From Watts to Wall Street: A situationist analysis of political violence

Chapter · April 2020 with 10 Reads 

DOI: 10.4324/9780429460357-2

In book: Cultures of Violence, Edition: 1st, Chapter: 1, Publisher: Routledge, pp.16-39
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340726696_From_Watts_to_Wall_Street_A_situationist_analysis_of_political_violence

This chapter applies ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’ – the Situationist account of the Watts Rebellion (Los Angeles, 1965) – to the August riots (England, 2011) and the global Occupy movement that followed. It draws two conclusions: that both May ‘68 and Occupy were formed by the political violence that preceded them; and that, although the Situationist essay makes problematic claims about race, its assessment of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy remains valuable. In fact, if combined with intersectional theory, it can provide a useful counterbalance to identity politics that can prevent what Alain Badiou calls an ‘immediate riot’ from becoming a ‘historical riot’ by fragmenting mass social movements and undermining unity.

JOURNAL ARTICLE

OCCUPY THE FUN PALACE

BRITT EVERSOLE

Thresholds

No. 41, REVOLUTION! (Spring 2013), pp. 32-45

Published by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43876495

Page Count: 14

Topics: Situationism, Modern art, Palaces, Dialectic, British culture, Radicalism, Graphics, Riots, Collage

B I B L I O T H E Q U E ~ V I R T U E L L E

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)The Devil of Perversity
translation of Charles Baudelaire

