Exploring the Situationists #9

@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 #9 (January 14, 2024) we examined these articles from Internationale Situationniste
Reform and Counterreform in the Bureaucratic Bloc [on the "Prague Spring"]
How Not To Understand Situationist Books
Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization (Riesel)
Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized Self-Management (Vaneigem)
The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power (Rothe)
The Latest Exclusions
The Elite and the Backward
Cinema and Revolution
The Organization Question for the SI (Debord)
The articles can also be found online at www.bopsecrets...

[@ZOGGYDOGGY]

Remember the Hungarian revolution in the wake of the defeat of Austrai=Hunagry, the political State of the Emperor is WWI. from Wikipedia:
In November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and set up the Party of Communists in Hungary. Adopting Lenin's tactics, he agitated against the government of Mihály Károlyi and achieved great popularity despite being imprisoned. After his release in March 1919, Kun led a successful coup d'état, formed a Communist-Social Democratic coalition government and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though the de jure leader of the republic was prime minister Sándor Garbai, the de facto power was in the hands of foreign minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radiotelegraph and received direct orders and advice from the Kremlin.[2]
The new regime collapsed four months later in the face of Romanian advance and great dissatisfaction among the Hungarian populace.[citation needed] Kun fled to Soviet Russia, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy as the head of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee from 1920. He organised and actively participated in the Red Terror in Crimea (1920-1921), following which he participated in the 1921 March Action, a failed Communist uprising in Germany.
During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of Trotskyism, arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously rehabilitated by Soviet leadership in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the De-Stalinization period under Nikita Khrushchev.
end Wikipedia
Idealists will always end up faction fighting over what the True Ideal is. Idealism is a pillar of class dominated society. Factions were banned by the Bolsheviks (themselves a faction) at the 10th Party Congress. And then, like Idealists, they formed factions, which in turn were murdered by the dominant faction.
We have said that the workers must become dialecticians and themselves take care of all their theoretical and practical problems.(2) Those who are concerned with running their own affairs need only appropriate our methods, instead of lapping up the latest rumors about us, and they will become that much more independent from us. [...]
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL 1969
The proletariat are those who are dependent on selling their labour power to an employer in order to make a living. That's wages system of slavery. When the workers unite as a class to emancipate themselves from the wage system and start producing for use with distribution based on need, the proletariat abolishes itself as a class and class dominated society.. However, that has never occurred.