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Theory of Poverty,
Poverty of Theory
A Report on the New Conditions of Revolutionary
Theory
“Better to be a debtor than to pay with coin that does not bear
our image!”
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
1
The organized theoretical effort (the most advanced since Marx) carried
out by the members of the Situationist International has not only burned itself out, it
seems content to accept a place among the curiosities in the museum of revolutionary
history. Rather than trying to get back on its feet, this fallen theoretical dragon
prefers to pride itself on the still-impressive reverberations from its past exploits
— exploits that are becoming distant enough to take on a comfortingly legendary
character.
The misadventures of the situationists’ theory and those to which comparable
movements of revolutionary intellectuals in the past succumbed are finally reunited in the
very nature of their failures. Just as with Marxist thought and other later efforts to
develop a revolutionary critique, all the achievements of the real situationist
theoretico-practical effort ended up undergoing a total inversion of their
meaning. They now constitute nothing more than one particular form of cultural verbiage
within the general pseudocommunication imposed by existing conditions, a
pseudocommunication that is as prevalent among those who revolt against those conditions
as among those who accept them.
The real situationist spirit, the spirit that (to those capable of grasping
undertakings of this order) was so clearly at the origin of the situationist adventure, no
longer has any choice but to turn without mercy against the edifice of its own petrified
theory, against its entire past and its former values, or else be swept from the
revolutionary battlefield as a source of useless and antiquated verbosity.
From now on no new development of revolutionary thought will be possible unless the
situationist critical power is applied not only to the old SI organization but to
situationist theory itself. The project of developing a theory of combat that contains its
own critique must be taken up again from scratch.
To accomplish this, the situationists’ theory must no longer be judged on the
terrain where it wants to be judged, namely on its theoretical intentions,
its scientific validity, its program, etc. To hesitate to go beyond this terrain and make
a more vital critique — whether out of some unwarranted concern for intellectual
objectivity or out of respect, because so far no one else has done any better (1917 Russia
didn’t come up with any theory better than Lenin’s) — would at best
amount to assuming the drawbacks of a disembodied orthodoxy à la Korsch or the sort
of illusion characteristic of Lukács. If the situationists’ theory still directly
interests the revolutionary movement, it is as an object-lesson of what such a theory
could become: one more ideology of revolution, one more system of representation
expressing something other than what it intends and serving ends other than its explicit
ends.
2
The situationists’ theory made itself known as the revolutionary theory of
dissatisfaction. It found itself at the converging point of all the lines of force
that are transforming the conditions of existence — and consequently of struggle
— in contemporary society, both because it was made possible by those conditions and
because it was capable of expressing them. As a critique of a particular stage of
a commodity society that was far from having concretely developed all its
material consequences (including the revolutionary opposition to itself), the
situationists’ theory ran the risk of becoming the expression of all the
dissatisfaction released in this process; that is, not only of the profound
dissatisfaction linked to the proletarianization of all sectors of social existence —
dissatisfaction that has become really revolutionary — but also of that far
more widespread superficial dissatisfaction stemming from particular features of
the present stage as well as from the ever-increasing frustrations of old habits and
tastes. The situationists’ theory was not in a position to see well enough the danger
contained precisely in the spectacular logic of the conditions it combated, which
led it to be understood, and ultimately to understand itself, according to the logic of illusion,
and thus to be assimilated by the existing order as a cultural code of integrated
dissatisfaction.
The hierarchized consumption of economic goods, of phony relations among individuals,
and of phony objects of struggle which the spectacle of modern dissatisfaction now
provides in superabundance has as its immediate subjective counterpart this form of
superficial dissatisfaction, which in fact constitutes the only real subjective basis
upon which the present social system can function.
When this superficial dissatisfaction feels obliged to express itself in
“situationist language,” the optical illusions and confusions it creates stem
from the very nature of existing conflicts. The revolutionary goal of establishing the
socio-historic conditions of “enjoyment without restraint” intersects with the
ordinary publicity of enjoyment within the economy (ranging from glorification of current
conditions to fantasies of bureaucratic-ecological reforms), sometimes to the point that
the expressions of the two are confused with each other. This apparent resemblance comes
from the fact that they reflect the same historical conflict, though seen from opposite
sides of the barricade. But even though they sometimes appear very close, superficial
dissatisfaction is qualitatively as far removed from revolutionary dissatisfaction as are
the resigned victims of existing conditions. The spread of superficial dissatisfaction
— the generally assumed standpoint that henceforth dominates the perception and all
the representations of contemporary social life — simply expresses the fact that
things have become so unsatisfactory that no one can be quietly resigned anymore;
even resignation has had to adopt the pose and language of dissatisfaction.
