The SI, without doubt a little 'upset' from having been surpassed, in the field of theoretical innovation, by Castoriadis, in the Editorial Notes of number 8 (January 1963) takes up the latter’s problematic and goes further. There we find the famous definition of the proletariat: 'In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that society allots to them (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion)' (p.13). This definition justifies the affirmation expressed in number 7, p.13: 'the new proletariat is tending to encompass everybody'. This definition is taken up and completed by Debord in the Society of the Spectacle: 'It [the proletariat] remains irreducibly in existence within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism: it is the immense majority of workers who have lost all power over the use of their lives and who, once they know this, redefine themselves as the proletariat, the negative at work within this society. (Thesis 114). Thus the existence of the proletariat, and consequently the proletarian revolution, finds itself to 'depend entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses.' (Ibid, thesis 123).
Simultaneous to with this quasi-'universal' definition of the proletariat, the SI also implements a 'restricted' definition: 'If the situationists certainly anticipated the Provos in regard to a few vague novelties, there is all the same a central point on which we flatter ourselves on relentlessly remaining “nineteenth century.” History is still young, and the proletarian project of a classless society, even if it began badly, is still more of a radically new curiosity than the combined achievements of molecular chemistry and astrophysics or the billions of fabricated events channelled by the spectacle. Despite our “avant-gardism” and thanks to it, it is to this movement alone that we wish to return.' (SI n 11, p.66). This restricted definition is never expressed other than through historical references, in which it appears that the proletariat is no longer this class 'encompassing almost everybody', but simply the class of alienated work and more precisely that which is defined by the relation of exploitation.
At first sight it would seem that the SI is torn between, on the one hand, its project of the conscious taking in hand by individuals of the material means of social conditioning in order to transform them into means of construction of life (situations), to which corresponds an [broad] definition of the proletariat as the subject of this transformation. And, on the other hand, what makes all the material means of this construction foreign to individuals and, generally, what makes everything that they live distant from them and confront them as spectacle – the principle of this general situation being alienated labour, to which then corresponds a more limited historical figure of the proletariat, a more 'nineteenth century' one. However, the SI doesn’t stop at using two different concepts of the proletariat depending on the circumstances and on the subjects it tackles. They are only two angles of attack synthesized in a historical conception of the proletariat.
But the historical problem is not at all to understand what the workers 'are', – today they are only workers – but what they are going to become. This becoming is the only truth of the being of the proletariat, and the only key to understanding really what the workers are already (Debord and Sanguinetti, The veritable split in the International, Champ Libre, p.114)
Here is the whole theoretical problem that the SI has not managed to solve, because it was put in an insoluble way. There is definitely, on the one hand, a clear rejection of any sociological definition of the proletariat: 'the proletariat can only be defined by what it can do and what it can and must want' (Ibid, p.56). But, on the other hand:
Capitalism has continually modified the composition of classes as it transformed global social labour. […] Only the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the primordial historic classes of this world, continue to sport between themselves over its destiny, in a confrontation which has essentially remained the same. But the circumstances, the background, the bit part players, and even the spirit of the principle protagonists, have changed with the times, which has led us to the final act. (Ibid, p.53)
The class composition of the proletariat is therefore historical, but the contradiction and the 'project' which formalises its supersession have essentially remained the same. The result of this is a deadlock in which the SI is stuck, and where it expresses the point of rupture of the programmatic theory of the communist revolution. The revolution is negation of the proletariat by itself, abolition of work, conscious history, abolition of all separated power, of the commodity, of exchange, passionate construction of life, but the contradiction between classes remains essentially the same as in the nineteenth century. The SI puts forward an immediate content for revolution which isn't programmatism any more, but it puts this content forward as the result of a contradiction between classes which remains, as we will see, in a programmatic problematic: objectivism, natural constraint, appropriation of means of existence, revolutionary organisation, contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, revelation and affirmation of a lived reality under and against the spectacle, authentic reality under the mystification, 'revolutionary being' of the proletariat. By not historicizing the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, while conferring on it an overcoming which is historically new, the only remaining variable allowing their system to hold together is the notion of class compostion as the definition of the proletariat. It is the only variable by which they can attempt to maintain the terms of this contradiction together, but it is also, for the same reason, the weakest link, the soft underbelly of situationist theory.
Because of the programmatic problematic which defines its contradiction with capital (and therefore defines itself), the proletariat can't be the subject of the non-programmatic overcoming of the contradiction. At that point, what workers are confront what they will become, but what they will become 'is already what they are', the SI goes around in circles. The SI acknowledges the defeat of the 'old workers movement' and puts forwards the content that the revolution to come will have to have. However, conceiving of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital in its time as remaining identical as to its structure, and as differentiating itself from the 'old workers movement' only by an extension to new domains of society, (extension due to the characteristics of modern capitalism rather than understood as a restructuring implying the disappearance of workers identity and the putting into question of itself by the proletariat in its contradiction with capital), the SI can’t overcome a rigid opposition between what workers are and what the working class doing the revolution will be, given the content conferred to this revolution. What it lacks is an understanding of the contradiction as reciprocal implication between classes, that is to say, in fact, of exploitation as contradiction between the proletariat and capital, as this concept is the only one by which we can go beyond a programmatic understanding.
The SI always has a being of the class to reveal. That is why the structure of the contradiction remains the same, and that’s the core of the problem. The central point of the theoretical block of the SI was that it didn’t conceive simultaneously of the proletariat as class of the capitalist mode of production and as revolutionary class. It didn’t theorize the reciprocal implication as contradiction, that is to say it brought programmatism to a paroxysm without overcoming it.
