Critique of the Situationist International (7)
| 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 autonomous. [13] 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 (i.e. the ideology which glorifies their development for its own sake : Tr.), 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 Rhenane. [15] 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 d'être of modernism. |
| [13] Translator'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. |
| [14] Translator'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. |
| [15] Translator's footnote : Published in 1975. Distributed by Editions de I'Oubli, Paris. |