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Internal SI Texts
Provisional Statutes
Provisional Theses for Discussion (Salvadori)
Remarks on the SI Today (Debord)
Declaration (Debord, Riesel, Viénet)
Untitled Text (Debord)
Participation in the SI and National Sections
1. The SI is an international association of individuals who, having
demonstrated an equality of capabilities — in general, not in every detail — for
our common theoretical and practical activity, are equal in all aspects of its democratic
management. Majority decision is executed by everyone; a minority has the duty to
break if the issue in dispute seems to it to concern a fundamental matter among the
previously recognized bases of agreement.
2. The SI organizes its activity on the basis of a division into national sections.
This “national” criterion is understood in both geographical and cultural terms;
it is possible, and in fact desirable, that each section be itself partially international
in its composition. Each section is also “national” in the sense that it engages
in a central advanced activity in a given country and does not seek to subdivide into
regional subgroups in that country. A section might envisage such a subdivision within
itself in certain exceptional geographical conditions, but the SI would continue to relate
to the section only as a single unit.
3. A member of the SI is ipso facto a member of any national section where he
expresses his decision to live and participate. Each member is responsible to the SI as a
whole, and the SI is collectively responsible for the known behavior of each of its
members.
4. The general assembly of all the members of the SI is the only decisionmaking power
over all theoretical and practical choices. To the exact degree that there exist practical
obstacles to the presence of everyone, the SI recognizes a system of delegates
representing each of the members. These delegates may or may not bear specific, imperative
mandates. Decisions made by delegates are revocable by those who have mandated them if the
mandates have been left open; they are not revocable in cases in which a delegate has
correctly executed a specific mandate.
Organization of National Sections
5. Each national section, on its own responsibility and within the general guidelines
adopted by the entire SI, democratically decides on all its activities and tactics on its
own terrain. It alone decides on all aspects of the publications, contacts and projects it
sees fit to pursue. If possible it publishes a journal, the editorial management of which
is entirely in its own hands. It goes without saying that personally undertaken projects
or theoretical hypotheses cannot be limited by the section, nor by the SI as a whole
— except in cases where they are manifestly hostile to the SI’s very bases.
6. Each national section is the sole judge, in its region, of breaks with persons on
the outside and of admissions to the section. It is responsible to the SI as a
whole only for guarding against anything that might lower the general level of the SI (cf.
Article #3) or introduce a notable inequality among participants. The entire SI
automatically recognizes and upholds all these breaks and admissions as soon as it is
informed of them.
7. Each section is master of its exclusions. It must immediately furnish the reasons
and all pertinent documents to all the other sections. In cases where the facts
are disputed by the excluded comrades, or in cases where another section requests a new
discussion bearing on the very basis of the dispute, these exclusions are
suspended until a general conference of the SI (or a meeting of delegates) makes the final
decision. As a general rule, it is not admissible that theoretical or programatic
oppositions — even serious ones — be dealt with by exclusion before a general
meeting of the SI can discuss the matter. But all practical failings must be dealt with on
the spot. Any divergence or choice that does not require exclusion allows for resignation.
8. On any theoretical or tactical question that has not met with unanimity during a
discussion, each member is free to maintain his own opinion (as long as he does not break
practical solidarity). If the same problems and divergences are met with on several
successive occasions, the members who are in agreement on one of the options have the
right to openly constitute a tendency, and to draft texts to clarify and sustain
their point of view, until there is some final resolution (by rediscovered unanimity, by a
break, or by a practical supersession of the divergence). Such texts may be circulated
throughout the SI and may also appear in the publications of one or more sections. A
tendency bearing on a general tactical problem should normally itself be international
(thereby tracing a division within several sections).
9. In exceptional cases in which a situationist finds himself isolated and yet active
on a concrete terrain (a country where he alone acts in the name of the SI), he alone must
determine his activity, while remaining answerable to the SI as a whole.
10. The present national sections can agree to temporarily share their contacts or
activities in certain countries where no SI section exists, in accordance with
considerations of common language or geographical proximity. Such apportionment must not
be institutionalized nor must it notably increase the importance of one of the sections
relative to the others.
11. Each national section will organize its own complete financial
autonomy; but in this domain, too, it will, as its means permit, show solidarity with
other sections that might be in need.
Coordination Between Sections
12. A general conference of the SI should meet as often as possible with all members,
or at least the greatest possible number of them who can get there. In no case will it be
held without the presence of at least one delegate from the section that would have the
greatest difficulty in getting there.
