REVIEWS FOR H&N 11 "The Politics of Whim: A Critique of the 'Situationist' Version of Marxism" by Chris R. Tame. (Published by the Libertarian Alliance, 1 Russell Chambers, London WC2E 8AA). It comes as a surprise that a four-page leaflet could give a substantial critique of the Situationist project. It is all the more surprising that it could be based on a reading of "Leaving the Twentieth Century" (always a strange and breathless selection) and written by an anarcho-capitalist. Inevitably, the situationist distaste for the forms in which needs are created and satisfied in modern societies is alien to an anarcho-capitalist: any diagnosis of alienation in labour or in leisure is found suspect. But by raising those very issues Tame presses on weak points in situationism. Did situationism deal in "real analysis, real questions and rational enquiry"? Or did it instead operate an ideology of rhetorical delusion and hide sectional interests under an abstract universalism? Situationism's proclaimed contempt for consumer goods provides much of its initial resonance for transitional social groups. Those forming their identity through differentiated taste are attracted by patrician distaste: poverty is in everyone else's lives. Washing machine and garbage disposal unit? No problem about rejecting those (although the cassette machine might be more awkward) But if (as Tame suggests) this merely projects feeling of "meaningless and banalisation" onto objects, then that blend of present misery and potential future "satisfaction of the demands of the passions" is ripe for picking by Tame's ally, the advertising industry. The pseudo-useful novelties in the Innovations catalogue exist to soak up that excess demand. Like other renovators, the Situationists found in the young Marx a vision of a life beyond specialised existence. Tame ridicules the "metaphysical whining against a universe in which individual effort, choice, labour and the division of labour are necessary". In recent years, radical prose has evaporated further. Never, it seems, is one more radical than when spouting on about a "humanity" counterposed to every feature of the current world. Situationist modernism displayed an untenable fifties' faith in automation and planning. Specialists in revolt The workers council based apparatus of late Situationism came wholesale from their dalliance with Socialisme ou Barbarie. Like a maitre d'hotel, it stood at the grant entrance luring passers-by, but disguising conditions in the kitchen. The proletariat would merely be guarantor of a highly-polished critique whose radicality remained organisationally-based (even in its abolition). But the audience was perceived as coming from the managerial stratum (explicitly so in the opening of Debord's In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle). The aristocratic critique denigrates only the rewards which that stratum draws from the system. The lifestylist can reject everything for re-integration in the beyond; the managerial strata have another tactic for transcending the particular. Aspiring managers preen themselves before a mirror where they see themselves attractively decked out as the goal of evolution. Free from particular duties and responsibilities, free for endless meetings to plan others' actions, free from the burden of expertise required to implement its decisions, their colourless ideas dream furiously. (Here are echoes of the situationists' early sympathy for cultural bureaucracies.) Lacking all practical skill, the aspiring bureaucrat is outraged by any need for dexterity. Production as a system of "forgetting" the labour in the commodity; leisure as an integral part of that system: criticism in these terms is foreign to Tame. Situationism contributed much to that critique, but contained other elements which neutralised much of its worth (not least the former leaders' subsequent self-historification and projection). Tame's pamphlet will be worthwhile if, despite its own purpose, it assists in a critique which returns to the actual living conditions. Alex Richards From Here & Now 11 1991 - No copyright