'Shake in your shoes bureaucrats' the Situationists 1965-1969 - Christopher Gray

By the mid sixties the situationist project had taken on its definitive form. The SI was to be a small, tightly knit group of revolutionaries devoted to forging a critique of contemporary, that is to say, consumer capitalism—and to publicising this critique by every form of scandal and agitation possible. All practical experiment with art went by the board. Everything depended on universal insurrection. Poetry could only be made by everyone.

Over 1965, 66 and 67 they put forward an analysis of life in the West more incisive than any made since the twenties. Lefebvre, the only thinker on the same level in France, was left looking distinctly pedestrian, as was Marcuse in the States. And both for the same reason. Because the SI refused to define themselves as detached observers. They knew that in the last analysis they were as proletarianised as everyone else, and because of this they were able to detect and identify with the unacknowledged and snowballing 'revolt of youth' of the early and mid-sixties in both its middle-class 'dropout' and its working-class 'delinquent' forms. At the same time they were among the very few revolutionary groups both to understand the crucial importance of the wildcat strikes and to see that this whole new stage of industrial struggle was in no way incompatible with the psychological distress experienced by the younger generation.

They did a far better job on the newspapers than Private Eye: repeatedly quoting the growing number of openly acknowledged signs of utter worldweariness and bitter anger spreading throughout Europe and the States. And they used these explosions of genuine revolt as a stick with which to still further belabour 'revolutionary' intellectuals: anyone who thought that revolution was only possible somewhere on the other side of the planet—which meant that they couldn't see anything wrong with contemporary society and its consumer goods; anyone who bemoaned the absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe without doing anything about it themselves. They really were incredibly rude, and rude in the worst possible taste, to the entire political and cultural avant-garde establishment. MR GEORGES LAPASSADE IS A CUNT, in huge letters, filled one page of the magazine. In return French culture boycotted them completely. The censorship of the SI has probably been the most blatant case of cultural repression since before the War.

July 1965, the first copies of a cheaply duplicated magazine called PROVO appeared on the streets in Amsterdam—and were promptly seized by the police owing to the unusual precision of their recipe for homemade bombs. The torchlight meetings, the street demonstrations, the smoke-bombs, the white bicycles, the sabotage of state occasions, etc. that followed marked the first eruption into public consciousness of precisely what the situationists had been heralding for years: an anarchic, festive attack on the quality of life organised as a political movement. The Provos were the occasion of the situationists' first appearance in the French press—as the 'occult international', the theoretical driving force behind the Provos' political carnival. Exactly how much influence the SI had on the Provos is difficult to ascertain. In a loose sense, a good deal: Amsterdam had been one of the hubs of situationist activity a few years before and at least one of the Provo leaders, Constant the architect, was ex-SI. There wasn't, however, any constructive interaction between the two groups: the SI was as haughty with the Provos as with everyone else. All they had to say was that unless the Provo street lumpenproletariat shook off its own bureaucracy and star system and fused with the Dutch working class the whole episode would end like a damp squib—which was precisely what did happen. Be that as it may, it was only after the Provos that situationist-type politics began to gain any real credibility.

The same year saw an even more violent corroboration of their theses: the Watts riots in the States. The SI's analysis of these riots—The Decline and Fall of the 'Spectacular' Commodity Economy—was translated and distributed in England and the States even before it appeared in French. The text achieved some notoriety, though largely for its violence and incomprehensibility—the idea that there was a revolutionary crisis brewing in America and that the blacks would play any part in it being obviously out of the question. As for the enthusiastic analyses of violence, looting and arson, let alone the discovery of poetry within them (poetry . .. ?) the good pacifist souls of the Anglo-American Left simply threw up their hands and fled. During the summer of 1966 an embryonic English section was formed, translated Vaneigem's Banalites de Base as The Totality for Kids, ran a magazine, Heatwave, and began to make contact with other lunatic fringe groups in London and the States.