First published in the July 1845 issue of Graham's Lady's And Gentleman's Magazine , this text was then republished, in a slightly revised version, in various collections of poems in the following years. Poe began to be known in France shortly before his death. The young Baudelaire discovered it in 1847, and immediately began translating his work. The first Extraordinary Histories are published in Paris ten years later.
  In the examination of faculties and inclinations - of the primordial motives of the human soul - the phrenologists forgot to take part in a tendency which, although apparently existing as a primitive, radical, irreducible feeling, was also omitted by all the moralists who preceded them. In the perfect infatuation of our reason, we have all omitted it. We have allowed its existence to escape our sight, only for lack of belief, of faith - whether it be faith in Revelation or faith in Cabal. The idea never came to us, simply because of its supererogatory quality. We did not feel the need to note this impulse - this tendency. We could not imagine the necessity. We couldn't grasp the notion of this mobile primum, and, even if it were forced into us, we could never understand what role it played in the economy of human things, temporal or eternal. It is impossible to deny that phrenology and a good part of the metaphysical sciences were a priori mixed. The man of metaphysics or logic, rather than the man of intelligence and observation, claims to conceive of God's designs - to dictate plans to him. Having thus deepened Jehovah's intentions to his full satisfaction, according to these said intentions, he built his innumerable and capricious systems. In matters of phrenology, for example, we first established, quite naturally, moreover, that it was in the designs of the Divinity that man ate. Then we assigned to the man an organ of nourishment, and this organ is the whip with which God compels man to eat, willy-nilly. Secondly, having decided that it was the will of God that man should continue his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. and this organ is the whip with which God compels man to eat, willy-nilly. Secondly, having decided that it was the will of God that man should continue his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. and this organ is the whip with which God compels man to eat, willy-nilly. Secondly, having decided that it was the will of God that man should continue his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. man to eat, willy-nilly. Secondly, having decided that it was the will of God that man should continue his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. man to eat, willy-nilly. Secondly, having decided that it was the will of God that man should continue his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. man continued his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. man continued his species, we immediately discovered an organ of amativity. And so those of combativeness, ideality, causality, constructiveness - in short, any organ representing an inclination, a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator. a moral feeling or a faculty of pure intelligence. And in this accommodation of the principles of human action, Spurzheimists, rightly or wrongly, in part or in whole, have only followed, in principle, the traces of their predecessors; deducing and establishing everything according to the preconceived destiny of man and taking as a basis the intentions of his Creator.
It would have been wiser, it would have been safer to base our classification (since we absolutely have to classify) on the acts that man usually performs and those that he performs occasionally, always occasionally, rather than on the assumption that it is Divinity itself which makes them accomplish it. If we cannot understand God in his visible works, how then can we understand him in his inconceivable thoughts, which call these works to Life? If we cannot conceive it in its objective creatures, how will we conceive it in its unconditional modes and in its phases of creation?
A posteriori induction would have led phrenology to admit as a primitive and innate principle of human action a paradoxical je ne sais quoi, which we will call perversity, for lack of a more characteristic term. In the sense that I attach to it, it is, in reality, a motive without motive, an unmotivated motive. Under his influence, we act without an intelligible goal; or, if this appears to be a contradiction in terms, we can modify the proposition to the point of saying that, under its influence, we act by reason that we should not. In theory, there could not be a more unreasonable reason; but, in fact, there is no stronger one. For some minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. My life is no more certain for me than this proposition: the certainty of sin or error included in any act is often the only invincible force that drives us, and only drives us to its accomplishment. And this overwhelming tendency to do evil for the love of evil will admit no analysis, no resolution in subsequent elements. It is a radical, primitive, - elementary movement. It will be said, I expect, that if we persist in certain acts because we feel that we should not persist in them, our conduct is only a modification of that which ordinarily derives from phrenological combativeness. But a simple glance will suffice to discover the falsity of this idea. Phrenological combativeness has for its existence the necessity of personal defense. It is our safeguard against injustice. Its principle concerns our well-being; and thus, at the same time as it develops, we feel the desire for well-being being exalted in us. It would follow from this that the desire for well-being should be simultaneously excited with any principle which would only be a modification of combativeness; but, in the case of that I do not know what I define perversity, not only the desire for well-being is not awakened, but also appears a singularly contradictory feeling.
Every man, appealing to his own heart, will find, after all, the best answer to the fallacy in question. Anyone who will honestly consult and carefully question his soul will not dare to deny the absolute radicalism of the addiction in question. It is no less characterized than incomprehensible. There is no man, for example, who at some point has not been devoured by an ardent desire to torture his listener by circumlocutions. Whoever speaks knows well that he does not like it; he has the best intention of pleasing; it is usually brief, precise and clear; the most laconic and brightest language is agitated and struggling over its language; it is only with difficulty that he himself forces himself to refuse him the passage, he dreads and conjures the bad mood of the one to whom he is addressing. However, this thought struck him, that by certain incises and parentheses it could generate this anger. This simple thought is enough. The movement becomes a desire, the desire grows in desire, desire changes into an irresistible need, and the need is satisfied - to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in disregard of all consequences.
We have before us a task that we must accomplish quickly. We know that delaying is our ruin. The greatest crisis of our lives calls for immediate action and energy with the imperative voice of a trumpet. We are burning, we are consumed with impatience to get to work; the taste of a glorious result ignites our whole soul. This task must, it must be attacked today, - and yet we postpone it to tomorrow; - and why? There is no explanation, except that we feel it is perverse; - let us use the word without understanding the principle. Tomorrow arrives, and at the same time a more impatient anxiety to do our duty; but with this increased anxiety also comes a burning desire, anonyne, to delay further, - positively terrible desire, because its nature is impenetrable. The more time flees, the more strength the desire gains. There is only one hour left for action, this hour is ours. We tremble with the violence of the conflict which is agitated within us, - the battle between the positive and the indefinite, between substance and shadow. But, if the struggle has come to this point, it is the shadow that prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. The more time flees, the more strength the desire gains. There is only one hour left for action, this hour is ours. We tremble with the violence of the conflict which is agitated within us, - the battle between the positive and the indefinite, between substance and shadow. But, if the struggle has come to this point, it is the shadow that prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. The more time flees, the more strength the desire gains. There is only one hour