[D66] S.I.: On the Poverty of Student Life (1966)

[Nord]

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Poverty_of_Student_Life


      Pamphlet


    /On the Poverty of Student Life:
    considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and
    particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy/

*


      byU.N.E.F. Strasbourg
      <http://library.nothingness.org/authors.php3?id=6>

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*

    /First published in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg by students
    of the university and members of the Internationale Situationniste./

    /A few students elected to the student union printed 10,000 copies
    with university funds. The copies were distributed at the official
    ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. The student
    union was promptly closed by court order. The judge's summation is
    reproducedhere
    <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#>./

We might very well say, and no one would disagree with us, that the 
student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from 
the priest and the policeman. Naturally he is usually attacked from the 
wrong point of view, with specious reasons derived from the ruling 
ideology. He may be worth the contempt of a true revolutionary, yet a 
revolutionary critique of the student situation is currently taboo on 
the official Left. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism 
repress the obvious--that what is wrong with the students is also what 
is wrong with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind 
enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia (from/Les Temps 
Modernes/to/L'Express/) prostrates itself before the so-called "rise of 
the student" and the declining bureaucracies of the Left (from the 
"Communist" party to the Stalinist National Union of Students) bids 
noisily for his moral and material support.

There are reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all provided 
by the present form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. We shall 
use this pamphlet for denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by 
one, on the principle that the end of alienation is only reached by the 
straight and narrow path of alienation itself.

Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue. The 
surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or 
economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false 
categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve 
what is most needed--a view of modern society as a whole. Fourier 
denounced their error long ago as the attempt to apply scientific laws 
to the basic assumptions of the science ("porter régulièrement sur les 
questions primordiales"). Everything is said about our society except 
what it is, and the nature of its two basic principles--the commodity 
and the spectacle. The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, 
and the details consign the totality to oblivion.

Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a 
general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a 
provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element 
in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form 
of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive 
societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off 
from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his 
present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and 
the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event "in the future." 
Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into 
his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, 
the present is a mystic trance.

At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official 
truths of "economic life." But for very simple reasons: looked at 
economically, student life is a hard one. In our society of abundance," 
he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above 
the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer 
Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of 
capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular 
societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. 
Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices and authority of 
the family to become part of the market even before he is adolescent: at 
fifteen he has all the delights of being directly exploited. In contrast 
the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile 
paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring occasional brushes with 
his family, but in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be 
treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his education. (If 
ever they stop screwing his arse off, it's only to come round and kick 
him in the balls.)

"There is no student problem." Student passivity is only the most 
obvious symptom of a general state of affairs, for each sector of social 
life has been subdued by a similar imperialism.

Our social thinkers have a bad conscience about the student problem, but 
only because the real problem is the poverty and servitude of all. But 
we have different reasons to despise the student and all his works. What 
is unforgivable is not so much his actual misery but his complaisance in 
the face of the misery of others. For him there is only one real 
alienation: his own. He is a full-time and happy consumer of that 
commodity, hoping to arouse at least our pity, since he cannot claim our 
interest. By the logic of modern capitalism, most students can only 
become mere/petits cadres/(with the same function in neo-capitalism as 
the skilled worker had in the nineteenth-century economy). The student 
really knows how miserable will be that golden future which is supposed 
to make up for the shameful poverty of the present. In the face of that 
knowledge, he prefers to dote on the present and invent an imaginary 
prestige for himself. After all, there will be no magical compensation 
for present drabness: tomorrow will be like yesterday, lighting these 
fools the way to dusty death. Not unnaturally he takes refuge in an 
unreal present.

The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, 
the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the 
University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, 
apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful 
systems of social control: the family and the State. He is their 
well-behaved and grateful child, and like the submissive child he is 
overeager to please. He celebrates all the values and mystifications of 
the system, devouring them with all the anxiety of the infant at the 
breast. Once, the old illusions had to be imposed on an aristocracy of 
labour; the/petits cadres/-to-be ingest them willingly under the guise 
of culture.

There are various forms of compensation for poverty. The total poverty 
of ancient societies produced the grandiose compensation of religion. 
The student's poverty by contrast is a marginal phenomenon, and he casts 
around for compensations among the most down-at-heel images of the 
ruling class. He is a bore who repairs the old jokes of an alienated 
culture. Even as an ideologist, he is always out of date. One and all, 
his latest enthusiasms were ridiculous thirty years ago.

Once upon a time the universities were respected; the student persists 
in the belief that he is lucky to be there. But he arrived too late. The 
bygone excellence of bourgeois culture (By this we mean the culture of a 
Hegel or of the/encyclopédistes,/rather than the Sorbonne and the Ecole 
Normale Supérieure.) has vanished. A mechanically produced specialist is 
now the goal of the "educational system." A modern economic system 
demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been 
rendered incapable of thinking. Hence the decline of the universities 
and the automatic nullity of the student once he enters its portals. The 
university has become a society for the propagation of ignorance; "high 
culture" has taken on the rhythm of the production line; without 
exception, university teachers are cretins, men who would get the bird 
from any audience of schoolboys. But all this hardly matters: the 
important thing is to go on listening respectfully. In time, if critical 
thinking is repressed with enough conscientiousness, the student will 
come to partake of the wafer of knowledge, the professor will tell him 
the final truths of the world. Till then--a menopause of the spirit. As 
a matter of course the future revolutionary society will condemn the 
doings of lecture theatre and faculty as mere noise--socially 
undesirable. The student is already a very bad joke.

