Anarcho-Communism

Beyond black and red: Situationists and the legacy of the workers movement

Jean-Cristophe Angaut

Situationnists have often been reduced to a mere group of artists criticizing everyday life, far away from social struggles.[272] The common description of their contribution to the events of 1968 in France is symptomatic of this reduction: either the so-called cultural orientation of these events is attributed to them, or it is said that, because the role of the situationnists has been too much emphasized, these events are reduced in the collective memory to their cultural part.[273] Nevertheless, this tendency tends to weaken, since one begins to actually read the situationnists’ text, instead of just talking about them in general. From this reading, it appears that the situationnists have been linked and/or opposed with most of the 60’s revolutionary groups (for example, Debord has been briefly a member of “Pouvoir ouvrier,” a group belonging “Socialisme ou barbarie” in the very beginning of the 60’s); it also appears that since the beginning of the 60’s, in the two main texts of situationnist theory (The society of the spectacle by Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Vaneigem[274]) as well as in their review L’Internationale Situationniste, they pointed up slogans of the workers councils; and, last but not least, they considered the events of 1968 as a revolutionary event, being the first illegal general strike of workers in history, rather than a student event. Therefore it is interesting to question their relations with the history of the workers movement. Or, this history led to a split between two trends, marxism and anarchism, red and black, communism and collectivism.

In this paper, I’d like to study the way situationnists are linked to this legacy, how they might have provided a way of going beyond this division between marxism and anarchism and what are the limits of this way. I will study this attempt in two directions. First, the situationnists have tried to critisize the separation between anticapitalist and antihierarchic struggles as an ideological one. In their relations with other revolutionary groups, this led to a harsh criticism against Marxist and Libertarian organizations that prospered around this division. If this part of the history of the situationnists is quite well known, the relation with their theories is not always clearly mentionned. Then, I would like to show thas this attempt to go beyond the separation between black and red leads to come back before the separation, by using the concepts and themes of the Young Hegelians movement — a movement Marx and Bakunin used to belong to.

Criticism of the separation between black and red

To begin with, it is important to keep in mind that the theoretical attempts of the situationnists during the 60’s cannot be isolated from the context: according to me, it’s the best way to avoid the temptation to worship them without any distance. I mentionned above Debord’s participation to “Socialisme ou Barbarie”: it’s also interesting to show that some members of the Situationnist Internationale maintained links with libertarian or council communist groups, especially in Nanterre University. In addition, in the early 60’s, the situationnists were close to the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, until they argued, accusing each others of plagiarism. Keeping this relations in mind do not minimize the originality of the situationnist theories, but helps to understand them better, particularly the double criticism of marxism and anarchism.

This double criticism (of the bureaucratic drifts in the history of Marxism and of the historical inefficencies of anarchism) does exist, although the main references used by situationnists seem to be more marxist than libertarian. For example, during the 1968 summer, they protested against the confusion between situationnists and anarchists in the newspapers like this: “Despite the obvious fact that the SI developped a historical view coming from Hegel and Marx, the press kept on mixing up situationnists and anarchism.”[275] They claimed filiation with what they called “revolutionary marxism.” As well as council communists, they may also appear more as marxists with libertarian trends than as anarchists integrating the marxism scientific contributions. Moreover, even when they are dealing with social and historical experiments they agree with, where anarchists have played the main role, they refuse to reduce this experiments to the expression of anarchism as a particular trend inside the workers movement. It is quite clear with the 1936 spanish revolution. In The society of the spectacle, Debord writes this in the §94: on one side “in 1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a revolution that was the most advanced expression of proletarian power ever realized”; but on the other side, anarchists did not have the initiative of the uprising (which was a defensive reaction against the military coup) and they were unable to defend efficiently the revolution against the bourgeois, the stalinians and fascism. Some of them even became government ministers.[276] In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem seems to be closer than Debord to libertarian ideals,[277] but it clearly speaks only about the anarchists, and never about anarchism, as if individuals worth more than the political trend they belong to.