The SI definitely speaks about the proletariat as it is in the capitalist mode of production but, at that moment, it is only commodity-labour power. From this arises its revolt against its situation as mere commodity, but this revolt, instead of stemming from the contradiction that this situation contains in the capitalist mode of production itself and for itself – that is to say from its situation as commodity labour power itself and from the contradictions that it implies (surplus labour–necessary labour; use value–exchange value) – but from what this situation denies: life, the lived, etc. It is not a question of the contradiction of two terms forming a totality and existing only through each other, but of two separate terms which are not mutually the raison d’etre and the negation of each other – it is not a contradiction.
For the SI, the reciprocal implication definitely exists in the capitalist mode of production, but only as representation of the class. Commenting on Rosa Luxembourg’s famous article, published in Die Rote Fahne of December 21, 1948, where she acknowledges the fact that the question of revolution is not posed openly and honestly any more, and that the troops protecting the old order intervene under the flag of the socialdemocratic party, Debord writes:
Thus, a few days before its destruction, the radical current of the German proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions engendered by the whole process that had gone before (a development to which the representation of the working class had greatly contributed): the spectacular organization of the ruling order’s defence, the social reign of appearances where no ‘central question’ can any longer be posed ‘openly and honestly.’ The revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this stage become both the primary cause and the central result of the general falsification of society. (Society of the Spectacle, thesis 101).
On one side, as representation, the proletariat defined in its reciprocal implication with capital; on the other side, the proletariat as revolutionary class, the class to which is denied all possibility of control of its means of existence and who knows it. The problem in the SI lies in the lack of a dialectical analysis of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. This lack leads it to fix, face to face, the proletariat in the reciprocal implication, under the form of its representation, and the revolutionary proletariat. With this fixed reality, it is the relation between the two that escapes it and that it tries, as we will see, to recreate under the form of the workers councils: simultaneously the true revolutionary proletariat (conscious history, abolition of the commodity) and absolute reference to the proletariat as it is in the capitalist mode of production. With the councils, the SI produces a frozen synthesis, it is left with questions of functionality, questions of form, to try to overcome what’s static [in this ‘synthesis’ – on questions of strategy, to link up the two sides that it fixed in a face to face relationship.]
The situationist theory must square the circle: how to have a contradiction between classes and a proletariat conceived of in a programmatic way ('revolutionary being', revelation of a concealed essence, proletarian project of appropriation of the productive forces and instruments rival to capital’s project); and, at the same time, to have a non programmatic overcoming of this contradiction. Vaneigem cut the Gordian knot by giving up all theory of communism as theory of the proletariat, leaving it to the liberty of individual subjectivity, then to the power of desire, before discovering that women, 'beings par excellence', have children. Debord, as for him, from the Veritable Split retreats into a mechanical 'integrated spectacle', against which autodestruction is the only hope. If the problem of the relation between the project and the situation of the proletariat can be found at any moment of the theoretical history of the SI (cf. the thesis of the German section during the London conference, September 1960, in SI, n.5, pp. 20–21), for a moment (from about 1965 to the end of 1968) the contradiction will however remain unresolved, it is the period of 'the state of grace of situationist theory'. The workers movement remains globally structured by an ideology and by organisations which still proclaim themselves programmatic (if only because of their adaptation of keynesianism) at the same time as can be seen the glimmers of the refusal of work and of the imposed way of life, of looting, of the multiplication of wild strikes, glimmers that herald the future of this workers movement which will [supposedly] only have to get rid of the leadership of the organisations which maintain its struggle within the system. And all this was taking place while capitalism was transforming itself rapidly through its extension to all domains of social reproduction. The revolution would no longer content itself with changing the factory owners, not even with a change limited to the production process, it would encompass the whole of everyday life and only under this condition would it be revolution. For a moment it seemed possible to put forward a non programmatic content to the revolution, while still putting it in a programmatic way; the contradiction would be the same structurally, but it would take place in a 'modern capitalism' whose characteristics would allow the concepts of colonisation of everyday life, of survival, of the critique of the economy, of organisation, of consciousness, of bureaucracy, of spectacle to 'bridge' this gap between a programmatic contradiction of the class struggle and its overcoming foreseen as beyond programmatism. At that moment of the proletarisation of the whole of society at the same time as the proletariat remained in its traditional sense (as it was still recognized as such in society and its reproduction), there was this brief and fragile state of grace when it was possible to invest a proletariat still defined more or less in a traditional way with the revolt of life against all existing conditions.
The SI, while maintaining its 'contradiction essentially the same', clearly saw that a new period of proletarian struggles was starting and that the previous period had already ended a long time ago (Barcelona 1937). But, being unable to formulate the concept of programmatism as well as the corollary historicisation of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital (quite simply because to do so, the failure of the wave of struggles of the late 60s / early 70s; as well as the beginning of a new phase of real subsumption were necessary), the SI, if it saw the end of the 'classical workers movement', didn’t understand its overcoming as a transformation – in its structure and in its content – of the contradiction that is exploitation. It was the case only of a change of circumstances:
What our critic [International Revolution, NDA] objects to is that we showed at the same time that these new developments in capitalism, and consequently the new developments in its negation, are also rediscovering their connections with the old truth of the previously vanquished proletarian revolution. This is very annoying to RI because it wants to possess this old truth without any newness mixed in (SI, n.12, p.53)
The way that the SI establishes a break between the ‘classical workers movement’ and the ‘new revolutionary movement’ will allow us to understand how it only envisages the overcoming of programmatism (contained in its project) in a way which is still programmatic. We will then develop the themes, already mentioned, of the objectivism of the SI and of the opposition it establishes between the real and its concealment. Lastly, we will be able to address the attempt at a synthesis – of a nonprogrammatic project and of a problematic of the contradiction which remains programmatic – in the theory of workers councils as overcoming of the spectacle, in the role given to the organisation and in the idea of the overcoming-realisation of art. We will finish with the drift of the concept of spectacle in the present cycle of struggles.