The student is blind to the obvious--that even his closed world is 
changing. The "crisis of the university"--that detail of a more general 
crisis of modern capitalism--is the latest fodder for the deaf-mute 
dialogue of the specialists. This "crisis" is simple to understand: the 
difficulties of a specialised sector which is adjusting(too late) to a 
general change in the relations of production. There was once a 
vision--if an ideological one--of a liberal bourgeois university. But as 
its social base disappeared, the vision became banality. In the age of 
free-trade capitalism, when the "liberal" state left it its marginal 
freedoms, the university could still think of itself as an independent 
power. Of course it was a pure and narrow product of that society's 
needs--particularly the need to give the privileged minority an adequate 
general culture before they rejoined the ruling class (not that going up 
to university was straying very far from class confines). But the 
bitterness of the nostalgic don (No one dares any longer to speak in the 
name of nineteenth century liberalism; so they reminisce about the 
"free" and "popular" universities of the middle ages--that "democracy of 
"liberal".) is understandable: better, after all, to be the bloodhound 
of the/haute bourgeoisie/than sheepdog to the world's white-collars. 
Better to stand guard on privilege than harry the flock into their 
allotted factories and bureaux, according to the whims of the "planned 
economy". The university is becoming, fairly smoothly, the honest broker 
of technocracy and its spectacle. In the process, the purists of the 
academic Right become a pitiful sideshow, purveying their " universal" 
cultural goods to a bewildered audience of specialists.

More serious, and thus more dangerous, are the modernists of the Left 
and the Students' Union, with their talk of a "reform of University 
structure" and a "reinsertion of the University into social and economic 
life", i.e., its adaptation to the needs of modern capitalism. The 
one-time suppliers of general culture to the ruling classes, though 
still guarding their old prestige, must be converted into the 
forcing-house of a new labor aristocracy. Far from contesting the 
historical process which subordinates one of the last relatively 
autonomous social groups to the demands of the market, the progressives 
complain of delays and inefficiency in its completion. They are the 
standard-bearers of the cybernetic university of the future ( which has 
already reared its ugly head in some unlikely quarters). And they are 
the enemy: the fight against the market, which is starting again in 
earnest, means the fight against its latest lackeys.

As for the student, this struggle is fought out entirely over his head, 
somewhere in the heavenly realm of his masters. The whole of his life is 
beyond his control, and for all he sees of the world he might as well be 
on another planet. His acute economic poverty condemns him to a paltry 
form of survival. But, being a complacent creature, he parades his very 
ordinary indigence as if it were an original lifestyle: 
self-indulgently, he affects to be a Bohemian. The Bohemian solution is 
hardly viable at the best of times, and the notion that it could be 
achieved without a complete and final break with the university milieu 
is quite ludicrous. But the student Bohemian (and every student likes to 
pretend that he is a Bohemian at heart) clings to his false and degraded 
version of individual revolt. He is so "eccentric" that he 
continues--thirty years after Reich's excellent lessons--to entertain 
the most traditional forms of erotic behavior, reproducing at this level 
the general relations of class society. Where sex is concerned, we have 
learnt better tricks from elderly provincial ladies. His rent-a-crowd 
militancy for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real impotence.

The student's old-fashioned poverty, however, does put him at a 
potential advantage--if only he could see it. He does have marginal 
freedoms, a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian 
control of the spectacle. His flexible working-hours permit him 
adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom 
scares him to death: he feels safer in the straight-jacketed space-time 
of lecture hall and weekly "essay . He is quite happy with this open 
prison organized for his "benefit", and, though not constrained, as are 
most people, to separate work and leisure, he does so of his own 
accord--hypocritically proclaiming all the while his contempt for 
assiduity and grey men. He embraces every available contradiction and 
then mutters darkly about the "difficulties of communication" from the 
uterine warmth of his religious, artistic or political clique.

Driven by his freely-chosen depression, he submits himself to the 
subsidiary police force of psychiatrists set up by the avant-garde of 
repression. The university mental health clinics are run by the student 
mutual organization, which sees this institution as a grand victory for 
student unionism and social progress. Like the Aztecs who ran to greet 
Cortes's sharpshooters, and then wondered what made the thunder and why 
men fell down, the students flock to the psycho-police stations with 
their "problems".

The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate, phantastic 
compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural 
spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple. 
Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of 
Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as 
an/admiring spectator./Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He 
peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers 
from the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his 
element: he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market 
research: a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational 
preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice 
against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).

Impervious to real passions, he seeks titillation in the battles between 
his anaemic gods, the stars of a vacuous heaven: AIthusser -- 
Garaudy-Barthes -- Picard -- Lefebvre -- Levi-Strauss -- 
Halliday-deChardin -- Brassens... and between their rival theologies, 
designed like all theologies to mask the real problems by creating false 
ones: humanism -- existentialism -- scientism -- structuralism -- 
cyberneticism -- new criticism -- dialectics-of-naturism -- 
meta-philosophism...

He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen the latest happening. He 
discovers "modernity" as fast as the market can produce its ersatz 
version of long outmoded (though once important) ideas; for him, every 
rehash is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he 
eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and "difficult" 
texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an 
atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock them off. But no: 
conspicuous consumers always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he 
devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them vicariously through the gaze 
of his friends. He is an/other-directed voyeur./

His favorite reading matter is the/kitsch/press, whose task it is to 
orchestrate the consumption of cultural nothing-boxes. Docile as ever, 
the student accepts its commercial/ukases/and makes them the only 
measuring-rod of his tastes. Typically, he is a compulsive reader of 
weeklies like/le Nouvel Observateur/and/l'Express/(whose nearest English 
equivalents are the posh Sundays and/New Society/). He generally feels 
that/le Monde/--whose style he finds somewhat difficult--is a truly 
objective newspaper. And it is with such guides that he hopes to gain an 
understanding of the modern world and become a political initiate!

