Mattick's virtue, his marxian approach, beside which Baran and Sweezy are revealed as quasi-keynesian (1), is at the same time his vice, or at least marks the limits of his perspective. From Mattick's point of view, the dynamics of capitalism can be comprehended by an understanding of the laws of capital accumulation. These laws ultimately lead the process of accumulation to an impasse, to a point where profits are insufficient for further accumulation. Far from resolving capitalism's classical contradictions, state intervention is only an admission that they persist. The contradictions reappear as a cancerous growth of unproductive expenditures. The "mixed economy", no less than the market economy, has limits, limits determined by its internal contradictions. Sooner or later these contradictions will become insurmountable. As a result, class struggle may well intensify and become revolutionary in character. The possibility of revolution hinges on the internal contradictions of the economy.

In this sort of analysis, the working class is only "tacitly present"; that is, its appearance as a revolutionary class is anticipated and even implied (given other assumptions about subjective capacities) by the theory of collapse, but until that point its struggle is not seen as having a qualitative impact on the economy. The struggle over wages and working conditions takes place within the confines of the law of value. The laws of accumulation-specifically the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit-which define the dynamic of the system incorporate this struggle as a struggle over the rate of exploitation, one of the variables of accumulation. The class struggle is, as it were, submerged by the "laws of motion" of the economy, and does not violate them.

An alternative theory, which postulates class struggle as the dynamic of capitalism was developed in the late 50's and early 60's by Cornelius Castoriadis (A.K.A. Paul Cardan), principal theoretician of the French group Socialisme Ou Barbarie. More recently, an American journal Zerowork, influenced by an Italian theoretical current, has come out with an analysis of the current crisis which bears certain similarities to Castoriadis' approach. Also, in Britain, Glyn and Sutcliffe, in their book British Capitalism and the Profit Squeeze, put forward a view of the British situation in the late 60's similar to that of Castoriadis and Zerowork. It is no accident that someone strongly influenced by Mattick, David Yaffe, has opposed their view. Although one could make reference to other tendencies and other authors, in what follows I will use Mattick as representative of one approach and Castoriadis and Zerowork as representative of an opposing approach. (2)
The issue of this opposition dates back at least to the 30's when Karl Korsch flirted with the notion - and then rejected it (3) - that after 1850 Marx's own theory turned progressively into a determinism which ignored class struggle. Korsch decided it was only a matter of a change in emphasis and that the Marx of class struggle and the Marx of a "contradiction between productive forces and relations of production" complemented each other. (4)

Castoriadis, however, portrayed Marx as a determinist, and argued that Marx's economic theories don't hold water. I'm not going to try to deal here in full with Castoriadis' characterization of and arguments against Marx. Whether or not they are valid, the motivation for Castoriadis' anti-Marxism is important. He aimed to oppose what is generally, or popularly, considered to be "Marxism" - determinism and economic reductionism - with a "new" theoretical starting point. The crisis of society, he argued, is not a narrowly economic one, but a crisis of the whole social fabric; it has to do with everything men and women face in their everyday life. What is important, according to Castoriadis, is not the contradictions of the economic system - but whatever bears upon the radical transformation of society by the self-activity of people. "Self-activity is the central theoretical category," he says. A sympathetic reading of Marx would show that in fact self-activity and capital as its very negation, is a central category of his work. Castoriadis however, in his unsympathetic reading, opposes this category to the Marx of economic law.

According to Castoriadis, Marx's failure to take self-activity into account in his economic theories has rendered them obsolete. Contrary to Marx's expectation, the rate of exploitation (also called the rate of surplus-value) had not continually risen but instead, in the, advanced capitalist countries, remained constant for some time. (5) What Marx hadn't counted on, said Castoriadis, was the power of the working class to achieve through struggle a continuous rise in wages. Moreover, in spite of this rise, capitalism had not collapsed, but had prospered. Through the expansion of an internal market and conscious intervention in the economy by the state, the system, though not free of recessions, was maintaining itself with no profound economic crisis; and, moreover, none could be expected simply on the basis of insoluble contradictions of the accumulation process. If the system were to fall into crisis, it would be due to contradictions arising from the bureaucratization of society, which for Castoriadis is the essential tendency of capitalism, and from class struggle, which for Castoriadis is the real dynamic of capitalism.

Discussing the current situation in his introduction to the 1974 edition of Modern Capitalism and Revolution, Castoriadis saw no reason to change his viewpoint. There he argues that the main cause of the rising rate of inflation has been the increasing pressure (…) of all 'wage and salary earners' for (…) higher incomes, shorter hours of work, and to an increasing extent, changes in their conditions of work." The international consequences of this rise in the rate of inflation due to social struggles, combined with other irrational factors he considers 'extrinsic to the economy" (e.g. politically motivated decisions of a president), could result, he says, in a serious economic crisis, but this "would not have been the outcome of those factors which the marxist conception considers operative and fundamental."

At the end of 1975, the journal Zerowork came out with an analysis of the current crisis which, like Castoriadis's, focuses on class struggle.

From the capitalist viewpoint every crisis appears to be the outcome of a mysterious network of economic "laws" and relations moving and developing with a life of its own. (…) Our class analysis proceeds from the opposite viewpoint, that of the working class. As a class relation, capital is first of all a power struggle. Capital's "flaws" are not internal to it and nor is the crisis; they are determined by the dynamics of working class struggle.

The contemporary Left sees the crisis from the point of view of economists, that is, from the viewpoint of capital. (… ) For the Left the working class could not have brought about the crisis; it is rather an innocent victim of the internal contradictions of capital, a subordinate element in a contradictory whole. This is. why the Left is preoccupied with the defense of the working class. (6)

For Zerowork, Keynesianism was a capitalist strategy based on a new relation with the working class growing out of previous struggles. "Full employment" had been imposed on capital'. Capital's counter-strategy consisted in recouping increasing wages by means of inflation, expanding the internal consumer market and instituting productivity schemes. The cycle of struggles of the late 60's and early 70's, characterized by the "refusal of work", an initiative tending to separate income from work (in which a strategic unity of the waged and the unwaged plays an essential role) imposes the new crisis on capital. In effect, continually rising income claims of all sectors of the working class combined with increased absenteeism, crimes against property", high employee turnover, sabotage, opposition to productivity schemes, etc., tend to sever income from productivity and thus cut into capitalist profit margins. The working class ruins the Keynesian balancing act by making incomes rise faster than productivity. Capital responds with a strategy of planned crisis aiming to reinforce the tie between income and work.
Zerowork's theses bring to the fore the rate of exploitation. They see active intervention on the pan of the working class, reducing the rate of exploitation, as the initial cause of the current crisis. "The crisis is characterized by an unprecedented decline in the rate of exploitation." (7)

In Britain, where' Glyn and Sutcliffe have tried to give evidence for a similar viewpoint, their thesis has been put into question by David Yaffe, who interprets the evidence differently.
Glyn and Sutcllffe's and Zerowork's thesis is actually stronger than Castoriadis'. I must distinguish them before discussing Glyn/Sutcliffe and Yaffe. Castoriadis argued in 1974 that wage pressure (as well as demands for shorter hours and changes in working conditions) was inflationary and that hyperinflation had a destabilizing effect on the world economy. A change in workers' behavior during economic downturns had resulted in a world recession. "The decisive factor here is a secular change in the behaviour of wage and salary earners who have come to consider as granted an increase in their real incomes, year in, year out..., " whatever the state of the economy. Allowing unemployment to rise to catastrophic levels could do away with this expectation (indeed it has), but only at the cost of creating a potentially explosive situation. There is no talk here of wage increases cutting into profit margins. What is important for Castoriadis is "self-activity", the fact that workers ceased to behave as manipulable objects, moderating their demands in response to planned downturns. It is not necessary for Castoriadis' argument that wage pressure actually resulted in increased real wages, only that it started an inflationary spiral that led to international monetary instability, which had deleterious effects on world trade.

Zerowork's argument is similar in that its main purpose is to explore how the working class breaks out of the capitalists' attempts to maintain it as a predictable "factor of production" and becomes a fighting unity. What Castoriadis calls a "secular, change in behavior" Zerowork sees as the "political recomposition of the working class", where Zerowork differs from Castoriadis is in emphasizing income pressure other than wage demands (welfare, shoplifting, self-reduction of transportation fares, meat boycott, etc.), and at least implying that income demands, combined with struggles which reduce productivity, are the cause of the profitability crisis. In this last matter, Zerowork resembles Glyn and Sutcliffe.

Glyn and Sutcliffe's argument is based on statistics which they claim show that in Britain between 1964 and 1970 profits fell while wages rose as a share of the national 'income. Yaffe attacks their use of the statistics and tries to show that in fact, there was in this period a decline in the share of net real wages and salaries (after tax) in national income. At the same time, productivity increased at a faster rate than real wages after tax. In other words, the rate of exploitation continued to rise. If this is correct, a Glyn and Sutcliffe/Zerowork type analysis fails to get at the source of the profitability crisis. It can't he due. to a simple drop in the rate of exploitation, to real wages rising faster than productivity.

For Yaffe, there's a problem with the rate of exploitation, but it arises from modern capitalism's internal contradictions rather tin from workers' militancy. Like Mattick, Yaffe sees modern capitalism creating a demand for surplus value that it can't adequately supply. Since progressively more capital is involved in state production the total profits earned are drawn from a base of private capital formation which, relatively speaking, is dwindling. In this situation, the only way to maintain the general rate of profit is to raise the rate of exploitation faster than before. "in order that state expenditure can be financed out of surplus value produced in the private sector of the economy, the rate of exploitation must be increased faster than before to prevent an actual fall in the rate of profit and a faster rate of inflation."

Yaffe's argument is based on an understanding that variable capital consists only of wages paid to productive workers, i.e. those workers involved in surplus value production. The rate of exploitation is not determined by the general level of wages but by the ratio of the total income of productive workers to the surplus value produced. Thus, a general rise in wages and a continued rise in the rate of exploitation are compatible if the number of productive workers remains relatively stable or decreases while productivity makes substantial gains. This is the theoretical basis for arguing that the rate of exploitation has continued to rise in Britain. However, more and more of the surplus-value produced has been allocated to unproductive expenditures, has gone not only into state production and social services but also finance and commerce. In other words, the productive sphere has been drained, or "looted," by the unproductive spheres. Though productivity has continued to rise, it has not risen fast enough to produce a mass of profit sufficient to meet all the demand made on the total surplus-value by both the productive and the unproductive spheres. The inflational spiral is a result of the fact that the demand on the total mass of profit exceeds its supply. Workers certainly have been struggling, struggling to keep the price of their commodity, labor-power, up with other prices, but the basic cause of the inflation is increased unproductive expenditures, which in turn rise largely because of government attempts to keep up the level of production, and thus employment, in spite of chronic stagnation due fundamentally to the tendential fall of the rate of profit. At the present time, British capitalists are trying to hold down wages and restructure industry which involves laying off workers - in order to raise productivity and thus further increase the rate of exploitation. (8)

For both Yaffe and Mattick, the insufficient rise in productivity is primarily a result of and in turn a cause of declining profitability. Since the post-war recessions did not and could not result in classical capitalist expansion, but rather only in an expansion in state production superimposed on real stagnation, the investment in new plant necessary for a sufficient rise in productivity could not take place. The lag in productivity results fundamentally from the internal contradictions of capital, has its source in the tendential fall of the rate of profit which cannot be reversed through Keynesian policies.

It would be naive to assume that what is at issue here is simply a question of fact. Zerowork presents its analysis as a basis for understanding working-class strategy in this period and as a basis for revolutionary organization. It proposes and allies itself with demands that further separate income from work or claim income for previously unwaged labor (e.g. wages for housework). Those influenced by Mattick's analysis tend to concern themselves with various working class strategies as responses to deteriorating conditions. (9) Both focus on similar means and forms of struggle, and both emphasize working class autonomy. But, in relation to one another, the one emphasizes the offensive and is more voluntarist", while the other emphasizes the defensive aspect of struggle and leans in a "spontaneist" direction. Zerowork poses the issue' starkly and polemically and claims there's no mid-ground between what it calls the "capitalist viewpoint" that the crisis arises from internal contradictions of the economy and what it calls the "working class viewpoint" that it is imposed on capital by the working class. However, the two viewpoints are not necessarily as mutually exclusive as Zerowork claims.

Mattick often points out that the classical marxian account of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall takes place on a high level of abstraction and doesn't exhaust the discussion of profitability, which also has to take into account the complexities of real, concrete capitalism. Marx's analysis, 'after all, abstracts from competition and assumes the existence of only two classes in a purely capitalist environment. Also, for Marx, the famous tendency of the rate of profit to fall is only a tendency, a consequence and expression of the increasing social productivity of labor, which is counteracted by other tendencies: rationalization, shortening the time of capital turnover (through improved transportation and communication) opening up of new spheres of production that have a low organic composition and thus high rate of profit, devaluation of capital in crisis, importing cheap foodstuffs and cheap raw materials, opening up of new areas for profitable capital investment and increasing the rate of exploitation. A tendency of the rate of exploitation to rise is bound up with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, these two opposed tendencies both following from the increasing social productivity of labor. But a conscious attempt of the capitalists to raise or maintain profits by raising the rate of exploitation through lowering wages and intensifying labor (speed-up) has a more immediate political impact. (10) These means of raising the rate of exploitation degrade and exhaust the laborers, leading them, in the classical conception, to overthrow the system. "The mass of misery, oppression, degradation, exploitation [grows]; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class." (11)

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall and these counter-tendencies form a dynamic which underlies and determines the character of capital accumulation, explains the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, and is the context of the struggle, both among capitalists and between classes, over the division of surplus-value. For Mattick, following Henryk Grossman, the ultimate significance of a falling rate of profit is that it limits the growth of the mass of profit, and the mass becomes' insufficient at some point for the profitable expansion of private capital.

Refutations and emendations of Marx, as well as defenses, often deal with the counter-tendencies to the fall of the rate of profit, both their power to preserve the system and their limits. Imperialistic expansion proved quite effective for capita' up to a point; world war itself served to literally destroy capital, as Mattick argues, recreating conditions for a period of expansion growing monopolization hindered devaluation in crises;Taylorisation of the labor-process is said to have allowed for increasing output and thus raising wages without decreasing the rate of exploitation, (12) and this in turn allowed for an expansion of the internal market; credit expansion has been another factor; state-intervention often involves rationalization; transportation and communications have improved phenomenally, cutting down the time of capital turnover.

Mattick concerns himself in part with the counter-tendencies to the counter-tendencies, their limits. For example, advertising costs, associated with an expanded internal market for the monopolistic consumer industries, are a drain on surplus value; "profits" made in state production are really a drain on surplus value. While Castoriadis rejects Marx's theory, claiming the rate of exploitation has not risen, and Zerowork claims the crisis is the result of the working class' reducing the rate of exploitation, Mattick reasserts the classical theory, pointing to the limits inherent in the means used to preserve the system and anticipating a point at which the reaching of these limits will provoke a sharpening of the struggle over the rate of exploitation.

