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Our Goals and Methods
in the Strasbourg Scandal
The various expressions of shock and outrage in response to the situationist pamphlet On
the Poverty of Student Life, which was published at the expense of the Strasbourg
chapter of the French National Student Union [UNEF], although having the salutary effect
of causing the theses in the pamphlet itself to be rather widely read, have inevitably
given rise to numerous misconceptions in the reportage and commentary on the SI’s
role in the affair. In response to all kinds of illusions fostered by the press, by
university officials and even by a certain number of unthinking students, we are now going
to specify exactly what the conditions of our intervention were and explain the goals we
were pursuing with the methods that we considered consistent with them.
Even more erroneous than the exaggerations of the press or of certain opposing lawyers
concerning the amount of money the SI supposedly took the opportunity of pillaging from
the treasury of the pitiful student union is the absurd notion, often expressed in the
newspaper accounts, according to which the SI sunk so low as to campaign among the
Strasbourg students in order to persuade them of the validity of our perspectives and to
get a student government elected on such a program. We neither did this nor attempted the
slightest infiltration of the UNEF by secretly slipping SI partisans into it. Anyone who
has ever bothered to read us is aware that we have no interest in such goals and do not
use such methods. What actually happened is that a few Strasbourg students came to us in
the summer of 1966 and informed us that six of their friends — and not they
themselves — had just been elected as officers of the Bureau of the local Student
Association (AFGES), although they had no program whatsoever and were widely known in the
UNEF as extremists who were in complete disagreement with all the factions of that
decomposing body, and who were even determined to destroy it. The fact that they were
elected (quite legally) was a glaring demonstration of the total apathy of the mass of
students and of the total impotence of the Association’s remaining bureaucrats. These
latter no doubt figured that the “extremist” Bureau would be incapable of
finding any adequate way to implement its negative intentions. Conversely, this was the
fear of the students who had sought us out; and it was mainly for this reason that they
themselves had declined to take part in this “Bureau”: for only a coup of some
scope, and not some merely humorous exploitation of their position, could save its members
from the air of compromise that such a pitiful role immediately entails. To add to the
complexity of the problem, while the students we were meeting with were familiar with the
SI’s positions and declared themselves in general agreement with them, those who were
in the Bureau were for the most part ignorant of them, and counted mainly on those we were
seeing to figure out what action would best correspond to their subversive intentions.
At this stage we limited ourselves to suggesting that all of them write and publish a
general critique of the student movement and of the society as a whole, such a project
having at least the advantage of forcing them to clarify in common what was still unclear
to them. In addition, we stressed that their legal access to money and credit was the most
useful aspect of the ridiculous authority that had so imprudently been allowed to them,
and that a nonconformist use of these resources would have the advantage of shocking many
people and thus drawing attention to the nonconformist aspects of the content of their
text. These comrades agreed with our recommendations. In the development of this project
they remained in contact with the SI, particularly through the SI’s delegate,
Mustapha Khayati.
The discussion and the first drafts undertaken collectively by those we had met with
and the members of the AFGES Bureau — all of whom had resolved to see the matter
through — brought about an important modification of the plan. Everyone was in
agreement about the basic critique to be made and the main points that Khayati had
suggested, but they found they were incapable of effecting a satisfactory formulation,
especially in the short time remaining before the beginning of the term. This inability
should not be seen as the result of any serious lack of talent or experience, but was
simply the consequence of the extreme diversity of the group, both within and
outside the Bureau. Having originally come together on a very vague basis, they were
poorly prepared to collectively articulate a theory they had not really appropriated
together. In addition, personal antagonisms and mistrust arose among them as the project
progressed. The only thing that still held them together was the shared concern that the
coup attain the most far-reaching and incisive effect. As a result, Khayati ended up
drafting the greater part of the text, which was periodically discussed and approved among
the group of students at Strasbourg and by the situationists in Paris — the only
(relatively few) significant additions being made by the latter.
