Dyscommunication

Situationist paraphrases or quotes for next weekend’s No Kings protest—after putting one on a sign, you could put the rest you like on a flyer and post or pass out! On the Poverty of Student Life allegedly inspired students to join striking workers, take over factories, turn cars over to create barricades, pull up cobblestones to throw at police, and almost take over France in May, 1968! It’s also an introduction to other Situationist texts and shows the inspiration of several authors of anti-authoritarian writings.

• Each sector of social life has been subdued by imperialism.
• The real problem is the poverty and servitude of all.
• ‘Driven by [their] freely-chosen depression, [the student] submits [themselves] 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”.’
• No Kings masks the real problems by creating a false one; commodity society was already in total control and still is, running autonomously.
• “the boredom of everyday existence, the dead life which is still the essential product of modern capitalism, in spite of all its modernizations.”
• “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 commodity economy”—“that whole system of production which alienates activity and its products from their creators.”
• ‘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.”
  • In “developed” countries, “the unions ... have become a static complement to the self-regulation of managerial capitalism.”
  • “In the struggle with the militant proletariat, these organizations are the unfailing defenders of the bureaucratic counter-revolution....”
  • “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.”
  • “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.”
• The administration has removed the “humanist-democratic facade of the system” and laid bare “its essential violence”.
• “the abolition of commodities” (exploitation of workers’ labor value to obtain a profit) ends the state of servitude as 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 [people’s] actions; autonomous action directed toward clearly perceived goals is impossible.”
  • “economic laws” depend on a “lack of consciousness”.
• “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 [self-management] is the attack on this principle.”
  • ‘Autogestion 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 [humanity’s] production of [themselves]) 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 and 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” and ”working hours,” ... has become the ... one contradiction which intensifies with the rise of the consumer. To destroy it, no strategy short of the abolition of work will do.’
• “The bourgeoisie and its Eastern heirs, the [former] 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 [human] with no power over the use of [their] 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 return to nature and [the] human nature [of mutual aid].”
  • “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 self-destruction of the working class” – the proletariat’s “destruction as a class, its dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and its accession to the realm of liberty.”
  • “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 untrammeled desire.”

CHAPTER 4: The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

Fascist totalitarianism's “organizational form” was “inspired by the totalitarian party that had first been tested and developed in Russia”. (“Fascism was [is] a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention.“) “Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crises or disillusioned by the socialist movement's failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is—a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is ... the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order....” (Thesis 109, p 55)

'Three years after Stalin's death (1953), the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev initiated a “deStalinization” campaign, beginning with a “secret” report ... entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” later the same year ... Khrushchev sent Russian tanks to crush the Hungarian revolution.' (Note 110, pp 134–135)

'the expressions of internal negation ... first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers”—a negation which has in one case has already gone to the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary.' (Thesis 111, p 57)

bureaucratic society is the total opposite of proletarian community. Bureaucratic power is based on possession of a nation-state and it must ultimately obey the logic of this reality, in accordance with the particular interests imposed by the level of development of the country it possesses. 'socialism in a single country' that Stalin was shrewd enough to maintain by destroying the revolutions in China in 1927 and Spain in 1937. The autonomous bureaucratic revolution in China [1949]—as already shortly before in Yugoslavia [1946]—introduced into the unity of the bureaucratic world a dissolutive germ that has broken it up in less than twenty years. workers of East Berlin . . . : reference to the East German revolt of 1953. workers councils in Hungary: Although the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Russian domination was ostensibly rallied around the liberalizing regime of Imry Nagy, the country was in reality organized by a network of nationally coordinated workers councils. See Andy Anderson's Hungary '56. See also the situationists' analysis of the 1968 “Prague Spring” (SI Anthology, pp. 256-265; Expanded Edition, pp. 326–336). this crumbling of the global alliance based on the bureaucratic hoax is also a very unfavorable developement for the future of capitalist society: In his “Preface to the Third French Edition of The Society of the Spectacle” (1992; included in Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation of The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994, pp. 7–10), Debord noted that this process, which scarcely anyone else had noticed at the time, had rapidly accelerated since the “fall of the Berlin Wall” in 1989.

(Note 111, pp 135–136)