Alan Jones tries to resolve the debate between Yaffe and Glyn and Sutcliffe this way:

At the onset of conjunctural crisis, notably when the process of accumulation falters, it is perfectly possible, indeed, inevitable, for direct struggle over the rate of exploitation to function as the cause of the onset of overt crisis (…) There is nothing contradictory whatever in understanding that in the final analysis the reason for the decline in the rate of profit is the changes in the organic composition of capital and in understanding that in a particular capitalism, in a particular time, the dominant element in the crisis is played by a direct struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie over the rate of surplus-value.

In fact, the rise in the rate of exploitation has slowed as "a result of May 1968 and the continued combativity of the working class. The rise in the rate of exploitation was thus slowed down by the resistance of the workers and therefore no longer exercised sufficient force to counteract the negative effect of the rise in the organic composition of capital". (13)

Such an approach seems to me most fruitful because it allows us to take into account both the economic system and the class struggle, without imagining that either is autonomous of the other or completely determined by the other. It allows us to recognize the working class as an active factor within the context of an economic system that has internal contradictions. The working class does not merely arrive post facto to save the world from the misery which capitalism has wrought. If the crisis demonstrates that capitalism has not solved its internal contradictions and, as Yaffe argues, needs to raise the rate of exploitation faster than previously, it also demonstrates that the working class has not become an integrated, manipulable component of the system, but is capable of self-activity. Its combativity becomes an obstacle to the functioning of a system – which has its own exigencies.
Because of the different Levels of abstraction on which this discussion takes place - Mattick and Yaffe abstract and theoretical, Cardan and Zerowork more empirical - the relationship and possibly complementary character of the two views is obscured. In the 30's, Anton Pannekoek criticized the economic theories of Mattickbs mentor, Henryk Grossman, for leaving out human intervention. Mattick answered:

Even for Grossman them are no "purely economic" problems; yet this did not prevent him, in his analysis of the law of accumulation, to restrict himself for methodological reasons to the definition of purely economic presuppositions and of thus coming' to theoretically apprehend an objective limiting point of the system. The theoretical cognition that the capitalist system must, because of its contradictions, necessarily run up against the crash does not at all entail that the real crash is an automatic process, independent of men. (14)

Mattick does not remain on the level of abstraction that Grossman did in his crisis theory. He relates the pure model to phenomena of modern capitalism. But he does tend to deal with the economy in abstraction from class struggle. Mattick is well aware of the limits of Grossman's and by implication of his own approach, and accepts them as self-imposed limits for methodological reasons. All one can say on the basis of an analysis of the developmental tendencies of capitalism, he says, is that crises will occur and "offer the possibility of a transformation of the class struggle within the society into a struggle for another form of society." Economic theory can only "give consciousness of the objective conditions in which the class struggle must evolve and determine its orientation." (15)
Although, as a temporary methodological procedure, this separation of economic theory can be justified, still, any permanent hypostatization of economic theory must be questioned. As Geoffrey Kay, discussing Yaffe, puts it;

The conventional interpretation of the law (of the falling rate of profit) can be attacked (…) for objectifying the economic process and thereby separating the class struggle from the accumulation of capital (…) The proletariat remains in the background (…) The law as conventionally understood (…) cannot yield any real understanding of the death crisis of capital as the birth pangs of a new form of society (…) can teach us nothing about the class that will make the revolution. (…) By objectifying economics and denying the proletariat any active and qualitative role in the creation of the crisis, Marxist economists have denied themselves any possibility for systematically analyzing the class struggle in its concrete forms, and lifting the problem of the political organization of the working class out of the limbo of ideological rhetoric. (16)

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The approach that analyzes recent developments in terms of class struggle is commonly applied to Italy, since its post-war competitiveness was based in part on low wages. "It was above all cheap domestic labor which financed Italy's post-war economic recovery," say one set of commentators.
The export industrialists were thus able to sell their products at stable or falling prices while maintaining profit margins high enough to self-finance further industrial expansion. . . . Once the industrial workers demanded higher wages, the whole house of cards began to collapse.

For over a decade now it has been the class struggle, and especially, though not exclusively, the consequent rising cost of labor, that has determined Italian economic cycles. (17)
The Italian steel, automotive and chemical industries were developed aftet the war with advanced techhology, which allowed Italy to take advantage of the post-war liberalization of trade. Repression of the labor movement guaranteed low wages.

In the late 50's and early 60's, various factors contributed to a heightening of workers' militancy. One was the increased parcellization of work and the process of de-skilling, which began to break down old hierarchies in the workforce. Another was the reduction of unemployment as a result of the "economic miracle." The new unity and strength of the working class manifested itself in the strike wave of 1962, which won a substantial wage increase.

In response, the capitalists first raised prices and then, in 1963, clamped down on credit to combat inflation. The rate of investment had already been falling. The credit squeeze further reduced investment and a three-year recession followed, duning which capitalists restructured factories for greater productivity. Production rose while wages fell. A period of upswing followed, but it was based on labor discipline rather than increased investment. In general, the Italian economy has been stagnating since 1963. As another commentator observes:

The temporary weakness [of the Italian working class] allowed a further spurt of growth in 1966-68, but this was obtained essentially by speedup, with next to no investments in more modern technology. (…) Since 1963-4, Italian capitalists have been investing very little, and the increasing technological lag has made Italian exports less and less competitive." (18)

The effects of rationalization on the conditions of work, as well as deteriorating urban living conditions, led to the "hot autumn" of 1969. As a response to speedup, workers struggled to gain more control over the organization and pace of work, as well as for higher wages. In order to do this they had to struggle against unions as well as employers and create autonomous organizational forms; general assemblies, factory councils and industrial zone councils. In this period workers won both substantial wage increases and some power to counter the employers' restructuring projects.
As usual, the capitalists then raised prices and tightened credit. However, the recession of 1970-72 did not bring about the hoped for reduction of militancy and wages continued to rise. Italy's problems then accelerated under the effects of economic instability on the global level. On top of rising labor costs and resistance to restructuring, Italian capital had to contend with worldwide hyperinflation and deteriorating market conditions. As the cost of imports, especially food and oil, rose, and markets for Italian goods contracted, Italy's trade deficit became insupportable and the country was forced to depend on unprecedented levels of international credit to avoid formal bankruptcy.

The current capitalist offensive involves increasing overtime, cutting out holidays, implementing speedups, and trying to impede the working of a sliding scale of wages. The attempt to link a new IMF loan to the subversion of the sliding scale was successfully resisted by workers in the spring of 1977.
Italian capitalism's long-term strategy is to destroy the degree of homogeneity attained by the working class struggle in recent years by decentralizing component operations and extending automation and to convert industry to capital goods production, which will require labor mobility and a long period of very high unemployment. Workers have responded with wildcat strikes, sabotage, autonomous Organization, expropriations, self-reduction, etc.

What's apparent in all this is a progressively intensifying struggle over the rate of exploitation. At least since the war, the strength of Italian capital seems to have depended on a disciplined workforce. Every time the Italian working class began to break its bonds, economic expansion was retarded and the ruling class was forced to respond by tightening the screws. Every working class victory on the wage front was met with increased prices, managed recession and an attack on the labor process. In the face of deteriorating trade conditions and without a docile working class, the Italians had to turn to inter-national borrowing. Domestic capital investment, lagging since 1963, was only available before that because of domestic cheap labor.

While this empirical account gives the intensification of the struggle over the rate of exploitation in Italy concreteness and specificity and indicates how it has been leading to direct action and autonomous organization, it doesn't really justify the conclusion that the Italian crisis is "caused" by working class activity. We are drawn back into asking why post-war Italian expansion necessitated low wages, into noting that it was based on investment in new industries in a period of post-war reconstruction and that after that no substantial investment was forthcoming. If the working class precipitated the Italian crisis, it was because Italian capital was so vulnerable to worker self-activity. We are dealing with a system that can't tolerate working class victories a system with little room for maneuver.

Looking for "causes", we would be drawn back into the pre-war period and asking general questions about the crisis of capital between the wars and the means used by the capitalists to extricate themselves from this crisis, in other words asking the very questions Mattick tries to answer in Marx and Keynes.
It was Britain's chronic low investment, as well as the combativity of the British working class from 1910 on, that served as an impetus to Keynes' theories. And it is in Britain that Keynesian policies have been most extensively applied and that the limits of the mixed economy are most evident. An obsolete industrial plant, a constantly expanding state budget, relatively high social services expenditures, and a large and growing state industrial sector are all a result of the long-term low profitability which has made Britain unattractive to private investors and uncompetitive on the world market. In 1976 the most sensational manifestation of these conditions was the steep fall in the value of the pound. In order to resolve its monetary problems, Britain would have to become competitive (preferably in a situation where world trade is expanding). And in order to do this it would have to decrease unit labor costs, i.e. increase productivity while restraining wage rates. In the 60's British industry tried to do so by tying wage increases to various organizational measures that would increase productivity, and by imitating an incomes policy. But this proved ineffective, both because of growing working class militancy, including a growing tendency to reject productivity deals, and because it has become apparent that large injections of capital are necessary to reestablish profitability.
One could say that the wave of struggles in the late 60's and early 70's plunged Britain over the brink into a more or less bankrupt state in which it is dependent on the IMF (at least until the expected oil revenues materialised). But this has to be understood in the context of chronic economic stagnation. (19) A 1973 article on Britain sums up the situation in this way:

British capital, handicapped by decades of low investment, requires a substantially increased share if it is to meet successfully the growing pressures of international competition. The unprecedented level of wage demands and wage settlements in the last five years... clearly accentuated this problem. Moreover, workers' readiness to co-operate, through productivity bargaining, in the more intensified exploitation of labor has to a large degree evaporated since the end of the 1960's. (20)

The global problem capitalist economists refer to as the "capital shortage' weighs heavily on Britain, as well as Italy.

Nowhere is the capital crisis more acute than in Britain and... Britain must invest some $45 billion in new plant and equipment to become competitive with its Common Market neighbors and with such trade rivals as Japan. In fact, the British government estimates [in 1975] that investment in manufacturing will fall. . . (21)

So capitalist planners speak in terms of "correcting the balance between consumption and production," i.e. lowering wages and unproductive expenses in the hopes that this will make funds available for investment.

However, politicians must weigh the possibility of intensified class struggle, which cutting into wages and social expenditures and increasing unemployment could set off, against the insolvency that would result from continuing old policies. For example, in Britain, after the steep drop in the value of the pound. the Chancellor of the Exchequer said "that the alternatives to going to the International Monetary Fund for a further loan would be 'economic policies so savage that they would lead to riots in the streets'." (22) Nevertheless, the IMF loan entailed further cuts in social service expenditure; full employment has become a relic of the past and the welfare state is being dismantled.

That the Chancellor wasn't being just rhetorical is substantiated by the fact that his scenario was quickly realized in Egypt, where in January a boost in government controlled prices of food and fuel - a measure taken to meet requirements of the IMF - actually did lead to riots in the streets. The Polish riots of 1976 were another version of this scenario; they were set off by price rises occasioned by Poland's loans coming due. Afterwards, in November, Brezhnev loaned Poland $1.3 billion "when Polish leaders convinced him that without help the worker uprising of last August would be only a prelude to a repeat of the working class rebellion of 1956." (23) In general, capital now has to perilously expand credit beyond all previous norms where and when it feels its power to raise the rate of exploitation is limited and will run up against too much working class resistance.

Currently in Britain, some union leaders have been arguing that the fact that inflation has been rising since last summer, despite wage restraint, proves that wage increases do not initiate the inflationary spiral. Now pressure from the rank and file has subverted attempts at renewal of the agreement between the TUC and the Labour government on wage restraint, and the possibility of a new "wage explosion" threatens to throw the crisis-ridden British economy even deeper into crisis. (24)

The conditions in all other countries are, of course, not identical to those in Britain and Italy, but the dynamic is similar enough for us to generalize with regard to the issue under discussion. In the late 60's capital found itself in the position of having increased expectations without having surmounted the economic contradictions which limit its production of wealth. Since it could not generate profits sufficient for profitable expansion of private capital on the basis of a renewal of the productive plant, capital had to both expand the unproductive spheres and simultaneously endeavor to increase productivity through rationalization and increasing the intensity of labor. However, working class resistance to productivity schemes grew. Simultaneously, income demands grew. The re-assertion of capitalism's "internal contradictions" met the re-assertion of working class militancy. As a result, capital has had to completely change its ideological tune; "affluence" and "rising expectations" have given way to "zero growth" and "small is beautiful." And a social reality is being constructed to match the ideology.

On the empirical level what we find are individual capitalists or corporations or nations, each intent on maintaining its competitive position, primarily by raising productivity while keeping the lid on wage rates and other expenses it" may consider flexible (such as social welfare programs). Internationally, the competition appears in the form of trade imbalances and ensuing monetary crises that put the now internationally interdependent economy in jeopardy. All of these matters, which the bourgeoisie understand as "economic", can be said to simultaneously express and mask both the class struggle and the contradictory process of capital accumulation. In a certain sense, a sense that doesn't invalidate the marxian viewpoint, it is all a matter of class struggle, since the capital accumulation process is based on historically specific production relations which were established and are maintained by a complex mix of physical and ideological manipulation and violence.

However, the particular struggles of actions of the working class, and their relationship to the specificities of particular units of capital - all this develops, not accidentally but, from the marxian perspective, in the context of an inexorable, contradictory capital-accumulation process which can be grasped theoretically on the basis of an analysis of the "total capital," i.e. on a level of analysis which abstracts from competition, if only to be able ultimately to work up to it by a series of approximations.

For the Marxist, the struggle between workers and bosses within various units of capital has to be understood in the context of the heightened international competition of the late 60's and the 70's. Heightened competition is characteristic of crisis conditions wherein capitalists struggle over a pool of surplus-value which is dwindling relative to their needs for profitable capital investment at the particular level of capital accumulation.

Particular nations jockey for a share of existing surplus-value sufficient to allow for further accumulation. But the crisis of capital is nothing but an insufficiency of the total surplus-value relative to the amount necessary for both productive investment f and unproductive expenditures. As a result in each nation, Britain more than others because of its poor competitive position, the struggle over the division of the existing surplus-value among its three functions - constant capital (plant, equipment and materials), variable capital (wages of productive workers), and revenue (capitalists' income and unproductive expenditures) - intensifies.

