle down. lt is to them and interest in the Situationist project at them alone that I address myself, it is the time cannot be emphasised for them alone that I am trying to enough. defend Surrealism against the accusa­ Whether by intelligent analysis or tion that it is, after all, no more than an chance, the pamphlets also allow the intellectual pastime like any other". reader to acquire some knowledge of In a similar spirit we offer this the two principal theoreticians of the anthology to young people of all ages Paris�based Situationists, Debord and who refuse to knuckle down. Vaneigem, before moving on to their main texts; whilst The Poverty of park Star, London 2001 Student Life, with its provocative and at times humourous writing, serves as a reminder that the Situationist International was a group project. For a substantial period of time these three pamphlets constituted the main knowledge of the Situationist project. With the translation of more . and more texts it has become easier to analyse the influences and events that shaped the Situationist International, its transition from Lettrism, the influ­ ence of Dada and Surrealism etc, and even to contemplate Situationist Exhibitions. However we have no doubt that these three pamphlets have both an historical and contemporary significance. In the Second Manifesto Of

Surrealism (1930), Andre · Breton wrote: "There are still today, in the lycees,even in the workshops, in the

On the poverty of student life Considered in its. economic, political,. psychological, sexual. and particularly intellectual aspects. and a modest proposal for its remedy

First published in 1966 at the University of the very futureofthe students of the University Strasbourg by students of the university and of Strasbourg." members of the lntemationale Situationniste. A fe w students elected to the student union To make • shame more shameful by printed 1o,ooo copies with university funds. The · giving it publicity copies were distributed at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academicyear. The We might very well say, and no one would dis­ student union was promptly closed by court agree with us, that the student is the most uni­ order. in his summation the judge concluded: versally despised creature in France, apart from "The accused have never denied the charge the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is of misusing the funds of the student union, usually attacked fro m the wrong point of view, Indeed, th ey openly admit to having made the with specious reasons derived from the ruling union pay some £1500 fo r the printing and dis' ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a tribution of 1o,ooo pamphlets, not to mention true revolutionary, yet a revolutionary critique of the cost of other literature inspired by the student situation is currently taboo on the "lnternationale Situationniste". Th ese publica­ official Left. The licensed and impotent oppo· tions express ideas and aspirations which, to nents of capitalism repress the obvious - that put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of what is wrong with the students is also what is a student union. One has only to read what the wrong with them. They convert their uncon­ accused have written, for it is obvious that these scious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The five students, scarcely more than adolescents, radical intelligentsia (from Les Te mps Moderries lacking all experience of real life, their minds to L' Express) prostrates itself before the so­ confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, called rise of the student and the declining political and economic theories, and perplexed bureaucracies of the Left (from the C6f!1munist by the drab monotony of their everyday life, party to the Stalinist National Union of make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to Students) bids noisily for his moral and !material pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright support. abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, There are reasons for this sudd�n enthusi­ God, re ligion, the clergy, the governments and asm, but they are all provided by the present political systems of the whole world.Rejectlng form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. all morality and restraint, these cynics do not We shall use this pamphlet for denunclation. We hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of shall expose these reasons one by one, on the scholarship,·the abolition of work, total subver­ principle that the end of alienation is only sion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution readied by the straight and narrow path of alien­ with "unlicensed pleasure" as its only goat. ation itself. In view of their basically anarchist character, Up to now, studies of student life · have . these theories and propaganda are eminently ignored the essential issue. The surveys and .. noxious; Their wide diffusionin both student cir­ analyses have all been . psychologicaL or socio­ cles and among the general public, by the local, logical or. economic: in other words, academic national and foreign press,. are a threat to the exercises, cqntent with the false categories of morality, the studies, the reputation .and thus one spedalisation or another. None of them can achieve what is most needed - a view of modern treated as a baby by the institutions which pro­ society as a whole. Fourier denounced their vide his education. (If ever they stop screwing error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific his arse off, it's only to come round and kick him laws to the basic assumptions of the science in the balls.) ("porter regulierement sur les questions primor­ "There is no student problem." St udent pas­ diales"). Everything is said about our society sivity is only the most obvious symptom of a except what it is, and the nature of its two basic general state of affairs, for each sector of social principles - the commodity and the spectacle. life has been subdued by a similar imperialism, The fetishism of facts masks the essential cate­ Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about gory, and the details consign the totality to the student problem, but only because the real oblivion. problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot we have different reasons to despise the student everyone a specific role in a general passivity. and all his works. What is unforgivable is not so The student is no exception to the rule. He has a much his actual misery but his complaicence in provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final the face of the misery of others. For him there is role as an element in market society as conser­ only one real alienation: his own. He is a full­ vative as the rest. Being a student is a form of time and happy consumer of that commodity, initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he can­ more primitive societies with bizarre precision. lt not claim our interest. By the logic of modern goes on outside of history, cut off from social capitalism, most students can only become reality. The student leads a double life, poised mere petits cadres (with the same function in between his present status and his future role. neo-capitatism as the skilled worker had in the The two are absolutely separate, and the jour­ nineteenth-century economy). The student real­ ney from one to the other is a mechanical event ty knows how miserable will be that golden "in the future." Meanwhile, he basks in a schiz­ future which is supposed to make up for the ophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his shameful poverty of the present. In the face of initiation group to hide from that future. that knowledge, he prefers to dote on the pres­ Protected from history, the present is a mystic ent and invent an imaginary prestige for himself. trance. After all, there will be no magical compensation At least in consciousness, the student can for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yes­ exist apart from the official truths of "economic terday, lighting these fools the way to dusty life." But for very simple reasons: looked at eco­ death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an nomically, student life is a hard one. In our soci­ unreal present. ety of abundance, he is still a pauper. So% of The student is a stoic slave: the more chains students come from income groups well above authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in the working class, yet 90% have less money phantasy. He shares with his new fa mily, the than the meanest labourer. Student poverty is University, a belief in a curious kind of autono­ an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier my. Real independence, apparently, lies in a age of capitalism; it does not share in the new direct subservience to the two most powerful poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet systems of social control: the fa mily and the to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. State. He is their well-behaved and grateful Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral child, and like the .submissive child he is overea­ prejudices and authority of the fa mily to become ger to please. He. celebrates all the values and part of the market even before he is adolescent: mystifications of the system, devouring them at fifteen he has all the delights of being direct­ with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast. ly exploited. In contrast the student covets his Once, the old illusions had to be imposed on an protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile aristocracy of tabour; the petits cadres-to-be paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring ingest them willingly under the guise of culture. occasional brushes with his family, but in There are various forms of compensation for essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be poverty. The total poverty of ancient societies produced the grandiose compensation .of reli­ social base disappeared, the vision became gion. The student's poverty by contrast is a mar­ banality. In the age of free-trade capitalism, ginal phenomenon, and he casts around for when the "liberal" state left it its marginal free­

· compensations among the most down-at-heel doms, the university could still think of itself as images of the ruling class. He is a· bore who an independent power. Of course. it was il pure repairs the old jokes of an alienated culture. and narrow product of that society's needs par­ Even as an ideologist, he is always out of date. ticularly the need to give the privileged minority One and all, his latest enthusiasms were ridicu­ an adequate general culture before they lous thirty years ago. rejoined the ruling class (not that going up to Once upon a time the universities were university was straying very far fromclass con­ respected; the student persists in the belief that fines). But the bitterness of the nostalgic don he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. (No one dares any longer to speak in the name The bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By of nineteenth century liberalism; so they remi­ this we mean the culture of a Hegel or of the nisce about the "free" and "popular" universi­ encyclopedistes, ratherthan the Sorbonne and ties of the middle ages - that democracy of "lib­ the Ecole Normale Superieure) has vanished. A eral") is understandable: better, after all, to be mechanically produced specialist is now the the bloodhound of the haute bourgeoisie than goal of the "educational system." A modern eco­ sheepdog to the world's white-collars, Better to nomic system demands mass production of stu­ stand guard on privilege than harry the flock into dents who are not educated and have been ren­ their allotted factories and bureaux, according dered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline to the whims of the "planned economy". The of the universities and the automatic nullity of university is becoming, fairly smoothly, the hon­ the student once he enters its portals. The uni­ est broker Of technocracy and its spectacle. In versity has become a society for the propagation the process, the purists of the academic Right of ignorance; "high culture" has taken on the become a pitiful sideshow, purveying their "uni­ rhythm of the production line; without excep­ versal" cultural goods to a bewildered audience tion, university teachers are cretins, men who of specialists. would get the bird from any audience of school­ More serious, and thus more dangerous, are boys. But all this hardly matters: the important the modernists of the Left and the Students' thing .is to go on listening respectfully. In time, if Union, with their talk of a "reform of University critical thinking is repressed with enough con­ structure" and a "reinsertion of the University scientiousness, the student will come to partake into social and economic life", i.e. its adaptation of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell to the needs of modern capitalism. The one-time him the final truths of the world. Till then - a suppliers of general culture to the ruling class­ menopause of the spirit. As a matter of course es, though still guarding their old prestige, must the future revolutionary society will condemn be converted into the forcing-house of a new the doings oflecture theatre and faculty as mere labour aristocracy. Far from contesting the his­ noise - socially undesirable. The student is torical process which subordinates one of the already a very bad joke. last relatively autonomous social groups to the

The student is blind to the obvious • that demands of the market,. the. progressives com­ even his closed world is changing. The "crisis of plain of delays and inefficiency in its completion. the university" - that detail of a more general They are the standard-bearers of the cybernetic crisis of modern capitalism - is the latest fodder university of the future (which has already for the deaf'mute dialogue of the specialists. reared its ugly head in some unlikely quarters). This "crisis" is simple to understand: the diffi­ And they are the enemy: the fight against the culties of a specialised sector which is adjusting market, which is starting again in earnest, ·(too late) to a general change in the relations of means the fight against its latest lackeys. production. As for the student, this struggle is fought There was once a vision - if an ideological out entirely over his head, somewhere in the one- of a liberal bourgeois university. But as its heavenly realm of his masters. The whole of his life is beyond his control, and for all he sees of why men fell down, the students flock to the the world he might as well be on another planet. psycho-police stations with their "problems". His acute economic poverty condemns him to a The real poverty of his everyday life finds its paltry form of survival. But, being a complacent immediate, phantastic compensation in the creature, he parades his very ordinary indigence opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural as if it were an original lifestyle: self-indulgent­ spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the ly, he affects to be a Bohemian. The Bohemian dutiful disciple. Although he is dose to the pro­ solution is hardly viable at the best of times, and duction-point, access to the Sanctuary of the notion that it could be achieved without a Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to dis­ complete and final break with the university cover "modern culture" as an admiring specta­ milieu is quite ludicrous. But the student tor. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. Bohemian (and every student likes to pretend He peeks at the corpse in cine-dubs and the­ that he is a Bohemian at heart) clings to hisfalse atres, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural and degraded version of individual revolt. He is supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in so "eccentric" that he continues - thirty years his element: he is the living proof of all the plat­ after Reich's excellent lessons - to entertain the itudes of American market research: a conspicu­ most traditional forms of erotic behaviour, ous consumer, complete with induced irrational reproducing at this level the general relations of preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), class soCiety. Where sex is concerned, we have and irrational prejudice against BrandY (Sartre, learnt better tricks from elderly provincial ladies. perhaps). His rent-a-crowd militancy for the latest good Impervious to real passions, he seeks titilla­ cause is an aspect of his real impotence. tion in the battles between his anaemic gods, The student's old-fashioned poverty, howev­ the stars of a vacuous heaven: Althusser - er, does put him at a potential advantage - if only Garaudy·Barthes • Picard - Lefebvre Levi he could see it. He does have marginal free­ Strauss • Halliday·deChardin • Brassens ... and dams, a small area of liberty which as yet between their rival theologies, designed like all escapes the totalitarian control of the spectacle. theologies to mask the real problems by creat­ His flexible working-hours permit him adventure ing false ones: humanism existentialism · sci· and experiment. But he is a sucker for punish­ entism - structuralism • cyberneticism • new crit­ ment and freedom scares him to death: he feels icism dialectics-of-naturism meta­ safer in the straight-jacketed space-time of lee· philosophism ... ture hall and weekly essay . He is quite happy He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen with this open prison organised for his "bene­ the latest happening. He discovers "modernity" fit", and, though not constrained, as are most as fast as the market can produce its ersatz ver­ people, to separate work and leisure, he does so sion of long outmoded (though once important) of his own accord - hypocritically proclaiming all ideas; for him, every rehash is a cultural revolu· the while his contempt for assiduity and grey tion. His principal concern is status, and he men. He embraces every available contradiction eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of and then mutters darkly about the "difficulties important and "difficult" texts with whiCh mass of communication" from the uterine warmth of culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an his religious, artistic or political clique. atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock Driven by his freely-chosen depression, he them off. But no: conspicuous consumers submits himself to the subsidiary police force of always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so psychiatrists set up by the avant-garde of he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them repression. The university mental health clinks vicariously through the gaze of his friends. He is are run by the student mutual organisation, an other-directed voyeur. which sees this institution as a grand victory for His favourite reading matter is the kitsch student unionism and social progress. Like the press, whose task it is to orchestrate the con­ Aztecs who ran to greet Cortes's sharpshooters, sumption of cultural nothing-boxes. Docile as and then wondered what made the thunder and ever, the student accepts its commercial ukases and makes them the only measuring-rod of his society well enough to administer it. tastes. Ty pically, he is a compulsive reader .of But the student, sad to say, is not deterred weeklies like Le Nouvel Observateur and by the odd anachronism. He feels obliged to L' Express (whose nearest· English equivalents have general ideas on everything, to unearth a are the posh Sundays and New Society). He gen­ coherent world-view capable of lending mean­ erally feels that Le Monde -whose style he finds ing to his need for activism and asexual promis­ somewhat difficult - is a truly objective newspa­ cuity. As a result, he falls prey to the last dod­ per. And it is with such guides that he hopes to dering missionary efforts of the churches. He gain an understanding of the mode.rnworld and rushes with atavistic ardor to adore the putres­ become a political initiate! cent carcass of God, and cherishes all the stink­ [n France more than anywhere else, the stu­ ing detritus of prehistoric religions in the tender dent is passively content to be politicised. In this belief that they enrich him and his time. Along sphere too,he readily accepts the same alienat­ with their sexual rivals, those elderly provincial ed, spectacular participation. Seizing upon all ladies, the students form the social category the tattered remnants of a Left which was anni­ with the highest percentage of admitted ad her· hilated more than forty years ago by "socialist" ents to these archaic cults. Everywhere else, the reform ism and Stalinist counter-revolution, he is priests have been either beaten off or devoured, once more guilty of an amazing ignorance. The but university clerics shamelessly continue to Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers' bugger thousands of students in their spiritual movement, and so are the workers themselves, shithouses. though more confusedly. But the students con­ We must add in all fairness that there do tinue blithely to organise demonstrations which exist students of a tolerable intellectual level, mobilise students and students only. This is who without difficulty dominate the controls political false consciousness in its virgin state, a designed to check the mediocre capacity fact which naturally makes the universities a demanded from the others. They do so for the happy hunting ground for the manipulators of simple reason that they have understood the the declining burea ucratic organisations. For system, and so despise it and know themselves them, it is child's play to program the student's to be its enemies; They are in the system for political options. Occasionally there are devia­ what they can get out of it - particularly grants. tionary tendencies and cries of "Independence!" Exploiting the contradiction which, for the but after a period of token resistance the dissi­ moment at least, ensures the maintenance of a dents are reincorporated into a status quo which small sector- "research"- still governed by a lib­ they have never really radically opposed. The eral-academic rather than a technocratic ration­

"Jeunesses · Communistes Revolutionnaires," ality, they calmly carry the germs of sedition to whose title is a case of ideological falsification the highest level: their open contempt for the gone mad (they are neither young, nor commu­ organisation is the counterpart .of a lucidity nist, nor revolutionary), have with much brio and which enables them to outdo the system's lack­ accompanying publicity defied the iron hand of eys, intellectually and otherwise. Such students the Party.•• but only to rally cheerily to the pon· cannot fail to become theorists of the coming tifical battle-cry, "Peace in Vietnam!" revolutionary movement. For the moment, they The student prides himself on his opposi­ make no secret of the fact that what they take so tion to the "archaic" Gaullist regime. But he jus­ easily from the system shaH be used for its over­ tifies his criticism by appealing - without realis­ throw. ing it · to older and far worse crimes. His radical· The student, if he rebels at all, must first ism prolongs the life of the different currents of rebel against his studies, though the necessity edulcorated Stalinism: Togliatti's, Garaudy's, of this initial move is felt less spontaneously by ·

Krushchev's, Mao's, etc •. His youth is synony­ him than by the worker, who intuitively identifies mous with appaling naivete; and his attitudes his work with his total condition. At the same are in reality far more archaic than the regime's - time, since the student is a product of modern the GauUists do after all understand modern society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his

