An essay on post-1939 Spanish anarchism and its ideological fossilization, with special emphasis on the CNT and the role it played in Spain during the1970s, during the Spanish “Transition”, when it attracted large numbers of workers who sympathized with anarchism—it had over 250,000 members in 1978—but soon lost most of them when it became a trade union indistinguishable from the others except for its revolutionary rhetoric, having been founded by a disparate assortment of people who, according to the author, had only one thing in common: “the desire to build a trade union federation that could contend with the Workers Commissions for preeminence in separate class representation.”
Published by the Berkley based group Perspectives in 1975 At Dusk was the first extensive critical text released on the Situationist International after its dissolution in 1972. Although there is much to critique in the arguments put forward in the text, it is an important historical document in terms of understanding the critical reception of the Situationists in the United States.
A former member of the Encyclopedie des Nuisances discusses the current reformist environmentalism of capitalism, the fashionable support for "curtailing economic growth", and the growing role of the State and NGOs in enforcing a new framework for the continued survival of capitalist social relations, and concludes that "a libertarian society can only be created by way of a libertarian revolution".
“Mode d’emploi du détournement” originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006).
From situationism to the abyss: a pamphlet against the harmful phenomena of the encyclopedia - Alpha Vingt
A libertarian Marxist/communist critique of the Encyclopedie des Nuisances, chronicling the group's evolution from situationist-inspired councilist activism during the 1970s, to its "abandonment of any kind of revolutionary perspective" during the early 1990s, until its final surrender to "passive contemplation of the catastrophe" and "apocalyptic defeatism" during the late 1990s. Includes critiques of Guy Debord's situationist theory and the Frankfurt School.
In this essay written after the LA Riots of 1992, Jaime Semprun expresses a pessimistic view of the new "barbarians", the uncivilized youth who according to him have been economically marginalized by capitalism but also socially integrated by the spectacle of power and violence, and compares their social dislocation and nihilism with Hannah Arendt's characterization of the preconditions for the mass psychology of totalitarianism ("isolation and the absence of normal social relations").