If, for theoretical purposes, we treat as secondary the struggle between capitalists and workers over how much labor is actually supplied for how much income, we can uncover what Mattick calls "the objective conditions in which the class struggle must evolve and determine its orientation"; that is, in this case, the context of economic stagnation and the fact that state intervention, rather than solving this problem, turns it into a problem of cancerous growth of unproductive expenditures. Finally, if, following Marx, we trace the economic stagnation back to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the limits of the counter-tendencies, that is, back to the internal contradictions of capitalism, we can understand why the capitalist class is incapable of delivering the goods, of satisfying the demands of a militant working class, and why, on the contrary, it must periodically attack the living standards of the working class and endeavor to increase the amount of surplus-value it pumps out of each unit of labor-time.

As "objective" as this sort of analysis appears, in that it is developed in abstraction from class struggle, nevertheless it leaves room for the "subjective" in that it shows how the basis of relative class harmony must break down and aims to put into question the capital relation itself. It abstracts from class struggle in order to show that the crisis of profitability, the context in which the struggle develops, is inherent in the development of the capital-relation. There are limits to organizing production and thus, indirectly, all social life, by means of the capital-relation, by means of wage-labor. Such a system results in a multi-faceted degradation of work and life, including at times serious decline in many people's material well-being.

However, even if this objective approach holds up theoretically, its limits must be recognized. Capitalism, as it develops (and decays), transforms the labor-process and life in general, and, as a result, the character and forms of revolt change also. Strategy and organization are historically specific. The belief in or proof of capitalism's inability to surmount its internal contradictions at best sets the- stage for understanding the specific character of the present crisis, the specific character of present struggles and the relation between the two. If the crisis offers "the possibility of a transformation of the class struggle within the society into a struggle for another form of society", it remains to be shown how this possibility can become a reality. What we need to do is 1) show how the intensified struggle over the rate of exploitation can actually become, or is in the process of becoming, a revolutionary struggle overflowing the bounds of the capital relation, how it can turn into a struggle against wage-labor, and 2) participate in this transformation.

"Critique" (…) includes from the point of view of the object an empirical investigation, "conducted with the precision of natural science," of all its relations and development, and from the point of view of the subject an account of how the impotent wishes, intuitions and demands of individual subjects develop into an historically effective class power leading to "revolutionary practice." (Praxis, Jan., July 1977). (25)

Footnotes

1. Paul Mattick, "Marxism and Monopoly Capital," Progressive Labor, July-August, 1967, reprinted as a pamphlet by Root and Branch, Box 236, Somerville, Mass 02143; and Mario Cogoy, "Las theories neo-marxistes, Marx et 'accumulation du capital", Les Temps Modernes, Sept.-Oct., 1972, pp. 396-427.
2. Here I'm using Mattick as a paradigm of "the Marxist" and reserving questions about the full adequacy of his analysis of the "internal contradictions." Castoriadis' thesis is developed most extensively in Modern Capitalism and Revolution. All reference is to issue #1; a second issue has just appeared. See Peter Rachleff's review of Zerowork in Fifth Estate, Nov., 1976. A very similar perspective can be found in Les ouvriers contre L'Etat, refus du travail). Also see Robert Cooperstein, The Crisis of the Gross Natfonal Spectacle. Glyn and Sutcliffe's book is discussed by Yaffe in "The Crisis of Profitability: a Critique of the Glyn-Sutcliffe Thesis," New Left Review, #80, 1973.
3. Only later to break with Marxism.
4. Nevertheless, Korsch was quite critical of crisis theorists like Mattick's mentor, Henryk Grossman.
5. The rate of exploitation is the ratio of surplus-value to variable capital.
6. Zerowork, #1, pp.2-6, https://libcom.org/library/introduction-zerowork-i.
7. Ibid., p.63.
8. In response, it could be argued that Yaffe presents the rise in unproductive expenditures as an "objective" economic development, following Mattick, but that in fact the rise in unproductive expenditures has occurred at least in part because past, present or potential working class struggle. The rise in social services and the increase in state production have occurred because the working class won through struggle the principle of full employment and basic social welfare. As Yaffe himself says, the main purpose of social services is to maintain social stability. "Unproductive expenditures," then, in large part, are the way that class struggle is obscured as a causative actor and becomes an "objective" economic category.
9.Cf. for example, Brecher and Costello, Common Sense for Hard Times, 1976.
10.Here the distinction and relationship between two meanings of "productivity" is important. For Marx, increasing productivity means increasing the product of a given amount of labor; for bourgeois economists it means increasing the product of a given amount of labor-time ("output per man-hour"). The importance of this is that the bourgeois concept does not distinguish between increases in output per man-hour due to improved technology and those due to speedup. In the 60's and 70's,generally speaking, the lag in productivity in the marxian sense has led capitalists to try to increase output per man-hour by intensifying labor, i.e. by getting more labor out of each unit of labor-time. Often the two are interconnected, as when the introduction of assembly-line methods not only increases the productive power of labor but forces workers to quicken their pace of work. However, where and when technological development lags, as in British and Italian industry in the 60's and 70's, the emphasis is placed on intensification of labor. See discussion below.
11. Capital, Vol.1, p.763.
12. Taylor himself claimed that scientific management would take "high wages and low labor costs.. .not only compatible, but...in the majority of cases mutually conditional." Quoted in Yaffe, op.cit., from F.W. Taylor, Shop Management, 1903, p.21-2.
13. Alan Jones, "Britain on the Edge of the Abyss," Inprecor, o 40/41, Dec., 1975, pp. 3&8. I don't mean to reduce social struggles to the struggle over the rate of exploitation. Although May 1968 did break a wage freeze, this is hardly its outstanding characteristic; indeed, the effect of May 1968 on wages was the result of the recuperation of struggles which went far beyond the wage issue.
14. Paul Mattick, "Zur Marxschen Akkumulation-und Zusammenbruchtheorie", in Ratekorrespondenz, 4, 1934, quoted in De Masi and Marramao, "Councils and State in Weimar Germany", Telos No.28,1976. By Marratao, also see "Theory of the Crisis and the Problem of Constitution", Telos, no.26,1976, which disscusses matters relevant to the issue at hand.
15. Paul Mattick, "Preface" to Henryk Grossman, Marx, L'economie politique classique et le problème de la dynamique, Editions Champ Libre, 1975, pp. 2-5.
16. Geoffrey Kay, "The Falling Rate of Profit, Unemployment and Crisis", Critique no.6, 1976, p.75. In this article Kay sets out to discredit the theory of the falling rate of profit. I should explain that I am neither convinced of the truth of Marx's economic theories, e.g., the theory of the falling rate 0 profit, nor am I an opponent of those theories. I am concerned here not primarily with determining whether one or another theory of crisis is true or false but with comparing different approaches to the present historical conjuncture. I have no pretensions to be offering definitive conclusions.
Besides Kay's, another interesting critique of the theory of the falling rate of profit is Geoff Hodgson's: "The Theory of the Falling Rate of Profit", New Left Review #84. March-Ap41, 1974. A group which defends the theory and economic perspectives close to Mattick's, is: Communist Workers Organization).
In Geoffrey Kay's discussion of Yaffe, he suggests that the intellectual attractiveness of the classical marxian argument is reason to be skeptical of it. The same could be said of the political attractiveness of the view that the working class imposes the Crisis. It makes the working class appear as powerful as we would like it to be. One political argument in favor of Mattick is that his view can be used in opposition to ruling class arguments that all will benefit in the long run if workers tighten their belts and work harder and give the capitalists a chance to restructure. For Mattick, such measures don't lead back to "Go"; capital is irretrievably in the "Jail" of low profitability. Even if workers' sacrifice kept things going for another cycle of accumulation, capital's problems would inevitably reappear and worsen.
17. J.B. Proctor and R. Proctor, "Capitalist Development, Class Struggle and Crisis in Italy, 1946-1975", Monthly Review, Vol.27, no.8, Jan., 1976, pp. 2-31.
18. Theleme Anarres, "Notes on Italy", Solidarity, vol.8, no.4, pp. 1-16.
19. Even this formulation is debatable. An article in New Left Review argues:" Neither the general rate of inflation (until 1971), nor the rate of increase in strikes was exceptional in the international terms, but the slow growth in productivity, real incomes and investment was. It was this weakness, the comparative weakness of British capital, not the relative strength of British working class, that constituted the real crisis point... and Sutcliffe". Class Struggle and the Heath Government", New Left Review, Vol. 1973, p.27.
20. Richard Hyman, "Industrial Conflict and the Political Economy: Trends of the Sixties and Prospects for the Seventies", The Social Register, 1973, p.112.
21. Businesss Week, Sept. 22,1975, p.96.
22. The London Times, Sept.30, 1976.
23. Jon Steinberg, "Why a few dissidents are frightening leaders in the West as well as the East", Seven Days, vol.1, no.3, p.10.
24. For an account of recent developments in Britain, see my article, "The Crisis of Wage Labor in Britain", in Now and After 12 (P.O. Box 1587, San Francisco, Ca.)
25.Karl Korsch, Three Essays on Marxism, Pluto Press, pp 65-6

Translator's Introduction to Critique of the S.I.

This text was written as a chapter of a much longer work, as yet unpublished, which is essentially a critical history of revolutionary theory and ideology, beginning with the work of Marx. The chapter's subject, the Situationist International (S.I.) existed in Europe (and briefly the U.S.) between 1957 and 1971. Since 1968, the year of its essential disintegration, the S.I. has exerted a profound influence on the post-war generation of revolutionaries in Europe. This influence, as the following text indicates, has been far from purely beneficial. Certainly the work of the S.I. has become known in the U.S. largely through its epigones, the "pro-situ" groups which flourished briefly in New York and on the West Coast during the early 70's. Such groups continue to exist and to come into being, here and in Europe. However, the older ones are vitiated of almost all content and significance by their persistent attachment to the most superficial and ideological aspects of the S.I.. The newer ones tend either to disintegrate very rapidly or else evolve towards a communist perspective often, regrettably, without retaining some of the best aspects of the S.I.'s thought which are absent from more orthodox revolutionary perspectives. By these I mean first of all the S.I.'s visionary quality, its attempt to bring the revolutionary project up to date with the post-war development of productive forces such as telecommunications, electronic data processing and automation. I also mean the S.I.'s restoration to this project of a critique of alienation and a concern with the freeing of individual producers and needs which were so prominent in the work of Marx and other communists during the mid-nineteenth century. These aspects were reflected in the S.I.'s assaults on art and urbanism and in its persistent assertion of the revolution as inaugurating a new way of life, a complete transformation of human activity, as well as a new mode of material production.

In the meantime, some original texts of the S.I., such as Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem's Treatise on Living for the Use of the Young Generation, have achieved a limited U.S. circulation as privately-printed editions, often very badly translated. In the last two years a not particularly representative sampling of the S.I.'s French language journal Internationale Situationniste has appeared in English under the title Leaving the Twentieth Century, poorly rendered and with an execrable commentary by an ex-member of the British section of the S.I.. In spite of this dissemination, the S.I.'s contributions have either been ignored or recuperated by the Left, which was briefly forced to acknowledge its existence during the late sixties because of its importance in the most coherent and aggressive wing of the French student movement. (This judgment regrettably also applies to most U.S. anarchists and "libertarian socialists" who denounce the S.I.'s , "abstractness" while remaining trapped in a precisely abstract, because superficial, critique of capitalism and the Left. For all its faults, the S.I. at least tried to grasp the laws of motion of these phenomena; without such a grasp, "libertarianism" leads easily back into the stifling embrace of social-democracy.)

The significance of the text which follows for U.S. readers lies not only in the acuteness of its criticism of situationist theory and practice, but also in the historical context which it provides for the S.I., the tracing of the influences which formed and deformed it. The S.I., like any other historical phenomenon, did not appear in a vacuum. An appreciation of the S.I.'s much-vaunted originality is here balanced with a critical revelation of the currents, notably Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B), which were decisive in its evolution and conversely, of other currents, such as the classical "Italian" communist Left, which it ignored to its own disadvantage. In fact, in the book of which this text forms a chapter, the critique of the S.I. is preceded by analyses of both S ou B and the Italian Left. Since I have not seen these two chapters, I cannot provide a summary of their content here. However I will attempt to provide from my own knowledge and viewpoint a brief introduction to both currents.

Socialisme ou Barbarie was a journal started by a small group of militants who broke with mainstream Trotskyism shortly after World War II. The grounds for this break were several. Firstly there was the fact that the post-war economic crisis, and the war itself, had failed to provoke the revolutionary upheaval predicted by Trotsky. Secondly, there was the situation of the Soviet Union, where the bureaucracy had survived and had consolidated itself without the country having reverted to private capitalism. This also ran counter to Trotsky's predictions as did the extension of Soviet-style bureaucratic rule to the rest of Eastern Europe. Thirdly, there was the miserable internal life of the so-called "Fourth International" which by now constituted a mini-bureaucracy of its own, torn by sectarian rivalry and also thoroughly repressive.

From this practical and historical experience, S ou B commenced a profound questioning of "Marxism" the ideology which runs through the words of Kautsky, Lenin and Trotsky, appears as a caricature in the writings of Stalin and his hacks, and has part of its origin in the late work of Engels. Out of this questioning, S ou B's leading theoretician, Cornelius Castoriadis, writing under the pseudonyms first of Pierre Chaulieu and later of Paul Cardan, derived the following general conclusions :

(i) that the Soviet Union must now be regarded as a form of exploitative society called state- or bureaucratic-capitalist;

(ii) that, in this, the Soviet Union was only a more complete variant of a process that was common to the whole of capitalism, that of bureaucratization;

(iii) that, because of this, the contradiction between propertyless and property-owners was being replaced by the contradiction between "order-givers and order-takers" (dirigeants et executants) and that the private bourgeoisie was itself evolving via the concentration and centralization of capital into a bureaucratic class;

(iv) that the advanced stage this process had reached in the Soviet Union was largely the result of the Leninist-Bolshevik conception of the Party, which seizes State power from the bourgeoisie on behalf of the workers and thence necessarily evolves into a new ruling class;

(v) that capitalism as a whole had overcome its economic contradictions based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and therefore the contradiction between order-givers and order-takers had become the sole mainspring of revolution, whereby the workers would be driven to revolt and achieve self-management only by the intolerable boredom and powerlessness of their lives, and not by material deprivation.

This theory, which undoubtedly had the merit (not shared by Trotskyism since the War) of internal consistency, was strongly reinforced by the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Here, without the intervention of a Leninist "vanguard", workers' councils formed throughout the country in a matter of days and assumed the tasks of social management as well as those of armed resistance to the Russian invasion and the AVO military police. S ou B took the view that... over the coming years, all significant questions will be condensed into one : Are you for or against the action and the program of the Hungarian workers ? (Castoriadis, "La Revolution proletarienne contre la bureaucratie", cited in Castoriadis, "The Hungarian Source", Telos, Fall 1976).