Nevertheless, there is a real criticism of marxism in the situationnist texts, a criticism which not only attacks the progressive degeneration of Marxism, but also points in Marx work the germs of that degeneration. This criticism is developed in §84–90 of The society of the spectacle, known as the closest book to the revolutionary marxism. First, Debord gives the impression, as well as other French left wing maxists,[278] that he just criticizes the bad use of Marx by those who claimed filiation with him. But straight from the §84, Debord explains that in Marx thought, there is a “scientific-determinist aspect” which “made it vulnerable to ideologization.”[279] This economism drift (for economics is “the historical science par excellence” always postpones the moment of revolutionary practice and the advent of the historical subject by claiming that objective conditions are not present. Marxism emphasizes a tendency which is already in Marx, a tendency which consists in separating the theory (especially the economics) from the revolutionary practice[280] — as well as Marx did isolate himself “by cloistered scholarly work in the British Museum.”[281] According to Debord, that lack in marxian theory has its roots in the fact that this theory was the faithfull expression of the revolutionary movement at that time, and also of the insufficiencies of this movement. This movement missed something that could not come from the theory, that is the concrete form of organization which came after spontaneously from the proletarian struggles: the workers councils, the soviets.[282] When Marx elaborated his theory, the organization he promoted could be nothing else but the one which was in adequation with his separate theoretical work, and that form had two failures. First, it mimics the bourgeois revolutions, in that sense that the main task of the proletariat would be to take the power as it exists inside the bourgeois society: “The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.”[283] The self-criticism, contained in Marx’s work about the Paris Commune, which corrects some fomulations of the Manifest,’[284] is here clearly recognizable. The second failure in Marxism consists in a lack of a conception of the organization which would have been really revolutionary, without any similarities of statist or bourgeois patterns. To sum things up, marxism (and all the marxist groups) has failed in thinking what the revolutionary organization should be. This passage of The society of the spectacle deserves a long quote:

“The proletarian class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing revolutionary struggles and in its reorganization of society at the moment of revolution [...]. But this crucial question of organization was virtually ignored by revolutionary theory during the period when the workers movement was first taking shape — the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary character it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). Instead, the organizational question became the weakest aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization of the workers movement that were developed on the basis of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit the maintenance of a unitary theory by breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented disciplines. This ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able to recognize the practical verifications of the unitary historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles; instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and memory of them.”[285]

With this quotation, which describes the process of degeneration of marxism, we understand the relative legitimacy of the anarchist criticism for the situationnists. At its foundation (deeply rooted in a original relation with the hegelian stream, in Marx and in Bakunin as well), the revolutionary theory was ahead of the time of the revolutionary practice it infers. Initially, this theory was unitary, but because of the lateness of the revolutionary practice, a revolutionary conception of the organization as the junction of the practice and the theory has missed. Then, the revolutionary theory adopted bourgeois and statist patterns of organization. Obviously, Debord has in thought the political parties organizations, in which the different powers are separated as if the parties were states. This separation of the different powers influenced in return the theory, separating the theory from the practice, and the theory itself in different fields, so that the unitary character of the theory could not be maintained, giving way to specialization and bureaucratism. And finally, when in the historical practice arises of form of organization in adequation with the originally unitary theory, the latest, which is aliened in the division of activism labor, crystallized in bureaucratic organizations and sometimes submitted to a state, is unable to recognize this right form and prevents its manifestation.

In this context, one can understand the Debord’s critical description in The society of the spectacle (§91–92) of the split between anarchism and marxism around this particular question of the organization’s form. §91 comes back over the conflict between Marx and Bakunin inside the International Workingmen’s Association and describes it as the opposition between two ideologies, “each containing a partially true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority.”[286] Those two criticisms are partially true because they apply on two different fields: the power inside a revolutionary society and the organization of the revolutionary movement. Bakunin and his friends are right when they see behind the idea of a temporary proletarian state the threat of a bureaucratic dictatorship, but Marx and his friends are also right when they denounce Bakunin’s projects of conspiration. If we stand at this point, this double criticism could be qulified as libertarian as it denounces the authoritarian drifts in both theories. But this libertarian criticism is paired with a historical criticism which owes a lot to Marx but targets the two organizations which have followed these two main orientations, the spanish FAI and the SDP of Germany.

§92–94 of The Society of the spectacle are especially devoted to anarchism but must be refered to the tense relations between the Situationnist International and libertarian organizations since young members of the french anarchist federation have claimed their high interest for the situationnist thesis, around 1966.[287] The anarchist federation was obsessed at that time with the possible inflitration of marxist elements in its ranks, since it had already split a few years earlier with the departure of libertarian communists. The young libertarians were forced to quit the anarchist federation and The society of the spectacle perhaps echoes this episode, especially in §92 when Debord explains why anarchist criticism remains only partial. The criticism of the political struggle by the anarchists remained abstract as they promoted a purely economical struggle based on the pattern of the instantaneous general strike. According to Debord, anarchists only see struggle as the realization of an ideal, opposed to reality, without questioning the practical means of realization of this ideal, and in each struggle, they constantly repeat the same things, which gives a way to guardians of the temple and self-proclaimed specialists of freedom (§93).

