Sous Les Pavés, La Plage!

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.   

Raoul Vaneigem

Never work!   Guy Debord 

Much of the Situationists' thesis is a reworking of  Marx's view of alienation: the worker is alienated from his product and from his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world. To this end, work is counter-productive, even self-defeating. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle ['The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image'] 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.

The way out for the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. By liberating oneself, one could change the power relations that existed between your self and everything else, thus transforming society. The process of liberation involved quite simply wandering and wondering, and questioning the power structures that shackled life and society together often with devastating effects.

In Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life he echoes Tolstoy - 'Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself' - when writing, 'People who talk about revolution without referring explicitly to everyday life... such people have a corpse in their mouth'. The Situationists were aware that ground zero was the self, and that society was a collection of selves, and thus any changes that were to happen in society had to happen first in the self. Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' was an indictment not only on the loss of self that had occurred on a grand scale across the capitalist-consumerist world (which one might think reprehensible enough) but it was also a disparaging commentary on the lengths people will be led to for the sale of that self in return for the most meagre of rewards.

In place of the society of the spectacle, and the consumerist clutter that people had clotted their selves with,the Situationists proposed a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-desires would be replaced by real needs. The division of labour and the antagonism between work and play would be overcome thereby opening up a society founded on the love of spontaneity, 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 thereby finding their own way, and thus their own Self. 

One of their slogans was, after all:

Beneath the paving stones, the beach!

'What Lies Beneath'   Merkland Street