extreme alienation can only be fought through working of the system. lt reassures because it the struggle against this whole society. lt is clear remains a marginal .phenomenon, in the that the university can in no circumstances apartheid of the temporary problems of a become the. battlefield; the. student, insofar as healthy pluralism (compare and contrast the he defines himself as such, manufactures a "woman question" and the "problem of racial· pseudo-value which must become an obstacle to ism"). In reality, if there is a problem of youth in any dearconsciousness of the reality of his dis­ modern capitalism it is part ofthe total crisis of possession. The best criticism of student life is that society. lt is just that youth feels the crisis the behaviour of the rest .of youth, who have most acutely. already started to revolt. Their rebellion has . Youth and its mock freedoms are the purest become one of the signs of a fresh struggle products of modern society. Their modernity against modern society. consists in the choice they are offered and are already making: total integration to neo-capital­ lt is not enough for thought to seek ism, or the most radical refusal. What is surpris­ Its realisation in practice: practice ing is not that youth is in revolt but that its eld· must seek its theory ers are so soporific. But the reason is history, not biology - the previous generation lived through After years of slumber and permanent counter· the defeats and were sold the lies of the long, revolution, there are signs of a new period of shameful disintegration of the revolutionary struggle, with youth as the new carriers of revo­ movement. lutionary infection. But the society of the spec­ In itselfYo uth is a publicity myth, and as tacle paints its own picture of itself and its ene· part of the new "social . dynamism" it is the mies, imposes its own ideological categories on potential ally of the capitalist mode of produc· the world and its history. Fear is the very last tion. The illusory primacy of youth began with response. For everything that happens is reas· the economic recovery after the second world suringly part of the natural order of things. Real war. Capital was able to strike a new bargain historical changes, which show that this society with labour: in return for the mass production of can be superseded, are reduced to the status of a new class of manipulable consumers, the novelties, processed for mere consumption. The worker was offered a role which gave him full revolt of youth against an imposed and "given" membership of'the spectacular society. This at way of life is the first sign of a total subversion. least was the ideal social model, though as lt is the prelude to a period of revolt • the revolt usual it bore little · relation to socio-economic ofthose who can no longer live in our society. reality (which lagged behind the c;onsumer ide­ Faced with a danger, ideology and· its daily ology). The revolt of youth was the first burst. of machinery perform the usual inversion of reality. anger at the persistent realities of the new world An historical process becomes a pseudo-catego­ • the boredom of everyday existence, the dead ry of some socio'natural science: the Idea of life which is still the essential product of modern Yo uth. capitalism, in spite of all its modernisations. A Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal small section of youth is able to refusethat soci­ revolt of youth; every generation espouses ety and its products, but without any idea that "good causes," only to forget them when "the this society can be superseded. They opt for a young man begins the serious business of pro­ nihilist present.Yet the destruction of capitalism duction and ·is · given concrete and real social is once again a real issue, an event in history, a aims," After the social scientists come the jour· process which has already begun. Dissident natists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is youth must achieve the coherence of a critical contained .by overexposure: we are given it to theory, and the practical organisation of· that . contemplate so that we shall forget to partici­ coherence. pate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a At the most primitive level, the "delin· social aberration • in other words a social safety quents" (b lousons noirs) of the world use vio· valve. • which has its part to play in the smooth lence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options, But their refusal is an abstract the pre-ideological mass found itself under the one: it gives them no chance of actually escap­ Bolshevik "guidance" of the artistic ruling class, ing the contradictions of the system. They are its who justified and maintained their power by an products - negative, spontaneous, but none the ideology of provo-democracy. At the moment less exploitable, All the experiments of the new when the sheer violence of the delinquent had social order produce them: they are the first become an idea - an attempt to destroy art and side-effects of the new urban ism; of the disinte­ go beyond it -the violence was channelled into gration of all values; of the extension of an the crassest neo-artistic reformism. The Provos increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the are an aspect of the last reformism produced by growing control of every aspect of everyday life modern capitalism: the reformism of everyday by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the life. Like Bernstein, with his vision of socialism economic survival of a family unit which has lost built by tinkering with capitalism, the Provo hier­ all significance. archy think they can change everyday life by a The "young thug" despises work but few well-chosen improvements. What they fail to accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle realise is that the banality of everyday life is not offers him - but now, with no down payment. incidental, but the central mechanism and prod­ This is the essential contradiction of the delin­ uct of modern capitalism. To destroy it, nothing quent's existence. He may try for a real freedom less is needed than all-out revolution. The in the use of his time, in an individual assertive­ Provos choose the fragmentary and end by ness, even in the construction of a kind of com­ accepting the totality. munity. But the contradiction remains, and kills. To give themselves a base, the leaders have (On the fringe of society, where poverty reigns, concocted the paltry ideology of the provotariat the gang develops its own hierarchy, which can (a politico-artistic salad knocked up from the only fulfil itself in a war with other gangs, isolat­ leftovers of a feast they had never known). The ing each group and each individual within the new provotariat is supposed to oppose the pas­ group.) In the end the contradiction proves sive and "bourgeois" proletariat, still wor­ unbearable. Either the lure of the product world shipped in obscure Leftist shrines. Because they proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to despair of the fight for a total change in society, do his honest day's work: to this end a whole they despair of the only forces which can bring sector of production is devoted specifically to about that change. The proletariat is the motor his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, of capitalist society, and thus its mortal enemy: scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him everything is designed for its suppression (par­ to the land of the cons.umer. Or else he is forced ties; trade union bureaucracies; the police; the to attack the laws of the market itself- either in colonisation of all aspects of everyday life) the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move because it is the only really menacing force. The towards a conscious revolutionary critique of , Provos hardly try to understand any of this; and commodity society. For the delinquent only two without a critique of the system of production, futures are possible: revolutionary conscious­ they remain its servants. In the end an anti­ ness, or blind obedience on the shop floor. union workers demonstration sparked off the The Provos are the first organisation of real conflict. The Provo base went back to direct delinquency - they have given the delinquent violence, leaving their bewildered leaders to experience its first political form. They are an denounce "excesses" and appeal to pacifist sen­ alliance of two distinct elements: a handful of timents. The Provos, who had talked of provok­ careerists from the degenerate world of 'art,' ing authority to reveal its repressive character, and a mass of beatniks looking for a new activi­ finished by complaining that they had been pro­ ty. The artists contributed the idea of the game, voked by the police. So much for their pallid though still dressed up in various threadbare anarchism. ideological garments. The delinquents had noth­ lt is true that the Provo base became revolu­ ing to offer but the violence of their rebellion. tionary in practice. But to invent a revolutionary . From the start the two tendencies hardly mixed: consciousness their first task is to destroy their leaders, to rally the objective revolutionary tions, with their blend of libertarian, political forces of the proletariat, and to drop the and religious tendencies, are always liable to Constants and deVries of this world {one the the obsession with "group dynamics" which favourite artist of the Dutch royal family, the leads to the closed world of the sect. The mass other a failed M.P. and admirer .of the English consumption of drugs is the expression of a real police). There is a modern revolution, and one of poverty and a protest against it; but it remains a its bases could be the Provos · but only without false search for "freedom" within a world dedi­ their leaders and ideology. If they want to cated to repression, a religious critique of a change the world, they must get rid of these who world that has no need for religion, least of all a are content to paint it white. new one. Idle reade'r, your cry of "What about The beatniks - that right wing of the youth Berkeley?" escapes us not. True, American soci­ revolt - are the main purveyors of an ideological ety needs its students; and by revolting against 'refusal' combined with an acceptance of the their studies they have automatically called that most fantastic superstitions {Zen, spiritualism, society in question. From the start ,they have 'New Church' mysticism, and the stale porridge seen their revolt against the university hierarchy of Ghandi·ism and humanism). Worse still, in as a revolt against the. whole hierarchical sys­ their search for a revolutionary program the tem, the dictatorship of the economy and the I American students fall into the same bad faith State. Their refusal to become an integrated part as the Provos, and proclaim themselves 'the of the commodity economy, to put theirspe­ most exploited class in our society! They must cialised studies to their obvious and inevitable understand one thing: there are no 'special' stu­ use, is a revolutionary gesture. it puts in doubt dent interests in revo lution. Revolution will be that whole system of production which alienates made by all. the victims of encroaching repres­ activity and its products from their creators. For sion and the tyranny of the market. all its confusion and hesitancy, the American And for the East, bureaucratic totalitarian­ student movement has discovered one truth of ism is beginning to produce its own forces of the new refusal: that a coherent revolutionary negation. Nowhere is the revolt of youth more alternative can and must be found within the violent and more savagely repressed -the rising "affluent society." The movement is still fixated tide of press denunciation and the new police on two relatively accidental aspects of the measures against "hooliganism" are proof American crisis -the Negroes and Vietnam - and enough. A section of youth, so the right-minded the mini-groups of the New Le.ft suffer from the 'socialist' functionaries tell us, have no respect fact. for moral and family order {which still flourishes There is an authentic whiff of democracy in there in its most detestable bourgeois forms). their chaotic organisation, but what they lack is They prefer "debauchery," despise work and a genuine subversive content. Without it they even disobey the party police. The USSR has set continually fall into dangerous contradictions. up a special ministry to fight the new delinquen- They may be hostile to the traditional politics of cy. the old parties; but the hostility is futile, and will Alongside this diffuse revolt a more specific be recuperated, so long as it is based on igno­ opposition is emerging. Groups and clandestine rance of the political system and naive illusions reviews rise and fall with the barometer of police about the world situation. Abstract opposition to repression. So far the most important has been their own society produces facile sympathy with the publication of the "open letter to the Polish its apparent enemies - the so-called Socialist Workers Party" by the young Poles Kuron and bureaucracies of China and Cuba. A group like Modzelewski, which affirmed the ·necessity of Resurgence Yo uth Movement.can· in the same "abolishing the present system of production breath condemn the State and praise the and social relations" and that to do this "revolu­ "Cultural Revolution" • that pseudo-revolt tion is unavoidable." The Eastern intellectuals directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of have one great task • to make conscious the modern times. At the same time, these organisa- concrete critical action of the workers of East Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest: the proletarian Communist Revolutionary. League. The move­ critique of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. In ment is already setting and solving the new the East the problem is not to define the aims of problems of revolutionary organisation. Without revolution, but to learn how to fight for them. In illusions, it fights both western capitalism and the West struggle may be easy, butthe goals are the bureaucracies of the so-called socialist left obscure or ideological; in the Eastern states. Without hierarchies, it groups together bureaucracies there are no illusions about what several thousand students and workers on a is being fought for: hence the bitterness of the democratic basis, and aims at the participation struggle. What is difficult is to devise the forms of every member in all the activities of the organ· revolution must take in the immediate future. isation. , In Britain, the revolt of youth found its first They are the first to carry the struggle on to expression in the peace movement. lt was never the streets, holding fast to a real revolutionary a whole-hearted struggle, with the misty non­ program, and with a mass participation. violence of the Committee of1oo as its most dar­ Thousands of workers and students have waged ing program, At its strongest the Committee a violent struggle with the Japanese police. In could call 30o,ooo demonstrators on to the many ways the C.R.L. lacks a complete and con­ streets, lt had its finest hour in Spring 1963 with crete theory of the two systems it fights with the. "Spies for Peace" scandal. But it had already such ferocity. lt has not yet defined the precise entered on a definitive decline: for want of a the· nature of bureaucratic exploitation, and it has ory the unilateralists fell among the traditional hardly formulated the character of modern capi­ left or were recuperated by the Pacifist con­ talism, the critique of everyday life and the cri­ science. tique of the spectacle. The Communist What is leftis the enduring (quintessential­ Revolutionary league is still fundamentally an ly English) archaisms in. the control of everyday avant-garde political organisation, the heir of life, and the accelerating decomposition of the the best features of the classic proletarian old secular values. These could still produce a movement. But it is at present the most impor­ total critique of the new life; but the revolt of tant group in the world • and should henceforth youth needs allies. The British working class be one of the poles of discussion and a rallying remains one of the most militant in the world. lts point for the new proletarian critique. struggles - the shop stewards movement and the growing tempo and bitterness of wildcat To create at long last a situation strikes - will be a permanent sore on an equally which goes beyond the point of no permanent capitalism until it regains its revolu­ return tionary perspective, and seeks common cause with the new opposition. The debacle of "To be avant-garde means to keep abreast of Labourism makes that alliance all the more pos­ reality" (lnternationa/e Situationniste 8). A radi· Oam.arades, des Cl '�:�A! vous sible and all the more necessary. If it came cal critique of the modern world must have the aures �ris l•6oonomie about, the explosion could destroy the old sod· totality as its object and objective. Its search­ entre vos mains, le ety � the Amsterdam riots would be child's play light must reveal the world's real past, its pres· pouvoir des in comparison. Without it, both sides of the rev­ ent existence and the prospects for its transfor­ CONSEILS DES 'm.A.VAILLEIJBS olution can only be stillborn: practical needs will mation as an indivisible whole; If we are to reach sera le seul find no genuine revolutionary form, and rebel­ the whole truth about the modern world • and a pouvoir lious discharge will ignore the only forces that fortori if we are to formulate the project of its danl!: le drive and can therefore destroy modern capital­ total subversion • we must be able to expose its pa,-s 11 t ism. Japan is the only industrialised country hidden history; in concrete terms this means where this fusion of student youth and working subjecting the history of the international revo­ class militants has already taken place. lutionary movement, as set in motion over a cen­ Zengakuren, the organisation of revolution­ tury ago by the western proletariat, to a demys­ ary students, and the league of Young Marxist tified and critical scrutiny. Workers joined to form the backbone of the "This movement against the total organisa- tion of the old world came to a stop long ago" Russian proletariat found its echo in the subjec­ (lnternationaleSituationniste 1). lt failed. Its last tion of the great mass of workers in other coun­ historical appearance was in the Spanish social tries to castes of trade union and political func­ revolution, crushed in the. Barcelona 'May Days' tionaries, with their own private interests in of 1937. Yet its so-called "victories" and repression. While the Stalinist monster haunted "defeats," ifjudged in the light of their historical the working-class consciousness, old-fashioned consequences, tend to confirm UeblCommune, is in fact its first great suc­ tions, a single social form is coming to dominate cess, whereby the primitive proletariat pro­ the world - this modern world which it proposes claimed its historical capacity to organise all to govern with the p.rinciples of a world long aspects of social life freely. And the Bolshevik dead and gone. The tradition of the dead gener­ revolution, hailed as the proletariat's first great ations still weighs like a nightmare on the minds triumph, turns out in the last analysis to be its of the living. most disastrous defeat. Opposition to the world offered from within The installation of the Bolshevik order coin­ - and in its own terms - by supposedly revolu­ cides with the crushing of the Spartakists by the tionary organisations, can only be spurious. German "Social-Democrats." The joint victory of Such opposition, depending on the worst mysti­ Bolshevism and reformism constitutes a unity fications and calling on more or less reified ide­ masked by an apparent incompatibility, for the ologies, helps consolidate the social order. Bolshevik order too, as it transpired, was to be a Trade unions and political parties created by the variation on the old theme. The effects of the working class as tools of its emancipation are Russian counter-revolution were, internally, the now no more than the 'checks and bal�mces' of institution and development of a new mode of the system. Their leaders have made these exploitation, bureaucratic state capitalism, and organisations their private property; their step­ externally, the growth of the 'Communist' ping stone to a role within the ruling c!ass. The International, whose spreading branches served party program or the trade union statute may the unique purpose of defending and reproduc­ contain vestiges of revolutionary phraseology, ing the rotten trunk. Capitalism, under its bour­ but their practice is everywhere reformist - and geois and bureaucratic guises, won a new lease doubly so now that official capitalist ideology of life - over the dead bodies of the sailors of mouths the same reformist slogans. Where the Kronstadt, the Ukrainian peasants, and the unions have seized power - in countries more workers of Berlin, Kiel, Turin, Shanghai, and backward than Russia in 1917 - the Stalinist Barcelona. model of counterrevolutionary totalitarianism The Third International, apparently created has been faithfully reproduced. Elsewhere, they by the Bolsheviks to combat the degenerate have become a static complement to the self­ reformism of its predecessor, and to unite the regulation of managerial capitalism. The official avant-garde of the proletariat in "revolutionary organisations have become the best guarantee communist parties," was too closely linked to of repression - without this 'opposition' the the interests of its founders ever to serve an humanist-democratic facade of the system authentic socialist revolution. Despite all its would collapse and its essential violence would polemics, the third International was a chip off be laid bare. the old block. The Russian model was rapidly· In the struggle ,with the m ilit!lntproletariat, imposed on the Western workers' organisations, these organisations are the unfailing defenders and the evolution of both was thenceforward of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and the one and the same thing. The totalitarian dicta­ docile creatures of its foreign policy. They are torship of the bureaucratic class over the the bearers of the most blatant falsehood in a world of lies, working diligently for the perenni­ the reinvention of a total critique. The Scylla and al and universal dictatorship of the State and the Charybdis of present revolutionary action are Economy. As the situationists put it, "a univer­ the museum of revolutionary prehistory and the sally dominant social system, tending toward modernism of the system itself. totalitarian self-regulation, is apparently being As for the various anarchist groups, they resisted - but only apparently - by false forms of possess nothing beyond a pathetic and ideolog­ opposition which remain trapped on the battle­ ical faith in this label. They justify every kind of field ordained by the system itself. Such illusory self-contradiction in liberal terms: freedom of resistance can only serve to reinforce what it speech, of opinion, and other such bric-a-brac. pretends to attack. Bureaucratic pseudo-social­ Since they tolerate each other, they would toler­ ism is only the most grandiose of these guises of ate anything. the old world of hierarchy and alienated labour." The predominant social system, which flat­ Asfor student unionism, it is nothing but the ters itself on its modernisation and its perma­ travesty of a travesty, the useless burlesque of a nence, must now be confronted with a worthy trade unionism itself long totally degenerate. enemy: the equally modern negative forces The principal platitude of all future revolu­ which it produces. let the dead bury their dead, tionary organisation must be the theoretical and The advance of history has a practical demysti­ practical denunciation of Stalinism in all its fyingeffect - it helps exorcise the ghosts which forms. In France at least, where economic back­ haunt the revolutionary consciousness, Thus the wardness has slowed down the consciousness revolution of everyday life comes face to face of crisis, the only possible road is over the ruins with the enormity of its task. The revolutionary of Stalinism. lt must become the delenda est project must be re invented, as much as the life it Carthago of the last revolution of prehistory. announces. If the project is still essentially the Revolution must break with its past, and abolition of class society, it is.because the mate­ derive all its poetry from the future. little groups rial conditions upon which revolution was based of 'militants' who claim to represent the authen­ are still with us. But revolution must be con­ tic Bolshevik heritage are voices from beyond ceived with a new coherence and a new radical­ the grave. These angels come to ·avenge the ism, starting with a dear grasp of the failure of "betrayal" of the October Revolution will always those who first began it. Otherwise its fragmen­ support the defence of the USSR - if only "in the tary realisation will bring about only a new divi­ last . instance." The 'under-developed' nations sion of society. are their promised land. They can scarcely sus­ The fight between the powers-that-be and tain their illusions outside this context, where the new proletariat can only be in terms ofthe their objective role is to buttress theoretical totality. And for this reason the future revolu­ underdevelopment. They struggle for the dead tionary movement must be purged of any ten­ body of 'Trotsky,' invent a thousand variations dency to reproduce within itself the alienation on the same ideological theme, and end up with produced by the commodity system; it must be the same brand of practical and theoretical the living critique of that system and the nega­ impotence. Forty years of counter-revolution tion of it, carrying all the elements essential for separate these groups from the Revolution; its transcendence. As lukacs correctly showed, since this is not 1920 they can only be wrong revo lutionary organisation is this necessary (and they were already wrong in 1920). mediation between theory and practice, Consider the fate . of an ultra-leftist group between men and history, between the Dams of like Socialisme ou Barbarie, where after the workers and the proletariat constituted as a departure of a 'traditional Marxist' faction (t he class (Lukacs' mistake was to believe that the impotent Pouvoir Ouvrier) a core of revolution­ Bolsheviks fulfilled this rote). If they are to be · ary 'modernists' under Cardan disintegrated and realised in practice, "theoretical" tendencies or disappeared within 18 months. While the old differences must be translated into organisa­ categories are no longer revolutionary, a rejec­ tional problems, lt is by its present organisation tion of Marxism a la Cardan is no substitute for that a new revolutionary movement will stand or fall. The final criterion of its coherence will be for the only possible form of workers' power - the compatibility. of its actual form with its generalised and complete autogestion - can be essential project - the international and shared with nobody. Workers' control is the abo­ absolute power of Workers' Councils as fore­ lition of all authority: it can abide no limitation, shadowed by the proletarian revolutions of the geographical or otherwise: any compromise last hundred years. There can be no compromise amounts to surrender, "Worl�ers' control must with the foundations of existing society - the be the means and the end of the struggle: it is at system of commodity production; ideology in all on�;e the goat of that struggle end its adequate its guises; the State; and the imposed division· of form." labour from leisure. Atotal critique of the world is the guarantee The rock on which the old revolutionary of the realism and reality of a revolutionary movement foundered was the separation of the­ organisation. To tolerate the existence of an ory and practice. Only at the supreme moments oppressive social system in one place or anoth­ of struggle did the proletariat supersede this er, simply because it .is packaged and sold as division and attain theirtruth. As a rule the prin· revolutionary, is to, condone universal oppres­ ciple seems to have been hie Rhodus hie non sion. To accept alienation as inevitable in any salta. Ideology, however 'revolutionary,' always one domain' of social life is to resign oneself to serves the ruling class; false consciousness is reification in all its forms. lt is not enough to the alarm signal revealing the presence of the favour Workers' Councils in the abstract; in con­ enemy fifth column. The lie is the essential pro­ crete terms they mean the abolition of com­ duce of the world of alienation, and the most modities and therefore of the proletariat. effective killer of revolutions: once an organisa­ Despite their superficial disparities, all existing tion which claims the social truth adopts the lie societies are governed by the logic of commodi­ as a tactic, its revolutionary career is finished. ties - and the commodity is the basis of their All the positive aspects of the Workers' dreams of self-regulation. This famous fetishism Councils must be already there in an organisa­ is still the essential obstacle to a total emanci· tion which aims at their realisation. All relics of pation, to the free construction of social life. In the Leninist theory of organisation must be . the world of commodities, external and invisible fought and destroyed. The spontaneous creation forces direct men's actions; autonomous action of Soviets by the Russian workers in 1905 was in directed towards clearly perceived goals is itself a practical critique of that baneful theory, impossible. The strength of economic taws lies yet the Bolsheviks continued to claim that work­ in their ability to take on the appearance of nat­ ing-class spontaneity could not go beyond ural ones, but it is also their weakness, for their "trade union consciousness" and would be effectiveness thus depends only on "the lack of unable to grasp the "totality." This was no less consciousness of those who help create them." than a decapitation of the proletariat so that the The market has one central pr-inciple - the · Party could place itself "at the head" of the loss of selfin the aimless and unconscious ere· Revolution. If once you dispute the proletariat's ation of a world beyond the control of its cre­ capacity to emancipate itself, as Lenin did so ators. The revolutionary core of autogestion is ruthlessly, then you deny its capacity to organise the attack on this principle. Autogestion is con· all aspects of a post-revolutionary society. In scious direction by all of their whole existence, lt such a .context, the slogan "All Power to the is not some vision of a workers' control of the Soviets" meant nothing more then the subjec: market, which is merely to choose one's own tion of the Soviets to the Party, and the installa­ alienation, . to program one's own survival tion of the Party State in place of the temporary (squaring the capitalist circle). The task of the 'State' of the armed masses. · Workers' Councils will not be the autogestion of "All Power to the Soviets" is still the slogan, the world which exists, but its continual qualita­ but this time without the Bolshevik after. tive transformation. The commodity and its laws thoughts. The proletariat can only play the. game (that vast detour in the history of man's procjuc· of revolution if the stakes are the whole world, tion of himself) will be superseded by a new social form. the basis of the poetry of the future, simply With autogestion ends one of the funda­ because they both depend on the preservation mental splits in modern society - between a of the old order. At most they harness over­ labour which becomes increasingly reified end a development to invent new repressions. For they "leisure" consumed in passivity. The death of know only one trick, the accumulation of Capital the commodity naturally means the suppression and hence of the proletariat - a proletarian being of work and its replacement by a new type of a man with no power over the use of his life, and free activity. Without this firm intention, socialist who knows it. The new proletariat inherits the groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie or Pouvoir riches of the bourgeois world and this gives it its Ouvrier fell back on a reformism of labour historical chance. Its task is to transform and couched in demands for its 'humanisation.' But destroy these riches, to constitute them as part it is work itself which must be called into ques­ of a human project: the total appropriation of tion. Far from being a 'Utopia,' its suppression is nature and of human nature by man. the first condition for a break with the market. A realised human nature can only mean the The everyday division between 'free time' and infinite multiplication of real desires and their 'working hours,' those complementary sectors gratification. These real desires are the underlife of alienated life, is an expression of the internal of present society, crammed by the spectacle contradiction between the use-value and into the darkest corners of the revolutionary exchange-value of the commodity. it has become unconscious, realised by the spectacle only in the strongest point of the commodity ideology, the dreamlike delirium of its own publicity. We the one contradiction which intensifies with the must destroy the spectacle itself, the whole rise of the consumer. To destroy it, no strategy apparatus of commodity society, if we are to short of the abolition of work will do. lt is only realise human needs. We must abolish those beyond the contradiction of use-value and pseudo-needs and false desires which the sys­ exchange-value that history begins, that men tem manufactures daily in order to preserve its make their activity an object of their will and power. their consciousness, and see themselves in the The liberation of modern history, and the world they have created. The democracy of free use of its hoarded acquisition, can come Workers' Councils is the resolution of all previ­ only from the forces it represses. In the nine­ ous contradictions. lt makes "everything which teenth century the proletariat was already the exists, apart from individuals, impossible.'' inheritor of philosophy; now it inherits modern What is the revolutionary project? The con­ art and the first conscious critique of everyday scious domination of history by the men who life, with the self-destruction of the working make it. Modern history, like all past history, is class art, and philosophy shall be realised. To the product of social praxis, the unconscious transform the world and to change the structure result of human action. In the epoch of totalitar­ of life are one and the same thing for the prole­ ian control, capitalism has produced its own reli­ tariat - they are the passwords to its destruction gion: the spectacle. In the spectacle, ideology as a class, its dissolution of the present reign of becomes flesh of our flesh, is realised here on necessity, and its accession to the realm of liber­ earth. The world itself walks upside down. And ty. As its maximum program it has the radical cri­ like the 'critique of religion' in Marx's day, the tique and free reconstruction of all the values critique of the spectacle is now the essential and patterns of behaviour imposed by an alien­ precondition of any critique. ated reality. The only poetry it can acknowledge The problem of revolution is once again a is the creativity released in the making of histo­ concrete issue. On one side the grandiose struc­ ry, the free invention of each moment and each tures of technology and material production; on event: Lautreamont's poesie faite par tous -the the other a dissatisfaction which can only grow beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For more profound. The bourgeoisie end its Eastern proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in heirs, the bureaucracy; cannot devise the means revolution the road of excess leads once and for to use their own overdevelopment, which will be all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game: The rules it was the Rector of the University who led are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering the chorus of modernist repression: "These stu- · death, and to indulge untrammelled desire. dents have insulted their professors", he declared, "They should be dealt with by psychi­ Postscript: if you make a social revo­ atrists. I don't want to take any legal measures lution, do it for fun against them - they should be in a lunatic asy­ lum. As to their incitement to illegal acts, the If the above text needed confirmation, it was Minister of the Interior is looking into that". ("I amply provided by the reactions to its publica­ stand for freedom", he added.) Later, besieged tion. In Strasbourg itself, a very respeGtable and by the press, he reiterated that, "We need soci­ somewhat olde-worlde city, the traditional reflex ologists and psychologists to explain such phe­ of outraged horror was still accessible - witness nomena to us". An Italian journalist replied that judge Llabador's naive admission that our ideas some of his most brilliant social science stu­ are subversive (see our introduction). At this dents were in fact responsible for the whole level too, the press seized on the passing affair. The situationists had an even better reply encouragements to stealing and hedonism to such appeals to the psychiatric cops: through (interpreted, inevitably, in a narrow erotic the agency of the student mutual organisation, sense). The union cellars had become the most they officially closed the local student psychi­ infamous dive in Strasbourg. The offices had atric clinic. lt is to be hoped that one day such been turned into a pigsty, with students daubing institutions will be physically destroyed rather the walls and relieving themselves in the corri­ than tolerated, but in the meantime this 'admin­ dors. They had come with inflatable mattresses istrative' decision has such an exemplary value to sleep on the premises "with women and chil­ that it is worth quoting: dren"! Minors had been perverted ... "The administrative committee of the The amoral popular press was of course at Strasbourg section of the Mutuelle Nationale wit's end to find adequate labels: the Provos, the des Etudiants de France considering that the Beatniks, and a "weird group of anarchists"were University Psychological Aid Bureaux (BAPU) variously reported to have seized power in the represents the introduction of a para-police con­ city. Under the direction of situationist beatniks, trol of students, in the form of a repressive psy­ the University restaurant was in the red, and the chiatry whose clear function everywhere - some­ union's Morsiglia holiday camp had been used where between outright judicial oppression and free, gratis and for nothing by these gentlemen. the degrading lies of the mass spectacle - is to SoJ11e tried their hand at analysis, but only help maintain the apathy of all the exploited vic­ communicated the incomprehension of a man tims of modern capitalism; considering that this suddenly caught in quicksands: "The San type of modernist repression ... was evoked as CE DER Francisco and London beatniks, the mods and . soon as the Committee of the General Federal un pEU rockers of the English beaches, the hooligans Association of the Strasbourg Students made behind the Iron Curtain, all have been largely known its adhesion to situationist theses by superseded by this wave of new-style nihilism. publishing the pamphlet On Student Poverty... To day it is no longer a matter of outrageous hair and that Rector Bayen was quite ready to and clothes, of dancing hysterically to induce a denounce those responsible to the press as, "fit state of ecstacy, no longer even a matter of cases for the psychiatrists"; considering that the entering the artificial paradise of drugs. From existence of a BAPU is a scandal and a menace now on, the international of young people who to all those students of the University who are are 'against it' is no longer satisfied with provok­ determined to think for themselves, hereby ing society, but intent on destroying it - on decides that from the twelfth of January 1967 the B =' J$ destroying the very foundations of a society BAPU of Strasbourg shall be closed down." 'made for the old and rich' and acceding to a Another development which must have CRPITULER state of 'freedom without any kind of restriction been predictable to any studious reader of the BEAUCOUP whatsoever' ". pamphlet was the attempt to explain away the Strasbourg affair in terms of a "crisis in the uni­ itself, and furthermore to confirm this critique versities". Le Mon.de, the most 'serious' French through its reactions to it. lt was essentially a paper, and a platform for technocratic liberal­ lesson in turning the tables on contemporary ism, kept its head while all around were losing society. The official world was played with by a theirs. After a long silence to get its breath back, group that understood its nature better than the it published an article which shackled situation­ official world itself. The exploiters were elegant­ is! activity in . Alsace to the "present student ly exploited. But despite the virtuosity of the malaise" (another symptom: fascist violence in · operation, it should be seen as no more than an Paris University), for which the only cure is to initial and, in view of what is to come, very mod­ give "real responsibility" to the students (read: est attempt to create the praxis by which the cri­ let them direct their own alienation). This type of sis of this society as a whole can be precipitated; reasoning refuses a priori to see the obvious as such. it raises far wider problems of revolu­ that so-called student malaise is a symptom of a tionary organisation and tactics. As the mysteri­ far more general disease. ous M.K. remarked to a journalist, Strasbourg Much was . made of the unrepresentative itself was no more than "a little experiment". character o( the union committee, although it The concept of 'subversion' (detournement), had been quite le gally elected. lt is quite true, originally used by the situationists in a purely however, that our friends got power thanks to cultural context, can well be used to describe the apathy of the vast majority. The action had the type of activity at present available to us on no mass base whatsoever. What it achieved was many fronts. An early definition: "the redeploy­ .to expose the emptiness of student politics and ment of pre-existing artistic elements within a indicate the minimum requirements for any con­ new ensemble ... Its two basic principles are the ceivable movement of revolutionary students. At loss of importance of each originally independ· the general assembly of the National Union of ent element (which may even lose its first sense French Students in January, the Strasbourg comp.letely), and the organisation of a new sig­ group proposed· a detailed motion calling for the nificant whole which confers a fresh meaning on dissolution of the organisation, and obtained each element" (cf. /nternation.ale Situation.niste the implicit support of a large number of honest 3, pp 10-11). The historical significance of this but confused delegates, disgusted by the corri­ technique or game derives from its ability to dor politics and phoney revolutionary preten­ both devalue and 'reinvest' the heritage of a sh:ms of the union. Such disgust, though per­ dead cultural past, so that "subversion negates haps a beginning, is not enough: a revolutionary the value of previous forms of expression .•. but consciousness among students would be the at the same time expresses the search for a very opposite of student consciousness. Until broader form, at a higher level • for a new cre­ students realise that their interests coincide ative currency". Subversion counters the with those of all who are exploited by modern .manoeuvre of modern society, which seeks to capitalism, there is little or nothing to be hoped recuperate and fossilise the relics of past ere· for from the universities. Meanwhile, the exem­ ativity within its spectacle. lt is clear that this plary gestures of avant-garde minorities are the struggle on the cultural terrain is no different in only form of radical activity av�ilable. structure from the more general revolutionary This holds good not only in the universities struggle; subversion can therefore also be con· but almost everywhere. In the absence of a ceived as the creation of a new use value for widespread revolutionary co nsciousness, a political and social debris: a student union, for quasi-terroristic denunciation of the. official example, recuperated long ago and turned into a world is the only possible planned public action paltry agency of repression, can become a bea· on the part of a revolutionary group. The impor­ con of sedition and revolt. Subversion is a form tance of Strasbourg lies in this: it offers one pos­ of action transcending the separation between sible model of sue� action. A situation was cre­ art and politics: it is the art of revolution. ated in which society was forced to finance, pub­ Strasbourg marks the beginning of a new licise. and broadcast a revolutionary critique of period of situationist activity. The social position of situationist thought has been determined up lapsed, and ·left the misery and chaos of every­ to now by the following contradiction: the most day life without any coherent dissimulation at highly developed critique of modern life has all. Politics, morality and culture are all in ruins • been made in one of the least highly developed and have now reached the point of being mar­ modern countries - in a country which has not keted as such, as their own parody, the specta­ yet reached the point where the complete disin­ cle of decadence being the last desperate tegration of aU values becomes patently obvious attempt to stabilise the decadence of the spec­ and engenders the corresponding forces of radi­ tacle. Less and less masks the reduction of the cal rejection. In the French context, situationist whole of life to the production and consumption theory has anticipated the social forces by which of commodities; less and less masks the rela­ it will be realised. tionship between the isolation, emptiness and In the more highly developed countries, the anguish of everyday life and this dictatorship of opposite has happened: the forces of revolt the commodity; less and less masks the increas­ exist, but without a revolutionary perspective. ing waste of the forces of production, and the The Committee of 100 or the Berkeley rebellion richness of lived experience now possible if of 1964, for example, were spontaneous mass these forces were only used to fulfil human movements which collapsed because they desires instead of to repress them. proved incapable of grasping more than the inci­ If England is the temporary capital of the dental aspects of alienation (the Bomb, Free spectacular world, it is because no other country

Speech •••), because they failed to understand could take.its demoralisation so seriously. The that these were merely specific manifestations island, having recovered from its fit of satirical of everyone's excluSion from the whole of his giggles, has flipped out. The consumption of experience, on every level of individual and hysteria has become a principle of social pro­ social life. Without a critique ofthis fundamental duction, but one where the real banality of the alienation, these movements could never articu­ goods lLabour Movement, Already, in the highly industrialised coun­ with its bone-hard hierarchies and its school­ tries, the decomposition of modern society is teacher notions of technology and s.ocial justice, becoming obvious at a mass level. All previous the greater the guarantee of total repression. ideological explanations of the world have col- The militant proletariat, whose opposition to the capitalist system is unabated,. will remain revo­ process). The only real subversion is in a new lutionary chickenfeed till the myth of the Labour consciousness and a new alliance - the location Movement has been finally l?id. of the struggie in the banalities of everyday life, With the decline of the spectacular antago­ in the supermarket and the beatclub as well as nisms (To ry/Labo u.r, East/West, High on the shopfloor. The enemy is entrism, cultural Culture/Low Culture), the official Left is looking or political. Art and the Labour Movement are around for new mock battles to fight. lt has dead! long live the Situationist International! always had a masochi�tic urge to embrace the tough minded alternative. The orthodox 'commu­ Members of the lnternationa/e Situationniste nist' party owed its popularity among the and Students of Strasbourg lumpenintelligentsia to an assertion that it was too practical to have thne for theory - a claim amply confirmed by its . own blend of flaccid intellectual nullity and permanent political impotence. Those who counsel "working within the. Labour Movement" play on the same secret craving to rush around with buckets of water try­ ing to light a fire. The latest enthusiasm of the left is Mao's "cultural revolution", that farce pro­ duced by courtesy of the Chinese bureaucracy (complete with blue jokes about red panties). To repeat an old adage, there is no revolution with­ out the arming of the working-class. A revolution ofunarmed schoolChildren, which even then has to be neutered by the "support" of the army, is a pseudo-revolution. serving some obscure need for readjustment within the bureaucracy. As a tactic for bureaucratic reorganisation it is famil­ iar - after the hysterical and ineffective purge of the Right comes the appeal to "discipline", the call "to purifyour ranks and eliminate individu­ alism" (People's Daily, 21st Feb 1967), and final­ ly the essential purge of the Left. Far from mark­ ing an attack on 'socialist' bureaucracy, the GPCR marks the bureaucracy's first adjustment to the techniques of neo-capitalist repression, its colonisation of everyday life. lt is the begin­ ning of the Great Leap Forward to Kruschov's Russia and Kennedy's America. The real revolution begins at home: in the desperation of consumer production, in the con­ tinuing struggle of the unofficial working class. As yet this unofficial revolt has an official ideol­ ogy, The notion that modern capitalism is pro­ ducing new revolutionary forces, new poverties of a new proletariat, is still suppressed. Instead there is an a priori fascination with the 'conver­ sion' or the 'subversion' of the old union move­ ment. The militants are recuperating themselves (and their_ intellectual 'advisers' urge on the

