Libertarian Marxist group who wrote extensively on culture and were highly influential on the events of May 1968 in France; members included Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem and René Riesel.
The SI was a libertarian socialist group founded in France. Famous for its writings on modern culture among other things, it played an important role in sparking the French mass strikes of 1968.
Situationist International (SI) - international, 1960s-70s
aka Situationiste Internationale
The SI was an international group of revolutionary socialists, founded in France by former members of the Lettrist International.
The Situationists fused Marxism with an analysis of the power of modern culture and the emptiness of everyday life under capitalism
A look at workers' councils and the historical contexts in which they were created. A useful analysis - which challenges some aspects of the standard anarchist analysis of the events in Spain during the 1936 Revolution.
A situationist-influenced critique of modern art by some UK radicals in the days of 1967 when, for many, revolution seemed to be getting close. Despite the occasional silly over-estimation of delinquency and shop-lifting, still a fine critique of its time of art and its limits.
A remembrance of the author's friendship with Guy Debord in the late 1950s and early 60s - with some theoretical reflections.
Written in English by David Blanchard, 1995. First published in Drunken Boat. Also published in Revolutionary Romanticism; edited by Max Blechman, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1999.
Documents produced by the Situationist International or groups the Situationists were involved with during the mass strike and revolt of the glorious May 1968 in France.
"...it is time we examine the Commune not just as an outmoded example of revolutionary primitivism, all of whose mistakes can easily be overcome, but as a positive experiment whose whole truth has yet to be rediscovered and fulfilled."
The Situationists reply to the misrepresentations and stupidities of their critics.
If the SI's activity had not recently led to some publicly scandalous and threatening consequences it is certain that no French publication would have reviewed our recent books.
-The Alba Platform
-What was the Bauhaus?
-A User's Guide to Détournement
-Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action
-Formulary for a New Urbanism
-Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The first English translation was published by Black & Red in 1970. It was revised in 1977, incorporating numerous improvements suggested by friends and critics of the first translation.
Gilles Dauve's analysis of both the Situationists' theoretical strengths and weaknesses.
Ideology and the Wage System
Capitalism transforms life into the money necessary for living. One tends to do any particular thing towards an end other than that implied by the content of the activity. The logic of alienation : one is an other; the wage system makes one foreign to what one does, to what one is, to other people.
Debord and Sanguinetti look back over the history of the Situationists and rather optimistically attempt to place them in historical perspective.
1
IN A MOMENT of universal history, the Situationist International imposed itself as the thought of the collapse of a world, a downfall that has now begun under our very eyes.
Culture can be defined as the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society's reproduction.
Over 14 million people could find themselves in fuel poverty in the near future, if new figures from gas giant Centrica predicting a 70% rise in gas prices prove accurate - nearly a quarter of the population.
First issue of an irregular workers' bulletin put together by users of the website, libcom.org. This issue focuses on the 2008 pay dispute over sub-inflation pay offers.