We feel it useful to point out that for various reasons, certain people who have never had anything to do with the situationists have been passing themselves off as members of the SI.

The wretched appearance of the opinions they express should be enough to make their listeners wary, and in that event all their solicitations should be treated with a level of distrust. Indeed, we have been reported in Bordeaux, Grenoble, and elsewhere. In Paris, following a certain Dominique Frager, who operated under the title until December, the names Christian Descamps and Alain Guillerm were also associated with the same less than sustainable role in April.

We would like to make it clear that the only way to contact the SI is through our mailing address (B.P. 307-07 Paris), or to be presented by one of the organizations with whom we maintain relations. The names of a sufficient number of SI members are always mentioned in each issue of this journal. Anyone who claims to spare someone of the necessary screening process therefore reveals themselves to be a mythomaniac and a provocateur. Watch out!

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/imposters.html

The 7th SI conference was held in Paris from the 5th to the 11th of July, 1966. The following questions were discussed: the organization of the SI; organization in general; the development of our relations with the revolutionary currents now presenting themselves; the present state of the processes and conditions that may be determined in different parts of the world; revolution and economy in developing countries; culture; new methods of agitation; the time of the abolition of separate power; situationist publications and translations; the financing of our activities; and the selection of theoretical work to develop. A general agreement was demonstrated in every subject debated.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/seventh.html

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 a unitary critique of the world, or is nothing. By unitary 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)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).

In July, Jan Strijbosch (Holland) was excluded by the 7th Conference for demanding the readmission to the SI of Rudi Renson, whose state of total inactivity for over a year is generally regarded as an effective resignation — or even pure and simple disappearance.

As Strijbosch's own activity has hardly been any more visible of late, we had no desire to justify some kind of "tendency" of incommunicable participation. (We should point out that we have never had any other problem with these comrades.)

Anton Hartstein was excluded shortly after for theoretical inadequacy, which became apparent with his intervention on the question of the State at the same Conference; and which was almost immediately exacerbated by the fact that he was somewhat slow to react when the practical solidarity of the SI was required.

Théo Frey, Jean Garnault and Herbert Holl were excluded as soon as they were no longer able to back up their lies in their confrontation with Mustapha Khayati, which was adjudicated by the SI. This was around midnight on 15 January: the detail is worth noting, for as an important argument in one of their proclamations, the liars later wrote that it was already the 16th, and therefore pretended that there was some discrepancy in their expulsion from the SI that somehow validated their accumulation of concerted falsifications. Having admitted at that point, almost as a justification, that they had for a few months constituted a secret faction devoted to taking power within the SI (an operation of a magical nature, because this "power" is nothing other than certain individual theoretical and practical capacities of which they felt deprived and, judging by their conduct, had no chance of ever attaining). They also claimed that Edith Frey was involved. Given the unreliability of their word, and the fact that she was absent, we could not be sure of this last confession concerning a third party, and her name has thus not been included in the statement of exclusion. However, as Edith Frey is effectively in solidarity with these liars, we have no choice but to assume that she was in on their secret.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/recent.html

In June 1966, beside a text by Kostas Axelos, ex-editor of Arguments (which says it all, really), number 55 of the bulletin of an "International Center for Poetic Studies" in Brussels contained an article by one Jacques Darquin, offering this same Axelos the stupidest and most unbridled worship. According to a biographical note introducing his article, Jacques Darquin "was briefly a member of the Situationist International." We immediately wrote to the journal's editor, Fernand Verhasen, pointing out that this was untrue, and that we expected him to make it known to both us and the readers of the following issue that his good faith had been abused.

This imposture, we might add, is all the more significant in that it is intended to qualify an adulator of Mr Kostas Axelos, whose work the situationists have mentioned several times in complete opposition. In this instance, Mr Darquin's self-promotional behavior casts in a redoubtable light what Axelosian thought meant with its amazing discovery that "false consciousness is hand in glove with the consciousness that believes it knows the truth." In order for Mr Darquin, for example, to have been "hand in glove" with the situationists, he would have to invent a false past for himself. The triviality of his case makes it obvious to everyone that he "links" himself to us in the same way that Mr Axelos does "to Heraclitus and to Marx, to Rimbaud and to Nietzsche," etc. But the impudence of Mr Darquin's links is even more immediately demonstrable.

Irritatingly, Verhesen provided no response whatsoever, effectively taking all responsibility for this falsification. Several weeks later, he was forced to suffer the consequences of this indignation when a few situationists chased him out of a nightclub in Brussels. This pathetic little character, who maintains his arrogance despite a courteous appeal to his intellectual honesty, and instantly becomes humble when given a slap in the face, then hastened to plead that there was no more a Darquin than there was ink in Axelos' intellectual pen, and that the entire Darquinage, the bleating article and the biographical note, were directly furnished by Axelos himself. What a mentality! Just as we've always said...

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/axelos.html

We wish to draw attention to some of our refusals to invitations from those who think they need to offer us a place in this or that despicable little niche of the very system we have consistently denounced. This information, of course, is not interesting for the refusals themselves — which shouldn't surprise anyone — but for the moronic indecency that a number of these offers clearly exhibit.

In June 1966, the situationists refused an offer from the journal Aletheia, open to all sorts of Stalinists and peppered with Heideggerianism, to participate in a special issue purporting to deal with "militantism"! In August of the same year, we declined an invitation to take part in the "Destruction of Art Symposium" planned for London in September, observing that "art is already destroyed and has been for a very long time... Nowadays, organizing the common spectacle of the debris and copies of the debris — Enrico Baj, for example — is not to destroy it but to pick up the pieces and try to stick them back together, that is, to be the academic art of the era of art's completion." In January, after an order for the situationist brochure from Strasbourg was placed by Maspéro — the famous bookseller of a bureaucracy on the road to liberalization — where a member of the public had the poor judgment to go looking for it, we wrote to its proprieter: "You Stalinist prick, it's no accident that you don't have our brochure. We despise you." In March, it was necessary to respond to the Center for Socialist Students, who had asked a member of the SI to become caught up in one of its debates on "concentration camp cities and socialist urbanism," that "we find those who are speaking in it, and those who are listening to them, completely uninteresting."