left for action, this hour is ours. We tremble with the violence of the conflict which is agitated within us, - the battle between the positive and the indefinite, between substance and shadow. But, if the struggle has come to this point, it is the shadow that prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. this hour is ours. We tremble with the violence of the conflict which is agitated within us, - the battle between the positive and the indefinite, between substance and shadow. But, if the struggle has come to this point, it is the shadow that prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. this hour is ours. We tremble with the violence of the conflict which is agitated within us, - the battle between the positive and the indefinite, between substance and shadow. But, if the struggle has come to this point, it is the shadow that prevails - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. prevails, - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late. prevails, - we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and it is the death knell for our happiness. It is at the same time for the shadow that has terrorized us for so long, the alarm clock song, the diane of the victorious rooster of ghosts. It flies away - it disappears - we are free. The old energy is coming back. We will work now. Alas! it's too late.
We are on the edge of a precipice, We look into the abyss, - we feel uneasy and dizzy. Our first movement is to back away from danger. Inexplicably we stay. Little by little our uneasiness, our vertigo, our horror merge into a cloudy and indefinable feeling. Gradually, imperceptibly, this cloud takes a form, like the vapor of the bottle from which rose the genius of the Arabian Nights. But from our cloud, on the edge of the precipice, rises, more and more palpable, a form a thousand times more terrible than any genius, than any demon of fables; and yet it is only a thought, but a dreadful thought, a thought which freezes the very marrow of our bones, and penetrates them with the ferocious delights of its horror. It's just this idea: What would be our sensations during the course of a fall made from such a height? And this fall, - this lightning annihilation, - for the simple reason that they imply the most dreadful, the most odious of all the most dreadful and all the most odious images of death and suffering that have ever presented themselves to our imagination , - for this simple reason, we desire them more ardently. And because our judgment violently drives us away from the edge, because of that very fact, we approach it more impetuously. It is not in the nature of passion more diabolically impatient than that of a man who, shivering on the edge of a precipice, dreams of jumping into it. To allow yourself, to try to think for a moment only, is inevitably to be lost; for reflection commands us to abstain from it, and it is for this very reason, I say, that we cannot. If there is not a friendly arm there to stop us, or if we are incapable of a sudden effort to throw ourselves away from the abyss, we rush forward, we are annihilated.
Let us examine these actions and others analogous, we will find that they result only from the spirit of perversity. We just perpetrate them because we feel we shouldn't. Below or beyond, there is no intelligible principle; and we could, in truth, consider this perversity as a direct instigation of the Archidemon, if it were not recognized that sometimes it serves the accomplishment of good.
If I have told you so much, it was to somehow answer your question, - to explain to you why I am here, - to have to show you some semblance of some cause which motivates these irons I wear and this convicted cell that I live in. If I hadn't been so verbose, or you wouldn't have understood me at all, or, like the crowd, you would have thought me crazy. Now you will easily perceive that I am one of the countless victims of the Devil of Evil.
It is impossible that an action has ever been devised with more perfect deliberation. For weeks, for months, I meditated on the means of assassination. I rejected a thousand plans, because the accomplishment of each involved a chance of revelation. In the long run, one day reading a few French memoirs, I found the story of an almost fatal illness which happened to Madame Pilau, due to an accidentally poisoned candle. The idea suddenly struck my imagination. I knew my victim used to read in bed. I also knew that her room was small and poorly ventilated. But I don't need to tire you of idle details. I will not tell you the easy tricks with the help of which I substituted, in the candlestick of his bedroom, a candle of my composition to the one I found there. In the morning the dead man was found in his bed, and the coroner's verdict was: Death by the visitation of God.
I inherited his fortune, and all went well for several years. The idea of ​​a revelation did not once enter my brain. As for the remains of the fatal candle, I had destroyed them myself. I had not left the shadow of a thread that could be used to convince me or even make me suspect the crime. One cannot imagine what a magnificent feeling of satisfaction arose in my breast when I reflected on my absolute safety. For a long period of time, I got used to reveling in this feeling. It gave me more real pleasure than all the purely material benefits resulting from my crime. But in the long run came an era from which the feeling of pleasure was transformed, by an almost imperceptible gradation, into a thought that harassed me. She harassed me because she haunted me. I could hardly get rid of it for a moment. It is quite an ordinary thing to have tired ears, or rather the memory obsessed with a kind of tintouin, by the refrain of a vulgar song or by some insignificant shreds of opera. And the torture will not be less, if the song is good in itself or if the opera air is estimable. This is how at the end I found myself constantly dreaming of my safety, and repeating this sentence in a low voice: I am saved! a vulgar song or by some insignificant shreds of opera. And the torture will not be less, if the song is good in itself or if the opera air is estimable. This is how at the end I found myself constantly dreaming of my safety, and repeating this sentence in a low voice: I am saved! a vulgar song or by some insignificant shreds of opera. And the torture will not be less, if the song is good in itself or if the opera air is estimable. This is how at the end I found myself constantly dreaming of my safety, and repeating this sentence in a low voice: I am saved!
One day, while strolling in the streets, I caught myself whispering, almost aloud, these accustomed syllables. In a fit of petulance, I expressed them in this new form: I am saved, - I am saved; - yes, - provided that I am not stupid enough to confess my case myself!
No sooner had I said these words than I felt an ice cold filter down to my heart. I had acquired some experience of these outbursts of perversity (of which I have not without difficulty explained the singular nature), and I remembered very well that in no case had I been able to resist these victorious attacks. And now this fortuitous suggestion, coming from myself, - that I could well be stupid enough to confess the murder of which I was guilty, - confronted me like the very shadow of the one I murdered, - and was calling me to death.
First, I made an effort to shake up this nightmare from my soul. I walked vigorously, - faster, - always faster; - in the long run I ran. I had an intoxicating desire to cry out with all my might. Each successive flow of my thought overwhelmed me with new terror; because, alas! I understood, all too well, that to think, in my situation, was to lose myself. I accelerated my race again. I leaped like crazy through the crowded streets. In the long run, the populace took the alarm and ran after me. I then felt the consumption of my destiny. If I had been able to tear my tongue out, I would have done so; - but a rough voice resounded in my ears, - an even rougher hand grabbed me by the shoulder. I turned around, I opened my mouth to suck. For a while, I experienced all the anguish of suffocation; I became blind, deaf, drunk: and then some invisible demon, I thought, struck me on the back with his large hand. The secret so long imprisoned sprang from my soul.
It is said that I spoke, that I uttered myself very distinctly, but with a marked energy and an ardent haste, as if I feared to be interrupted before I had completed the short, but large, important sentences which delivered to the executioner and to hell.
Having recounted all that was necessary for the full conviction of justice, I fell to the floor, passed out.
But why should I say more? Today I'm wearing these chains, and I'm here! Tomorrow I will be free! -but where?