Various preliminary actions announced the appearance of the pamphlet. On October 26 the
cybernetician Moles (see Internationale Situationniste #9, page 44), having
finally attained a professorial chair in social psychology in order to devote himself to
the programming of young functionaries, was driven from it during the opening minutes of
his inaugural lecture by tomatoes hurled at him by a dozen students. (Moles was
subsequently given the same treatment in March at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris, where this certified robot was to lecture on urbanistic methods for controlling the
masses — this latter refutation being carried out by two or three dozen young
anarchists belonging to groups that want to bring revolutionary criticism to bear on all
modern issues.) Shortly after this inaugural class — which was at least as
unprecedented in the annals of the university as Moles himself — the AFGES began
publicizing the pamphlet by pasting up André Bertrand’s comic strip “The Return
of the Durruti Column,” a document that had the merit of stating in no uncertain
terms what his comrades were planning on doing with their positions: “The general
crisis of the old union apparatuses and leftist bureaucracies was felt everywhere,
especially among the students, where activism had for a long time had no other outlet than
the most sordid devotion to stale ideologies and the most unrealistic ambitions. The last
squad of professionals who elected our heroes didn’t even have the excuse that they
had been misled. They placed their hopes for a new lease on life in a group that
didn’t hide its intentions of scuttling this archaic militantism once and for
all.”
The pamphlet was distributed point-blank to the notables at the official opening
ceremony of the university. Simultaneously, the AFGES Bureau announced that its only
“student” program was the immediate dissolution of that Association, and
convoked a special general assembly to vote on that question. This prospect immediately
horrified many people. “This may be the first concrete manifestation of a revolt
aiming quite openly at the destruction of society,” wrote a local newspaper (Dernières
Nouvelles, 4 December 1966). L’Aurore (November 26) referred to
“the Situationist International, an organization with a handful of members in the
chief capitals of Europe — anarchists playing at revolution, who talk of
‘seizing power,’ not in order to keep it, but in order to sow disorder and
destroy even their own authority.” And even in Turin the Gazetta del Popolo
of the same date expressed excessive concern: “It must be considered, however,
whether repressive measures . . . may risk provoking disturbances.
. . . In Paris and other university cities in France the Situationist
International, galvanized by the triumph of its adherents in Strasbourg, is preparing a
major offensive to take control of the student organizations.” At this point we had
to take into consideration a new decisive factor: the situationists had to defend
themselves from being coopted as a mere “news item” or intellectual
fad. The pamphlet had ended up being transformed into an SI text: we had not felt that we
could refuse to help these comrades in their desire to strike a blow against the system,
and it was unfortunately not possible for this help to have been less than it was.
This involvement of the SI gave us, for the duration of the project, a position as de
facto leaders which we in no case wanted to prolong beyond this limited joint action:
as anyone can well imagine, the pitiful student milieu is of no interest to us.
Here as in other situations, we had simply tried to act in such a way as to make the new
social critique that is presently taking shape reappear by means of the practice without
concessions that is its exclusive basis. The unorganized character of the group of
Strasbourg students had prevented the carrying out of an orderly dialogue, which alone
could have ensured a minimal equality in decisionmaking, and had thus made necessary our
direct intervention. The debate that normally characterizes a joint action undertaken by
independent groups had scarcely any reality in this agglomeration of individuals, who
showed more and more that they were united in their approval of the SI and separated in
every other regard.
It goes without saying that such a deficiency in no way constituted for us a
recommendation for this group of students as a whole, who seemed more or less
interested in joining the SI as a sort of easy way of avoiding having to express
themselves autonomously. Their lack of homogeneity was also revealed, to a degree we had
not been able to foresee, on an unexpected issue: at the last minute several of them got
cold feet at the idea of aggressively distributing the pamphlet at the university’s
opening ceremony. Khayati had to explain to these people that one must not try to make
scandals half way; that it is absurd to commit yourself to such a coup and then hope to
reduce the risk by toning down its repercussions; that on the contrary, the success of a
scandal is the only relative safeguard for those who have deliberately triggered it. Even
more unacceptable than this last-minute hesitation on such a elementary tactical point was
the possibility that some of these individuals, who had so little confidence even in each
other, might at some point come to make statements in our name. Khayati was thus charged
by the SI to have the AFGES Bureau declare that none of them was a situationist. This they
did in their communiqué of November 29: “None of the members of our Bureau belongs
to the Situationist International, a movement which for some time has published a journal
of the same name, but we declare ourselves in complete solidarity with its analyses and
perspectives.” On the basis of this declared autonomy, the SI then addressed
a letter to André Schneider, president of the AFGES, and Vayr-Piova, vice-president, to
affirm its total solidarity with what they had done. The SI’s solidarity with them
has been maintained ever since, both by our refusal to dialogue with those who tried to
approach us while manifesting a certain envious hostility toward the Bureau members (some
even having the stupidity to denounce their action to the SI as being
“spectacular”!) and by our financial assistance and public support during the
subsequent repression (see the declaration signed by 79 Strasbourg students at the
beginning of April in solidarity with Vayr-Piova, who had been expelled from the
university; a penalty that was rescinded a few months later). Schneider and Vayr-Piova
stood firm in the face of penalties and threats; this firmness, however, was not
maintained to the same degree in their attitude toward the SI.