The prize, however, goes to Kostas Axelos (see above1 ), who wrote to us on 27 February as editor of the Editions Minuit collection of Arguments, proposing that we "send a copy of Vaneigem's Traité" for him to read. Our response was short but offensive.

I love my camera because I love life... I record the best moments of existence... I relive them whenever I like, in all their splendor.

THE SPECTACLE'S DOMINATION OVER LIFE

This advertisement for Eumig cameras (summer 1967) evokes with great accuracy the glaciation of individual life inverted in the spectacular perspective: the present surrenders to being immediately lived as memory. Through this spacialization of time, which submits to the illusory order of a permanently accessible present, time and life are lost together.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/refusals.html

• 1When Axelos Found a Disciple

[Louis] Janover, the ex-editor of Front Noir, who now seems to be the only author in issue #1 of the Cahiers de Front Noir,1 is a moralist, simply because he collected for [Maximilien] Rubel the famous "ethical" explications of [Karl] Marx's works, one of the numerous sources of pseudo-unification that is useful for the job2 of the Marxologue who is paid well by all of the modern States, that is to say, useful to anyone who is incapable of conceiving dialectical thought. [Max] Stirner was not wrong to say that all moralists have slept in the bed of religion and, for example, the ethics affirmed by Hanover -- despite his lip-service to the "Dionysiac dream" of utopian socialism -- smell more of the kill-joy [l'eteignoir] than of Fourierism: "All forms of amorous reciprocity, insofar as they distance themselves from sexual relations founded on animalistic satisfaction or the necessity of reproduction, are indissociable from sexual fidelity. All intellectual affinity, moral or emotional, disappears in cases of infidelity because they suppose that trust and mutual love haven't acquired enough force to give birth to a fixation superior to the sexual instinct of the animal" (page 30).

This honest moralist, who sets himself up as the exclusive depositary for revolutionary purity -- everything that is not a part of his insignificance appears to him as mere arrivisme -- was stung by the [editorial] note that we dedicated to him in I.S. #10 (page 72: "L'armee de reserve du spectacle").3 He doesn't go as far as respond to this precise article, which is effectively unanswerable. But all the same there's been progress: now he names the SI when he attacks it, and directly quotes us. We want to make it clear that, for us, Janover is discredited, not only because the dissimulation and falsification of reality is "immoral," but also because it is fundamentally incompatible with the methods and goals of a revolution that must abolish ideology and class. However, Janover's moralism is agreeably evident in his manner of quotation. He selected the three rare phrases in which the situationists used concepts from the old (Trotskyist) ultra-Left in a non-critical manner (and this concerning marginal points in "cultural" texts). We believe that it hasn't escaped anyone that the SI's theoretical investigations have -- fortunately -- constituted a movement that is deely sincere [approfondi] and unified in its commitment to correcting a good number of its first presuppositions: we have written as much in I.S. #9, pages 3 and 4. As if by chance, the quotations selected by Janover all come from the first issue of I.S., and particularly from a text that pre-dates the formation of the SI by ten years. But honest Janover would like people to believe that we opportunistically flit about, in every [written] line, between incompatible positions, at the will of fashion, from one day to the next.

How can he make disappear the real development of our theoretical work, which hasn't been published without effecting certain, already perceptible changes in intellectual methodology, and that he himself hasn't disdained from using (because he hasn't only read Rubel)? His method is simple and direct. So as to show that the SI has, "in the hope of throwing us off the trail," flipped from a kind of perfect bureaucratic Trotskyism to its current positions, Janover introduces his little series of quotations, not dated but more than a decade old, with the simple remark: "just yesterday it was a question . . ." (page 75). This just yesterday is the best of this kind of moralism, to which Janover's reputation certainly can't fail to forever remain monogamously loyal, without "throwing us of the trail."

Translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2006. From https://www.notbored.org/janover.html

• 1Trans. Notebooks of the Black Front, a surrealist journal.
• 2Trans. English in the original.
• 3Trans. See Internationale Situationniste #10 May 1966. "The reserve army of the spectacle" has never been translated into English.

In March [1967], several situationists accidentally encountered the members of the "Union of Anarcho-Communist Groups" (address: Edith Dard, post box 114 Paris, 10th arr.), who accepted the principle of a subsequent discussion in full knowledge of the fact that the critiques of them would be tough: the theses of the U.A.C.G, which propose to surpass frozen anarchist ideology and to bear in mind a certain revolutionary contribution from Marxism, in reality move towards rallying the worst ideological and organizational debris of sub-Leninism, as if it were a new thing that was unquestionable. These anarcho-communists nevertheless say they have moved beyond the positions that they expressed the preceding year in their document addressed To the international anarchist movement. This was surely a move in the worst possible direction, because one of their tracts, which we happened to see a little later, allied the two counter-truths that concluded their debilitated argument this way: "In Yugoslavia, the Workers' Committees manage the business enterprises. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong have created committees of popular self-management. Why not in France?"

We immediately wrote to them: "Given this tract, you will understand that it is impossible for us to meet you." They responded to us as follows (with a quotation from [Peter] Archinoff's History of the Makhnovist Movement that makes one think that the U.A.C.G. sees itself participating in the beginning of a new 1917 revolution):

"Comrades, precisely given this tract, it is a shame that you can not meet us. Moving from a lucid critique of society to the means of touching the popular strata at the level that they can understand it is something other than demagoguery. We believe that your dialectical spirit, the quality of which, it seems to us, hides something other than aristocratic habits -- perhaps arrogantly revolutionary [ones] -- will allow you to feel this."
This conception of the "popular strata" [couches populaires] seems to us beneath comment.

Translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2006.) From https://www.notbored.org/UACG.html

It seems to us that the insurrections of the blacks in Newark and Detroit have indisputably confirmed our 1965 analysis of the Watts riot [The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy]. In particular, the participation of numerous whites in the looting demonstrates that in its deepest sense Watts really was "a revolt against the commodity," an elemental reaction to the world of "commodity abundance." On the other hand, the danger represented by the leadership that is trying to constitute itself above the movement is now taking more definite shape: the Newark Conference has adopted the essential features of the Black Muslim program of black capitalism. Stokely Carmichael and the other "Black Power" stars are walking the tightrope between the vague and undefined extremism necessary to establish themselves at the head of the black masses (Mao, Castro, power to the blacks and we don't even have to say what we're going to do about the 9/10 of the population who are white) and the actual unavowed paltry reformism of a black "third party," which would auction off its swing vote in the American political marketplace and which would eventually create, in the person of Carmichael and his colleagues, an "elite" like those that emerged out of the other American minorities (Poles, Italians, etc.), an elite that has so far never developed among the blacks.

In Algeria, too, Boumédienne has unfortunately proved the correctness of our analysis of his regime [The Class Struggles in Algeria]. Self-management there is now completely dead. We have no doubt we will eventually see it return under more favorable conditions. But for the moment no revolutionary network has succeeded in forming on the basis of the offensive resistance of the self-managed sector; and our own direct efforts toward this goal have been extremely inadequate. [...]

Daniel Guérin wrote to us to say that our note about him [The Algeria of Daniel Guérin, Libertarian] was unfair and that he wanted to explain himself. We met him. He had to admit that we gave a correct account of his analysis of Algeria, which is at the opposite pole from ours. He complained only of having been presented as a sort of agent of Ben Bella. We stated that our note in no way suggests such an idea. Guérin explained his admiration for Ben Bella by psychological arguments whose sincerity we don't question: He had found Ben Bella very likable, particularly after thirty years of disappointments with his other militant anticolonialist North African friends, who have generally ended up becoming government officials. Ben Bella remained a man of the people, that was his good side. He became President of the Republic, that was his failing. Guérin already found Ben Bella's Algeria "miraculous" and reproached us for demanding a succession of additional miracles. We replied that such a succession was precisely our conception of revolution; that any single "miracle" that remains miraculous (i.e. isolated and exceptional) will quickly disappear. We proposed to Guérin that he publish a text in response to our article; but he considered that his oral explanation was sufficient. [...]

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1967)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).

We have been forced to withdraw our publications from "La Vielle Taupe" bookstore. Its proprieter1 has too many revolutionary pretensions to be considered neutral with regard to the writings on display; and too little rigor in his activity to be considered revolutionary (allowing the prolonged presence and conversation of imbeciles, including Maoists).

More seriously: we formally deny that the bookseller and editor Georges Nataf (26 rue des Boulangers, Paris 5e) has ever been authorized by the situationists to present himself as responsible or liable for the publication or reissue of the journal Internationale Situationniste, or any other SI text. This imposture (whose motivations we imagine to be emotional rather than economic) was sharply refuted by us in June by means of a direct intervention which could not be ignored by anyone who knows him.

Translated by Reuben Keehan: From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/bookstore.html

• 1Translator's note: Pierre Guillaume (b.1941), former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, more recently a prominent negationist (or holocaust revisionist) and author of the interesting though somewhat questionable Guy Debord (La Vielle Taupe 1, Spring 1995).

Our comrade Charles Radcliffe was recently charged in London with issuing counterfeit money: this had to do with his participation in the production of a tract critical of America's war in Vietnam that had been illustrated with the image of a one dollar bill. The accusation seems to have come from a dossier drawn up by the CIA in Paris, and presented to the British authorities by the US ambassador to England, in order to convince them that Radcliffe's activity constituted an offence. It would therefore be completely erroneous to assume that this incident provides the Final Solution to the old semi-mythological questions raised now and again about the origins of our financial resources. After several months in hiding, Radcliffe is currently out on bail.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/gold.html

With the 10,000 copies of the first French edition of our pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life having sold out in two months, the SI released a second edition in March, also running to 10,000 copies. In the months that followed, the pamphlet was translated and reissued in a number of different countries. In England, an initial complete translation was followed by an expanded edition including annotations and the text 'If you make a social revolution, do it for fun' under the general title Ten Days that Shook the University: The Situationists at Strasbourg. In the United States, another translation was issued in New York care of Tony Verlaan; while an abridgment of a different translation (by Jim Evrard) was published in Seattle. In Sweden, a complete translation, done by Anders Löfqvist and Gunnar Sandin, was released in Lund, then in Stockholm.

Extracts have appeared in the Spanish revolutionary journal Acción Comunista, and the Italian journals Nuova Presenza in Milan and Fantazaria in Rome (the latter with an introduction by Mario Perniola, who published an article in favor of the SI, 'Art and revolution,' in the journal Tempo presente in December). Other yet-to-be-published unabridged translations have been completed in Spain, Holland, West Germany and Denmark.

Our English-language brochure on the Watts uprising (The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Economy) was reproduced in the London journal Cuddon's1 . In the same year, Vaneigem's text 'Basic Banalities' was published in pamphlet form under the title The Totality for Kids (translated by Christopher Gray). This pamphlet should be reprinted shortly. The first issue of an English journal, Situationist International, will appear in early 1968.2 3

In January, the SI published the tract Attention! Three Provocateurs, explaining the ignominious exclusion of the Garnautins (this document is still available from us on request).

In August, The Explosion Point of Ideology in China was published as a pamphlet whose entire run was almost completely sold out within six weeks.