 

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B  I  B  L  I  O  T  H  E  Q  U  E ~ V  I  R  T  U  E  L  L  E

  Jack London
War of the Classes



PREFACE
When I was a youngster I was looked upon as a weird sort of creature, because, forsooth, I was a socialist. Reporters from local papers interviewed me, and the interviews, when published, were pathological studies of a strange and abnormal specimen of man. At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made a stand in my native town for municipal ownership of public utilities, I was branded a "red-shirt," a "dynamiter," and an "anarchist"; and really decent fellows, who liked me very well, drew the line at my appearing in public with their sisters.

But the times changed. There came a day when I heard, in my native town, a Republican mayor publicly proclaim that "municipal ownership was a fixed American policy." And in that day I found myself picking up in the world. No longer did the pathologist study me, while the really decent fellows did not mind in the least the propinquity of myself and their sisters in the public eye. My political and sociological ideas were ascribed to the vagaries of youth, and good-natured elderly men patronized me and told me that I would grow up some day and become an unusually intelligent member of the community. Also they told me that my views were biassed by my empty pockets, and that some day, when I had gathered to me a few dollars, my views would be wholly different,--in short, that my views would be their views.

And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,--still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few philosophical ideas, Germanic in their origin, I was an interesting and pleasing personality.

Through all this experience I noted one thing. It was not I that changed, but the community. In fact, my socialistic views grew solider and more pronounced. I repeat, it was the community that changed, and to my chagrin I discovered that the community changed to such purpose that it was not above stealing my thunder. The community branded me a "red-shirt" because I stood for municipal ownership; a little later it applauded its mayor when he proclaimed municipal ownership to be a fixed American policy. He stole my thunder, and the community applauded the theft. And today the community is able to come around and give me points on municipal ownership.

What happened to me has been in no wise different from what has happened to the socialist movement as a whole in the United States. In the bourgeois mind socialism has changed from a terrible disease to a youthful vagary, and later on had its thunder stolen by the two old parties,--socialism, like a meek and thrifty workingman, being exploited became respectable.