The judicial repression immediately initiated in Strasbourg — and which has been
followed by a series of proceedings in the same vein that are still going on —
concentrated on the supposed illegality of the AFGES Bureau, which was, upon the
publication of the situationist pamphlet, suddenly considered to be a mere “de facto
Bureau” that was usurping the union representation of the students. This repression
was all the more necessary since the holy alliance of bourgeois, Stalinists and priests
against the AFGES had even less support among the city’s 18,000 students than did the
Bureau. It began with the court order of December 13, which sequestered the
Association’s offices and administration and prohibited the general assembly that the
Bureau had convoked for the 16th for the purpose of voting on the dissolution of the
AFGES. This ruling (resulting from the mistaken belief that a majority of the students
were likely to support the Bureau’s position if they had the opportunity to vote on
it), by freezing the development of events, meant that our comrades — whose only goal
was to destroy their own position of leadership without delay — were obliged to
continue their resistance until the end of January. The Bureau’s best practice until
then had been their treatment of the mob of reporters who were flocking to get interviews:
they refused most of them and insultingly boycotted those who represented the worst
institutions (French Television, Planète), thereby pressuring one segment of the
press into giving a more exact account of the scandal and into reproducing the AFGES
communiqués less inaccurately. Since the fight was now taking place on the terrain of
administrative measures and since the legal AFGES Bureau was still in control of the local
section of the National Student Mutual, the Bureau struck back by deciding on January 11,
and by implementing this decision the next day, to close the “University
Psychological Aid Center” (BAPU), which depended financially on the Mutual,
“considering that the BAPUs are the manifestation in the student milieu of repressive
psychiatry’s parapolice control, whose obvious function is to maintain
. . . the passivity of all exploited sectors, . . . considering that
the existence of a BAPU in Strasbourg is a disgrace and a threat to all the students of
this university who are determined to think freely.” At the national level, the UNEF
was forced by the revolt of its Strasbourg chapter — which had previously been held
up as a model — to recognize its own general bankruptcy. Although it obviously did
not go so far as to defend the old illusions of unionist liberty that were so blatantly
denied its opponents by the authorities, the UNEF nevertheless could not accept the
judicial expulsion of the Strasbourg Bureau. A Strasbourg delegation was thus present at
the general assembly of the UNEF held in Paris on January 14, and at the opening of the
meeting demanded a preliminary vote on its motion to dissolve the entire UNEF,
“considering that the UNEF declared itself a union uniting the vanguard of youth
(Charter of Grenoble, 1946) at a time when labor unionism had long since been defeated and
turned into a tool for the self-regulation of modern capitalism, working to integrate the
working class into the commodity system, . . . considering that the vanguardist
pretension of the UNEF is constantly belied by its subreformist slogans and practice,
. . . considering that student unionism is a pure and simple farce and that it
is urgent to put an end to it.” The motion concluded by calling on “all
revolutionary students of the world . . . to join all the exploited people of
their countries in undertaking a relentless struggle against all aspects of the old world,
with the aim of contributing toward the international power of workers councils.”
Only two delegations, that of Nantes and that of the convalescent-home students, voted
with Strasbourg to deal with this preliminary motion before hearing the report of the
national leadership. (It should be noted, however, that in the preceding weeks the young
UNEF bureaucrats had succeeded in deposing two other bureaus that had been spontaneously
in favor of the AFGES position, those of Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand.) The Strasbourg
delegation consequently walked out on a debate where it had nothing more to say.
The final exit of the AFGES Bureau was not to be so noble, however. Around this same
time three situationists [the “Garnautins”] were excluded from the SI for having
jointly perpetrated — and been forced to admit before the SI — several
slanderous lies directed against Khayati, whom they had hoped would himself be excluded as
a result of this clever scheme (see the January 22 tract “Warning! Three
Provocateurs”). Their exclusion had no connection with the Strasbourg scandal —
in it as in everything else they had ostensibly agreed with the conclusions reached in SI
discussions — but two of them happened to be from the Strasbourg region. In addition,
as we mentioned above, some of the Strasbourg students had begun to be irritated by the
fact that the SI had not rewarded them for their shortcomings by recruiting them.
