Jean-Christophe Angaut

Introduction

Over the last 20 years, the situationists have often been reduced to a mere group of artists criticizing everyday life, detached from any social struggle. The common description of their contribution to the events of 1968 in France was symptomatic of this reduction: either the so-called cultural orientation of these events was attributed to them, or it was said that, because the role of the situationists had been over-emphasized, these events were reduced in the collective memory to their cultural aspect.[898] Nevertheless, this understanding tends to weaken with a close reading of the situationists’ texts (consisting of articles, letters, pamphlets and theoretical books).[899] From this literature, it appears that the situationists were linked with and/or opposed to most of the revolutionary groups of the 1960s.[900] For example, Debord was briefly a member of ‘Pouvoir ouvrier,’ a group belonging to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in the early 1960s, and in 1966 he had connections with members of the French Anarchist Federation, which subsequently excluded the members of what was regarded as a situationist conspiracy inside the organization. It also appears that since the beginning of the 1960s, in the two main texts of situationist theory (The Society of the Spectacle by Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Vaneigem[901]) as well as in their journal Internationale Situationniste and during the events of 1968, the situationists pointed up slogans of the workers’ councils,[902] celebrating this spontaneous revolutionary structure and its recurrence in Budapest in 1956.[903] Last but not least, they considered the events of May and June 1968 in France to be a revolutionary event, being the first general wildcat strike of workers in history, rather than a student event.[904] It is therefore interesting to investigate their relations with the history of the workers’ movement, a history which led to a split between two main trends, Marxism and anarchism, or statist communism and libertarian socialism.[905]

This chapter studies the way the situationists are linked to this legacy, how they might have provided a way of going beyond this division between Marxism and anarchism and what the limits of their perspective might be. This attempt is considered in two directions. First, the situationists presented a critique of the separation between anti-capitalist and antihierarchical struggles as an ideological split rather than an objective distinction. In their relations with other revolutionary groups, this led to harsh criticisms directed at Marxist and libertarian organizations that prospered from this division. This part of the history of the situationists is beginning to be better known, but the relation of the practice to their theories is not always systematically explained. By revisiting the concepts and themes of the Young Hegelian movement — a movement to which both Marx and Bakunin belonged — the chapter then continues by showing that this attempt to go beyond the separation between black and red brings us back to a point before that separation. In other terms, the situationist claim to go beyond the Marxist and anarchist traditions is not a negation of the history of the workers’ movement, but an attempt to renew this movement on the basis of its original theoretical sources.

The critique of the separation between black and red

It is important to keep in mind that the theoretical attempts of the situationists during the 1960s cannot be isolated from their political and social context: this seems to me the best way to maintain the critical distance missing in the work of the so-called ‘pro-situs’ (‘pro-situationists’) who were attacked by Debord in 1972.[906] First of all, Debord’s participation in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie,’ mentioned above, meant that he and other members of the group had common reference points in left communism in general, with authors such as Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg. Furthermore, some groups close to the Situationist International (SI), especially the ‘Enragés’ at Nanterre University,[907] maintained links with libertarian groups, such as ‘Noir et Rouge,’[908] and with Council Communist groups, such as ‘Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières.’[909] Moreover, in the early 1960s, the situationists were close to the philosopher, sociologist and heterodox Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, until their relationship broke down acrimoniously amid reciprocal accusations of plagiarism.[910] Situationist theories are a meeting point of at least three trends. First, a Left communist tradition which was critical of the Leninist trends in the workers’ movement (in short, those who believed that the Russian Revolution was betrayed by the Bolsheviks and not just by Stalin) and which promoted the workers’ councils as direct democratic organizations. Second, a tradition of anti-authoritarian critique of capitalism and so-called socialist societies. And finally, a trend of sociological reflexion aboutmodern urban life as alienated. Keeping this relation in mind does not minimize the originality of the situationist theories, but helps to understand them better, and particularly to understand the dual critique of Marxism and anarchism.