Here the views of S ou B converged sharply with those of the remaining theorists of the German communist Left, such as Anton Pannekoek, whose Workers' Councils (1940) had reached very similar conclusions some fifteen years earlier (although it must be said in Pannekoek's defense that he would have taken a much more critical view of the program of the Hungarian councils, which called for parliamentary democracy and workers' management of the national economy, than did S ou B). At any rate, out of these two currents came the ideology of councilism, which dominated virtually the entire theoretical corpus of the revolutionary minorities between 1945 and 1970. I will not here attempt a critique of councilism or S ou B; this has been done quite ably by Barrot himself in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement, and also by other groups such as the International Communist Current. Suffice it to say that Castoriadis went on from the conclusions outlined above to reject the whole of marxian theory (which he persisted in viewing through the distorting lenses of Kautsky and Lenin) and to re-found the revolutionary project entirely on the subjective discontent of workers, women, homosexuals, racial minorities, etc., who no longer form a class (the proletariat) opposed to the "order-givers" (capitalists and bureaucrats) but merely a mass of oppressed individuals. The revolution which they will carry out on this basis will be a matter of creating new organs of management which will federate and organize commodity exchange between themselves while supposedly "transforming" society. The similarity of these views to both American New Leftism of the SDS/Tom Hayden/Peoples' Bicentennial Commission variety and certain types of classical anarchism will be readily apparent : their disastrous political consequences will be even more so.

The "Italian Left" presents at first sight merely the thesis to which the radical anti-"marxism" of S ou B was the antithesis. Far from rejecting Lenin's theory of the Party, it has defended it more vigorously than almost anyone else. From its contemporary manifestations, notably the "International Communist Party" (ICP), it would seem to be the last word in sectarian Leninist dogmatism, distinguished from the more hard-nosed varieties of Trotskyism only by its insistence on the capitalist nature of the USSR, China et al. This appearance, however, is deceptive. In order to understand the real significance of this current it is necessary first of all to understand its historical origins.

The "Italian Left" was born out of the revolutionary wave which swept Europe from 1917 to 1920. This places it in sharp contrast to both Trotskyism and S ou B, which came into being as attempts to comprehend and combat the counter-revolution which followed that wave. The "Left" began as a few hundred of the most resolute and clear sighted members of the Italian Socialist party (PSI) who came together in response to their party's vacillations vis-a-vis the World War and the crisis of the workers' movement in general. They formed themselves into the "Abstentionist Communist Fraction" of the PSI around positions very similar to those of the German Left. These were basically that capitalism had entered a severe crisis in which the reformist tactics of the pre-war period would no longer work (particularly participation in electoral politics, hence the label "Abstentionist") and in which revolution had become the order of the day. The Left's "abstentionism" at once set it apart from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who attacked it, as well as its German counterpart, in the infamous pamphlet "Left-Wing" Communism : An Infantile Disorder. It was also distinguished from the Bolsheviks by its insistence, against Antonio Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo faction, that the new communist party must be from the beginning constituted entirely of theoretically coherent militants who would make no concession to the backwardness of the rest of the class, and who would therefore make no alliances with the Social Democracy whether Right, Center or Left. This also gave it a commonality with the German Left, which insisted (c.f. Gorter's Reply to Lenin) that the proletariat was now alone in its struggle and could no longer rely on even temporary alliances with the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie or with so-called workers' parties' which repressed strikes and shot workers in the name of democratic Order. However, unlike the German Left, the Italian communists had no real critique of the labor unions which (like orthodox leninists) they regarded as being merely badly led. Nor did they make any distinction, at least much of the time, between the party, the political organizations of the consciously revolutionary minority, and the class organs like workers' councils which, according to the German Left's conceptions, would actually hold power in the proletarian dictatorship. For the Italian Left, at least as it emerged from Mussolini's completion of the Italian counter-revolution, the organ of this dictatorship was the party and it alone.

But these crucial weaknesses aside, the Italian Left was distinguished from its German counterpart in positive ways as well. For one thing, it had a critique of democracy that was more sophisticated than that of the Germans who formed the KAPD) [German Communist Party]. To be sure, this critique tended to be expressed in a rigid parliamentarism. But it did preserve the Italian Left from errors of the councilist type; as early as 1918 the Abstentionists were criticizing the Ordine Nuovo faction for its equation of socialism with workers' management. They insisted from the start that the goal of the communist movement was the suppression of wage labor and commodity production, and that this could only be done by destroying the separation between units of production as enterprises. This makes them virtually unique among the revolutionary tendencies of the period. Such a clear view of the communist program emerges only rarely in the work of the rest of the "lefts" (e.g. in Sylvia Pankhurst's 1920 critique of the newly-formed Communist Party of Ireland).

The Italian Left is thus revealed as a profoundly contradictory tendency, combining a rigorous and coherent grasp of marxian theory in the abstract, and a principled position on practical questions like parliamentarisrn and frontism, with an extreme voluntarism and substitutionism of the classic leninist variety. If the revolutionary wave had managed to advance further and establish a proletarian power in Germany, it is probable that the Italians would have overcome these confusions, just as the necessity of carrying out communist measures would have forced the German revolutionaries to abandon any vestiges of councilism and federalism. Instead, however, the majority of the European proletariat failed to break decisively with Social Democracy. Following the Bolshevik-assisted degeneration of the Comintern and the expulsion of the KAPD, the "Lefts", both German and Italian, were reduced to tiny groups which attempted to maintain their theoretical coherence under the tremendous pressure of the counter-revolution. Here and there a few, like the French section of the international Communist Left around the journal Bilan, managed to preserve a considerable degree of clarity. Elsewhere the twin fetishisms of party and councils took hold. The elements of a theory which had never been fully united were further fragmented and turned into ideologies.

It was this wreckage that the S.I. confronted when it began its attempt to recover the legacy of the 1917-21 period. Under the circumstances it was perhaps understandable that the S.I. gravitated toward the councilist modernism of S ou B rather than attempting to penetrate the decidedly unattractive surface of the ICP or its by-products of the Italian Left tradition. Ironically, it was only after the S.I. had already reached an advanced stage of decomposition in late 1968 that other tendencies began to emerge which reclaimed the best aspects of the Italian Left and attempted to synthesize them with the German Left's complementary contributions (e.g. Revolution Internationale and the journals Le mouvement communiste and Negation, both now defunct). By this time the S.I.'s theoretical inadequacies had themselves already merged into an ideology, "situationism", which prevented the Situationists from comprehending the very crisis they had predicted years earlier. This process and its further evolution are well documented by Barrot in his critique.

In conclusion, it must be said that I am by no means in complete agreement with everything Barrot says about the S.I. or even its veterans and successors such as Sanguinetti and Semprun. I particularly consider Vaneigem to have been underestimated. However, I support the general argument of the critique - and most of its particular conclusions - wholeheartedly.

- L.M.

Critique of the Situationist International

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.

Now, human activity does not produce only goods and relationships, but also representations. Man is not homo faber : the reduction of human life to the economy (since taken up by official marxism) dates from the enthronement of capital. All activity is symbolic: it creates, at one and the same time, products and a vision of the world. The layout of a primitive village:

"summarizes and assures the relations between Man and the universe, between society and the supernatural world, between the living and the dead."

(Levi-Strauss)

The fetishism of commodities is merely the form taken by this symbolism in societies dominated by exchange.

As capital tends to produce everything as capital, to parcelize everything so as to recompose it with the help of market relations, it also makes of representation a specialized sector of production. Stripped of the means of their material existence, wage-workers are also stripped of the means of producing their ideas, which are produced by a specialized sector (whence the role of the "intellectuals", a term introduced in France by the Manifesto of the [dreyfusite] Intellectuals, 1898). The proletarian receives these representations (ideas, images, implicit associations, myths) as he receives from capital the other aspects of his life. Schematically speaking, the nineteenth century worker produced his ideas (even reactionary ones) at the cafe, the bar or the club, while today's worker sees his on television - a tendency which it would certainly be absurd to extrapolate to the point of reducing to it all of reality.

Marx defined ideology as the substitute for a real but impossible change: the change is lived at the level of the imaginary. Modern man is in this situation as extended to every realm. He no longer transforms anything except into images. He travels so as to rediscover the stereotype of the foreign country; loves so as to play the role of the virile lover or the tender beloved etc. Deprived of labor (transformation of environment and self) by wage-labor, the proletarian lives the "spectacle" of change.

The present-day wage-worker does not live in "abundance" in relation to the nineteenth-century worker who lived in "poverty". The wage-worker does not simply consume objects, but reproduces the economic and mental structures which weigh on him. It is because of this, contrary to the opinion of Invariance, 1 that he cannot free himself of these representations except by suppressing their material basis. He lives in a community of semiotics which force him to continue: materially (credit), ideologically and psychologically (this community is one of the few available). One does not only consume signs : the constraints are as much, and first of all, economic (bills to be paid, etc.). Capital rests on the production and sale of objects. That these objects also function as signs (and sometimes as that above all) is a fact, but this never annuls their materiality. Only intellectuals believe themselves to be living in a world made purely of signs. 2

True and False

What are the consequences for the revolutionary movement of the "the function of social appearances in modern capitalism" (I.S. 10, p. 79) ? As Marx and Dejacque3 put it, communism has always been the dream of the world. Today, the dream also serves not to change reality. One cannot content oneself with "telling" the truth: this can only exist as practice, as relationship between subject and object, saying and doing, expression and transformation, and manifests itself as tension. The "false" is not a screen which blocks the view. The "true" exists within the false, in Le Monde or on television, and the "false" within the true, in texts which are revolutionary or which claim to be. The false asserts itself through its practice, by the use which it makes of the truth: the true is so only in transformation. Revolutionary activity that locates itself in what it says on this side of what the radio says is a semi-futility. Let us measure the gap between words and reality. The S.I. demanded that revolutionaries not dazzle with words. Revolutionary theory is not made revolutionary by itself, but by the capacity of those who possess it to put it to subversive use not by a sudden flash, but by a mode of presentation and diffusion which leaves traces, even if scarcely visible ones. The denunciation of Leftists, for example, is secondary. Making it the axis of activity leads to not dealing with fundamental questions for the purposes of polemic against this or that group. Acting in this way modifies the content of ideas and actions. One addresses the essential only through denunciations, and the denunciation quickly becomes the essential.

Face to face with the multiplication of individuals and texts with radical pretensions, the S.I. obliges one to ask : is this theory the product of a subversive social relation seeking its expression, or a production of ideas being diffused without contributing to a practical unification? Everyone listens to the radio, but radio sets unify proletarians in the service of capital - until the day when these technical means are seized by revolutionary proletarians, at which time one hour of broadcasting will be worth years of previous "propaganda".4

However, the "end of ideology" does not mean that there could be a society without ideas, functioning automatically, like a machine : this would presuppose a "robotized" and thus a non-"human" society, since it would be deprived of the necessary reaction of its members. Having become an ideology in the sense of The German Ideology, the imaginary develops exactly along these lines. There is no dictatorship of social relations which remote-controls us, without reaction and reflection on our part. This is a very partial vision of "barbarism". The mistake in descriptions of completely totalitarian societies (Orwell's 1984 or the film THX 1138) is that they do not see that all societies, even the most oppressive, presuppose the intervention and action of human beings in their unfolding. Every society, including and especially capitalist society, lives on these tensions, even though it risks being destroyed by them. The critique of ideology denies neither the role of ideas nor that of collective action in propagating them.

The Theoretical Deadend of the Notion of the "Spectacle"

The notion of the spectacle unites a large number of given basic facts by showing society- and thus its revolutionary transformation - as activity. Capitalism does not "mystify" the workers. The activity of revolutionaries does not demystify; it is the expression of a real social movement. The revolution creates a different activity whose establishment is a condition of what classical revolutionary theory called "political" tasks (destruction of the State).

But the S.I. was not able to conceive in this way of the notion which it had brought to light. It invested so much in this notion that it reconstructed the whole of revolutionary theory around the spectacle.

In its theory of "bureaucratic capitalism", Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B) had capital rest on the bureaucracy. In its theory of "spectacular commodity society", the S.I. explained everything from the spectacle. One does not construct a revolutionary theory except as a whole, and by basing it on what is fundamental to social life. No, the question of "social appearances" is not the key to any new revolutionary endeavor (I.S.#10, p. 79).

The traditional revolutionary groups had only seen new means of conditioning. But for the S.I., the mode of expression of the "media" corresponds to a way of life which did not exist a hundred years ago. Television does not indoctrinate, but inscribes itself into a mode of being. The S.I. showed the relationship between the form and foundation, where traditional marxism saw nothing but new instruments in the service of the same cause.

Meanwhile, the notion of the spectacle elaborated by the S.I. falls behind what Marx and Engels understood by the term "ideology". Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle presents itself as an attempt to explain capitalist society and revolution, when in fact it only considers their forms, important but not determinant phenomena. It robes the description of them in a theorization which gives the impression of a fundamental analysis, when in fact the method, and the subject being studied, remain always at the level of social appearances. At this level, the book is outstanding. The trouble is that it is written (and read) as if one were going to find something in it that isn't there. While S ou B analyzed the revolutionary problem by means of industrial sociology, the S.I. analyzes it starting out from a reflection on the surface of society. This is not to say that The Society of the Spectacle is superficial. Its contradiction and, ultimately, its theoretical and practical dead-end, is to have made a study of the profound, through and by means of the superficial appearance. The S.I. had no analysis of capital: it understood it, but through its effects. It criticized the commodity, not capital - or rather, it criticized capital as commodity, and not as a system of valuation which includes production as well as exchange.

Throughout the book, Debord remains at the stage of circulation, lacking the necessary moment of production, of productive labor. What nourishes capital is not consumption, as he leads one to understand, but the formation of value by labor. Debord is right to see more in the relation between appearance and reality than in that between illusion and the reality, as if appearances did not exist. But one never understands the real on the basis of the apparent. Thus Debord does not complete his project. He does not show how capitalism makes what is only the result into the cause or even into the movement. The critique of political economy (which Debord does not make, content to ignore it as were the utopians before him) shows how the proletarian sees standing over and against him not only his product, but his activity. In the fetishism of commodities, the commodity appears as its own movement. By the fetishism of capital, capital takes on an autonomy which it does not possess, presenting itself as a living being (Invariance is a victim of this illusion): one does not know where it comes from, who produces it, by what process the proletarian engenders it, by what contradiction it lives and may die. Debord makes the spectacle into the subject of capitalism, instead of showing how it is produced by capitalism. He reduces capitalism to its spectacular dimension alone. The movement of capital becomes the movement of the spectacle. . In the same way Banalites de base5 makes a history of the spectacle through religion, myth, politics, philosophy, etc. This theory remains limited to a part of the real relations, and goes so far as to make them rest entirely on this part.

The spectacle is activity become passive. The S.I. rediscovered what Marx said in the Grundisse about the rising-up of Man's being (his self-transformation, his labor) as an alien power which crushes him: facing it, he no longer lives, he only looks. The S.I. brought a new vigor to this theme. But capital is more than pacification. It needs the intervention of the proletarian, as S ou B 6 said. The S.I.'s overestimation of the spectacle is the sign that it theorizes on the basis of a social vision born at the periphery of society, and which it believed to be central.

