Originally
appeared in Internationale Situationniste No.12 (September 1969). Translated
by Point Blank
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The Question of Organization for the SI
Guy Debord
1. UP UNTIL NOW, everything for which the SI has been known belongs
to an age that is fortunately over (more precisely, it can be said that
this was the "second period," if the activity that centered around the
supersession of art from 1957 to 1962 is counted as the first).
2. The new revolutionary tendencies of current society, however weak
and confused they may still be, are no longer restricted to a clandestine
scope: this year they are appearing in the street.
3. Parallel to this, the SI emerged from silence, and in strategic terms
it must now exploit this opening. The vogue that the term "situationist"
has achieved here and there cannot be prevented. We must act in such a
way that this (normal) phenomenon serves us more than it hinders us. To
me, "what serves us" is indistinguishable from what serves to unify and
radicalize scattered struggles. This is the SI's task as an organization.
Beyond this, the term "situationist" could be used to vaguely designate
a certain age of critical thought (and it is no mean feat to have inaugurated
this), but where everybody is only engaged by what he does personally,
without any reference to an organizational community. But as long as such
a community exists, it will have to succeed in distinguishing itself from
whoever talks about it without being a part of it.
4. Concerning the tasks on which we already recognized each other previously,
it can be said that we must presently concentrate less on theoretical
elaboration, which is to be continued, and more on its communication.
Essentially, we must emphasize our practical relationship with what appears,
while immediately increasing our possibilities for intervention, for critiques,
and for exemplary support.
5. The movement that is beginning primitively is the beginning of our
victory (in other words, the victory that we have been supporting and
pointing out for many years). But we must not "capitalize" on this victory,
for every affirmation of a moment of the revolutionary critique calls
for the requirement that every coherent organization must know how to
lose itself in revolutionary society. In the current and forthcoming subversive
currents, there is much to criticize. It would be very clumsy if we were
to make this necessary critique while leaving the SI above it all.
6. The SI must now prove its efficiency in a subsequent stage of revolutionary
activity - or else disappear.
7. In order to have the opportunities of attaining this efficiency,
we must recognize and state several truths about the SI that were certainly
true prior to this; but, in the current stage, at which "the truth is
verifying itself," it has become urgent to make it precise.
8. Since we have never considered the SI to be a goal in itself, but
as a moment of historical activity, the force of things now leads us to
prove it. The "coherence" of the SI is the relationship, directed towards
coherence, between all the theses that have been formulated, between them
and our action, as well as our solidarity on many, but not all, of the
questions about which each of us must engage the responsibility of others.
It cannot be a kind of mastery that is guaranteed to anybody, because
this person would then gain the reputation of having acquired our theoretical
bases so well that they would automatically glean an exemplary line of
conduct from them. It cannot be a demand for an equal excellence of all
on all questions or operations, and even less can it be a recognition
of such excellence.
9. Coherence is acquired and verified by egalitarian participation in
the totality of a common practice, which simultaneously reveals mistakes
and supplies remedies - this practice requires formal meetings to arrive
at decisions, the transmission of all information, and the examination
of all stated failures.
10. Currently, this practice demands more participants in the SI, taken
from among those who affirm their accord and display their capacities.
The small number of members has been selected very unjustly up until now,
and it has been the cause and the consequence of a ridiculous over-estimation
"officially" accorded to all the members of the SI simply by virtue of
that fact, when many of them had in no way given proof of any minimum
real capacities (i.e., the exclusions that have occurred in one year,
Garnautins or Englishmen).Such a pseudo-qualitative numerical limitation
exaggeratedly increases the importance of each particular stupidity while
supporting it at the same time.
