Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (109 page)

At the end of 1967, Guy Debord in
The Society of the Spectacle
and Raoul Vaneigem in
The Revolution of Everyday Life
presented the most elaborate expositions of Situationist theory which had a widespread influence in France during the 1968 student rebellion. Many of the most famous slogans which were scribbled on the walls of Paris were taken from their theses, such as FREE THE PASSIONS, NEVER WORK, LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME. Members of the Situationist International (SI) co-operated with the
enragés
from Nanterre University in the Occupations Committee of the Sorbonne, an assembly held in permanent session. On 17 May the Committee sent the following telegram to the Communist Party of the USSR:

Groups of
enragés
in Strasbourg, Nantes and Bordeaux were also inspired by the Situationists and attempted to ‘organize chaos’ on the campuses. The active thinkers however never numbered much more than a dozen.

In their analysis, the Situationists argued that capitalism had turned all relationships transactional, and that life had been reduced to a ‘spectacle’. The spectacle is the key concept of their theory. In many ways, they merely reworked Marx’s view of alienation, as developed in his early writings. The worker is alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world:

The increasing division of labour and specialization have transformed work into meaningless drudgery. ‘It is useless’, Vaneigem observes, ‘to expect even a caricature of creativity from a conveyor belt.’
²⁵
What they added to Marx was the recognition that in order to ensure continued economic growth, capitalism has created ‘pseudo-needs’ to increase consumption. Instead of saying that consciousness was determined at the point of production, they said it occurred at the point of consumption. Modern capitalist society is a consumer society, a society of ‘spectacular’ commodity consumption. Having long been treated with the utmost contempt as a producer, the worker is now lavishly courted and seduced as a consumer.

At the same time, while modern technology has ended natural alienation (the struggle for survival against nature), social alienation in the form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has continued. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing. The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what could be. ‘Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation’, Vaneigem asks, ‘entails the risk of dying of boredom?’
²⁶

The way out for the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. To transform the perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed power relations and therefore transformed society. They therefore tried to construct situations which disrupt the ordinary
and normal in order to jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting. In place of petrified life, they sought the
dérive
(with its flow of acts and encounters) and
détournement
(rerouting events and images). They supported vandalism, wildcat strikes and sabotage as a way of destroying the manufactured spectacle and commodity economy. Such gestures of refusal were considered signs of creativity. The role of the SI was to make clear to the masses what they were already implicitly doing. In this way, they wished to act as catalysts within the revolutionary process. Once the revolution was underway, the SI would disappear as a group.

In place of the society of the spectacle, the Situationists proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labour, classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-needs would be replaced by real desires, and the economy of profit become one of pleasure. The division of labour and the antagonism between work and play would be overcome. It would be a society founded on the love of free play, characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to perform roles. Above all, they insisted that every individual should actively and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every moment of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of their lives and release their own potential and obtain their own pleasure.

As for the basic unit of the future society, they recommended workers’ councils by which they meant ‘sovereign rank-and-file assemblies, in the enterprises and the neighbourhoods’.
²⁷
As with the communes of the anarcho-communists, the councils would practise a form of direct democracy and make and execute all the key decisions affecting everyday life. Delegates would be mandated and recallable. The councils would then federate locally, nationally and internationally.

In their call for the ‘concrete transcendence of the State and of every kind of alienating collectivity’ and in their vision of communist society the Situationists come closest to the anarchists.
²⁸
They not only referred to Bakunin for their attack on authoritarian structures and bureaucracy, but Debord argued that ‘anarchism had led in 1936 [in Spain] to a social revolution and to a rough sketch, the most advanced ever, of proletarian power’.
²⁹
The Situationists differ however from traditional anarchism in their elitism as an exclusive group and in their overriding concern with coherence of theory and practice. In their narrow insistence on the proletariat as the sole revolutionary class, they overlooked the revolutionary potential of other social groups, especially the students. They also denied that they were ‘spontaneists’ like the 22 March Movement and rejected the ‘ideology’ of anarchism in so far as it was allegedly another restrictive ideology imposed on the workers.

Despite the acuteness of their critique of modem capitalism, the Situationists mistakenly took a temporary economic boom in post-war France for a permanent trend in capitalist societies. Their belief in economic abundance now seems wildly optimistic; not only underproduction but also underconsumption continue in advanced industrial societies. In many parts of the globe, especially in the southern hemisphere, so-called ‘natural alienation’, let alone social alienation, has yet to be overcome. Nevertheless, for all their weaknesses, the Situationists have undoubtedly enriched anarchist theory by their critique of modern culture, their celebration of creativity, and their stress on the immediate transformation of everyday life. Although the SI group disbanded in 1972 after bitter wrangling over tactics, their ideas have continued to have widespread influence in anarchist and feminist circles and inspired, at times almost subconsciously it seemed, much of the style and content of punk rock.

The only place in Europe where a profoundly libertarian movement got underway outside France was in Holland where the ‘Provo’ movement which emerged in the mid sixties had been inspired by anarchist militants. The movement began when the philosophy student Roel van Duyn, who had participated in anarchist artist Robert Jaspar Grootveld’s staged ‘happenings’, set up the monthly magazine
Provo.
The ‘Provos’ – short for provocateurs — brought social issues to public attention by means of well-orchestrated protests and demonstrations.