5,000 copies of the current issue of Internationale Situationniste have been printed.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/concerning.html

• 1Cuddon's Cosmpolitan Review #10 (August 1966)
• 2Translator's note: With the resignation of Charles Radcliffe in November 1967 and the exclusion of the rest of the English section the following month, the projected journal was never released. See 'The latest exclusions'(I.S. #12).
• 3Libcom note: The English section went on to become King Mob.

Responding to a letter from Editions Gallimard, which was published in I.S. #10 (page 84 1 ), wrote simply that his "projects," as well as the "climate" in which he had written his Revolution of Everyday Life, were best expressed in the journal Internationale Situationniste. The publishers promptly returned the manuscript, restating, as a motif of definitive condemnation, the two reservations they had already made known: the "repetitions," and the "artificial" division into two parts. A few weeks went by, then Editions Gallimard, for reasons that remain obscure to us, did a complete about-face: they asked for the same manuscript again, and offered Vaneigem a contract to sign straight away. A year has now passed since this contract was signed, and the still the book has not appeared; it will not be released until the beginning of 1968. This administrative red tape is an inexpensive way of holding off the accelerating development of these new issues in ever-widening circles.

In light of this experience, Guy Debord, who did not finish writing The Society of the Spectacle until much later, began by proposing his book to Editions Buchet-Chastel, a publisher far more familiar with the material, who will release the book as soon as possible, in November.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/books.html

• 1The SI's Publications

Though we have never actually met them, we have many points of agreement with the comrades at Regroupement Inter-Entreprises who publish Information-Correspondance Ouvrière (address: Blachier, 13 bis rue Labois-Rouillon, Paris-19e), which we strongly recommend reading for an understanding of the current workers' struggles (ICO has also published interesting brochures on The Movement for Workers Councils in Germany, Spain today, etc.). There is, however, one fundamental opposition: we believe in the necessity of formulating a precise theoretical critique of the present society of exploitation. We consider that such a theoretical formulation can only be produced by an organized collectivity; and inversely we think that any present permanent liaison organized with workers must attempt to discover a general theoretical basis for its action. What On the Poverty of Student Life described as ICO's choice of nonexistence in this domain does not mean that we think that the ICO comrades lack ideas or theoretical knowledge, but on the contrary that by intentionally putting these diverse ideas in parenthesis, they lose more than they gain in their capacity for unification (which is, in the end, of the highest practical importance). One might therefore say that the level of information and correspondence between the editors of ICO and ourselves has, in the past, been rather limited. Indeed, a student reporting on the situationist critique of his milieu for number 56 of their bulletin announced that "all things considered," our proposal for the supersession of the university system consisted entirely of the expropriation of student grants.

In a letter published in the following number, we pointed out that we spoke, rather, of the "absolute power of the workers councils," and that there is a difference here that is not unworthy of attention. It also seems to us that ICO has exaggerated the difficulty and byzantinism of the SI's vocabulary, advising readers to pack a good dictionary, and on one occasion going so far as to publish two columns of remarks: one in a situationist style; the other their translation into an ordinary style (we have not been able to decide with any certainty which column was the most situationist).

As for the international conference of a few similar European workers' groups in Paris organized by the ICO for July, one can read in the preparatory bulletin this Letter to the German Comrades:

It seems that we will send at most a single observer this year, thus fulfilling your predictions without taking account of our suggestions. The English comrades (Solidarity) appear to have rather strong objections to continuing to participate in the direction that we had suggested. They not only think that the participation of the situationists would be of little interest, which, as you know, we agree with; but they disapprove of the participation of Heatwave, Rebel Worker and the Provos as well. Although they don't explicitly mention it, I presume this indicates that they also disapprove of some of the more controversial themes that we consider important. If I am to understand them correctly, they consider that such themes as the psychology of authoritarianism, that is to say the authoritarian personality; the internalization of alienated norms and values; sexual oppression; popular culture; everyday life; the spectacle; and the commodity nature of our society — the last three points in the Marxist-situationist sense — are too "theoretical" to be "political."

They suggest instead that we organize a separate conference with these groups. In these conditions, we feel that our participation is more a waste of money than a real interest. For capitalism is now at a stage where the more enlightened members of the ruling class can consider replacing the hierarchical system of production with a more democratic form, that is to say the participation of workers in management, naturally on the condition that they will be brainwashed into believing that they can identify with their bosses.

This might be a good opportunity to clear up a few points. These advanced workers' groups contain a number of intellectuals, which is fair enough and even necessary. But what is not so fair and necessary is that such intellectuals, with their entirely different and still uncritical lifestyle and their own more or less contradictory or otherwise received ideas, can be in a position — in the absence of a precise theoretical and practical accord that only they control — as informers of the workers; and all the more easily in the name of a purist demand of absolute worker autonomy without thought. You have Rubel, you have Mattick, etc., and each to his own dada.

If a hundred thousand armed workers were therefore to send their delegates, this would be all well and good. But indeed this prototype of the council system must recognize that it is now on an entirely different level, having surpassed the tasks of the vanguard (a concept that must cease being put into practice in its absolute identification with the Leninist notion of the 'vanguard' party, whose task it was to represent — and above all to direct — the working class.)

This distrust towards theory explains the horror aroused by the situationists, a group not as strong as the Anarchist Federation, but more sensible, and more in tune with modern questions than even the German comrades. What's more, ICO's agitation has a reassuring theoretical inconsistency, and they are content: they thus still prefer the Provos or the American anarcho-surrealism of Rebel Worker to the situationists, who are "of little interest." If they also prefer the English journal Heatwave, it is because have still not admitted that its editor is now a member of the SI. This discrimination is all the more curious since they explicitly propose discussing some of the SI's theses.