The Spectacle and the Theory of Art

The theory of the spectacle expresses the crisis of the space-time outside labor. Capital more and more creates a realm outside of labor according to the logic of its economy: it does not develop leisure to control the masses, but because it reduces living labor to a lesser role in production, diminishes labor-time, and adds to the wage-worker's time of inactivity. Capital creates for the wage-workers a space-time that is excluded, empty, because consumption never succeeds in filling it completely. To speak of space-time is to insist on the fact that there is a reduction in the working day, and that this freed time also occupies a geographical and social space, in particular the street (c.f. the importance of the city and of the derive7 for the S.I.).

This situation coincides with a dual crisis of "art". Firstly, art no longer has meaning because Western society doesn't know where it's going. With 1914, the West lost the meaning and direction of civilization. Scientism, liberalism and apologetics for the "liberating" effect of productive forces went bankrupt like their adversaries (Romanticism, etc.). From then on, art was to be tragic, narcissistic, or the negation of itself. In former periods of crisis, one sought the meaning of the world: today, one doubts if it has one. Secondly, the colonization of the market and the vain and frenzied search for a "direction" enlist the artist in the service of consumption outside of labor.

The S.I. is conscious of its social origin. Sur le passage de quelques personnes... (1959), one of Debord's films, speaks of people "on the margin of the economy." On this terrain, like S ou B on the terrain of the enterprise, the S.I. understood that modern capitalism tends to exclude people from all activity and at the same time to engage them in a pseudo participation. But, like S ou B, it makes a decisive criterion out of the contradiction between active and passive. Revolutionary practice consists of breaking the very principle of the spectacle: non-intervention (I.S. # 1, p. 110). At the end of the process, the workers council will be the means of being active, of breaking down separation. Capital endures by the exclusion of human beings, their passivity. What moves in the direction of a refusal of passivity is revolutionary. Hence the revolutionary is defined by "a new style of life" which will be an "example" (I. S. #6, p. 4).

The realm outside labor rests on bonds that are more contingent (c.f. the derive) and subjective than wage labor, which belongs more to the necessary and the objective. To the traditional economy, the S.I. opposes "an economy of desires" (I.S. #7, p. 16); to necessity, it opposes freedom; to effort, pleasure; to labor, the automation which makes it unnecessary; to sacrifice, delight. The S.I. reverses the oppositions which must be superceded. Communism does not free one from the necessity of labor, it overthrows "labor" itself (as a separate and alien activity - Tr.). The S.I. identifies revolution with a liberation from constraints, based on desire and first of all on the desire for others, the need for relationships. It makes the link between "situation" and "labor" badly, which limits its notion of the situation. It thinks of society and its revolution from the context of non-wage-earning social layers. Hence, it carries over onto the productive proletariat what it said about those who are outside the wage system (street gangs, ghetto blacks). Because it was ignorant of the center of gravity of the movement, the S.I. moved toward councilism: the councils permit a "direct and active communication" (Society of the Spectacle). The revolution appeared as the extension of the construction of intersubjective situations to the whole of society.

The critique of the S.I. passes through the recognition of its "avant-garde artist" aspect. Its sociological origin often provokes abusive and absurd interpretations of the "they were petty-bourgeois" variety. The question is clearly elsewhere. In the case of the S.I., it theorized from its own social experience. The S.I.'s artistic origin is not a stigma in itself; but it leaves its mark on theory and evolution when the group envisages the world from the point of view of its specific social layer. - The passing to a revolutionary theory and action that were general (no longer aimed only at art, urbanism, etc.) corresponds to a precise logic on the S.I.'s part. The S.I. says that each new issue of its journal can and must allow one to re-read all the previous issues in a new way. This is indeed the characteristic of a theory which is growing richer, being enriched, and the opposite of S ou B. It is not a matter of., on one side the general aspect of the S.I., and on the other its more or less critical relationship to art. The critique of separation was its guiding thread. In art, as in the council, in self-management, in workers' democracy and in organization (c.f. its Minimum definition of revolutionary organizations), the S.I. wanted to break down separation, to create a real community. While the S.I. refused "questioning" á la Cardan, it ended by adopting the problematic of "participation" á la Chaulieu.

The S.I. and Socialisme ou Barbarie

In order to attain "the transparency of inter-subjective relations", the S.I. wound up with the councilism supported by S ou B. The council is the means of rediscovering unity. Debord met the S ou B through Canjuers and joined it for several months. His membership was not mentioned in the S.I. journal. On the contrary : La Veritable Scission8 , speaking of Khayati, excludes on principle "a double membership (in both the S.I. and another group) which would immediately border on manipulation" (p. 85). However that may be, Debord participated in the activities of S ou B, throughout the time he was a member, notably taking part in the team that was sent to Belgium during the great strike of 1960. At the end of an international meeting organized by S ou B, which was at once deceptive and revealing of the lack of perspectives, and which concluded with a pretentious speech by Chaulieu on the tasks of S ou B, Debord announced his resignation. Not without irony, he declared that he was in accord with the vast perspectives outlined by Chaulieu, but that he did not feel equal to so immense a task.

I. S. #6 (1961) adopted the idea of the councils, if not councilism; in any case it adopted the thesis of the division between "order-givers" and "order-takers". The project which the S.I. set for itself in I.S. 6, comprising among others "the study without illusions of the classical workers' movement" andof Marx, was not to be realized. The S.I. was to remain ignorant of the reality of the communist left, particularly Bordiga. The most radical of the revolutionary movement would always be an improved S ou B. It saw theory through this filter.

Vaneigem's Banalites de base cheerfully bypasses Marx. and rewrites history in the light of S ou B, while adding to it the critique of the commodity. The S.I. criticized S ou B but only in terms of degree : for the S.I., S ou B limited socialism to workers management, while in fact it meant management of everything. Chaulieu confined himself to the factory, Debord wanted to self-manage life. Vaneigem's procedure is close to that of Cardan. He looks for a sign (evidence): no longer the shameless exploitation of workers on the shop-floor, but the misery of social relationships, there is the revolutionary detonator :

The feeble quality of the spectacle and of everyday life becomes the only sign.

La Veritable Scission... would also speak of a sign of what was unbearable. Vaneigem is against vulgar marxism, but he does not integrate marxism into a critique. He does not assimilate what was revolutionary about Marx that established marxism has obliterated. In I.S. #9 (1963), the S.I. still acknowledged that Cardan was "in advance" of it.

Like Society of the Spectacle, Banalities de base situates itself at the level of ideology and its contradictions. Vaneigem shows how religion has become the spectacle, which obliges revolutionary theory to criticize the spectacle as it once had to start out from a critique of religion and philosophy. But in this way one obtains only the (pre) condition of revolutionary theory: the work remains to be done. The S.I. at first hoped for a lot from Lefebvre9 and Cardan, then violently rejected them. But it kept in common with them the lack of both a theory of capitalism and a theory of society. Toward 1960, it opened up to new horizons but did not take the step. The S.I. confronted value (c.f. Jorn's text on political economy and use value) but did not recognize it for what it was. Its theory had neither centrality nor globality. This led it to overestimate very diverse social movements, without seeing the kernel of the problem.

It is, for example, incontestable that the article on Watts (#9, 1964)10 is a brilliant theoretical breakthrough. Taking up in its own way what might have been said about the exchange between Mauss and Bataille, the S.I. posed the question of the modification of the very substance of capitalist society. The article's conclusion even takes up once again Marx's formulation about the link between Man and his generic nature, taken up at the same time by Camatte in the P.C.I.11 (c.f. #1 of Invariance). But staying at the level of the commodity, the S.I. was incapable of differentiating between the levels of society, and of singling out what makes a revolution. When it writes that

"a revolt against the spectacle situates itself at the level of the totality. . ."

it proves that it is making the spectacle into the totality. In the same way its "management-ist" illusions led it to distort the facts concerning Algeria after Boumedienne's coup d'etat:

"The only program of the Algerians socialist elements is the defense of the self-managed sector, not only as it is, but as it ought to be."

(#9, 1964, p. 21).

In other words, without revolution, that is to say, without the destruction of the State and key transformations in society, the S.I. believed that there could be workers' management, and that revolutionaries should work for its extension.

Positive Utopia

The S.I. allows the recognition at the level of revolutionary activity of the implications of the development of capital since 1914, already recognized by the communist left insofar as this development involved reformism, nations, wars, the evolution of the state, etc. The S.I. had crossed the path of the communist left.

The S.I. understood the communist movement and the revolution as the production by the proletarians of new relations to each other and to "things". It rediscovered the Marxian idea of communism as the movement of self-creation by men of their own relations. With the exception of Bordiga, it was the first to connect again with the utopian tradition. This was at once its strength and its ambiguity.

The S.I. was initially a revolt which sought to take back the cultural means monopolized by money and power. Previously the most lucid artists had wanted to break the separation between art and life: the S.I. raised this demand to a higher level in their desire to abolish the distance between life and revolution. "Experimentation" had been for surrealism an illusory means of wrenching art out of its isolation from reality: the S.I. applied it in order to found a positive utopia. The ambiguity comes from the fact that the S.I. did not know exactly whether it was a matter of living differently from now on or only of heading that way.

"The culture to be overthrown will not really fall except along with the totality of the socio-economic formation which upholds it. But, without further ado, the S.I. proposes to confront it throughout its length and breadth, up to and including the imposition of an autonomous situationist control and experimentation against those who hold the existing cultural authority(ies), i.e. up to and including a state of dual power within culture... The center of such a development within culture would first of all have to be UNESCO once the S.I. had taken command of it: a new type of popular university, detached from the old culture; lastly, utopian centers to be built which, in relation to certain existing developments in the social space of leisure, would have to be more completely liberated from the ruling daily life ... would function as bridgeheads for a new invasion of everyday life."

(#5, 1960, pp. 5 & 31).

The idea of a gradual liberation is coherent with that of a self-management spreading everywhere little by little: it misunderstands society as a totality. Besides this, it grants privilege to "culture", the "center of meaning of a meaningless society" (#5, p. 5).

This exaggeration of the role of culture was later to be carried over into workers' autonomy: the "power of the councils" was supposed to spread until it occupied the whole of society. These two traits have deep roots in the origins of the S.I.. The problem, then, is not that the S.I. remained too "artistic" in the Bohemian sense, lacking in "rigor" (as if the "Marxists" were rigorous), but that it applied the same approach throughout.

The projects for "another" life were legion in the S.I.. I.S. #6 (1961) dealt with an experimental town. At the Goteborg conference, Vaneigem spoke of constructing situationist bases, in preparation for a unitary urbanism and a liberated life. This speech (says the account of the proceeding) met with no opposition (#7, 1962, p. 27).

One makes an organization: revolutionary groups "have no right to exist as a permanent vanguard unless they themselves set the example of a new style of life." (#7, p. 16). The overestimation of organization and of the responsibility of living differently now led, obviously, to a self-overestimation of the S.I.. Trocchi declares in #7:

"We envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation constructed by the imagination ... we have already gone through enough experiences in a preparatory direction: we are ready to act."

(pp. 50 & 53).

A significant fact : the critique of this article in the following issue did not pick up on this aspect (#8, pp. 3-5). Trocchi was to realize this program in his own way in Project Sigma: the S.I. did not disavow it, but only stated that Trocchi was not undertaking this project in his capacity as a member of the S.I. (#9, p. 83).

The ambiguity was brought to a head by Vaneigem who in fact wrote a treatise on how to live differently in the present world while setting forth what social relations could be. It is a handbook to violating the logic of the market and the wage system wherever one can get away with it. La Veritable Scission... has some harsh words for Vaneigem and his book. Debord and Sanguinetti were right to speak of "exorcism":

"He has said so as not to be"

(p. 143).

No doubt. But the critique is belated. Vaneigem's book was a difficult work to produce because it cannot be lived, threatened with falling on the one hand into a marginal possibilism and on the other into an imperative which is unrealizable and thus moral. Either one huddles in the crevices of bourgeois society, or one ceaselessly opposes to it a different life which is impotent because only the revolution can make it a reality. The S.I. put the worst of itself into its worst text. Vaneigem was the weakest side of the S.I., the one which reveals all its weaknesses. The positive utopia is revolutionary as demand, as tension, because it cannot be realized within this society: it becomes derisory when one tries to live it today. Instead of hammering away at Vaneigem as an individual, The Real Split... could have drawn up the balance sheet of the practice which had produced Vaneigem, but there was no such balance sheet (see below).

The reformism of the everyday was later transferred to the level of work; arriving late for work, writes Ratgeb12 is the beginning of a critique of wage labor. We are not seeking to make fun of Vaneigem, unhappy theoretician of an art of living, "la radicalité". His brio only succeeds in giving the Treatise an empty pretension which makes one smile. The Real Split... is ill inspired to mock the attitude of Vaneigem in May 1968, when he left for his vacation as planned even though the "events" had begun (he quickly returned). This personal contradiction reflected the theoretical and practical contradiction sustained by the S.I. from its beginnings. Like every morality, Vaneigem's position was untenable and had to explode on contact with reality. The S.I. in denouncing his attitude gave itself over also to a moralistic practice : it judged acts without examining their causes. This revelation of Vaneigem's past, whether it troubles or amuses the radicalists, has besides something unpleasant about it. If Vaneigem's inconsistency in 1968 was important, the S.I. should have drawn conclusions from it, as it did not fail to do in a host of other cases, and should not have waited until four years later to talk about it. If Vaneigem's default was not important, it was useless to talk about it, even when he broke with the S.I.. In fact the S.I., to use its own expression, exorcised the impotence of its morality by denouncing the individuals who failed in upholding this morality, thus saving at one blow both the morality and itself as the S.I.. Vaneigem was the scapegoat for an impossible utopianism.

Materialism and Idealism in the S.I.

Against militant moralism, the S.I. extolled another morality : that of the autonomy of individuals in the social group and in the revolutionary group. Now, only an activity integrated into a social movement permits autonomy through an effective practice. Otherwise the requirement of autonomy ends up by creating an elite of those who know how to make themselves autonomous13 . Whoever says elitism also says disciples. The S.I. showed a great organizational idealism, as did Bordiga (the revolutionary as "disintoxicated"), even though the S.I. resolved it differently. The S.I. had recourse to an immediate practical morality, which illustrates its contradiction. Every morality puts on top of the given social relations the obligation to behave in a way which runs counter to those relations. In this case, the S.I.'s morality requires that one be respectful of spontaneity.