In France <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#>more 
than anywhere else, the student is passively content to be politicized. 
In this sphere too, he readily accepts the same alienated, spectacular 
participation. Seizing upon all the tattered remnants of a Left which 
was annihilated more than/forty years ago/by "socialist" reformism and 
Stalinist counter-revolution, he is once more guilty of an amazing 
ignorance. The Right is well aware of the defeat of the workers' 
movement, and so are the workers themselves, though more confusedly. But 
the students continue blithely to organize demonstrations which mobilize 
students and students only. This is political false consciousness in its 
virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the universities a happy 
hunting ground for the manipulators of the declining bureaucratic 
organizations. For them, it is child's play to program the student's 
political options. Occasionally there are deviationary tendencies and 
cries of "Independence!" but after a period of token resistance the 
dissidents are reincorporated into a/status quo/which they have never 
reallyradically opposed 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/4#>. The 
"Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires," whose title is a case of 
ideological falsification gone mad (they are neither young, nor 
communist, nor revolutionary), have with much brio and accompanying 
publicity defied the iron hand of the Party...but only to rally cheerily 
to the pontifical battle-cry, "Peace in Vietnam!"

The student prides himself on his opposition to the "archaic" Gaullist 
régime. But he justifies his criticism by appealing--without realizing 
it--to older and far worse crimes. His radicalism prolongs the life of 
the different currents of edulcorated Stalinism: Togliatti's, Garaudy's, 
Krushchev's, Mao's, etc. His youth is synonymous with 
appalling/naiveté/;, and his attitudes are in reality far more archaic 
than the régime's--the Gaullists do after all understand modern society 
well enough to administer it.

But the student, sad to say, is not deterred by the odd anachronism. He 
feels obliged to have general ideas on everything, to unearth a coherent 
world-view capable of lending meaning to his need for activism and 
asexual promiscuity. As a result, he falls prey to the last doddering 
missionary efforts of the churches. He rushes with atavistic ardor to 
adore the putrescent carcass of God, and cherishes all the stinking 
detritus of prehistoric religions in the tender belief that they enrich 
him and his time. Along with their sexual rivals, those elderly 
provincial ladies, the students form the social category with the 
highest percentage of admitted adherents to these archaic cults. 
Everywhere else, the priests have been either beaten off or devoured, 
but university clerics shamelessly continue to bugger thousands of 
students in their spiritual shithouses.

We must add in all fairness that there do exist students of a tolerable 
intellectual level, who without difficulty dominate the controls 
designed to check the mediocre capacity demanded from the others. They 
do so for the simple reason that they have understood the system, and so 
despise it and know themselves to be its enemies. They are in the system 
for what they can get out of it--particularly grants. Exploiting the 
contradiction which, for the moment at least, ensures the maintenance of 
a small sector--"research"--still governed by a liberal-academic rather 
than a technocratic rationality, they calmly carry the germs of sedition 
to the highest level: their open contempt for the organization is the 
counterpart of a lucidity which enables them to outdo the system's 
lackeys, intellectually and otherwise. Such students cannot fail to 
become theorists of the coming revolutionary movement. For the moment, 
they make no secret of the fact that what they take so easily from the 
system shall be used for its overthrow.

The student, if he rebels at all, must first rebel against his studies, 
though the necessity of this initial move is felt less spontaneously by 
him than by the worker, who intuitively identifies his work with his 
total condition. At the same time, since the student is a product of 
modern society just like Godard or Coca-Cola, his extreme alienation can 
only be fought through the struggle against this whole society. It is 
clear that the university can in no circumstances become the 
battlefield; the student, insofar as he defines himself as such, 
manufactures a pseudo-value which must become an obstacle to any clear 
consciousness of the reality of his dispossession. The best criticism of 
student life is the behavior of the rest of youth, who have already 
started to revolt. Their rebellion has become one of the/signs/of a 
fresh struggle against modern society.

After years of slumber and permanent counterrevolution, there are signs 
of a new period of struggle, with youth as the new carriers of 
revolutionary infection. But the society of the spectacle paints its own 
picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological 
categories on the world and its history. Fear is the very last response. 
For everything that happens is reassuringly part of the natural order of 
things. Real historical changes, which show that this society can 
be/superseded/, are reduced to the status of novelties, processed for 
mere consumption. The revolt of youth against an imposed and "given" way 
of life is the first sign of a total subversion. It is the prelude to a 
period of revolt--the revolt of those who can no longer/live/in our 
society. Faced with a danger, ideology and its daily machinery perform 
the usual inversion of reality. An historical process becomes a 
pseudo-category of some socio-natural science: the Idea of Youth.


Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth; every 
generation espouses "good causes," only to forget them when "the young 
man begins the serious business of production and is given concrete and 
real social aims," After the social scientists come the journalists with 
their verbal inflation. The revolt is contained by overexposure: we are 
given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In the 
spectacle, a revolution becomes a social aberration--in other words a 
social safety valve--which has its part to play in the smooth working of 
the system. It reassures because it remains a marginal phenomenon, in 
the apartheid of the temporary problems of a healthy pluralism (compare 
and contrast the "woman question" and the "problem of racialism"). In 
reality, if there is a problem of youth in modern capitalism it is part 
of the total crisis of that society. It is just that youthfeels 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/140#>the crisis 
most acutely.