13. To coordinate the SI’s activity in the periods between conferences, meetings
of delegates from the sections will be held as often as necessary. Each delegate
disposes of the exact number of votes as the number of situationists from the section that
has mandated him. In cases where two different positions exist within a section, such a
section would have to have two delegates, each representing the number of votes supporting
his position. Any member of the SI can participate and vote in these delegate meetings (in
such a case, his vote obviously could not also be allotted to a delegate).
14. A section that cannot send a delegate to these meetings has the right to have
itself represented by a situationist it chooses from another section, who will bear a
specific mandate. The selected delegate should be informed far enough in advance to allow
him to refuse to uphold a mandate if he disapproves of its content. The section that
cannot attend would in that case have to ask another situationist to defend its point of
view.
Adopted 30 September 1969 at the 8th SI Conference in Venice
Provisional Theses for the
Discussion of New Theoretico-Practical
Orientations in the SI
(excerpts)
[...] The “April Theses” [Debord’s The
Organization Question for the SI] pointed out that the SI now needs to concentrate
more on the dissemination of theory than on its elaboration (though the latter must also
be continued). I want to call attention to the fact that in order to accomplish this,
theory must first of all be put in a condition in which it can be effectively
disseminated. The first step of theory’s advance toward practice takes
place within theory itself. The dissemination of theory is thus inseparable from its
development. The task of giving all our formulated or implicit theses a systematic and
completely dialectical development, one that will bring them not only to the point where
no one can any longer be unaware of them, but also to the point where they circulate among
the workers “like hotcakes” and finally spark a definitive awakening of
consciousness (a scandal) — this is certainly a theoretical task. But it also has an
immediately practical utility; more precisely, it is both necessary and banal at this time
when the SI is more or less led to play double or nothing with history.
Let us consider, for example, the excellent project of a Situationist Manifesto
(“situationist” in the sense that it is done by situationists). I think that
some of the difficulty in conceiving or “imagining” it must be attributed to the
fact that we have yet to attain a certain level of theoretical development. By this I
mean: the SI’s theory is solid and is already maturing without becoming old (it being
the last theory, assuming that this era’s decisive revolution is the last
revolution). But beyond the fact that the SI’s Manifesto must be translated
into all the languages spoken by the modern proletariat and disseminated among the
workers, it should be in a position to last at least as well as the Communist
Manifesto, without having the latter’s defects and inadequacies. It thus clearly
cannot be a book, or an article (like the Address to
Revolutionaries of All Countries, for example) that would arbitrarily be called a
“manifesto”; rather, it must be the geometric locus of the theory of modern
society and the constant reference point of any future revolution. In this sense the
project proposed by Guy(1) of settling our accounts with
Marx, by precisely assessing the degree of accuracy of his analyses and predictions, is a
preliminary project, though not a necessary one. More generally, our theory certainly runs
through all the SI articles, from which it may easily be drawn; but in that form our
theory has to be reconstructed by the reader. This theory must now be unified and
synthesized, and for this end some additional analyses will be in order. In particular,
the new simplicity of language we are seeking will certainly not be able to make our
language familiar in the short run. Thus, before the Manifesto we might
undertake the intermediate task of scientifically developing all our previously
outlined themes (articles, pamphlets, books).
In contrast, it seems to me that René-Donatien’s proposal of a Wildcat
Striker’s Handbook should be realized in the near future. To a brief history of
the wildcat movement and a confirmation of its critique in acts of the unions, we could
add a critique of the worker milieu and a brief final programatic chapter (defeat of the
revolutionary movement, bureaucracy, spectacle-commodity society, return of social
revolution, workers councils, classless society). This would be a premise for the Manifesto
as well as a followup to Student Poverty, in that it might lead to a
“Strasbourg of the factories.”