The approach of the Provos was non-violent, playful, and Utopian; they were determined to release the
homo ludens
buried in each of their staid compatriots. They used games, satire and mimicry in order to make authority reveal the coercive nature bidden under its tolerant mask. One of their more memorable plans was to leave white bicycles all over Amsterdam for anyone to use to counteract the effect of the private motor car on the environment. The campaign grew until the police began to confiscate the bicycles, not on the grounds that they might affect the car industry but because they might be stolen!

Given the highly industrialized and densely populated nature of their society, the Provos were particularly concerned with environmental issues. They did not look to the proletariat like the Situationists in France but to the ‘provotariat’ – hippies, drop-outs, students and the disaffected young -as the agents of change. The were self-consciously anarchist. The journal
Provo
, which reached a circulation of 10,000, included in its declaration of principles: ‘PROVO regards anarchism as the inspirational source of
resistance’ and ‘PROVO wants to revive anarchism and teach it to the young’.
³⁰

Roel van Duyn, the principal theoretical spirit, specifically identified himself with the anarchist tradition. A former art and philosophy student, van Duyn had emerged from an anarchist group inspired by the Dutch anarcho-pacifist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. He was also profoundly influenced by Kropotkin’s arguments for co-operation as the key factor in evolution, his call for a total revolution of society, and his vision of a balance between town and country.
³¹

The Provos participated in the 1966 municipal elections in Amsterdam, and won one seat, but their provocative nature inevitably led to clashes with the police. The movement reached a climax in 1966 when it disrupted Princess Beatrix’s wedding with smoke bombs — a riot followed. It began to flounder soon afterwards and wound itself up in 1967. On 13 May 1967 a Provo happening took place, proclaiming the ‘death of Provo’.

Concerned about the violent and destructive direction the Provos had taken, van Duyn concluded that it was not enough to protest against consumer society and centralized power; like the anarcho-syndicalists before him, he decided that it was essential to try and build a new society in the shell of the old. He now felt that the Provos should have put more emphasis on love than on creativity. In order to remind people of their close bond with nature, he chose as a symbol of a revitalized libertarian movement the figure of the ‘kabouter’, an elf or gnome.

It was the role of the modern kabouter, van Duyn argued, to become a ‘playful technologist’. In his
Message of a Wise Kabouter
(1969), he further tried to link cybernetics with anarchism since it teaches that a healthy organism controls itself. At the same time, he was less optimistic than Kropotkin in his estimate of the reasonableness of human beings; there is a ‘screwed up little dictator in each of us’ who has to be overcome.
³²
He also went beyond Kropotkin’s positivism to develop a formal dialectics based on the marriage of love and aggression. Whereas Kropotkin’s symbol was said to be the industrious and co-operative ant, van Duyn chose the peacock butterfly. Its normal mode of existence is based on love and co-operation, but it can also frighten its predator by spreading its wings and revealing menacing eyes.

In February 1970 the Kabouters announced the formation of an alternative community called the ‘Orange Free State’ (the royal house of Holland is the House of Orange). They set up twelve departments paralleling existing government ministries. In their playful proclamation, they declared that the new society would emerge out of the old society like a toadstool from a rotting trunk; from the subculture of the existing order will grow an alternative community. It will create a new culture with a new human being — the
‘culture elf’ – who will bring to an end the tension between nature and the old culture. The tension between riches and poverty will also be overcome by collectivizing property.

The ‘Free State’ will be a society without government in which everybody is responsible for his or her own destiny. Its form will be anti-authoritarian and decentralized, based on a council democracy which will never resort to force. In order to build their new autonomous society in the midst of the old order, the Kabouters recommended non-violent direct action, sabotage and ‘erotics’. In short, their social philosophy is not ‘the socialism any more of the clenched fist, but of the interlaced fingers, of the erect penis, of the flying butterfly, of the moved glance, of the Holy Cat. It is anarchism.’
³³
An orange tree was planted as a symbol for the new society and the citizens of Amsterdam were invited to dance around it, singing the new national anthem, ‘The Cuckoo Song’.

The Kabouters never formed a party and remained a broad libertarian movement, but, six months after the formation of the Free State, they caused a sensation by winning seats in six municipalities in Holland with eleven per cent of the vote and gaining five seats in the forty-five-member council of Amsterdam. Groups on similar lines were formed in other parts of Europe. Although such parliamentary action was clearly a retreat from pure anarchism and a ‘Free State’ is a contradiction in terms, van Duyn saw it as a peaceful way of creating a free society on libertarian lines. When the Kabouters began to falter in 1971, he formed a new group called the ‘Panic Sowers’, after expressing his views in personal form in a
Panic Diary
(1971). While his comrades evoked the Greek God Pan in their attempt to defend nature against its enemies, they singularly failed to create panic in the authorities. The movement collapsed silently in Holland in the early seventies, but the electoral strategy and the concern with the environment of the Kabouters made them forerunners of the European Greens.