The assault of the first workers movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago, and nothing can bring it back to life. It failed. Certainly it achieved immense results, but not the ones it had originally intended. No doubt such deviation toward partially unexpected results is the general rule in human actions; but the one exception to this rule is precisely the moment of revolutionary action, the moment of the all-or-nothing qualitative leap. The classical workers movement must be re-examined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future. This movement must be precisely delineated in time. The classical workers movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the failure of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937. We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period and to re-examine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all the neglected possibilities, without any longer being impressed by the fact that some won out over others and dominated the movement; for we now know that the movement within which they were successful was an overall failure. […] All this, of course, not with the aim of scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to contribute toward the formation of a new revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many premonitory signs over the last few years, one of which is our own existence. It will be profoundly different. […] There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution… […]. But why does this reconception seem so difficult? Starting from an experience of free everyday life (that is, from a quest for freedom in everyday life) it is not so difficult. It seems to us that this question is quite concretely felt today among young people. And to feel it with enough urgency enables one to rediscover lost history, to salvage and rejudge it. It is not difficult for thought that concerns itself with questioning everything that exists. […] Many people are sceptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying themselves with some category separate from the workers (such as artists); in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody. (SI, n.7, pp.12–13).
It is significant that, in this long extract from SI number 7 (April 1962), there is nowhere a definition of the 'classical workers movement' and neither is there one elsewhere in the SI’s texts. It’s only negatively, against the description of the characteristics of the 'modern revolutionary movement' that we can understand the content of what the 'classical workers movement' was for the SI. It appears that what defines the classical workers movement is the fact that it didn’t ask the question of revolution at the level of a free activity in everyday life, of the free construction of it. We can therefore deduce a definition of the classical workers movement as a movement with a critique of the capitalist mode of production applied to specific forms of alienation, – essentially on the organisation of the productive process, on forms of property, on forms of distribution. What is most important here is the absence of a positive definition of the classical workers movement at the same time as the SI declares it to be over. If the SI is unable to define the classical workers movement in a positive way, it is because, even if it declared it to be totally over, the new revolutionary movement of which it is part, of which it is a proof, completes, in changed circumstances the project of this classical workers movement. We might even want to say that the only thing changing are the circumstances, as if the workers movement was a constant modelling itself according to circumstances. The second important point of this approach to the classical workers movement is, after the absence of a positive definition, the absence of an understanding of the relation between 'victories' and 'defeats', that is to say, the inability to understand the 'classical workers movement' as a totality, what we call here a cycle of struggles.
What escapes the SI absolutely, and has to escape it (unless it would give up any theory of revolution based on class struggles) is the necessary link between all the forms of affirmation of the proletariat, what we call programmatism, which makes all the aspects of the 'classical workers movement' participate to the same totality (where all cows are not equally grey…). Reformism is the necessary limit of the Commune; and Luxembourg and Noske belong to the same cycle of struggle. Not simply because their dates by chance coincide, but because the limits of the revolution of the former is the content of the counter-revolution of the latter (this unity has been demonstrated in the text 'The Bolshevik revolution' in Theorie Communiste, n.12). Similarly, the Bolshevik counterrevolution is, in Russia, the organisation of the limits of the programmatic revolution itself. As long as the revolution is affirmation of the class, the proletariat tries to free, against capital, its social power as it exists in capital. What gives to it its capacity to promote this [encompassing] affirmation, that is to say its coming to power as a class of the capitalist mode of production (formalised in the workers movement), becomes its limit. This affirmation turns against itself and constitutes itself as reproduction of capital, which it implies or which it organises (Russia), as counter-revolution.
Programmatism is the content of the contradiction between classes which defines the formal subsumption of labour under capital. During this period, capital, in the process of exploitation, doesn’t integrate the reproduction of the working class, doesn’t specify waged labour in relation to any value producing labour, it is a constraint to surplus labour. What derives from this is the existence of a workers’ community of labour (that is to say of productive labour, of labour productive of value) and that the movement of class struggles has, as its resolution, the relation that the working class has with itself in the organisations of the workers movement. As well as the liberation of productive labour, the appropriation of the means of production, the liberation from free capitalist anarchy, the abolition of private property, the establishment of value as mode of production, the liberation of the productive forces, the necessity to conceptualise oneself as part of a tendency toward progress. All of this comes from the fact that the proletariat, in the contradiction which confronts it to capital, is already the positive moment to bring out/to free; its affirmation, its rise to being the dominant class, is the realisation of its being. This content of class struggles is what we call here programmatism (the proletariat, in its liberation, derives the programme of communism – communism as a programme – from what its situation and its definition is in the capitalist mode of production.)