Finally, it seems to me that the Manifesto project is the way in which we can
consider the necessity of an overall advance in the relations among our theses as well as
between them and the real movement, and that it thus presupposes the realization of
virtually all the other projected theoretical works that have been formulated in the
course of this debate. For example, René’s and Raoul’s proposed pamphlet on
workers councils and the critique of Pannekoek; of the four major projects presented by
Guy, at least the analysis of the “two concomitant failures” (insofar as they
concern the process of the formation of conscious revolutionary organizations and the
critique of the present process of purely spontaneous struggle) and, linked to the
critique of the councils of the past and of councilist ideology, the definition of the
armed coherence (the outline of a program) of the new councils, which “will be
situationist or nothing.” Thus the “preface to the practical critique of the
modernized old world” opens up the quest for a real antireformism and for new forms
of mass or generalized action in the proletariat’s development toward an autonomous
movement, the first phase of which is manifested by sabotage, wildcat strikes and above
all by the new, modern demands. Besides this, it will still be necessary to come
back to the question of historical class determination, notably that of the working class
and its revolutionary nature, since it continues, because of its material
position in society, to bear the consciousness of humanity as a whole. (Tony: “We
must affirm that the workers can become revolutionary, and that they are the only ones who
will be so effectively.” Raoul: “The path of the worker is direct:
because he holds the fate of the commodity in his hands, all he has to do in order to
break free of his brutalization and stop being a worker is to become conscious of his
power. His positivity is immediate. The intellectual is at best negative. . . .
Our critique must now bear essentially on the worker milieu, the motor of the
proletariat.”) Essential chapters are thus: the analysis of American capitalism and
American society with its new déclassés; the critique of the most modern ideologies in
relation to the supersession in acts of political economy and to the delay
of the revolution (urbanism as destruction of the city; automation seen as automatically
liberating; ecology as present-day society’s moral crisis, which compels it to
envisage the necessity to itself transform production relations; and, linked to
all the above, “situationism”: the critique of everyday life conducted by power
itself); the analysis of the material presence in work and in everyday life of all the
fragmentary elements of the totality, of the entire historical project, of that which the
disappearance of art, the withering away of philosophy and the bankruptcy of science were
unable to abolish, but have on the contrary injected everywhere by making it a definitive
acquisition of the workers who are henceforth becoming their conscious inheritors. In
general, there is a need to pursue an international strategy of revolution by
politico-historical articles on different countries, that is to say, to continue to
translate The Society of the Spectacle into terms like those of The Decline
and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy, and even further in that direction. (A
good translation of the former has yet to appear in Italy.)
Another project I think it is useful to add is this: beginning with a quick run-through
of past revolutions (like Marx does in the Manifesto, Engels in the Introduction
to The Class Struggles in France, Trotsky in 1905, Pannekoek in Workers
Councils), to develop an answer to the question, “Why will the next revolution
be the last one?” The history of the workers movement — aspects of which have
been treated in numerous articles and whose line is most fully traced in “The
Proletariat as Subject and Representation” [Chapter 4 of The Society of the
Spectacle], along with Riesel’s critique of its highest moments, the councils,
in Internationale Situationniste #12 — is still far from being an outworn
topic on which everything of consequence has already been said. But what seems to me of
even greater interest is to clarify why modern revolutions are henceforth, and for the
first time, exclusively proletarian, and this at a time that is witnessing a
decisive transformation of the workers and of work itself. Thus the revolutions of the
past failed to attain, except marginally, that without which the modern revolution cannot
even begin: the fact that victory can be achieved only by demanding the totality is now
also expressed in the fact that there are no longer even any struggles except for the
totality. One could start from a definitive critique and a justification of
Russian Bolshevism (of Trotsky and Lenin) in relation to the real conditions of the
Russian proletariat, those conditions being in their turn considered in relation to the
conditions of the modern proletariat, which simultaneously make Bolshevism impossible and
the councils necessary, “no longer at the periphery of what is ebbing, but at the
center of what is rising.” This would also be a verification of Marx’s general
thesis: As long as the existing production relations are not exhausted and have not
entered into contradiction with the development of the productive forces (in the total
historical sense that includes the development of the revolutionary class itself and of
the consciousness that produces history), revolutions run the greatest risk, which so far
has never been avoided, of being defeated and leading to a modernization of domination.
Each revolution sets loose all possibilities (in 1789 as in 1871 and 1917), but in the
final analysis realizes only those that correspond to the level attained by the
development of productive forces. Out of all the possibilities each revolution opens up
for itself, it always seems to choose the nearest. All the possibilities are there
before it, but some of them remain invisible while others are in everybody’s
mind: it is obviously everyday life, the immediate relation with the existing world, that
puts them there. This can just as well be expressed by saying that in all revolutions the
negation is never absolute, that the positive plays a large part, whether as
positive or inversely as determining the negation: if the condition of victory
consists in reducing the former, it also always consists in reinforcing the latter, in
reducing the positive to its objective basis.
