A Masperisation

NOTICE

This translation is a first draft, and has not been independently proofread. However, to the best of my knowledge this text has never been translated into English. Therefore I am making it available in this form with the caveat that there are likely to be mistakes in it. PLEASE APPROACH IT WITH CAUTION!

Draft 0.0 (14 January 2016)

A Masperisation

Issue 42 of the journal Partisans (June 1968) – dedicated to the occupations movement – reproduced some of the documents published by the SI and the CMDO (as they had been, in much greater numbers, in many journals and pamphlets in Europe, America and Japan).

However Partisans, run by the Stalino-Castrist Maspero, distinguished itself from all the other journals by a doctoring that strongly reeked of the Stalinist school of falsification of which it is a distinguished graduate.

The CMDO’S Report on the Occupation of the Sorbonne was seriously masperised on pages 76 and 77, where the beginning and end of the text were kept, but more than half was deceitfully removed – everything that actually constituted the report on the struggles that took place in the Sorbonne. Obviously without any sign or indication of the existence of any deletion.

On page 103, this merely negative masperisation was elaborated into a striking example of total masperisation: a falsification involving the construction of a fake text by combining one section of a real text with phrases added to give it a different meaning. This concerned the tract For the Power of Workers’ Councils, reproduced without its title or date (22 May) but with the signature of the CMDO. The last part of the tract in question can be read by starting from the tenth line of the text constructed by the masperatisers. However the beginning hasn’t just vanished: it has been replaced by nine lines that not one of us has ever seen before 1 that call for a protest “today the 24 May”, and include huge concessions to the CGT (“Yes, the CGT want to bring your claims to a successful resolution”).

We are content to cite these specific excesses, without thinking that a person as notoriously sleazy as Maspero deserves to be punished for his fakery. It’s his recognised occupation. Here, it is merely enough to link his name to it. We’ll only recall how many far-fetched things he has written, as in Le Crapouillot of May-June 1969 where he wrote that the journal I.S. was “at one point distributed by Maspero”. What’s more many people whispered that the Situationists despise Maspero so much only because he would have been very pleased to have published them himself! Such remarks pass judgement on their makers. We don’t know if such talk originates within the entourage of this miserable scoundrel. We can only state that, in view of the behaviour we’ve noted here, it wouldn’t surprise us.

Translated by Ian Thomson. From https://isinenglish.com/12-8-8-a-masperisation/

• 1“n’a jamais vues nulle part” – literally “have ever seen anywhere”