The meaning of this criticism is clear: the theoretical basis of the libertarian organizations, theoretical anarchism, is an out-dated stage in the history of revolutionary theory, the stage of the ideological conflict with authoritarian socialism, which is also the stage of the separation between black and red and between proletariat and its representation. So the libertarian organizations (the french Anarchist Federation, and later the Italian one and the rebuild spanish CNT for Debord) are a remains of the past, small churches having no relation with contemporary revolutionary movement, in order to perpetuate themselves by repeating always the same ideological antithesis (that’s why those who proclaimed their affinity with situationnist thesis were fired). On the contrary, workers councils, as they arised spontaneously (that is to say: apart from any theory) in revolutionary Russia and spreaded in Germany and Spain, as a unitary practice, are supposed to be in adequation with the unity of the revolutionary theory. And this theoretical unity is to be found before the separation between black and red, before the split which gave birth to marxism and anarchism as two partial truthes, that means in the revolutionary theory, as expressed in the 1840’s.

Before black and red: situationnists and young hegelians

According to Debord, the unity of the revolutionary theory is to be found in an original critical relation with the hegelian thought among the young hegelians in the 1840’s: “All the theoretical currents of the revolutionary working-class movement — Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx — grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.”[288] The situationnists reactivate this critical confrontation which characterizes young hegelianism. It is difficult to determine precisely which knowledge the situationnists had from this movement, beyond the young Marx’s writings. Nevertheless, we know that Debord published in 1973 in the editions Champ Libre a translation of August Cieskowski’s Prolegomena to a Historiosophy[289] (1838) and ten years later even wrote a preface for a possible republishing of the book.[290] In this text, he considers the polish philosopher as “the dark point around which the whole historical thought knew its turning point since one and an half century.” Moreover, in Debord and in Vaneigem, we can find hidden quotations of young hegelian texts — in particular of Die Reaktion in Deutschland (The Reaction in Germany, 1842), the seminal article of Michael Bakunin, which was not yet translated into french at that time. Situationnists keep from young hegelianism the fact that marxist communism and individualistic and collectivist variants of anarchism as well have their roots in an original confrontation with hegelian thought. I will briefly study three young hegelian themes, reactivated, updated and sometimes twisted by the situationnists: the connections between theory and practice, the primacy of the negative moment in the dialectical process, and finally the theme of alienation. I don’t pretend to exhaust, in that way, the philosophical content of situationnist writings, neither the meaning of their relation with Marx. I’d just like to show what their conception of the unity of revolutionary theory implies concerning their relation with the history of philosophy.

Or, precisely, their conception of theory (and the postulation of its unity with a historical practice) is already the reactivation of a young hegelian theme. For example, when Debord in The society of the spectacle, characterizes Hegel as “the philosophical culmination of philosophy,”[291] he reactivates a theme that can be found in three main figures of young hegelianism. First in Cieskowski for who a thought of history, a philosophy of the practice (the “historiosophy”) has to go beyond the split between being and thought, which characterizes the old philosophy: Hegel’s philosophy of history is a philosophy of the past, when historiosophy is a philosophy of the future, which depends on a practice.[292] A similar conception can be found in The Reaction in Germany, Bakunin’s first revolutionary writing: Hegel is claimed to have “already gone above theory, but inside the theory itself’ and to have “postulated a new, practical world”[293] so that in Hegel, the theory itself, separated from the practice under the name of philosophy, finds its own limit. And last but not least, Marx’s Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) explains that it is time to “realize philosophy”: the first task of philosophy was to criticize religion, which is “the prerequisite of all criticism,”[294] therefore a criticism in acts of social alienation, hence, the “transcendence of the proletariat,” “dissolution of society as a particular estate.”[295] In the situationnist theories, the aim of this postulated unity between theory and practice is to object to theoretical specialization as a germ of degeneration for Marxism, leading to autoritarian forms. This degeneration ends up in a relation of subordination between theory and practice, where the theory becomes unable to recognize the revolutionnary form of organization and ignores the rationality inherent to the practice.[296]