Youth and its mock freedoms are the purest products of modern society. 
Their modernity consists in the choice they are offered and are already 
making: total integration to neo-capitalism, or the most radical 
refusal. What is surprising is not that youth is in revolt but that its 
elders are so soporific. But the reason is history, not biology-- the 
previous generation lived through the defeats and were sold the lies of 
the long, shameful disintegration of the revolutionary movement.

In itself Youth is a publicity myth, and as part of the new "social 
dynamism" it is the potential ally of the capitalist mode of production. 
The illusory primacy of youth began with the economic recovery after the 
second world war. Capital was able to strike a new bargain with labor: 
in return for the mass production of a new class of manipulable 
consumers, the worker was offered a role which gave him full membership 
of the spectacular society. This at least was the ideal social model, 
though as usual it bore little relation to socio-economic reality (which 
lagged behind the consumer ideology). The revolt of youth was the first 
burst of anger at the persistent realities of the new world--the boredom 
of everyday existence, the dead life which is still the essential 
product of modern capitalism, in spite of all its modernizations. A 
small section of youth is able to refuse that society and its products, 
but without any idea that this society can be superseded. They opt for a 
nihilist present. Yet the destruction of capitalism is once again a real 
issue, an event in history, a process which has already begun. Dissident 
youth must achieve the coherence of a critical theory, and the practical 
organization of that coherence.

At the most primitive level, the "delinquents" (/blousons noirs/) of the 
world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile 
options, But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance 
of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are its 
products--negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable, All the 
experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first 
side-effects of the new urbanism; of the disintegration of all values; 
of the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the 
growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist 
po- lice force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has 
lost all significance.

The "young thug" despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the 
spectacle offers him-- but/now/, with no down payment. This is the 
essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may try for a 
real freedom in the use of his time, in an individual assertiveness, 
even in the construction of a kind of community. But the contradiction 
remains, and kills. (On the fringe of society, where poverty reigns, the 
gang develops its own hierarchy, which can only fulfill itself in a war 
with other gangs, isolating each group and each individual within the 
group.) In the end the contradiction proves unbearable. Either the lure 
of the product world proves too strong, and the hooligan decides to do 
his honest day's work: to this end a whole sector of production is 
devoted specifically to his recuperation. Clothes, records, guitars, 
scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of the 
consumer. Or else he is forced to attack the laws of the market 
itself--either in the primary sense, by stealing, or by a move towards a 
conscious revolutionary critique of commodity society. For the 
delinquent only two futures are possible: revolutionary consciousness, 
or blind obedience on the shop floor.

The/Provos/are the first organization of delinquency--they have given 
the delinquent experience its first political form. They are an alliance 
of two distinct elements: a handful of careerists from the degenerate 
world of "art," and a mass of beatniks looking for a new activity. The 
artists contributed the idea of the game, though still dressed up in 
various threadbare ideological garments. The delinquents had nothing to 
offer but the violence of their rebellion. From the start the two 
tendencies hardly mixed: the pre-ideological mass found itself under the 
Bolshevik "guidance" of the artistic ruling class, who justified and 
maintained their power by an ideology of provo-democracy. At the moment 
when the sheer violence of the delinquent had become an idea--an attempt 
to destroy art and go beyond it--the violence was channeled into the 
crassest neo-artistic reformism. The Proves are an aspect of the last 
reformism produced by modern capitalism: the reformism of everyday life. 
Like Bernstein, with his vision of socialism built by tinkering with 
capitalism, the Provo hierarchy think they can change everyday life by a 
few well-chosen improvements. What they fail to realize is that the 
banality of everyday life is not incidental, but/the central mechanism 
and product of modern capitalism/. To destroy it, nothing less is needed 
than all-out revolution. The Proves choose the fragmentary and end by 
accepting the totality.

To give themselves a base, the leaders have concocted the paltry 
ideology of the provotariat (a politico-artistic salad knocked up from 
the leftovers of a feast they had never known). The new provotariat is 
supposed to oppose the passive and "bourgeois" proletariat, still 
worshipped in obscure Leftist shrines. Because they despair of the fight 
for a/total/change in society, they despair of the only forces which can 
bring about that change. The proletariat is the motor of capitalist 
society, and thus its mortal enemy: everything is designed for its 
suppression (parties; trade union bureaucracies; the police; the 
colonization of all aspects of everyday life) because it is the only 
really menacing force. The Proves hardly try to understand any of this; 
and without a critique of the system of production, they remain its 
servants. In the end an' anti-union workers demonstration sparked off 
the real conflict. The Prove base went back to direct violence, leaving 
their bewildered leaders to denounce "excesses" and appeal to pacifist 
sentiments. The Proves, who had talked of provoking authority to reveal 
its repressive character, finished by complaining that they had been 
provoked by the police. So much for their pallid anarchism.

It is true that the Provo base became revolutionary in practice. But to 
invent a revolutionary consciousness their first task is to destroy 
their leaders, to rally the objective revolutionary forces of the 
proletariat, and to drop the Constants and deVries of this world (one 
the favorite artist of the Dutch royal family, the ether a failed M.P. 
and admirer of the English police). There is a modern revolution, and 
one of its bases could be the Proves--but only without their leaders and 
ideology. If they want to change the world, they must get rid of these 
who are content to paint it white.

