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Minimum Definition of
Revolutionary Organizations
Since the only purpose of a revolutionary organization is the abolition of all existing
classes in a way that does not bring about a new division of society, we consider an
organization to be revolutionary if it consistently and effectively works toward the
international realization of the absolute power of the workers councils, as prefigured in
the experience of the proletarian revolutions of this century.
Such an organization makes an integral critique of the world, or is nothing. By
integral critique we mean a comprehensive critique of all geographical areas where various
forms of separate socioeconomic powers exist, as well as a comprehensive critique of all
aspects of life.
Such an organization sees the beginning and end of its program in the complete
decolonization of everyday life. It thus aims not at the masses’ self-management of
the existing world, but at its uninterrupted transformation. It embodies the
radical critique of political economy, the supersession of the commodity
system and of
wage labor.
Such an organization refuses to reproduce within itself any of the hierarchical
conditions of the dominant world. The only limit to participating in its total democracy
is that each member must have recognized and appropriated the coherence of
its critique. This coherence must be both in the critical theory as such and in the
relation between this theory and practical activity. The organization radically criticizes
every ideology as separate power of ideas and as ideas of
separate power. It is thus at the same time the negation of any remnants of religion, and of
the prevailing social spectacle which, from news media to mass culture,
monopolizes communication between people around their unilateral reception of images of their
alienated activity. The organization dissolves any “revolutionary ideology,”
unmasking it as a sign of the failure of the revolutionary project, as the private
property of new specialists of power, as one more fraudulent representation
setting itself above real proletarianized life.
Since the ultimate criterion of the modern revolutionary
organization is its comprehensiveness, such an organization is ultimately a critique of politics.
It must explicitly aim to dissolve itself as a separate organization at its moment of
victory.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
July 1966
“Définition minimum des organisations révolutionnaires”
was adopted by the 7th Conference of the SI (July 1966) and reproduced in
Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967). This translation by
Ken Knabb is from the Situationist
International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.
[Other Situationist Texts]
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