It also seems to me that we have arrived at a point where we must go over all of
situationist theory from top to bottom and rewrite it, so as to deal with the mediations
that were treated too rapidly and with the questions that were left open. The recognized
value of writing books, for example (books that in the present period the workers should
begin to read), obviously stems from this necessity of superseding the opening moment of
hostilities on a new front of modern critique. [...]
In conclusion, we ourselves don’t have a head start at this beginning of an era:
it’s the beginning of an era for us too. The SI was able to trace, condensed into a
few phrases, a few of the fundamental alternatives and perhaps all of the modern
directions of development; but it is precisely for this reason that it is
virtually a question of beginning over again (except for the spectacle, the critique of
everyday life, a few brief though excellent politico-historical texts on revolutions, and
of course the analysis of May). Our most notable theoretical acquisition so far is our
theoretical method, which must be verified in a number of concrete respects by deepening
the theory itself in a decisive manner, precisely because “the force of spirit is
only as great as its externalization.” We have already written, in installments, our German
Ideology, but our 1844 Manuscripts will be the text Guy proposes for the
historical détournement of Marx. We are beginning to consider our Manifesto at
the same time as our Critique of the Gotha Program. Moreover, we don’t come
only from Hegel and Marx. The Revolution of Everyday Life has only opened the
way; antiutopia is an unexplored territory from which no one has returned so far. It is
this antiutopia, made possible on the bases of modern society, that must fill in the gaps
left by Marx’s “insufficiencies,” just as it must itself be rendered
dialectical and find a practical use. [...]
PAOLO SALVADORI
Milan, May 1970
(excerpts)
1
I am in agreement with Paolo’s text (“Provisional Theses,” May 1970),
apart from two slight differences. First, on page 5 of the French translation, I think it
is necessary to dialectize somewhat more the question of the relation of Bolshevism to the
backwardness of productive forces in Russia, by pointing out the very role of Lenin’s
Bolshevism as a factor of retardation and regression for that central part of the
productive forces: the revolutionary class’s consciousness. Elsewhere (page
7) Paolo characterizes this formulation regarding what the SI has so far been able to
accomplish — “the element of promise still surpasses the element of
accomplishment” — as a “slight exaggeration.” On the contrary, I find
this phrase to be completely true, without any exaggeration. With these theses of Paolo
and a number of those expressed by various comrades, notably Raoul, René and Tony (as
well as Gianfranco’s very correct insistence on our developing certain economic
analyses more concretely), it seems to me that we have a substantial basis from which we
can more and more concretely develop both our strategical analysis and our
theoretico-practical activity.
2
However, a few points remain to be dealt with that are preliminary to this
debate (though they have already been touched on in texts by René, René-Donatien and
myself). Paolo was right to parenthesize these preliminaries, for they have little direct
relation with his programatic outline; and he has taken care, in a final note, to make the
very significance of his text contingent on their practical resolution. We must
thus now make an effort to determine these difficulties more concretely —
difficulties which are simultaneously archaisms in our own historical development
and preconditions that we have to master before really undertaking the
development of a more advanced perspective. [...]
4
After four months of this orientation debate we have not seen any theoretical
divergences emerge; and this was fairly predictable. But one begins to wonder if these
texts — which go in the same general direction and many of which contain excellent
points — are not piling up like so many monologues while scarcely being used.
To clarify what I mean regarding this underuse of theory: Just as Magritte could paint a
pipe and then correctly write on the painting, “This is not a pipe,” to declare
that one does not separate theory and practice is not yet to practice theory. And
putting revolutionary theory into practice is not at all messianically postponed until the
victory of the revolution, it is required throughout the entire process of
revolutionary activity. Similarly (and this too is only a theoretical observation, but a
necessary one), we all naturally refuse to consider even the most fundamentally
theoretical activity as separable from even the most distinctly practical activity. To
formulate the most general revolutionary theory is inconceivable without a very precise
practice, and vice versa. Even in a street fight you still have to think! But if we leave
aside these dialectical truisms on extreme cases, we can consider the most common concrete
situation in which dialecticians reveal themselves as such (even if many of them
don’t have the intellectual background enabling them to talk about
dialectics or to write theory at the dialectical level). People meet each other.
