New Notes and Updates

Page 1. Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb (revised and expanded edition, PM Press, 2024), pp. 106­107. Hereafter cited as SI Anthology.

1. Quote from La Rochefoucauld’s Maxim #19.

2. I was alluding to the expanding hole in the ozone layer which, if it had not been dealt with, would have exposed the earth to lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation. This is one of the few environmental crises that has actually been resolved, due to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that phased out CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals. While the ozone hole still appears annually over Antarctica, it has been shrinking since 2006 and is on track for full recovery in the latter half of this century.
Note that in this exceptional case, although the companies that used or produced CFCs predictably claimed that CFCs were harmless, those companies’ power was far less than that of the fossil fuel and automobile industries that have continued to resist serious solutions to climate change. Once the scientific data was clear to virtually everyone, virtually all countries and all companies were willing to make this comparatively minor sacrifice to ward off the devastating threat.

4. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated and annotated by Ken Knabb (PM Press, 2024).

12. Some books worth reading on these movements: Leon Trotsky, 1905. A. J. Ryder, The German Revolution: 1918-1919. Richard M. Watts, The Kings Depart: Versailles and the German Revolution. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920. Gwyn A. Williams, Proletarian Order: Antonio Gramsci, Factory Councils and the Origins of Communism in Italy, 1911-1921. Manuel Grossi, The Asturian Uprising. Andy Anderson, Hungary ’56. Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution? Stan Persky, At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Labor Union. On Spain 1936-1937, see p. 84. On Czechoslovakia 1968, see SI Anthology, pp. 326-336.

22. Quote from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Concept of Nature. The full quote is: “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.”

24. SI Anthology, p. 161.

26. The Taoist fable is online here.

26. For more on this topic, see “Understanding Debord Dialectically” here.

27. Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, translated and edited by Ken Knabb (revised and expanded edition, PM Press, 2026), pp. 149–150.

29. The boxer analogy is from Jacques Ellul’s excellent book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.

30. Cossery’s novel has been translated by Anna Moschovakis as The Jokers (New York Review Books, 2010).

30. The posters signed themselves “Li I-Che” (Li Yizhe). Their text was published in English by the Hong Kong “70s” group in their book The Revolution Is Dead, Long Live the Revolution (1976; later reprinted by Black Rose Books). There is also a lengthy study of the affair: On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System: The Li Yizhe Debates (Routledge, 1985), edited by Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger.
On the “70s” group, see “A Radical Group in Hong Kong,” reprinted in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997), pp. 302-305. Online here.

48. I had seen figures ranging from 20,000 to 40,000. But either those figures were mistaken or the numbers have gone down in the last thirty years: current estimates are that “only” 10,000 to 17,000 children die of starvation each day.

49. For more extensive discussion of these issues, see my critiques of “socially engaged Buddhism” here.

51. SI Anthology, p. 121.

52. See “The Opening in Iran,” reprinted in Public Secrets, pp. 306–308. Online here.

53. For a more detailed examination of war and patriotism, see Randolph Bourne’s essay “War Is the Health of the State,” online here.

53. The English edition of Leys’s book (long out of print) is now online here.

55. On the Gulf War, see “The War and the Spectacle,” reprinted in Public Secrets, pp. 357–361. Online here.

58. The sympathetic theater director was the great film actor Jean-Louis Barrault, best known for his portrayal of the mime character in The Children of Paradise.

63. For more detailed discussion of this issue, see SI Anthology, pp. 304-306 and 358-359.

66. The current CEO-to-worker pay ratio ranges from 281/1 to 632/1, depending on the types of companies analyzed. In 2024, the average CEO of lower-wage-paying companies earned 632 times more than their average worker’s salary. The other measures of wealth inequality (percentages of wealth, land ownership, etc.) have skyrocketed similarly.

66. See Louis Adamic’s Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America and Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! (For the latter, get the updated edition published in 2020 by PM Press.)

69. Vaneigem’s book on surrealism has been translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Cavalier History of Surrealism (AK Press, 1999). His book on self-management was translated by Paul Sharkey (chapters 1 and 2) and by Ken Knabb (chapter 3 plus the introduction). The combined translation is online here.