What makes formulating this concept useful is the fact that it makes the historisation of the notion of class struggles, revolution, and communism possible. What’s more, it allows us to understand class struggle and revolution in their real historical characteristics rather than in relation to a norm; to stop opposing revolution / communism and conditions (the famous conditions that are never ripe enough); to escape the deadlock created by the gap between a proletariat which is always substantially revolutionary (revolutionary, in fact, as the following period understands this term) and a revolution that it never enacts; to understand the diverse elements of an epoch as a totality by describing the internal connections of their diversity and their conflicts (Marx and Bakunin, Luxembourg and Bernstein…). To avoid ending up with a revolutionary nature of the proletariat, which, each time it manifests itself, leads to a restructuring of capital. If we have at one’s disposal a totalising concept of class struggle – like that of programmatism – also allows us to go from this concept to the concept of cycles of struggles. If we understand the revolution, in formal subsumption, as affirmation of the proletariat, then we can understand all the determinations of this period – including the characteristics of the German revolution – in their internal connections (the relation between rising working class power and the autonomy of the class) and as a totality: from the social-democracy to the AAUE; from Noske to Rühle. (We will develop the whole history of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital in Volume 2 of this Theory of Communism.1)) What results from this is the fact that the impossibility of revolution as affirmation of the class is produced from itself: contradiction between rising working class power in capital and its autonomy, which can however only find its bases in the former, necessity of a transition period, implication within the restructuring of capital.
The SI can very well state that all the revolutions of its century have been defeated from within (n.10, p.46), but it never explains why, because it never goes as far as criticizing the content of revolution itself. Critique for them, as is often the case, will only be a 'disillusioned' critique, while what we need now is critique full stop. The SI maintains that the classical workers movement produced its own negation, (it reached the point of rupture of programmatism), but it is unable to link the two and again leaves it to the 'dissilusioned critique'. The SI has reached the threshold of the understanding of programmatism without crossing it: '…the bureaucratic society is precisely the inverted world of proletarian community' ('The Explosion Point of Ideology in China', SI n.11, p.3). The SI also reaches this threshold without crossing at other points, when for exemple it describes unionism as 'an apparatus for the self-regulation of modern capitalism which aim is to integrate the working class into managerial capitalism…' However, the limit point that all theories which don’t formalise the concept of programmatism come up against is the impossibily of saying why bureaucracy is the inverted world of proletarian community, why unionism and 'integration' in general, function at all. That is to say to simply recognize that the proletariat doesn’t need to be integrated to the world of commodities: it sells its labour power, and that is enough. To acknowledge the intrinsic links between all the aspects of the 'classical workers movement'; acknowledging that there is no integration would be for programmatism to sink itself, and this, neither the SI nor any other theoretical production of the time could do, unless they pushed unilaterally the theory of integration to the point in which contradiction and classes disappear, as it implies not understanding the reciprocal implication as contradiction in the definition of exploitation itself.
Because they didn’t, and couldn’t, base the break between the 'classical workers movement' and the 'new revolutionary movement' on a restructuring of the contradiction between proletariat and capital which would overcome the programmatic content of this contradiction, the SI could only base this break [cut] on its circumstances, on its framework, on its extention. The general programmatic problematic remained (development of the conditions, liberation of a revolutionary essence of the proletariat, affirmation of the class) but in circumstances such that this problematic had a non programmatic outcome: there lied the point of implosion of situationist ideology. In that break between the two periods of the workers movement, the central concept, the founding one, was the concept of 'everyday life', itself linked to the concept of 'modern capitalism'.
The theory of everyday life is that 'place' in the theory of the SI where we see this [contradictory] 'overcoming' of programmatism which remains in the framework of programmatism. At the seminar he devoted (via the mediation of a tape recorder) to the definition of what must be understood by 'everyday life', on 17 May 1961 (the script can be found in SI, n.6, pp.20–27), Debord maintains from the start, as a kind of postulate, that we can only define everyday life as something that we want to transform. This concept is for us fondamental, insofar as, (we will see later), the concept of 'everyday life' is defined by the possibility of the proletariat to go beyond the 'old workers movement'. While it is still stuck in the classical problematic of 'conditionning' and 'mystification', the critique of everyday life must simultaneously open new horizons/perspectives beyond the affirmation of the proletariat.
Debord quickly eliminates two possible meanings of the concept of everyday life, not because they are totally wrong in themselves, but because they are partial, and wrong if we go no further: to consider everyday life to be what remains from the whole of social practices once specialised practices have been taken out; and to consider everyday life to be peculiar to a specific category of the population, namely the working class.
Someone said here that it would be interesting to study the workers as guinea pigs who have probably been infected with this virus of everyday life because they, having no access to specialized activities, have no life except everyday life. This condescending manner of investigating the common people in search of an exotic primitivism of everyday life […] never ceases to astonish.
This attitude clearly reveals a desire to hide behind a development of thought based on the separation of artificial, fragmentary domains so as to reject the useless, vulgar and disturbing concept of 'everyday life.' Such a concept covers an uncatalogued and unclassified residue of reality, a residue some people don’t want to face because it at the same time represents the standpoint of the totality and thus implies the necessity of a holistic political judgment.
In relation to the first point, Debord maintains that there is no outside to everyday life, that it it the centre of everything, as shown by the small deviation from common practices that the utilisation of a tape recorder for his intervention represents. The critique of the second point completes the first one, but this conception which sees everyday life as what embarrassingly remains outside all specific activities, simultaneously recognizes it as the point of view of totality. 'Everyday life is the mesure of everything…' (ibid.) That everyday life is the standpoint of totality because it appears as a residue only means that 'everyday life is organized within the limits of a scandalous poverty' and 'there is nothing accidental about this poverty of everyday life: it is a poverty that is constantly imposed by the coercion and violence of a society divided into classes, a poverty historically organized in line with the evolving requirements of exploitation' (ibid.) Through an inversion, the common and uninteresting banal nature of everyday life becomes the proof of its centrality, but only from the point of view of the will to transform it – it is only possible to define everyday life as something which needs to be transformed. And if everyday life is still outside history, if it is where banality constantly repeats itself 'it is above all a verdict against the historical, insofar as it has been the heritage and project of an exploitative society'. In 'accepting' the starting point of the banality of everyday life, its residual statut, Debord inverts this definition as the standpoint of the totality of this banalisation which has become the general principle of this society. He draws from the extreme banality of everyday life, from the fact that it can’t be an object of analysis, the proof that it is the general verity of the society of capital. And it is only in this regard that it becomes the 'prerogative' of a specific category within this society, category which can precisely have the standpoint of totality because of its necessity to transform everyday life.
