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Instructions for an
Insurrection
If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the
organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries
where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all
the alternatives are even more ridiculous, since they imply accepting the existing
order in one way or another. If the word “revolutionary” has been neutralized to
the point of being used in advertising to describe the slightest change in an
ever-changing commodity production, this is because the possibilities of a central desirable
change are no longer expressed anywhere. Today the revolutionary project stands accused
before the tribunal of history — accused of having failed, of having simply
engendered a new form of alienation. This amounts to recognizing that the ruling society
has proved capable of defending itself, on all levels of reality, much better than
revolutionaries expected. Not that it has become more tolerable. The point is simply that
revolution has to be reinvented.
This poses a number of problems that will have to be theoretically and practically
overcome in the next few years. We can briefly mention a few points that it is urgent to
understand and resolve.
Of the tendencies toward regroupment that have appeared over the last few years among
various minorities of the workers movement in Europe, only the most radical current is
worth preserving: that centered on the program of workers councils. Nor
should we overlook the fact that a number of confusionist elements are seeking to
insinuate themselves into this debate (see the recent accord among “leftist”
philosophico-sociological journals of different countries).
The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of
revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within
the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against
such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with,
we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on
the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an
absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a
really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the
decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role
of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a
specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.
People’s creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective project
explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. The only way to “arouse
the masses” is to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions
of life and the present poverty of life. Without a critique of everyday life, a
revolutionary organization is a separated milieu, as conventional and ultimately as
passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure.
Sociologists, such as Henri Raymond in his study of Palinuro, have shown how in such
places the spectacular mechanism recreates, on the level of play, the dominant relations
of the society as a whole. But then they go on naïvely to commend the “multiplicity
of human contacts,” for example, without seeing that the mere quantitative increase
of these contacts leaves them just as insipid and inauthentic as they are everywhere else.
Even in the most libertarian and antihierarchical revolutionary group, communication
between people is in no way guaranteed by a shared political program. The sociologists
naturally support efforts to reform everyday life, to organize compensation for it in
vacation time. But the revolutionary project cannot accept the traditional notion of play,
of a game limited in space, in time and in qualitative depth. The revolutionary game
— the creation of life — is opposed to all memories of past games. To provide a
three-week break from the kind of life led during forty-nine weeks of work, the holiday
villages of Club Med draw on a shoddy Polynesian ideology — a bit like the French
Revolution presenting itself in the guise of republican Rome, or like the revolutionaries
of today who define themselves principally in accordance with how well they fit the
Bolshevik or some other style of militant role. The revolution of everyday life
cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.
The experience of the empty leisure produced by modern capitalism has provided a
critical correction to the Marxian notion of the extension of leisure time: It is
now clear that full freedom of time requires first of all a transformation of work and the
appropriation of this work in view of goals, and under conditions, that are utterly
different from those of the forced labor that has prevailed until now (see the activity of
the groups that publish Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, Solidarity in
England(1) and Alternative in Belgium). But those
who put all the stress on the necessity of changing work itself, of rationalizing it and
of interesting people in it, and who pay no attention to the free content of life (i.e.
the development of a materially equipped creative power beyond the traditional categories
of work time and rest-and-recreation time) run the risk of providing an ideological cover
for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of greater
efficiency and profitability without at all having called in question the experience
of this production or the necessity of this kind of life. The free construction of the
entire space-time of individual life is a demand that will have to be defended against all
sorts of dreams of harmony in the minds of aspiring managers of social reorganization.
The different moments of situationist activity until now can only be understood in the
perspective of a reappearance of revolution, a revolution that will be social as well as
cultural and whose field of action will right from the start have to be broader than
during any of its previous endeavors. The SI does not want to recruit disciples or
partisans, but to bring together people capable of applying themselves to this task in the
years to come, by every means and without worrying about labels. This means that we must
reject not only the vestiges of specialized artistic activity, but also those of
specialized politics; and particularly the post-Christian masochism characteristic of so
many intellectuals in this area. We don’t claim to be developing a new revolutionary
program all by ourselves. We say that this program in the process of formation will one
day practically oppose the ruling reality, and that we will participate in that
opposition. Whatever may become of us individually, the new revolutionary movement will
not be formed without taking into account what we have sought together;
which could be summed up as the passage from the old theory of limited permanent
revolution to a theory of generalized permanent revolution.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1961
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTE]
1. A later issue of Internationale Situationniste
has the following note on Solidarity: “The majority of the British Solidarity group
that is apparently demanding this boycott of the situationists are very combative
revolutionary workers. We feel confident in stating that its shop-steward members have not
yet read the SI, certainly not in French. But they have an ideological shield, their
specialist of nonauthority, Dr. C. Pallis, a well-educated man who has been aware of the
SI for years and who has been in a position to assure them of its utter unimportance. His
activity in England has instead been to translate and comment on the texts of Cardan
[Cornelius Castoriadis], the thinker who presided over the collapse of Socialisme ou
Barbarie in France. Pallis knows quite well that we have for a long time pointed out
Cardan’s undeniable regression toward revolutionary nothingness, his swallowing of
every sort of academic fashion and his ending up becoming indistinguishable from an
ordinary sociologist. But Pallis has brought Cardan’s thought to England like the
light that arrives on Earth from stars that have already long burned out — by
presenting his least decomposed texts, written years before, and never mentioning the
author’s subsequent regression. It is thus easy to see why he would like to prevent
this type of encounter.” (Internationale Situationniste #11, p. 64)
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version entitled “Instructions
for Taking Up Arms” in the Situationist International Anthology).
No copyright.
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