88. Get the new edition of Journey Through Utopia (PM Press, 2019) with a new introduction and two afterwords.

88. Bolo’bolo was originally published in 1983. There have been several later additions to it, all of which can be found here.

91. Although primitive versions of the Internet date back to the 1970s, there was no Web till the early 1990s, and even then it was far from a mass phenomenon. Most people had never heard of it, and less than 1% of the global population had access to it. The few people who had computers used them mostly for word processing or other simple desktop applications. Even cell phones were still relatively rare, and they were used only for telephoning. Note that in the article about 1993 China, the government was mainly worried about fax machines.
        Then around the mid-1990s the Web really began to take off and computers became far more widespread. The emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994 led to the first significant use of the Web in social struggles — not so much by the Zapatistas themselves (who were mostly without Internet connections) but by radicals around the world who used it to publicize and coordinate support for them. See Harry Cleaver’s 1997 article The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric to get an idea of what things looked like back then.
        I started my website in 1998, and in 2008 I posted the article Ten Years on the Web describing my experiences during those early years when the Web was still excitingly new and rapidly developing.

94. Jo Freeman’s article is now online here.

100. For more information on this topic, see Anti-Prison Resources.

106. See chapter 2 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

115. A newer edition (2018) has an afterword by Pohl and new introduction and afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson, who notes that the book’s analysis remains relevant and accurate.

117. A later edition (Columbia University Press, 1990) adds Percival Goodman’s afterword: “Communitas Revisited.”

122. Quote from the opening lines of The Odyssey.

123. Lines from Whitman’s “Song of the Broad-Axe.”

141. Rexroth’s Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century, edited and with a new introduction by Ken Knabb, will be published by PM Press in December 2026. For much more by and about Rexroth, see the Kenneth Rexroth Archive.

143. “The concept of the spectacle, which derives from the French Situationists . . . is a useful analytic device: it simplifies a world of phenomena that seem otherwise disparate. Surely the spectacle is conspicuous, once one learns to see it in its many dimensions.” (Todd Gitlin article in Liberation, May 1971.)

149. Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) was greatly admired at the time by Filiss, John Zerzan, and many other primitivists.

176. See pp. 72-73.

184. See “How I Evaded the Draft” in Public Secrets, pp. 107-108. Online here.

184. Double-Reflection: Preface to a Phenomenology of the Subjective Aspect of Practical-Critical Activity (1974). Pamphlet reprinted in Public Secrets, pp. 204-220. Online here.

193. The online video of that huge demonstration in Madrid with the “Hymn to Joy” is now inaccessible, but you can see a clip from it here. If you wish to explore this movement, note that it was usually referred to as “15-M” or the “Indignados.”

195. Here and in the following articles, underlined phrases indicate links in the online versions, where you can go if you wish to check them out.

195. Oakland mayor Jean Quan had ordered the police to clear the Occupy Oakland encampment in part on the grounds that it was “unhygienic.”

211. “The Blind Men and the Elephant (Selected Opinions on the Situationists)”: a 1975 poster, online here. For an expanded version of the quotations, see SI Anthology, pp. 502-512.

221. See p. 57.

229. See the film Occupy the Farm.

235. See the footnote on p. 61.

237. “Beyond Voting”: an email text I sent to contacts during various US elections from 2000 to 2016. It contained a few passages from The Joy of Revolution about the limits of electoral politics plus brief comments on the specific elections. See www.bopsecrets.org/recent/beyond-voting.htm  .

242. See pp. 173-177.

246. Allusion to the title character of Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play King Ubu, generally considered the first example of theater of the absurd. Ubu is astonishingly similar to Trump — greedy, vain, boastful, blustering, obnoxious, corrupt, cowardly, vindictive, treacherous. So much so that after Trump’s first election many theater companies performed the play and the relevance was immediately obvious to everyone. 

New notes and updates in Ken Knabb’s The Joy of Revolution and Related Texts (PM Press, 2026).