They talk about how they understand the world and what they think they can do in it. They
judge each other while judging their world; and each judges the judgments of the others.
They agree with or oppose each other’s projects. If there is a common project, they
have to know at different moments what this project has become. Their success or
failure is measured by practice and their consciousness of practice (they may
themselves, rightly or wrongly, characterize their failures and successes as secondary or
decisive; the result may later be reversed and they may be aware of this or have forgotten
it). Etc., etc. In a word, it is in this concerted and theorized action (which is also
theory tested in action) that revolutionary dialecticians have to recognize as well as
possible the decisive elements of a complex problem; the probable or modifiable
(by them) interaction of these elements; the essential character of the
moment as result, as well as the development of its negation. This is the territory of
the qualitative where individuals, their acts, meaning and life know each other
— and where it is necessary to know how to know. The presence of history in
the everyday life of revolutionaries. You comrades will certainly say that the preceding
lines are very banal; and this is quite true. [...]
6
Leaving aside the fact that all the issues of Internationale Situationniste
have included a number of personal contributions (often notable and sometimes even
discordant), it can be said that for the most part the anonymous portions of issues 1-5
were produced in a truly collective manner. Issues 6-9 were still done relatively
collectively, mainly by Raoul, Attila and me. But from number 10 on I have found myself
left with almost the entire responsibility for preparing each publication. And
what seems to me even more alarming and unhealthy is that I consider — unbiasedly, I
hope — that these three issues are the best ones of the series! This situation was
still somewhat obscured for me in numbers 10 and 11 by a small (but welcome) amount of
collaboration from Mustapha (I’m still referring to the articles published without
signature). We know that the departure of Mustapha right in the middle of the preparation
of number 12 (though after he had turned in the article on Czechoslovakia) pushed things
to a scandalous point, since at the same time the membership of the French section had
doubled. I resigned soon thereafter from the position as “director” of the
journal, mainly so as not to be an accomplice to a sort of spectacular lie, since we all
had plenty of opportunity to be aware of our distance in this regard from our stated
principles. A year has now gone by since this problem was posed, and the present
editor-comrades are beginning to put themselves in a position to resolve it. If they
succeed in this it will be by finally appropriating the methods that have
“officially” been theirs for several years. [...]
8
This deficiency of collective activity (I don’t mean to say, of course,
that we haven’t collectively discussed, decided on and carried out a certain number
of actions or writings, even during the last two years) is mainly noticeable — in the
French section — by a sort of general aversion to any critique aimed at a specific
fact or at one of us. This was quite evident at the July 14 meeting. The slightest
critique is felt as a total calling into question, an absolute distrust, a manifestation
of hostility, etc. And this emotional reaction is not only expressed by the criticized
comrade. The SI comrades are very quick and adept at judging the pro-situs(2)
(the successive writings of the poor GRCA, for example), that is to say, something of very
little importance. But almost everyone manifests a strange reluctance when it comes to
judging anything about a member of the SI. They are visibly uneasy even when someone else
of us does so. I cannot believe that some hollow politeness is at the origin of this. It
must therefore be a certain fatigue that sets in the moment questions are broached that
really concern our movement: things we risk succeeding or failing in. In
any case a critique is never carried further by other comrades and no one (except
occasionally the criticized comrade) strives to draw from it any conclusions that might be
useful for our subsequent collective action. In this way the SI has a tendency to freeze
into a sort of perpetual and admirable present (as if a more or less admirable past was
continued in it). This not very historical or practical harmony is only broken in two
situations, in one case really, in the other only apparently. When a critique is really
taken seriously and given practical consequences (because the incident is so glaring that
everyone demands this conclusion) an individual is excluded. He is cut off from the
harmonious communion, perhaps even without ever having been criticized before, or only
once briefly. The apparent break in our habitual comfort happens this way: A
critique is made or a defect of our action is pointed out. Everyone goes along with this
critique, often without even bothering to express themselves about it; the point
seems clear and undeniable, but boring (and correspondingly little attention is given to
really remedying it). But if someone has insisted on the point, everyone admits that the
detail is indeed a bad thing. And everyone immediately decides that it must not continue,
that things must change, etc. But since no one bothers with the practical ways and means,
this decision remains a pious hope and the thing may well recur ten times; and by the
tenth time everyone has already forgotten the ninth. The general feeling,
expressed not so much in the responses as in the silences, is clearly: “Why make a
drama out of it?” But this is a false idea because it’s not a matter of a drama
and the choice is not between drama and passivity. But in this way the problem, when it
eventually is dealt with, is dealt with only dramatically, as many of our exclusions have
shown. [...]