- . ' . ' Our Goals & Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal

The various expressions of stupor and indigna­ determined to destroy it. The factthat they were tion in response to the situationist pamphlet On elected (quite legally) clearly showed the corn· the Poverty of StudentLife , which was published plete apathy of the mass of students and the at the expense of the Strasbourg chapter of the complete impotence of the Association's remain­ French NationaLStudent Union (U N EF), although ing bureaucrats. These latter no doubt figured havingthe salutary effect of causing the theses that the "extremist" Bureau would be incapable in the pamphleUtself to be rather widely read, of fi nding any adequate way to express its nega­ have fnevitably given rise to numerous miscon­ tive intentions. Conversely, this was the fear of ceptions in the reportage and commentaries on the students who came to see us; and .it was the SI's role in the affair. In response to all kinds mainly for this reason that they had felt they of illusions fostered by the press, by university themselves shouldn't take part in this 'Bureau': officials and even by a certain number of for only a coup of some scope, and not some unthinking students, we are now going to speci­ merely humorous exploitation of their position, fy exactly what the conditions of our interven­ icould save its members from the air of compro· tion were and recount the goals we were pursu­ mise that such a pitiful role immediately entails. ing with the methods that we considered consis· · To add to the complexity of the problem, while tent with them. the students who spoke with us were familiar Even more erroneous than the exaggera· with the SI's positions and declared themselves tions of the press or of certain opposing lawyers · in general agreement with them, those who concerning the amount of money the SI suppos­ were in the Bureau were for the most part igno· edly took the opportunity of pillaging from the rant of them, and counted mainly on the stu­ treasury of the pitiful student union is the dents we were seeing to determine the activity absurd notion, often expressed in the journalis­ that would best correspond to their subversive tic accounts, according to which the SI sunk so intentions. low as to campaign among the Strasbourg stu­ At this stage we limited ourselves to sug· dents in order to persuade them of the validity of gesting that all of them .write and publish a gen· our perspectives and to get a bureau elected on era! critique of the student movement and of the such a program. We neither did this nor attempt­ society, such a project having at least the advan­ ed the slightest infiltration of the UNEF by tage of forcing them to clarify in common what secretly slipping SI partisans into it. One has was still unclear to them. In addition, we only to read us to realise that we have no inter­ stressed that their legal access to money. and est in such goals and do not use such methods. credit was the most useful aspect of the ridicu· The fact is that a few Strasbourg students came lous authority that had so imprudently . been to us in the summer of 1966 and informed us allowed to them, and that a nonconformist use that six of their friends - and not they them­ of these resources would certainly have · the selves • had just been elected as officers of the advantage of shocking many people and thus Bureau of the local Students Association drawing attention to the nonconformist aspects (AFGES), without any program whatsoever and of the content of their text in spite of their being widely known in the UNEF These comrades agreed with our recom· as extremists in complete disagreement with all mendations. In the development of this project the variants of that decomposing body, and even they remained in contact with the SI, particular- ly through Mustapha Khayati. The discussion Column, a document that had the merit of stat· and the first drafts undertaken collectively by ing in no uncertain terms what his comrades those we had met with and the members of the were planning on doing with their positions: ArGES Bureau -who had all resolved to see the "The general crisis of the old union apparatuses ' matter through - brought about an important and leftist bureaucracies was felt everywhere, modification of the plan. Everyone agreed on the especially among the students, where activism, basis of the critique to be made, and specifically for a long time. had no other outlet than the on the main points as Khayati had outlined most sordid self sacrifice to stale ideologies and them, but they fo und they were incapable of the most unrealistic ambitions. The last squad of effecting a satisfactory formulation, especially professionals who elected our heroes didn't in the short time remaining before the beginning even have the excuse of mystification. They of the term. This inability should not be seen as placed their hopes for a new lease of life in a the result of any serious lad< of talent or experi· group that didn't hide its intentions of scuttling ence, but was simply the consequence of the this archaic militantism once and for all." extreme heterogeneity of the group, both within The pamphlet was distributed point-blank and outside the Bureau. Their initial coming to the notables at the official opening ceremony together on the most vague bases prepared of the university; simultaneously, the AFG ES them very poorly to collectively articulate a the· Bureau made it known that its only 'student' pro­ ory they had not really appropriated together. In gram was the immediate dissolution of that addition, personal antagonisms and mistrust Association, and convoked a special general arose among them as the project progressed; assembly to vote on that question. This perspec­ the common concern that the coup attain the tive immediately horrified many people. "This most far-reaching and incisive effectwas all that may be the first concrete manifestation of a still held them together. In such circumstances, revolt aiming quite openly at the destruction of Khayati ended up drafting the greater part of the society," wrote a local newspaper (Dernieres text, which was periodically discussed and Nouvelles, 4 December 1966). And L' Aurore of approved among the group of students at 26 November: "The Situationist International, Strasbourg and by the situationists in Paris · the an organisation with a handful of members in only (few) significant changes being made by the chief capitals of Europe, anarchists playing the latter. at revolution, talk of. 'seizing power' • not in Various preliminary actions announced the order to keep it, but to sow disorder and destroy appearance of the pamphlet. On 26 October the even their own authority." And even in Turin the cybernetician Moles, having finally attained a Gazetta del Popolo of the same date expressed professorial chair in social psychology in order excessive concern: "lt must be considered, how­ to devote himself to the programming of young ever, whether repressive measures... might not cadres, was driven from it in the opening min· risk provoking disturbances .•• ln Paris and other utes of his opening lecture by tomatoes hurled university cities in France the Situationist at him by a dozen students. (Moles was given International, galvanized by the triumph of its the same treatment in March at the Musee des adherents in Strasbourg, is preparing to launch Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where this certified a major offensive to take control of the student robot was to lecture on the control of the mass­ organisations." At this point we had to take into es by means of urbanism; this latter refutation consideration a new decisive factor: the situa· was carried out by some thirty young anarchists tionists had to defend themselves from being belonging to groups that want to bring revolu· re cuperated as a 'news item' or an intellectual tionary criticism to bear on all modern issues.) fad. The pamphlet had ended up being trans· Shortly after this inaugural class • which was at formed into an SI text: we had not felt that" We least as unprecedented in the annals of the uni­ could refuse to aid these comrades in their versity as Moles himself - the ArGES began pub­ desire to strike a blow against the system, and it licising the pamphlet by pasting up Andre was unfortunately not possible fo r this aid to Bertrand's comic strip, The Return of the Durruti have been less th an it was. This involvement of the SI gave us, for the duration of the project, a Bureau belongs to the Situationist International, function of de facto leadership which we in no a movement which for some time has published case wanted to prolong beyond this limited joint a journa,l of the same name, but we .declare our­ action: as anyone can well imagine, the pitiful selves in complete solidarity with its analyses student milieuis of no .interest to us. Here as in and perspectives." On the· basis of this declared any other situation, we simply had to act in such autonomy, the SI then .addressed a letter to a way as to make the new social critique that is Andre Schneider, president of the AFGES, and presently taking shape reappear by means of Vayr-Piova, vice-president, to affirm its total sol· the practice without concessions that is its idarity with what they had done. The SI's soli· exclusive basis. lt was the unorganised charac­ darity with them has been maintained ever ter of the group of Strasbourg students which since, both by our refusal to dialogue with those had created the necessity for the direct situa­ who tried to approach us while manifesting a tionist intervention and at the same time pre­ certain envious hostility toward the Bureau vented even the carrying out of an orderly dia­ members (some even having the stupidity to logue, which alone could have ensured a mini· denounce their action to the SI as being "spec· mal equality in decision-making. The debate tacular"!) and by our financial assistance and that normally characterises a joint action under· public support during the subsequent repres· taken by independent groups had scarcely any sion (see the declaration signed by 79 reality in this agglomeration of individuals who Strasbourg students at the beginning of April in showed more and more that they were united in solidarity with Vayr-Piova, who had been their approval of the SI and separated in every expelled from the university; a penalty that was other regard. rescinded a few months later). Schneider and lt goes without saying that such a deficien· Vayr-Piova stood firm in the face ofpenalties and cy in no way constituted for us a recommenda­ threats; this firmness, however, was not main­ tion for the ensemble of this group of students, tained to the same degree in their attitude who seemed more or less interested in joining toward the SI. the SI as a sort of easy way of avoiding having to The judicial repression immediately initiat· express themselves autonomously. Their lack of ed in Strasbourg · and which has since been fol­ homogeneity was also revealed, to a degree we lowed by a series of proceedings in the same had not been able to foresee, on an unexpected vein that are still going on • concentrated on the issue: at the last minute several of them hesitat, supposed illegality of the AFGES Bureau, which ed before the forthright distribution of the text was, upon the publication of the situationist at the university's opening ceremony. Khayati pamphlet, suddenly considered as a mere 'de had to show these people that one must not try facto Bureau' usurping the union representation to make scandals half way, nor hope, in the of the.students. This repression was all the more midst of such an act in which one has already necessary since the holy alliance of the bour· implicated oneself, that one wilt become less geois, the Stalinists and the priests, formed in implicated by toning down the repercussions of opposition to the AFGES, enjoyed an 'authority' the coup; that on the contrary, the success of a even smaller than that of the Bureau among the scandal is the only relative safeguard for those city's 18,ooo students.' lt began with the court who have deliberately triggered it. Even more order of 13 December, which sequestered the unacceptable than this last-minute hesitation on Association's offices and administration and such a basic tactical point was the possibility prohibited the general assembly that the Bureau that some of these individuals, who had so little had convoked for the 16th for the purpose of vot­ confidence even in each other, would at some ing on the dissolution of the AFGES. This ruling point come to make statements in our name. (resulting from the mistaken belief that a major• Kliayati was thus charged by the SI to have the ity of the students were likely to support the AFG£5 Bureau declare that none of them was a Bureau's position if they had the opportunity to situationist. This they did in their communique vote on it), by . freezing the development of of 29 November: "None of the members of our events, meant that our comrades - whose only perspective was to destroy their own position of that student unionism is a pure and simple farce leadership without delay - were obliged to con­ and that it is urgent to put an end to it." This tinue their resistance until the end of January. motion concluded by calling on "all revolution­ · The Bureau's best practice until then had been ary students of the world... to prepare along their treatment of the mass of journalists who with all the exploited people of their countries a were flocking to get interviews: they refused relentless struggle against all aspects of the old most of them and insultingly boycotted those world, with the aim of contributing toward the who represented the worst institutions (French advent of the .international power of the workers Television, Planete); thus one segment of the councils." Only two associations, those of press was induced to . give a more exact account Nantes and of the convalescent-home students, of the scandal and to reproduce the AFGES com­ voted with Strasbourg to deal with this prelimi­ muniques less inaccurately. Since the fight was nary motion before hearing the report of the now taking place on the terrain of administrative national leadership (it should be noted, howev­ measures and since the legal AFGES Bureau was er, that in the preceding weeks the young UNEF still in control of the local section of the National bureaucrats had succeeded in deposing two Student Mutual, the Bureau struck back by other Association bureaux that had been spon­ deciding on 11 January, and by implementing this taneously in favour of the AFGES position, those decision the next day, to close the 'University of Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand). The Psychological Aid Centre' (BAPU), which Strasbourg delegation consequently walked out depended financially on the Mutual, "consider­ on a debate where it had nothing more to say. ing that the BAPUs are the manifestation in the The final exit of the AFGES Bureau was not student milieu of a repressive psychiatry's para­ to be so noble, however. At this time three situ­ police control, whose clear function is to main­ ationists (the 'Garnautins') had just been tain... the passivity of all exploited sectors... , excluded for having jointly perpetrated - and considering that the existence of a BAPU in been forced to admit before the SI - several slan­ Strasbourg is a disgrace and a threat to all the derous lies directed against Khayati, whom they students of this university who are determined had hoped would himself be excluded as a to think freely." At the national level, the UNEF result of this clever scheme (see the 22 January was forced by the revolt of its Strasbourg chap­ tract Wa rning! Three Provocateurs) . Their exclu­ ter - which had previously been held up as a sion had no relation with the Strasbourg scandal model - to recognise its own general bankruptcy. - in it as in everything else they had ostensibly · Although it obviously did not go so far as to agreed with the conclusions reached in SI dis­ defend the old illusions of unionist liberty that cussions - but two of them happened to be from were so blatantly denied its opponents by the the Strasbourg region. In addition, as we men­ authorities, the UNEF nevertheless could not tioned above, certain of the Strasbourg students sanction the judicial expulsion of the Strasbourg had begun to be irritated by the fact that the SI Bureau. A Strasbourg delegation was thus pres­ had not rewarded them for their shortcomings ent at the general assembly of the UNEF held in by recruiting them. The excluded liars sought Paris on 14 January, and at the opening of the out an uncritical public among them and count­ meeting demanded a preliminary vote on its ed on covering up their previous lies and their motion to dissolve the entire UNEF, "considering admission of them by piling new lies on top of that the UNEF declared itself a union uniting the them. Thus all those who had been rejected vanguard of youth (Charter of Grenoble, 1946) at joined forces in the mystical pretension of going a time when workers' unionism had long since beyond the practice that had condemned them. been defeated and turned into a tool for the self­ They began to believe the newspapers and even regulation of modern capitalism, working to to expand on them. They saw themselves as integrate the working class into the commodity masses who had really 'seized power' in a sort of system ... considering that the vanguardist.pre­ Strasbourg Commune. They told themselves tension of the UNEF is constantly belied by its that they hadn't been treated the way a revolu­ subreformist slogans and practice... considering tionary proletariat deserves to be treated. They '\ MOUTIN ,. \ /� . IAIII \\ / \ MDmN, \ ' ' -- / ' \ / \ \/ \ / RABID /' 1 MDUTON / assured themselves that their historic action to "the prestige of the SI." (More and more had superseded all previous theories: forgetting often, recently, in the most diverse discussions, that the only discernable 'action' in an affair of liars end up in this way unwittingly identifying this sort was, at most, the drafting of a text, they "the prestige of the SI" with the simple fact of collectively compensated for this deficiency by telling the truth - an amalgam that certainly inflating their illusions. This amounted to noth· does us honour.) Before three months had gone ing more ambitious than dreaming together for a by, "the association of Frey and consorts with few weeks while continually upping the dose of Vayr-Piova and all those who were willing to constantly reiterated falsifications. The dozen maintain a keenly solicited adhesion (at one Strasbourg students who had effectively sup­ time there were as many as eight or nine of ported the scandal split into two equal parts. them) was to reveal its sad reality: based on This supplementary problem thus acted as a infantile lies byindividuals who considered each touchstone. We naturally made no promises to other to be clumsy liars, it was the very picture, those who remained "partisans of the SI" and involuntarily parodic, of a type of 'collective we clearly stated that we would not make any: it action' that should never be engaged in; and was simply up to them to be, unconditionally, with the type of people who should never be partisans of the truth. Vayr-Piova and some oth· associated with! They went so fa r as to conduct ers became partisans. of falsehood with the a ludicrous electoral campaign before the stu­ excluded "Garnautins" (although certainly with· dents of Strasbourg. Dozens of pages of pedan­ out knowledge of several excessive blunders in tic scraps of misremembered situationist ideas Frey's and Garnault's recent fabrications, but and phrases were, with a total unawareness of nevertheless being aware of quite a few of the absurdity, run off with the sole aim of keep­ them). And re Schneider, whose support the liars ing the 'power' of the Strasbourg chapter of the hoped to obtain since he held the title of AFGES MNEF, mlcrobureaucratic fiefdom of Vayr-Piova, president, was overwhelmed with false tales who was eligible forre-election 13 April. As suc­ from all of them, and was weak enough to cessful In this venture as in their previous believe them without further investigation and maneouvres, they were defeated by people as to countersign one of their declarations. But stupid as they were • Stalinists and Christians after only a few days, independently becoming who were more naturally partial to electoralism, aware of a number of indisputable lies that and who also enjoyed the bonus of being able to these people thought it natural1to tell their initi­ denounce their deplorable rivals as "false situa· ates in order to save their miserable cause, tionists." In the tract The SI To ld Yo u So, put out Schneider immediately decide� that he should the next day,Andre Schneider and his comrades publicly acknowledge the mistake of his first were easily able to show how this unsuccessful course: with his tract Memorie� from the House attempt to exploit the remains of the scandal of of the Dead he denounced those who had five months before for promotional purposes deceived him and led him to share the responsi­ revealed itself as the complete renunciation of bility for a false accusation against the SI. The the spirit and the declared perspectives of that return of Schneider, whose character the liars scandal. Finally Vayr-Piova, in a communique had underestimated and who had thus been distributed 20 April, stated: "I find it amusing to

privileged to witness the full extent of their col­ be at last denounced as a 'nonsituationist' • lective manipulation of embarrassing facts, something I have openly proclaimed since the SI struck a definitive blow in Strasbourg itself set itself up as an official power." This is a rep­ against the excluded and their accomplices, who resentative sample of a vast and already forgot­ had already been discredited everywhere else. ten literature. That the SI has become an official

In their spite these wretches, who the week power - this is one of those theses typical of before had gone to so much trouble to win over Vayr-Piova or Frey, which can be examined by Schneider in order to add to the credibility of those who are interested in the question; and their venture, proclaimed him a notoriously fee­ after doing this they will l

I! I their world, for the suppression of work. When young people begin to know the current theo­ retical form of this real movement that is every­ where spontaneously bursting forth from the soil of modern society, this is only a moment of the progression by which this unified theoreti· cat critique, which identifies itself with an a de· quate practical unification, strives to break the silence and the general organisation of separa· tion. lt is only in this sense that we find the result satisfactory. We obviously exclude from these young people that alienated semiprivi· leged fraction molded by the university: this sector is the natural base for an admiring con· sumption of a fantasised situationist theory considered as the latest spectacular fashion. We will continue to disappoint and refute this kind of approbation. Sooner or later it will be understood that the SI must be judged not on the superficially scandalous aspects of certain manifestations through which it appears, but on its essentially scandalous central truth.

Situationist lntemationai 11,0ctober 1967

® The To tality For Kids

Almost everyone has always been excluded from everyone accepts the purity of his renunciation.

life and forced to devote the whole 1:>ftheir en er· To the real sacrifice of the worlwelfare state imposes the mythical sacrifice of the organiser, each the elements of this survival in the form of tech· negates himself in the other, the strange nological comforts (cars, frozen foods, Welwyn becomes fa miliar and the familiar strange, each Garden City, Shakespeare televised for the is realised in an inverted perspective. From this masses). common alienation a harmony is born, a nega· Moreover, the organisation controlling the tive harmony whose fundamental unity lies in material equipment of our everyday lives is such the notion of sacrifice. This objective (and per­ that what in itself would enable us to construct verted) harmony is sustained by myth; this term them richly, plunges us instead into a luxury of having been used to characterise the organisa· impoverishment, making alienation even more tion of appearances in unitary societies, that is intolerable as each element of comfort appears to say, in societies where power over slaves, over to be a liberation and turns out to be a servitude. a tribe, or over serfs is officially consecrated by We are condemned to the slavery of working for divine authority where the sacred allows power freedom. to seize the totality. To be understood, this problem must be The harmony based initially on the 'gift of seen in the light of hierarchical power. Perhaps it oneself' contains a relationship which was to isn't enough to say that hierarchical power has develop, become autonomous, and destroy it. preserved humanity for thousands of years as This relationship is based on partial exchange

