On the poverty of student life
considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and
particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy

Published by UNEF, Strasbourg 1966

          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
          reproduced here.

     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 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 really radically opposed. 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 youth feels 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 faithfully
     reproduced. Elsewhere, they have become a static complement to the
     self-regulation of managerial capitalism. 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
     Carthago 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 the commodity system; 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 that baneful
     theory, 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 its adequate form."

     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.

     Notes

     [1] This was written in 1966.

     [2] Recent "schisms" in both christian and communist organizations
     have shown, if anything, that all these students are united on one
     fundamental principle: unconditional submission to hierarchical
     superiors.

     [3] Not only feels it but tries to give it expression.

     [4] These countries have been industrialized on classic lines:
     primitive accumulation at the expense of the peasantry,
     accelerated by bureaucratic terror.

     [5] For 45 years the French "Communist" Party has not taken a
     single step towards the conquest of power, The same situation
     applies in all advanced nations which have not fallen under the
     heel of the so-called Red Army.

     [6] Whose defining characteristic is the dominance of work qua
     commodity. Cf. in English our pamphlet "The Decline and Fall of
     the Spectacular Commodity Economy."

     [7] Compare the theoretical critique of Rosa Luxemburg.

     [8] "Les Luttes de Classes en Algérie," in Internationale
     Situationniste 10.