11. Externally, a direct product of this selective illusion has been
the mythological recognition of autonomous pseudo-groups, gloriously located
at the level of the SI when they were merely feeble-minded admirers (and,
briefly put, were necessarily dishonest slanderers as well). It seems
to me that we cannot recognize any group as autonomous unless they are
engaged in autonomous practical work, nor the lasting success of such
a group unless they are engaged in united action with the workers (without
of course having such action fall below our "minimum definition of revolutionary
organizations"). All kinds of recent experiences have shown the recuperated
confusionism of the term "anarchist," and it seems to me that we must
oppose this confusionism everywhere.
12. I submit that the possibility of tendencies concerning diverse preoccupations
or tactical options must be admitted into the SI on the condition that
our general bases not be put into question. Furthermore, we must advance
toward a complete practical autonomy of national groups, to the extent
that they will be really able to constitute themselves.
13. Contrary to the habits of the excluded people who inactively pretended
in 1966 to attain a total realization of transparency and friendship in
the SI (it was almost embarrassing to judge their company to be boring),
and who, as a corollary, developed the most idiotic jealousies, lies unworthy
of grammar school kids, and conspiracies as ignominious as they were irrational,
and all of this in secret - contrary to their habits, we must only admit
historical relationships among us, (i.e., a critical confidence, the knowledge
of each member's possibilities or limits), but only on the basis of the
fundamental loyalty demanded by the revolutionary project that has been
defining itself for over a century.
14. We have no right to be mistaken in breaking with people. We will
have to be mistaken in matters of adhesion, and more or less frequently,
at that. Exclusions have almost never marked any theoretical progress
of the SI (on such occasions, we have not arrived at a more precise definition
of what is unacceptable; indeed, the surprising thing about the Garnautins
is precisely linked to the fact that it was an exception to this rule).
Exclusions have almost always been responses to objective pressures that
existing conditions reserved for our action. Thus, we run the risk of
having this reproduce itself on higher levels. All kinds of "Nashisms"
could re-shape themselves: the only question is whether we are in a position
to destroy them.
15. To accord the form of this debate to what I believe to be its content,
I propose that this text be communicated to certain comrades close to
the SI or desirous of taking part in it, and that we solicit their opinion
on this question.
Note added in August 1969
These notes of April 1968 were a contribution to a debate on organization
that at the time had to begin. Two or three weeks afterwards, the occupations
movement, which was certainly more agreeable and more instructive than
this debate, forced us to set them aside.
The last point alone had been immediately approved by the comrades of
the SI. Thus, this text, which obviously has nothing secret about it,
was, properly speaking, not even an internal SI document. However, toward
the end of 1968, we found that truncated and undated version of it had
been circulated by several leftist groups, to what purposes is unknown.
Consequently, the SI decided that the authentic version had to be published
in this review [Internationale Situationniste].
When our discussion on organization was able to be renewed in the fall
of 1968, the facts progressed very swiftly, and the situationists adopted
these theses, which were confirmed. Reciprocally, the SI knew how to act
in May in a manner that suitably responded to the demands that these theses
had formulated for the immediate future.
At the moment when this text is receiving wider distribution, I think
it necessary to add precision, in order to avoid any misunderstanding
on the question of the relative openness demanded by the SI. I have not
proposed any concession here to "common action" with those semi-radical
currents that are already in a position to be formed, and especially not
the abandonment of our rigor in choosing the members of the SI and in
the limitation of their number. I criticized a bad, abstract use of this
rigor, which could lead to the contrary of what we want. The admiring
or subsequently hostile excesses of all those who speak of us from the
viewpoint of unwanted and passionate spectators cannot be answered by
a "situ braggadocio" that would help spread the word that the situationists
are marvelous people effectively possessing everything in their lives
that they have expressed, or simply admitted, as a revolutionary theory
and program. Since May, it has been seen what magnitude and urgency this
problem has assumed.
The situationists do not have a monopoly to defend, nor any reward to
anticipate. A task that suited us has been undertaken and maintained through
good and bad, and as a whole, correctly with what is to be found here.
The current development of the subjective conditions of the revolution
must lead toward the definition of a strategy that, starting from different
data, should be as good as that which the SI has followed in more difficult
times.
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