alcohol preserves a foetus, by arresting either (commodity, money, product, labour force••. ) the growth or decay. lt should also be made dear exchange of a part of oneself on which the bour­ that hierarchical power represents the most geois conception of liberty is based. it arises as highly evolved form of private appropriation, commerce and technology become preponder­ and historically is its alpha and omega. Private ant within agrarian-type economies. appropriation itself can be defined as appropria­ When the bourgeoisie seized power they tion of things by means of appropriation of peo· destroyed its unity. Sacred private appropriation pie, the struggle against natural alienation became liacised.in capitalistic mechanisms. The engendering social alienation. totality was freed from its seizure by power and Private appropriation entails an organisa­ became concrete and immediate once more. The tion of appearances by which its radical contra­ era of fragmentation has been a succession of dictions can be dissimulated. The executives attempts to recapture an inaccessible unity, to must see themselves as degraded reflections of shelter power behind a substitute for the sacred. the master, thus strengthening, through the A revolutionary movement is when 'all that looking-glass of an illusory liberty, aU that pro· reality presents' findsits immediate representa· duces their submission and their passivity. The tion. For the rest of the time hierarchical power. master must be identified with the mythical and always more distant from its magical and mysti· perfect servant of a god or a transcendence, cal regalia, endeavours to make everyone forget whose substance is no more than a sacred and that the totality (no more than reality!) exposes abstract representation of the totality of people its imposture. and things over which the master exercises a power which can only become even stronger as Bureaucratic capitalism has found its out? - at the positive pole of alienation as the 1 legitimation in: Marx. I am not referring end of social alienation, as the end of humani­ here to orthodox Marxism's dubious merit of ty's term of social alienation. having reinforced the neocapitalist structures whose present reorganisation is an implicit The socialisation of primitive human homage to Soviet totalitarianism; I am empha­ 3 groups reveals a will to struggle more sising the extent to which Marx's most profound effectively against the mysterious and terrifying analyses of alienation have been vulgarised in forces of nature. But struggling in the natural the most commonplaqe facts, which, stripped of environment, at once with it and against it, sub­ their magical veil and materialised in each ges­ mitting to its most inhuman laws in order to ture, have become the sole substance, day after wrest from it an increased chance of survival - day, of the lives of an increasing number of peo­ doing this could only engender a more evolved ple. In a word, bureaucratic capitalism contains form of aggressive defence, a more complex and the palpable reality of alienation; it has brought less primitive attitude, manifesting on a higher it home to everybody far more successfully than level the contradictions that the uncontrolled Marx could ever have hoped to do, it has and yet influenceable forces of nature never banalised it as the diminishing of material ceased to impose. In becoming socialised, the poverty has been accompanied by a spreading struggle against the blind domination of nature mediocrity of existence. As poverty has been triumphed inasmuch as it gradually assimilated reduced in terms of mere material survival, it has primitive, natural alienation, but in another become more .profound in terms of our way of form. Alienation became social in the fight life - this is at least one widespread feeling that against natural alienation. Is it by chance that a exonerates Marx from all the interpretations a technological civilisation has developed to such degenerate Bolshevism has derived from him. a point that social alienation has been revealed The "theory" of peaceful coexistence has accel­ by its conflict with the last areas of natural erated such an awareness and revealed, to resistance that technological power hadn't man­ those who were still .confused, that exploiters aged (and for good reasons) to subjugate? can get along quite well with each other despite To day the technocrats propose to put an end to their spectacular divergences. primitive alienation: with a stirring humanitari­ anism they exhort us to perfect the technical 2 "Any act," writes Mircea Eliade, "can means that "in themselves" would enable us to become a religious act. Human existence conquer death, suffering, discomfort and bore­ is realised simultaneously on two parallel dom. But to get rid of death would be less of a planes, that of temporality, becoming, illusion, miracle than to get rid of suicide and the desire and that of eternity, substance, reality." In the to die. There are ways of abolishing the death nineteenth century the brutal divorce of these penalty than can make one miss it. Until now the two planes demonstrated that power would specific use of technology - or more generally have done better to have maintained reality in a the socioeconomic context in which human mist of divine transcendence. But we must give activity is confined - while quantitatively reduc­ reformism credit for succeeding where ing the number of occasions of pain and death, Bonaparte had failed, in dissolving becoming in has allowed death itself to eat like a cancer into eternity and reality in. illusion; this union may the heart of each person's life. not be as solid as the sacraments of religious marriage, but it is lasting, which is the most the I• 1 The prehistoric food-gathering age was managers of coexistence and social peace can -r succeeded by the hunting age during ask of it. This is also what leads us to define our­ which clans formed and strove to increase their selves - in the illusory but inescapable perspec­ chances of survival. Hunting grounds and tive of duration - as the end of abstract tempo­ reserves were staked out from which outsiders rality, as the end of the reified time of our acts; were absolutely excluded since the welfare of to define ourselves - does it have to be spelled the whole clan depended on its maintaining its territory. As a result, the freedom gained by set­ which each member was an integral part of the tling down more comfortably in the natural envi­ group ("organic interdependence"). Their guar­ ronment, and by more effective protection antee of survival depends on their activity with­ against its rigors, engendered its own negation in the framework of privative appropriation. outside the boundaries laid down by the clan They reinforce a right to property from which and forced the group to moderate its customary they are excluded. Due to this ambiguity each of rules in organising its relations with excluded them sees himself as participating in ownership, and threatening groups. From the moment it as a living fragment of the right to possess, and appeared, socially constituted economic sur· this belief in turn reinforces his condition as vival implied the existence of boundaries, excluded and possessed. (Extreme cases of this restrictions, conflicting rights. lt should never be alienation: the faithful slave, the cop, the body­ forgotten that until now both history and our guard, the centurion - creatures who, through a own nature have developed in accordance with sort of union with their own death, confer on the movement of privative appropriation: the death a power equal to the forces of life and seizing of control by a class, group, caste or indi· identifyin a destructive energy the negative and vidual of a general power over socioeconomic positive poles of alienation, the absolutely sub­ survival whose form remains complex .- from missive slave and the absolute master.) lt is of ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, vital importance to the exploiter that this all the way to the "pure" exercise of power ove r appearance is maintained and made more people (hierarchy). Beyond the struggle against sophisticated; not because he is especially regimes whose vision of paradise is a cybernetic machiavellian, but simply because he wants to welfare state lies the necessity of a still greater stay alive. The organisation of appearance is struggle against a fundamental and initially nat­ bound to the survival of his privileges and to the ural state of things, in the development of which physical survival of the non-owner, who can thus capitalism plays only an incidental, transitory remain alive while being exploited and excluded role; a state of things which will only disappear from being a person. Privative appropriation and when the last traces of hierarchical power disap­ domination are thus originally imposed and felt pear - along with the "swine of humanity;' of as a positive right, but in the form of a negative course. universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the To be an owner is to arrogate a good from right of privative appropriation is objectified in a 5 whose enjoyment one excludes other general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in people - while at the same time recognising an essential law under which everyone individu­ everyone's abstract right to possession. By ally manages to tolerate the more or less narrow excluding people from the real right of owner· limits assigned to his right to live and to the con­ ship, the owner extends his dominion over those ditions of life in general. he has excluded (absolutely over non-owners, relatively over other owners), without whom he In this social context the function of alien­ is nothing. The non-owners have no choice in the 6 ation must be understood as a condition matter. The owner appropriates and alienates of survival The labour of the non-owners is sub� them as producers of his own power, while the ject to the same contradictions as the right of necessity of ensuring their own physical exis­ privative appropriation. lt transforms them into tence forces them in spite of themselves to col­ possessed beings, into producers of their own laborate in producingtheir own exclusion and to expropriation and exclusion, but it represents survive without ever being able to live. the only chance of survival for slaves, for serfs, Excluded, they participate in possession for workers • so much so that the activity that through the mediation of the owner, a mystical allows their existence to continue by emptying it participation characterising from the outset all of all content ends up, through a natural and sin­ the clan and social relationships that gradually ister reversal of perspective, by taking on a pos­ replaced the principle of obligatory cohesion in itive sense. Not only has value been attributed to work (in its form of sacrifice in the ancien sciousness and the critical penetration of insur­ regime, in its brutalising aspects in bourgeois rection, are also responsible for the fact that ideology and in the so-called People's once the "excesses" of revolution are past, the Democracies), but very early on to work for a struggle against alienation is grasped on a theo­ master, to alienate oneself willingly, became the retical plane, subjected to an "analysis" that is a honourable and scarcely questioned price of carryover from the demystification preparatory survivaL The satisfaction of basic needs remains to revolt. lt is at this point that the truest and the best safeguard of alienation; it is best dis­ most authentic aspects of a revolt are re-exam­ simulated by being justified on the grounds of ined and repudiated by the "we didn't really undeniable necessities. Alienation multiplies mean to do that" of the theoreticians charged needs because it can satisfy none of them; with explaining the meaning of an insurrection nowadays lack of satisfaction is measured in the to those who made it - to those who aim to number of cars, refrigerators, TVs: the alienating demystify by acts, not just by words. objects have lost the ruse and mystery of tran­ All acts contesting power call for analysis and scendence, they are there in their concrete tactical development. Much can be expected of: poverty. To be rich today is to possess the great­ a) the new proletariat, which is discover­ est number of poor objects. ing its destitution amidst consumer abun­ Up to now surviving has prevented us from dance (see the development of the work­ living. This is why much is to be expected of the ers' struggles presently qeginning in increasingly evident impossibility of survival, an England, and the attitudes of rebellious impossibility which willbecome all the more evi­ youth in all the modern countries); dent as the glut of conveniences and elements b) countries that have had enough of of survival reduces life to a single choice: suicide their partial, sham revolutions and are or revolution. consigning their past and present theo­ rists to the museums (see the role of the The sacred presides even over the strug­ intelligentsia in the Eastern bloc); 7 gle against alienation. As soon as the c) the Third World, whose mistrust of E relations of exploitation and the violence that technological myths has been kept alive underlies them are no longer concealed by the by the colonial cops and mercenaries, the mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a moment last, over-zealous militants of a transcen­ of clarity, the struggle against alienation is sud­ dence against which they are the best denly revealed as a ruthless hand-to-hand fight possible vaccination; with naked power, power exposed in its brute d) the force of the SI ("our ideas are in force and its weakness, a vulnerable giant everyone's mind"), capable offores talling whose slightest wound confers on the attacker remote-controlled revolts, "crystal the infamous notoriety of an Erostratus. Since nights" and sheepish resistance. power survives, the event remains ambiguous. Praxis of destruction, sublime moment when the Privative appropriation is bound to the complexity of the world becomes tangible, 8 dialectic of particular and generaL In the transparent, within everyone's grasp; inexpiable mystical realm where the contradictions of the revolts - those of the slaves, the Jacques, the slave and feudal systems are resolved, the non­ iconoclasts, the Enrages, the Communards, owner, excluded as a particular individual from Kronstadt, the Asturias, and - promises of things the right of possession, strives to ensure his sur­ to come - the hooligans of Stockholm and the vival through his labour: the more he identifies wildcat strikes ... only the destruction of all hier­ with the interests of the master, the more suc­ archical power will allow us to forget these. We cessful he is. He knows the other non-owners aim to make sure it does. only through their common plight: the compul­ The deterioration of mythical structures and sory surrender of their labour power their slowness in regenerating themselves, (Christianity recommended voluntary surrender: which make possible the awakening of con- once the slave "willingly" offered his labour power, he ceased to be a slave), the search for sadness); he, like each of us, was anxiously the optimum conditions of survival, and mystical seeking the adventure where he could find him· identification. Struggle, though born of a univer­ self on the road to his total perdition. Could the sal will to survive, takes place on the level of master, at the very moment he alienates the oth· appearance where it brings into play identifica· · ers, see that he reduces them to dispossessed tion with the desires of the master and thus and excluded beings, and thus realise that he is introduces a certain individual rivalry that only an exploiter, a purely negative being? Such reflects the rivalry between the masters. an awareness is unlikely and would be danger· Competition develops on this plane as long as ous. By extending his dominion over the great­ the relations of exploitation remain dissimulat· est possible number of subjects, isn't he ed behind a mystical opacity and as long as the enabling them to survive, giving them their only conditions producing this opacity continue to chance of salvation? ("Whatever would happen exist; as long as the degree of slavery deter­ to the workers if the capitalists weren't kind mines the slave's consciousness of the degree of enough to employ them?" the high-minded lived reality. (We are still at the stage of calling souls of the nineteenth century liked to ask.) In "objective consciousness" what is in reality the fact, the owner officially excludes himself from consciousness of being an object.) The owner, all claim to privative appropriation. To the sacri­ for his part, depends on the general acknowl­ fice of the non- owner, who through his labour edgment of a right from which he alone is not exchanges his real life for an apparent one (thus excluded, but which is seen on the plane of avoiding immediate death by allowing the mas­ appearance as a right accessible to each of the ter to determine his variety of living death), the excluded taken individually. His privileged posi­ owner replies by appearing to sacrifice his tion depends on such a belief, and this belief is nature as owner and exploiter; he excludes him­ also the basis for the strength that is essential if self mythically, he puts himself at the service of he is to hold his own among the other owners; it everyone and of myth (at the service of God and is his strength. If, in his turn, he seems to his people, for example). With an additional ges­ renounce exclusive appropriation of everything ture, with an act whose gratuitousness bathes and everybody, if he poses less as a master than him in an otherworldly radiance, he gives renun­ as a servant of public good and defender of col· ciation its pure form of mythical reality, rehounc· lective security, then his power is crowned with ing common life, he is the poor man amidst illu­ glory and to his other privileges he adds that of sory wealth, he who sacrifices himself for every· denying, on the level of appearance (which is one while all the other people only sacrifice the only level of reference in unilateral commu­ themselves fot their own sake, for the sake of nication), the very notion of personal appropria­ their survival. He turns his predicament into tion; he denies that anyone has this right, he prestige. The more powerful he is the greater his repudiates the other owners. In the feudal per· sacrifice. He becomes the living reference point spective the owner is not integrated into appear­ of the whole illusory life, the highest attainable ance in the same way as the non-owners, slaves, point in the scale of mythical values. soldiers, functionaries, servants of all kinds. The "Voluntarily" withdrawn from common mortals, lives of the latter are so squalid that the majori· he is drawn toward the world of the gods, and ty can live only as a caricature of the Master(the his more or less established participation in feudal lord, the prince, the major-domo, the divinity, on the level of appearance (t he only taskmaster, the high priest, God, Satan .••) . But generally acknowledged frame of reference), the master himself is also forced to play one of consecrates his rank in the hiera rchy of the other these caricatural roles. He can do so without owners. In the organisation of transcendence much effort since his pretension to total life is the feudal lord • and, through osmosis, the own­ already so caricatural, isolated as he is among ers of some power or production materials, in those who can only survive. Heis already one of · varying degrees · is led to play the principal role, our own kind (with the added grandeur of a past the �ole that he really does play in the economic epoch, which adds an exquisite savour to his organisation of the group's survival. As a result, EST DAN5 Lt\ RUE the existence of the group is bound on every austerity and wastes away. Model of gods and · level to the existence of the owners as such, to heroes, the master, the owner, is the true reality those who, owning everything because they own of Prometheus, of Christ, of all those whose everybody, also force everyone to renounce their spectacular sacrifice has made it possible for lives on the pretext of the owners' unique, "the vast majority of people" to continue to sac­ absolute and divine renunciation. (From the god rifice themselves to the extreme minority, to the Prometheus punished by the gods to the god masters. (Analysis of the owner's sacrifice · Christ punished by men, the sacrifice of the should be worked out more subtly: isn't the case Owner becomes vulgarised, it loses its sacred of Christ really the sacrifice of the owner's son? aura, is humanised.) Myth thus unites owner If the owner can never sacrifice himself except and non-owner, it envelops them in a common on the level of appearance, then Christ stands form in which the necessity of survival, whether for the real immolation of the owner's son when merely physical or as a privileged being, forces circumstances leave no other alternative. As a them to live on the level of appearance and of son he is only an owner at a very early stage of the inversion of real life, the inversion of the life development, an embryo, little more than a of everyday praxis. We are still there waiting to dream of future ownership. In this rhythic dim en· · live a life less than or beyond a mystique against sion belongs Bam�s· well-known remark in 1914 which our every gesture protests while submit· when war had arrived and made his dreams ting to it. come true at last: "Our youth, as is proper, has gone to shed torrents of our blood.") This rather Myth, the unitary absolute in which the distasteful little game, before it became trans­ 9 contradictions of the world find an illuso­ formed into a symbolic rite, lFidel Castro. The tools of quences for what they have done. power are wearing out; their desire for their own freedom should be taken into account. All unresolved, unsuperseded antago· nisms weaken. Such antagonisms can At the very moment when slave revolt evolve18 only by remaining impri!?onedin previous 19 threatened to overthrow the structure unsuperseded forms (anticultural art in the cul­ of power and to reveal the relationship between tural spectacle, for example). Any radical oppo­ transcendence and the mechanism of privative sition that fails or is partially successful (which appropriation, Christianity appeared with its amounts to the same thing) gradually degener­ grandiose reformism, whose central democratic ates into reformist opposition. Fragmentary demand was for the slaves to accede not to the oppositions are like the teeth on cogwheels, reality of a human life · which would have been they mesh with .each other and make the impossible without denouncing the exclusionary machine go round, the machine of the spectacle, aspect of privative appropriation · but rather to the machine of power. the unreality of an existence whose source of Myth maintained all.antagonisms within the happiness is mythical (the imitation of Christ as archetype of Manicheanism. But what can func­ the price of the hereafter). What has changed? tion as an archetype in a fragmented society? In Anticipation of the hereafter has become antici­ fact, the memory of previous antagonisms, pre­ pation of a brighter tomorrow; the sacrifice of sented in their obviously devalued and unag­ real, immediate life is the price paid for the illu­ gressive form, appears today as the last attempt sory freedom of an apparent life. The spectacle to bring some coherence into the organisation of • is the sphere where forced labour is transformed appearance, so great is the extent to which the into voluntary sacrifice. Nothing is more suspect spectacle has become a spectacle of confusion than the formula "To each according to ·�is and equivalences. We are ready to wipe out all work" in a world where work is the blackmail of trace of these memories by harnessing all the survival; to say nothing of the formula "To each energy contained in previous antagonisms for a according to his needs" in a world where needs radical struggle soon to come. All the springs are determined by power Any construction that blocked by power will one day burst through to attempts to define itself autonomously and thus form a torrent that will change the face of the partially, and does not take into account that it is world. in fact defined by the negativity in which every­ In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges thing is suspended enters into the reformist everyone �o be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the project. lt is trying to build on quicksand as nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroen, spaghetti, though it were rock. Contempt and misunder­ mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nation· standing of the context fixed by hierarchical alisation, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. power can only end up reinforcing that context. On the other hand, the spontaneous acts we can tially an operatic revolt • didn't Nietzsche see see everywhere fo rming against power and its Wagner as a prj!cursor? - in which actors who spectacle must be warned of all the obstacles in have been pushed aside for a long time and see their path and must find a tactic taking into themselves as less and less free suddenly account the strength ofthe enemy and its means demand to play the leading roles. Clinically of recuperation. This tactic, which we are going speaking, fascism is the hysteria of the spectac· to popularise, is detournement. ular world pushed .to the point of paroxysm. In this paroxysm the spectacle momentarily Sacrifice must be rewarded. In ensures its unity while at the same time reveal­ 20 exchange for their real sacrifice the ing its radical inhumanity. Through fascism and workers receive the instruments of their libera­ Stalinism, which constitute its romantic crises, tion (comforts gadgets) but this liberation is the spectacle reveals its true nature: it is a dis· purely fictitious since power controls the ways in ease. which all the material equipment can be used; We are poisoned by the spectacle. All the since power uses to its own ends both the elements necessary for a detoxification (that is, instruments and those who use them. The for the construction of our everyday lives) are in Christian and bourgeois revolutions democra­ the hands of specialists. We are thus highly tised mythical sacrifice, the "sacrifice of the interested in all these specialists, but in differ­ master.'' To day there are countless initiates who ent ways. Some are hopeless cases: we are not, receive crumbs of power for putting to public for example, going to try and show the special­ service the totality of their partial knowledge. ists of pQwer, the rulers, the extent of their delir· They are no longer called "initiates" and not yet ium. On the other hand, we are ready to take into "priests of the logos"; they are simply known as account the bitterness of specialists imprisoned specialists. in roles that are constricted, absurd or ignomin· On the level of the spectacle their power is ious. We must confess, however, that our indul· undeniable: the contestant on "Double Yo ur gence has its limits. If in spite of all our efforts, Money" and the postal clerk running on all day . they persist in putting their guilty conscience about all the mechanical details of his car both and their bitterness in the service of power by identify with the specialist, and we know how fabricating the conditioning that colonises their production managers use such identification to own everyday lives; ifthey prefer an illusory rep­ bring unskilled workers to heel. Essentially the resentation in the hierarchy to true realisation; if true. mission of the technocrats would be to they persist in ostentatiously brandishing their unifythe logos; if only - because of one of the. specialisations (their painting, their novels, their contradictions of fragmentary power - they equations, their sociometry, their psychoanaly­ weren't so absurdly compartmentalised and iso­ sis, their ballistics); finally, if, knowing perfectly lated. Each one is alienated in being out of well • and soon ignorance of this fact will be no phase with the others; he knows the whole of excuse ·that only power and the SI hold the key one .fragment and knows no realisation. What to using their specialisation, they nevertheless real control can the atomic technician, the still choose to serve power because power, bat· strategist or the political specialist exercise over tening on their inertia, has chosen them to serve a nuclear weapon? What ultimate control can it, then fuck them! No one could be more gener· power hope to impose on all the gestures devel· ous. They should understand all this and above oping against it? The stage is so crowded that all the fact that henceforth the revolt of nonrul· only chaos reigns as master. "Order reigns and ing actors is linked to the revolt against the doesn't govern" (IS #6). spectacle (see below the thesis on the SI and To the extent that the specialist takes part in power). the development of the instruments that condi­ tion and transform the world, he is preparing the The generalised anathematisation of way for the revolt of the privileged. Until now 2 the lumpenproletariat stems from the such revolt has been called fascism. lt is essen• use 1to which it was put by the bourgeoisie, which it served both as a regulating mechanism which, through a reversal of perspective, will for power and as a source of recruits for the have ceased to be the priority sector, in order to more dubious forces of order:. cops, informers, serve the priority of life over survival. hired thugs, artists ... Nevertheless, the lumpen­ proletariat embodies a remarkably radical 22 Unitary power strove to dissolve indi- implicit critique of the society of work. Its open vidual existence in a collective con­ contempt for both lackeys and bosses contains a sciousness so that each social unit subjectively good critique of work as alienation, a critique defined itself as a particle with a clearly deter­ that has not been taken into consideration until mined W\!ight suspended as though in oil. now because the lumpenproletariat was the sec­ Everyone had to feel overwhelmed by the tor of ambiguities, but also because during the omnipresent evidence that everything was nineteenth century and the beginning of the merely raw material in the. hands of God, who twentieth the struggle against natural alienation used it for his own purposes, which were natu­ and the production of well-being still appeared rally beyond individual human comprehension. as valid justifications for work. All phenomena were seen as emanations of a Once it became known that the abundance supreme will; any abnormal divergence signified of consumer goods was nothing but the flip side some hidden meaning (any perturbation was of alienation in production, the lumpenproletari­ merely an ascending or descending path toward at acquired a new dimension: it liberated a con­ harmony: the Four Reigns, the Wheel of Fortune, tempt for organised work which, in the age of trials sent by the gods). One can speak of a col­ the Welfare State, is gradually taking on the pro­ lective consciousness in the sense that it was portions of a demand that only the rulers still simultaneously for each individual and for refuse to acknowledge. In spite of the constant everyone: consciousness of myth and con­ attempts of power to recuperate it, every exper­ sciousness of particular-existence-within-myth. iment carried out on everyday life, that is, every The power of the illusion was such that authen­ attempt to construct it (an illegal activity since tically lived life drew its meaning from what was the destruction of feudal power, where it was not authentically lived; from this stems that limited arid restricted to a minority), is concre­ priestly condemnation of life, the reduction of tised today through the critique of alienating life to pure contingency, to sordid materiality, to work and the refusal to submit to forced labour. vain appearance and to the lowest state of a So much so that the new proletariat tends to transcendence that became increasingly define itself negatively as a "Front Against degraded as it escaped mythical organisation. Forced Labour" bringing together all those who God was the guarantor of space and time, resist recuperation by power. This defines our whose coordinates defined unitary society. He field of action; it is here that we are gambling on was the common reference point for all men; the ruse of history against the ruse of power; it space and time came together in him just as in is here that we back the worker (whether steel­ him all beings became one with their destiny. In worker or artist) who - consciously or not - the era of fragmentation, man is torn between a rejects organised work and life, against the time and a space that no transcendence can worker who - consciously or not - accepts work­ unify through the mediation of any centralised ing at the dictates of power. In this perspective, power. We are living in a space and time that are it is not unreasonable to foresee a transitional out of joint, deprived of any reference point or period during which automation and the will of coordinate, as though we were never going to be the new proletariat leave work solely to special­ able to come into contact with ourselves, ists, reducing managers and bureaucrats to the although everything invites us to. rank of temporary slaves. In a generalised Th ere is a place where you create yourself automation the "workers," instead of supervis­ and a time in which you play yourself. The space ing machines, could devote their attention to of everyday life, that of one's true realisation, is watching over the cybernetic specialists, whose encircled by every form of conditioning. The nar­ sole task would be to increase a production row space of our true realisation defines us, yet we define ourselves in the time. of the spectacle. us is to become spectators of the gangrene and Or put another way: our consciousness is no decay, spectators of survival. longer consciousness of myth and of particular­ The drama of consciousness to which He gel being-in-myth, but rather consciousness of the referred is actually the consciousness of drama. spectacle and of particular-role-in-the"specta­ Romanticism resounds like the cry of the soul cle. (I pointed out above the relationship torn from the body, a suffering all the more acute between all ontology and unitary power; it as each of us finds himself alone in facing the should be recalled here that the crisis of ontol­ fall of the sacred totality and of all the Houses of ogy appears with the movement toward frag­ Usher. mentation.) Or to put it still another way: in the space-time relation in which everyone and .The totality is objective reality, in the everything . is situated, time has become the 2-r1• movement of which subjectivity can imaginary (the field of identifications); space participate only. in the form of realisation. defines us, although we define ourselves in the Anything separate from the realisation of every­ imaginary and although the imaginary defines -day life rejoins the spectacle where survival is us qua subjectivlties. frozen (hibernation) and served out in slices. Our freedom isthat of an abstract temporal­ There can be no authentic realisation except in ity in which . we are .named in the language of objective reality, in the totality. All the rest is car­ power (these names are the roles assigned to icature. The objective realisation that functions us), with a choice left to us to find officially in the mechanism of the spectacle is nothing but recognised synonyms for ourselves. In contrast, the success of power-manipulated objects (the the space ofour authentic realisation (the space "objective realisation in subjectivity" of fa mous of our everyday life) is under the dominion of artists, stars, celebrities of Who's Who). On the silence. There is no name to name the space of level of the organisation of appearance, every lived experience except in poetry, in language success - and every failure - is inflated until it liberating itself from the domination of power. becomes a ,stereotype, and is broadcast as though it were the only possible success or fail­ By desacralising and fragmenting myth, ure. So far power has been the only judge, 23· the bourgeoisie was led to demand first though its judgment has been subjected to vari­ of all independence of consciousness (demands plis pressures, Its criteria are the only valid ones for freedom of thought, freedom of. the press, for those who accept the spectacle and are sat­ freedom of research; rejection of dogma). isfied to play a role in it. But there are no more Conscioilsnes� thus ceased being more or less • artists on that stage, there are only extras. consciousness- reflecting-myth. lt became con­ sciousness of successive roles played within the The space.-time of private life was har- spectacle. What the bourgeoisie demanded 25 monised in the space-time of myth. . above all was the freedom of actors and extras in Fourier's harmony responds to this perverted · a. spectacle. no longer organised by God; his cops harmony. As soon as myth no longer encom­ and his priests, . but by natural and economic passes the individual and the partial in a totality laws; "capricious and inexorable laws" defend­ dominated by the sacred, each fragment sets ed by a.new team of cops and specialists. itself up as a totality. The fragment set up as a God has been torn off like a useless band- totality is, in fact, the totalitarian. In the dissoci­ age aridthe wound has stayed raw. The bandage ated space-time that constitutes . private life, may have prevented the ·wound from .healing, time - made absolute in the form of abstract but it justified suffering, it gave it a meaning well freedom, the freedom of the spectacle - consoli­ worth a few ·shots of morphine. Now-suffering dates by its very dissociation the spatial has no justification whatsoever· and morphine is absolute of private life, its isolation and con­ far from cheap. Separation has become· con­ striction. The mechanism of the alienating spec­ crete. Anyone at all can put their finger on it,- and tacle wields such force that private life reaches the only answer cybernetic society has to offer the point of being defined as that which is

deprived of spectacle; the fact that one escapes anything but facts emptied of their authentically roles and spectacular categories is experienced lived content. lt is in this sense that hierarchical as an additional privation, as a malaise which power, imprisoning everyone in the objective power uses as a pretext to reduce everyday life mechanism of privative appropriation (admis­ to insignificant gestures (sitting down; washing, sion/exclusion, see section 3), is also a dictator­ opening a door). ship over subjectivity. lt is as a dictator over sub­ jectivity that it strives, with limited chances of The spectacle that imposes its norms success, to force each individual subjectivity to on lived experience itself arises out of become objectivised, that is, to become an lived26 experience. The time of the spectacle, lived object it can manipulate. This extremely inter­ in the form of successive roles, makes the space esting dialectic should be analysed in greater of authentic experience the area of objective detail (objective realisation in subjectivity - the impotence, while at the same time the objective realisation of power - and objective realisation in impotence that stems from the conditioning of objectivity - which enters into the praxis of con­ privative appropriation makes the spectacle the structing eve·ryday life and destroying power). ultimate of potential freedom. Facts are deprived of content in the name of the Elements born of lived experience are communicable, in the name of an abstract uni­ aclindividualism. Today experience; sociology is enriching the categories of psychol­ b) Impossibility (that is, limits imposed ogy, but the introduction of variety into the roles on real experience by privative appropria­ merely accentuates the monotony of the identi· tion) determines the field of abstract pos­ fication reflex. The freedom of the "survivor" will sibilities. be to assume the abstract constituent to which Survival is two-dimensional. Against such a he has "chosen" to reduce himself. Once any reduction, what forces can bring out what con­ real realisation has been put out of the picture, stitutes the daily problem of all human beings: all that remains is a psychosociological drama­ the dialectic of survival and life? Either the spe­ turgy in which interiority functions as a safety­ cific forces the SI has counted on will make pos­ valve, as an overflow to drain off the effectsone sible the supersession of these contraries, has worn for the daily exhibition. Survival reuniting space and time in the construction of becomes the ultimate stage of life organised as everyday life; or life and survival will become the mechanical reproduction of memory. locked in an antagonism growing weaker and weaker until the point of ultimate confusion and Until now the approach to the totality ultimate poverty is reached. 2 has been falsified. Power has pai'asiti· cally8 interposed itself as an indispensable medi· 7 Lived reality is spectacularly fragment· ation between man and nature. But the relation 2 ed and labelled in biological,. . sociologi­ between man and nature is based only on prax· cal or other categories which, while being relat­ is. lt is praxis which constantly breaks through ed to the communicable, never communicate the coherent veneer of lies that myth and its substitutes try to maintain. it .is praxis, even Thus Manicheanism has found itself momentari­ alienated praxis, which maintains contact with ly revived. Why did St. Augustine attack the the totality. By revealing its own fragmentary Manicheans so relentlessly? it was because he character, praxis at the same time reveals the recognised the danger of a myth offering only real totality (reality) : it is the totality being one solution, the victory of good over evil; he realised by way of its opposite, the fragment. saw that this impossibility threatened to pro­ In the perspective of praxis, every fragment is· voke the collapse of all mythical structures and totality. In the perspective of power, which alien­ bring into the open the contradiction between ates praxis, every fragment is totalitarian. This mythical and authentic life. Christianity offered should be enough to wreck the attempts cyber­ the third way, the way of sacred confusion. What netic power will make to envelop praxis in a mys­ Christianity accomplished through the force of tique, although the seriousness of these myth is accomplished today through the force of attempts should not be underestimated. things. There can no longer be any antagonism All praxis enters into our project; it enters between Soviet workers and capitalist workers with its share of alienation, with the impurities or between the bomb of the Stalinist bureau­ of power: but we are capable of filtering them crats and the bomb of the non-Stalinist bureau­ out: We will elucidate the force and purity of acts crats; there is no longer anything but unity in the of refusal as well as the manipulative maneou­ chaos of reified beings. vres of power, not in a Manfchean perspective, Who is responsible? Who should be shot? but as a means of developing, through our own We are dominated by a system, by an abstract strategy, this combat in which everywhere, at form. Degrees of humanity and inhumanity are every moment, the adversaries are seeking one measured by purely quantitative variations of another but only clashing accidentally, lost in passivity. The quality is the same everywhere: irremediable darkness and uncertainty. we are all proletarianised or well on the way to becoming so. What are the traditional "revolu­ Everyday life has always b�en drained tionaries" doing? They are eliminating certain 29 to the . advantage of apparent life, but distinctions, making sure that no proletarians appearance, in its mythical cohesion, was pow­ are any more proletarian than all the others. But erful enough to repress any mention of everyday what party is working for the end of the prole­ life. The poverty and emptiness of the spectacle, tariat? revealed by all the varieties of capitalism and all The perspective of survival has become the varieties of bourgeoisie, has revealed both intolerable. What is weighing us down is the the existence of everyday life (a shelter life, but weight of things in a vacuum. That's what reifi­ a shelter for what and from what?) . and the cation is: everyone and everything falling at an poverty of everyday life. As reification and equal speed, everyone and everything stigma­ bureaucratisation grow stronger, the debility of tised with their equal value. The reign of equal the spectacle and of everyday life is the Ot11Y values has realised the Christian project, but it thing that remains clear. The conflict between· has realised it outside Christianity (as Pascal the human and the inhuman has also been had supposed) and, above all, it has realised it transferred to the plane of appearance. As soon over God's dead body, contrary to Pascal's as Marxism became an ideology, Marx's struggle expectations. against ideoJogy in the name of the richness of The spectacle and everyday life coexist in life was transformed into an ideological antHde­ the reign of equal values. People and things are ology, an antispectacle spectacle Gust as in interchangeable. The world of reification is a avant-garde culture the antispectacular specta­ world without a centre, like the new prefabricat­ cle is restricted to actors alone, antiartistic art ed cities that are its decor. The present fades being created and understood only by artists, so away before the promise of an eternal future the relationship between this ideological anti­ that is nothing but a mechanical extension of the ideology and the function of the professional past. Time itself is deprived of a centre. In this revolutionary in Leninism should be examined). concentration-camp world, victims and torturers wear the same mask and only the torture is real. Nevertheless we refuse both concentrat· No new ideology can soothe the pain, neither ed power and the right of representation, the ideology of the totality (Logos) nor that of conscious that we are now taking the only nihilism - which will be the two crutches of the public attitude (for we cannot avoid being cybernetic society. The tortures condemn all known to some extent in a spectacular hierarchical power, however organised or dis­ manner) enabling those who find that simulated it may be. The antagonism the SI is they .share our theoretical and practical going to revive is the oldest of all, it is radical positions to accede to revolutionary antagonism and that is why it is taking up again power: power without mediation, power and assimilating all that has been left by the entailing the direct action of everyone. insurrectionary movements and great individu­ Our guiding image could be the Durruti als in the course of history. Column, moving from town to village, liq­ uidating the bourgeois elements and So many other banalities could be leaving the. workers to see to their own 30 taken up and reversed. The best things self-organisation. never come to an end. Before rereading the b) The intelligentsia is power's hall of mir­ above - which even the most mediocre intelli­ rors. Contesting power, it never offers gence will be able to understand by the third anything but passive cathartic identifica- attempt - the reader would be well-advised to . tion to those whose every gesture grop­ concentrate carefully on the following text, fo r ingly expresses real contestation. The these notes, as fragmentary as the preceding radicalism • not of theory, obviously, but ones, must be discussed in detail and imple­ of gesture · that could be glimpsed in the mented. lt concerns a central question: the SI "Declaration of the 121," however, sug­ and revolutionary power. gests some different possibilities. We are Being aware of the crises of both mass par­ capable of precipitating this crisis, but we ties and "elites," the SI must embody the super­ can do so :only by entering the intelli­ session of both the Bolshevik Central Committee gentsia as a power against the intelli­ (supersession of the mass party) and of the gentsia. This phase - which must precede Nietzschean project (supersession of the intelli· and be contained within the phase gentsia). des.cribed in point a) - will put us in the a) Every time a power has presented itself perspective of the Nietzschean project. as directing a revolutionary upsurge, it We will form a small, almost alchemical, has automatically undermined the power experimental group within which the real­ of the revolution. The Bolshevik C.C. isation of the total man can be started. defined itself simultaneously as concen­ Nietzsche could conceive of such an tration and as representation. undertaking only within the framework of Concentration of a power antagonistic to the hierarchical principle. lt . is, in fact, bourgeois power and representation of within such a framework that we find our­ the will of the masses. This duality led it selves. it is therefore of the utmost impor­ rapidly to become no more than an empty tance that we present ourselves wit.hout power, a power of empty representation, the slightest ambiguity (on the level of and consequently to rejoin, in a common the ,group, the purification- of the nucleus form (bureaucracy), a bourgeois power and the elimination of residues now that was being forced (in response to the seems to be completed). We accept the. very existence of the Bolshevik power) to hierarchical framework in which we are . follow a similar evolution. The conditions placed only while impatiently working to for a concentrated power and mass repre­ abolish our domination over those whom sentation exist potentially in the SI when we cannot avoid dominating on the basis it states that it holds the qualitative and of our criteria for mutual recognition. that its ideas are in everyone's mind. c) Tactically our communication should be a diffusion emanating from a more or less hidden centre. We will establish non­ materialised networks (direct relation­ ships, episodic ones, contacts without ties, development of embryonic relations based on sympathy and understanding, in the manner of the red agitators before the arrival of the revolutionary armies). We will claim radical gestures (actions, writings, political attitudes, works) as our own by analysing them, and we will con­ sider that our own acts and analyses are supported by the majority of people. Just as God constituted the reference point of past unitary society, we are preparing to create the central reference point for a unitary society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed. As opposed to the ever-renewed confusion that cybernetic power draws from the past of inhumanity, it stands for the game that everyone will play, "the moving order of the future."