By this time the situationist critique of society was almost complete. The problem before them was one of publicising their position: of breaking the very real conspiracy of silence against them. Some publicity came from the fact that their main base in Denmark was blown up and burnt down—to the situationists' great delight—apparently by the extreme right-wing for the role they had played in fomenting a series of riots in the Danish town of Randers. However it was the 'occupation' of Strasbourg University in November 1966 that finally rocketed the SI to national headlines. A small group of students from Strasbourg University approached the SI in early 1966. Over the summer they worked out their tactics.

This small group got itself elected, amidst the apathy of Strasbourg's 16,000 students, to the committee of the left-wing students' union. Once in this position of power they began to put union funds to good use. They founded a Society for the Rehabilitation of Karl Marx and Ravachol. They plastered the walls of the city with a Marxist comic-strip: 'The Return of the Durruti Column'. They proclaimed their intention to dissolve the union once and for all. Worst of all, they enlisted the aid of the notorious Situationist International and ran off ten thousand copies of a lengthy pamphlet which poured shit on student life and loves (and a few other things). When this was handed out at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year, only de Gaulle was unaffected. The press—local, national and international—had a field-day. It took three weeks for the local Party of Order—from right-wing students to the official left via Alsation mill-owners—to eject these fanatics. The union was closed by a court order on the 14th of December. The judge's summing up was disarmingly lucid:

The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds of the students' union. Indeed they openly admit to having made the union pay some £500 for the printing and distribution of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature insed by 'Internationale Situationniste'. These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One has only to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion and a world-wide proletarian revolution with 'unlicensed pleasure' as its only goal. In view of their basically anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. Their wide diffusion in both student circles and among the general public by the local, national and foreign press are a threat to the morality, the studies, the reputation and thus the very future of the siutdents of the University of Strasbourg.

(from the first English version of Ten Days That Shook The University)

This was Europe's first university occupation and for weeks the scandal echoed through all the student unions in France. The pamphlet referred to, Of Student Poverty, became a bestseller over-night and there can hardly have been a single left-wing student in France who didn't hear of the SI. Over 1967 the pamphlet was translated into half a dozen European languages; the English version, Ten Days That Shook The University, was reproduced several times in the States both in the underground press and as a pamphlet. In France the court cases dragged on for several months and the scandal was still further exacerbated by another batch of exclusions (`the Garnautins'), a nasty and protracted business this time solely about the supposed authoritarian role played by Debord. Their new-found fame, however, remained untarnished. The SI had become synonomous with the utmost extremism. It bathed in revolutionary charisma.

The whole of that year the SI gained greater and greater influence in French universities. They made personal contact with a fair number of students (via their official P.O. Box no., the only way they made contact with anyone) but always insisted that the people they met developed on their own and formed autonomous and self-sufficient groups. Of all these students the ones they became closest to were a group from Nanterre—a handful of anarchists destined, the following year, to become almost as notorious as the SI itself. The situationists' theoretical expression was completed by the publication of two full length books, Raoul Vaneigem's Traite de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations and Debord's La Societe du Spectacle, treating what could be called the subjective and objective aspects of alienation respectively. Both books were almost enitrely ignored by the French press until the following summer.

What can the revolutionary movement do today? Everything. What is it turning into in the hands of the parties and the unions? Nothing. What does it want? The realisation of a classless society through the power of the workers' councils.

Counseil pour le maintien des occupations, Paris, May/June 1968

Yet for all this there was a growing desire for direct action within the group itself. Amongst many plans there was one particularly good one to cause a massive scandal in the heart of Paris by staining the Seine blood-red and dumping the bodies of a couple of hundred vaguely Vietnamese Asiatics in it, so they floated downstream past Notre Dame and Cite Saint-Louis. The corpses were a cinch: one of the main medical schools in Paris bought dead Chinamen by the ton for dissection. The route taken by the refrigerated truck was known and quite sensible plans for highjacking it were worked out. The bodies were to be dropped into the Seine upstream in the suburbs. The fuck-up was the red industrial dye. The quantities necessary seemed enormous. The connection didn't come through and the whole thing petered out...