Only dangerous things are abhorrent. The thing that is not dangerous is always respectable. And so with socialism in the United States. For several years it has been very respectable,--a sweet and beautiful Utopian dream, in the bourgeois mind, yet a dream, only a dream. During this period, which has just ended, socialism was tolerated because it was impossible and non-menacing. Much of its thunder had been stolen, and the workingmen had been made happy with full dinner-pails. There was nothing to fear. The kind old world spun on, coupons were clipped, and larger profits than ever were extracted from the toilers. Coupon-clipping and profit-extracting would continue to the end of time. These were functions divine in origin and held by divine right. The newspapers, the preachers, and the college presidents said so, and what they say, of course, is so--to the bourgeois mind.

Then came the presidential election of 1904. Like a bolt out of a clear sky was the socialist vote of 435,000,--an increase of nearly 400 per cent in four years, the largest third-party vote, with one exception, since the Civil War. Socialism had shown that it was a very live and growing revolutionary force, and all its old menace revived. I am afraid that neither it nor I are any longer respectable. The capitalist press of the country confirms me in my opinion, and herewith I give a few post-election utterances of the capitalist press:-

"The Democratic party of the constitution is dead. The Social- Democratic party of continental Europe, preaching discontent and class hatred, assailing law, property, and personal rights, and insinuating confiscation and plunder, is here."--Chicago Chronicle.

"That over forty thousand votes should have been cast in this city to make such a person as Eugene V. Debs the President of the United States is about the worst kind of advertising that Chicago could receive."--Chicago Inter-Ocean.

"We cannot blink the fact that socialism is making rapid growth in this country, where, of all others, there would seem to be less inspiration for it."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

"Upon the hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms--great, far-sweeping reforms--are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand before the world responsible for our system of government being changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages must cease, or socialism will seize another lever to lift itself into power."--The Chicago New World.

"Scarcely any phase of the election is more sinisterly interesting than the increase in the socialist vote. Before election we said that we could not afford to give aid and comfort to the socialists in any manner. . . It (socialism) must be fought in all its phases, in its every manifestation."--San Francisco Argonaut.

And far be it from me to deny that socialism is a menace. It is its purpose to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of present-day society. It is distinctly revolutionary, and in scope and depth is vastly more tremendous than any revolution that has ever occurred in the history of the world. It presents a new spectacle to the astonished world,--that of an ORGANIZED, INTERNATIONAL, REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT. In the bourgeois mind a class struggle is a terrible and hateful thing, and yet that is precisely what socialism is,--a world-wide class struggle between the propertyless workers and the propertied masters of workers. It is the prime preachment of socialism that the struggle is a class struggle. The working class, in the process of social evolution, (in the very nature of things), is bound to revolt from the sway of the capitalist class and to overthrow the capitalist class. This is the menace of socialism, and in affirming it and in tallying myself an adherent of it, I accept my own consequent unrespectability.

As yet, to the average bourgeois mind, socialism is merely a menace, vague and formless. The average member of the capitalist class, when he discusses socialism, is condemned an ignoramus out of his own mouth. He does not know the literature of socialism, its philosophy, nor its politics. He wags his head sagely and rattles the dry bones of dead and buried ideas. His lips mumble mouldy phrases, such as, "Men are not born equal and never can be;" "It is Utopian and impossible;" "Abstinence should be rewarded;" "Man will first have to be born again;" "Cooperative colonies have always failed;" and "What if we do divide up? in ten years there would be rich and poor men such as there are today."

It surely is time that the capitalists knew something about this socialism that they feel menaces them. And it is the hope of the writer that the socialistic studies in this volume may in some slight degree enlighten a few capitalistic minds. The capitalist must learn, first and for always, that socialism is based, not upon the equality, but upon the inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, and with conscience, stern and awful, at times blazingly imperious, demanding the right,--the right, nothing more nor less than the right.

JACK LONDON. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA. January 12, 1905.
 

READ THE CLASS STRUGGLE HERE  http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/london_war_classes.html

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Tom VagueThe Boy Scout's Guide
to the
Situationist International
 

The Effect The S.I. Had On Paris '68 And All That, Through The Angry Brigade And King Mob To The Sex Pistols

 

DEFINITIONS:

Constructed Situation: a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and game of events.

Situationist: having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.

Situationism: a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by anti- situationists.

Psychogeography: the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour on individuals.

Psychogeographical: relating to psychogeography. That which manifests the geographical environment's direct emotional effects.