It is not surprising that the revolutionary theory that reintroduced the dialectical
method of the totality into the struggle (in order to put the comprehension of the
social question on better bases) was able, even while remaining fundamentally
uncomprehended, to strike such a sympathetic chord in these social conditions where the
economy dominates human life in a totalitarian manner. This modern aspect of the
notion of totality has become familiar to everyone, if only because everyone has been
conditioned to it through the rules of hierarchized consumption: if each level of
hierarchized consumption and power can do nothing but covet the next higher level, this is
because hierarchical organization presents the totality of economic benefits and
social powers to people’s covetous desires.
The totality effectively serves as the new universal standard of reference of
social needs, but only considered passively, as the external totality of economic goods.
Consequently, whether superficial dissatisfaction respects all the economic rules or ends
up infringing some of them in the name of what it believes to be a revolutionary program,
the objects it covets will always bring it back to where it started, subjected to the same
principle of an economy of social life and consequently to an economy of its
consciousness and practice.
Even if a constituted situationist theory had never existed as a possible
source of inspiration, the system of commodity consumption implicitly contains its own
situationism in the form of a utopian fantasy of defectless and limitlessly
consumable economic pleasures. Because the sphere of consumption (which amounts to all the
social life nominally left to the initiative of individuals) is only one aspect of the
economic process, is unable to free itself from its limits, and is absolutely dependent on
its economic complement, its natural situationism tends to become genuinely
situationist. But before this can take place the concept of pleasure inherited from
the economic era must be fundamentally transformed.
Modern commodity production and consumption have eliminated many human capacities that
people in previous eras possessed to at least some degree and that in some cases were
necessary simply to ensure their survival. What is now actually taught, desired and
practiced in the sphere of social consumption is simply the perfected economy of
pleasure and of the capacity for living; what are being imposed everywhere, without
encountering any real revolutionary resistance, are the petty culture, enjoyments, tastes
and manias of antihistorical humanity. These are the same traits of general
mediocrity that end up poisoning and rendering impossible every attempt at serious
revolutionary struggle. Because it comes to him from outside, the habit of
economic pleasure keeps the individual in his place, separate from the rest of the world;
and this externality of economic pleasure, which excludes all fundamental initiative in
decision and action, is precisely what is desired and consumed.
3
Some people still believe, for example, that the stupefying power of advertising lies
in the fact that it makes people buy more useless goods. Actually, when advertising vaunts
the merits of this or that particular commodity or of this or that pseudoneed that
absolutely must be satisfied, it inevitably runs up against the contradiction of a
competing product, of a consumers union, or of people’s ordinary common sense. But
beyond the commercial terrain, what advertising really imposes without meeting any
resistance (by deflecting the spectator’s attention from the fact that the language
of advertising already implies and presents the happy spectacle of the total approval
of the existing system) are all the socioeconomic presuppositions of which
advertising is only one of the least serious consequences; along with the mode of
subjection that is linked to those presuppositions, the poverty of the needs that result
from them, and the absurd pretense that the latter can be satisfied within the rules of
consumption. The fact that advertising has proved capable of turning itself into an object
of spectacular debate, provoking people into declaring themselves for or against it, is an
extreme example of its present stupefying power.
But if we judge it on the basis of its power of stupefaction, commercial advertising is
far less dangerous than other, less obvious forms of publicity, whether in the political
or the “cultural” sphere (including even the purely scientific sector). In
reality, all colonized daily life contains all the stupefying power of the publicity of
the present world: In a certain sense the Lip workers have recently produced much more
formidable advertisements for the existing way of life than has Madison Avenue, if we take
into account all their respective potential mystifying effects.
4
As critique of alienated labor and project of its revolutionary abolition,
the situationists’ theory meets, as a favorable objective terrain, the phenomenon of
an increasing declassment of a sector of the population that was previously integrated and
subdued but that is now more inclined to turn against the institution of work. A structural
crisis of the modern economy, however, tends to throw individuals into revolutionary
ideology well before they are in a position to grasp revolution as the only historical
solution capable of practically dissolving the alienation of human activity. Those who
treat work as the heaviest fetter on the new forms of struggle and consciousness remain
dominated by the work-world, which casts those it declasses into solutions of peripheral
survival, hustles, petty criminality and dubious revolutionary fantasies.