Idle reader, your cry of "What about Berkeley?" escapes us not. True, 
American society/needs/its students; and by revolting against their 
studies they have automatically called that society in question. From 
the start they have seen their revolt against the university hierarchy 
as a revolt against/the whole hierarchical system/, the dictatorship of 
the economy and the State. Their refusal to become an integrated part of 
the commodity economy, to put their specialized studies to their obvious 
and inevitable use, is a revolutionary gesture. It puts in doubt that 
whole system of production which alienates activity and its products 
from their creators. For all its confusion and hesitancy, the American 
student movement has discovered one truth of the new refusal: that a 
coherent revolutionary alternative can and must be found/within/the 
"affluent society." The movement is still fixated on two relatively 
accidental aspects of the American crisis--the Negroes and Vietnam--and 
the mini-groups of the New Left suffer from the fact. There is an 
authentic whiff of democracy in their chaotic organization, but what 
they lack is a genuine subversive content. Without it they continually 
fall into dangerous contradictions. They may be hostile to the 
traditional politics of the old parties; but the hostility is futile, 
and will be recuperated, so long as it is based on ignorance of the 
political system and naive illusions about the world 
situation./Abstract/opposition to their own society produces facile 
sympathy with its apparent enemies-- the so-called Socialist 
bureaucracies of China and Cuba. A group like Resurgence Youth Movement 
can in the same breath condemn the State and praise the "Cultural 
Revolution"--that pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine 
bureaucracy of modern times.

At the same time, these organizations, with their blend of libertarian, 
political and religious tendencies, are always liable to the obsession 
with "group dynamics" which leads to the closed world of the sect. The 
mass consumption of drugs is the expression of a real poverty and a 
protest against it; but it remains a false search for "freedom" within a 
world dedicated to repression, a religious critique of a world that has 
no need for religion, least of all a new one. The beatniks--that right 
wing of the youth revolt--are the main purveyors of an ideological 
"refusal" combined with an acceptance of the most fantastic 
superstitions (Zen, spiritualism, "New Church" mysticism, and the stale 
porridge of Ghandi-ism and humanism). Worse still, in their search for a 
revolutionary program the American students fall into the same bad faith 
as the Provos, and proclaim themselves "the most exploited class in our 
society." They must understand one thing: there are no "special" student 
interests in revolution. Revolution will be made by all the victims of 
encroaching repression and the tyranny of the market.

An for the East, bureaucratic totalitarianism is beginning to produce 
its own forces of negation. Nowhere is the revolt of youth more violent 
and more savagely repressed--the rising tide of press denunciation and 
the new police measures against "hooliganism" are proof enough. A 
section of youth, so the right-minded "socialist" functionaries tell us, 
have no respect for moral and family order (which still flourishes there 
in its most detestable bourgeois forms). They prefer "debauchery," 
despise work and even disobey the party police. The USSR has set up a 
special ministry to fight the new delinquency.

Alongside this diffuse revolt a more specific opposition is emerging. 
Groups and clandestine reviews rise and fall with the barometer of 
police repression. So far the most important has been the publication of 
the "open letter to the Polish Workers Party" by the young Poles Kuron 
and Modzelewski, which affirmed the necessity of "abolishing the present 
system of production and social relations" and that to do this 
"revolution is unavoidable." The Eastern intellectuals have one great 
task--to make conscious the concrete critical action of the workers of 
East Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest: the proletarian critique of the 
dictatorship of the bureaucracy. In the East the problem is not to 
define the aims of revolution, but to learn how to fight for them. In 
the West struggle may be easy, but the goals are left obscure or 
ideological; in the Eastern bureaucracies there are no illusions about 
what is being fought for: hence the bitterness of the struggle. What is 
difficult is to devise the forms revolution must take in the immediate 
future.

In Britain, the revolt of youth found its first expression in the peace 
movement. It was never a whole-hearted struggle, with the misty 
non-violence of the Committee of 100 as its most daring program, At its 
strongest the Committee could call 300,000 demonstrators on to the 
streets, It had its finest hour in Spring 1963 with the "Spies for 
Peace" scandal. But it had already entered on a definitive decline: for 
want of a theory the unilateralists fell among the traditional Left or 
were recuperated by the Pacifist conscience.

What is left is the enduring (quintessentially English) archaisms in the 
control of everyday life, and the accelerating decomposition of the old 
secular values. These could still produce a total critique of the new 
life; but the revolt of youth needs allies. The British working class 
remains one of the most militant in the world. Its struggles--the shop 
stewards movement and the growing tempo and bitterness of wildcat 
strikes--will be a permanent sore on an equally permanent capitalism 
until it regains its revolutionary perspective, and seeks common cause 
with the/new/opposition. The/débâcle/of Laborism makes that alliance all 
the more possible and all the more necessary. If it came about, the 
explosion could destroy the old society--the Amsterdam riots would be 
child's play in comparison. Without it, both sides of the revolution can 
only be stillborn: practical needs will find no genuine revolutionary 
form, and rebellious discharge will ignore the only forces that drive 
and can therefore destroy modern capitalism.

Japan is the only industrialized country where this fusion of student 
youth and working class militants has already taken place.

/Zengakuren/, the organization of revolutionary students, and the/League 
of Young Marxist Workers/joined to form the backbone of the/Communist 
Revolutionary League./The movement is already setting and solving the 
new problems of revolutionary organization. Without illusions, it fights 
both western capitalism and the bureaucracies of the so-called socialist 
states. Without hierarchies, it groups together several thousand 
students and workers on a democratic basis, and aims at the 
participation of every member in all the activities of the organization.