9
[...] I have mentioned the prompt critique of the errors of the pro-situs, not in order
to say that it is not in itself justified, but in order to note that the pro-situs are not
our principal reference point (any more than ICO or the leftist bureaucrats). Our
principal reference point is ourselves, it is our own operation. The
underdevelopment of internal criticism in the SI clearly reflects, at the same time that
it contributes toward, the underdevelopment of our (theoretico-practical) action. [...]
11
I think that all this is only a symptom of a correctable deficiency: several
situationists’ lack of cohabitation with their own practice. I almost always
remember the times I have been mistaken; and I acknowledge them rather often even when
no one reminds me of them. I am led to think that this is because I am rarely
mistaken, having never concealed the fact that I have nothing to say on the numerous
subjects in which I am ignorant, and habitually keeping in mind several contradictory
hypotheses regarding the possible development of events when I don’t yet discern the
qualitative leap. In speaking here for myself I would nevertheless like to believe that,
as Raoul would put it, I am also speaking for some others. And, by anticipation, for all
those comrades who will decide to consciously self-manage their own basic activity. [...]
15
The style of organization defined by the SI and that we have tried to implement is not
that of the councils or even that which we have outlined for revolutionary organizations
in general; it is specific, linked to our task as we have understood it so far.
This style has had some obvious successes. Even now it is not a question of criticizing it
for lacking effectiveness: if we successfully overcome the present problems of the phase
of entering into a “new era,” we will continue to be more “effective”
than many others; and if we don’t overcome them, it doesn’t much matter if we
have carried out a few publications and encounters a little slower or a little faster. I
am thus not criticizing any ineffectiveness of this style of organization, but the
essential fact that at the moment this style is not really being applied among us. If, in
spite of all its advantages, our organizational formula has this sole fault of not
being real, it is obvious that we must at all costs make it real or else renounce it
and devise another style of organization, whether for a continuation of the SI or for a
regroupment on other bases, for which the new era will sooner or later create the
conditions. In any case, to take up Paolo’s phrase, most of us “will not stop
dancing.” We must only stop pretending.
16
Since the present problem is not at the simply theoretical level (and since it
is dissimulated when we carry on theoretical discussions, which are moreover virtually
contentless since they immediately lead to a consequenceless unanimity), I don’t
think we can settle it by constituting formal tendencies (much less by forgetting
about it). I think that each of us might first try to find with one other
situationist, chosen by affinity and experience and after very thorough
discussion, a theoretico-practical accord that takes account of all the elements we are
already aware of (and of those that may appear in the process of continuing this
discussion). This accord could then, with the same prudence, be extended to another, etc.
We might in this way arrive at a few regroupments that would be capable of dialoguing with
each other — whether to oppose each other or to come to an agreement. The process
could be long (but not necessarily so) and it would probably be one way to put into
practice the perspective evoked a few months ago but scarcely developed since of
“rejoining the SI” (without formally suspending the present accord, but by here
and now preparing its future). Suffice it to say that it is time to seek concrete
individuals behind the now-evident abstraction of the “SI
organization”; and to find out what they really want to do and can do. Without
claiming that this will produce a stable assurance for the future, it would at least make
it possible to bring into the open and deal with all the difficulties and discouraging
impressions that have already been noted. We still have to talk about all this until acts
permit us to shut up.
GUY DEBORD
27 July 1970
The crisis that has continually deepened in the SI in the course of the last year, and
whose roots go back much further, has ended up revealing all its aspects; and has led to a
more and more glaring increase in theoretical and practical inactivity. But the most
striking manifestation of this crisis (ultimately revealing what was precisely its
original hidden center) has been several comrades’ indifference in the face
of its concrete development, month after month. We are quite aware that no one has in any
way expressed this indifference. And that is precisely the heart of the problem,
for what we have really been experiencing, behind abstract proclamations of the contrary,
is this refusal to take any responsibility whatsoever in participating in either the
decisions or the implementation of our actual activity, even at a time when it
has been so indisputably threatened.