Psychogeographer: schoolteacher who hacks up his pupils...Sorry! One who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena.

Derive: a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through various ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving.

Unitary Urbanism: the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour.

Detournement: short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, detournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.

Culture: the reflection and prefiguration of the possibilities of organization of everyday life in a given historical moment; a complex of aesthetics, feelings and mores through which a collectively reacts on the life that is objectively determined by it's economy. (We are defining this term only in the perspective of the creation of values, not in that of the teaching of them.

Decomposition: the process in which the traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves as a result of the emergence of superior means of dominating nature which enable and require superior cultural constructions. We can distinguish between an active phase of the decomposition and effective demolition of the old superstructure - which came to an end around 1930 - and a phase of repetition which has prevailed since then. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism.

You'll find the term 'Situationist' liberally sprinkled throughout contemporary agit-prop/pop culture. A lot of people name drop it but what it actually means and where it comes from is never properly explained and mapped out for people. This particular effort is going to be no exception to that. However "Situationist" is most definitely not some arty term that Malcolm Mclaren dreamed up to con people. It goes back many years before Talky Malky's reign of terror and had already been used to far greater effect.

The term came to the attention of certain sectors of the British populus, 5 years before Malcolm Mclaren borrowed some situationist ideas for the Sex Pistols, when on the night or January 12th, 1971 the country, and more specifically the house of Robert Carr, Ted Heath's Secretary of State for Employment, was rocked by two bomb explosions. Old Blighty had, of course, already felt the anti-imperialist anger of the I.R.A. in a similar way. But this was different. The IRA used bomb attacks for very specific purposes; troops out and home rule. The Carr Bombing was undoubtedly connected with Carr's controversial industrial relations bill, but the people responsible were not part of any traditional revolutionary group. All Special Branch had to go on was a communiqué from an organization calling itself "drumroll." "The Angry Brigade- Robert Carr got it tonight. We're getting closer."

Special Branch had heard or them before, but always dismissed them as (relatively) harmless anarchistic cranks. After the Carr Bombing they took them rather more seriously, asking themselves if this was the beginning of something big - the Revolution that people had been predicting throughout the 60's? Special Branch informants and files on political groups were useless. In fact the only real clue they had was a list of targets included in an earlier communiqué: "Embassies, High Pigs, Spectacles, Judges, Property." The third from last term "Spectacles" intrigued one enterprising Special Branch sergeant, who started visiting Liberatarian bookshops and sifting through underground magazines and literature.

The enterprising Special Branch sergeant found that the word Spectacle was a popular slogan, used by a Paris based group known as Situationists, to describe capitalism, the state, the whole shooting match. Owing as much to the Surrealists and Dada as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists starting point was that the original working class movement had been crushed, by the Bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East; Working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to World Capitalism; And furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class which they were supposed to represent.

Unlike the Special Branch sergeant, Malcolm Mclaren obviously did'nt do his homework properly (Or maybe, schoolboy prankster that he is, he did'nt care about the exam results as long as he became a personality cult). However in 1957 the soon to be Situationists did not accept this as the way things would remain, not if they had anything to do with it. In opposition to this process they formed 'the Situationist International': a group consisting mostly of artists, intellectuals and the like (it has to be said), which set out to develop a new way of interpreting society as a whole. (Prior to the S.I. the Lettrists, who predated Punk by almost 30 years sporting trousers painted with slogans).

On the surface the Situationists appear as extremely cynical fatalists. They began by condemning as redundant and articulately destroying anything that came before them. Everything from the Surrealists and the Beat Generation fell in their wake. Yet they had a fundamental, utopian belief that the bad days will end. Their criteria was basically, "if we explain how the nightmare works, everyone will wake up!" An inevitable optimism absent, by the very fact of their existence, from traditional political groups: who always operate on the premise that people are too thick to decide for themselves.

This was how (and why) leading Situationist, Guy Debord formulated his theory of The Spectacle. He argued, in their journal ('Internationale Situationniste') that through computers, television, rapid transport systems and other forms of advanced technology capitalism controlled the very conditions of existence. Hence the World we see is not the Real World but the World we are conditioned to see: THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (the name of Debord's book). The Spectacle's audience is the lumpen proletariat, the bourgeoisie, even the bosses now merely look at the Show: Real Life: thinking about it as spectators, not actually participating or experiencing it.

