Selected Judgements

Recent advances concerning the SI

"The verbal gesticulations of the situationists do not have consequences [...] Furthermore, it is curious to see the eagerness of the bourgeois press, which refuses to pass on information emanating from the revolutionary workers' movement, to take up and popularize the gesticulations of these puppets."

-- Monde Libertaire (January 1967)

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"Although I no longer collaborate on Le Monde Libertaire, I do not like to see it denigrated by one who publishes in it, nor to see one avoid, with perjorative intention, all allusions to libertarian action with regard to situationism, this new form of Baroque-ism [...] I have read the texts of the pamphlet in question (style, intentions and insults) dozens of times before 1914 [...] It remains that the modernism of the situationists smells too much of patch-work for one to await their directives. Above all, the current conjuncture poses the problems of ability and responsibility for the responsible people who are not their own judges."

-- C.A. Bontemps, Monde Libertaire (January 1967).

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"For several years -- that is to say, well before the situationists provisionally left the shadows -- I 'posed the questions' and I posed the questions to the movement. I still think that this is necessary and I will continue. But I absolutely refuse to let my opposition to the current forms of the A.F. [Anarchist Federation] be annexed by or serve the arguments of those who, under the pretext of renewing anarchism, sniff out their inspirations from the trashcans of Marxism [...] For the rest, many will be carried off by the wind. Because tomorrow there will no longer be any situationists."

-- Cesar Fayolle, Tuning up, published in Philosophy in a schoolyard (February 1967).

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"The event that set the others in motion was the situationist pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life and my response in the newspaper. There wasn't enough to whip a cat. Insulted without any provocation on our part by a handful of library revolutionaries, I responded to these nonentities in a suitable tone, which is not only my right but my duty as a militant. And everything would have remained there. However, the scandal was launched by a certain Bodson, then scorned by all of the fifth column that had waited for years for the favorable instant to attack our organization [...] It is true that I have never read their [the situationists'] journal. But it is pleasing to see these idiots [zigotos], who haven't read any of the theoreticians of anarchy, reproach me for failing to read. They are not only odious, they are also ridiculous. I know perfectly well what situationism is: a critique of society made by all those in opposition to it, that which is easy and naturally a part of the exhibitionism that is the lot of all sycophants of the Revolution. Naturally, [it is] a finality that doesn't exclude the State, quite surely to be renovated! [...] Because the epileptic protests of certain nonentities will permit us to get to the bottom of the problem and reveal in broad daylight all the ramifications of the warped conspiracy by the Marxists to dissolve the Anarchist Federation [...] When one perceives that all of the manoeuvres have failed, one applies the last tactic, which is called "situationist." One urges saboteurs in the organization to try to break it up in its interior; when it disappears it will leave a place for a new organization that, under the libertarian abbreviation guaranteeing the freedom of man, will permit the resumption of the Marxist operation that, lacking Revolution, reserves fruitful sinecures for its agents!"

-- Maurice Joyeux, The Hydra of Lerne, the infantile disorder of anarchy (report to the Bordeaux Congress, May 1967).

Translated from the French by NOT BORED! From: https://www.notbored.org/FA.html