Exploring the Situationists #8

@Exploring the Situationists is an ongoing series of Zoom sessions where I (Ken Knabb) comment on various situationist texts, followed by Q&A. The sessions are being recorded and posted on RUclips. We are currently going through the "Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition" (10 sessions). After that we'll be doing a close reading of my annotated translation of Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" (12 sessions).
Participation is free. If you're interested in joining the live sessions (which take place every other Sunday, 5:00-7:00pm Pacific Time) please contact me at knabb AT bopsecrets DOT org
In this session #8 (December 17, 2023) we examined the May 1968 revolt in France, reading the article "Beginning of an Era" and various "May 1968 Documents."
The articles can also be found online at www.bopsecrets...

[@ZOGGYDOGGY]

Workers' councils are the form, but what content do they reflect?
I think we see what the content was in the Poland, France, Algeria and Hungary of today.
Why?
I think that about 99% of the socialist/communist and/or anarchist or union newspapers have NEVER mentioned the abolition of wage labour, commodity production/sale and classes as the Sits did in their communications. How can the workers emancipate themselves if they don't know what the solution is. The Sits at least spoke and wrote about those power dynamics before May 68.
My view is that the workers can't create the material conditions and make it to the next step of an actually existing social revolution (not just another political revolution) without knowing beforehand why the system operates to enslave them. They may feel it, they may be exuberant about exercising some political power for a while, but they can't consciously pursue it because they have yet to be able to articulate how...."to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class."
Unions officially only call for 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. The rank and file agree, even though, as Marx and Engels pointed out more than a century ago that wage labour produces all the wealth of nations, excepting the wealth already existing in 'natural resources'. The point is to challenge that conservative, Idealist slogan about 'fair' wages, but 99% of the left doesn't. The bottom 99% of the left never hammers away at the notions expressed by Marx way back in 1865 when he addressed a gathering of leftist oriented proles:
"Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
"Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.
"Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system."
"They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!""
So, what do the workers reproduce after the euphoric moments of a revolutionary upheaval?
They reproduce conformity with the old social relations of top down power, the negative notion of freedom being dependent on the unfreedom of others who compete with them for dominance. They do not establish, "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
"Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking-and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority."
―Erich Fromm,
The Art of Loving
We should be asking, as the Sits did, some of the following questions:
What are we conforming to?
Do we all conform to the same thing?
What is this thing?
Do we conform to different things depending on how we were brought up, where we were brought up, which culture we were brought up in?
Is the need to conform consistent with our need to survive?
Can''t that need be effectively addressed from a communist perspective now that we face mega deaths by the end of this century. as the wage system we reproduce operates to spew ever more greenhouse gas into an ecosphere becoming a gas chamber?