Modern economic transformation modifies the conditions of alienated labor, changes the
composition of social classes, destroys their traditionally established representations,
reconstructs the environment from top to bottom, and alters all the rules of the global
politico-economic game, but ultimately leaves the declassed individuals in the same
antihistorical destitution as the others whom it still employs. The aspects of
alienated labor which are now more or less confusedly resisted everywhere, and which are
explicitly denounced as archaic by the new mentality that is developing into the subjective
corollary of the modern forms of commodity production, are for the most part the same
aspects that the work-world itself is attempting to phase out.
The fact that the remnants of know-how that were formerly linked to certain sectors of
material and intellectual production, along with virtually all traces of practical
sense, are tending to disappear from the social terrain is a direct consequence of
the extreme fragmentation and absurdity of tasks in commodity production. (The total
colonization of workers’ gestures and decisions within their direct economic
alienation is only one aspect of the colonization of all social life.) All capacities and
desires for autonomous, non-externally-dictated activity are being utterly
destroyed among the present population. Powerless laziness, which goes so far as
to reject the pseudoactivities offered within production without being able to reinvent
human activity on other bases, is emerging everywhere as the normal subjective attitude in
the face of the new state of social reality.
A parallel conflict related to modern conditions of alienated labor arises from the
model of maximum economic enjoyment embodied in the cadre social
stratum, a model which is presented as the ultimate meaning of existence nor only for the
cadres but for all subservient social strata. Modern proletarians are molded into the
average cadre mentality. Peasants, blue-collar workers, intellectuals, etc., are tending
to lose the particular representations they once had, which are being replaced with the
typical representations, tastes and desires of the cadres. This homogenization of
subjective alienation manifests itself for example in the work-world by the fact that the
demand for individual participation in economic decisions (or, outside of work, in
political decisions), which was previously limited to the cadre socioeconomic level, is
now becoming the natural demand of all types of workers, at the same time as it is
becoming the official critique that the organization of labor makes of itself.
We can judge the extent of the problems that will present themselves to the
revolutionary movement in the years to come by considering that the global cultivation of
proletarian talents and the long apprenticeship of a new form of all-encompassing
practical sense will have to start out from a near-total loss of all the old talents
and from a current state of spirit that has neither the taste nor the preparation for any
free practical enterprise whatsoever.
5
As a theory of individual autonomy, the situationists’ theory, once
deprived of its negative spirit, becomes virtually indistinguishable from the
bourgeois ethical vision of abstract individual freedom. But the real poverty that can
delude itself in this way about its own lot is no longer so much the nominal freedom of
labor in the face of capital as it is that freedom of pure appearance bred to the
rules of consumable pleasure; that freedom of irresponsibility which continually resorts
to external means of valorization and which gets “into” this or that while
remaining separate from everything.
The nature of the freedom demanded by those who identify their own superficial
dissatisfaction with the situationist project can, like all ideologies of refusal, be
understood as a banal daydream of social advancement. The individual molded by present-day
conditions, who has in fact lost all individual qualities, dreams of reaching a classless
society just as he is. Scarcely concerning himself with accomplishing anything despite
present conditions, he can hardly pursue revolution as the socio-historic means of extending
such accomplishments; he merely dreams that his wretchedness will be less difficult to
take than in the old world. He still hasn’t felt the need to make himself a master of
social life, and as a consequence of the narrowness of his actual needs he is still very
poor at identifying the real obstacles to a revolution; he simply wishes that his present
masters would stand aside in the face of a proletarian miracle. Thus, even when
he sincerely believes himself capable of doing without authority, he is already setting
himself up for the new power that will subdue him.
6
When a revolutionary theory is no longer in a position to effect its practical task of transforming
existing conditions of consciousness, the poverty and lack of originality of those
who carry on within its ruins rapidly attain caricatural proportions. The average
revolutionary in such conditions tends to be subject to the average alienations of his
era.
Even if, for example, he scorns the crude boss stereotype, the contemporary
revolutionary has in no way rid himself of hierarchical needs. The motives that
make him identify with the “revolutionary camp” suffice to demonstrate this.
