Stephen Hastings-King has an interesting piece over at Class Against Class on Guy Debord's patricidal efforts to replace Socialisme ou Barbarie as the vanguard (sic) of the working class with the Situationniste International.
This relationship changed again in 1964. During 1963, SB had been consumed by an internal conflict triggered mostly by Castoriadis's attempt to push to their logical conclusion the implications of his 1959-1961 text. If the working class really had been destructured as a class for itself, and if one plotted this development onto the extended critique of Marxism (politics, economics, theory of history) that SB had pursued since 1946, then there really was not much reason to continue to hold onto Marxism as a frame of reference for thinking about revolution. Revolutionary theory would have to be rethought from the most basic assumptions outward. One would have to work out a core normative theory that was sufficiently abstract to be applicable to social conflicts emerging from various directions. One would also need to multiply the analyses of social conflicts: the working class could no longer provide militants with a template that they could use as a sort of overlay to break a new social movement into its component stages. And one would have to rethink the whole notion of the militant as a function of the definitions of the political arrived at through the reconstruction of revolutionary theory. The debate about these issues split SB down the middle. It revealed the affect with which many SB members invested the idea of being-Marxist, and their reliance on proletarian struggles as a kind of magic key for understanding all social conflict. It also revealed the material limitations for a small group like SB, which found itself confronted with what must have seemed like the call for a 1:1 map of the social world.(39)
For Debord, this was heresy. With the lead article in IS no. 9, "Maintenant L'I.S." Debord announced that the Situationist International had assumed SB's mantle as the revolutionary vanguard (despite SB's sustained critique of the notion of a "Vanguard Party"). He coupled this with a campaign to throw SB out of the Left. From the outset, Debord had surveyed and resurveyed the Parisian scene, drawing lines that separated what he thought acceptable from what was not. The journal Arguments had long been Debord's preferred example of empty revisionism: special ridicule was reserved for Edgar Morin and Kostas Axelos. "Argumentiste" was a epithet hurled at former Marxists who gave in to the lure of incoherence once they passed beyond the borders of the Imaginary; patrolled by Guy Debord. In posing the alternative-one can either "be Marxist or be revolutionary"- SB slid from leader of the revolutionary movement into" Argumentiste" revisionism. Despite this banishment, Debord continued his close observation of the group. The IS reproduced (with near-audible glee) an editorial disclaimer that accompanied a review of Christianismeet revolution by Maximillienne Gautrat, as proof of SB's slide into dilettantism: (40)
Editorial note: It is perhaps useful to note that, for the vast majority of Socialisme ou Barbarie members, the Kingdom of God is essentially meaningless, and also that they do not see any reason why someone who thinks otherwise should be prevented from self-expression.
Debord's fiercer sarcasms were directed specifically at Castoriadis:
The revolutionary critique of all existing conditions certainly does not have a monopoly on intelligence, but does on its use. In the present crisis of culture and of society, those who do not have this usage do not, in fact, have any discernible intelligence. Stop talking to us about intelligence without [correct] usage, it would make us happy. Poor Heidegger! Poor Lukacs! Poor Sartre! Poor Barthes! Poor Lefebvre! Poor Cardan [Castoriadis]! Tic, tic and tic. Without the proper use of intelligence, one has only the caricatural fragments of innovative ideas, those that could understand the totality of our time and the movement that contests it as well. It is not even clear how to plagiarize these ideas in a harmonious way when one encounters them where they already are. ( ... )The former specialist of ultra-left politics is dazzled to discover, along with structuralism and psychosociology, an ethnological ideology [that is] entirely new to him: the fact that the Zuni Indians do not have a history seems to him a luminous explanation for his own incapacity to act on our history (go laugh at the first 25 pages of no. 36 of Socialisme ou Barbarie). The specialists of thought can only be thinkers of specialization. We do not pretend to have a monopoly on the dialectic that everyone is talking about; we only claim to have a provisional monopoly on its usage.
The change in the intellectual scene that Debord outlines has a complex conjectural explanation: the end of the Algerian War and the collapse of the radical scene that had developed within the oppositional movement, the return to "normal" everyday life combined with Althusser's intertwining of structuralism and the dialectical to give the impression that there was a "refreeze" in the Cold War. Debord's polemical response to this situation, and SB's role in it, is in part a power play: he was trying to supplant Sartre as the cultural arbiter of the Left.
This culture-broker role was secondary to his desire to personally salvage revolutionary politics. This intention was signaled by direct pronouncement. The stra egy amounted to a wholesale incorporation of older SB positions into those of the IS. At the graphics level, IS took the format of SB's "Le Monde en Question," which surveyed the press for indications of conflict and/ or incoherence within the dominant order ("echoes" as the group called them). From the contents of SB Debord took the call for the formation of councils. If this was the goal-Debord's politics were, as I have argued, rooted in a subjectivist position-then to salvage revolutionary politics would be to fully externalize the textual collage through which he (Debord) imagined revolution. In trying to become Castoriadis and the revolutionary vanguard, and in his effort to exclude SB from the Left as if the group had been part of the IS, Debord blurred the organizational distinction between inside and outside and the individual distinction between psyche and social world. Debord himself was the oppositional movement: he was what the bourgeois order feared. He was the specter haunting Europe. This sets up a reading of his 1967 book, Society of the Spectacle, as Debord's attempt to stage, through collage, his subjective organization of the textual material that circulated within the Marxist Imaginary. The book is Debord's refusal of the crisis of the Imaginary through a retreat into narcissism and a positing of traditional revolutionary Marxism as transcendental. The recourse to the authorized sources of theory was a traditional heretical move within this instituted Imaginary, which presupposed it still operational and capable of renewal. By fashioning this text-collage, Debord tries to map his voice onto that of the Revolutionary Prophet, and in so doing, to mime that role. With this, Debord began his period of "megalomaniac" ambition to be the revolutionary vanguard, which he would later attribute to the Situationists as a group, and which was the basis, in 1972, for his dissolving the organization.(41)
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