To make things clearer still: the majority of the British Solidarity group that is apparently demanding this boycott of the situationists are very combative revolutionary workers. We feel confident in stating that its shop-steward members have not yet read the SI, certainly not in French. But they have an ideological shield, their specialist of nonauthority, Dr. C. Pallis1 , a well-educated man who has been aware of the SI for years and who has been in a position to assure them of its utter unimportance. His activity in England has instead been to translate and comment on the texts of Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], the thinker who presided over the Socialisme ou Barbarie debacle in France. Pallis knows quite well that we have for a long time pointed out Cardan’s undeniable regression toward revolutionary nothingness, his swallowing of every sort of academic fashion and his ending up becoming indistinguishable from an ordinary sociologist. But Pallis has brought Cardan’s thought to England like light from a dead star — by presenting his least decomposed texts, written years before, and never mentioning the author’s subsequent regression. It is thus easy to see why he would like to prevent this type of encounter.

Moreover, the above discussion, which we will ignore, is beside the point, for we certainly do not find it useful to participate in the mute dialogue of a gathering that, at this stage, is not ready for real communication. If we are not mistaken, the revolutionary workers will come across these problems themselves, and must discover how to grasp them for themselves. We will see what we can do for them when the time comes. In contrast to the view of the small parties that never cease to go in search of the workers in the illusory goal having them at their disposal, we expect that the real struggle of the workers will bring them to us; and we therefore place ourselves at their disposal.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/reading.html

• 1Libcom note: aka Maurice Brinton

In the article on Spain in I.S. #10 regarding the doomed union of the bourgeoisie, the Stalinists and others attempted by bourgeois democracy in order to succeed the Francoist state with a more rational form of advanced capitalism 1 , we pointed out that "the recent negotiations between the CNT and the Falangist unions are yet another reflection of this same tendency toward submission to bourgeois evolution." After having virtuously reproached the situationists for criticizing Proudhon (challenging our assertion of his "hierarchical separation" of women 2 , but without trying to refute it) Le Monde Libertaire declared in June 1966: "Likening the Spanish CNT to the Falangist unions is taking it a bit too far! The SI overlooks the fact that the group 'negotiating' with Francoism is certainly not the CNT and was vigorously denounced by the entire international anarchist movement. Malevolence or ignorance? In either case the SI has discredited itself..." This odd lyricism requires some explanation. We clearly did not "identify" the CNT with the Falange; on the contrary, this monstrosity was cited as the supreme example of the discouragement of any anti-Franco opposition. No one could imagine us supposing that the entire exiled CNT would ratify such a gesture, which signifies the renunciation of everything for which its members gave their very lives. But our article concerned events inside Spain, in a period when the civil war era organizations carry much less weight than they used to, when survivors hunted for decades tend toward discouragement, toward all sorts of "democratic fronts." While I.S. #10 was at the printers, the press broke the news of a few scandalous indiscretions on the part of the best Falangists, either opposed to this attempt or disappointed with its results. But we already know the falseness of the pious variant of anarchism "vigorously" presented in response — a handful of traitors, simply resuscitated by the Falangists — and unfortunately these people represent a real current.

To respond now to this imputation of "malevolence or ignorance" advanced with a certain cynicism three months later by the well-informed but discreet people at Le Monde Libertaire, we are in a position to clear up the following issues: in the name of the CNT's "secretary of the interior," the traitor Royano (aka Romero) conducted negotiations with the highest Falangist authorities, after having spoken with General Alonso. He wished to include the CNT in the foundation of a great legal democratic union whose right to strike would be conditional. Royano obtained every police protection imaginable to carry out his politics in Spain and beyond, and to involve anybody he felt to be of use to his undertaking. Following this, he organized a clandestine conference within the CNT — evidently directed by the most bureaucratic selection imaginable, but composed of actual CNT militants — where he explained his politics. With the exception of one or two delegates who immediately refused to listen to a word, a few put aside their reservations, and the great majority gave Royano their approval. Hoping to have his perspective ratified, he then attended the CNT's General Congress — extended to an "inter-continental" geographic zone — which was held in Montpellier from 10 to 16 August 1965. On the eve of the conference, he met secretly with the tendency in opposition to the International Secretariat of the CNT. He revealed his dealings to them in their full extent; and explained his naïve intention to state his opinions before the congress. These opponents — who included Cipriano Mera and José Peraits, responsible for the FIJI — sensed the incongruity and danger of his conduct; and persuaded him that if he absolutely had to appear at the conference, he was not to say anything about his enormous blunder. They kept the affair carefully hidden (six months later, they were denounced for kidnapping a Spanish bishop in Rome). While the CNT's International Secretariat, investigating its own emissaries, had suspicions that something was brewing in Spain, it did not discover who was involved. The opposition played the game of concealing him, thus allowing back into Spain a man they knew had dangerous contacts with the police.

This straightforward summary should suffice to show the extent of the demoralization experienced by most of the Spanish anarchist movement, in spite of the claims of the systematically respectful anarchists of other countries — people who have been absent from the revolutionary plane for around half a century. It also demonstrates the odd fashion in which the "activists" of the Spanish liberation movement could combat the CNT-FAI's "immobilism," using all available means. This immobilism is, on one hand, the product of the crushing defeat of the Spanish workers' revolution; and on the other hand the refusal to undertake a rigorous critique of the very history of this defeat, and of the choices made thereafter (this leads us back to the general problem of anarchist ideology). It would be difficult to suspect the SI of defending any sort of ideological immobilism whatsoever. We are only too happy to say that we find reckless bids by reformist liquidators far, far worse.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/cnt.html