Considering that the SI has carried out an action that has been at least substantially
correct and that has had a great importance for the revolutionary movement of the period
ending in 1968 (though with an element of failure that we must account for); and that it
has the potential to continue to make significant contributions by lucidly
comprehending the conditions of the new period, including its own conditions of existence;
and that the deplorable position in which the SI has found itself for so many months must
not be allowed to continue — we have constituted a tendency.
Our tendency aims to break completely with the ideology of the SI and with its
corollary: the miserable vainglory that conceals and maintains inactivity and inability.
We want an exact definition of the SI organization’s collective activity and of the
democracy that is actually possible in it. And we want the actual application
of this democracy.
After everything we have seen these last several months, we reject in advance any
abstract response, any response that might still aim to simulate a comfortable
euphoria by finding nothing specific to criticize or self-criticize in the functioning
— or nonfunctioning — of a group in which so many people know so well what they
have lacked. After what we have all seen for months regarding the question of our common
activity, nothing can any longer be accepted as before: routine optimism becomes a lie,
unusable abstract generalization becomes a dodge. Several of the best situationists have
become something else; they don’t talk about what they know and they talk
about what they don’t know. We want a radical critique — a critique ad
hominem.
Without prejudging any later, more considered and serious responses they may make, we
declare our disagreement with the American comrades, who have constituted a tendency on
completely futile bases. At the present moment the infantile futility of pseudocritiques
is a bluff as unacceptable as the noble generality of pseudocontentment; both are evasions
of real criticism. Other comrades have for months never undertaken to respond in any
manner whatsoever to the mass of clearly urgent questions pointed to by facts
themselves and by the first, and increasingly specific, written critiques
that we have been formulating for months. The very terrain of the scandal and of its
denunciation have expanded together and any silence makes one directly
complicitous in all the deficiencies. Let no one believe in our naïveté, as if we were
putting forward here some new exhortation aimed at arousing the members against some
incomprehensible and paralyzing fatality — an exhortation that would meet with the
same absence of response as all the preceding ones! We are quite aware that some of you
have not wanted to respond.
This shameful silence is going to stop immediately because we demand, in the
name of the rights and duties given us by the SI’s past and present, that each member
accept his responsibilities right now.
At this stage there is obviously no need to reiterate the central questions regarding
which we await responses. Everyone is aware of them and they have already been put in
writing. Let us simply say that we will naturally accept no response that is in
contradiction with the actual practice of the person who formulates it.
If certain members have hidden goals different from ours, we want those goals
to be brought out into the open and to be expressed, as they should be naturally, in
distinct actions carried out under distinct responsibilities. And if anyone doesn’t have
any real goals, as strange as it seems to us that anyone would want to conserve the
miserable status quo ante, let us only say that we will not contribute to
covering for some glorified pseudocommunity of “retired thinkers” or unemployed
revolutionaries.
Our tendency is addressing this declaration to all present members of the SI without
distinction or exception. We want it to be clearly understood that we are not seeking the
exclusion of anyone (and much less will we be satisfied with the exclusion of some
scapegoat). But since we consider it very unlikely that a genuine accord can be arrived at
so belatedly among everyone, we are prepared for any split, the dividing lines of
which will be determined by the forthcoming discussion. In that eventuality we will for
our part do everything possible to make such a split take place under the most proper
conditions, particularly by maintaining an absolute respect for truth in any future
polemics, just as all of us have together maintained this truthfulness in all the
circumstances in which the SI has acted until now.
Considering that the crisis has attained a level of extreme gravity, we henceforth
reserve the right — in accordance with Article 8 of the statutes voted at Venice
— to make our positions known outside the SI.
DEBORD, RIESEL, VIÉNET
Paris, 11 November 1970
(excerpts)
Comrades,
In casting back into their nothingness the contemplatives and incompetents who counted
on a perpetual membership in the SI, we have taken a great step forward. We must continue
to advance; because now an era is over for the SI too, and is better
understood. The undeniable success that we have registered in this case was so easy,
and so belated, that certainly no one will think we have the right to settle back
for a few weeks to gloat over it. Yet already over the last few weeks a certain lethargy
has begun to manifest itself again (without, in my opinion, any longer having the previous
excuses or semi-justifications) when it comes to developing our present positions. [...]
1) The SI recently was in danger of becoming not only inactive and ridiculous, but
cooptive and counterrevolutionary. The lies multiplying within it were beginning to have a
mystifying and disarming effect outside. The SI could, in the very name of its exemplary
actions in the previous period, have become the latest form of revolutionary
spectacle, and you know those who would have liked to maintain this role for another
ten or twenty years.
