Critique of the Situationist International - Jean Barrot - Translator's Introduction to Critique of the S.I.

Critique of the Situationist International

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

This text was written as a chapter of a much longer work, as yet unpublished, which is essentially a critical history of revolutionary theory and ideology, beginning with the work of Marx.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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