Unable to count for much in the existing social hierarchy, he tries to console himself by
dreaming of a future society; not necessarily because he intrigues for a dominant role in
it (usually nothing in him leads him to such an illusion), but because this assures him a
share of the hierarchical status that membership in the revolutionary community provides
within the present society. Among diverse other obligations that such a position
brings with it, the contemporary revolutionary feels obliged to despise the old world and
its most conspicuous servants, just as some poorly paid European workers still
despise the immigrant laborer: because he reflects their own slavish image too
crudely.
But through the vicissitudes of his theatrical subadventure the average revolutionary
ends up demonstrating much more directly his profound need for a hierarchical environment:
the solidity of his ideology, the degree of conviction he can give to it, depends directly
on the absolute ideological assurance embodied in the personality of the leader.
Conversely, if he himself happens to be in a leadership position, he feels an absolute
need to be followed, since it is only the blind conviction of his followers that can
support him in his role (objectively and, above all, subjectively). Whether he follows
others or others follow him, the same need for illusion and show underlies his mentality.
Experimental egalitarian associations that develop in the coming struggles must no
longer accept within themselves — and must combat externally — any theoretical
followerism that does not simultaneously assign itself the humility and discretion
that was characteristic of the serious student of classical education.
Revolutionary ideology is not merely a state of social false consciousness; it
constantly manifests itself as a direct practical refusal of truth and of its concrete
consequences. As an aspect of revolutionary ideology, the sole function of egalitarian
voluntarism is to furnish an honorable decor for the flight from practical tasks.
It is notorious that anarcho-situationist egalitarianism has always refused to
recognize the hierarchical aspects of its actual organizational functioning. This major
practical evasion finally reduced the situationists’ theory regarding revolutionary
organization to a mere counterideology opposed to the dominant hierarchical
organization, enabling the participants to share the illusion and the official lie of
equality rather than to bear the shame of admitting their failure to achieve it. Yet the
possibility of effectively anticipating all the new problems while there was still time to
do so (notably for the old SI) hinged upon the admission of this failure and upon the
recognition of the theoretico-practical conclusions resulting from it.
7
The ideological need which persists in individuals molded to the rules of
commodity society’s social relations, and which consistently regenerates itself even
within their revolt, is totally contrary to the real theoretical sense and intuition on
which will depend the course and ultimate outcome of all real theoretico-practical
rebellion from now on.
Ideology, regardless of whatever element of scientific truth it may contain
(Marxist-situationist theory, for example, still contains a substantial scientific
foundation long after its inversion into ideology), is a veil placed between the
individual and reality, and it reflects a system of interests that want to preserve
this veil. Within the revolutionary counterideology opposed to existing conditions —
which functions in a manner analogous to the social spectacle it depends on
— the interests of the separate and the real need for separation that dominates it
are dolled up in a hollow affirmation of the totally opposite state of affairs.
Nevertheless, the ideological foundations of all modern revolutionary pseudothought,
whether semiofficial or antiofficial, can be directly detected by its theoretical and
practical sterility.
Ideological consciousness — which only rarely takes the form of gross ignorance
— is essentially consciousness of content, i.e. the direct, positivistic
assimilation of some external reality, whether that reality is a theoretical
master or an individual or sociohistorical situation. Ideological consciousness functions
by identifying with things, and is in fact based on the need for such
identification. Dialectical consciousness, in contrast, derives its anti-ideological
force from its capacity to discern the form, to grasp the processes
concealed behind the immediate perception of content. Awareness of form, of the nonvisible
part of reality (an awareness that is always lacking in ideological consciousness) is the
indispensable condition for determining the ultimate meaning found in the relation
of form and content.
Behind the screen on which the drama of contents is projected (the spectacular
character of modern society can be understood as the systematic social organization of
this screen) the work of negation proceeds mainly at the level of forms before
itself becoming a visible content. (Human activity can be seen as the higher form that has
this privilege of creating its own contents, of transforming them, or of withdrawing from
them, at will.)
While dialectical consciousness depends on the faculty of distanciation
vis-à-vis content, ideological escapism reflects the impairment of that faculty.
Unable to theoretically and practically master existing forms, ideological thought is
instead totally subjected to them.
The negating faculty of distanciation can be understood as the faculty of turning in on
oneself, of breaking one’s own immediate relations with existing conditions; and
ultimately, as the individual’s capacity to take part in the internal conflicts that
result from those relations.
