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