Raou/ Va neigem, lnternationa/e Situationniste 7 & 8, 1962 -63

Le dcveloppcment meme de la societe de classes jusqu'a }'organisation spectaculaire de la non-vie mene flonc le projct rcvolntionnaire a devenir visiblement ce qu'il ct ait deja essentiellement.

Paris: May 1968

Introduction understanding of modern society, it will never be (Written fo r the original edition, published by possible consciously to change it. But this analy· Solidarity in June 1968) sis will have to wait for a while until some of the dust has settled. What can be said now is that, if This is an eye-I,Nitnessaccount of two weeks honestly carried out, such an analysis will corn· spent in Paris during May 1968. it is what one pel many 'orthodox' revolutionaries to discard a person saw, heard or discovered during that mass of outdated ideas, slogans and myths to short period. The account has no pretence at te-assess contemporary reality; particularly the comprehensiveness. lt has been written and reality of modern bureaucratic capitalism, its produced in haste, its purpose bein'g to inform dynamic, its methods of control and manipula· rather than to analyse • and to inform quickly. tion, the reasons for both its resilience and its The French events have a significance that brittleness and • most important of all • the extends far beyond the frontiers of modern nature of its crises. Concepts and organisations France. They will leave their mar� on the history that have been found wanting will have to be of the second half of the 2oth century. French discarded. The new phenomena (new in them­ bourgeois society has just been shaken to its selves or new to traditional revolutionary theo­ fo undations. Whatever the outcome of the pres­ ry) will have to be recognised for what they are ent struggle, we must calmly take note of the and interpreted in all their implications. The real fact that the political map of Western capitalist events of 1968 will then have to be integrated society will never be the same again. A whole into a new framework of ideas, for without this epoch has just come to an end: the epoch during development of revolutionary theory, there can which people couldn't say, with a semblance of be no development of revolutionary practice • verisimilitude, that 'it couldn't happen here'. and in the long run no transformation of society Another epoch is starting: that in which people through the conscious actions of men. know that revolution is possible under the con· ditions of modern bureaucratic capitalism. Rue Gay Lussac For Stalinism too, a whole period is ending: the period during which Communist Parties in Sunday 12 May Western Europe could claim (admittedly with dwindling credibility) that they remained revolu­ The rue Gay-Lussac still carries the scars of the tionary organisations, but that revolutionary , 'night of the barricades'. Burnt out cars line the opportunities had never really presented them· pavement, their carcasses a dirty grey under the selves. This notion has now irrevocably been missing paint. The cobbles, cleared from the swept into the proverbial 'dustbin of history'. middle of the road, lie in huge mounds on either When the chips were down, the French side. A vague smell of tear gas still lingers in the Communist Party and those workers under its air. influence proved to be the final and most effec­ At the junction with the rue des Ursulines tive �brake' on the development of the revolu· lies a building site, its wire mesh fence breached tionary self-activity of the working class. in several places. From here came material for at A full analysis of the French events will even­ least a dozen barriCades: planks, wheelbarrows, tually have to be attempted, for, without an metal drums, steel girders, cement mixers, blocks of stone. The site also yielded a pneu­ teachihg staff (SNESup) called for an unlimited matic drill. The students couldn't use it, of strike.' For a week the students held their course • not until a passing building worker ground, in ever bigger and more militant street showed them how, perhaps the first worker demonstrations. On Tuesday 7 May so,ooo stu· actively to support the student revolt. Once bro­ dents and teachers march('!dthrough the streets ken, the road surface provided cobbles, soon behind a single banner: 'Vive La Commune', and put to a variety of uses. sang the lnternationale at the Tomb of the All that is already history. Unknown Soldier, at the Arc de Triomphe. On People are walking up and down the street, Friday 10 May students and teachers decided to .as if trying to convince themselves that it really occupy the Latin Quarter en masse. They felt happened. They aren't students. The students they had more right to be there than the police, themseiV('!S know what happened arid why it for whom barracks were provided elsewhere. happened. They aren't local inhabitants either. The cohesion and sense of purpose of the The local inhabitants saw what happened, the demonstrators terrified the Establishment. viciousness of the CRS charges, the assaults on Power couldn't be allowed to lie with this rabble, the wounded, the attacks on innocent who had even had the audacity to erect barri­ bystanders, the unleashed fury of the state cades. machine against those who had challenged it. Another inept gesture was needed. Another The people in the streets are the ordinary people administrative reflex duly materialised. Fouchet of Paris, people from neighbouring districts, hor­ (Minister of the Interior) and joxe (Deputy Prime rified at what they have heard over the radio or Minister) ordered Grimaud (Superintendent of read in their papers and who have come for a the Paris police) to clear the streets. The order walk on a fine Sunday morning to see for th�m­ was confirmed in Writing, doubtless to be pre­ selves. They are talking in small clusters with served forposterity as an example of what not to the inhabitants of the rue Gay-Lussac. The do in · certain situations. The CRS charged ... Revolution, having for a week held the universi· clearing the rue Gay-Lussac and opening the ty and the streets of the Latin Quarter, is begin­ doors to the second phase of the Revolution. ning to take hold of the minds of men. In the rue Gay-Lussac and in adjoining On Friday 3 May the CRS had paid their his· streets, the battle-scarred walls carry a dual toric visit to the Sorbonne. They had been invit· message. They bear testimony to the incredible ed in by Paul Roche, Rector of Paris University. courage of those who held the area for several The Rector had almost certainly acted in con· hours against a deluge of tear gas, phosphorous nivance with Alain Peyrefitte, Minister of grenades and repeated charges of dub-swing­ Education, if not with the Elysee itself. Many stu· ing CRS. But they also show something of what dents had been arrested, beaten up, and several the defenders were striving for... were summarily convicted. Mural propaganda is an integral part of the The unbelievable • yet thoroughly pre­ revolutionary Paris of May 1968. it has become a dictable ineptitude of this bureaucratic 'solu· mass activity, part and parcel of the Revolution's tion' to the 'problem' of student discontent trig­ method of self-expression. the walls of the Latin gered off a chain reaction. lt provided the pent· Quarter are the depository of a new rationality; up anger, resentment and frustration of tens of no longer confined to books, but democratically thousands of young people with both a reason displayed at street level and made available to for further action and with an attainable objec­ all. The trivial and the profound, the traditional tive. The students, evicted from the university, and the esoteric, rub shoulders in this new fra­ took to the street, demanding the liberation of ternity, rapidly breaking down the rigid barriers their comrades, the reopening ·of their faculties, and compartments in people's minds. the withdrawal ofthe cops. 'Desobeir d'abord: alors ecris sur \es murs Layers upon layers of new people were soon (Loi du 10 Mai 1968)' reads an obviously recent drawn into the struggle. The student union inscription, clearly setting the tone. 'Si tout le (UNEF) and the union representing university peuple faisait comme nous' (if everybody acted like us ... ) wistfully dreams another in joyful main root of the student 'crisis' in the backward· anticipation, I think, rather than in any spirit of ness of the university in relation to society's cur· self-satisfied substitutionism. Most of the slo· rent needs, in the quantitative inadequacy of the gans are straightforward, correct and fairly tuition provided, in the semi-feudal attitudes of orthodox: 'Liberez nos camarades'; 'Fouchet, some professors, and in the general insufficien· Grimaud, demission'; 'A bas l'Etat policier'; cy of job opportunities. They see the University 'Greve Generate Lundi'; 'Travailleurs, etudiants, as unadapted to the modern world. The remedy soldaires'; 'Vive les Conseils Ouvriers'. Other for them is adaptation: a modernising reform slogans reflect the new concerns: 'La publicite te which would sweep away the cobwebs, provide manfpule'; 'Examens = hierarchie'; 'L'art .est more teachers, better lecture theatres, a bigger mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre'; 'A bas la educational budget, perhaps a more liberal atti· societe de consommation'; 'Debout les damnes tude on the campus and, at the end of it all, an de Nanterre'. The slogan 'Baisses·toi et broute' assured job. (Bend your head and chew the cud) is obviously The rebels (which include some but by no aimed at those whose minds are still full of tra· means all of the 'old' revolutionaries) see this ditional preoccupations. concern with adapting the university to modern 'Contre la fermentation groupusculaire' society as something of a diversion. For it is moans a large scarlet inscription. This one is modern society itself which they reject. They really out of touch. For everywhere there is a consider bourgeois life trivial and mediocre, profusion of pasted up posters and journals: repressive and repressed. They have no yearn· Vo ix Ouvriere, Avant·Garde and Revoltes (for the ing (but only contempt) for the administrative Trotskyists), Servir le Peuple and Humanite and managerial careers it holds out for them. Nouvel/e (for the devotees of Chairman Mao), Le They are not seeking integration into adult soci· Libertaire (for the Anarchists), Tribune Socialiste ety. On the contrary, they are seeking a chance (for the PSU). Even odd copies of/' Humanite are radically to contest its adulteration. The driving pasted up. lt is difficult to read them, so covered force of their revolt is their own alienation, the are they with critical comments. meaninglessness of life under modern bureau· On a hoarding, I see a large advertisement cratic capitalism. lt is certainly not a purely eco· for a new brand of cheese: a child biting into an nomic deterioration in their standard of living. enormous sandwich. 'C'est bon le fromage So· lt is no accident that the 'revolution' started and·So' runs the patter. Someone has covered i.n the Nanterre faculties of Sociology and the last few words with red paint. The poster Psychology. The students saw that the sociology reads 'C'est bon la Revolution'. People pass by, they were being taught was a means of control· look, and smile. ling and manipulating society, not a means of I talk to my companion, a man of about 45, understanding it in order to change it. In the an 'old' revolutionary. We discuss the tremen· process they discovered revolutionary sociology. dous possibilities now opening up. He suddenly They rejected the niche allocated to them in the turns towards me and comes out with a memo· great bureaucratic pyramid, that of 'experts' in rable phrase: "To think one had to have kids and the service of a technocratic Establishment, spe· wait 20 years to see all this... " . cialists of the 'human factor' in the modern We talk to others in the street, to young and industrial equation. In the process they discov· old, to the 'political' and the 'unpolitical', to peo· ered the importance of the working class. The ple at all levels of understanding and commit· amazing thing is that, at least among the active ment. Everyone is prepared to talk · in fact layers of the students, these 'sectarians' sud· everyone wants to. They all seem remarkably denly seem to have become the majority: surely articulate. We find no·one prepared to defend the best definition of any revolution. the actions of the administration. The 'critics' fall The two types of 'criticism' of the modern into two main groups: French educational system do not neutralise one The 'progressive' university teachers, the another. On the contrary, each creates its own Communists, and a number of students see the kind of problems for the University authorities and for the officials at the Ministry of Education. or. supervisor in sight. The workers stream in. A The real point is that one kind of criticism ·what loud hailer tells them to proceed to their respec­ one might call the quantitative one - could in tive shops, to refuse to start work and to. pro­ time be coped with by modern bourgeois socie­ ceed, at Sa m, to their traditional meeting place, ty. The other.- the qualitative one · never. This is an enormous shed-like structure in the middle of what gives it its revolutionary potential. The the lle Seguin (an island in the Seine entirely 'trouble with the University', for the powers that co)lered by parts of the Renault plant). be, isn't that money can't be found for more As each worker goes through the gates; the teachers. lt can. The 'trouble' is that the pickets give him a leaflet, jointly produced by University is full of students · and that the heads the three unions. Leaflets in Spanish are also of the students are full of revolutionary Ideas. distributed (over 2000 Spanish workers are Among those we speak to there is a deep employed at Renault). French and Spanish ora­ awareness that the problem cannot be solved in tors succeed one another, in short spells, at the the Latin Quarter, that isolation of the revolt in a microphone. Although all the unions are sup­ student 'ghetto' (even an 'autonomous' one) porting the one-day strike, all the orators seem would spell defeat. They realise that the salva­ to belong to the CGT. lt's their loudspeaker... tion of the movement lies in its extension to 6:45am. Hundreds of workers are · now other sectors of the population. But here wide streaming in. Many look as if they had come to differences appear. When some talk of the work rather than to participate in mass meetings importance of the working class it is as a substi­ at the plant. The decision to call the strike was tute for getting on with any kind of struggle only taken on the Saturday afternoon, after themselves, an excuse fo r denigrating the stu­ many of the men had already dispersed for the dents' struggle as 'adventurist'. Yet it is precise­ weekend. Many seem unaware of what it's all ly because of its unparalleled militancy that the about. I am struck by the number of Algerian and students' action has established that direct black workers. action works, has begun to influence the There are only a few posters at the gate, younger workers and to rattle the established again mainly those of the CGT. Some pickets organisations. Other students realise the rela­ carry CFDT posters. There isn't an FO poster in tionship of these struggles more clearly. We will sight. The road and walls outside the factory find them later. at Censier, animating the 'work­ have been well covered with slogans: 'One day er-student' action committees. strike on Monday'; 'Unity in defence of our But enough, for the time being, about the claims'; 'No to the monopolies'. · Latin Quarter. The movement has already spread The little cafe near the gates is packed. beyond its narrow confines. People seem unusually wide awake and commu­ nicative for so early an hour. A newspaper kiosk May 1': From Renault to the streets is selling about three copies of I' Humanite for of Par1s every copy of anything else. The local branch of the Communist Party is distributing a leaflet Monday 13 May calling for 'resolution; calm, vigilance and unity' and warning against 'provocateurs'. 6:15am, Avenl!eYves Kermen. A clear, cloudless The pickets make no attempt to argue with day. Crowds begin to gather outside the gates of those pouring in. No-one seems to know the giant Renault works at Bol!logneBillancour t. whether they will obey the strike call or not. Less The main trade union 'centrales' (CGT, CFDT and than 25°/o of Renault workers belong to any FO) have called a one day general strike. They 'union at all. This is the biggest car factory in are protesting against police violence in the Europe. Latin Quarter and in support of long-neglected The loud hailer hammers home its message: "The CRS have recently assaulted peasants at claims concerning wages, hours, the age of ' retirement and trade union rights in the plants. Quimper, and workers at Caen, Rhodiaceta The factory gates are wide open. Not a cop (Lyon) and Dassault. Now they are turning on the students. The regime will not tolerate opposi­ like rear car seats, cornplete with attached tion. lt will not modernise the country. lt will not springs, from the ground to first floor level. grant us our basic wage demands. Our one day Some to,ooo workers are soon assembled strike will show both Government and employ­ in the shed. The orators address them through a ers our determination. We must compel them to loudspeaker from ·a narrow platform some 40 retreat." The message is repeated again and feet up. The platform runs in front of what looks again, like a gramophone record. I wonder like an elevated inspection post but which I am whether the speal

brought to a halt. doesn't have to continue alone. There is an Many of the lathes have coloured pictures unquenchable thirst for information, ideas, liter­ plastered over them: pin·ups and green fields, ature, argument, polemic. The man just stands sex and sunshine. Anyone still working is there as people surround him and press forward exhorted to get out into the daylight, not just to to get the leaflets. Dozens of demonstrators, dream about it. In the main plant, over half a without even reading the leaflet, help him dis­ mile long, hardly 12 men remain in their overalls. tribute them. Some 6ooo copies get out in a few Not an angry voice can be heard. There is much minutes. All seem to be assidiously read. People good humoured banter. By uam thousands of argue, laugh, joke. I witnessed such scenes workers have poured out into the warmth of a again and again. morning in May. An open-air beer and sandwich Sellers of revolutionary literature are doing stall, outside the gate, is doing a roaring trade. well. An edict, signed by the organisers of the 1.15 pm. The streets are crowded. The demonstration, that "the only literature allowed response to the call for a 24-hour general strike would be that of the organisations sponsoring has exceeded the wildest hopes of the trade the demonstration" (see I' Humanite, 13 May unions. Despite the short notice Paris is paral· t968) is being enthusiastically flouted. This ysed. The strike was only decided 48 hours ago, bureaucratic restriction (much criticised the pre­ after the 'night of the barricades'. lt is moreover vious evening when announced at Censier by the 'illegal'. The law of the land demands a five-day student delegates to the Co-ordinating notice before an 'official' strike can be called. Committee) obviously cannot be enforced in a Too bad for legality. crowd of this size. The revolution is bigger than A solid phalanx of young people is walking any organisation, more tolerant than any institu­ up the Boulevard de Sebastopol, towards the tion 'representing' the masses, more realistic Gare de I' Est. They are proceeding to the student than any edict of any Central Committee. rallying point for the giant demonstration called Demonstrators have climbed onto walls, jointly by the unions, the students' organisation onto the roofs of bus stops, onto the railings in (UNEF) and the teachers' associations (FEN and front of the station. Some have loud hailers and SNESup). make short speeches. All the 'politicos' seem to There is not a bus or car in sight. The streets be in one part or other of this crowd. I can see of Paris today belong to the demonstrators. the banner of the )eunesse Communiste Thousands of them are already in the square in Revolutionaire, portraits of Castro and Che front of the station. Thousands more are moving Guevara, the banner of the FER, several banners in from every direction. The plan agreed by the of 'Servir le Peuple' (a Maoist group) and the sponsoring organisations is for the different cat­ banner of the UJCML (Union de la ]eunesse egories to assemble separately and then to con· Communiste Marxiste-Leniniste), another verge on the Place de la Republique, from where Maoist tendency. There are also banners from the march will proceed across Paris, via the Latin many educational establishments now occupied Quarter, to the Place Denfert-Rochereau. by those who work there. Large groups of We are already packed like sardines for as lyceens (high school kids) mingle with the stu· far as the eye can see, yet there is more than an dents as do many thousands of teachers. hour to go before we are due to proceed. The At about 2pm the student section sets off, sun has been shining all day. The girls are in singing the 'lnternationale'. We march zo-30 summer dresses, the young men in shirt sleeves. abreast, arms linked. There is a row of red flags A red flag is flying over the railway station. There in front of us, then a banner so feet wide carry­ are many red flags in the crowd and several ing four simple words: 'Etudiants, Enseignants, black ones too. Travailleurs, Solidaires'. lt is an impressive A man suddenly appears carrying a suitcase sight. . full of duplicated leaflets. He belongs to some The whole Boulevard de Magenta is a solid left 'groupuscule' or other. He opens his suitcase seething mass of humanity. We can't enter the CONSfll iU�RAL du REL and distributes perhaps a dozen leaflets, Sut he Place de la Republique, already packed full of demonstrators. One can't even move along the double, and succeed in infiltrating groups of 100 pavements or through adjacent streets. Nothing or so into parts of the march ahead of them, or but people, as far as the eye can see. behind them. The Stalinist stewards walking As we proceed slowly down the Boulevard hand in hand and hemming the march in on de Magenta, we notice on a third floor balcony, either side are powerless to prevent these sud­ high on our right, an SFIO (Socialist Party) head· den influxes. The student demonstrators scatter quarters. The balcony is bedecked with a few like fish in water as soon as they have entered a decrepit-looking red flags and a banner pro· given contingent. The CGT marchers themselves claiming 'Solidarity with the students'. A few are quite friendly and readily assimilate the elderly characters wave at us, somewhat self· newcomers, not quite sure what it's all about. consciously. Someone in the crowd starts chant· The students' appearance, dress and speech ing "0-pur-tu·nistes". The slogan is taken up, does not enable them to be identifiedas readily rhythmically roared by thousands, to the dis· as they would be in Britain. comfiture of those on the. balcony who beat a The main student contingent proceeds as a hasty retreat. The people have not forgotten the compact body. Now that we are past the bottle­ use of the CRS against the striking miners in neck of the Place de la Republique the pace is 1958 by 'socialist' Minister of the Interior Jules quite rapid. The student group nevertheless Moch. They remember the 'socialist' Prime takes at least half an hour to pass a given point. Minister Guy Mollet and his role during the The slogans of the students contrast strikingly Algerian War. Mercilessly, the crowd shows its with those of the CGT. The students shout "le contempt for the discredited politicians now Pouvoir aux Ouvriers" (All Power to the seeking to jump on the bandwagon. "Guy Workers); "le Pouvoir est dans la rue" (Power Mollet, au musee", tlieyshout, amid laughter. lt lies in the street); "liberez nos camarades". CGT is truly the end of an epoch. members shout ,;Pompidou, demission" At about 3Pm we at last reach the Place de (Pompidou, resign). The students chant "de la Republique, our point of departure. The crowd Gaulle, assassin", or "CRS·SS". The CGT: "Des here is so dense that several people faint and sous, pas de matraques" (money, not police E have to be carried into neighbouring cafes. Here clubs) or "Defence du pouvoir d'achat" (Defend people are packed almost as tight as in the our purchasing power). The students say "Non a street, but can at least avoid being injured. The I'Universite de classe". The CGT and the Stalinist window of one cafe gives way under the pres­ students, grouped around the banner of their sure of the crowd outside. There is a genuine paper Clarte reply "Universite Democratique". fear, in several parts of the crowd, of being Deep political differences lie behind the differ· crushed to death. The first union contingents ences of emphasis. Some slogans are taken up fortunately begin to leave the square. There isn't by everyone, slogans such as "Dix ans, c'est a policeman in sight. assez", "A bas I'Etat policier", or "Bon anniver­ Although the demonstration has been saire, mon General". Whole groups mournfully announced as a joint one, the CGT leaders are entone a well-known refrain: "Adieu, de Gau\le".

still striving desperately to avoid a mixing-up, on They wave their handkerchieves, to the· great the streets, of students and workers. In this they merriment of the bystanders. are moderately successful. By about 4-3opm the As the main stui:lent contingent crosses tlie students' and teachers' contingent, perhaps Pont St Michel to enter the Latin Quarter it sud· 8o,ooo strong, finally leaves the Place" de la denly stops, in silent tribute to its wounded. All Republique. Hundreds of thousands of demon· thoughts are for a moment switched to those strators have preceded it, hundreds of thou· lying in hospital, their sight in danger through sands follow it, butthe 'left'contingent has been too much tear gas or their skulls or ribs fractured well and truly 'bottled-in'. Several groups, by the truncheons of the CRS. The sudden, angry understanding at last the CGT's manoeuvre� silence of this noisiest part ofthe demonstration break·loose once we are out of the square. They conveys a deep impression of strength and reso­ take short cuts via various side streets, at the lution. One senses massive accounts yet to be settled. 'tierce' (horse-betting), in watching the telly, in At the top of the Boulevard St Michel l drop their annual 'conges' (holidays), and that the out of the march, climb onto a parapet lining the worldng class cannot see beyond the problems Luxembourg Gardens, and just watch. I remain of its everyday life. lt was so palpably untrue. I there for two hours as row after row of demon­ also thought of those who say that only a narrow strators marches past, 30 or more abreast, a and rotten leadership lies between the masses human tidal wave of fantastic, inconceivable and the total transformation of society. lt was size. How many are they? 6oo,ooo? 8oo,ooo? A equally untrue. Today the working class is million? t,soo,ooo? No-one can really number becoming conscious of its strength. Will it · them. The first of the demonstrators reached the decide, tomorrow, to use it? final dispersal point hours before the last ranks I rejoin the march and we proceed towards had left the Place de la Republique, at 7pm. Denfert Rochereau. We pass several statues, There were banners of every kind: union sedate gentlemen now bedecked with red flags banners, student . banners, political banners, or carrying slogans such as 'Liberez nos cama­ non-political banners, reformist banners, revolu­ rades'. As we pass a hospital silence again tionary banners, banners of the 'Mouvement descends on the endless crowd. Someone starts contre i'Armement Atomique', banners of vari­ whistling the 'lnternationale'. Others take it up. ous Conseils de Parents d'Eleves, banners of Like a breeze rustling over an enormous field of every conceivable size and shape, proclaiming a corn, the whistled tune ripples out in all direc­ common abhorrence at what had happened and tions, From the windows of the hospital some a common will to struggle on. Some banners nurses wave at us. were loudly applauded, such as the one saying At various intersections we pass traffic 'Liberons !'information' (Let's have a free news lights which by some strange inertia still seem service) carried by a group of employees from to be working. Red and green alternate, at fixed the ORTF. Some banners indulged in vivid sym­ intervals, meaning as little as bourgeois educa­ bolism, such as the gruesome one carried by a tion, as work in modern society, as the lives of group of artists, depicting human hands, heads those walking past. The reality of today, for a few and eyes, each with its price tag, on display on hours, has submerged all of yesterday's pat­ the hooks and trays of a butcher's shop. terns. Endlessly they filed past. There were whole The part of the march in which I find myself sections of hospital personnel, in white· coats, is now rapidly approaching what the organisers some carrying posters saying 'Ou sont les dis­ have decided should be the dispersal point. The parus des hopitaux?' (where are the missing CGT is desperately keen that its hundreds of injured?). Every factory, every major workplace thousands of supporters should disperse quiet� seemed to be represented. There were numer­ ly. lt fears them, when they are together. lt wants ous groups of railwaymen, postmen, printers, them nameless atoms again, scattered to the Metro personnel, metal workers, airport work­ four corners of Paris, powerless in the context of ers, marl