The individual capable of distanciation is an individual reconciled with his true
individuality, i.e. capable of looking at himself from the standpoint of his development
and of the fundamental historical conflict upon which his development depends. It is
through the faculty of distanciation that the individual preserves his capacity for
freedom and is able to carry out and verify the practical development of that freedom in
struggle.
The individual who lacks the faculty of distanciation is an individual continually
clinging to externally determined values. Separated from himself, he ends up interiorizing
the external social separation of the proletarian condition. He remains a stranger to
himself just as he remains a stranger to the perspective of revolutionary theory even if
circumstances have led him to superficially devote his existence to it.
In the same way, the historical movement by which the proletarian class progressively
frees itself from the total externality of its original sociohistorical condition is
nothing other than an act of historical distanciation upon which hinges, among
other possibilities, the possibility of a class consciousness.
8
Because he remains above all an external being, the unoriginal individual produced by
existing conditions feels the need, once present social conflicts touch him directly, for
his gestures of revolt to be embodied in mythological heroes.
Christ is essential to the Christian mentality because he is the subjective incarnation
connecting earth with heaven; he is the external subjective being who makes the Christian
mentality possible because it is the earth, and the role that this mentality plays on it,
that constitute for Christianity the actual inaccessible heaven. In the ordinary
revolutionary mentality — within which the situationist mentality distinguishes
itself only by a more marked and often more blind voluntarism — revolutionary heroes
literally perform the function of Christ. The romantic vision of supertheorists and of a
select few historical uprisings carries out, through the sacred person of the heroes, the
union of terrestrial triviality with the heaven of universal history. The Bolsheviks were
great pioneers in this type of cultifying: Lenin declared that to really be a Marxist one
should always ask oneself, “What would Marx have thought and done in this
situation?” The personal spectacular talents of the former SI (which at the same time
constituted some of its real practical talents) attempted the highest stage of this
classic heroic drama, decisively augmenting the concretization of myth: with the SI, a
community of demigods found itself invested with the power of announcing the new
conditions of paradise.
In opposition to the most elementary common sense, the contemporary revolutionary
begins his task by no longer looking himself in the face. Instead, he successively
identifies (in decreasing order of abstraction) with “the movement of history,”
the epic of a disembodied “proletariat,” the romantic personalities of
his intellectual masters, and finally and most directly, with the petty leaders that daily
life puts in his path. Like all religious devotees, he arranges his own biblical
universe wherein are gathered all the fantastic episodes that define the meaning of
his rites. He learns, for example, that “the Paris Commune was the dictatorship of
the proletariat” and that the blacks of Watts embodied “the critique in acts of
everyday life,” while being warned against “sociology” and
“structuralism,” which he is taught to see as evil offshoots of “the
commodity” and “the spectacle.”
Just as he ends up making a pitiful farce out of his whole concrete life (in this
regard the average revolutionary is a worthy child of the present era), so his thought is
nothing but a pale imitation of what others, because they have lived the necessary degree
of adventure, have thought for him and before him. Depending on which sect he belongs to,
he salivates at the most miserable clichés, which serve as collective bonds and
representations among him and his companions; he prides himself on understanding the
ideological in-references; he never jokes about anything except the scapegoats that his
ideology designates because he knows that, like himself, his companions would be incapable
of laughing at anything else. His self-expression within the group, and ultimately his
only truly personal fulfillment, is reduced to demonstrating as often as possible that he
is a servile student of the sect and the sectarianism that contain him.
9
Certain practical tasks induce revolutionaries to collaborate with each other; but more
often than not they fail to achieve the slightest objective they have set for themselves
because they have begun by carrying out this collaboration in an inappropriate manner. The
qualitative weakness of the modern revolutionary movement continues to demonstrate that in
the manner of associating, more than in anything else, everything remains to be
learned. The depth of the objectives that revolutionaries are capable of setting for
themselves in the course of their struggles, and their chances of achieving those
objectives, depend dialectically on their competence in dealing with organizational
questions.
Nevertheless, when things come to the point where association becomes a practical
necessity, it is always possible to judge the worth of an individual — that is, the
nature of the relations he maintains with himself, with others, and with reality as a
whole — by noting that ideological escapism, which is not always immediately
detectable on the level of ideas alone, will invariably leave the individual in a constant
state of poverty and impotence.