The S.I.'s materialism is limited to the awareness of society as intersubjectivity, as interaction of human relationships on the immediate plane, neglecting the totality: but society is also the production of its own material conditions, and the immediate relations crystallize into institutions, with the state at their head. The "creation of concrete situations" is only one facet of the revolutionary movement. In theorizing it, the S.I. does indeed start out from the real conditions of existence, but reduces them to intersubjective relations. This is the point of view of the subject trying to rediscover itself, not a view which encompasses both subject and object. It is the "subject" stripped of its "representation". The systematization of this opposition in The Society of the Spectacle takes up again the idealist opposition characterized by its forgetting of Man's objectifications (labor, appropriation of the world, fusion of Man and nature). The subject-object opposition is the guiding thread of Western philosophy, formed in a world whose meaning Man sees escaping him little by little. Already Descartes was setting side by side the progress of mathematics and the stagnation of metaphysics. Mercantile Man is in search of his role.

The S.I. was not interested in production. It reproached Marx for being too economistic, but did not itself make a critique of political economy. Society is an ensemble of relations which assert themselves by objectifying themselves, creating material or social objects (institutions); the revolution destroys capitalism by a human action at the level of its objectifications (system of production, classes, state) carried out precisely by those who are at the center of these relations.

Debord is to Freud what Marx is to Hegel: he founds what is only a materialist theory of personal relationships, a contradiction in terms. Instead of starting from the ensemble of social relations, the notion of the "construction of situations" isolates the relation between subjects from the totality of relations. In the same way as, for Debord, the spectacle says all there is to be said about capitalism, the revolution appears as the construction of situations expanded to the whole of society. The S.I. did not grasp the mediations on which society rests; and foremost among these, labor, the "fundamental need" (William Morris) of Man. As a consequence of this, it did not clearly discern the mediations on the basis of which a revolution can be made. To get out of the difficulty it exaggerated the mediation of the organization. Its councilist, democratic and self-management-ist positions are explained by its ignorance of the social dynamic.

The S.I. insisted on forms of organization to remedy the inadequacy of the content which escaped it. Practicing "the inversion of the genitive" like Marx in his early work, it put things back on their feet : inverting the terms of ideology so as to understand the world in its reality. But a real understanding would be more than an inversion: Marx was not content to turn Hegel and the Young Hegelians upside down.

The S.I. only saw capital in the form of the commodity, ignoring the cycle as a whole. Of Capital, Debord only retains the first sentence, without understanding it: capital presents itself as an accumulation of commodities, but it is more than that. The S.I. saw the revolution as a calling into question more of the relations of distribution (c.f. the Watts riot) than of the relations of production. It was acquainted with the commodity but not with surplus value.

The S.I. showed that the communist revolution could not be only an immediate attack on the commodity. This contribution is decisive. Although the Italian Left had described communism as the destruction of the market, and had already broken with the ideology of the productive forces, it had not understood the formidable subversive power of concretely communist measures.14 Bordiga, in fact, pushes social communization back beyond a seizure of "political power". The S.I. viewed the revolutionary process at the level of human relations. Even the State cannot be destroyed strictly on the military plane. The mediation of society, it is also (but not) solely destroyed by the demolition of the capitalist social relations which uphold it.

The S.I. ended up with the opposite mistake to Bordiga's. The latter reduced the revolution to the application of a program: the former limited it to an overthrow of immediate relations. Neither Bordiga nor the S.I. perceived the whole problem. The one conceived a totality abstracted from its real measures and relations, the other a totality without unity or determination hence an addition of particular points extending itself little by little. Incapable of theoretically dominating the whole process, they both had recourse to an organizational palliative to ensure the unity of the process - the party for Bordiga, the councils for the S.I.. In practice, while Bordiga depersonalized the revolutionary movements to the point of excess, the S.I. was an affirmation of individuals to the point of elitism. Although it was totally ignorant of Bordiga, the S.I. allows one to develop Bordiga's thesis on the revolution further by means of a synthesis with its own.

The S.I. itself was not able to realize this synthesis, which presupposes an all-round vision of what society is. It practiced positive utopianism only for the purpose of revelation, and that is without doubt its theoretical stumbling block.

"What must happen ... in the centers of unequally shared but vital experience is a demystification."

(#7, p. 48).

There was a society of "the spectacle", a society of "false consciousness", as opposed to the supposedly classical capitalism of the 19th century : it was a matter of giving it a time consciousness of itself. The S.I. never separated itself from Lukacsian idealism, as is shown by the only critique of the S.I. which has appeared up to the present : Supplement au no. 301 de la Nouvelle Gazette Rhenane15 . Lukacs knew (with the help of Hegel and Marx) that capitalism is the loss of unity, the dispersion of consciousness. But, instead of concluding from this that the proletarians will recompose a unitary world view by means of their subversive practice (concluding in the revolution), he thought that consciousness must be re-unified and rediscovered first in order for this subversion to happen. As this is impossible he too fled back into magic and theorized the need for a concretization of consciousness which must be incarnated in an organization before the revolution is possible. This organized consciousness is the "party". One sees immediately that, for Lukacs, the justification of the party is secondary : what is primary is the idealism of consciousness, the primacy accorded to consciousness of which the party is only the manifestation. What is essential in his theory is that consciousness must be incarnated in an organization. The S.I. takes up in an uncritical way Lukacs' theory of consciousness but replaces the "party" with the S.I. on side and the councils on the other. For the S.I., as for Lukacs, the difference between "class in itself" and "class for itself" is that the latter possesses class consciousness. That this consciousness would not be brought to it by a party, but would spring spontaneously from the organization of the workers into councils is quite secondary. The S.I. conceived of itself as an organization destined to make the truth burst forth : it made revelation the principle of its action. This explains the inordinate importance which the S.I. saw in the tendency toward "total democracy" in 1968. Democracy is the perfect place for consciousnesses to elucidate themselves. Everything is summed up in the S.I.'s definition of a proletarian as one who "has no control over the use of his life and who knows it".

Art is today voluntary alienation; in it the systematic practice of artifice renders more visible the facticity of life. Shutting itself in its idea of the "spectacle", the S.I. remained a prisoner of its origins. The Society of the Spectacle is already a completed book. The theory of appearances turns back on itself. Here one can even read the beginnings of currently fashionable ideas about capital as representation. Capital becomes image... the concentrated result of social labor... becomes apparent and submits the whole of reality to appearance.

The S.I. was born at the same moment as all the theses about "communication" and language and in reaction against them, but it mostly tended to pose the same problem in different terms. The S.I. was formed as a critique of communication, and never departed from this point of origin: the council realizes a "true" communication. In spite of this, unlike Barthes and his ilk, the S.I. refused to let the sign turn back on itself. It did not want to study apparent reality (the study of "mythologies" or of the "superstructures" dear to Gramsci's heart) but rather reality as appearance. Marx wrote in 1847:

"Human activity = commodity. The manifestation of life, active life, appears as a mere means : appearance, separate from this activity, is grasped as an end in itself."

The S.I. itself succumbed to fetishism in fixating itself on forms: commodity, subject, organization, consciousness. But unlike those who today repeat its ideas while conserving only the flashy parts and the mistakes (utopia, etc.), the S.I. did not make it a rule to confuse language with society. What was for the S.I. a contradiction became the raison datre of modernism.

No Theoretical Summing up

Nothing is easier than a false summing-up. One can even do it over, like the famous self-criticism, every time one changes one's ideas. One renounces the old system of thought so as to enter the new one, but one does not change one's mode of being. The "theoretical summing-up" can be in fact the most deceitful practice while appearing to be the most honest. The Real Split... succeeds in not talking about the S.I. and its end, except so as not to grapple with its conceptions - in a word, it talks about it non-theoretically. Denouncing (no doubt sincerely) triumphalism and self-sufficiency in relation to the S.I. and in the S.I. but without a theoretical critique, the book ends up presenting the S.I. as a model. Debord and Sanguinetti don't get to the point except with the pro-situs, who inspired them to some good reflections, but still at the level of subjective relations, of attitudes. Theory is always seen from the standpoint of attitudes which incarnate it; an important dimension certainly, but not an exclusive one.

There is no self-analysis of the S.I.. The S.I. came, 1968 announces the return of the revolution, now the S.I. is going to disappear so as to be reborn everywhere. This lucid modesty masks two essential points: the authors argue as though the SIs perspective had been totally correct; they do not ask themselves whether there might not be a link between the sterility of the S.I. after 1968 (c.f. the correspondence of the Orientation Debate) and the insufficiency of that perspective. Even on the subject of the pro-situs, Debord and Sanguinetti fail to establish any logical relation between the S.I. and its disciples. The S.I. was revolutionary with the aid of a theory based on attitudes (which would later prove to be a brake on its evolution). After the phase of revolutionary action, the pro-situ retained nothing but the attitude. One cannot judge a master solely by his disciples: but he also has, in part, disciples he has called forth. The S.I. accepted the role of master involuntarily, through its very conceptions. It did not directly propose a savoir-vivre, but in presenting its ideas as a "savoir-vivre" it pushed an art of living on its readers. The Real Split... registers the ideological use to which I.S. was put, its being turned into a spectacle, says the book, by half the readers of the journal. This was partly inevitable (see below on recuperation) but in part also due to its own nature. Every radical theory or movement is recuperated by its weaknesses: Marx, by his study of the economy in-itself and his radical-reformist tendencies, the German Left by its councilism, etc. Revolutionaries remain revolutionaries by profiting from these recuperations, eliminating their limitations so as to advance toward a more developed totalization. The Real Split... is also a split in the minds of its authors. Their critique of Vaneigem is made as if his ideas were foreign to the S.I.. To read Debord and Sanguinetti, one would think that the S.I. had no responsibility for the Traite: Vaneigem's weakness, one would think, belongs to him alone. One or the other: either the S.I. did indeed take his faults into account - in which case why didn't it say something about them ? - or else it ignored them. The S.I. here inaugurates a practice of organization (which S ou B would have qualified with the word "bureaucratic" ): one does not learn of the deviations of members until after their exclusion. The organization retains its purity, the errors of its members do not affect it. The trouble comes from the insufficiencies of the members, never from on high, and not from the organization. As the eventual megalomania of the leaders does not explain everything, one is obliged to see in this behavior the sign of a mystified coming-to-consciousness of the group's impasse, and of a magical way of solving it. Debord was the S.I.. He dissolved it: this would have been proof of a lucid and honest attitude if he had not at the same time eternized it. He dissolved the S.I. so as to make it perfect, as little open to criticism as he was little able to criticize it himself.

In the same way, his film Society of the Spectacle is an excellent means of eternizing his book. Immobilism goes side by side with the absence of summing-up. Debord had learned nothing. The book was a partial theorization: the film totalizes it. This sclerosis is even more striking in what was added for the film's re-release in 1976. Debord replies to a series of criticisms of the film, but says not a word about various people (some of them very far removed from our own conceptions) who judged the film severely from a revolutionary point of view. He prefers to take on Le Nouvel Observateur16 More and more, his problem is to defend his past. He runs aground of necessity, because all he can do is re-interpret it. The S.I. no longer belongs to him. The revolutionary movement will assimilate it in spite of the situationists.

An Exercise in Style

Otherwise serious, Sanguinetti's book Veridique Rapport17 is still a mark of his failure (echec). We will not judge the book by its public, which appreciates it as a good joke played on the bourgeoisie. These readers are content to repeat that the capitalists are cretins, even that they are contemptible compared to "real" ruling classes of the past; if we wanted to, they say, we could be far bigger and better bourgeois. Elitism and scorn for capitalism are derisory enough as reactions, but reassuring when revolution does not appear any longer to be an absolute certainty. But complacency in the denunciation of bourgeois decadence is far from being subversive. It is shared by those (like Sorel) who scorn the bourgeoisie while wanting to save capitalism. The cultivation of this attitude is thus absurd in anyone who has the slightest revolutionary pretensions. Let us admit in any case that Sanguinetti scored a good shot.

The problem most commentators fail to deal with (and for good reason) is to know whether he puts forward a revolutionary perspective. If he does not he has only succeeded in letting off a firecracker within bourgeois politics and the game of the parties. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. His analysis of past events is false, and so is the revolutionary perspective he proposes.

First of all, there was no "social war" in Italy in 1969 nor in Portugal in 1976. May 1968 in France was the upsurge of a vast spontaneous workers' organization: on the scale of a whole country, and in hundreds of big enterprises, proletarians partook at the same moment of the "proletarian experience", of confrontation with the state and the unions, and understood in acts that working-class reformism only serves capital. This experience will remain. It was an indispensable break, and a lasting one even though the wound now seems to have been closed again.

But the S.I. took this break for the revolution itself. 1968 realized for it what 1966 realized for S ou B: the practical verification of its theory, in fact the confirmation of its limits and the beginning of its getting tangled up. La Veritable Scission... asserts that the occupation movement 18 had situationist ideas: when one knows that almost all the strikers left control of the strike to the unions, unless one mythologizes the occupation movement, this shows only the limits of situationist ideas. This ignorance of the state on the part of the movement was not a supersession of jacobinism, but its corollary, as it was in the Commune: the non-destruction of the state, its simple democratization, went side by side in 1871 with an attempt by some people to create a dictatorship on the model of 1793. It is true that looking at 1871 or 1968 - one would have to show the strength and not the weakness of the communist movement, its existence rather than its absence. Otherwise the revolutionary only develops a superior pessimism and an abstract negation of everything which is not "the revolution". But the revolutionary movement is such only if it criticizes itself, insisting on the global perspective, on what was missing in past proletarian movements. It does not valorize the past. It is the state and the counterrevolution that take up the limits of past movements and make their program out of them. Theoretical communism criticizes previous experiences, but also distinguishes between proletarian assault as in Germany in 1918-21, and attacks that were immediately bogged down by capital as in 1871 and in Spain in 1936. It is not content to describe positive movements, but also indicates the ruptures which they had to effect in order to make the revolution. The S.I. did the opposite. Moreover, starting in 1968, it theorized a rising revolution. But above all it denied the question of the state.

"When the workers are able to assemble freely and without mediations to discuss their real problems, the state begins to dissolve."

(The Real Split, p.33).

All of anarchism is there. Far from wanting, as one would expect, to demolish the state, anarchism is most precisely characterized by its indifference to it. Contrary to that "Marxism" which puts foremost and above all else the necessity of "taking power", anarchism in fact consists of a neglect of the question of state power. The revolution unfolds, committees and assemblies form parallel to the state, which, emptied of its power, collapses of its own accord. Founded on a materialist conception of society, revolutionary marxism asserts that capital is not only a soda, spread out thinly everywhere, but that it is also concentrated in institutions (and first of all armed force) which are endowed with a certain autonomy, and which never die by themselves. The revolution only triumphs by bringing against them an action at once generalized and concentrated. The military struggle is based on the social transformation, but has its own specific role. The S.I. for its part, gave way to anarchism, and exaggerated the importance of workers' assemblies (in 1968, Pouvoir Ouvrier and the Groupe de Liaison pour l'Action des Travailleurs were also preoccupied essentially with calling for democratic workers' assemblies).