Everyday life, policed and mystified by every means, is a sort of reservation for the good natives who keep modern society running without understanding it – this society with its rapid growth of technological powers and the forced expansion of its market. History (that is to say the transformation of reality) cannot presently be used in everyday life because the people who live that everyday life are the product of a history over which they have no control. It is of course they themselves who make this history, but they do not make it freely or consciously.[…] And so everyday life, where all questions are liable to be posed in a unitary manner, is naturally the domain of ignorance.” (ibid.)
It will inevitably appear that the unbearable misery of everyday life will become the feeling that all real possibilities, all desires were lying in everyday life rather than in specialised activities and forms of entertainment. At that moment:
Awareness of the profound richness and energy abandoned in everyday life is inseparable from awareness of the poverty of the dominant organization of this life' (ibid)
By saying this, Debord dismisses all idea of 'reformism of everyday life' (what will be the fondation of the critique of the movement provo in the Netherlands), as the consciousness of the misery of everyday life can only be the consciousness what makes it miserable: the organisation of society into classes.
The critique of everyday life is in situationist theory the differentiating point between the 'classical workers movement' and the 'new revolutionary movement', which adopts the standpoint of the critique of totality. This differentiation occurs on different points (which, negatively, make it possible to get at a definition of the 'old workers movement'.)
10-First of all, the critique of everyday life imposes the end of the 'politics of separation'. Without the critique of everyday life, revolutionary critique is as conventional, separated and, ultimately, as passive as 'those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure.' (SI, n.6, p.4) The coming revolution can only be a critique of revolution; here the differentiation with the 'classical worker’s movement' clearly posed the differenciating moment with the 'old workers movement': a revolution which would not situate itself at the level of everyday life could only create a new 'separated power'. First, this implies a critique of the overestimation of the moment of the taking of power as this overestimation immediately implies the repression of all revolutionary tasks. The standpoint of everyday life consequently implies a conception of revoltion as immediate communisation of society; in this regard, this standpoint differentiates itself from programmatism. Secondly, the critique of 'separated politics' has the critique and the abolition of work as its content.
This is the essential differentiating point from the 'classical workers movement': the critique of everyday life can only be a critique of work. Because it is the first time we use this term in this chapter on the SI, we should say what the SI mean by work: 'work in the common sense of the word' (SI, n.8, p.4). We say it with no irony at all; it is certainly the richest and the most practical definition that we encountered in all these pages on the critique of work.
The experience of the empty leisure produced by modern capitalism has provided a critical correction to the Marxian notion of the extension of leisure time: It is now clear that full freedom of time requires first of all a transformation of work and the appropriation of this work in view of goals, and under conditions, that are utterly different from those of the forced labor that has prevailed until now (see the activity of the groups that publish Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, Solidarity in England and Alternative in Belgium). But those who put all the stress on the necessity of changing work itself, of rationalizing it and of interesting people in it, and who pay no attention to the free content of life (i.e. the development of a materially equipped creative power beyond the traditional categories of work time and rest-and-recreation time) run the risk of providing an ideological cover for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of greater efficiency and profitability without at all having called in question the experience of this production or the necessity of this kind of life. The free construction of the entire space-time of individual life is a demand that will have to be defended against all sorts of dreams of harmony in the minds of aspiring managers of social reorganization. (SI, n.6, p.4)
It is necessary to go beyond the transformation of work, to go beyond the notion of production itself and of contenting oneself with the marxian idea of the extension of leisure time. The critique of work – rather than its 'humanisation' – the critique of the separation between working time and leisure time – to promote instead the unitary construction of lived time – appears to the SI to be the principal characteristic of the struggles which herald this 'new revolutionary movement' (cf. Naples, Merlebach, Liege, in SI, n.7, p.11). The centre of the revolutionary project is nothing less than the abolition of work, as well as the abolition of the proletariat.
The criterion of the non programmatic overcoming that get formalised in the concept of everyday life remain however contained within a programmatic contradiction as it is not the contradiction which is modified but its setting. This is the principal point which makes this overcoming of programmatism part of a programmatic problematic: this differentiating point (the critique of everyday life) is linked to the new conditions of 'modern capitalism', these conditions being analysed as spectacle. All the rest then follows: the technical means to build another society already exist; the contradiction between classes, as it implies the realisation and affirmation of one of its poles, retains an affirmative general form; the Workers' Councils remain as the formal organisation of communism; and underlying all this is the presupposition of a human nature and an opposition between the real and its concealment.
The very fact of making the revolutionary project and practice of the proletariat dependent on objective conditions – rather than understanding the definition and the practice of the proletariat as a term of the contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, as the development itself of the contradiction between classes – shows that the SI remains in a problematic in which the class is in itself (as it represents the irrepressible nature of the lived) productive of communisme, face to face with capital, and therefore enters in contradiction with it. The revolutionary project is then, as we will see, dependant on the reversal/detournement of these objective conditions, seen as conditioning. Dependant on the contradiction between the misery of everyday life and the possible constructions of life rendered possible by present technical means.