Debord saw the end result as Alienation. Separation of person from person; crowds or strangers, laughing and crying together but ultimately isolated from everybody and everything. The Spectacle makes spectators of us all, because we've been conned into substituting material things for Real experiences. However, Debord felt this feeling of alienation could eventually break the stranglehold of the Spectacular society. People were already rebelling against being kept apart by mass culture/ commodity/ consumer society. In the early 60s thousands of young americans questioned their role in middle morality America and dropped out in the anonymous tenements of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. In 1965, in the Watts suburb of Los Angeles, thousands of black kids burnt down their schools and factories.

To Debord these unconscious revolts against the Spectacle were evidence of it's vulnerability. It wasn't as invincible as it seemed. But before the Spectacle could be overcome it's safety net, Recouperation, had to be dealt with: to survive Spectacular Society has to have strict social control. This is retained, without much fuss, by it's ability to recouperate a potentially revolutionary situation. By changing chameleonlike it can resist an attack, creating new roles, cultural forms and encouraging participation in the construction of the world of your own alienation into the bargain.

For example alternative lifestyles can be turned into commodities. The Haight- Ashbury hippies were eventually packaged off into commodity culture, as, of course, the London punk rockers were a decade later. And, with a lifestyle safely recouperated, after a certain amount of time it can be dusted off and sold back to people, inducing a yearning for the past. The Spectacle had gone that whole step further. For those bored with the possession of mere things, it was now capable of packaging even the possession of experiences: package holidays, community schemes, pop culture.

Spectacular Society is made complete by the recuperation of the environment in which all this must be experienced: The Recouperators realized that people would no longer accept the damage the growth of the Spectacle: heavy industry: was doing to their physical surroundings: the world. Hence environmental recuperation or "Urbanism." This consists of replacing disordered urban-sprawl with more manageable structures; factory-towns, new-towns, shopping-malls, super-markets. Huge areas designed solely for the purpose of work and the creation of profit, with total disregard for the needs or the people forced to service it. The workers kept apart in 'new architecture, traditionally reserved to satisfy the ruling class...for the first time, directly aimed at the poor: 'Dwelling Unit, Sweet Dwelling Unit.' Rabbit hutches designed soullessly to isolate and instill formal misery.

The Situationists' answer to "Urbanism" 'was the reconstruction or the entire environment, according to the needs of the people that inhabit it. Their answer to modern society was to be nothing short of the "REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE" (the title of the companion book to 'The Society Of The Spectacle' by Raoul Vaneigem). Unlike traditional revolutionary groups, the Situationists were not concerned with the improvement of existing society, or reforming it. They were interested in destroying it completely and pulling something new and better in it's place. No half measures. No gestures. No immediate solution.

The Situationist programme began where art ended. They argued that mechanization and automation had potentially eliminated the need for all forms of traditional labour: leaving a gaping hole, now known as leisure time. Rather than fill this hole with 'Specialist Art', the Situationists wanted a new type of creativity to come out of it, which would be inseparable from everyday life. This new environment has to be brought about by the 'construction of situations'. Never an easy one to grasp that. Basically it's confronting the Spectacle with it's own irrelevance;

"To make the World a sensuous extension of man rather than have man remain an instrument of an alien world, is the goal of the Situationist Revolution. For us the reconstruction of Life and the rebuilding of the World are one and the same desire. To achieve this the tactics of subversion have to be extended from schools, factories, universities, to confront the Spectacle directly. Rapid transport systems, shopping centers, museums, as well as the various new forms of culture and the Media, must be considered as targets for scandalous activity."

Areas For Scandalous Activity; Strasbourg University, 1966.

So by appropriating a bit of Marx, a bit of anarchist practice, plenty of Dadaism (Situationist practice owes more to Groucho Marx than Karl), even some Rimbaud, and by refusing absolutely to have anything to do with traditional hierarchies and the transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, the Situationists were ready to become a social force. By the mid-60's they were looking around for opportunities to intervene in existing radical situations; in order to speed up the inevitable collapse of the Spectacular Society.