Ideology, which must always be understood as not only a particular state of false
consciousness but also as a set of material and subjective conditions that require such
false consciousness, prevents any progress in the capacity for living or
struggling. It is the worst school for such capacities, and is always promoted by people
who basically do not want anything to change and who, above all, do not want to change themselves.
The modern slave, whether he is a revolutionary or someone who is quite satisfied with
present conditions, or something in between, is a supremely antidialectical
being, the creature of an era where all progress, all taste for progress, and all
understanding of progress have been repressed. Whenever urgent external circumstances
disturb his complacency and force him to recognize his slavish position, he strives only
to regain his illusion of freedom as soon as possible. Knowing nothing of time nor of
“the organic progression of activity,” he is the man of simulation and show,
because that is the only mode of self-affirmation that can indefinitely ignore time.
10
Any revolutionary theoretical counterattack, whether it amounts to a new style of
situationist struggle or to the emergence of some qualitatively different form, must
render impossible the element of superficial approval that has prevailed over the
last few years without encountering any effective opposition.
We have to begin by recognizing that the current vanguard of revolutionary theory has
not only ceased keeping abreast of reality, it is dragging along a hundred leagues behind
it. We might sum up the present crisis of revolutionary theory by saying that it found
itself sooner than it expected having to theoretically overcome not only the
society it is fighting but its own internal problems arising out of the struggle
itself. At the center of these problems must be counted the rapid obsolescence of its
previous ideas: their glaring inadequacy when it comes to trying to understand the stage
now reached by the real revolutionary movement and to acting in it rather than
merely enthusiastically announcing its existence.
The mass of new questions to which revolutionaries have so far been unable to find
responses risks becoming time and terrain lost for the revolution itself. The contrast
between the richness of this historical period and the scandalous silliness of its
revolutionary critique has become glaring enough to rouse a new generation of
revolutionaries to do something about it.
The coming struggles for practical theory will have to detect and combat not only the
classic and generally known forms of alienation, but also the new forms of alienation
stemming from the return of class struggles — notably, the forms of alienation that
reconstitute themselves within the very heart of theoretical and practical struggles.
Knowledge, even very sophisticated knowledge, of the old revolutionary movement and the
obstacles it ran up against proves quite inadequate when it comes to mastering the
problems and tasks of the modern revolutionary movement. The revolution that is coming
back into play can in scarcely any regard be equated with its past experiences. Taking the
valid findings of classic Marxist-situationist theory as a point of departure,
revolutionaries must henceforth learn to understand their revolution as it happens,
by reinventing for it the theory that it requires now. It is no longer so much a
matter of demonstrating that the old world should be and is going to be destroyed as of
understanding the development of this destruction. The critical power of theory
must first of all be brought to bear on the revolutionary movement itself; for in this
movement, despite all its weaknesses and confusions, the construction of the new world has
already begun. In its next stage, revolutionary theory will take on the character of a theory
of social war. Losing the taste for skirmishes and games without consequences, it
will know that in each fight the total stakes of this war are put in question.
Contrary to prevalent assumptions, the present revolutionary movement is far from
having the victory of a situationist revolution within reach. A new class of rulers —
whose members could be recruited, under the cover of the next revolutionary assault, from
all the present spheres of social life (from among the most extremist revolutionaries as
well as from the current ruling classes) — would certainly have better reasons for
optimism than the amorphous minority of revolutionaries scattered around the world who
intend the live the Marxist-situationist program all the way. There exists no serious
opposition to the semirevolution which is being confusedly carried out before our
eyes and which aims, whether peacefully or violently, at nothing more than reforming a few
social irrationalities that have become too glaring. As for a genuinely
situationist revolution, it is only on the horizon of present conflicts. For the
moment the situationist program actually serves only as a source of inspiration for a
new status quo of the existing order — just as, in another era, the communist
program served to justify the kindred regimes of the Bolsheviks and the social democrats.
DANIEL DENEVERT
Autumn 1973
Théorie de la misère, misère de la théorie
(Paris, 1973) was first translated September 1974 by Robert Cooperstein, Dan Hammer and
Ken Knabb, with the collaboration of the author, under the title Theory of
Misery, Misery of Theory. The present version, reprinted from Public
Secrets, is a revised translation by Ken Knabb.
No copyright.
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