It may seem difficult to accept that the situationists were criticizing the bureaucratic tendencies in the history of Marxism as well as what they saw as the historic inefficacy of anarchism, because the main references they used seemed to be more Marxist than libertarian. For example, during the summer of 1968, the group protested: ‘Despite the obvious fact that the Situationist International developed a historical view deriving from Hegel and Marx, the press kept on mixing up situationists and anarchism.’[911] They also claimed filiations with what they called ‘revolutionary Marxism,’ an expression that excluded such statist interpretations of Marxism as Leninism and social democracy. Furthermore, like Council Communists, they may also appear to be Marxists with libertarian tendencies rather than anarchists integrating Marxist scientific contributions. Moreover, even when they are dealing with social and historical experiments they agree with, where anarchists have played the main role, they refuse to reduce these experiments to the expression of anarchism as a particular trend within the workers’ movement. This is made quite clear with their discussion of the 1936 Spanish revolution. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord recognized that on the one hand, ‘in 1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a revolution that was the most advanced expression of proletarian power ever realized’; but he argued that on the other hand, the uprising was not an anarchist initiative, it was a defensive reaction against a military coup, and they were unable effectively to defend the revolution against the bourgeois, the Stalinists and Fascism. Some of them even became government ministers, he noted.[912]

In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem seems to be closer than Debord to libertarian ideals, for example when he explains that ‘from now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy.’[913] However, the words ‘anarchism’ or ‘anarchy’ cannot be found anywhere in the book. Vaneigem clearly speaks about anarchists (quoting, for example, Makhno and Durruti) but never about anarchism; as if individuals were worth more than their particular ideology and more than the political trend they belonged to.

Nevertheless, despite this seeming proximity to Marxism and Marxist tropes, there is very real and open critique of Marxism in these same situationist texts, a critique which not only attacks the progressive degeneration of Marxism, but also points out the germs of that degeneration in Marx’s personality and work. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, where Marx is quoted less and in a more critical way than in Debord’s texts, Vaneigem speaks, for example, about ‘Marx’s authoritarian attitudes in the First International.’[914] However, this criticism is also developed further in The Society of the Spectacle, the book which is nevertheless known as the closest to revolutionary Marxism. In Chapter IV of the book, Debord at first gives the impression, like other French left-wing Marxists of the time,[915] that his criticisms are of the incorrect use of Marx by those who claimed filiation with him. But Debord goes on to explain that in Marx’s thought, there is a ‘scientific-determinist aspect’ which ‘made it vulnerable to ideologisation.’[916] That drift towards economism (for, as Marx put it, economics is ‘the historical science par excellence’) always postpones the moment of revolutionary practice and the advent of the historical subject by claiming that the correct objective conditions are not present. For Debord, Marxism as it evolved emphasized a tendency which was already there in embryo in Marx, consisting principally in separating the theory (especially the economics) from the revolutionary practice, just as Marx isolated himself ‘by cloistered scholarly work in the British Museum.’[917] According to Debord, that lack in Marxist theory also has its roots in the fact that this theory was the faithful expression of the revolutionary movement at that time, and also of the insufficiencies of this movement. This movement missed something that could not come from the theory, but had to emerge from the concrete form of organization that arose spontaneously from the proletarian struggles: the workers’ councils, the soviets.

When Marx elaborated his theory, the working-class organization he promoted could be nothing other than that which was in accord with his separate theoretical work, and that form has two failures. First, it mimics the bourgeois revolutions, in the sense that the main task of the proletariat would be to take power as it exists in bourgeois society: Debord explains that ‘the theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.’[918] The self-criticism contained in Marx’s work on the Paris Commune, which corrects some formulations of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), seems here to be clearly recognizable. According to the Communist Manifesto, the proletariat was supposed to seize the State machine as it was in order to make it work for the benefit of the proletariat. In Chapter II, we read: ‘The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.’[919] Later, in The Civil War in France, which was written just after the end of the Paris Commune (1871), Marx argues that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,’ but has to destroy it immediately, replacing it with the Commune, which is ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.’[920] However, Debord does not repeat the praise of the Commune as ‘the political form at last discovered,’ and even when he praises the workers’ councils, he does not speak about them as ‘political forms.’ To understand this point, it is therefore important to consider his critique of political parties, which takes us to the second failure in Marxism.