The excluded liars sought out an uncritical audience among them and counted on covering up
their previous lies and their admission of them by piling new lies on top of them. Thus
all those who had been rejected by the SI joined forces in the mystical
pretension of “going beyond” the practice that had condemned them. They began to
believe the newspapers, and even to expand on them. They saw themselves as masses who had
actually “seized power” in a sort of Strasbourg Commune. They told themselves
that they hadn’t been treated the way a revolutionary proletariat deserves to be
treated, and that their historic action had superseded all previous theories. Forgetting
that their only discernable “action” in this affair was to have made a few
meager contributions to the drafting of a text, they collectively compensated for
this deficiency by inflating their illusions. This amounted to nothing more ambitious than
collectively fantasizing for a few weeks while continually upping the dose of constantly
reiterated falsifications. The dozen Strasbourg students who had effectively supported the
scandal split into two equal parts. This supplementary problem thus acted as a touchstone.
We naturally made no promises to those who remained “partisans of the
SI” and we clearly stated that we would not make any: it was simply up to them to be,
unconditionally, partisans of the truth. Vayr-Piova and some of the others became
partisans of falsehood with the excluded “Garnautins” (although certainly
without knowledge of several excessive blunders in Frey’s and Garnault’s recent
fabrications, but nevertheless being aware of quite a few of them). André Schneider,
whose support the liars hoped to obtain since he held the title of AFGES president, was
overwhelmed with false tales from all of them, and was weak enough to believe them without
further investigation and to countersign one of their declarations. But after only a few
days, independently becoming aware of a number of undeniable lies that these people
thought it natural to tell their initiates in order to protect their miserable cause,
Schneider immediately decided that he should publicly acknowledge his mistake: in his
tract “Memories from the House of the Dead” he denounced those who had deceived
him and led him to share the responsibility for a false accusation against the SI. The
return of Schneider, whose character the liars had underestimated and who had thus been
privileged to witness the full extent of their collective manipulation of embarrassing
facts, struck a definitive blow in Strasbourg itself against the excluded and their
accomplices, who had already been discredited everywhere else. In their spite these
wretches, who the week before had gone to so much trouble to win over Schneider in order
to add to the credibility of their venture, proclaimed him a notoriously feeble-minded
person who had simply succumbed to “the prestige of the SI.” (More and more
often, recently, in the most diverse situations, liars end up in this way unwittingly
identifying “the prestige of the SI” with the simple fact of telling the
truth — a connection that certainly does us honor.) Before three months had gone
by, the association of Frey and consorts with Vayr-Piova and all those who were willing to
maintain a keenly solicited adhesion (at one time there were as many as eight or nine of
them) was to reveal its sad reality: based on infantile lies by individuals who considered
each other to be clumsy liars, it was the very picture, involuntarily parodic, of a type
of “collective action” that should never be engaged in; and with the type of
people who should never be associated with! They went so far as to conduct a ludicrous electoral
campaign before the students of Strasbourg. Dozens of pages of pedantic scraps of
misremembered situationist ideas and phrases were, with a total unawareness of the
absurdity, churned out with the sole aim of holding on to the “power” of the
Strasbourg chapter of the MNEF, the minibureaucratic fiefdom of Vayr-Piova, who was
eligible for reelection April 13. As successful in this venture as in their previous
maneuvers, they were defeated by people as stupid as they were — the Stalinists and
Christians, who were more naturally deft at electoral politics, and who also enjoyed the
bonus of being able to denounce their deplorable rivals as “fake situationists.”
In the tract “The SI Told You So,” put out the next day, André Schneider and
his comrades were easily able to show how this unsuccessful attempt to exploit the leftovers
of the scandal of five months before for promotional purposes revealed itself as the
complete renunciation of the spirit and the declared perspectives of that scandal. Finally
Vayr-Piova, in a communiqué distributed April 20, stated: “I find it amusing to be
at last denounced as a ‘nonsituationist’ — something I have openly
proclaimed ever since the SI set itself up as an official power.” This is a
representative sample of a vast and already forgotten literature. That the SI has become an
official power — this is one of the typical theses of Vayr-Piova or Frey, which
can be examined by those who are interested in the question; and after doing so they will
know what to think of the intelligence of such theoreticians. But this aside, the fact
that Vayr-Piova proclaims (whether “openly,” or even “secretly,”
in a “proclamation” reserved for the most discreet accomplices in his lies) that
he has not belonged to the SI since whenever was the date of our transformation into an
“official power” — this is a boldfaced lie. Everyone who knows him
knows that Vayr-Piova has never had the opportunity to claim to be anything but a
“nonsituationist” (see what we wrote above concerning the AFGES communiqué of
November 29).