These conditions are those of the 'bureaucratic society of consumerism' which everywhere shapes its own setting and manifests in all aspects of everyday life its fundamental principe of alienation and constraint. This extension of conditioning is the new framework from which the revolutionary movement will have to struggle. From that point on, the contradiction of modern capitalism is for the SI exactly the same as for SoB:
The internal defect of the system is that it cannot totally reify people; it also needs to make them act and participate, without which the production and consumption of reification would come to a stop (SI, n.7, p.9)
But while SoB sees the revolutionary movement as a taking in hand of the labour process by the workers themselves from their own experience in the factory, the SI extented the conception of alienated labour to the whole of society trough the concept of everyday life. This allows the situationists to answer Le Monde Libertaire who reproach them for speaking about everything but very little about work, that in fact they were never speaking about anything else, but not where the specialised politics intend to limit the question of work. Against modern capitalism, the revolutionary movement is a construction of life in its totality and an abolition of separations.
The thesis of Society of the Spectacle provide the theoretical basis of this extension. The principle of the spectacle is the fetichism of commodities. In modern capitalism, this fetichism has become the regulation of all the time and space of life.
The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is its world.[…] With the 'second industrial revolution,' alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production. (Debord, op.cit., thesis 42)
But the fact that these conditions are theorized as spectacle gives them, as conditions, a very specific character. Their overcoming implies not understanding them as conditions any more, and what’s more it is only possible to understand the spectacle when conceiving its overcoming. Understanding present conditions as spectacle implies conceiving of them in an overcoming which would be the abolition of all conditions: we are dealing with the critique of economy. It is in the formulation itself of the conditions of revolution as spectacle – that is to say in a programmatic problematic – that the SI manages to 'rub programmatism out'. The SI formulates conditions, thus a programmatic problematic, but these conditions are such that in them programmatism seems to disappear.
Understanding capitalist society as having reached the stage of spectacular society makes impossible the conception of a contradiction to this society which would be contemplative – that is to say dependant on the development of the productive forces or on any accumulation of conditions. An attitude at the same time contemplative (understanding itself as dependant on conditions) and antagonistic to capitalist society would be in itself contradictory, would abolish itself. To the extent that this society is understood as spectacular, this attitude would in itself be the acceptance of what it claims to be criticizing – that is to say capitalist society as spectacular.
The inversion carried out by Marx in order to 'salvage' the thought of the bourgeois revolutions by transferring it to a different context does not trivially consist of putting the materialist development of productive forces in place of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter with itself […]. For once history becomes real, it no longer has an end. Marx demolished Hegel’s position of detachment from events, as well as passive contemplation by any supreme external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theory’s concern is simply to know what it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day society’s passive contemplation of the movement of the economy is an untranscended holdover from the undialectical aspect of Hegel’s attempt to create a circular system (Thesis 80)
The historical critique that Debord makes breaks away from programmatism to the extent that it breaks out, through the critique of Hegelianism, from the return to itself of the subject which always remains an ahistorical dynamic and perspective because it presupposes an end. Marx’project is one of a conscious history. In a history without end, all contemplative position is abolished, as nothing guarantees the future: we need to free the dialectic from an affirmative essence such that the negation only exists for the advent of the positive, even if it is labelled 'negation of the negation'. History has no object distinct from what it creates from out of itself. The final metaphysical vision, according to Debord, is the one which looks at 'the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the object of history.' (ibid., thesis 74)
From this critical basis, Debord reaches the most important theoretical conclusion of Society of the Spectacle: that revolutionary practice doesn’t refer to anything outside itself which would guarantee its truth. There is no possible identification of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie from the point of view of the revolutionary taking of power. But we will see that it is precisely where Debord goes the furthest in the overcoming of all programmatic theory that he falls back to it and doesn’t achieve this overcoming because he resuscitates, through the concept of spectacle itself, a problematic of the conditions. Let’s look at these two important conclusions.