down and two were seriously injured. Many career. For the students, and for many others, it more narrowly escaped. The van was finally sur­ was the llving proof that direct action worked. rounded. One. of the policemen in the front seat Concessions had been won through struggle . was dragged out and repeatedly punched by the which had been unobtainable by other means. infuriated crowd, determined to lynch him. He Early on the Monday morning the CRS pla­ was finally rescued, in the nick of time, by the toons guarding the entrance to the Sorbonne stewards. They more or less carried him, semi­ were discreetly withdrawn. The students moved consciqus, down a side street where he was in, first in small groups, then in hundreds, later passed horizontally, like. a battered blood in thousands. By midday the occupation. was sausage, through an open ground floor window. complete. Every 'tricolore' was promptly hauled To do this, the stewards had had to engage down, every lecture theatre occupied. Red flags in a running fight with several hundred very were hoisted from the official flagpoles and from angry marchers. The crowd then started rocking improvised ones at many windows, some over­ the stranded police van. The remaining police­ looking the streets, others the big internal court­ man drew his revolver and fired. People ducked. yard. Hundreds of feet above the milling stu· By a .miracle no-one was hit. A hundred yards dents, enormous red and black flags fluttered away the bullet made a hole, about three feet side by side from the Chapel dome. above ground level, in a window of'le Belfort', a What happened over the next few days will big can�at 297 Boulevard Raspail. The stewards leave a permanent mark on the French educa­ again rushed to the rescue, forming a barrier tional system, on the structure of French society between the crowd and the police . van, which and • most important of aH • on the minds of was allowed to escape down a side street, driv­ those who lived and made history during that en by the policeman who had fired at the crowd. hectic first fortnight. The Sorbonne was sudden­ Hundreds of demonstrators then thronged ly transformed from the fusty precinct where round the hole in the window of the cafe. Press French capitalism selected and moulded its hierc photographers were summoned, arrived, duly archs, its technocrats and its administrative took their close-ups - none of which, of course, bureaucracy into a revolutionary volcano in full were ever published. (Two days later I'Humanite eruption whose lava was to spread far and wide, carried a few lines about the episode, at the bot­ searing the social structure of modern France. tom of a column on page s.) One effect of the The physical occupation of the Sorbonne episode is that several thousand more demon­ was followed by an intellectual explosion of . strators decided not to disperse. They turned unprecedented violence. Everything, literally and marched down towards the Champ de Mars, everything, was suddenly and simultaneously · shouting "lls ont tire a Oenfert" (they've shot at up for discussion, for question, for challenge. us at Oenfert). If the incident had taken place an There were no taboos. lt is easy to criticise the hour earlier, the evening of 13 May might have chaotic upsurge of thoughts, ideas and propos­ had a very different complexion. als unleashed in . such c.i rcumstances. 'Professional revolutionaries' and petty bour­ The Sorbonne 'Soviet' geois philistines criticised to their heart's con­ tent. Butin so doing they only revealed �ow they On Saturday 11 May, shortly before midnight, Mr themselves were trapped in the ideolpgy of a Pompidou, Prime Minister of France, overruled previous epoch and were incapable of tran· his Minister of the Interior, his Minister of scending it. They failed to recognise the tremen­ Education, and issued orders to his 'independ­ dous significance of the new, of all that could ent' Judiciary. He ·announced that the police not be apprehended within their own pre-estab­ would be withdrawn from the Latin Quarter, that lished intellectual categories. The phenomenon the faculties would re-open on Monday 13 May, was witnessed again and agailil,as it doubtless and that the law would 'reconsider' the question has been in every really great upheaval in histo­ of the students arrested the previous week. lt ry. was the biggest political climb-down of his Day and night, every lecture theatre was packed out, the seat of continuous, passionate (frowned on for a generation) took over with a debate on every subject that ever preoccupied vengeance. Literature stalls sprouted up a\eng thinking humanity. No formal lecturer ever the whole inner perimeter. Enormous. portraits enjoyed so massive an audience, was ever lis· appeared on the internal walls: MarX;·· Lenin, tened to with such rapt attention • or given such Trotsky, Mao, Castro; Guevara, a revolutionary short shriftif he talked nonsense. resurrection breaking the bounds of time and A kind of order rapidly prevailed. By the sec­ place. Even Stalin put in a transient appeai�nce ond day a noticeboard had appeared near the (above a Maoist stall) until it was tactfully sug­ front entrance announcing what was being gested to the comrades that he wasn't really at talked about, and where. ! noted: 'Organisation home in such company. of the struggle'; 'Political and trade union rights On the stalls themselves every kind of liter­ in the University'; 'University crisis or social cri­ ature suddenly blossomed forth in the summer sis?'; 'Dossier of police repression'; 'Self-man­ sunshine: leaflets and pamphlets by. anarchists, agement'; 'Non-selection' (or how to open the Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists (t hree varieties), doors of the University to everyone); 'Methods the PSU and the non-committed. The yard of the of teaching'; 'Exams', etc. Other lecture theatres Sorbonne had become a gigantic revolutionary were given over to the students-workers liaison drug-store, in which the most esoteric products committees, soon to assume great importance. no longer had to be kept beneath the counter In yet other halls, discussions were under way but could now be prominently . displayed. Old on 'sexual repression', on 'the colonial ques­ issues of journals, yellowed by the years, were tion', on 'ideology and mystification'. Any group unearthed and often sold as well as more recent of people wishing to discuss anything under the material. Eve rywhere there were groups of 10 or sun would just take over one of the lecture the· 20 people, in heated discussion, people talking atres or smaller rooms. Fortunately there were about the barricades, about the CRS, about their dozens of these. own.experiences, but also about the commune The first impression was of a gigantic lid of 1871, about 1905 and 1917, about the Italian suddenly lifted, of pent-up thoughts and aspira­ left in 1921 and about France in 1936. A fusion tions · suddenly exploding, on being released was taking place between the consciousness of from the realrrfof dreams into the realm of the the revolutionary minorities and the conscious­ real and the possible. In changing their environ­ ness of whole new layers of people, dragged day ment people themselves were changed. Those by day into the maelstrom of political controver­ who had never dared say anything suddenly felt sy. The students were learning within days what their thoughts to be the most important thing in it had taken others a lifetime to learn. Many the world • and said so. The shy became com­ lyceens came to see what it was all about. They municative. The helpless and isolated suddenly too got sucked into the vortex. I remember a boy discovered that collective power lay in their of 14 explaining to an incred ulous man of 6o why hands. The traditionally apathetic suddenly students should have the right to depose pro­ realised the intensity of their involvement. A fessors. tremendous su rge of community and cohesion Other things also happened. A large piano gripped those who had previously seen them­ suddenly appeared in the great central yard and selves as isolated and impotent puppets, domi­ • remained there for several days. People would nated by institutions that they could neither come and play on it, surrounded by enthusiastic control nor understand. People just went up and supporters. As people talked in the lecture the­ tall,ed to one another without a trace of self-con· atres of neo-capitalism and of its techniques of sciousness. This state of euphoria lasted manipulation, strands ·Of Chopin and bars of throughout the whole .fortnight I was there. An jazi:, bits of La Carmagnole and atonal composi­ inscription scrawled on a wall sums it up per­ tiQnS wafted through the air. One evening there fectly: 'Deja dix jours de bonheur' (ten days of was a drum .recital, then some clarinet players happiness already). took over. These 'diversions' may have infuriated In the yard of the Sorbonne, politics some of the more single-minded revolutionaries, but theY were as much part and parcel of the moning their courage, actually entered the erst· total transformation of the Sorbonne as were the while sacrosanct premises,- as they were being revolutionary doctrine� being proclaimed in the exhorted to by numerous posters proclaiming lecture hails. that the Sorbonne was now open to all. Yo ung An exhibition of huge photographs of the workers who 'wouldn't have been seen in that 'night of the barricades' (in beautiful half-tones) place' a month ago now walked in in groups, at appeared one morning, mounted on stands. No­ first rather self-consciously, later as if they one .knew who had .put it up. Everyone agreed owned the place, which of course they did. that it succinctly summarised the horror and As the days went by, another kind of inva· glamour, the anger and promise of that fateful si on took place · the invasion by the cynical and night. Even the doors of the Chapel giving on to the unbelieving, or · more charitably · by those the yard were soon covered with inscriptions: who 'had only come to see'. lt gradually gained 'Open this door • Finis, les tabernacles'. momentum. At certain stages it threatened to -'Religion is the last mystification'. Or more pro· paralyse the serious work being done, part of saically: 'We want somewhere to piss, not some· which had to be hived off to the Fatuity. of where to pray'. Letters, at Censier, also occupied by the stu· The massive outer walls of the Sorbonne dents. lt was felt necessary, however, for the were likewise soon plastered with posters • doors to be kept open, 24 hours a day. The mes· posters announcing the first sit-in strikes, sage certainly spread: Deputations came first posters describing the wage rates of whole sec· from other universities, then from high schools, tions of Paris workers, posters announcing the later from factories and offices,to look, to ques· next demonstrations, posters describing the sol· tion, to argue, to study. idarity marches in Peking, posters denouncing The most telling sign, however, of the new the. police repression and the use of CS gas (as and heady climate was to be found on the walls well as ofordinary tear-gas) against the demon· of the Sorbonne corridors; Around the main lee· strator's. There were posters, dozens of them, tu re theatres there is a maze of such corridors: warning students against the Communist Party's dark, dusty, depressing, and hitherto unnoticed band-wagon -jumpingtactics, telling them how it passageways leading from nowhere in particular had attacked their movement and how it was to nowhere else. Suddenly these corridors now. seeking to assume its leadership. Political sprang to life in a firework of luminous mural posters in plenty. But also others, proclaiming wisd'o in • much of it of Situationist inspiration. the new ethos; A big one for instance near the Hundreds of people suddenly stopped to read main entrance, boldly proclaimed 'Defence d'in· such pearls as: 'Do not consume Marx. Live it'; terdire' .(Forbidding forbidden). And others, 'The future will only contain what we put into it equally .to the point: 'Only the truth is. revolu­ now'; 'When examined, we will answer with tionary', 'Our revolution · is greater than our· questions'; 'Professors, you make us feel old': selves', 'We refuse the role assigned to us, we 'One doesn't compose with a society in decom· will not be trained as police dogs'. People's con· position'; 'We must remain the unadapted cerns varied but converged. The posters reflect· ones'; 'Workers of all lands, enjoy yourselves'; ed tlie deeply libertarian prevailing philosophy: 'Those who carry out a revolution only half-way 'Humanity will only be happy when the last cap· • through merely dig themselves a tomb (St Just)'; italist has been strangled with the guts of the 'Please leave the PC (Communist Party) as clean last bureaucrat'; 'Culture is disintegrating: on leaving as you would like to find it on enter· Create!;; 'l take my wishes for reality for I believe ing'; 'The tears of the philistiiles are the nectar in the reality of my wishes'; or more simply, of the gods'; 'Go and die in Naples, with the Club 'Creativity, spontaneity, life'. Mediterranee'; 'Long live communication, down In street outside, hundreds of passers· with telecommunication'; 'Masochism today by read these improvised wall· dresses up as reformism'; 'We will claim noth· gaped. Some sniggered. ing. We will ask for nothing. We will take. We will loaae:a cassE�m.Some argued. Some, sum· occupy'; :'The only outrage to -the To mb of the Unknown Soldier was the outrage that put him I' Humanite had carried paragraphs either there'; 'No, we won't be picked up by the Great attacking the students or making slimy innuen­ Party of the Working Class'. And a big inscrip­ does about them. Now the line suddenly tion, well displayed: 'Since 1936 I have fought changed. for wage increases. My father, before me, also The Party sent dozens of its best agitators fought for wage increases. Now I have a telly, a into the Sorbonne to 'explain' its case. The case fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet all in all, my life has was a simple one. The Party 'supported the stu­ always been a dog's life. Don't discuss with the dents' - even if there were a few 'dubious ele­ bosses. Eliminate them.' ments' in their leadership. lt 'always .had'. lt Day after day the courtyard and corridors always would. are crammed, the scene of an incessant bi-direc­ Amazing scenes followed. Every Stalinist tional flow to every conceivable part of the enor­ 'agitator' would immediately be surrounded by a mous building. lt may look like chaos, but it is large group of well-informed young people, the chaos of a beehive or of an anthill. A new denouncing the Party's counter-revolutionary structure is gradually being evolved. A canteen role. A wall-paper had been put up by the com­ has been organised in one big hall. People pay rades of Voix Ouvriere on which had been post­ what they can afford for glasses of orange juice, ed, day by day, every statement attacking the 'menthe', or 'grenadine' - and for ham or students to have appeared iri /' Humanite or in sausage rolls. I enquire whether costs are cov­ any of a dozen Party leaflets. The 'agitators' ered and am told they more or less break even. couldn't get a word in edgeways. They would be In another part of the b4ilding a children's jumped on (non-violently). "The evidence was creche has been set up, elsewhere a first-aid over there, comrade. Would the Party comrades station, elsewhere a dormitory. Regular sweep­ like to come and read just exactly what the Party ing-up rotas are organised. Rooms are allocated had been saying not a week ago? Perhaps to the Occupation Committee, to the Press I' Humanite would like to grant the students Committee, to the Propaganda Committee, to space to reply to some of the accusations made the student/worker liaison committees, to the against them?" Others in the audience would committees dealing with foreign students, to the then bring up the Party's role during the Algerian action committees of Lyceens, to the commit­ War, during the miners' strildirect democracy. The amphithe­ Confronted with this tremendous explosion atre could seat up to 5000 people in its enor­ which it had neither foreseen nor been able to mous hemicyde, surmounted by three balcony control the Communist Party tried desperately tiers. As ofte� as not every seat was taken and to salvage what it could of its shattered reputa­ the crowd would flow up the aisles and onto the tion. Between 3 May and 13 May every issue of podium. A black flag and a red one hung over the simple wooden table at which the chairman sat. Students in front of the packed auditorium. The Having seen meetings of so break up in chaos it scene remains printed in my mind. is an amazing experience to see a meeting of "Explain to us", Cohn-Bendit said, "why the sooo get down to business. Real events deter­ Communist Party and the CGT told their mili· mined the themes and ensured that most of the tants to disperse · at Denfert Rochereau, why it talk was down to earth. prevented them joining up with us for a discus­ The topic having been decided, everyone sion at the Champ de Mars?". was allowed to speak. Most speeches were "Simple, really", sneered Catala. "The made from the podium but some from the body agreement concluded between the CGT, the of the hall or from the balconies. The loudspeak­ CFDT, the UN EF and the other sponsoring organ· er equipment usually worked but sometimes isations stipulated that dispersal would take didn't. Some speakers could command immedi­ place at a predetermined place. The Joint ate attention, without even raising their voices. Sponsoring Committee had not sanctioned any Others would instantly provoke a hostile further developments... " response by the stridency of their tone, their "A revealing answer", replied Cohn-Bendit, insincerity or their more or less obvious "the organisations hadn't foreseen that we attempts at manoeuvring the assembly. Anyone would be a million in the streets. But life is big­ who waffled, or reminisced, or came to recite a ger than the organisations. With a million people set-piece, or talked in terms of slogans, was almost anything is possible. You say the given short shrift by the audience, politically the Committee hadn't sanctioned anything further. most sophisticated I have ever seen. Anyone On the day of the Revolution, comrade, you will making practical· suggestions was listened to doubtless tell us to forego it 'because it hasn't attentively. So were those who sought to inter­ been sanctioned by the appropriate sponsoring pret the movement in terms of its own experi­ committee' ..." . ence or to point the way ahead. This brought the house down. The only ones Most speakers were granted three minutes. who didn't rise to cheer were a few dozen Some were allowed much more by popular Stalinists. Also, revealingly, those Trotskyists acclaim. The crowd itself exerted a tremendous who tacitly accepted the Stalinist conceptions control on the platform and on the speakers. A and whose only quarrel with the CP is that it had two-way relationship emerged very quickly. The excluded them from being one of the 'sponsor· political maturity of the Assembly was shown ing organisations'. most stril

- - ' Sorbonne, they also took over the 'Centre edge that they had no time to waste. They allfelt Censier' (the new Paris University Faculty of the pressing need for direct action propaganda, Letters). and that the urgency of the situation required of Censier is an enormous, ultra-modern, them that they transcend any doctrinal differ­ steel-concrete-and-glass affair situated at the ences they might have with one another. They south-east corner of the Latin Quarter. Its occu­ were all intensely political people. By and large, pation attracted less attention than did that of their politics were those of the new and increas­ the Sorbonne. lt was to prove, however, just as ingly important historical species: the ex-mem­ significant an event. For while the Sorbonne was bers of one or other revolutionary organisation. the shop window ofrevolutionary Paris .:.,with all What were their views? Basically they boiled that that implies in terms of garish display down to a few simple propositions. What was Censier was its dynamo, the place where things needed just now was a rapid, autonomous really got done. development of the working class struggle, the To many, the Paris May Days must have seen setting up of elected strike committees which an essentially nocturnal affair: nocturnal battles would link union and non-union members in all with the CRS, nocturnal barricades, nocturnal strike-bound plants and enterprises, regular debates in the great amphitheatres. But this was meetings of the strikers so that fundamental but one side of the coin. While some argued late decisions remained in the hands of the rank and into the Sorbonne night, others went to bed file, workers' defence committees to defend early for in the mornings they would be handing pickets from police intimidation, a constant diac out leaflets at factory gates or in the suburbs, logue with the revolutionary students aimed at · leaflets that had to be drafted, typed, duplicat­ restoring to the working class its own tradition ed, and the distribution of which had to be care· of direct democracy and its own aspiration to fully organised. This patient, systematic work self-management (auto-gestion), usurped by was done at Censier. lt contributed in no small the bureaucracies of the trade unions and the measure to giving new revolutionary conscious­ political parties. ness articulate expression. For a whole week the various Trotskyist and Soon after Censier had been occupied a Maoist factions didn't even notice what was group of activists commandeered a large part of going on at Censier. They spent their time in the third floor. This space was to be the head­ public and often acrimonious debates at the quarters of their proposed 'worker-student Sorbonne as to who could provide the best lead­ action committees'. The general idea was to ership. Meanwhile, the comrades at Censier establish links with groups of workers, however were steadily getting on with the work. The small, who shared the general libertarian-revo­ majority of them had 'been through' either lutionary outlook of this group .of students. Stalinist or TrotslGaullism as we meet a whole group of young workers, aged a meaningful way of life, 'accepted' by the about 18. They had been in the factory earlier in French people, has taken a tremendous knock. the day. But so has the image of the Communist Party as They tell us that at any given time, just over a viable challenge to the French establishment. 1ooo workers are engaged in the occupation. As far as the students are concerned the The strike started on the Thursday afternoon, at recent actions of the PCF (Parti Communiste about 2pm, when the group of youngsters from Francais) are such that the Party has probably shop 70 decided to down tools and spread into sealed its fate in this milieu for a generation to all parts of the factory asking their mates to do come. Among the workers the effects are more likewise. That same morning they had heard of difficult to assess and it would be premature to the occupation of Cleon and that the red flag attempt this assessment. All that can be said is was floating over the factory at Flins. There had that the effectsare sureto be profound although been a lot of talk about what to do. At a midday they will probably take some time to express meeting the CGT had spoken vaguely of a series themselves. The proletarian condition itself was of rotating strikes, shop by shop, to be initiated for a moment questioned. Prisoners who have the following day. had a glimpse of freedom do not readily resume The movement spread at an incredible pace. a life sentence. The youngsters went . round shouting The full implications of the role of the PCF "Occupation! Occupation!". Half the factory had and of the CGT have yet to be appreciated by stopped working before the union officials British revolutionaries. They need above all else realised what was happening. At about 4pm, to be informed. In this section we will document the role of the PCF to be best of our ability. lt is numbers (ltthe gates of factories and in .places important to realise that for every ounce of shit where immigrant workers live, distributing thrown at the students in its official publication, leaflets and other propaganda. These false revo­ the Party poured tons more over them at meet­ .lutionaries must be unmasked, for objectively ings or in private conversations. In the nature of they are serving the interests of the Gaullist things it is more difficult to document this kind power and of the big capitalist monopolies." of slander. I Monday 6May Friday3 Mdy The police have been occupying the Latin A meeting was called in the yard of the Sorbonne Quarter over the weekend. There have been big by UNEF, JCR, MAU and FER to protest at the clo­ student street demonstrations. At the call of sure of the Nanterre faculty. lt was attended by UNEF and SNESup 2o,ooo students marched militants of the Mouvement du 22 Mars. The from Denfert Rochereau to St Germain des Pres police were called in. by Rector Roche and calling for the liberation of the arrested workers activists from all these groups were arrested. and students. Repeated police assaults on the The UEC (Union des Etudiants demonstrators: 422 arrested, Boo wounded. Communistes) . didn't participate in this cam­ L' Humanite states: "One can dearly see paign. But it distributed a leaflet in the today the outcome of the adventurist actions of Sorbonne denouncing the activity of the 'grou­ the leftist, anarchist, Trotskyist and other puscules' (abbreviation for 'groupes min· iscu\es', groups. Objectively they are playing into the tl� group�. hands of the government... The discredit into "The leaders of the leftist groups are taking which they are bringing the student movement advantage of the shortcomings of the govern­ is helping feed the violent campaigns of the ment. They are exploiting student discontent reactionary press and of the ORTF, who by iden­ and trying to stop the functioning of the facul­ tifyingthe actions of these groups with those of ties. They are seeking to prevent the mass of the mass of the students are seeking to isolate students from working and from passing their the students from the mass of the population... " . exams. These false revolutionaries are acting objectively as allies of the Gaultist power. They Tu esday 7 May are acting as supporters of its policies, which are harmful to the mass of the students and in UNEF and SNESup call on their supporters to particular to those of modest origin". start an unlimited strike. Before discussions On the same day /' Humanite had written with the authorities begin they insist on: "Certain small groups (anarchists, Trotskyists, a) a stop to all legal action against Maoists) composed mainly of the sons of the big the students and workers who have been bourgeoisie and led by the German anarchist questioned, arrested or convicted in the Cohn-Bendit, are taking advantage of the short­ course of the demonstrations of the last comings of the gove rnment ... " etc ... (see above) . few days, The same issue of I' Humanite had published an b) the withdrawal of the police from article by Marchais, a member of the Party's the Latin Quarter and from all University Central Committee. This article was to be widely premises, distributed, as a leaflet, in factories and offices: c) a reopening of the closed faculties. "Not satisfied with the agitation they are In a statement showing how comparatively conducting in the student milieu - 13ndagitation out of touch they were with the deep motives of which is against the interests of the mass of the the student revolt, the 'Elected Communist students and favours fascist provocateurs - Representatives ofthe.Paris Region' declared (in these pseudo:revolutionaries now have the I' Humanite): nerve to seek to give lessons to the working "The shortage of credits, of premises, of class movement. We find them in increasing equipment, of teachers ... prevent three students out of four from completing their studies, with­ sponsible groups are assisting · the out mentioning all those. who never have access Establishment in its aims... What we must do is to higher education•••• This situation has caused ask for a bigger educational budget whith would profound and legitimate discontent among both ensure bigger student grants, the appointment students and teachers. lt has also favoured the of more and better qualified teachers, the build­ activity .of irresponsible groups whose concep­ ing of new faculties••• " tions can offerno solution to the students' prob­ The UJCF (Union , des )eunesses lems. lt is intolerable that the government Communistes de France) and the UJFF (Union should take advantage of the behaviour of an des ]eunes Filles Francaises) distribute a leaflet infinitesimal minority to stop the studies of tens in a number of lycees. L' Humanite quotes it of thousands of students a few days from their approvingly: "We protest against police violence · exams••• ". unleashed against the students. We demand the The same issue of I' Humanite carried .. a reopening of the Nanterre and of the Sorbonne statement from the 'Sorbonne-L.ettres' (t each­ and the liberation of all those arrested. We ers) branch of the Communist Party: "The denounce the Gaullist poweras being mainly (!) Communist teachers demand the liberation of responsible for this situation. We also denounce the arrested students and the reopening of the the adventurism of certain irresponsible groups Sorbonne. Conscious of our responsibilities, we and call on the lyceens to fight side by side with specify that this solidarity does· not mean that the working <;lass and its Communist Party••• " We agree with or support the slogans emanating from certain student organisations. We disap­ Monday 13 May prove of unrealistic, demagogic and anti-com­ munist slogans and of the unwarranted methods Over the weekend Pompidou has climbed down. of action advocated by various leftist groups". But the unions, the UNEF and the teachers have On the same day Georges Seguy, general decided to maintain their call for a one day gen­ secretary of the CGT, spoke to the Press about eral strike. the programme of the Festival of Working Class On its front page I' Humanite publishes, in Yo uth (scheduled for May 17-19, but subse­ enormous headlines, a call for the 24 hour strike quently cancelled): "The solidarity between stu­ followed by a statement from the Political dents, teachers and the working class is a famil­ Bureau: iar notion to the militants of the CGT••• lt is pre­ "The unity of the working class and of the cisely this tradition that compels us not to toler­ students threatens the regime••• This creates an ate any dubious or provocative elements, ele­ enormous problem. lt is essential that no provo­ ments which criticise the working class organi­ cation, .no diversion should be allowed to divert sations••. " any of the forces struggling against the regime or should give the government the flimsiest pre­ Wednesday 8 May text to distort the meaning of this great fight. The Communist Party associates itself without A big students demonstration called by the reservation with the just struggle of the stu: UNEF has taken place in the streets of Paris the dents••• " previous evening. The front page of l' Humanite carries a statement from the Party Secretariat: Wed nesday 15 May "The discontent of the . students is legitimate. But the situation favours adventurist activities, The enormous Monday demonstrations in Paris whose conception offers no perspective to the and other towns which incidentally prevented students and has nothing in common with a real, I' Humanite as well as other papers from appearc ly progressive and forward-looking policy... " ing on the Tuesday - were a tremendous suc­ In the same issue, J M Catala, general secre­ cess. In a sense they triggered off the 'sponta­ tary of the UEC (Union des Etudiants neous' wave of strikes which followed within a , Communistes) writes that: "the actions of irrl:!- day or two. L' Humanite publishes, on its front page, a statement issued the day before by the opment of the movement ..." Party's Political Bureau. Aftertaking all the cred­ The same issue of the paper devoted a it for May 13, the statement continues: whole page to warning students of the fallacy of

