SITUATIONISTS AND THE 1£CH MAY 1968

capitalist system is unabated,. will remain revolutionary
chickenfeed till the myth of the Labour
Movement has been finally l?id.
With the decline of the spectacular antagonisms
(Tory /Labou.r, East/West, High
Culture/Low Culture), the official Left is looking
around for new mock battles to fight. lt has
always had a masochitic urge to embrace the
tough minded alternative. The orthodox 'communist'
party owed its popularity among the
lumpenintelligentsia to an assertion that it was
too practical to have thne for theory - a claim
amply confirmed by its . own blend of flaccid
intellectual nullity and permanent political
impotence. Those who counsel "working within
the. Labour Movement" play on the same secret
craving to rush around with buckets of water trying
to light a fire. The latest enthusiasm of the
left is Mao's "cultural revolution", that farce produced
by courtesy of the Chinese bureaucracy
(complete with blue jokes about red panties). To
repeat an old adage, there is no revolution without
the arming of the working-class. A revolution
ofunarmed schoolChildren, which even then has
to be neutered by the "support" of the army, is a
pseudo-revolution . serving some obscure need
for readjustment within the bureaucracy. As a
tactic for bureaucratic reorganisation it is familiar
- after the hysterical and ineffective purge of
the Right comes the appeal to "discipline", the
call "to purify our ranks and eliminate individualism"
(People's Daily, 21st Feb 1967), and finally
the essential purge of the Left. Far from marking
an attack on 'socialist' bureaucracy, the
GPCR marks the bureaucracy's first adjustment
to the techniques of neo-capitalist repression,
its colonisation of everyday life. lt is the beginning
of the Great Leap Forward to Kruschov's
Russia and Kennedy's America.
The real revolution begins at home: in the
desperation of consumer production, in the continuing
struggle of the unofficial working class.
As yet this unofficial revolt has an official ideology,
The notion that modern capitalism is producing
new revolutionary forces, new poverties
of a new proletariat, is still suppressed. Instead
there is an a priori fascination with the 'conversion'
or the 'subversion' of the old union movement.
The militants are recuperating themselves
(and their_ intellectual 'advisers' urge on the
process). The only real subversion is in a new
consciousness and a new alliance - the location
of the struggie in the banalities of everyday life,
in the supermarket and the beatclub as well as
on the shopfloor. The enemy is entrism, cultural
or political. Art and the Labour Movement are
dead! long live the Situationist International!
Members of the lnternationa/e Situationniste
and Students of Strasbourg