This second failure is the lack of a conception of the organization which would have been truly revolutionary, that is, without any echo of statist or bourgeois forms. In summary, Marxism (and all Marxist groups) had failed in their thinking about what the revolutionary organization should be. The following passage deserves quoting at length:

The proletarian class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing revolutionary struggles and in its reorganization of society at the moment of revolution […]. But this crucial question of organization was virtually ignored by revolutionary theory during the period when the workers’ movement was first taking shape — the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary character it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). Instead, the organizational question became the weakest aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization of the workers’ movement that were developed on the basis of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit the maintenance of a unitary theory by breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented disciplines. This ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able to recognize the practical verifications of the unitary historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles; instead, it contributed to repressing every manifestation and memory of them.[921]

With this quotation, which describes the process of degeneration of Marxism, we understand the relative legitimacy of the anarchist critique for the situationists. At its foundation (deeply rooted in an original relation with the Hegelian current in both Marx and in Bakunin, as we shall see), revolutionary theory was ahead of the time of the revolutionary practice it infers — and that is part of the original theory of the avant-garde the situationists developed at that time. Initially, that theory was unitary, but because of the lateness of the revolutionary practice, a revolutionary conception of the organization as the junction of practice and theory was lacking. Revolutionary theory thus adopted bourgeois and statist patterns of organization. Obviously, Debord has the party system in mind, in which the different powers are separated as if the parties were small states and where parties compete for power like states, and his critique has to be seen in relation to that developed by socialist and trade union thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in Germany.[922] But Debord also suggests something more difficult to understand about the link between the internal organization of the political parties and the separations that occurred inside what he called revolutionary theory. Indeed, following Debord, it seems that the separation of different powers (the classical division into a legislature, an executive and a judiciary), that was available inside political parties, in turn influenced the theory, separating the theory from the practice, and the theory itself in different fields, so that the unitary character of the theory could not be maintained, giving way to specialization and bureaucratism. And finally, when in historical practice there arises a form of organization which is in accord with the originally unitary theory, the latter, which is alienated in the division of labor involved in activism, crystallized in bureaucratic organizations and sometimes submitted to a state, is unable to recognize this right form and prevents its manifestation.

The emergence of the workers’ councils during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 is a key contextual fact to explain Debord’s praise of the workers’ councils and the reasons why he does not repeat Marx’s praise of the Commune. As a merely political form, the Commune would imply a separation of politics as a particular activity. As a goal to attain, it would imply a separation between the form of organization that is desired and the form of organization by which the goal is supposed to be attained. In short, the Commune could maintain a separation between the revolutionary subject and their representation.[923] On the other hand, the workers’ councils compensate for the two failures of the organization promoted by Marxism. Workers’ councils are indeed organizations of struggle and prefigurations of the coming social organization. In a workers’ council based on direct democracy, there is neither hierarchy nor separate function, and that is why it is a form of organization radically different from the State. This explains why, in an article written for the last issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste, Erné Riesel wrote that ‘the victory of the councils has its place not at the end, but at the very beginning of the revolution.’[924] The councils are not an aim which could be contemplated as the dreamed for political form for the day following the revolution: they are a way of organizing which is effective in the very process of the revolution and which prevents the harmful action of bureaucratic organizations (parties and trade unions). The Commune was thus not an adequate revolutionary instrument.

In May and June 1968 the situationists formed a Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (Conseil pour le maintien des occupations, or CMDO) with the Enragés, and in several situationist texts, one can detect the ambition of making the SI into an organization that would prefigure such a coming organization. It is particularly clear in a text which is both the testament and the obituary of the SI, namely the Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time written by Debord in 1972 and published the same year in The Veritable Scission in the International.[925] The Theses are particularly remarkable in their definition of revolutionary organizations:

The revolutionary organization of the proletarian age is defined by different moments of the struggle, where it must succeed each time, and in each of these moments, it must succeed in never becoming a separate power. […] Whenever it is able to act, the revolutionary organization unites practice and theory, which constantly proceed together, but it never believes that it can accomplish this through a mere voluntarist proclamation of the necessity of their total fusion. When the revolution is still distant, the major task of the revolutionary organization is above all the practice of theory. When the revolution begins, its major task increasingly becomes the theory of practice, but then the revolutionary organization has taken on an entirely different character. In the former circumstances, very few individuals are avant-garde, and they must prove it by the coherence of their general project, and by the practice that enables them to know and communicate this project; in the latter situation, the mass of workers are of their time, and must remain so as its only possessors by mastering the totality of their theoretical and practical weapons, notably by refusing all delegation of power to a separate avant-garde. In the former circumstances, a dozen effective people can be enough to begin the self-explanation of an age that contains in itself a revolution that it still does not yet know about, and that seems to it everywhere to be absent and impossible; in the latter, the vast majority of the proletarian class must hold and exercise all power by organizing itself into permanent deliberative and executive assemblies, which allow nothing to remain in the form of the old world and the forms that defend it.[926]