They are the first to carry the struggle on to the streets, holding fast 
to a real revolutionary program, and with a mass participation. 
Thousands of workers and students have waged a violent struggle with the 
Japanese police. In many ways the C.R.L. lacks a complete and concrete 
theory of the two systems it fights with such ferocity. It has not yet 
defined the precise nature of bureaucratic exploitation, and it has 
hardly formulated the character of modern capitalism, the critique of 
everyday life and the critique of the spectacle. The Communist 
Revolutionary League is still fundamentally an 
avant-garde/political/organization, the heir of the best features of the 
classic proletarian movement. But it is at present the most important 
group in the world--and should henceforth be one of the poles of 
discussion and a rallying point for the new proletarian critique.

"To be avant-garde means to keep abreast of reality" (/Internationale 
Situationniste/8). A radical critique of the modern world must have the 
totality as its object and objective. Its searchlight must reveal the 
world's real past, its present existence and the prospects for its 
transformation as an/indivisible whole/. If we are to reach the whole 
truth about the modern world--and/a fortori/if we are to formulate the 
project of its total subversion--we must be able to expose its/hidden 
history;/in concrete terms this means subjecting the history of the 
international revolutionary movement, as set in motion over a century 
ago by the western proletariat, to a demystified and critical scrutiny.

"This movement against the total organization of the old world came to a 
stop long ago" (/Internationale Situationniste/1)./It failed/. Its last 
historical appearance was in the Spanish social revolution, crushed in 
the Barcelona "May Days" of 1937. Yet its so-called "victories" and 
"defeats," if judged in the light of their historical consequences, tend 
to confirm Liebknecht's remark, the day before his assassination, that 
"some defeats are really victories, while some victories are more 
shameful than any defeat." Thus the first great "failure" of workers' 
power, the Paris Commune, is in fact its first great/success/, whereby 
the primitive proletariat proclaimed its historical capacity to organize 
all aspects of social life/freely/. And the Bolshevik revolution, hailed 
as the proletariat's first great triumph, turns out in the last analysis 
to be its most disastrous defeat.

The installation of the Bolshevik order coincides with the crushing of 
the Spartakists by the German "Social-Democrats." The joint victory of 
Bolshevism and reformism constitutes a unity masked by an apparent 
incompatibility, for the Bolshevik order too, as it transpired, was to 
be a variation on the old theme. The effects of the Russian 
counter-revolution were, internally, the institution and development of 
a new mode of exploitation, bureaucratic state capitalism, and 
externally, the growth of the "Communist" International, whose spreading 
branches served the unique purpose of defending and reproducing the 
rotten trunk. Capitalism, under its bourgeois and bureaucratic guises, 
won a new lease of life--over the dead bodies of the sailors of 
Kronstadt, the Ukrainian peasants, and the workers of Berlin, Kiel, 
Turin, Shanghai, and Barcelona.

The Third International, apparently created by the Bolsheviks to combat 
the degenerate reformism of its predecessor, and to unite the 
avant-garde of the proletariat in "revolutionary communist parties," was 
too closely linked to the interests of its founders ever to serve an 
authentic socialist revolution. Despite all its polemics, the third 
International was a chip off the old block. The Russian model was 
rapidly imposed on the Western workers' organizations, and the evolution 
of both was thenceforward one and the same thing. The totalitarian 
dictatorship of the bureaucratic class over the Russian proletariat 
found its echo in the subjection of the great mass of workers in other 
countries to castes of trade union and political functionaries, with 
their own private interests in repression. While the Stalinist monster 
haunted the working-class consciousness, old-fashioned capitalism was 
becoming bureaucratized and overdeveloped, resolving its famous internal 
contradictions and proudly claiming this victory to be decisive, Today, 
though the unity is obscured by apparent variations and oppositions, a 
single social form is coming to dominate the world--this modern world 
which it proposes to govern with the principles of a world long dead and 
gone. The tradition of the dead generations still weighs like a 
nightmare on the minds of the living.

Opposition to the world offered from within--and in its own terms--by 
supposedly revolutionary organisations, can only be spurious. Such 
opposition, depending on the worst mystifications and calling on more or 
less reified ideologies, helps consolidate the social order. Trade 
unions and political parties created by the working class as tools of 
its emancipation are now no more than the "checks and balances" of the 
system. Their leaders have made these organizations their private 
property; their stepping stone to a role within the ruling class. The 
party program or the trade union statute may contain vestiges of 
revolutionary phraseology, but their practice is everywhere 
reformist--and doubly so now that official capitalist ideology mouths 
the same reformist slogans. Where the unions have seized power--in 
countries more backward than Russia in 1917--the Stalinist model of 
counterrevolutionary totalitarianism has been faithfullyreproduced 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#>. Elsewhere, 
they have become astatic complement to the self-regulation of managerial 
capitalism. 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#>The official 
organizations have become the best guarantee of repression--without this 
"opposition" the humanist-democratic facade of the system would collapse 
and its essential violence would be laid bare.

In the struggle with the militant proletariat, these organizations are 
the unfailing defenders of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and the 
docile creatures of its foreign policy. They are the bearers of the most 
blatant falsehood in a world of lies, working diligently for the 
perennial and universal dictatorship of the State and the Economy. As 
the situationists put it, "a universally dominant social system, tending 
toward totalitarian self-regulation, is apparently being resisted--but 
only apparently-- by false forms of opposition which remain trapped on 
the battlefield ordained by the system itself. Such illusory resistance 
can only serve to reinforce what it pretends to attack. Bureaucratic 
pseudo-socialism is only the most grandiose of these guises of the old 
world of hierarchy and alienated labor."

