According to Le Monde Libertaire in December 1964: ‘The SI’s revolutionary critique of everyday life is incontestably right on the mark. However, there is one domain, far from having lost its importance, that escapes them: work.’ We, on the other hand, believe that we’ve more or less never dealt with any problem other than that of work at our epoch?: its conditions, its contradictions, and its consequences. The error of Le Monde Libertaire stems perhaps from the habits of undialectical thinking, which isolates an aspect of reality on conveniently recognizable terrain, and thus can only treat it conventionally. (SI nº10, p.67)
The SI was the theoretical putting into crisis of all programmatism at the time when, as the practical content of class struggles, it was becoming obsolete. Unlike the ultra-left, their critique does not arise from a contradiction that is passively suffered, and from the impossibility of reorganising the elements of programmatism. Indeed, the ultra left continues to speak about the affirmation of the proletariat whilst witnessing the collapse, as a revolutionary movement, of everything that could mean the rising in working class power in the capitalist mode of production – a rising in power without which this affirmation becomes a completely empty project. With the SI, it is the problematic itself and its basic elements as such – rather than their organisation – that is put into question. The SI expresses the crisis of programmatism as such, having recognised it in all its determinations, but without having recognised it generally and historically for what it was.
Rarely do critical analyses of the SI start from their texts: the SI has been obscured by its own myth. At an immediate level, whereas all critiques quote what they criticise, quotations are not used when speaking about the SI: it is enough to say ‘commodity’, ‘spectacle’, ‘generalised self-management’ ‘supersession of Art’, ‘critique of everyday life’ etc. That any critique speaks more of itself than of its presumed object – that at the end of the day this object is only a pretext for its own argument – is all in all ‘natural’, and even ‘legitimate’. But in the case of the SI, this approach becomes problematic, because the reliance on these catchphrases is usually accompanied with a critique which actually accords with the content of the concepts as developed in the SI. For example, the use of the category ‘commodity’ is criticized on the ground that ‘capital’ should be used instead, but the SI speaks about capital in the commodity, and that is precisely the problem. The theory of the spectacle is criticised as idealist on the ground that it is only a development of the alienation of wage labour, but Debord always saw it this way; the problem is precisely that he puts forward the alienation of wage labour this way. The workers’ councils are criticised as a formal and managerial conception of the revolution, but the SI always gave them the abolition of exchange as a content. The problem is that it formalized this abolition as well as the abolition of work and of the proletariat in the councils. The subjectivism of the SI is criticised on the ground that a crisis is necessary for the appearance of a revolutionary subject, but nothing is more objectivist than their theory of the revolution, etc. In fact, most of the time, there is no critique: the critique, at the same time as advancing these catchphrases, shows itself to be defending precisely what the SI puts into these words. What explains this is not the alleged difficulty of what is criticized, but rather the impossibility of criticizing the SI within the framework of programmatism. The SI represented theoretically, in a unified theory, the extreme point of tension of the contradictions of programmatism, namely: to speak of the abolition of capital as affirmation of a revolutionary nature of the proletariat which would have its own negation as its content (the overcoming of this problem is of an extreme simplicity: it requires thinking of revolutionary activity not as nature but as situation. However, a restructuring and a change of cycle of struggles were necessary to reach that point) Consequently, unless we escape this framework, which the SI circumscribed entirely, all critique is reduced to the mere attempt at opposing aspects of this theory against each other.
Unlike the other theories we examined previously, in the SI, the critique of work is a putting into question of the entirety of the problematic of programmatism: proletariat, alienation, content of communism, fetishism, human essence, the role of theory and of organisations, objectivism, etc. The point which focuses this general putting into question and its limits (as this putting into question stays within the framework of programmatism) is naturally that of the definition of the proletariat.