First, it appears from the above that the main theme of the revolutionary organization is negative: something has to be avoided, namely the separation of the organization as an autonomous power. That signals the opposition of the situationists to any Leninist or social democratic conception of the organization. Nevertheless, revolutionary organization cannot be defined once and for all and admits of two main stages, which form a chiasmus, constituted by the ‘practice of theory’ and the ‘theory of practice.’ ‘Practice of theory’ defines the ‘avant-garde’ stage of revolutionary organization, and means not only that the practice of the avant-garde consists only in the theoretical explanation of the revolution, which is contained as a virtuality in a certain society at a certain time, but also that its practice is determined by the theory it builds. Therefore, the main task of the avant-garde is to experiment with a new kind of life, in harmony and coherence with the revolutionary project. The avant-garde is no ruling elite, but a prefiguration of future organization. ‘Theory of practice,’ which defines the second stage of revolutionary organization, signifies that theory is no longer in advance of practice and from then on only has to be in harmony with revolutionary practice — in other terms, theory becomes somehow minor, and the main task is to practically prevent the emergence of a separate power. The most remarkable characteristic of this definition of revolutionary organizations is the conception of the avant-garde it promotes. Against the Leninist conception of organization, developed for instance in What Is To Be done? (1902) and criticized by Rosa Luxemburg, the situationists built an original theory of the avant-garde which results from the importing of an artistic conception of avant-garde into the field of politics. Therefore, in so far as it is not a general staff, the avant-garde does not lead, but conducts experiments, expresses what is still unsaid and prefigures the coming social organization.

One can therefore understand the critical description of the split between anarchism and Marxism around this very question of the organization’s form that can be found in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord explicitly turns back to the conflict between Marx and Bakunin inside the International Workingmen’s Association and describes it as the opposition between two ideologies, ‘each containing a partially true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority’.[927] Those two criticisms are partially true because they apply on two different fields: the power inside a revolutionary society and the organization of the revolutionary movement. Bakunin and his friends are right when they see the threat of a bureaucratic dictatorship behind the idea of a temporary proletarian state, but Marx and his friends are also right when they denounce Bakunin’s conspiracy plans. If we stand at this point, this double criticism could be qualified as libertarian as it denounces the authoritarian tendencies in both theories. But this libertarian criticism is paired with a historical criticism which owes a lot to Marx but targets the two organizations which followed these two main orientations, the Black and the Red: the Spanish FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, Iberian Anarchist Federación) and the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of Germany).

Paragraph 92–94 of The Society of the Spectacle are devoted to anarchism but must be read in the context of the tense relations between the SI and libertarian organizations, since young members of the French Anarchist Federation had declared their great interest in the situationist theses around 1966 and 1967.[928] The French Anarchist Federation was obsessed at that time with the possible infiltration of Marxist elements into its ranks, since it had already split a few years earlier with the departure of the libertarian communists. The young libertarians were forced to quit the Federation and The Society of the Spectacle perhaps echoes this episode, especially in §92 when Debord explains why the anarchist critique remains only partial. In particular, he claimed, the criticism of the political struggle by the anarchists remained abstract as they promoted a purely economic struggle based on the pattern of the instantaneous general strike — which means that Debord is thinking here of anarcho-syndicalism. According to Debord, anarchists only see struggle as the realization of an ideal, opposed to reality, without questioning the practical means of realization of this ideal, and in each struggle, they constantly repeat the same things, which leads to their presenting themselves as guardians of the temple and self-proclaimed specialists of freedom (§93).

The meaning of this criticism is clear: the theoretical basis of the libertarian organizations, theoretical anarchism, is an outdated stage in the history of revolutionary theory, the stage of the ideological conflict with authoritarian socialism, which is also the stage of the separation between black and red and between the proletariat and its representation. Therefore libertarian organizations such as the French and (later) the Italian Anarchist Federations and the rebuilt Spanish CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Confederation of Labor) are, for Debord,[929] remnants of the past, small churches having no relation with the contemporary revolutionary movement, seeking to perpetuate themselves by constantly repeating the same ideological antitheses (which is why those who proclaimed their affinity with situationist theses were expelled). On the contrary, according to the situationists, workers’ councils, as they arose spontaneously (that is to say: independently of any preconceived theory) in revolutionary Russia and spread in Germany and Spain, as a unitary practice, are supposed to be in accord with the unity of revolutionary theory. And this theoretical unity is to be found before the separation between black and red, before the split which gave birth to Marxism and anarchism as two partial truths, which means in revolutionary theory as expressed in the 1840s.

