Critique of the Situationist International - Jean Barrot

Critique of the Situationist International (9)

An Exercise in Style

Otherwise serious, Sanguinetti's book Veridique Rapport [17] is still a mark of his failure (echec). We will not judge the book by its public, which appreciates it as a good joke played on the bourgeoisie. These readers are content to repeat that the capitalists are cretins, even that they are contemptible compared to "real" ruling classes of the past; if we wanted to, they say, we could be far bigger and better bourgeois. Elitism and scorn for capitalism are derisory enough as reactions, but reassuring when revolution does not appear any longer to be an absolute certainty. But complacency in the denunciation of bourgeois decadence is far from being subversive. It is shared by those (like Sorel) who scorn the bourgeoisie while wanting to save capitalism. The cultivation of this attitude is thus absurd in anyone who has the slightest revolutionary pretensions. Let us admit in any case that Sanguinetti scored a good shot.

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

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

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

"When the workers are able to assemble freely and without mediations to discuss their real problems, the state begins to dissolve." (The Real Split, p.33).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veridique rapport contains two ideas : (i) the governmental participation of the C.P. is indispensable to Italian capitalism; (ii) the revolution is the workers' councils. The second idea is false, the first one true; capitalists like Agnelli have also expressed it. In a word, Sanguinetti manages to grasp the totality as a bourgeois and nothing more. He wanted to pass himself off as an enlightened bourgeois : he has succeeded all too well. He has beaten himself at his own game.

[17] Translator's footnote : Veridique rapport sur les derniers chances de sauver le capitalisme en Italie.
[John Gray Note : Recently translated by Len Bracken and published by Flatland Books]

[18] Translator's footnote : i.e. The movement of occupation of workplaces and campuses during May '68.

[19] Translator's footnote : The translator disagrees with this estimation; c.f. the account of the TAP strike in Portugal : Anti-Fascism or Anti-Capitalism, Root and Branch, 1976.