Secondly, in Debord and in Vaneigem, the critical confrontation with the hegelian thought is reperformed by asserting the predominance of the negative in the dialectical process. Once again, situationnists get this theme from the young hegelians. Bakunin’s article explains that the opposition (which is for him the center of hegelian philosophy) is “a preponderance of the Negative” on the Positive:[297] the negative, identified as the party of the revolution, is what the positive, identified as the reaction, tries to reject from itself, so that the positive is only the negation of the negative, the negation of the destructive movement. The assertion of the preponderance of the negative is a central theme in young hegelianism, as it also can be found in Bruno Bauer.[298] On the contrary, it is important, according to Bakunin, to recognize the positivity of the negative, that is to say the new world which is supposed to arise in the very process by which the old world perishes. In The society of the spectacle, Debord identifies in a similar way revolutionary proletariat as the negative party[299] and at the same time, he asserts the primacy of the negative in the hegelian dialectical process — and the style of the dialectical theory has to express this primacy.[300] Similarly, in The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem explains that the negative has to become positive.[301] This theme was brilliantly illustrated in Bakunin’s article with the famous sentence: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”[302] This sentence is quoted (without any mention of origin) inside a chapter of the book which relates the situationnists’ contribution to the events of 1968 in France,[303] as it was in Vaneigem’s book.[304] This reading of the hegelian dialectical process has a precise meaning in situationnists: revolutionary theory, unitary theory, expresses the global rejection of the actual world, and a new world can be born only from the global negation of this world.

Eventually, situationnists, as other marxists in the 60’s, use to a large extend the concept of alienation. They owe this use to a particular reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as a seminal work which contains Marx’s philosophy, later developed in the rest of his writings. It’s a reconstruction of marxism based on a philosophy of alienation, in which the theme of commodity fetichism has its place (in Debord particularly[305]). The theme of alienation is especially used in Vaneigem’s book, without any mention of its marxian nor hegelian origin. In fact, the concept of alienation is transformed by the situationnists in two ways. In Marx, this concept (which translates two german words: Entausserung — giving something up by alienating it — and Enfremdung — when the alienated object has become stranger) is the result of a transfer from the field of religion criticism to the field of social and political criticism. Marx had read this transfer in Moses Hess’s On the essence of money. In the same way that in Christianity (in Feuerbach) human essence is alienated, so that humanity is unable to recognize what she’s oppressed by, the human being, in capitalist societies, alienates its vital activity in money, which is another form of oppression. In the situationnist appropriation of this theme, the first transformation is an historicization: in The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem explains that history is a “transformation of natural alienation into social alienation.”[306] The second transformation is a widening. In Marx’s Manuscripts, alienation applies to the process of production: the worker becomes slave of the machines and is dispossessed of the fruit of his labors. Situationnists expand this theme to the consumer’s alienation. Alienation is commodity alienation: it happens in the commodity production (the workers lost the control of their labor and of the fruits of their labors) and also in the commodity consumption, particularly in the spectacle as the ultimate commodity, according to Debord.[307] Spectacle is alienation insofar as “the passive contemplation of images, which have been moreover chosen by someone else, substitutes for what is experienced and for the determination of the events by the individual itself”[308] and, eventually dominates the individual.

Conclusion: Beyond Black and Red today

Situationnist criticism is often reduced to its negative dimension and its attempt to go beyond outdated oppositions, such as black and red. This reduction gave the impression that situationnists theories were radically new and radically separated from the history of the workers movement. Yet, such a fascination has nothing to do with situationnist theories, although it happens among those who were denounced by Debord en 1972 as “pro-situs.” These ones tend to consider that situationnist thesis suddenly arise in history, completely out of the blue. Preventing the dominated ones to remember the history of their revolts is one of the powerful effects of the society of the spectacle. For that very reason, it is important to recall that situationnists attempted to go beyond the opposition between black and red for the sake of a revolutionary theory, which unity has to be restored, integrating the social and historical experiment of the workers councils and beyond the alienation of theory in bureaucratic economism. So here is the situationnist answer to the question that forms the matter of this conference: black is dead, red is dead, but the unification of both trends is still the manifestation of the workers democracy and has to be kept at the head of the agenda of history.

Yet situationnist concepts of unity and totality have to be questioned. The capitalist society is to be entirely rejected, and a unitary theory can be very useful, but a question remains: is there only one alternative to this society? Black and red today mean the multiplicity of the real social alternatives, avoiding hierarchy and the rule of commodity. Moreover, we have to recognize which characters of our societies remain outside that rule, such as public services, which have to be self-managed by the workers and the users. These aspects of our society are a kind of collective inheritance which escapes partially from the rule of commodity but always risks to be caught up.