• 1Contribution to a Councilist Program in Spain
• 2in Lefebvre the Historian

The famous but short-lived "Provo" movement has often been linked to the SI. There were the revelations contained in a widely read article published in Figaro Litteraire (4-8-1966) — "Behind the angry young men of Amsterdam we find an Occult International" — and the equally popular article in the Belgian journal Syntheses, published in April [1967], which took into account the "radical argumentation" with which the SI opposes the derisory sub-ludic moderatism of the Provo "intellectuals," and contained our prediction that the Provo movement was about to end, which was something it did not fail to do in May [1967], when it dissolved. While it is indeed true that "the Provos have invented nothing," it is, however, quite incorrect to suppose that "the Provos provide the previously isolated theorists of the Situationist International with troops, 'intelligent surrogates,' capable of constituting the secular arm of an organization which itself prefers to remain more or less behind the scenes" (Figaro Litteraire). We don't consider ourselves so isolated that we need to keep such company; and it goes without saying that we don't want any sort of "troops," even if they were much better troops than these. Indeed, the relationship between the SI and the Provos occured elsewhere, on two distinct planes. As a spontaneous expression of the revolt appearing in European youth, the Provos usually positioned themselves on the terrain defined by situationist critique (against capitalist abundance, in favor of a fusion of art and everyday life, etc.). Furthermore, as they fell under the influence of a directorship composed of "philosophers" and suspect artists, they encountered people who were also somewhat acquainted with the SI's theses. But this dissimulated knowledge was at the same time the simple recuperated falsification of various fragments. It is sufficient to note the presence in the Provo hierarchy of the ex-situationist Constant, with whom we broke in 1960. Back then, Constant's technocratic tendencies prevented him from seeing things from the perspective of revolution, which he deemed to be "nonexistent" (cf. I.S. #3 1 ). As soon as the Provo movement became fashionable, Constant rediscovered revolution, and, under the name "anarchist urbanism," he slipped in the eternal maquettes of "his" unitary urbanism, at exactly the same time as they were being exhibited at the Venice Biennale under their original title in order make a good impression. Constant represented Holland as its official artist. The rout of the Provos was already inscribed in their submission to an internal hierarchy and in the idiotic ideology that they devised in order for their hastily organized hierarchy could function. The SI has only ever had contact with the elements of the radical base, which should be distinguished from the official movement; and we have always advocated an urgent split from the latter.

We're not particularly interested in returning yet again to such a dull theoretical subject: sufficient critique of the doctrine and behavior of the Provos has already been made in the English journal Heatwave, and in our brochure On the Poverty of Student Life. But it is above all the practical development of the contradictions of contemporary society that, having created the authentic element of the Provo revolt, has carried out its derisory institutionalization. The greatest demonstrations of the Provos' conformism were their regurgitation of the sociological and journalistic dogma that maintains that the proletariat has dissappeared, and their certainty that the workers are now satisfied and perfectly bourgeoisified. The riot that began in Amsterdam on 14 June 1966 and continued for the next few days — the extent of which cast the Provos in the falsest of lights — showed that their movement was in reality already dead. The Provo movement was indeed dead that June day, because this was an exemplary workers' riot of our era, one that began as an attack upon the bureaucratic union building, continued as a battle with the police (and the reinforcements who came from their supporters in the harbor district), and culminated as an attempt to destroy the office-block occupied by that great daily newspaper, The Telegraaf, because it of course published lies. Indeed, most of the rebellious youth of Amsterdam (for it would be false to identify all the Provos as a student movement) joined the workers in the street. But the Provo hierarchy, upon discovering in the conflict the negation of its piteous ideology, was faithful to only itself: it disavowed the violence, condemned the workers, appealed for calm on radio and television, and promoted other banalities before spectacularly leaving town en masse, in order to provide a good example of passivity.

If the situationists certainly anticipated the Provos in regard to a few vague novelties, there is all the same a central point we flatter ourselves on, which is the fact that we relentlessly remain "nineteenth century." History is still young, and the proletarian project of a classless society, even if it began badly, is still more of a radically new curiosity than the combined achievements of molecular chemistry and astrophysics or the billions of fabricated events channeled by the spectacle. Despite our "avant-gardism" and thanks to it, it is to this movement alone that we wish to return.

Translated by Reuben Keehan; edited by Not Bored! From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/holland.html

• 1Discussion on an Appeal to Revolutionary Intellectuals and Artists

Contrary to all of the rumors knowingly spread in the Anarchist Federation, and even decried at its Congress at Bordeaux, there has never been any sort of "situationist conspiracy" aimed at exploding this Federation, which has always presented the most total lack of interest to our eyes. We know no one in it. Our episodic reading of the deplorable Monde Libertaire did not lead us to suppose that the SI had the least audience in it. In this regard, On the Poverty of Student Life supplied a certain surprise: different members of the A.F. heartily approved of it. The permanent leadership of the A.F. -- which (with the same benevolence that the leadership accorded to the Workers' Strength union) had absolutely full support from the pro-Chinese [Communists], surrealists and lettrists in its ranks or among those invited to contribute to its newspaper -- reacted very so strongly as to remove one-doesn't-know-which-militants at the first indication of an influence that the leadership judged to be pernicious. We sent a very hard response, which placed on every individual with revolutionary pretentions the obligation to demand its publication and, if that appeared impossible to the leaders, to manage the consequences. The "anarchists" of the Nanterre Group, for example, did not do this: true students, they believed that they were able to offer themselves the combined luxuries of applauding us as aesthetes, of being guaranteed their existence as anarchists by the A.F. label, and of not being at all compromised by the actions of the A.F., since they continually condemned it from the outside. Three groups -- that of Menilmontant, the Revolutionary-Anarchist Group and the Makhno Group of Rennes -- found themselves in the circumstance of defending an honorable position. This problem made all of the others rise up. Things were inflamed to the point that at the Bordeaux Congress in April [1967], another split -- numerically much more considerable -- founded a second A.F., which reproduced on its own account the confusion and deficiencies of the real one. Of course, the SI had and will have no relations whatsoever with these two A.F.s. For their part, the three radical groups that were defined by this process fused together, and announced the publication of a journal called Internationale Anarchiste (address: 80, rue de Menilmontant, Paris, 20th). It is quite clear that, without any pressure from the outside, the A.F. will splinter from the moment that certain of its members discover the least trace of a real critical current. Because to see such a critique is, at the same time, to see the emptiness of the A.F. and the manner in which this emptiness defends itself.