"The People of Paris marched for hours in any notions of 'student power' - en passant - the streets of the capital showing a power which attributing to the 'Mouvement du 22 Mars' a made any provocation impossible. The Party whole series of political positions they never organisations worked day and night to ensure held. that this great demonstration of workers, teach­ ers and students should take place in maximum Monday 20 May unity, strength and discipline... lt is now clear that the Establishment confronted with the The whole country is totally paralysed. The protests and collective action of all the main sec­ Communist Party is still warning about 'provoca­ tions of the population, will seek to divide us in tions'. The top right hand corner of I' Humanite the hope of beating us. lt will resort to all meth­ contains a box labelled "WARNING". "Leaflets ods, including provocation. The Political Bureau have been distributed in the Paris area calling warns workers and students against any adven­ for an insurrectionary general strike. lt goes turist endeavours which might, in the present without saying that such appeals have not been circumstances, dislocate the broad front of the issued by our democratic trade union organisa� struggle which is in the process of developing, tions. They are the work of provocateurs seeking and provide the Gaullist power with an unex­ to provide the government with a pretext for pected weapon with which to consolidate its intervE!ntion... The workers must be vigilant to shaky rule ... " defeat all such manoeuvres ..." In the same issue, Etienne Fajon of the Saturday 18 May Central Committee, continues the warnings: "The Establishment's main preoccupation at the Over the past 48 hours, strikes with factory moment is to divide the ranks of the working occupations have spread like a trail of gunpow­ class and to divide it from other sections of the der, from one corner of the country to the other. population ... Our political Bureau has warned The railways are paralysed, civil airports fly the workers and students, from the very beginning, red flag. (Provocateurs have obviously been at against adventurist slogans capable of dislocat­ world) ing the broad front of the struggle. Several L' Humanite publishes on its front page a provocations have thus been prevented. Our declaration from the National Committee of the political vigilance must clearly be maintained... " CGT: "From hour to hour strikes and factory The same issue devoted its central pages to occupations are spreading. This action, started an interview of Mr Georges Seguy, general sec­ on the initiative of the CGT and of other trade retary of the CGT, conducted over the Europe No. union organisations (sic!), creates a new situa­ 1 radio network. In these live interviews, various tion of exceptional importance .... Long-accumu­ listeners phoned questions in directly. The fol­ lated popular discontent is now finding expres­ lowing exchanges are worth recording: sion. The questions being asked must be Question "Mr Seguy, the workers on strike answered seriously and full notice taken of their are everywhere saying that they will go the importance. The evolution of the situation is giv­ whole hog. What do you mean by this? What are ing a new dimension to the struggle ... While mul­ your objectives?" tiplying its efforts to raise the struggle to the Answer "The strike is so powerful that the needed level, the National Committee warns all workers obviously mean to obtain the maximum CGT militants and local groups against any concessions at the end of such a movement. The attempts by outside groups 'to meddle in the whole hog for us trade unionists, means winning conduct of the struggle, and against all acts of the demands for which we have always fought, provocation which might assist the forces of but which the government and the employers repression in their attempts to thwart the devel- have always refused to consider. They have opposed an obtuse intransigence to the propos­ These political "Organisations are not your busi· als for negotiations which we have repeatedly ness, of course, but the CGT is a revolutionary made. organisation. You must bring out your revolu­ The whole hog means a general rise in tionary flag. The workers are astounded to see wages (no wages less than 6oo francs per you so timid". month), guaranteed employment, an earlier Answer "While you were bathing in the retirement age, reduction of working hours with­ Odeon fever, I was in the factories. Amongst out loss of wages and the defence and extension workers. I assure you that the answer I am giving of trade union rights within the factory. I am not you is the answer of a leader of a great trade putting these demands in any particular order union, which claims to have assumed all its because we attach the same importance to all of responsibilities, but which does not confuse its them". wishes with reality". Question "If I am not mistaken the statutes A caller "I would like to speak to Mr Seguy. of the CGT declare its aims to be the overthrow My name is Duvauchel. I am the director of the of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. Sud Aviation factory at Nantes". In the present circumstances, that you have Seguy "Good morning, sir". yourself referred to as 'exceptional' and 'impor· Duvauchel "Good morning, Mr General tant', why doesn't the CGT seize this unique Secretary. I would like to know what you think of chance 10f calling for its fundamental objec­ the fact that for the last four days I have been tives?" sequestrated, together with about 20 other Answer "This is a very interesting question. managerial staff, inside the Sud Aviation factory I like it very much. lt is true that the CGT offers at Nantes". the workers a concept of trade unionism that we Seguy "Has anyone raised a hand against consider the most revolutionary insofar as its you?" final objective is the end of the employing class Duvauche/ "No. But I am prevented from and of wage labour. lt is true that this is the first leaving, despite the fact that the general manag­ of our statutes. it remains fundamentally the er of the firm has intimated that the firm was E CGT's objective. But can the present movement prepared to make positive proposals as soon as reach this objective? If it became obvious that it free access to its factories could be resumed, could, we would be ready to assume our respon­ and first of all to its managerial staff". sibilities. lt remains to be seen whether all the Seguy "Have you asked to leave the facto- social strata involved in the present movement ry?" are ready to go that far". Duvauche/ "Yes!" Question "Since last week's events I have Seguy "Was permission refused?" gone everywhere where people are arguing. I Duvauchel "Yes!" went this afternoon to the Odeon Theatre. Seguy "Then I must refer you to the declara­ Masses of people were discussing there. I can tion that I made yesterday at the CGT's press assure you that all the classes who suffer from conference. I stated that I disapproved of such the present regime were represented there. activities. We are taking the necessary steps to When I asked whether people thought that the see that they are not repeated". movement should go further than the small But enough is enough. The Revolution itself demands put forwards by the trade unions for will doubtless be denounced by the Stalinists as the last 10 or 20 years, I brought the house a provocation! By way of an epilogue it is worth down. I therefore think that it would be criminal recording that at a packed meeting of revolu· to miss the present opportunity. lt would be tionary students, held at the Mutualite on criminal because sooner or later this will have to Thursday 9 May, a spokesman of the Trotskyist done. The conditions of today might allow us to organisation Communiste lnternationaliste do it peacefully and calmly and will perhaps could think of nothing better to do than call a never come back. I think this call must be made meeting to pass a resolution calling on Seguy to by you and the other political organisations. call a general strike!!! France, 1968 argued, applied. Language, rendered stale by decades of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, eviscer­ This has undoubtedly been the greatest revolu­ ated by those who manipulate it for advertising tionary upheaval in Western Europe since the purposes, suddenly reappeared as something days of the Paris Commune. Hundreds of thou­ new and fresh. People reappropriated it in all its sands of students have fought pitched battles fullness. Magnificently apposite and poetic slo­ with the police. Nine million workers have been gans emerged from the anonymous crowd. on strike. The red flag of revolt has flown over Children explained to their elders what the func­ occupied factories, universities, building sites, tion of education should be. The educators were shipyards, primary and secondary schools, pit educated. Within a few days, young people of 20 heads, railway stations, department stores, attained a level of understanding and a political docked transatlantic liners, theatres, hotels. The and tactical sense which many who had been in Paris Opera, the Folies Bergeres and the build­ the revolutionary movement for 30 years or ing of the National Council for Scientific more were still sadly lacking. Research were taken over, as were the head­ The tumultuous development of the stu­ quarters of the French Football Federation - dents' struggle triggered off the first factory whose aim was clearly perceived as being 'to occupations. lt transformed both the relation of preventordinar y footballers enjoying football'. forces in society and the image, in people's Virtually every layer of French society has minds, of established institutions and of estab· been involved to some extent or other. Hundreds lished leaders. it compelled the State to reveal of thousands of people of all ages have dis­ both its oppressive nature and its fundamental cussed every aspect of life in packed-out, non­ incoherence. lt exposed the utter emptiness of stop meetings in every available schoolroom Government, Parliament, Administration • and of and lecture hall. Boys of 14 have invaded a pri­ ALL political parties. Unarmed students had mary school for girls shouting "Liberte pour \es forced the Establishment to drop its mask, to filles". Even such traditionally reactionary sweat with fear, to resort to the police club and enclaves as the Faculties of Medicine and Law to the gas grenade. Students finally compelled have been shaken from top to bottom, their hal­ the bureaucratic leaderships of the 'working lowed procedures and institutions challenged class organisations' to reveal themselves as the and fo und wanting. Millions have taken a hand ultimate custodians of the established order. in making history. This is the stuff of revolution. But the revolutionary movement did still Under the influence of the revolutionary stu­ more. lt fought its battles in Paris, not in some dents, thousands began to query the whole prin­ under-developed country, exploited by imperial­ ciple of hierarchy. The students had questioned ism. In a glorious few weeks the actions of stu­ it ·where it seemed the most 'natural': in the dents and young workers dispelled the myth of realms of teaching and knowledge. They pro­ the well-organised, well-oiled modern capitalist claimed that democratic self-management was society, from which radical conflict had been possible and to · prove it began to practice it eliminated and in which only marginal problems themselves. They denounced the monopoly of remained to be solved. Administrators who had information and produced millions of leaflets to been administering everything were suddenly break it. They attacked some of the main pillars shown to have had a grasp of nothing. Planners of contemporary 'civilisation': the barriers who had planned everything showed them­ between manual workers and intellectuals, the selves incapable of ensuringthe endorsement of consumer society, the 'sanctity' of the university their plans by those to whom they applied. and of other founts of capitalist culture and wis­ This most modern movement should allow dom. real revolutionaries to shed a number of the ide· Within a matter of days the tremendous cre­ ological encumbrances which in the past ham· ative potentialities of the people suddenly pered revolutionary activity. it wasn't hunger erupted. The boldest and most realistic ideas which drove the students to revolt. There wasn't ahd they are usually the same · were advocated, an 'economic crisis' even in the loosest sense of the word. The revolt had nothing to do with order. The functioning of bureauc�afic capitalism 'under-consumption' or with . 'over-production'. creates the conditions within which revolution­ The 'falling rate of profit' just didn't come into ary consciousness may appear. These condi­ the picture. Moreover, the student movement tions are an integral part of the whole alienating wasn't based on economic demands. On the hierarchical and oppressive social structure. contrary, the movement only found its . real Whenever people struggle, sooner or later they stature, and only evoked its tremendous are compelled to question the whole of that response, when it went beyond the economic social structure: . demands within which official student unionism These are the ideas . which many of us in had for so long soughtto contain it (incidentally Solidarity have. long subscribed to. They were with the blessing of all the political parties and developed at length in some of Paul Card an's 'revolutionary' groups of the 'left'). And con­ pamphlets. Writing in Le Mon9e (20 May 1968) E versely it was by confining the workers' struggle Morin admits that what is happening today in to purely economic objectives that the trade France is "a blinding resurrection: the resurrec­ union bureaucrats have so far succeeded in tion of that libertarian strand which seeks con­ coming to the assistance ofthe re_gime. ciliation with marxism, in a fo rmula of which The present movement has shown that the Socialisme ou Barbarie had provided a first syn­ fundamental contradiction of modern bureau­ thesis a few years ago ... " As after every verifica­ cratic capitalism isn't the 'anarchy of the mar­ tion of basic concepts in the .crucible of real ket'. lt isn't the 'contradiction between the events, many will proclaim that these had forces of production and the property relations'. always been their views. This, of course isn't 1 The central conflict to which all others are relat­ true. The point however i.sn't to lay claims to a ed is the conflict between order-givers kind of copyright in the realm of correct revolu­ (dirigeants) and order-takers (executants). The tionary ideas. We welcome converts, fro m what- · insoluble contradiction which tearsthe guts out ever source and however belated. of modern capitalist society is the one which We can't deal here at length with what is compels it to exclude people from the manage­ now an important problem in France, namely the ment of their own activities and which at the creation of a new kind of revolutionary move­ same time compels it to solicit their participa­ ment. Things would indeed have been different tion, without which .it would collapse. These ten­ if such a movement had existed, strong enough dencies. find expression on the one hand ·in the to outwit the bureaucratic manoeuvres •. alert attempt of the bureaucrats to convert men into enough day by day to expose the duplicity of the objects (by violence, mystification, new manipu­ 'left' leaderships, deeply enough implanted to lation techniques - or 'economic carrots') and, explain to the workers the real meaning.of the on the other hand, in mankind's refusal to allow students' struggle, to propagate the idea . of itself to be treated in this way. autonomous strike committees (linking up union The French events show clearly something and non-union members), of workers' manage­ that all revolutions have shown, .but which ment of production and of workers'. councils. appc;trently has again and again to be learned Many things which could have been done anew. There is no 'in-built revolutionary per­ weren't done because there wasn't S!Jcha move­ spective', no 'gradual increase of contrad.ic­ ment: The way the students' own struggle was tions', no . 'progressive development of a revolu­ unleashed shows. that such an 'organisation tionary mass consciousness', What are given are could have played a most important catalytic the contradictions and the conflicts we have role without automatically. becoming a bureau­ described and the fact that modern bureaucratic cratic 'leadership'. But such regrets are futile. society more or less inevitably produces period­ The non-existence of such a movement is no ic 'accidents' which disrupt its functioning. accident. If it had been formed during the previ­ These both provoke · popular interventions and ous period it certainly wouldn't have been the provide the people with opportunities for assert­ kind of movem�nt of which we are speaking. ing themselves and for changing the social Even taking the 'best' of the small organisation - and multiplying its numbers a hundredfold - get beyond bureaucratic organisation by deny­ wouldn't have met the requirements of the cur­ ing all organisation. One doesn't challenge the rent situation. When confronted with the test of sterile rigidity of finished programmes by refus­ events all the 'left' groups just continued playing ing to define oneself in terms of aims and meth­ their old gramophone records. Whatever their ods. One doesn't refute dead dogma by the con­ merits as depositories of the cold ashes of the demnation of all theoretical reflection. The stu� revolution-a task they have now carried out fo r dents and young workers can't just stay where several decades - they proved incapable of they are. To accept these 'contradictions' as valid snapping out of their old ideas and routines, and as something which cannot be transcended incapable of learning or forgetting anything. 2 is to accept the essence of bureaucratic capital­ The new revolutionary movement will have ist ideology. lt is to accept the prevailing philos­ to be built from the new elements (students and ophy and the prevailing reality. ltis to integrate workers) who have understood the real signifi­ the revolution into an established historical cance of current events. The revolution must order. step into the great political void revealed by the If the revolution is only an explosion lasting crisis of the old society. lt must develop a voice, a few days (or weeks), the established order - a face, a paper - and it must do it soon. whether it knows it or not - will be able to cope. We can understand the reluctance of some What is more - at a deep level - class society students to form such an organisation. They feel even needs such jolts. This kind of 'revolution' there is a contradiction between action and permits class society to survive by compelling it thought, between spontaneity and organisation. to transform and adapt itself. This is the real Their hesitation is fed by the whole of their pre­ danger today. Explosions which disrupt the vious experience. They have seen how thought imaginary world in which alienated societies could become sterilising dogma, organisation tend to live - and bring them momentarily down become bureaucracy or lifeless ritual, speech to earth - help them eliminate outmoded meth­ become a means of mystification, a revolution­ ods of domin,ation and evolve new and more ary idea become a rigid and stereotyped pro­ flexible ones. gramme. Through their actions, their boldness, Action or thought? For revolutionary social­ their reluctance to consider long-term aims, they ists the problem is not to make a synthesis of have broken out of this straight-jacket. But this these two preoccupations of the revolutionary isn't enough. students. lt is to destroy the social context in Moreover many of them had sampled the which such false alternatives find root. traditional 'left' groups. In all their fundamental aspects these groups remain trapped within the Solidarity, 1968 ideological and organisational frameworks of bureaucratic capitalism. They have programmes fixed once and for all, leaders who utter fixed 1 We recall for instance a long review of Modern speeches, whatever the changing reality around Capitalism and Revolution in International Socialism (No 22) where, under the heading 'Return to Utopia', them, organisational form which mirror those of Card an was deemed to have "nothing to say in relation existing society. Such groups reproduce within to theory". His prediction that people would eventually their own ranks the division between order-tak­ reject the emptiness of the consumer society were ers and order-givers, between those who 'know' described as "mere moralising" and as "doing creditto and those who don't, the separation between a Christian ascetic". The authors should perhaps visit the new monastery at the Sorbonne. scholastic pseudo-theory and real life. They would even like to impose this division into the working class, whom they aspire to lead, 2 We are not primarily referring to trotskyist groups because (and I was told this again and again) such as the FER, which on the night of the barricades, "the workers are only capable of developing a despite repeated appeals for help, refused to cancel trade union consciousness". their mass meeting at the Mutualite or to send rein­ forcements to assist students and workers already But these students are wrong. One doesn't engaged in a bitter fight with the CRS on the barricades . of the rue Gay lussac. We are not referring to their leader Chisseray who claimed it was "necessary above all to preserve the revolutionary vanguard from an unnecessary massacre". Nor are we referring to the repeated maoist criticisms of the students' struggle, uttered as late as 7 May. What we are referring to is the inability of any Trotskyist or Maoist group to raise the real issues demanded in a revolutionary situation, ie to call for workers' management of production and the formation of workers' councils. None of these groups even touched on the sort of question the revolutionary students were discussing day and night: the relations of production in the capitalist factory, alienation at work whatever the level of wages, the division between ' leaders and led within the factory hierarchy or within the 'working class' organisations themselves. All that Humanite Nouvel/e could counterpose to the constant­ ly demobilising activities of the CGT was the immense­ ly demystifying slogan: "Vive le CGT" ("The· CGT isn't re ally what it appears to be, comrade"), All that Voix Ouvriere could counterpose to the CGT's demand for a minimum wage of 6oo fra ncs was... a minimum wage of 1000 francs. This kind of revolutionary auction (in pure­ ly economic demands), after the workers had been occupying the fa ctories for several weeks, shows the utter bankruptcy of revolutionaries who fa il to recog­ nise a revolution. Avant Garde correctly attacked some of the ambiguities of auto-gestion (self-management) as advocated by the CFDT, but fa iled to point out the deeply revolutionary implications of the slogan. Wo rkers Beware! Text of a CGT poster, placarded all over Boulogne Billancourt:

For some months the most diverse publications have been distributed by elements recruit- ed in a milieu foreign to the working class. . The authors of these articles remain anonymous most of the time, a fact which .fully illustrates their dishonesty. They give the most weird and tempting titles to their papers,

the better to mislead: Luttes Ouvrieres; Servir le Peuple; Unite et Tra vail*; · Lutte Co mmuniste; Revoltes; Voix Ourriere; Un Groupe d' Ouvriers. The titles may vary but the content has a common objective: to lead the workers away from the CGT and to provoke divisions in their ranks, in order to weaken them. At night, their commandos tear up our posters. Every time they distribute something at the gates, the police are not far off, ready to protect their distribution, as was the case recently at LMT. Recently they attempted to invade the offices of the Labour Exchange at Boulogne. Their activities are given an exaggerated publicity on the Gaullist radio and in the columns of the bourgeois press. This warning is no doubt superfluous for the majority of Renault workers, who, in the past, have got to know about this kind of agitation. On the other hand the younger work­ ers must be told that these elements are in the service of the bourgeoisie, who have always made use of these pseudo-revolutionaries whenever the rise of united left forces has presented a threat to its privileges. lt is therefore important not to allow these people to come to the gates of our factory, to sully our trade union organisation and our CGT militants. who are tirelessly exerting themselves in defence of our demands and to bring about unity. These elements always reap a fat reward at the end of the day fo r their dirty work, and for the loyal services given to the bosses (some now occupy high positions in the management of the factory). This having been said, the CGT (Renault} Committee calls on the workers to continue the fight for their demands, to intensify their efforts to ensure greater unity of the trade union and democratic forces, and to strengthen the ranks of the CGT struggling for these noble objectives:

Th e Tra de Union Bureau, CGT, Renault

*This is a fascist publication; all the others are 'left' public'ations. A typical amalgam technique.

® The Decline & Fall of the "Spectacular" Commodity- Economy

From the 13th to the 16th of August, 1965, the order", calling upon catholics to oppose the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident plundering and the apparently unjustified vio­ involving traffic police and pedestrians devel­ lence. All the theorists and "spokesmen" of the oped into two days of spontaneous riots. The international Left (or, rather of its nothingness) forces of order, despite repeated reinforcement, deplored the irresponsibility and disorder, the were unable to gain control of the streets. By the pillaging and above all the fact that arms and third day, the negroes had armed themselves by alcohol were the first targets for plunder; finally, pillaging such arms shops as were accessible, that 2,ooo fires had been started by the Watts and were so enabled to open fire on police heli­ gasoline throwers to light up their battle and copters. Thousands of soldiers - the whole mili­ their ball. But who was there to defend the riot­ tary weight of an infantry division, supported by ers of Los Angeles in the terms they deserve? tanks - had to be thrown into the struggle before Well, we shall. Let us leave the economists to the Watts area could be surrounded, after which grieve over the 27 million dollars lost, and the it took several days and much street fighting for town planners over one of their most beautiful it to be brought under control. The rioters didn't supermarkets gone up in smoke, and Mclntyre hesitate to plunder and burn the shops of the over his slain Deputy Sheriff; let the sociologists area. The official figures testify to 32 dead, weep over the absurdity and the intoxication of including 27 negroes, plus Soo wounded and this rebellion. The job of a revolutionary journal 3,ooo arrested. is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, Reactions on all sides were invested with but to help uncover their just reasons: to explain clarity: the revolutionary act always discloses theoretically the truth for which such practical the reality of existing problems, lending an action expresses the search. unaccustomed and unconscious truth to the var­ In Algiers in July, 1965, following ious postures of its opponents.Police Chief Boumedienne's coup d' etat, the situationists William Parker, for example, refused all media­ published an Address to the Algerians and to tion proposed by the main Negro organisations, revolutionaries all over the world, which inter- . asserting correctly that the rioters had no preted conditions in Algeria and in the rest of the leader. Evidently, as the blacks were without a world as a whole; among their examples, they leader, this was the moment of truth for both evoked the American negroes, who if they could parties. What did Roy Wilkins, general secretary "affirm themselves significantly" would unmask of the NAACP, want at that moment ? He the contradictions of the most advanced of capi­ declared that the riots should be put down "with talist systems. Five weeks later, this significance all the force necessary". And the Cardinal of Los found an expression on the street. Theoretical Angeles, Mclntyre, who protested loudly; had criticism of modern society, in its advanced not protested against the violence of the repres­ forms, and criticism in actions of the same soci­ sion, which one would have supposed the subtle ety, co-exist at this moment: still separated but thing to do, at the moment of the aggiornamen­ both advancing towards the same reality, both to of the Roman church; instead, he protested in talking of the same thing. These two critiques the most urgent tones about "a premeditated are mutually explanatory, each being incpmpre­ revolt against the rights of one's . neighbour; hensible without the other. Our theory of "sur­ respect for the law and the maintenance of vival" and the "spectacle" is illuminated and ver- ified by these actions so unintelligible to the were in their path alone, attacking only the American false cons,ciousness. One day these white policemen: similarly, black solidarity did actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory. not extend to black shopkeepers, not even to Up to this time the Negro "Civil Rights" black car-drivers. Even Luther King, in Paris last demonstrations. had been kept by their leaders October, had to admit that the limits of his com­ within the limits of a legal system which over­ petence had been overshot: "They were not race looked the most appaling violence on the part of riots," he said, "but one class." the police and the racists: in Alabama the previ­ The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion ous March for instance, at the time of the against commodities and of worker consumers Montgomery March, and as if this scandal was hierarchically subordinated to commodity val­ not sufficient, a discreet agreement between the ues. The negroes of Los Angeles • like the young Federal government, Governor Wallace and delinquents of all advanced countries, but more Pastor King had led the Selma Marchers of the radically because at the level of a class globally 1oth of March to stand back at the first request, deprived of a future, a sector of the proletariat in dignity and prayer. Thus the confrontation unable to believe in significant chance of inte· expected by the crowd had been reduced to the gration and promotion • take modern capitalist charade of a merely potential confrontation. In propaganda literally, with its display of afflu­ that moment, Non-Violence reached the pitiful ence. They want to possess immediately all the limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to objects shown and made abstractly accessible: the enemies' blows, then force your moral they want to make use of them. That is why they grandeur to the point of sparing him the trouble reject the values of exchange, the commodity­ of using more force. But the basic fact is that the re ality which is its mold, its purpose and its final civil rights movement, by remaining within the goal, which has prese/ected everything. Through law, only posed legal problems. lt is logical to theft and gift they retrieve a use which at once make an appeal to the law legally. What is not gives the lie to ·the oppressive rationality of logical is to appeal legally against a patent ille­ commodities, disclosing their relations and galityas if this contradiction would disappear if invention to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The pointed out. for it is clear that the superficial plunder of the Watts sector was the most simple and outrageously visible illegality • from which possible realisation of the hybrid principle: "To the blacks still suffer in many American states - each according to his (false) needs" • needs has its roots in a socio-ecoriomic contradiction determined and produced by the economic sys· which existing laws simply cannot touch, and tem, which the act of pillaging rejects. which no future juridical law will be able to get But the fact that the vaunting of abundance rid of in face of more basic cultural laws of the is taken at its face value and discovered in the society: and it is against these that the negroes immediate instead of being eternally pursued in are at last daring to raise their voices and. asking the course of alienated labour and in the face of the right to live. In reality, the American negro increasing but unmet social needs • this fact wants the total subversion of that Society • or means that real needs are expressed in carnival, nothing. playful affirmation and the potlatch of destruc· The problem of this necessity for subversion tion. The man who destroys commodities shows arises of its own accord the moment the blacks his human superiority over commodities. He start using subversive means: the changeover to frees himself from the arbitrary forms which such methods happens on the level of their daily cloak his real needs. The flames of Watts con· life, appearing at one and the same time as the sumed the system of consumption! The theftof most accidental and the most objectively justi· large refrigerators by people with no electricity, fied development. This issue is no longer the or with their electricity cut off, gives the best status of the American negro, but the status of possible metaphor for the life of affluence trans­ America, even if this happens to find its first formed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer expression among the negroes. This was not a bought, the commodity lies open to criticism racial conflict: the rioters left certain whites that and modification, and this under whichever of its forms it may appear. Only so long as it is paid for is also here that they are furthest behind that with money, as a status symbol of survival, can it high point of affluence which is California. be worshiped fetishistically. Pillage is the natu­ Hollywood, the pole of the worldwide spectacle, ral response to the affluent society: the afflu­ is in their immediate vicinity. They are promised ence, however, is by rio means natural or human that, with patience, they will join in America's -it is simply abundance of goods. Pillage, more­ prosperity, but they realise that this prosperity is over, which instantly destroys commodities as not a static sphere but rather a ladder without such, discloses the ultima ratio of commodities, end. The higher they climb, the further they get namely, the army, the police imd the other spe­ from the top, because they don't have a fair cialised detachments which have the monopoly start, because they are less qualified and thus of armed force within the State. What is a police­ more numerous among the unemployed, and man ? He is the active servant of commodities, finally because the hierarchy which crushes the man in complete submission to commodi­ them is not one based simply on buying power ties, whose job is to insure that a given product as a pure economic fact: an essential inferiority of human labour remains a commodity with the is imposed on them in every area of daily life by magical property of having to be paid for instead the customs and prejudices of a society in which of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle - a mute, all human power is based on buying power. So passive insensible thing, itself in submission to long as the human riches of the American negro the first cornerto make use of it. Over and above are despised and treated as criminal, monetary the indignity of depending on a policeman, the riches will never make him acceptable to the blacks reject the indignity of depending on com­ alienated society of America: individual wealth modities. The Watts youth, having no future in may make a rich negro but the negroes as a market terms, grasped another quality of the whole must represent poverty iri a society of present, and the truth of that present was so hierarchised wealth. Every witness noted this irresistible that it drew on the whole population, cry which proclaims the fundamental meaning of women, children, and even sociologists who the rising: 'This is the Black Revolution, and we happened to find themselves on the scene. A want the world to know it!" Freedom now! is the young negro sociologist of the district, Bobbi password of all historical revolutions, but here Hollon, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in for the first time it is not poverty but material October: "Before, people were ashamed to say abundance which must be controlled according they came from Watts. They'd mumble it. Now, to new laws. The control of abundance is not just they say it with pride. Boys who always went changing the way it is shared out, but re defining around with their shirts open to the waist, and its every orientation, superficial and profound who'd have cut you into strips in half a second, alike. This is the first skirmish of an enormous used to apply here every morning. They organ­ struggle, infinite in its implications. ised the distribution of food. Of course it's no The blacks are not isolated in their struggle good pretending the food wasn't plundered ... All because a new proletarian consciousness - the that Christian blah has been used too long consciousness of not being the master of one's against the negroes. These people could plun­ activity, of one's life, in the slightest degree - is der for ten years and they wouldn't get back half taking form in America among strata whose the money that has been stolen from them all refusal of modern capitalism resembles that of these years. Myself, I'm just a little black girl." the negroes. Indeed, the first phase of the negro Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash from struggle has been the signal to a movement of her sandals the blood that splashed them during opposition which is spreading. In December, the rioting, adds: "All the world looks to Watts 1964 the students of Berkeley, frustrated in their now." participation in the civil rights movement, ended How do 'men make history, starting from the up by calling a strike to oppose the system of conditions pre-established to persuade them California's "multiversity", and by extension the not to take a hand in it? The Los Angeles negroes social system of the U.S., in which they are allot­ are better paid than any others in the U.S., but it ted such a passive role. Immediately, drinking and drug orgies were uncovered among the siu­ to-be-desired is a colony of the white one, and dents -the sam·e supposed activities for which thus they see through the lie c;>fthis total eco­ the negroes have long been castigated. This nomico-cultural spectacle more quickly: By generation of students has since invented a new wanting to participate really and immediately in form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, affluence - and this is an official value of every the teach-in, a form taken up by the Edinburgh American - they demand the equalitarian reali­ students on October 2oth apropos of the sation of the American spectacle of everyday Rhodesian crisis.' This clearly . imperfect and life: they demand that the half-heavenly, half­ ·primitive type of opposition represents the terrestrial values of this spectacle be put to the stage of discussion which refuses to be limited test. But'it is of the essence of the spectacle that . in time (academically), arid in this its logical out­ it cannot be made real either immediately or come is a progression to practical activity. Also equally; and this, not even fo r the whites. (In in o.ctober, thousands of demonstrators fact, .the function of the negro in terms of the appeared in the streets of . Berkeley and New spectacle is to serve as the perfect prod: in the York, their cries echoing those. of the Watts riot: race for riches, such underprivilege is an incite­ ers: "Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!" ment to ambition.) ln taking the capiialist spec­ The whites, becoming more radical, have tacle at its face value the negroes are already stepped· outside the law: "courses" are given on rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a how to defraud the recruiting boards, draft cards drug for slaves. it is not supposed to be taken lit­ are burned and the act televised. ln the affluent erally, but followed at just a few paces' distance; society, disgust for affluence and fo r its price is if it were not for this albeit tiny distance, it would Onding expression. The spectacle is being .spat become total mystification. The fact is that in the on by an· advanced sector whose autonomous U.S. today the whites are enslaved to commodi­ activity denies its values. The classical proletari­ ties while the negroes negate them. The blacks at, to the extent to which it had been provision­ ask for more .than the whites - that is the core of ally integrated into the capitalist system, had an insoluble problem, or rather one only soluble itself failed to integrate the negroes (several Los through the dissolution of the white social sys­ Angeles unions refused negroes until 1959); tem. This is why those whites who want· to now, the negroes are the rallying point for all escape their own servitude must needs rally to those who refuse the logic of integration into the negro cause, not in a solidarity based on that system - integration into capitalism being of colour, obviously, but in a global rejection of course the ne plus ultra of all integration prom­ commodities and, in the last analysis, of the ised. And comfort will never be comfortable State. The economic and social backwardness of enough for those who seek what is not on the the negroes allows them to see what the white market - or rather, that which the market elimi­ consumer is, and their justified contempt for the nates. The level reached by the technology of white is nothing but contempt for any passive the most privileged becomes an insult - and one consumer. Whites who cast offtheir role have no more easily expressed than that . most basic chance unless they link their struggle more and insult, which is reification. The Los Angeles more to the negro's struggle, uncovering his real rebellion is the first in history able to justify and coherent reasons and supporting them until itself by the argument that there was no air con­ the end. If such an accord were to be ruptured at ditioning during a heatwave. a radical point in the battle, the result would be The American negro has his own particular the. formation of a black nationalism.· and a con­ spectacle, his press, magazines, coloured film frontation between the two splinters exactly stars, and if the blacks reaiise this, if they spew after the fashion of the prevailing system. A out this spectacle for its phoneyness, as an phase of mutual extermination is the other pos­ expression of their unworthiness, it is because sible outcome of the present situation, once res­ they see it to tie a m_inority spectacle - nothing ignation is overcome. butthe appendage of a general spectacle. They · The attempts to build a black nationalism, recognise that-this parade of their consumption- separatist and pro-African as, they are, are dreams g1v1ng no answer to the reality of repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies and oppression The American negro has no father­ the fact that the whole world strength of com­ land. He is in his own country and he is alienat­ modities is directed blindly and automatically ed: so is the rest of the population, but the towards their protection, leads us to see - the blacks differ insofar as they are aware of it. ln moment we engage on a negating praxis - that this sense, they are not the most backward sec­ every hierarchy is absurd. tor of their society, but the most advanced. They The rational world produced by the industri­ are the negation at work, "the bad aspect pro­ al revolution has rationally liberated individuals ducing the movement which makes history by from their local and national limitations, and setting the struggle in motion". (Marx: The related them on a world scale; but denies reason Poverty of Philosophy) . Africa has nothing to do by separating them once more, according to a with it. hidden logic which finds its expression in mad The American negroes are the product of ideas and grotesque value-systems. Man, modern industry, just as are electronics, adver­ estranged from his world, is everywhere sur­ tising or the cyclotron. And they carry within rounded by strangers. The barbarian is no longer them its contradictions. These are the men at the ends of the earth, he is on the spot, made whom the spectacle-paradise must integrate into a barbarian by this very same forced partic­ and repulse simultaneously, so that the antago­ ipation in hierarchised consumption. The nism between the spectacle and the real activity humanism cloaking.all this is opposed to man, of men surrenders completely to their enuncia­ and the negation of his activity and his desires; tions. The spectacle is universal in the same way it is the humanism of commodities, expressing '· as the commodities. But as the world of com­ the benevolence of the parasite, merchandise, modities is based in class conflict, commodities towards the men off whom it feeds. For those are themselves hierarchic. The necessity of com­ who reduce men to objects, objects seem to modities · and hence of the spectacle whose job acquire human qualities, and manifestations of it is to inform about commodities - to be at once real human activity appear as unconscious ani­ universal and hierarchic leads to a universal mal behaviour. Thus the chief humanist of Los hierarchisation. But as this hierarchisation must Angeles, William Parker, can say: "They started remain unavowed, it is expressed il'lthe form of behaving like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo." unacknowledgeable hierarchic value judge­ When the state of emergency was declared ments, in a world of reasonless rationalisation. by the California authorities, the insurance com­ lt is this process which creates racialisms every­ panies recalled that they do not cover risks at where: the English Labour government has just that level: they guarantee nothing beyond sur­ restrained coloured immigration, while the vival. Overall, the American negroes can rest industrially advanced countries of Europe are assured that, if they keep quiet, their survival is once again becoming racialist as they import guaranteed; and capitalism has become suffi­ their sub-proletariat from the Mediterranean ciently centralised and entrenched in the State area, so exerting a colonial exploitation within to distribute "welfare" to the poorest. But sim­ their borders. And if Russia continues to be anti­ ply because they are behind in the process of semitic, it is because she is still a society of hier­ intensification of socially organised survival, the archy and commodities, in which labour must be blacks present problems of life and what they bought and sold as a commodity. To gether, com­ demand is not to survive but to live. The blacks modities and hierarchies are constantly renew­ have nothing to insure of their own; they have to ing their alliance, which extends its influence by destroy all the forms of security and private modifying its form: it is seen just as easily in the insurance known up to now. They appear as relations between trade unionist and worker as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies between two car owners with artificially distin· · - not of the vast majority of Americans - but of guished models. This is the original sin of com­ the alienated way of life of all modern society; modity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois the most advanced country industrially only reason, whose legacy is bureaucracy. But the shows us the road that will be everywhere fol- !owed unless the system is overthrown. Certain black .nationalist .extremists, in showing why they could never accept less than a separate State, have advanced the argu ment that American society, even if it someday con· cedes total civic and economic equality, will never get around to accepting mixed marriages. it is therefore this American society which must disappear, not only in America but everywhere in the world. The end of all racial prejudice (like the end of so many other prejudices such as sexual ones related to inhibitions) can only lie beyond "marriage" itself: that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which is questioned by the American negroes). This is the rule as much in Russi11 as in the United States, as a model of hierarchic re la· tions and of the stability of an inherited power (be it money or soda-bureaucratic status). lt is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, is rising again as a force of opposition, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time, its "Lincoln Battalions" must understand the full signifi· cance of the struggle in which they engage, sup· porting it up to the end of its universal implica· tions. The "excesses" of Los Angeles are no more a political error in the Black Revolt than the armed resistance of the P.O.U.M in Barcelona, May 1937, was a betrayal of the anti-Franquist war. A rebellion against the spectacle is situated on the level of the totality, because • even were it only to appear in a single district, Watts · it is a protest by men against the inhuman life, because it begins at the level of the real single individual, and because community, from which the individual in revolt is separated, is the true social nature of man, human nature: the positive transcendence of the spectacle.