Their first major opportunity arose in 1966 at Strasbourg University; a notoriously inactive careerist student body but with a leftist student union. 5 Pro-situ students infiltrated the union and set about scandalizing the authorities. They formed an anarchist appreciation society, appropriated union funds for situationist inspired flyposters and invited the SI to write a critique of the university and society in general. The resulting pamphlet, "On The Poverty Of Student Life (Ten Days That Shook The University)" was designed to wind up the apathetic students by confronting them with their subservience to the Family and the State. And it was none too subtle about it;

"The whole of (the Student's) life is beyond his control, and for all he sees of the World he might as well be on another planet...Every student likes to feel he is a bohemian at heart; but the student bohemian clings to his false and degraded version of individual revolt. His rent-a-crowd militancy for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real impotence...he does have marginal freedoms; a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian control of the Spectacle; his flexible working hours permit adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the straightjacketed space-time of the Lecture Hall and the weekly essay. He is quite happy with this open prison organized for his benefit...The Real poverty of his Everyday Life finds it's immediate phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities...he is obliged to discover modern culture as an admiring spectator...he thinks he is avant-garde if he's seen the latest Godard or 'participated' in the latest 'happening'. He discovers modernity as fast as the market can provide it: for him every rehash of ideas is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and 'difficult' texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstore. Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he devours them with his gaze.'"

The pamphlet went on to dismiss the university as "The Society for the propagation of ignorance...high culture with the rhythm of the production line...With out exception the lecturers are cretins...bourgeois culture is dead...all the university does is make production-line specialists. But on the positive side, it pointed out that away from student life, in the Real World, working class kids were already rebelling against the boredom of everyday life;

"...the 'delinquents' of the world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options. But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are it's products - negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable. All the experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first side- effects of the new urbanism; or the disintegration of all values; or the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has lost all significance.

"The 'young thug' despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle offers him - but NOW, with no down payment. This is the essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may try for a real freedom in the use of his time, in an individual assertiveness, even in the construction of a kind of community. But the contradiction remains, and kills (on the fringe old society, where poverty reigns, the gang develops it's own hierarchy, which can only fulfill itself in a war with other gangs, isolating each group and each individual within the group). In the end the contradiction proves unbearable. Either the lure of the product world proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to do his honest day's work: to this end a whole sector of production is devoted specifically to his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of the consumer. Or else he is forced to attack the laws of the market itself either in the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move towards a conscious revolutionary critique of commodity society. For the delinquent only two futures are possible: revolutionary Consciousness, or blind obedience on the shop floor."

However existing student rebels, such as The Dutch Provos, the British 'Committee of 100' and the Berkeley students got the thumbs down: Basically for fighting the symptoms (Nuclear Arms/ the Vietnam war/ Racism/ Censorship) not the disease: And specifically for their tendency to sympathize with western society's apparent enemies; China especially whose cultural revolution pamphlet considered "a pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times." (it did begrudgingly have a good word for the Committee of 100's "Spies for Peace" scandal: where, in 1963 the anti-nuke movement invaded secret fallout shelters reserved for the British government.)

Summing up, "On the Poverty..." outlined the solution as confronting the present social system with the negative forces it produces;

"We must destroy the Spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of the commodity society...We must abolish the pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve it's power."

Using appropriated union funds, 10,000 copies of the pamphlet were printed and handed out at the official ceremony, to mark the beginning of the Strasbourg academic year. There was an immediate outcry. The local, national, and international press condemned it as incitement to violence, which of course it unashamedly was. The Rector of the University said they should be in a lunatic asylum. The students responsible were expelled and the student union closed by court order.

The presiding Judge pronounced; "The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds of the student union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some 650 pounds for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the 'International Situationniste'. These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One only has to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world, rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion and a worldwide proletarian revolution with 'Unlicensed pleasure' as it's only goal.

"In view of their basically anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. Their wide diffusion in both student circles and among the general public, by the local, national and foreign press, are a threat to the morality, the studies, the reputation and thus the very future of the students of the University of Strasbourg."

Areas For Scandalous Activity; Paris '68 And All That.

"This work is part of a subversive current of which the last has not yet been heard. It's significance should escape no one! In any case, as time will show, no one is going to escape its implications!"

-Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution Of Everyday Life"



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