The centrality of class to Situationist ideas

The infection of human relations by exchange and bargaining is plainly linked to the existence of the bourgeoisie. The fact that exchange persists in a part of the world where it is claimed that there is a classless society suggests that the shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red flag. Especially as the pleasure of giving, which appears in all industrial societies, defines very clearly the frontier between the world of calculation and the world of exuberance, of festivity. This style of giving has nothing to do with the prestige-gift practiced by the nobility, hopelessly imprisoned by the notion of sacrifice. The proletariat really does carry the project of human fullness, the project of total life: a project in which the aristocracy had failed, albeit failed magnificently.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth

Minimum Definition of Revolutionary Organizations

Since the only purpose of a revolutionary organization is the abolition of all existing classes in a way that does not bring about a new division of society, we consider any organization revolutionary which consistently and effectively works toward the international realization of the absolute power of the workers councils, as prefigured in the experience of the proletarian revolutions of this century.

Such an organization makes an integral critique of the world, or is nothing. By integral critique we mean a comprehensive critique of all geographical areas where various forms of separate socioeconomic powers exist, as well as a comprehensive critique of all aspects of life.

Such an organization sees the beginning and end of its program in the complete decolonization of everyday life. It thus aims not at the masses’ self-management of the existing world, but at its uninterrupted transformation. It embodies the radical critique of political economy, the supersession of the commodity and of wage labor.

Such an organization refuses to reproduce within itself any of the hierarchical conditions of the dominant world. The only limit to participating in its total democracy is that each member must have recognized and appropriated the coherence of its critique. This coherence must be both in the critical theory as such and in the relation between this theory and practical activity. The organization radically criticizes every ideology as separate power of ideas and as ideas of separate power. It is thus at the same time the negation of any remnants of religion, and of the prevailing social spectacle which, from news media to mass culture, monopolizes communication between people around their one-way reception of images of their alienated activity. The organization dissolves any “revolutionary ideology,” unmasking it as a sign of the failure of the revolutionary project, as the private property of new specialists of power, as one more fraudulent representation setting itself above real proletarianized life.

Since the ultimate criterion of the modern revolutionary organization is its totalness, such an organization is ultimately a critique of politics. It must explicitly aim to dissolve itself as a separate organization at its moment of victory.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL

July 1966

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth

revolution of everyday life, vaneigem.

ironically

(in the chapter on sacrifice I believe)

Quote:

HENCEFORTH, the situationists are everywhere, and their task is everywhere. All those who think they are situationists have simply to prove the "truth, in other words, reality and power, that which is material" of their thought before the ensemble of the revolutionary proletarian movement, wherever it begins to create its International, and no longer before the SI alone. As for us, we no longer have to guarantee in any way that such individuals are situationists or not, because we no longer need to, and we have never found that sort of thing to our taste.

From thesis 53 'Theses on the SI and its time' (King James Version)

Maybe it is as well to keep in mind that the practice of quoting authorities is explictly anti-situationist. Also, in this text the SI denounce not just individualist anarchists but the FAI and all anarchist federations.

It seems their most appropriate work for 2006.

pilpil

we no longer have to guarantee in any way that such individuals are situationists or not, because we no longer need to, and we have never found that sort of thing to our taste.

Or even better, the version of The Revolution of Everyday life in the libcom library