Before black and red: The situationists and the Young Hegelians

In this section, I provide a critical reconstruction of the situationist attempt to theorize the antecedent theory to the separation between Marxism and anarchism and from that examine the parallels between their theoretical practices and those of the Young Hegelian movement of the 1840s. This means showing the proximity between the two movements in their relation to Hegel, questioning the knowledge the situationists had about the Young Hegelians and seeing which Young Hegelian themes are reactivated by situationist theories.

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According to §78 of The Society of the Spectacle, the unity of the revolutionary theory is to be found in an original critical relation with Hegelian thought among the Young Hegelians in the 1840s: ‘All the theoretical currents of the revolutionary working-class movement — Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx — grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.’[930] The situationists reactivate this critical confrontation which characterizes Young or Left Hegelianism, and they do it, first, by using some Hegelian texts which also found favor with the Young Hegelians. Each of the two main situationist books written by Debord contains a quotation from the Phenomenology of the Spirit, which was, among Hegel’s works, the one the Young Hegelian movement, from its very beginnings, admired the most.[931]

The final chapter of The Society of the Spectacle, which describes what a society beyond the society of the spectacle could be, is introduced with this sentence: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.’[932] In accordance with the situationist concept of ‘détournement’ (misappropriation or twisting), the Hegelian theory of acknowledgment, once moved onto the appropriate field (from an idealistic description of the development of self-consciousness to a prospective description of a desired society), gains its real meaning: such expressions as ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘acknowledgment’ cannot find their meaning inside the society of the spectacle, which is rather characterized by alienation and the lack of any self-consciousness.

La véritable scission dans l’Internationale[933] (The Veritable Scission in the International) begins with another Hegelian quotation:

One party proves itself to be victorious by the fact that it breaks up into two parties; for in that fact it shows it possesses within it the principle it combats, and consequently shows it has abolished the one-sidedness with which it formerly made its appearance. The interest which was divided between it and the other, now falls entirely within it, and forgets the other, because that interest finds lying in it alone the opposition on which its attention is directed. At the same time, however, the opposition has been lifted into the higher victorious element, where it manifests itself in a clarified form. So that the schism that arises in one party, and seems a misfortune, demonstrates rather its good fortune.[934]

Initially, Hegel was describing the victory of the Enlightenment in its struggle against superstition, and the best proof of this victory was that superstition had disappeared and that, instead of a struggle between Enlightenment and superstition, there was from then on a struggle inside the Enlightenment between two opposite principles, pure thought and pure matter. In 1972, Debord uses this quotation in order to describe the split inside the SI. The SI has accomplished its historical task as avant-garde, and the best proof of this accomplishment is the split, not between Marxists and Bakuninists, but between two trends concerning the very question of the spectacle: the SI begins to be contemplated by spectators who describe themselves as ‘pro-situs’ (‘pro-situationist’), and that is why it has to disappear.[935] This manner of using Hegel is one of the ways in which situationists can be compared with Young Hegelians.[936]

It is difficult to determine precisely what knowledge the situationists had of the Young Hegelian movement, beyond the young Marx’s writings. Nevertheless, we know that in 1973 Debord published a translation (by Michel Jacob) of one of the first texts of that movement, August Cieskowski’s Prolegomena to a Historiosophy[937] (1838), and ten years later even wrote a preface for a possible republication of the book.[938] In this text, he considers the Polish philosopher as ‘the dark point around which all historical thought has turned for the last century and a half.’ Moreover, in Debord and in Vaneigem, we can find hidden quotations of Young Hegelian texts — in particular of Die Reaktion in Deutschland (The Reaction in Germany, 1842), Michael Bakunin’s seminal article, which has not yet been entirely translated into French.[939]

What the situationists take from Young Hegelianism is the fact that Marxist communism and individualistic and collectivist variants of anarchism both have their roots in an original confrontation with Hegelian thought. I will briefly study three Young Hegelian themes, reactivated, updated and sometimes ‘twisted’ by the situationists: the connections between theory and practice, the primacy of the negative moment in the dialectical process, and finally the theme of alienation. I do not claim, in doing so, to exhaust the philosophical content of situationist writings, or the meaning of their relation with Marx or Hegelian thought. I would just like to show how the situationist conception of the unity of revolutionary theory relates to the history of philosophy and therefore support the hypothesis of a specific situationist attempt to renew revolutionary thought beyond the separation between black and red from the common source of both currents.

