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, 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.
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 Dejacque 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.”
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 base” 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 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 derive 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” la Cardan, it ended by adopting the problematic of “participation” 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 Véritable Scission, 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. M, comprising among others “the study without illusions of the classical workers’ movement” and of 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 Véritable 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 Lefebvre 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) 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. (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.” (I. S. #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” (I. S. #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 (I. S. #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.” (I. S. #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 . S. #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 (I. S. #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 Ratgeb 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.