As for student unionism, it is nothing but the travesty of a travesty, 
the useless burlesque of a trade unionism itself long totally degenerate.

The principal platitude of all future revolutionary organization must be 
the theoretical and practical denunciation of Stalinism in all its 
forms. In France at least, where economic backwardness has slowed down 
the consciousness of crisis, the only possible road is over the ruins of 
Stalinism. It must become the/delenda est Carthag/o of the last 
revolution of prehistory.

Revolution must break with its past, and derive all its poetry from the 
future. little groups of "militants" who claim to represent the 
authentic Bolshevik heritage are voices from beyond the grave. These 
angels come to avenge the "betrayal" of the October Revolution will 
always support the defense of the USSR--if only "in the last instance." 
The "under- developed" nations are their promised land. They can 
scarcely sustain their illusions outside this context, where their 
objective role is to buttress theoretical underdevelopment. They 
struggle for the dead body of "Trotsky," invent a thousand variations on 
the same ideological theme, and end up with the same brand of practical 
and theoretical impotence. Forty years of counter-revolution separate 
these groups from the Revolution; since this is not 192O they can only 
be wrong (and they were already wrong in 192O).

Consider the fate of an ultra-Leftist group like/Socialisme ou 
Barbarie/, where after the departure of a "traditional Marxist" faction 
(the impotent/Pouvoir Ouvrier/) a core of revolutionary "modernists" 
under Cardan disintegrated and disappeared within 18 months. While the 
old categories are no longer revolutionary, a rejection of Marxism à la 
Cardan is no substitute for the reinvention of a total critique. The 
Scylla and Charybdis of present revolutionary action are the museum of 
revolutionary prehistory and the modernism of the system itself.

As for the various anarchist groups, they possess nothing beyond a 
pathetic and ideological faith in this label. They justify every kind of 
self-contradiction in liberal terms: freedom of speech, of opinion, and 
other such bric-a-brac. Since they tolerate each other, they would 
tolerate anything.

The predominant social system, which flatters itself on its 
modernization and its permanence, must now be confronted with a worthy 
enemy: the equally modern negative forces which it produces. Let the 
dead bury their dead, The advance of history has a practical 
demystifying effect--it helps exorcise the ghosts which haunt the 
revolutionary consciousness, Thus the revolution of everyday life comes 
face to face with the enormity of its task. The revolutionary project 
must be reinvented, as much as the life it announces. If the project is 
still essentially the/abolition/of class/society/, it is because the 
material conditions upon which revolution was based are still with us. 
But revolution must be conceived with a new coherence and a new 
radicalism, starting with a clear grasp of the failure of those who 
first began it. Otherwise its/fragmentary/realization will bring about 
only a new division of society.

The fight between the powers-that-be and the new proletariat can only be 
in terms of the totality. And for this reason the future revolutionary 
movement must be purged of any tendency to reproduce within itself the 
alienation produced by thecommodity system 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#>; it must be 
the/living/critique of that system and the negation of it, carrying all 
the elements essential for its transcendence. As Lukacs correctly 
showed, revolutionary organization is this necessary mediation between 
theory and practice, between men and history, between the Dams of 
workers and the proletariat/constituted as a class/(Lukacs' mistake was 
to believe that the Boleheviks fulfilled this role). If they are to be 
real- iced in practice "theoretical" tendencies or differences must be 
translated into organizational problems, It is by its present 
organization that a new revolutionary movement will stand or fall. The 
final criterion of its coherence will be the compatibility of its actual 
form with its essential project--/the international and absolute power 
of Workers' Councils/as foreshadowed by the proletarian revolutions of 
the last hundred years. There can be no compromise with the foundations 
of existing society--the system of commodity production; ideology in all 
its guises; the State; and the imposed division of labor from leisure.

The rock on which the old revolutionary movement foundered was the 
separation of theory and practice. Only at the supreme moments of 
struggle did the proletariat supersede this division and attain their 
truth. As a rule the principle seems to have been/hic Rhodus hic non 
salta./Ideology, however "revolutionary," always serves the ruling 
class; false consciousness is the alarm signal revealing the presence of 
the enemy fifth column. The lie is the essential produce of the world of 
alienation, and the most effective killer of revolutions: once an 
organization which claims the/social truth/adopts the lie as a tactic, 
its revolutionary career is finished.

All the positive aspects of the Workers' Councils must be already there 
in an organization which aims at their realization. All relics of the 
Leninist theory of organization must be fought and destroyed. The 
spontaneous creation of Soviets by the Russian workers in 1905 was in 
itself a practical critique of thatbaneful theory 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#>, yet the 
Bolsheviks continued to claim that working-class spontaneity could not 
go beyond "trade union consciousness" and would be unable to grasp the 
"totality." This was no less than a decapitation of the proletariat so 
that the Party could place itself "at the head" of the Revolution. If 
once you dispute the proletariat's capacity to emancipate itself, as 
Lenin did so ruthlessly, then you deny its capacity to organize all 
aspects of a post-revolutionary society. In such a context, the slogan 
"All Power to the Soviets" meant nothing more then the subjection of the 
Soviets to the Party, and the installation of the Party State in place 
of the temporary "State" of the armed masses.