Now, their conception of theory (and the postulation of its unity with a historical practice) is already the reactivation of a Young Hegelian theme. For example, when Debord characterizes Hegel as ‘the philosophical culmination of philosophy,’[940] he reactivates a theme that can be found in three main figures of Young Hegelianism. First in Cieskowski for whom a thought of history, a philosophy of practice (the ‘historiosophy’), has to go beyond the split between being and thought which characterizes the old philosophy: Hegel’s philosophy of history is a philosophy of the past, while historiosophy is a philosophy of the future which depends on a practice.[941] A similar conception can be found in The Reaction in Germany, Bakunin’s first revolutionary writing: Hegel is claimed to have ‘already gone above theory, but inside the theory itself’ and to have ‘postulated a new, practical world’[942] so that in Hegel, the theory itself, separated from the practice under the name of philosophy, finds its own limit. And last but not least, Marx’s Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) explains that it is time to ‘realize philosophy’: the first task of philosophy was to criticize religion, ‘the prerequisite of all criticism,’[943] thus a critique of social alienation, leading to the ultimate ‘transcendence of the proletariat,’ the ‘dissolution of society as a particular estate.’[944] In the situationist theories, the aim of this postulated unity between theory and practice is to object to theoretical specialization, which they saw as the germ of degeneration in Marxism, leading ultimately to authoritarian forms. This degeneration ends up in a relation of subordination between theory and practice, where, as I discussed above, the theory becomes unable to recognize the revolutionary form of organization and ignores the rationality inherent in practice.[945]

Second, in Debord and in Vaneigem, the critical confrontation with Hegelian thought is re-performed by asserting the predominance of the negative in the dialectical process. Once again, the situationists take this theme from the Young Hegelians. Bakunin’s article explains that the category of opposition, which is for him the center of Hegelian philosophy, is ‘a preponderance of the Negative’ over the Positive[946]: the negative, identified as the party of the revolution, is what the positive, identified as the reaction, tries to reject from itself, so that the positive is only the negation of the negative, the negation of the destructive movement. The assertion of the preponderance of the negative is a central theme in Young Hegelianism, also found in Bruno Bauer.[947] For Bakunin however, it is important to recognize the positivity of the negative, that is to say the new world which is supposed to arise in the very process by which the old world perishes. In §114 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord similarly identifies the revolutionary proletariat as the negative party[948] and at the same time, he asserts the primacy of the negative in the Hegelian dialectical process — and, as it is written in §206, the style of the dialectical theory has to express this primacy.[949] Similarly, in The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem explains that the negative has to become positive.[950] This theme was brilliantly illustrated in Bakunin’s article with the famous sentence: ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.’[951] This sentence is quoted (without any source reference) in the chapter which relates the situationists’ contribution to the events of May and June 1968 in France,[952] as it was in Vaneigem’s book.[953] This reading of the Hegelian dialectical process has a precise meaning in situationism: revolutionary theory, unitary theory, expresses the global rejection of the actual world, and a new world can be born only from the global negation of this world.