Much as been made, both in the newspapers at the time and in subsequent sociological studies, of the situationists' influence on May '68: on the first general wildcat strike in history and the wave of occupations that left France tottering on the brink of a revolutionary crisis more vertiginous than anything since the Spanish Civil War. This influence can't be measured in any meaningful way. In the first place the SI never claimed to stand for more than the consciousness of a real social and historical process embodied by millions of people; nor to act as more than a catalyst in certain quite specific social areas. However, once that has been said, one can only add that the extent to which they had prefigured everything that materialised that May was little short of clairvoyant.

More specifically: it should be remembered that the first spark that set off the whole gunpowder keg came from the handful of Enrages—a group which had adopted the theses of the SI and who turned the University of Nanterre upside down in early 1968. Several of them were disciplined by university authorities along with other radicals and this action precipitated the immediate crisis at the university level. The 22nd March Movement had been thoroughly impregnated with situationist ideas by the Enrages, although they had walked out of it at its inception because of its mish-mash composition and its refusal to expel certain known Stalinists. Situationist ideas had also spread far among many students, 'artists' and politicos in the Latin Quarter and throughout the entire French university system. (After it was all over, Vaneigent's Traite turned out to be the most widely ripped off book in France in 1968.)

As the crisis developed the SI and the Enrages played a decisive part: the Enrage Riesel and others were elected to the Sorbonne Occupation Committee and were the first to communicate the call for self-management and the creation of workers' councils after the first factories were occupied by French workers. But they were unable to prevent the steady encroachment of the various bureaucratic leftist sects and the endless verbalisation so beloved of students; and so they left in disgust.

On May 17th they founded the Council for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO) which occupied the National Pedagogical Institute on rue d'Ulm, and then, from the end of May, the basement of a 'School of Decorative Arts' next door. The CMDO dissolved itself on June 1 5th with the nationwide ebbing of occupations. About forty people made up the permanent base of the CMDO, who were joined for a while by other revolutionaries and strikers coming from various industries, from abroad or from the provinces, and returning there, The CMDO was more or less constantly made up of about ten situationists and Enrages (among them Debord, Khayati, Reisel and Vaneigem), and as many respectively from the workers, high school students or 'students', and other councilists without specific social functions, Throughout its existence it was a successful experiment in direct democracy, guaranteed by an equal participation of everyone in debates, decisions and their execution. It was essentially an uninterrupted genera] assembly deliberating day and night. No faction or private meetings ever existed outside the common debate.

A unit spontaneously created in the conditions of a revolutionary moment, the CMDO was obviously less of a council than a councilist organisation, thus functioning on the model of soviet democracy; As an improvised response to that precise moment, the CMDO could neither present itself as a permanent councilist organisation nor, as such, attempt to transform itself into an organisation of that kind. Nonetheless general agreement on the major situationist theses reinforced its cohesion. Three committees had organised themselves within the general assembly to make possible its practical activity. The Printing Committee took charge of the writing and printing of the CMDO's publications, both using the machines to which it had access and in collaboration with certain occupied print shops whose workers gladly put back into operation the excellent equipment at their disposal. The Liaison Committee, with ten cars at its disposal, took care of contacts with occupied factories and the delivery of material for distribution, The Requisitions Committee, which excelled during the most difficult period, made sure that paper, petrol, food and money were never lacking- There was no permanent committee to ensure the rapid writing of the texts, whose content was determined by everyone, but on each occasion several members were designated, who then submitted the result to the assembly,

The CMDO printed a series of very curt, simple posters; and a series of leaflets and throwaways—amongst which were an Address To All Workers and a reprinting of the Minimum Definition of a Revolutionary Organisation. The major texts had printings of between 150,000 and 200,000 copies, and responsibility was taken for translation into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish and Arabic. They also published several appropriate songs and about forty comic-strips, which seem to have been popular (at any rate several of the occupied factories produced their own), though the massive use of graffiti was a more successful medium, indeed the first new form of expression since the twenties: the spray can, far more than the street poster, offers the writer the one way he can be certain of being read by everyone.