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

The thousands of lines accumlated by the Garnautins1 in the several dozen circulars and tracts that they have published since their exclusion, which are filled with peremptory affirmations that have been surreptitiously taken from previous situationist publications and that are completely beneath comment here, have only pursued a single goal: to hide behind an ideological smoke-screen the simple, trivial, small, direct and brutal fact that Frey, Garnault and Holl have been excluded for having lied as a team, in the hope of obtaining the exclusion of Khayati,2 by trying to obtain this "success" by doing whatever they could, up to the last minute, to convince an assembly of the SI [Situationist International] that, over the hours, treated them more and more clearly as suspect.

On our side, with the exception of a report3 immediately sent to all of the members of the SI absent from this assembly and to only four other people engaged, at that moment, in a practical action with us (only Vayr-Piova4 will prefer not to understand), we have only published a single text [on the subject], "Be Careful! Three Provocateurs,"5 which was sufficient and definitive. But in their many documents the Garnautins haven't even thought that it might be useful (because they are obviously no longer living a lie) to reject this truly sufficient and central accusation, once and for all. They have not realized that this silence judges them in the eyes of all unbiased people. They have evaded, issued counter-truths, spoken of other things, made allusions to the heart of the subject with modest embarassment: "Khayati lies: he reports the details inexactly and, even if these details had been 'exactly' reported, he could not have lied less about the totality of the situation . . ." (Garnautin tract dated 19 January [1967].) One will admire the half-confession of their "even if." This was indeed what had happened [Khayati reported the "details" exactly] and the "detail" was, to tell the truth, as big as what they lack.

The rapid exposure [mise au jourdu] of their lie pushed their tendency to the ideological reversal of the real, which led them to the conspiratorial lie, to the extreme by making it a necessity. From that moment no enormity stopped them in their course of misinterpretations. They have found "cop-like" [flicard] the SI's tract that denounced their utterly classic, police-like procedure of producing several false witnesses to dishonor and eliminate a troublesome adversary in the best tradition of the "Taschereau Document."6 They shelter themselves behind Hegel so as condemn the "so-called psychological reflections" that want to disparage "great historical figures" with small explications from the private sphere.7 Thus, the Garnautins postulate with crashing naivete that they are historical men. Thus they "want and [will] accomplish a great thing, not imaginary and presumed, but quite exact and necessary." These heros have simply forgotten that all they have ever wanted -- if not accomplished -- was the success of a fake as vile as it was meaningless, and that, if we have had to advance several specifications of their psychological poverty, it was because we had to explain the surprising pettiness of their action. The majority that rejected them -- in fact, all those who did not figure in their exposed [secret] faction -- is transformed into a dictatorship by [Guy] Debord and his fanatical partisans. The Garnautins invented this personal power within the SI so as to attach [reappliquer] to it the master/slave dialectic. They believed that they have been slaves serving the ends of Guy Debord, and that they are thus summoned to become masters. But, as always, they are ignorant of the essential when it comes to a "supercession of the SI." Perhaps they were slaves due to their personal tastes. We don't know. But, in this case, they were, rest assured, slaves who did not work. Thus,8 they did not alienate by usage that which was their work, since it did not exist; nor did it become strong from the practical function to which it was submitted, since there wasn't any. It was precisely their own non-participation in the collective activity of the SI, their firmness -- despite their engagements [with the SI] -- in dwelling in a "student-y," provincial life devoted to quiet speculations, that created their inferiority, their contemplative knowledge of the SI.9 This admiring contemplation normally changes into rancor. Their faction was secretly constituted on the theme of the equality to be established within the SI, and these ideologues of pure equality were quite blind for not seeing [sentir] that their constitution of a secret faction (even before their recourse to organized calumny) placed them above the totality of the SI and constituted the first objective inequality ever created and institutionalized in the relations between situations.

As soon as the Garnaults were understood by the SI, and treated accordingly, the ideology of pure equality was proclaimed loudly and used to assemble [around the Garnautins] several students who themselves had been scorned the day before, and not without reason. Within several weeks, they would equate [the scandal at] Strasbourg with a fury and extremism that made the demands of the Levelers10 and the bare-armed workers [les bras-nus], the millenarianists11 and the Babouvists,12 look like childrens' games. The Garnautins would proclaim that the fault of the SI was that it was only an avant-garde; that avant-gardes only exist due to the delay of other developments; that the delay had been abolished by Garnault; that it was thus necessary to have "a revolutionary organization capable of acting on a vast scale in the world" (L'Unique et sa propriete);13
and that he thus become that organization. With a stroke of the pen, the global proletariat -- come forth from diverse degrees of delay as if it were one man -- is there, rigorously equal in consciousness and capacity to Garnault and anyone else. And this is the supercession of the SI, which is so desirable for his position. Naturally, all this takes place in pure thought.

The product of "this enthusiasm that, like a pistol shot, immediately begins with absolute learning" (Hegel) appeared for the dazzled astonishment of the world, which will not soon see it again, on 13 April 1967.14 Here the "revolutionary organization capabale of acting on a vast scale in the world" was crushed by the Strasbourg section of the M.N.E.F.15 And to have been defeated in this electoral epic, this does not diminish the glorious memory of its total praxis in Garnault sauce[16] 16 (thus no one will be surprised if our ideologues then went on to condemn the abuse of the requirement in the SI for coherence between what one says and what one does).

The highest production of this Alsatian ideology17 was printed in the pamphlet The Unique and its Property. Here Debord replaced Khayati as the object of envy and hate. The Garnautins total incoherence, which even affected the text, led to this development. The SI's theory had great qualities. It had a serious fault: it was Debordist. With the result that it was worth nothing, not even as theory. Because only praxis . . . (see above).