Like other Marxists of the 1960s (notably Herbert Marcuse), the situationists came to use the concept of alienation extensively. They owe this use to a particular reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as a seminal work which contains Marx’s philosophy, which later developed throughout the rest of his writings. This reading is a reconstruction of Marxism based on a philosophy of alienation, in which the theme of commodity fetishism is central (in Debord particularly[954]). The theme of alienation is especially used in Vaneigem’s book, without any mention of its Marxian or Hegelian origin. Actually, the concept of alienation is transformed by the situationists in two ways. In Marx, the concept of alienation, which translates two German words: Entäußerung – giving something up by alienating it — and Entfremdung – when the alienated object has become stranger, is the result of a transfer from the field of the critique of religion to the field of social and political critique.[955] Marx had read this transfer in Moses Hess’s On the Essence of Money. In the same way that in Christianity (according to Feuerbach) human essence is alienated, so that humanity is unable to recognize what it is oppressed by, the human being in capitalist societies alienates its vital activity in money, which is another form of oppression.[956] In the situationist appropriation of this theme, the first transformation is a historicisation: in The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem explains that ‘history is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation,’[957] which would suggest that religious alienation is natural. The second transformation is a widening. In Marx’s Manuscripts, alienation applies to the process of production: the worker becomes the machine’s slave and is dispossessed of the fruit of his labors. Situationists expand this theme to the alienation of the consumer. Alienation is commodity alienation: it happens in commodity production (workers lose control of their labor and of the fruits of their labors) and also in commodity consumption, particularly in the spectacle as the ultimate commodity, according to Debord.[958] Spectacle is alienation in so far as ‘the passive contemplation of images, which have moreover been chosen by someone else, substitutes for what is experienced and for the determination of the events by the individual itself’[959] and, eventually dominates the individual.

Conclusion: The present relevance of a critique

Situationist critique is often reduced to its negative dimension and its attempt to go beyond outdated oppositions, such as black and red. This reduction gave the impression that situationist theories were radically new and radically separated from the history of the workers’ movement. Yet, such a position bears little relation with situationist theories. While the pro-situs tended to consider that situationist theses as a spontaneous historical form, without antecedent, the aim of this chapter has been to link situationism back to its Hegelian roots, roots shared by both anarchists and Marxists. In other words, in denouncing the ‘pro-situs’[960] in 1972 Debord objected to creating a new object of contemplation, and the last object of spectacular domination out of the SI. Preventing the dominated from remembering the history of their revolts is one of the most powerful effects of the society of the spectacle. For that very reason, it is important to recall that the situationists attempted to go beyond the opposition between black and red for the sake of a revolutionary theory whose unity had to be restored, integrating the social and historical experiment of the workers’ councils and beyond the alienation of theory in bureaucratic economism. So this would be the situationist answer to Bismarck’s anxiety about a possible reunification of black and red after the split of 1872: black is dead, red is dead, but the unification of both trends is still the manifestation of workers’ democracy and, if we follow Bakunin’s first words as a revolutionary, has to be kept ‘at the top of the agenda of history.’[961]

What did the situationist attempt to repeat and extend the seminal moves of revolutionary thought from the 1840s bring to revolutionary movements of the 1960s? Basically, the reactivation of Young Hegelian themes provided a renewed theory of alienation which made possible the critique of both capitalist society and false oppositions to it. Capitalist society was from then on criticized not only as a society in which workers are exploited, but also as a society in which consumers are passive. The category of alienation enables us to criticize both aspects: workers are alienated in so far as they have no control over production, and consumers are alienated in so far as they are in a passive relation to the commodity. But the theme of alienation is also a weapon against representative conceptions of democracy or ‘vanguardist’ conceptions of revolution,[962] in which people are separated from their representation and are unable to act effectively. By showing that opposition to the capitalist system can also take alienated forms, the situationists pointed out that the realization of a society without alienation begins in the very process of opposition to it.

Yet we cannot bury our head in the sand about certain limits of the situationist attempt to go beyond black and red. The first one concerns the question of the revolutionary organization. Their theoretical criticism of Marxism and anarchism on this very question is as acute as one could wish. Nevertheless, their practical attempt to prefigure another kind of organization deserves in turn to be criticized in many respects. As Challand’s chapter shows in this volume, like the group SouB, the SI had its own authoritarianisms. Debord explained the many expulsions that occurred in the history of the SI by reference to the need to keep the group small and thereby also forcing those excluded to be free on their own.[963] Nevertheless, there is also evidence that some of the exclusions can be explained by personal resentments.[964] And what kind of prefiguration can be implied by the almost exclusively male composition of the group, or the objective domination of the French section?

Moreover situationist concepts of unity and totality have to be questioned. There are very solid reasons to think that capitalist society has to be entirely rejected, and in that respect a unitary theory can be very useful, but a question remains: is there only one alternative to this society? Black and red today mean the multiplicity of real social alternatives, avoiding hierarchy and the rule of the commodity. In addition, we have to recognize which elements of our societies remain outside that rule, such as public services, which could be self-managed by the workers and users. These aspects of our society are a kind of collective inheritance which escaped partially from the rule of the commodity but always risks being caught up in it.