The scientific-determinist aspect of Marx’s thought was precisely what made it vulnerable to the process of ideologization.[…] The advent of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, which is increasingly seen as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own future negation. In this way revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this negation, tends to be pushed out of theory’s field of vision. (ibid., thesis 84)
As a result '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 – this is where the practical conditions of consciousness must exist” (ibid, thesis 90). When Debord declares that 'the most advanced theoretical truth of the International Workingmen’s Association was its own existence in practice', not only does he wrongly paraphrases Marx’ famous judgment on the Commune, but he also belittles his own claim. He wrongly paraphrases Marx’ jugement because by saying this he identifies the 'organisation' (the Commune) of an insurrection confronting its adversary through the mesures it takes for the production of new social relations with what is simply a formal organisation which has no vocation of being in itself the constitution of a communist society. (the SI, at their own level, partly came a cropper because of this confusion). Thus, if Debord ends up conceiving the course of the capitalist mode of production essentially as a contradiction between the proletariat and capital, and this contradiction as being its own condition – as he doesn’t refer to the development of productive forces or to the economy in general (which are only determinations of itself), it is only true to the extent that this unity takes shape in formal organisations. To the movement of the economy which must guarantee the necessity of its negation Debord substitutes the movement of the revolutionary theory 'which must reach its own total existence'. It reaches this total existence as its practical verification through the historical forms which appeared in the spontaneous struggle of workers, to the extent that these organisations guarantee 'the practical conditions of consciousness'. At that point, the fundamental condition for revolution is realised: 'The proletariat cannot create its own new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence of such a power – not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession which that growth entails.' (ibid, thesis 88). The parallel is not accidental: the dialectic of theory –organisation – consciousness has replaced the dialectic of the productive forces, but it plays an identical role. And, as with the productive forces, it must go through a history of its realisation:
The weakness of Marx's theory is naturally the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. […] Revolutionary theory thus could not yet [underlined by us] achieve its own total existence. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and clarifying it with cloistered, scholarly work, in the British Museum, caused a loss in the theory itself. (ibid., thesis 85)
Throughout his life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but the exposition of his theory was carried out on the terrain of the dominant thought insofar as it took the form of critiques of particular disciplines, most notably […] of political economy. (ibid.,thesis 84)
This central question of organization was the question least developed by revolutionary theory at the time when the workers' movement was founded (ibid., thesis 90)
Debord conceives that the 'coming to be of the subject of history' is its own movement, its own conscious practice, but he understands it as a becoming of theory and it is this becoming that poses, as consciousness, the condition of this coming to be. This is where he goes back on his first principles. This is why the theory of the spectacle, for the same reason that it expresses the abolition of all contemplative attitude in revolutionary practice (simply because it defined capital as spectacle and therefore cannot critizice it in a contemplative way without finding itself in contradiction with the definition it gave to the object it criticizes), reproduces in the form of consciousness, not a contemplative attitude, but a new separation between the proletariat as class of the capitalist mode of production (simple determination and 'actor/agent' of the spectacle) and as revolutionary class (class of consciousness). As the transition from one to the other has been made impossible ( by the theorie of the Spectacle itself), consciousness will need to reach its own total existence through the dialectic theory/organisation/consciousness. The main weakness, up to this point, of the critique of programmatism – including the SI’s critique – is that it understands the reciprocal implication between the proletariat and capital as relations between things rather than as practices, activities. This is why the proletariat as active revolutionary class, was only understood and developed in the form of cousciousness, in opposition to its belonging to the capitalist mode of production, but only abstractly, and understanding the abstraction as its waiting to meet the practical conditions it was missing to become true. The overcoming of programmatism doesn’t consist in proclaiming the negation of the proletariat or the abolition of work, it starts when exploitation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are produced theoretically not only as development of capital but as contradiction between the proletariat and capital, the central concepts being exploitation and accumulation.
The second point (that there is no possible identification between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie regarding the way it seizes power in the revolution) that allows Debord (through his critique of hegelianism) to go the furthest in his critique of programmatism, is closely linked to the first one.
The bourgeoisie developed its autonomous economic power in the medieval period of the weakening of the State, at the moment of feudal fragmentation of balanced powers. (ibid., thesis 87)
The bourgeoisie came to power because it is the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by becoming the class of consciousness.[…] A Jacobin seizure of power cannot be its instrument. No ideology can help the proletariat disguise its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality which is really its own. (ibid., thesis 88)
The distinction that Debord establishes is fundamental: the proletarian revolution cannot be the affirmation of a power which develops itself within capitalist society. For proletarians, all the conditions of existence of society have become something contingent, exterior and antagonistic, on which they have no control and on which no social organisation can give them control. It follows from this that not only is the proletarian revolution not the development of a power acquired within the [old world], but also that it is the negation of the proletariat itself.
Not basing himself on anything in the previous society whose power or whose 'mechanical' development would in itself guarantee its success, Debord draws the conclusion that the only 'guarantee' of the revolution is the proletariat becoming the class of consciousness. Here again we find the critique of the contemplative attitude which is the basis of everything we can consider as critique of programmatism in Society of the spectacle, that is to say the critique of the separation between the activity of the proletariat and its conditions, the fact that the contradiction between the proletariat and capital is considered as its own movement and as being based only on itself. The proletariat becoming class of consciousness means that the only thing it needs to know is what it does. It is clearly consciousness to the extent that the proletariat does not present itself as an observer exterior to what is happening, it is not in the situation of an observer contemplating the movement of an exterior supreme agent. But the proletariat cannot become the class of consciousness. Again Debord’s critique inverts itself and remains in the framework of programmatism at the moment when it would seem it is the furthest from it.
It is not enough to 'ruin Hegel's position as separate from what happens, as well as contemplation by any supreme external agent whatever', one must avoid reintroducing a new 'Reason' in order to achieve this 'critical confrontation with Hegelian thought out of which all the theoretical currents of the revolutionary workers' movement grew' (ibid, thesis 78) 'The thought of history can be saved only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class cannot be less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world.' (ibid, thesis 78). If we are going to demonstrate the perfectly Hegelian character of such an assertion – which, involuntarily or not, follows the movement of self-consciousness exposed in the paragraphe entitled 'Idealism' in the chapter 'The certainty and truth of reason' of the Phenomenology of Spirit – it is not because we think that the simple qualification of idealist is enough to criticize a position. Criticizing the idealism of a position does not lead anywhere if it does not imply criticizing the position which needs an idealist formulation. Here what is most important is not idealism but what idealism is the expression of. What it expresses here is the revolutionary practice of the proletariat as consciousness operating on the totality of its world, that is to say a revolutionary practice in which the proletariat makes the world become its own – world in which it recognizes itself, in which it is itself its own object in the alterity of the world, this alterity having become, through the revolution, an alterity recognized as its own. It is the movement which brings the consciousness of the proletariat to recognize itself in a world transformed by revolution, but this transformation is in fact only an appropriation. The aim is not to manage existing misery because, by definition, once it has been appropriated, misery, which is the spectacle, is not misery any more. The proletariat takes itself as object; it is… the definition of the 'workers council' in the situationist theory (Luckacs’ identical subject-object). It is always when Debord seems the furthest from programmatism that he resuscitates it.