2) The process of alienation gone through by various past emancipatory endeavors (from
the Communist League to the FAI, or even, if this comparison should also be evoked in our
case, surrealism) was followed by the SI in all its easily recognizable forms: theoretical
paralysis; “party patriotism”; lying silence on increasingly evident faults;
imperious dogmatism; wooden language addressed to the miners of Kiruna — still rather
far off, fortunately — and to Iberian exiles; invisible titles of ownership possessed
by little cliques or individuals over one or another sector of our relations or
activities, on the basis of their being “SI members” (like people used to invoke
the privileges of being a “Roman citizen”); ideology and dishonesty. Naturally
this process took place this time in the present historical conditions, that is
to say, to a large extent in the very conditions created by the SI; so that many features
of past alienations were precluded. This set of conditions could have made a
counterrevolutionary subversion of the SI all the more dangerous if it had succeeded, but
at the same time it made such a success difficult. I think that this danger virtually no
longer exists: We have so well smashed the SI in the preceding months that there
is scarcely any chance that that title and image could become harmful by
falling into bad hands. The situationist movement — in the broad sense of the word
— is now diffused more or less everywhere. And any of us, as well as some of the
excluded members, could at any time, in the name of the SI’s past and of the radical
positions presently needing to be developed, speak by himself to the
revolutionary current that listens to us; but that is precisely what Vaneigem will be
unable to do.(3) On the other hand, if a neo-Nashist
regrouping dared to form, a single pamphlet of 20 pages would suffice to demolish it. To
smash the SI and reduce to nothing the dubious pretensions that would have been able to
preserve it as an alienated and alienating model — this had become at least
our most urgent revolutionary duty. On the basis of these new measures of security we have
fortunately implemented, we can now probably do better.
3) The SI had (and still has, but fortunately with less of a monopoly on it) the most
radical theory of its time. On the whole it knew how to formulate it, disseminate it and
defend it. It often was able to struggle well in practice; and some of us have
often even been capable of conducting our personal lives in line with that theory (which
was, moreover, a necessary condition to enable us to formulate its main points). But the
SI has not applied its own theory in the very activity of the formulation of that
theory or in the general conditions of its struggle. The partisans of the
SI’s positions have for the most part not been their creators or their real agents.
They were only more official and more pretentious pro-situs. This has been the SI’s
main fault (avoidable or not?). To have gone so long without being aware of it has been
its worst error (and to speak for myself, my worst error). If this attitude had
prevailed, it would have been the SI’s ultimate crime. As an organization, the SI has
partly failed; and this has been the part in which it has failed. It was thus
necessary to apply to the SI the critique it had applied, often so well, to the dominant
modern society. (It could be said that we were rather well organized to propagate our
program, but not our organizational program.)
4) The numerous deficiencies that have marked the SI were invariably produced
by individuals who needed the SI in order to personally be something; and that
something was never the real, revolutionary activity of the SI, but its opposite. At the
same time, they praised the SI to the extreme, both to make it seem that they subsisted in
it like fish in water and to give the impression that their personal extremism was above
any vulgar corroboration of facts and acts. And yet the alternative has always been quite
simple: either we are fundamentally equal (and prove it) or we are not even comparable.
As for us here, we can take part in the SI only if we don’t need it. We must
first of all be self-sufficient; then, secondarily, we may lucidly combine our specific
(and specified) desires and possibilities for a collective action which, on that
condition, may be the correct continuation of the SI [...]
GUY DEBORD
28 January 1971
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. The SI members mentioned in these texts by their first names are
Guy Debord, Mustapha Khayati, Attila Kotányi, René Riesel, Paolo Salvadori, Gianfranco
Sanguinetti, Raoul Vaneigem, Tony Verlaan and René-Donatien Viénet.
2. pro-situ: pejorative term referring to active or passive
followers of the SI. See Debord and Sanguinetti’s “Theses on the SI and Its
Time” ##25-38, in La véritable scission dans l’Internationale.
3. Raoul Vaneigem resigned from the SI on 14 November 1970 in
response to the Debord-Riesel-Viénet “Declaration.” His letter of resignation,
along with the SI’s “Communiqué Concerning Vaneigem,” is reproduced in La
véritable scission. Vaneigem has since written a number of books, but they are not
on the same level as his SI writings.
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the versions in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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