In the same way, to say that in Portugal the pressure of the workers hindered the construction of the modem capitalist state, is to have only the viewpoint of the state, of capital. Is capital's problem to develop in Portugal, to constitute a new and powerful pole of accumulation there? Wasn't the objective of the "revolution of the carnations" to channel confused popular and proletarian aspirations toward illusory reforms, so that the proletariat would remain quiescent? Mission accomplished. It is not a matter of a half-victory for the proletariat, but of an almost total defeat, in which the "proletarian experience" was almost non-existent, because there was not, so to speak, any direct confrontation, any alignment of proletarians around a position opposed to capitalism. They never stopped supporting the democratized state, even at times against the parties, which they accused of "treason". 19

Neither in Italy in 1969, nor in Portugal in 1974-5, was there a "social war". What is a social war if not a head-on struggle between classes, calling into question the foundations of society -- wage labor, exchange, the state? There was not even the beginning of a confrontation between classes, and between the proletariat and the state in Italy and Portugal. In 1969, the strike movements sometimes spread into riots but not every riot is the beginning of the revolution. The conflicts born of demands could become violent and could even provoke the beginning of a struggle against the forces of Order. But the degree of violence does not indicate the content of the struggle. In battling the police, the workers continued to believe no less in a leftwing government. They called for a "real democratic state" against the conservative forces supposedly dominating it.

Explaining the failure of the "social war" by the presence of the C.P.s is as serious as attributing everything to the absence of the party. Should one ask whether the German revolution miscarried in 1919 because of the S.P.D. and the unions? Or should one rather ask why the S.P.D. and the unions existed, why the workers continued to support them? One must begin from inside the proletariat.

Certainly, it is comforting to see a book which presents the C.P. as one of the pillars of capitalism undergo a wide distribution. But this success is ambiguous. If capital no longer has any all-encompassing thought, or even no thinkers at all (which is in any case incorrect), the S.I. thinks well enough in its place, but badly for the proletariat, as we shall see. Sanguinetti finishes by reasoning in capitalist terms. In fact, he has constructed an analysis such as a capitalist who had assimilated vulgar marxism would have. It is the bourgeoisie who speak of revolution where there is none. For them, occupied factories and barricades in the streets are the beginning of a revolution. Revolutionary marxism does not take the appearance for reality, the moment for the whole. The "heaviness" of marxism is preferable to a lightness without content. But let us leave the readers to choose according to what motivates their reading.

The S.I. has succeeded at an exercise in style: the final verdict for a group that mocked the cult of style in a style-less world. It has come in the end to play capitalist, in every sense of the word. Its brilliance is unimpaired, but it has nothing else left but brilliance. The S.I. gives good advice to capitalists and bad advice to proletarians, to whom it proposes nothing but councilism.

Veridique rapport contains two ideas: (i) the governmental participation of the C.P. is indispensable to Italian capitalism; (ii) the revolution is the workers' councils. The second idea is false, the first one true; capitalists like Agnelli have also expressed it. In a word, Sanguinetti manages to grasp the totality as a bourgeois and nothing more.

He wanted to pass himself off as an enlightened bourgeois: he has succeeded all too well. He has beaten himself at his own game.

Recuperation

At the same moment, Jaime Semprun, the author of La Guerre sociale au Portugal, published a Precis de recuperation. Here is what the S.I. once said about "recuperation":

"It is quite normal that our enemies should come to use us partially... just like the proletariat, we do not pretend to be unexploitable under present conditions."

(I.S. #9. p. 4).

"The vital concepts undergo at one and the same time the truest and most lying uses ... because the struggle of critical reality against apologetic spectacle leads us to a struggle over words, a struggle the more bitter as the words are more central. It is not an authoritarian purge, but the coherence of a concept's use in theory and in practical life which reveals its truth."

(I.S. #10, p. 82).

The counterrevolution does not take up revolutionary ideas because it is malign or manipulative, let alone short of ideas, but because revolutionary ideas deal with real problems with which the counterrevolution is confronted. It is absurd to launch into a denunciation of the enemy's use of revolutionary themes or notions. Today, all terms, all concepts are perverted. The subversive movement will only reappropriate them by its own practical and theoretical development.

Since the end of the 19th century, capitalism and the workers' movement have engendered a fringe of thinkers who take up revolutionary ideas only so as to empty them of their subversive content and adapt them to capital. The bourgeoisie has, by nature, a limited vision of the world. It must call on the vision of the class, the proletariat, which is the bearer of another project. This phenomenon has been amplified since marxism has been officially recognized as having public usefulness. During the first period, capital drew from it a sense of the unity of all relations and of the importance of the economy (in the sense in which Lukacs rightly said that capitalism produces a fragmented vision of reality). But to the extent that capitalism comes to dominate the whole of life, this vision -- broadly speaking, that of old-fashioned economistic vulgar marxism -- is inadequate to its complexity and to the extension of conflicts to all its levels. During the second period, the one we are living in today, determinist orthodox marxism has been rejected by the bourgeoisie itself. At the universities, it was good fun to shrug one's shoulders at Capital fifty years ago : around 1960, it became permissible to find "interesting ideas" in it, the more so as they were being "applied" in the U.S.S.R.... To be in fashion today, it is enough to say that Capital is in the rationalist and reductionist tradition of Western philosophy since Descartes, or even since Aristotle. The new official marxism is not an axis; instead one puts a little bit of it everywhere. It serves to remind one of the "social" character of all practice: the "recuperation" of the S.I. is only a particular case.

One of the natural channels of this evolution is the university, since the apparatus of which it is a part backs a considerable part of the research on the modernization of capitaL Official "revolutionary" thought is the scouting party of capital. Thousands of appointed functionaries criticize capitalism from every direction.

Modernism expresses the social crisis of which the crisis of the proletariat is only an aspect. Out of the limits which the subversive movement encounters at every step, modernism makes its objectives. It serves in particular to justify immediate reformism at the social level. In fact, traditional working class reformism no longer needs justification inasmuch as it has become the rule. The reformism of customs and daily life still needs to be theorized, both against the revolutionary movement from which issues the bias toward it, and against backward capitalist fractions which reject liberties that are nonetheless inoffensive to capital. Modernism thus gets developed because it helps capital to free itself from the fetters on capitalist liberty. The reformism of the everyday is still in its ascendant phase, as economic and working class reformism was seventy years ago.

The common trait of all modernism is the taking up of revolutionary theory by halves; basically its approach is that of "marxism" as against Marx. Its axiom is to call, not for revolution, but for liberation from a certain number of constraints. It wants the maximum of freedom within the existing society. Its critique will always be that of the commodity and not of capital, of politics and not of the state. of totalitarianism and not of democracy. Is it by accident that its historical representative, Marcuse, came from a Germany forced to turn away from the radical aspirations revealed in 1917-21?

It is conceivable to denounce deformations in revolutionary theory in order to make things absolutely precise - on the condition, however, that there is more than just a denunciation. In Semprun's book, there is not an ounce of theory to be found. Let us take two examples. In his critique of G. Guegan20 , Semprun shows what he considers important. Why demolish this personage? To demarcate oneself, even with violent language, has no meaning unless one Puts oneself at a higher level. Semprun spreads Guegan's life over several pages. But if it is really necessary to talk about Guegan, there is something that must be got straight concerning Cahiers du futur (Future Notebooks), the journal he edited. If the first issue was uselessly pretentious, the second, devoted to the counter-revolution, is particularly detestable. It presents the fact that the counter-revolution feeds on the revolution as a paradox, takes pleasure in pointing out the mix-up without explaining anything, as something to revel in amid complacently morbid drawings, and sends everybody into a tailspin. This (intentional ?) derision for all revolutionary activity mixes in a little more and fosters a feeling of superiority among those who have understood because they have been there: "That's where revolution leads. . . " (read: "That's what I was when I was a militant . . . " One can only dream of what the S.I. in its prime might have written about this.

Semprun also shows how Castoriadis21 has innovated in taking it upon himself to "recuperate" his own past revolutionary texts, striving to make them unreadable by heaping them with prefaces and footnotes. This is amusing at first sight, but becomes less so when one knows what the S.I. owes to S ou B. Semprun even shows condescension toward Chaulieu's "marxist" period. The ultra-left was indeed dry as dust, but not enough to stop Debord from joining it. Whether one likes it or not, this is falsification: one amuses the reader while making him forget what the S.I.'s bankruptcy owes to Chaulieu before he went bankrupt himself.

In these two cases as in others, individuals are judged by their attitude, not by their theoretical evolution, from which one might profit. Semprun presents us with a gallery of moral portraits. He does not analyze, he judges. He pillories a number of assholes who stole from the S.I.. Criticizing these attitudes, he is himself nothing but an attitude.

Like every moralistic practice, this one leads to some monstrosities. The most striking is the aggravation of the practice of organization already mentioned in relation to The Real Split... As Debord's new bodyguard, Semprun settles accounts with former members of the S.I.. Reading these works, the uninitiated wouldn't think that the S.I. was ever much of anything. Busy with his self-destruction, Debord now unleashes a sectarianism which reveals his fear of the world. Semprun's style can thus only insult everything that comes within its scope and which is not Debord. He is nothing but a demarcation. He does not know either how to approve or to scorn. Of radical criticism, he has retained only the contempt.

Spectacle

The S.I. always valued its trademark and did its own publicity. One of its great weaknesses was wanting to appear to be without weaknesses, without faults, as if it had developed the Superman within itself. Today it is no more than that. As a critique of traditional groups and of militantism, the S.I. played at being an International, turning politics into derision. The rejection of the pseudo-serious militant who achieves only the spirit of the cloister today serves to evade serious problems. Voyer22 practices derision only to become derisory himself. The proof that the S.I. is finished is that it continues in this form. As a critique of the spectacle, the S.I. shows off its bankruptcy by making a spectacle of itself, and ends up as the opposite of what it was born for.

For this reason, the S.I. continues to be appreciated by a public in desperate need of radicality of which it retains only the letter and the tics. Born from a critique of art, the S.I. winds up being used (despite and because of itself) as a work of literature. One takes pleasure in reading the S.I. or its successors, or the classics which it appreciated, as others take pleasure in listening to the Doors. In the period when the S.I. was really searching and self-searching, when the practice of derision clothed real theoretical and human progression, when humor did not serve merely as a mask, the S.I.'s style was much less fluid and facile than that of these current writings. The rich text resists its author as well as its readers. The text which is nothing but style flows smoothly.

The S.I. contributed to the revolutionary common good, and its weaknesses also have become fodder for a public of monsters, who are neither workers nor intellectuals, and who do nothing. Barren of practice, of passion, and often of needs, they have nothing between them but psychological problems. When people come together with out doing anything, they have nothing in common but their subjectivity. The S.I. is necessary to them; in its work, they read the ready-made theoretical justification for their interest in these relations. The S.I. gives them the impression that the essential reality resides in immediate intersubjective relations, and that revolutionary action consists in developing a radicality at this level, in particular in escaping from wage labor, which coincides with their existence as déclassés The secret of this radicality consists of rejecting everything that exists (including the revolutionary movement) so as to oppose to it whatever seems farthest away from it (even if this has nothing revolutionary about it). This pure opposition has nothing revolutionary about it but the words. The life-style has its rules, which are just as constricting as those of the "bourgeois" world. Most often, bourgeois values are Inverted in apologetics for not working, for marginal existence, for everything that seems to transgress. Leftism makes apologetics for the proletariat as something positive in this society: the pro-situs glorify themselves (as proletarians) as pure negation. As for the ones who have some theoretical substance, their watchword is always the "critique of the S.I.", a critique which is impossible for them because it would be also the critique of their milieu.

The vigor of the S.I. was not in its theory but in a theoretical and practical exigency which its theory only partially recovered, which it helped to locate. The S.I. was the affirmation of the revolution. Its rise coincided with a period when it was possible to think that there would be a revolution soon. It was not equipped to survive past that period. It was successful as the self-critique of a social stratum incapable of making the revolution by itself, and which denounced this stratum's own pretensions (as represented for example, by leftism which wants workers to be led by "conscious" drop-outs from the middle class).

Radical Subjectivity

The S.I. had in relation to classical revolutionary marxism (of which Chaulieu was a good example) the same function, and the same limits, as Feuerbach had in relation to Hegelianism. To escape from the oppressive dialectic of alienation/ objectification, Feuerbach constructed an anthropological vision which placed Man, and in particular love and the senses, at the center of the world. To escape from the economism and factory-fetishism (usinisme) of the ultra-left; the S.I. elaborated a vision of which human relations were the center and which is consonant with "reality", is materialist, if these relations are given their full weight so that they include production, labor. Feuerbachian anthropology prepared the way for theoretical communism such as Marx was able to synthesize during his own time, via the transition of the 1844 Manuscripts. In the same way, the theory of "situations" has been integrated into a vision of communism of which the S.I. was incapable such as is shown today in Un monde sans argent23 .

For the same reason, Debord read Marx in the light of Cardan, considering the "mature" Marx to have been submerged in political economy, which is false. Debord's vision of communism is narrow in comparison to the whole problem. The S.I. did not see the human species and its reconciliation with Nature. It was limited to a very Western, industrial urban universe. It located automation wrongly. It spoke of "dominating nature" which also bespeaks the influence of S ou B. When it dealt with material conditions, in relation to the organization of space, it was still a matter of "relations between people". S ou B was limited by the enterprise, the S.I. by subjectivity. It went as far as it could, but on its original trajectory. Theoretical communism is more than a revolutionary anthropology. The 1844 Manuscripts assimilate Feuerbach's vision by putting Man back into the totality of his relations.

The S.I. owed a great deal to the texts of the young Marx, but it failed to see one of their important dimensions. While other communists rejected political economy as a justification of capitalism, Marx superseded it. The comprehension of the proletariat presupposes a critique of political economy. The S.I. had much more in common with Moses Hess and Wilhelm Weitling, with Feuerbach and Stirner, the expression of a moment in the emergence of the proletariat. The period which produced them (1830-48) greatly resembles the one in which we live. Putting forward a radical subjectivity against a world of commodity objects and reified relationships, the S.I. expressed an exigency which was fundamental, yet had to be superseded. Becker, a friend of Weitling's, wrote in 1844:

"We want to live, to enjoy, to understand everything... communism concerns itself with matter only so as to master it and subordinate it to the mind and spirit..."

A large part of current discussions reproduces these pre-1848 debates. Like Invariance today, Feuerbach made humanity into a being which permits the breaking of isolation:

"Isolation signifies a narrow and constricted life, while community, by contrast, signifies an infinite and free one."

Though he conceptualized the relation between Man and Nature (reproaching Hegel for having neglected it), Feuerbach made the human species into a being over and above social life: "The unity of I and Thou is God." The 1844 Manuscripts gave the senses their place in human activity. By contrast, Feuerbach made sensualism (sic) into the primary problem:

The new philosophy rests on the truth of feelings. In love, and in a more general way, in his feelings, every man affirms the truth of the new philosophy.