To support his joke -- Debord alone has always directed and done everything -- the stupidest procedures were employed among a dozen obvious lies: thus the idea that there has never been opposition in the SI,18 whereas our Garnautins were, in fact, the first of these oppositions that, cowardly, remained secret. The pamphlet attributes one remark to Debord (in which one feigns to believe that the concept of "communication" isn't employed in the SI's sense, but in the unilateral sense of O.R.T.F.,19 for example), and two quotations presented without attribution that are, in fact, written by Raoul Vaneigem: all the situationists, and all the attentive readers of our publications, know quite well that certain of Vaneigem's conceptions concerning the qualities of the situationist organization present important personal nuances. As leader, Debord is identified with Cardinal de Retz,20 who, in return, sees himself endowed with a quite bizarre class-consciousness: "watching oneself play the aesthetic game of a struggle that is hopeless in the face of the bureaucratic-bourgeois machine"). Our ideologues should read Retz: they will learn from him that "in incidents of calumny, everyone who is not harmed serves he who was attacked."

The height of the Garnautins' analysis is the discovery, made in the "Marxist" style of L'Humanite Dimanche,21 of the facts that the journal Internationale Situationniste is published legally and that Debord, its [official] editor, finds himself personally responsible for our debts at the printer, who has the temerity to have confidence in us. Here, in these facts, we have the basis for an economic power that would explain the inevitability [fatalite] of a Debordist power over the entire SI and the fact that the heroes of equality did not for even a minute try to oppose that power and were in fact always nice to it.

The facts, for example, that all of our publications outside of France have always and everywhere been published on completely autonomous financial bases, by the comrades of these respective countries, and with other "directors" and other printinghouse workers, have not been considered in this narrowly Alsatian optic.

The reality of the SI as an "international group of theoreticians" appeared quite beautiful to the Garnautins when they believed that they had their places in it and thus the ability to prove that they, too, were theoreticians, at least. From the day after their exclusion, the Garnautins reproached the SI for only being the SI, that is, for not declaring itself to be the "revolutionary organization capable of acting on a vast scale in the world." It would be quite useless to expect from them the least consciousness of the realities of the practical process that could create this type of modern workers' organization. But, to remain on the emotional and egocentric planes that hold them captive, one might ask oneself what difference it would make for the Garnautins if the new revolutionary current is at the stage of its first liaisons with a new theoretical basis, or if this new theoretical basis has already been lived by the revolutionary workers in struggle, or if the revolutionary current is at the stage of the power of the [Workers'] Councils. Because the Garnautins and their real practice will be condemned at every moment [of such a process]. Revolutionary workers do not amuse themselves with questions of calumny -- unlike the bureaucrats and politicians, who rule by the manipulation of lies. And the proletarian power of the Councils, which is the putting into practice of the truth, must obviously treat instances of lies supported as a team, by secret groups, which pursue their own ends, as one of the rare forms of obstruction that it still has to repress.

Unattributed; probably written by Guy Debord. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2006. From https://www.notbored.org/alsatian-ideology.html

• 1Trans. Collective and apparently arbitrary name (a pun on "to garnish"?) for Theo Frey, Jean Garnault and Herbert Holl, who were excluded from the SI en bloc on 15 January 1967 Active in the SI since 1965, all three lived in Strasbourg, a town in the Alsace.
• 2Trans. Mustapha Khayati, with whom the "Garnautins" had worked since 1965, was the primary author of On the Poverty of Student Life, the publication of which caused a great scandal in Strasbourg in November 1966.
• 3Trans. See letter dated 15 January 1967..
• 4Trans. Bruno Vayr-Piova, a reformist Strasbourgeois student.
• 5Trans. See our translation of Be Careful! Three Provocateurs.
• 6Trans. A police forgery found by a journalist named Tashereau, who used it to defame Blanqui, circa 1848.
• 7Trans. See the last few paragraphs of Be Careful! Three Provocateurs.
• 8Trans. In the following lines, the author (more and more clearly Debord himself?) seeks to demonstrate that, like the Hegel-quoting Garnautins, he, too, has read (but he has also understood) the works of the great German philosopher.
• 9Trans. To our knowledge, this is the first reference to/critique of "contemplative situationists," that is, people within the SI who (merely) admired it as if they were outside of it, contemplating some kind a spectacle. During and in the wake of the orientation debate of 1970, the "contemplative situationist" par excellence would be Raoul Vaneigem.
• 10Trans. Radical democrats during the English Civil War (circa 1645).
• 11Trans. See especially Raoul Vaneigem's The Movement of the Free Spirit (1986).
• 12Trans. Partisans of Gracchus Babeuf during the French Revolution.
• 13Trans. The title of one of the Garnautins' statements, and an attempt to detourne the title of a work by Max Stirner (1845).
• 14Trans. On that day, Bruno Vayr-Piova -- thrown out of the university a few weeks previously -- lost in the university election to a candidate from the UNEF (National Union of French Students).
• 15Trans. The National Mutual Benefit Association of French Students.
• 16Trans. An untranslatable in-joke. For other situ in-jokes that involve the culinary arts, see the letter by Debord dated 15 August 1968.
• 17Trans. A detournement of the title of Karl Marx's The German Ideology (1845).
• 18Trans. Serious splits had already taken place in 1959 (the exclusion of Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio and the collapse of the Italian section), 1960 (the resignation of Constant and the exclusion of the rest of the Dutch section) and 1962 (the exclusions of the "Nashists" and the entire German section).
• 19Trans. The French Office of Television Broadcasting.
• 20Trans. Jean-Francois-Paul de Gondi was one of the leaders of the aristocratic rebellion known as the Fronde (1648).
• 21Trans. The Sunday edition of the Communist Party's daily newspaper.