Guy Debord Situationist International, December 1965

Documents

Communique ING DURING THE 6 MAY RIOT

Comrades, Occupation Committee of the Autonomous and Considering that the Sud-Aviation factory at Popular Sorbonne University, 26 May 1968, 7 .oo Nantes has been occupied' for two days by the pm workers and students of that �ity, and thattoday the movement is spreading to several factories (Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne Minimum definition of revolutionary ·in Paris, Renault in Cleon, etc), THE SORBONNE organisations · . OCCUPATION COMMITTEE calls fo r the immedi' ate occupation of all the factories in France and Since the only purpose of a revolutionary organ­ the formation of Workers Councils. isation is the abolition 'of all existing classes.in a Comrades, spread and reproduce this . way that does not bring about a new division of · appeal as quickly as possible. society, we consider any organisation revolu­ tionary which consistent/yand effectively works toward the internatfonal ,realisation of the Sorbonne, 26 May 1968, J.JO pm . absolute power of the workers councils, as pre­

· figured in the experienc.e of the proletarian· revo-· Slogans to be spread now by every lutions of this century, .means Such an organisation makes a unitary cri' · tique of the world, !>r is nothing. By unitary cri­ (Leaflets, announcements over microphones, tique we mean a comprehensive critique of all comic strips, songs, graffiti, balloons on paint­ geographical areas where V�Jriousforms of sep­ ings in the Sorbonne, announcements in the­ arate socioeconomic powers exist, as well as a atres during films or while disrupting them, bal­ comprehensive critique of all aspects of life. · loons on subway billboards,before making love, Such an · organisation sees the beginning after making love, in elevators, each time you and end of its program in the complete decolohi­ raise your glass in a bar): sation of everyday life ..it thus aims not at the mas�es' self-management of the existing world, · OCCUPY THE FACTORIES but at its UJ1interrupted transformation. it POWER TO TH E WORKERS COUNCILS embodies the radical critique of political econo­ ABOLISH CLASS SOCIETY my, the supersession of the commodity and of DOWN WITH THE SPECTACLE-COMMODITY wage labour. SOCIETY Such an Henri Lefebvre, one of the most well-known the van they'd been taken to, is an example to agents of recuperation of this half of the century follow. When there are only three cops in a (it's well-known how the situationists well and police van, we'll know what to do. The case of truly put him and the whole Arguments gang in Sergeant Brunet, done over yesterday, will set a their place in their pamphlet Into the Dustbin of precedent: death to the pigs! History!) proposes to add the Zengakuren to his Already violence has shut the mouths of the trophies. The CNRS has its emissaries, PRAXIS petty bosses of the political groups; to chal­ has its researchers. lenge the bourgeois university alone is trivial The metaphilosopher Lefebvre is less stupid when it's the whole of this sociey which is to be than the pataphilosopher Morin. But the destroyed. metastalinist ought to have the good grace to shut up when it's a matter of class struggle. LONG LIVE THE ZENGAKUREN! A word to the wise is enough. LONG LIVE. THE VANDALIST COMMITTEE OF PUB­ LIC SAFETY (Bordeaux)! Th e Enrages, Nanterre, March 19, �968 LONG LIVE THE ENRAGES! LONG LIVE THE S.l.! LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION! Gut rage! Th e Enrages, Paris, May 6, 1968 Comrades, In spite of the proven collusion between UEC Stalinists and reactionaries, last Friday's marvel- The castle is burning! Coordinating Committee) see their work sabo­ taged by pseudo-spontaneous groups. Address to the Council ofthe University of Paris All the debates on organisation, which peo­ ple wanted to argue about before any action, are Relics of the past, pointless if we do nothing. Yo ur crass ignorance of life gives you no authoriy AT THIS RATE, TH E MOVEMENT WILL BE to do anything. Do you want proof? If you can sit BURIED IN THE SORBONNE! · today it will only be if you are backed up by a The prerequisite of direct democracy is the cordon of police. minimum support that revolutionary students In fact nobody respects you any more. So can give to revolutionary workers who are occu­ cry now over your old Sorbonne. pying their factories. lt just makes me laugh that certain mod­ it is inexcusable that yesterday evening's ernising old farts are getting touchy about incidents in the GA should pass without retalia­ defending me, supposing - wrongly - that after tion. having spat in their faces, I might once more The priests are holding us back when anti­ become presentable enough for them to protect clerical posters are torn up. me. Despite their perseverance in such The bureaucrats are holding us back when, masochism, these opportunists wouldn't even without even giving their names, they paralyse know how to patch up the Universly. Monsieur the revolutionary awareness that can take the Lefebvre, I say to you, shit. movement forward from the barricades. There will be more and more of those who Once again, it's the future that is sacrificed take from the education system the best thing it to the re-establishment of the old unionism. has: the grants. You've refused this to me, so I've Parliamentary cretinism wants to take over had nothing to hide. I've got to bite the bullet. the rostrum, as it tries to put the old, patched-up To day's trial is, of course, a ridiculous fairy system back on its feet again. tale. The real trial took place on Monday on the Comrades,the reform of the university alone 1107 streets, and secular justice has already detained is insignificant, when it is the whole of the old about thirty riotes. For my comrades, what mat­ world which is to be destroyed. ters is the unconditional release of all the pris­ The movement is nothing if it is not revolu­ oners (as well as the students). tionary. Freedom is the crime which contains all crimes. Woe betide feudal justice when the cas­ Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, May 16, tle is burning! 1968, 4.3opm.

Rene Riese/, Paris, May 10, 1968 Watch outl

Vigilance! The Press Committee situated on the second floor, stair C, in the Gaston Azard library, repre­ Comrades, sents only itself. lt happens to be a case of a The supremacy of the revolutionary assem­ dozen or so student journalists anxious to prove bly can only mean something if it exercises its themselves straight away to their future employ­ power. 'ers and future censors. For the last 48 hours even the capaciy of the This Committee, which is trying to monopo­ general assembly to make decisions has been lize all contact with the Press, refuses to trans­ challenged by a systematic obstruction of all mit the communiques of the regularly elected proposals for action. bodies of the general assembly. Up until now no motion could be voted on or TH IS PRESS COMMITTEE IS A CENSORSHIP even discussed, and bodies elected by the gen­ COMMITTEE: don't have anything more to do eral assembly (Occupation Committee and with it. The varlous working parties can, while wait­ and in that case it is clear that it will no longer ing for this evening's general assembly where want to concern itself with anything but ·a new decisions will be taken, address themselves Gaullist reform ofthe university. to the occupation committee and the coordinat­ ing committee elected by the GA yesterday Occupation Committee of the autonomous and evening. popular Sorbonne University, 16 May 1968, EVERYBODY COME TO THE GENERAL 6.Jopm ASSEMBLY THIS EVENING IN ORDER TO TH ROW OUTTHE BUREAUCRATS! Te legrams Occupation Co mmittee of the autonomous and popular The Sorbonne, May 16, spm 17 MAY 1968 I PROFESSOR IVAN SVITAK PRAGUE CZECHOSLOVAKIA I THE OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND POPU­ Watch out for manipulators! LAR SORBONNE SENDS FRATERNAL SALUTA· Watch out for bureaucrats! TIONS TO COMRADE SVITAK AND TO CZECHO­ SLOVAKIAN REVOLUTIONARIES STOP LONG LIVE Comrades, THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF TH E WORKERS No-one must be unaware of the Importance COUNCILS STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY of the GA this evening (Thursday 16 May). For TILL THE LAST CAPITALIST IS HUNG WITH THE two days individuals one recognizes from having GUTS OF THE LAST BUREAUCRAT STOP LONG seen them previously peddling their party lines LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM have succeeded in sowing confusion and in smothering the GAs under a barrage of bureau­ 17 MAY 1968 I ZENGAKUREN TOKYO JAPAN I cratic manipulatlons whose clumsiness clearly LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE JAPANESE demonstrates the contempt they have- for this COMRADES WHO HAVE OPENED COMBAT a�emb� SIMULTA NEOUSLY ON THE FRONTS OF ANTI­ This assembly must learn to make itself STALINISM AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM STOP LONG respected, or disappear. Two points must be dis­ LIVE FACTO RY OCCUPAT IONS STOP LONG LIVE cussed above all: THE GEN ERAL STRIKE STOP LO NG LIVE THE WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THE MARSHALS? INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS whose disgusting role is intolerable. COUNCILS STOP HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY WHY IS THE PRESS COMMITTEE - which TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE dares to censor the communiques that it is Gl.JTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP OCCUPA­ charged to transmit to the agencles - composed TION COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND of apprentice journalists who are careful not to 'POPULAR SORBONNE disappoint the ORTF bosses or jeopardize their future job possibilities? 17 MAY 1968 I POLITBURO OF THE COMMUNIST Apart from this: as the workers are begin­ PARTY OF THE USSR THE KREMLIN MOSCOW I ning to occupy several factories in France, FOL­ SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP LOWING OUR EXAMPLE AND WITH THE SAME THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS RIGHT WE HAVE, the Sorbonne occupatlon com­ COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP mittee issued a statement approving of this HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST movement at 3 pm this afternoon. The central BUREAUCRAT IS. HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE problem of the present GA is therefore to declare LAST CAPITALIST STOP LO NG LIVE THE STRUG­ itself by a clear vote supporting or disavowing GLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE this appeal of its occupation committee. In the MAKHNOVSHCHINA AGAiNST TROTSKY AND case of a disavowal, this assembly will then have LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 (OUNCILIST taken the responsibility of reserving for the stu­ INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN dents a right that it refuses to the working class; WITH THE STATE STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTION- ARY MARXISM STOP OCCUPAT ION COMMITTEE discuss their university problems. But the occu­ OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND POPUlAR piers immediately decided to open it to the pub­ SOBONNE lic to freely discuss the general problems of the society. This was thus a prefiguration of a coun­ 17 MAY 1968 / POliTBURO OF THE CHINESE cil, a council in which even the students broke COMMUNIST PARTY GAT E OF CElESTIAL PEACE out of their miserable studenthood and ceased PEKING / SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAU· to be students. CRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAl POWER OF To be sure, the occupation has never been THE WORKERS COUNCILS Will SOON WIPE YOU total: a chapel and some remnants of adminis· OUT STOP H UMANITYWON'T BE HAPPYTlll TH E trative offices have been tolerated. The democ­ . lAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF racy has never been complete: future. teth· THE lAST CAPITAliST STOP lONG LIVE FACTORY nocrats of the UNEFclai�d to be making them· OCCUPAT IONS STOP lO NG liVE THE GREAT CHI· . selves useful and other political bureaucrats NESE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1927 have also tried their manip1:1lations. Workers' BETRAYED BY THE STAliNIST BUREAUCRATS participation has remained very limited and the STOP LONG liVE TH E PROLETARIANS OF CAN· presence of nonstudents soon began to be TON AND ELSEWHERE WHO HAVE TAKEN UP questioned. Many students; professors, journal­ ARMS AGAINSTTHE SO-CALLED PEOPLE'S ARMY ists and imbeciles of other occupations have STOP LONG. liVE THE CHINESE WORKERS AND come as spectators. STU DENTS WHO HAVE ATTACKED THE SO­ In spite of all these deficiencies, which are CALLED CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND TH E not surprising considering the contradiction MAOIST. BUREAUCRAT IC ORDER STOP LONG between the scope of the project and the nar­ liVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP DOWN rowness of the student milieu, the exemplary WITH TH E STATE STOP OCCUPATION COMMIT­ nature of the best aspects nf this situation TEE OFTHEAUTONOMOUSAND POPULAR SOR­ immediately took on an explosive sigmficance. BONNE Workers could not fail to be inspired by seeing free discussion, the striving for a radical critique and direct democracy in action. Even limited ta a Report on the occupation of the Sorbonne liberated from the state, this was a SQrbonne revolutionary program developing its own forms. The day after the occupation of the Sorbonne The occupation of the Sorbonne that began the Sud·Aviation workers of Nantes occupied Monday, 13 May, has inaugurated a new period their factory. On the third day, Thursday the 16th, in the crisis of modern society. The events now the Renault factories at Cleon and Flins were taking place in France foreshadow the return of occupied and the movement began at the NMPP the proletarian revolutionary movement in all and at Boulogne-Billancourt, starting at Shop countries. The movement that had already 70. Now, at the end of the week, 100 factories advanced from theory to struggle in the streets have been occupied while the wave of strikes, has now advanced to a struggle for power over accepted but never initiated by the union the means of production. Modernized Ci'!Pitalisrn bureaucracies, is paralyzing the railroads and thaught it had finished with class struggle • it's developing toward a general strike. started up again!The proletariat no longer· exist- The only power in the Sorbonne was the ed - but here it is again. general assembly of its occupiers. At its first ses­ In surrendering the Sorbonne, the govern­ sion, on 14 May, amidst a certain confusion, it ment counted .on pacifying the student revolt, had elected an Occupation Committee of 15 which had already succeeded in holding a sec­ members revocable by it each day. Only one of tion of Paris behind its barricades an entire night the delegates, belonging to the Nanterre-Paris before being recaptured with great difficulty by Enrages group, had set forth a program: defence the police. The Sorbonne was given overto the of direct .democracy in the Sorboime and students in the hope that they would peacefully absolute power of workers' councils as ultimate goal. The next day's general assembly reelected Friday the 17th at 2pm the regular assembly its entire Occupation Committee, which had not saw its rostrum occupied for a long time by self· been able to accomplish anything by then. In appointed marshals belonging to the FER; and in fact, all the specialised groupings that had set addition had to interrupt the session for the sec­ themselves up in the Sorbonne followed the ond march on Billancourt at 5 pm. directives of a hidden "Coordination Committee" That evening at 9 pm, the Occupation composed of volunteer and very moderating Committee was finally able to present a report of organizers responsible to no one. An hour after its activities. lt was cpmpletely unsuccessful, the reelection of the Occupation Committee one however, in getting Its actions discussed and of the "coordinators" privately tried to declare it voted on, in particular its appeal for the occupa­ dissolved. A direct appeal to the base in the tion of the factories, which .the assembly did not courtyard of the Sorbonne aroused a movement taloccupation of factories and public buildings revolution ... whether they march under the ban­ throughout the country has not only blocked the ner ofTrotsky or Mao, of anarchy or situation ism functioning of the economy, it has brought about (we have only to recall that those who today fol­ a general questioning of the society. A deep­ low Trotsky or Mao, to say nothing of the pitiful seated movement is leading almost every sector "Anarchist Federation) have nothing to do with of the population to seek a real change of life. lt the present revolution. The bureaucrats may is now a revolutionary movement, a movement now change their minds about what they call which lacks nothing but the consciousness of "authentically revolutionary"; authentic revolu­ what it has already done in order to triumph. tion does not have to change its condemnation What forces will try to save capitalism? The of bureaucracy. regime will fall unless it threatens recourse to At the present moment, with the power they arms (accompanied by the promise of new elec­ hold and with the parties and unions being what tions, which could only take place after the they are, the workers have no other choice but to capitulation of the movement) or even resorts to organise themselves in unitary rank-and-file immediate armed repression. As for the possible committees directly seizing all aspects of the coming to power of the left, it too will try to reconstruction of social life, asserting their defend the old world through concessions and autonomy vis-a-vis any sort of politico-unionist through force. In this event, the best defender of leadership, ensuring their self-defence and fed­ such a "popular government" would be the so­ erating with each other region ally and called "Communist" Party, the party of Stalinist nationally. By taking this path they will become bureaucrats, which has fought the movement the sole real power in the country, the power of from the very beginning and which began to the workers councils. Otherwise the proletariat, envisage the fall of the de Gaulle regime only because it is "either revolutionary or nothing" when it realised it was no longer capable of will again become a passive object. lt will go being that regime's main guardian. Such a tran­ back to watching television. sitional government would really .. be What defines the power of the councils? "Kerenskyist" only if the Stalinists were beaten. Dissolution of all external power; direct and All this will depend essentially on the workers' total democracy; practical unification of decision consciousness and capacities for autonomous and execution; delegates who can be revoked at organisation: those who have already any moment by those who have mandated them; rejected the ridiculous accords-that so gratified abolition of hierarchy and independent speciali­ the union leaders need only discover that they sations; conscious management and transfor­ cannot "win" much more within the framework mation of all the conditions of liberated life; per­ of the existing economy, but that they can take manent creative participation of the masses; everything by transforming all the bases of the internationalist extension and coordination. The economy on their own behalf. The bosses can present requirements are nothing less than this. hardly pay more; but they can disappear. Self-management is nothing less. Beware of the The present movement did not become recuperators of every modernist variety - includ­ "politicised" by going beyond the miserable ing even priests - who are beginning to talk of self-management or even of workers councils without acknowledging this minimum, because they in fact want to save their bureaucratic func­ tions, the privileges of their intellectual speciali­ sations or their future as petty bosses! In reality what is necessary now has been necessary since the beginning of the proletarian revolutionary project. People struggled for the abolition of wage labour, of commodity produc­ tion, of the state. lt was a matter of acceding to conscious history, of suppressing all separations and "everything that exists independently of individuals." Proletarian revolution has sponta­ neously sketched out its adequate form in the councils, in St. Petersburg in 1905 as in Turin in 1920, in Catalonia in 1936 as in Budapest in 1956. The maintaining of the old society, or the formation of new exploiting classes, hi!s each time been by way of the suppression of the councils. Now the working class knows its ene­ mies and its own appropriate methods of action. "Revolutionary organisation has had to learn that it can no longer fight alienation with alien­ ated forms" (The Society of the Sp ectacle). Workers councils are clearly the only solution, since all the other forms of revolutionary strug­ gle have led to the opposite of what was aimed at.

Enrages-Situationist InternationalCommittee

Council for maintaining the occupations, Paris, 30 May 1968 The struggle against alienation has to give the words their real meaning as well as to return tothem their initial force

So, don't say anymore but say

society racket

professor psychologist poet sociologist militants (of an feathers) cops conscientious objector trade unionist priest family (non-exhaustive list)

information deformation (at the level ofthe world racket and its mystifica· tions) work hard labour art that's how much? dialogue masturbation culture shit that is used as a permanent gargle by an the pedantic idiots (see professor) my sister my Love dear professor croak bastard good night daddy croak bastard excuse me officer croak bastard thank you doctor croak croak bastard legality trap for assholes civilisation sterilisation urbanism preventive police village 1, 2, 3, 4, strategic hamlets structuralism last chanceof neocapitalism whose glaring failures are covered up by official lies, which are clumsily plastered over the most obvious contradictions.

Students, you are impotent fools (we know that already), but you will remain it as long as you will not have

-beaten up your professors -buggered all your priests , -set fire to the university

No the Commune is not dead.

Va ndalist' s departfliJent fo r Public Welfare - Leafletiss ued at Bordeaux (France) in April 1968

Further Reading

Debord, Guy Knabb, Ken Society ofthe Spectacle Situationist International Anthology Rebel Press/Black and Red Bureau of Publi(Secrets £5.95 0939682001 f12.95 . .Debord, Guy ci So · ety ofthe Spectacle and Other Films King Mob Rebel Press King Mob Echo - English Section of the Situationist 0946061068 International £5.50 Dark Star /Vague 31 1871692075 Vaneigem, Raoul £6.oo Tht;! Revolution of Everyday Life Rebel Press Fo r a comprehensive bibliography of Situationist and 0946061017 Situationist-inspirei:Jtexts consult: £7.95 Ford, Simon Vaneigem, Raoul The Realisation and Suppression of the Situationist A Cavalier History of Surrealism International - An Annotated Bibliography 1972 - 1992 ' AK Press AK Press 1873176945 1873176821 . £7·95 £7·95

Vienet, Rene

·. } Enrages· and· Situationists in the Occupation Movement, Fra nce, May 68 Rebel Press All of the abovMitlesare curr:nilyin print. If you have any dif­ 0946o66o5X ficulty.obtaini ng any of the titles. they are all available mail £5.95 order fro m:

Gray, Chris AK Distribution Leaving the 2oth Century: The Incomplete Wo rk of the P 0 Box 12766 Situationist International Edinburgh Rebel [lress Scotland 0946061157 EH8 9YE £9.90 [email protected] www.akuk.com Home, Stewart The Assault on Culture - Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Please setir.(a· large SA E fo r a fu ll catalogue Class Wa r AK Press They are also·stocked by: 1873176309 Housman's Bool

.·�

® Afterword There is a tradition of denigrating certain political ideas and actions by describing them as Utopian, unrealistic, naive etc. We have deliberately cho­ sen the ti'tle of this Anthology as we feel it sums up important aspects of the events in May. The importance that graffiti1 posters, pamphlets etc played both in terms of practical communication and inspirational agitation cannot be denied. Some of the slogans may on one level appear Utopian but a clos­ er analysis shows that they partake of the great Surrealist tradition of the imaginative transformation of the world, a transformation firmly rooted in, not an escape from, reality. As Andre Breton observed, "The Imaginary is that which tends tci become real." On one level a slogqn on a .Parisian wall refer­ ring to the beach appears a contradiction. The beach with its connotation of seaside holidays, fun and leisure scrawled on an urban wall in the capital of France. However, although the quality of our illustrations doesn't allow us to show it too clearly, if you look carefully at photographs of Parisian streets

which have had their paving stones/ cobbles torn up what can you· ·' see? · Sand,· of course. For our records and for use in future editions of this book Dark Star would welcome copies of the covers of the pamphlets reprinted in this book to enable us to illustrate the widespread distribution of them both in terms of time and geographical locations.

DA RK STAR c/o AK Distribution Dark Star would like to thank Chris Gray and Ken Knabb, without whose translations this anthology would not have been possible. As Lautre amont observed, "Words expressing evil are destined to take on a more positive meaning. Ideas improve - the sense of words takes part in this process. Plagiarism is neces­ sary. it is implied in the idea of progress. it clasps an author's sentence tight, uses his exp ressions, eliminates a fa lse idea, replaces it with the right idea. To be well wrought, a maxim does not need to be corrected. it needs to be developed. "

.. This anthology brings together the three most widely translated, distributed and influential pamphlets of the Situationist International available in the sixties, along with an eyewitness account of the May Events published in June 2968. Beneath The Paving Stones - Sltuatlonlsts and the Beach in addition includes numerous documents, photographs, poster art and graffiti originating from Paris In 2968; It offers the reader not only a concise introduction to the ideas of the Situationists but also an insight into what Situationist material was readily available in the late sixties.

ISBN J."1025"1331!-3

DAF.:t-::: STAF.: J,,,,,, > £9.00 I $15.00 (USA) """