The theoretical renaissance around 1968 renewed the old concept within the same limits. Stirner opposed the "will" of the individual to Hess's moralism and Weitling's denunciation of "egoism", just as the S.I. opposed revolutionary pleasure to militant self-sacrifice. The insistence on subjectivity testifies to the fact that proletarians have not yet succeeded in objectifying a revolutionary practice. When the revolution remains at the stage of desire, it is tempting to make desire into the pivot of the revolution.

Gilles Dauvé (1979)

Publication Details - John Gray website

This article was first published in the American journal Red-eye #1 (Berkeley, 1979). It has twice been reprinted, first as a pamphlet retitled What is Situationism? (Unpopular Books, London, 1987) and secondly in the anthology What is Situationism? A Reader ed. Stewart Home (AK Press, London, 1996). (The version in the latter includes some minor typo's mostly involving the emphases).

The footnotes are the translator's notes from the original Red-eye version and in some instances are out of date. We have added additional notes to some of them.

The original translator's introduction is also included. The translator Louis Michaelson had been a member of the group For Ourselves (best known for the pamphlet The Right to be Greedy) and subsequent to this was involved with the journal Processed World.

This article doesn't seem to have been published in French. The translator's introduction refers to it being a chapter from a proposed book on the history and ideology of the revolutionary movement. This book was never published. We understand it was called Les géants des sectes and also contained chapters on Socialisme ou Barbarie, Bordiga and Invariance.

Gilles Dauvé the author of this article, who wrote as Jean Barrot in the 1970's, was involved with the journal La Banquise in the 1980's. The second issue of that journal included a long article "le roman de nos origines" about the origins of the political current within which La Banquise situated itself. "le roman..." has sections dealing with various groups including the S.I. and presumably drew on the work done for this proposed book. (It refers to this article.) "le roman..." is available in French here on this site, and some sections, including that on the S.I are available as draft translations.

La Banquise announced more than once that it would publish an article about the S.I. In its final issue, in an article looking back at its own activities, it published the following :

et l'IS ?

Une critique de l'IS avait été annoncée dès le no. 1 de LB. Un texte reste à faire. Il devrait ne pas ressembler à un bilan, encore moins à une réfutation, et poser autrement les questions abordées par l'IS, les déplacer si besoin. Il faudrait, grâce à l'IS et contre elle, parler de choses cruciales, sans imaginer dans la critique de l'IS une « clé »théorique ou pratique. (Rappelons que l'un des meilleurs textes sur l'IS date de 1974: Supplément au no. 301 de la Nouvelle Gazette Rhénane.)

Sans remplir ici cette tâche, on peut indiquer quelques directions, qui ne sont pas sans rapport avec ce que nous disions plus haut du militantisme.

Le no. 2 de l'IS (décembre 1958, p. 10) expose ainsi la critique de la vie quotidienne :

« [... ] répandre une autre idée du bonheur. La gauche et la droite étaient d'accord sur une image de la misère, qui est la privation alimentaire. La gauche et la droite étaient aussi d'accord sur l'image d'une bonne vie. C'est la racine de la mystification qui a défait le mouvement ouvrier dans les pays industrialisés. »

« La propagande révolutionnaire doit présenter à chacun la possibilité d'un changement personnel profond, immédiat [ ... ] Les intellectuels révolutionnaires devront abandonner les débris de leur culture décomposée, chercher à vivre eux-mêmes d'une façon révolutionnaire. »

« Au centre de notre action collective il y a en ce moment l'obligation urgente de faire bien comprendre ce qu'est notre tâche spécifique, un saut qualitatif dans le développement de la culture et de la vie quotidienne. »
Pour mesurer à la fois l'écart entre cette époque et la nôtre, et bien évaluer la vision de l'IS, citons Debord dans Potlach (no. 29, 5 novembre 1957) :

« Je crois que tous mes amis se satisferaient de travailler anonymement au ministère des Loisirs d'un gouvernement qui se préoccuperait enfin de changer la vie, avec des salaires d'ouvriers qualifiés.»

On peut se demander si l'erreur centrale de l'IS n'est pas d'être partie d'un usage de la vie, et d'en avoir cherché un nouveau, alors qu'il n'y a pas d'usage à organiser : de là viendraient l'obsession stratégique, le formalisme conseilliste, c'est-à-dire la tendance (parallèle au postulat gestionnaire de SoB) à faire de tout une question d'organisation plus que de contenu. Cela n'empêchait pas l'IS de retrouver et développer le contenu communiste, mais à travers le filtre autogestionnaire et malgré lui.
Dans son no. 3 (décembre 1959, p. 23), l'IS explique longuement comment les révolutionnaires dans la culture doivent trouver « de nouveaux métiers ». Là se situe une illusion qui en entraînera d'autres : l'IS remplacera le rôle d'« avant-garde expérimentale » et expérimentant dans l'art et la culture par un rôle d'avant-garde dans la façon d'être.

l'IS, qui s'était toujours définie comme groupe d'intellectuels révolutionnaires, a rejoint le prolétariat en 1968 : son action au CMDO fut l'affirmation de principes plus qu'une pratique révolutionnaire. Sa propagande pour les conseils ouvriers, de par sa nature même de propagande, de mot d'ordre plaqué, déconnecté des rapports de lutte réels où quelque chose d'autre aurait pu se jouer, prouvait l'extériorité de l'IS par rapport à un mouvement social dont par ailleurs elle exprimait bien certaines aspirations.
Les situationnistes ont eu la bonne attitude face à toute une série de réalités à détruire, sans pouvoir généralement la fonder. Mais quand il n'y a plus eu que l'attitude, il n'y a bientôt même plus eu la bonne attitude, comme ce fut le cas après 1968 (autovalorisation, incapacité à se dégager du conseillisme, fascination pour la stratégie, erreurs à répétition sur l'Italie, le Portugal).
La limite de l'IS est contenue à l'intérieur de son point fort : la critique de la marchandise. La Société du spectacle reprend une analyse fondamentale sans aller jusqu'au fondement.

Qu'est-ce qui constitue le noyau de notre critique du monde marchand et salarial? Chaque marchandise se confronte à l'autre en donnant d'elle-même un visage qui n'est pas elle, qui n'est pas sa nature profonde, puisqu'elle met en avant la quantité de travail incarnée en elle et non son contenu réel. Elle présente un résumé d'elle, si différent d'elle qu'il ne dit rien d'elle, qu'il parle d'autre chose. Les marchandises n'arrêtent pas de s'échanger sans se dire ce qu'elles sont. Leur rapport s'établit sur une forme, une enveloppe : chacune emballe un paquet de travail dont on ne s'occupe plus. Puisque tout est marchandisé, notre monde est une société de la représentation.

Chaque personne, chaque acte, chaque objet n'existe pas seulement par sa présence réelle, mais par son image. Tout doit se présenter et être représenté. Tout possède un second niveau d'existence qui double le premier et en dépossède, devenant plus réel que le premier. Avec l'expansion industrielle et consommatoire, ce processus s'étend à tout, de l'économie à la politique, l'art, la pensée, la vie publique et privée. La démocratie s'avère la forme la plus adéquate au capitalisme, puisque son principe repose sur la délégation et la représentation d'un pouvoir : il s'agit toujours de trouver le lieu et le moment aptes à confronter les opinions, à instaurer une structure de décision, à inventer une forme d'organisation incarnant une volonté générale.

Le capital est la société où en art comme en politique, en affaires comme dans l'échange d'idées, le problème essentiel est de représenter une collectivité afin de lui donner une réalité qu'elle n'aurait pas sans cette réunion censée décider de son avenir.
Face à cette démocratisation, le risque est grand de s'enfermer dans la seule dénonciation de son côté formel, en réclamant une démocratie « réelle » introuvable. L'une des limites des révolutionnaires du milieu du XIXe siècle, Marx inclus, fut de ne pas pouvoir relier critique de la marchandise et critique de la politique et de la démocratie. Il y en avait pourtant des éléments pratiques dans les réactions de prolétaires contre le libéralisme bourgeois, et théoriques dans certains textes, en particulier chez Marx. Mais la critique de la démocratie en tant que telle n'était pas faite. En revenant aux sources (Marx, Feuerbach ... ) l'IS reprit et développa ce qu'elles contenaient de mieux, mais aussi leur limitation historique. Les situationnistes sont toujours à la recherche d'une véritable démocratie, d'une structure où les prolétaires ne seraient plus passifs, mais actifs.

Le spectacle est le résultat de la transformation de notre vie en une image qui la redouble et s'y substitue. Tout un travail social, dont l'échange est le coeur, éloigne de nous la vie directement vécue. Le spectacle en est le produit autonomisé. Il part de nous, cesse d'être nous, et la représentation universelle des marchandises est le mécanisme de cette séparation. Le spectacle ne devient extérieur à notre vie que parce que cette vie produit et reproduit sa propre extériorisation.

Si l'IS a tant insisté sur le spectacle, peut-être à cause de son origine dans la critique de l'art, et non sur la représentation, qui est un concept plus total et mieux explicatif que celui de spectacle, cela l'a poussée à revendiquer aussi une société du non-spectacle mais qui resté dans les problèmes de représentation : la démocratie des conseils. Il n'y a pas et il ne peut y avoir de critique de la démocratie chez l'IS, parce qu'elle n'est pas allée au fond du mécanisme capitaliste dont elle a pourtant montré la voie.
La Banquise Nº 4. 1986

In 2000 Gilles Dauvé has published an article 'Back to the S.I' which we understand is an introduction for a reprint of this text. An english translation can be found on-line at this link.

• 1Translator's footnote : Invariance : journal published by a group which split from the International Communist Party, itself the most dogmatic and voluntarist by-product of the "Bordiguist" Italian left. After several years of obscure, though occasionally brilliant theoretical involutions, Invariance's editor Jacques Camatte arrived at the position that capital has "escaped the law of value" and that therefore the proletariat has disappeared. For a presentation in English of his views, see The Wandering of Humanity published by Black and Red, Detroit.
• 2Translator's footnote : The term "sign" is used in structuralist writing to mean a signifier (representation) that has become separated from what it originally signified (a phenomenon in the world). A "sign" thus implies a representation which refers only to itself, i.e. is "tautological". One example of a "sign" would be the credit extended in ever greater quantities to bankrupt nations by large banks, credit which cannot possibly be repaid : it is a representation of commodities which will never be produced.)
• 3Translator's footnote : Joseph Dejacque : French communist artisan active in the 1848 rising. A collection of his writings is available under the title A Bas les chefs (Champ Libre, Paris 1974).
• 4Translator's footnote : The struggle over Radio Renascensa in Portugal during 1975 bears out this point.
• 5Translator's footnote : Appeared in English as The Totality for Kids.
• 6Translator's footnote : In a series of articles in Socialisme ou Barbarie, it was shown how capitalist industry needs the active and creative cooperation of workers in order to function. The most telling example of this is the British rank-and-file workers' tactic of the "work to rule" in which all jobs are carried out precisely according to union contract and employer specification. This usually results in a decline in output by anywhere up to 50 percent. (Tr.)
• 7Translator's footnote : This concept was central to the "unitary urbanism" of the early S.I.. Loosely translated it means drifting around, usually on foot, in a city, and exploring and analyzing the life of the city thereby. (Tr.)
• 8Translator's footnote: La veritable scission dans I'Internationale: Editions Champ Libre. Documents by various members of the S.I. concerning the splitting and dissolution of the group.
  [John Gray note : An english translation was published in 1974 entitled "The Veritable Split in the International"]
• 9Translator's footnote : Henri Lefebvre : at one time the most sophisticated philosophical apologist for the French CP (c.f. his Dialectical Materialism, Cape Editions, London). Lefebvre broke with the Party and during the late '50's and early '60s began to construct a "critical theory of everyday life". His work was important to the S.I. although he never transcended a fundamentally academic and sociologistic viewpoint. The S.I. denounced him after he published a text on the Paris Commune which was largely stolen from the S.I.'s earlier "Theses" on the same topic.
  [John Gray note : Lefebvre denies this and also makes some interesting charges of his own in an interview which you can find on line here on the Not Bored site]
• 10Translator's footnote : Published in the U.S. as Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy.
• 11Translator's footnote : Internationalist Communist Party (founded in 1943). Their English journal is Communist Program.
• 12Translator's footnote : Ratgeb : pseudonym used by Vaneigem for his book, De la greve sauvage a l'autogestion generalisee Editions 10/18, Paris, 1973.
  [John Gray note : Translated into english minus the preface as 'Contributions to the revolutionary struggle intended to be discussed, corrected, and principally put into practise without delay'. (Bratach Dubh, 1981).]
• 13Translator's footnote : This fetishism of "autonomy" developed into a nasty little game among the "pro-situ" groups. They would solicit "dialogue" from people who "saw themselves" in one of their texts. When naive sympathizers responded, they would be encouraged to engage in some "autonomous practice" so as to prove that they were not "mere spectators." The most sincere among them would then attempt this. The result would invariably be savagely denounced by the prositu group as "incoherent", "confusionist", etc. and relations would be broken off.
• 14Translator's footnote : Such as the subversive effect of the mass refusal to pay and the free distribution of goods and services carried out by the Italian "self-reduction" movement. Naturally, in a full-fledged revolutionary situation, this would go much further and would include the immediate communization of key means of production both to provide for the survival of the proletarian movement and to undermine the resource base of the remaining capitalist forces.
• 15Translator's footnote : Published in 1975. Distributed by Editions de I'Oubli, Paris.
• 16A left-wing intellectual French weekly.
• 17Translator's footnote : Veridique rapport sur les derniers chances de sauver le capitalisme en Italie.
  [John Gray Note : Recently translated by Len Bracken and published by Flatland Books]
• 18Translator's footnote : i.e. The movement of occupation of workplaces and campuses during May '68.
• 19Translator's footnote : The translator disagrees with this estimation; c.f. the account of the TAP strike in Portugal : Anti-Fascism or Anti-Capitalism, Root and Branch, 1976.
• 20Translator's footnote : Geugan was the manager and the real founder of Champ Libre Publications until he was fired in 1975. He is now a fashionable figure in literary and avant-garde circles.
• 21Translator's footnote : Cardan - Chaulieus real name. (tr)
  [John Gray note : Chaulieu and Cardan were both pseudonyms used by Cornelius Castoriadis.]
• 22Translator's footnote : Jean-Pierre Voyer, author of "Reich : How to Use" (available from Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044 Berkeley, Ca. 94701) and other texts published by Champ Libre. (tr.)
• 23Le communisme : un monde sans argent (3 vols.) by Organization des jeunes Travailleurs Revolutionnaires. Paris, 1975. [Libcom note - available in English translation on this site as: A world without money: communism.]