The most favorable results of this whole affair naturally go beyond this new and
opportunely much-publicized example of our refusal to enlist anything that a
neomilitantism in search of glorious subordination might throw our way. No less negligible
is the fact that the scandal forced the official recognition of the irreparable
decomposition of the UNEF, a decomposition that was even more advanced than its pitiful
appearance suggested: the coup de grace was still echoing in July at its 56th
Congress in Lyon, in the course of which the sad president Vandenburie had to confess:
“The unity of the UNEF has long since ended. Each association lives (SI note:
this term is pretentiously inaccurate) autonomously, without paying any attention to
the directives of the National Committee. The growing gap between the rank and file and
the governing bodies has reached a state of serious degradation. The history of the
proceedings of the UNEF has become nothing but a series of crises. . . .
Reorganization and a revival of action have not proved possible.” Equally comical
were some side-effects stirred up among the academics, who felt that this was another
current issue to petition about. As can be well imagined, we considered the position
published by the forty professors and assistants of the Faculty of Arts at Strasbourg,
which denounced the fake students behind this “tempest in a teacup”
about false problems “without the shadow of a solution,” to be more logical and
socially rational (as was, for that matter, Judge Llabador’s summing up) than that
wheedling attempt at approval circulated in February by a few decrepit
modernist-institutionalists gnawing their meager bones at the professorial chairs of
“Social Sciences” at Nanterre (impudent Touraine, loyal Lefebvre, Maoist
Baudrillart, cunning Lourau).
In fact, we want ideas to become dangerous again. We cannot be accepted with
the spinelessness of a false eclectic interest, as if we were Sartres, Althussers, Aragons
or Godards. Let us note the wise words of a certain Professor Lhuillier, reported in the Nouvel
Observateur (21 December 1966): “I am for freedom of thought. But if there are
any Situationists in the room, I want them to get out right now.” While not entirely
denying the effect that the dissemination of a few basic truths may have had in slightly
accelerating the movement that is impelling the lagging French youth toward an awareness
of an impending more general crisis in the society, we think that the distribution of On
the Poverty of Student Life has been a much more significant factor of clarification
in some other countries where such a process is already much more clearly under way. In
the afterword of their edition of Khayati’s text, the English situationists wrote:
“The most highly developed critique of modern life has been made in one of the least
highly developed modern countries — in a country which has not yet reached the point
where the complete disintegration of all values becomes patently obvious and engenders the
corresponding forces of radical rejection. In the French context, situationist theory has
anticipated the social forces by which it will be realized.” The theses of On the
Poverty of Student Life have been much more truly understood in the United States and
in England (the strike at the London School of Economics in March caused a certain stir,
the Times commentator unhappily seeing in it a return of the class struggle he
had thought was over with). To a lesser degree this is also the case in the Netherlands
— where the SI’s critique, reinforcing a much harsher critique by events
themselves, was not without effect on the recent dissolution of the “Provo”
movement — and in the Scandinavian countries. The struggles of the West Berlin
students this year have also picked up on some aspects of the critique, though in a still
very confused way.
But revolutionary youth has no alternative but to join with the mass of workers who,
starting from their experience of the new conditions of exploitation, are going to take up
once again the struggle to control their world and to do away with work. When young people
begin to know the current theoretical form of this real movement that is everywhere
spontaneously bursting forth from the soil of modern society, this is only a moment
of the progression by which this unified theoretical critique (inseparable from an
adequate practical unification) strives to break the silence and the general
organization of separation. It is only in this sense that we find the result satisfactory.
In speaking of revolutionary youth, we are obviously not referring to that alienated and
semiprivileged fraction molded by the university — a sector that is the natural base
for an admiring consumption of a fantasized situationist theory considered as the latest
spectacular fashion. We will continue to disappoint and refute that kind of approbation.
Sooner or later it will be understood that the SI must be judged not on the superficially
scandalous aspects of certain manifestations through which it appears, but on its essentially
scandalous central truth.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
October 1967
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
On the Poverty of Student Life
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