The CMDO recognised that what had initially been a student revolt now contained, because of the factory occupations, the possibilities for a social revolution. As such it attempted to show what prevented the May movement from becoming revolutionary; in its interventions it denounced the recuperators of the parties, Stalinist unions and the confusion of the ‘groupuscules' (Trotskyists, Maoists and Anarchists who formed 'action committees' of militants united only on the most immediate particulars—the banal demands of 'reform the university' and 'end police repression') who sought to impose their `non'-leadership on the movement. But more importantly, the CMDO posed the issue of self-management concretely as an immediate possibility; revolution was the only demand to be made by the French proletariat.

The occupations were the reappearance, out of the blue, of the proletariat as a historic class—suddenly enlarged to include almost everyone working for someone else—inevitably bent on the real abolition of the class system and of wage-labour. The occupations were a rediscovery of history, personal and social history at one and the same time, a rediscovery of the sense that 'history' can lie in the hands of ordinary people, of the sense of irreversible time—above all of the sense that 'things just can't go on in the same old way'. The alien life everyone had been living eight days before just seemed ridiculous. The occupations were a total attack on every form of alienation, on every form of ideology, on the whole straitjacket into which real life has been crammed. Everything radiated the desire to unify; to make one. Inevitably property rights were trampled underfoot. Everything belonged to everybody. Frankly confessed desire to meet people, to be completely honest with them, to enjoy a real community, were fostered by occupied buildings whose sole purpose was to make people meet, fostered by fighting side by side in the streets. The telephones, among the few public services still functioning, the number of messengers and of people just generally on the road throughout Paris and all over the country, prefigured something of what real 'communications' could be. The occupations, to say the least of it, were a rejection of all that's understood by work today: they were exuberance, they were playfulness, they were the real dance of men and time. Authority was rejected in all its forms. So was specialisation. So was hierarchical rip-off. So was the State. So were political parties. So were trades unions. So were sociologists. So were professors. So were moralists. So were doctors. 'Quick' advised perhaps the best of all the graffiti—and everyone that the occupations had awoken to themselves felt nothing but embarrassment and contempt for the way of life they had been leading and for all those, from superstars to town-planners, who had done their best to keep them bogged down in it. It was an end to bullshit: in particular all the CP bullshit from Castro to Sartre. Real internationalism sprang up overnight. Workers and intellectuals from all over Europe came to fight. The importance of the role played by women throughout the whole of May is a clear indication of the extent of the revolutionary crisis. Free love began to become something real. The occupations for all their chaos were an attack on the commodity form (even if this was still understood crudely and 'sociologically' as an attack on 'consumer society'). Art was also put down pretty heavily though few people actually realised that they had reached the stage where the abolition of art had become the next logical thing to do. The best anyone came up with was the abstract and somewhat vague slogan 'All power to the imagination'. But there wasn't any idea of how this power could be put into effect: how everything could be reinvented. Once it ran out of power it ran out of imagination. Utter detestation of recuperators, though felt by everyone, failed to reach a level of theoretico-practical consciousness sufficient to liquidate them: neo-artists and neo-political road-managers, neo-spectators of the very movement that had them up against the wall. If this active criticism of the spectacle of non-life failed to become its revolutionary supersession, it was only because the May insurrection's 'spontaneous orientation towards the Workers' Councils' was in advance of almost all concrete preparations for it, amongst which the theoretical and organisational consciousness which would have allowed it to express itself as power: as the only power...

'The dawn which in a single moment lights up the whole shape of the new world'—that was what we saw that May in France. The red and black flags of workers' democracy flew together in the wind. The axe is laid to the root of the tree. And if we, to however small an extent, have emblazoned our name on the reawakening of this movement, it is not to preserve any single moment of it nor to attain any particular celebrity. Now we are sure of a satisfactory conclusion to all we have done: the SI will be superseded.

IS no.12, 1969