From the fact that self-consciousness is Reason, its hitherto negative attitude towards otherness turns round into a positive attitude. So far it has been concerned merely with its independence and freedom; it has sought to save and keep itself for itself at the expense of the world or its own actuality, both of which appeared to it to involve the denial of its own essential nature. But qua reason, assured of itself, it is at peace so far as they are concerned, and is able to endure them; for it is certain its self is reality, certain that all concrete actuality is nothing else but it. Its thought is itself eo ipso concrete reality; its attitude towards the latter is thus that of Idealism. […] Reason is the conscious certainty of being all reality. This is how Idealism expresses the principle of Reason. Just as consciousness assuming the form of reason immediately and inherently contains that certainty within it, in the same way idealism also directly proclaims and expresses that certainty. I am I in the sense that the I which is object for me is sole and only object, is all reality and all that is present.[…] Self-consciousness, however, is not merely from its own point of view (für sich), but also in its very self (an sich) all reality, primarily by the fact that it becomes this reality, or rather demonstrates itself to be such.” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Aubier Montagne, t.1, p.196–197)
If it is possible to let oneself get 'caught' into 'critical confrontation with Hegelian thought', it is because this selfconsciousness as reason is not a given, a definition of consciousness, but a becoming. Self-consciousness demonstrates itself to be all reality with the disappearance of otherness as beingin- itself, but also with the disappearance of otherness simply for itself. The idealism about which Hegel speaks here is self-consciousness which has forgotten the path which is behind it when it appears as reason. As idealism it only declares being all reality without considering the work which produced it as such. It is therefore possible to consider this self-consciousness as being a historical stage, even if it is a historical stage of Spirit (and, therefore, for Hegel, of reality). 'Consciousness will determine its relation to otherness or its object in various ways according as it is at one or other stage in the development of the world-spirit into selfconsciousness. How the world-spirit immediately finds and determines itself and its object at any given time, or how it appears to itself, depends on what it has already come to be, or on what it already implicitly and inherently is. (ibid, pp.198–199)
And Hegel continue with the study of the 'categories', that is to say the unity of thought and being, even if, as category, this unity is not developed concretely. If it was, this unity could very well, following self-consciousness as consciousness finding itself back in its object, become the movement of 'conscious history'. It is necessary for consciousness to go through separation, alienation, to be, as proletariat, consciousness of the world ; similarly in the 'workers' council', the proletariat would find itself back as subject by making the world – its own – world which wasn’t itself but which was already its production. It was necessary for it to produce this world as otherness (here the spectacle becomes a necessary moment of the history of the proletariat, as alienation is a necessary moment of the 'history' of Spirit) before finding it back in the process of finding itself back.
As we said, Debord’s thesis is not criticisable simply because it is idealistic but because, in the critical confrontation with Hegel, it retains the overcoming of a contradiction as a recovered positivity. It is at this moment that it becomes idealist. Debord, through his distinction between the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution reaches an extreme point of the critique of programmatism, but the concept of spectacle that underlies this critique of programmatism – as it relies on an opposition between the real true and authentic and its mystification, presupposes its overcoming as the victory of the real recognizing itself as being the real and no longer, in an alienated way, as spectacle of itself. Its victory is to take itself as object, its victory is the victory of self-consciousness. If, as Debord himself says it, revolution is the communisation of society, that is to say the abolition of capital and of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot become the 'class of consciousness' Even the revolution (above all the revolution) is not the moment when the proletariat operates on its world. The communist activity of the proletariat has always as its content the mediation of the abolition of capital by its relation to capital; it is neither a liberation of capital as affirmation of the proletariat nor an immediatism of communism (a pivotal moment when the proletariat would recognize that all belongs to it before abolishing itself or as a precondition to its abolition). We must put an end once and for all to all transitional periods (whether they give themselves this name or not). The activity of the proletariat and the consciousness that is inherent to it always goes through something which is different from it: capital.
The self-consciousness of the proletariat is not an immediate consciousness. If, as any other class, the proletariat recognizes itself in its particularity only in its opposition to another class, it finds in this opposition no confirmation of itself. The proletariat has self-consciousness (which means nothing more than its existence and activity against capital) only in its opposition to capital. Because of this, this non-immediate consciousness is theory (we will develop this idea in the next chapter) Defining the proletariat as the class of consciousness, in the sense of the unity of the subject and the object, is still a form of its affirmation as a class:
The accession of the working class to historical consciousness will be the task of the workers themselves, and that will be possible only through an autonomous organization. The form of the council remains the means and goal of total emancipation. (Viénet, Enrages and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, Gallimard, p.155)
The programmatic duality of the revolutionary nature and of the conditions has only been suppressed because the conditions have taken the shape of the 'spectacle', and this reintroduced a new programmatic structure of the revolutionary course which still present itself, in the movement of selfconsciousness, in the form of the loss of the subject and its coming back to itself.
The spectacle is at the same time the condition of the critique of the classical workers movement, the possibility of formulating in an absolutly new way the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, and, simultaneously, the fondamental impossibility to go beyond programmatism: the contradiction which is exploitation can well be posed as the origin of the spectacle, it resolves itself as suppression of the spectacle which takes the form of the overcoming of alienation. In this instance through the creation of a world in which the revolutionary class recognizes itself, the world of Workers' Councils. The contradiction is only seen as separation, as the existence of a mediation (the spectacle) which takes away from the individual its own lived experience, the contradiction is the appearance of self-consciousness, that is to say consciousness recognizing itself in the world through the abolition of the spectacle.