"All Power to the Soviets" is/still/the slogan, but this time without 
the Bolshevik afterthoughts. The proletariat can only play the/game/of 
revolution if the stakes are the whole world, for the only possible form 
of workers' power--generalized and complete autogestion--can be shared 
with nobody. Workers' control is the abolition of all authority: it can 
abide no limitation, geographical or otherwise: any compromise amounts 
to surrender, "Workers' control must be the means and the end of the 
struggle: it is at once the goal of that struggle end itsadequate form." 
<http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141#>

A/total/critique of the world is the guarantee of the realism and 
reality of a revolutionary organization. To tolerate the existence of an 
oppressive social system in one place or another, simply because it is 
packaged and sold as revolutionary, is to condone universal oppression. 
To accept alienation as inevitable in any one domain of social life is 
to resign oneself to reification in all its forms. It is not enough to 
favor Workers' Councils in the abstract; in concrete terms they mean the 
abolition of commodities and therefore of the proletariat. Despite their 
superficial disparities, all existing societies are governed by the 
logic of commodities-- and the commodity is the basis of their dreams of 
self-regulation. This famous fetishism is still the/essential/obstacle 
to a total emancipation, to the free construction of social life. In the 
world of commodities, external and invisible forces direct men's 
actions; autonomous action directed towards clearly perceived goals is 
impossible. The strength of economic laws lies in their ability to take 
on the appearance of natural ones, but it is also their weakness, for 
their effectiveness thus depends/only/on "the lack of consciousness of 
those who help create them."

The market has one central principle--the loss of self in the aimless 
and unconscious creation of a world beyond the control of its creators. 
The revolutionary core of autogestion is the attack on this principle. 
Autogestion/is/conscious direction by all of their whole existence, It 
is not some vision of a workers' control/of the market/, which is merely 
to choose one's own alienation, to program one's own survival (squaring 
the capitalist circle". The task of the Workers' Councils will not be 
the autogestion of the world which exists, but its continual qualitative 
transformation. The commodity and its laws (that vast detour in the 
history of man's production of him- self) will be superseded by a new 
social form.

With autogestion ends one of the fundamental splits in modern 
society--between a labor which becomes increasingly reified end a 
"leisure" consumed in passivity. The death of the commodity naturally 
means the suppression of/work/and its replacement by a new type of free 
activity. Without this firm intention, socialist groups like/Socialisme 
ou Barbarie/or/Pouvoir Ouvrier/fell back on a reformism of labor couched 
in demands for its "humanization." But it is work itself which must be 
called in question. Far from being a "Utopia," its suppression is the 
first condition for a break with the market. The everyday division 
between "free time" end "working hours," those complementary sectors of 
alienated life is an/expression/of the internal contradiction between 
the use- value and exchange-value of the commodity. It has become the 
strongest point of the commodity ideology, the one contradiction which 
intensifies with the rise of the consumer. To destroy it, no strategy 
short of the abolition of work will do. It is only beyond the 
contradiction of use-value and exchange-value that history begins, that 
men make their activity an object of their will and their consciousness, 
and see themselves in the world they have created. The democracy of 
Workers' Councils is the resolution of all previous contradictions. It 
makes "everything which exists apart from individuals impossible."

What is the revolutionary project? The conscious domination of history 
by the men who make it. Modern history, like all past history, is the 
product of social praxis, the unconscious result of human action. In the 
epoch of totalitarian control, capitalism has produced its own 
religion:/the spectacle./In the spectacle, ideology becomes flesh of our 
flesh, is realized here on earth. The world itself walks upside down. 
And like the "critique of religion" in Marx's day, the critique of the 
spectacle is now the essential precondition of any critique.

The problem of revolution is once again a concrete issue. On one side 
the grandiose structures of technology and material production; on the 
other a dissatisfaction which can only grow more profound. The 
bourgeoisie end its Eastern heirs, the bureaucracy; cannot devise the 
means to use their own overdevelopment, which will be the basis of the 
poetry of the future, simply because they both depend on 
the/preservation of the old order./At most they harness over-development 
to invent new repressions. For they know only one trick, the 
accumulation of/Capital/and hence of/the proletariat/--a proletarian 
being a man with no power over the use of his life, and who knows it. 
The new proletariat inherits the riches of the bourgeois world and this 
gives it its historical chance. Its task is to transform and destroy 
these riches, to constitute them as part of a human project: the total 
appropriation of nature and of human nature by man.

A realized human nature can only mean the infinite multiplication 
of/real desires/and their gratification. These real desires are the 
underlife of present society, crammed by the spectacle into the darkest 
corners of the revolutionary unconscious, realized by the spectacle only 
in the dreamlike delirium of its own publicity. We must destroy the 
spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of commodity society, if we are to 
realize human/needs/. We must abolish those pseudo-needs and false 
desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve its power.

The liberation of modern history, and the free use of its hoarded 
acquisition, can come only from the forces it represses. In the 
nineteenth century the proletariat was already the inheritor of 
philosophy; now it inherits modern art and the first conscious critique 
of everyday life, With the self-destruction of the working class art and 
philosophy shall be realized. To transform the world and to change the 
structure of life are one and the same thing for the proletariat--they 
are the passwords to its destruction as a class, its dissolution of the 
present reign of necessity, and its accession to the realm of liberty. 
As its maximum program it has the radical critique and free 
reconstruction of all the values and patterns of behavior imposed by an 
alienated reality. The only poetry it can acknowledge is the creativity 
released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and 
each event: Lautréamont's/poésie faite par tous/--the beginning of the 
revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is 
nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the 
palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the/game/. 
The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and 
to indulge untrammelled desire.



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