Cultural Revolution VI: Situationists, Free Festivals and Rebellion

Keith Allen, Notting Hill

In September 1974, the first issue of Maya magazine (the ‘Windsor Free Nation News’) was published after the termination of the third Windsor Free Festival. It contained a message of hope from the Wallies of Stonehenge free festival declaring that:

“Everyone’s Wally: I look to the revolution to rename every citizen with one sound and the composite name of all citizens to be the analogue of the deepest terrestrial vibration so that when we are all called, we will all hear… [the announcement continued] At the beginning of the French Revolution there was a movement known as the Jacquerie in which everyone called themselves Jacques.”

Maya no.1, September 1974

In fact, the Jacquerie took place in France in May and June 1358 and the name Jacques Bonhomme (Jack Goodfellow) seems to have been bestowed by the aristocracy on the peasants as a contemptuous name that lumped them all together (after the revolt was safely crushed). Nonetheless, in the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, the name ‘Jack’ was deliberately adopted as a pseudonym by the rebels as a means of keeping their identities secret- and perhaps in a nod to their French predecessors. So, there are contemporary records of peasant leaders called Jack Straw, Jack Carter, Jack Mylner (Miller), Jack Trewman, Jack Sharp and John Raw.

The Wallies of Stonehenge may have got their facts a bit wrong, but the message- the myth- was what counted. They were following in a time-honoured tradition, therefore, asserting equality and unity through a single name, even before any cosmic aspects are considered. Their aim was to reject the structures and conventions of the old world and to create a new communal society for the future. Jettisoning the patronymics of the past was an easy first step towards a more sharing, loving way of living.

So far, so good; but what has all of this got to do with the Situationist International (SI)? Well, the starting point for my chain of thought was a collage exhibited by Michele Bernstein at the Exi Gallery in Odense, Denmark in June and July 1963. The entire show ‘The Destruction of RSG-6’ was a showcase for SI works. Bernstein (who was wife of Guy Debord, leading figure in the SI) produced three reconstructions of battles scenes that turned historic revolutionary defeats into victories. The Jacquerie was over and crushed within a fortnight or so, but Bernstein’s collage, The Victory of the Great Jacquerie in 1358, “corrects the history of the past, making it better, more revolutionary and more successful than it ever was” as Debord said. In 1967 Raoul Vaneigem, author and collaborator with Debord, wrote that the pictures’ importance was that their twin goals “the rectification of the history of the workers’ movement and the realisation of art.” People could derive inspiration and encouragement from these examples of the past. The Wallies plainly did- even if, in their case, it was misremembered rather than reconstituted; the result was the same though- they were creating their own foundational myths.

There isn’t a straight line connecting the Situationists and the events of May 1968 in Paris with the Wallies at Stonehenge or Albion Free State at Windsor free festival, but I think there is a common thread of shared ideas.

Heathcote Williams, near to Meat Roxy, Notting Hill

The Situationist International was founded in 1957. Its broad aim was ‘revolution,’ with the purpose of freeing individuals from consumer capitalism, and from repetitive industrial jobs, thereby allowing each person to turn away from the ‘spectacle’ of passively consuming mass-produced goods, mass media and conventional politics, releasing them instead to explore their own creativity. From the SI’s initiation, the group produced a steady flow of ideas, texts, films and slogans, which arguably constitute its main significance. Its actual impact on politics and society was as limited as those previous uprisings that Michele Bernstein had re-imagined in 1963: the Jacquerie, the Paris Commune and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s. The SI’s revolutionary moment began in late 1967 when they became involved in student unrest at the University of Strasbourg. These occupations and protests spread to Paris and erupted in the ‘events’ of May 1968- sit-ins, mass street protests, strikes and factory take-overs. Throughout that key period the SI helped to direct and to inspire the students and disgruntled workers, but slowly the French state reasserted control and the moment passed.

What was the Situationist International legacy, therefore? It was their principles, imagined possibilities and catchphrases, as much as anything- but I’d argue that these filtered through into the thinking of the British radicals of the early 1970s whom I’ve discussed before and shaped their activities in the period 1972-75.

In November 1966 SI member Mustapha Khayati issued a pamphlet titled On the Poverty of Student Life. It included the following declaration:

“For the proletariat, revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live, instead of devising a lingering death and to indulge untrammeled desire.”

On the Poverty of Student Life 25.

“Revolt is a festival“- and for Ubi Dwyer, Wally Hope, Paul Pawlowski and others, this was literally true. The British free festivals were a conscious rebellion and a demonstration of a new way to live. Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution (1983) that “There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life. A big part of a passionate life would be love and the intimation it gives us of true communication.” One manifestation of this aspiration was the peace, love and communes movement that lay behind the Windsor, Stonehenge and other gatherings.

Heathcote Williams, November 1973

As Khayati’s text suggests, a memorable slogan was key to spreading the SI message. These catchphrases were either contained in their publications, or were turned into posters and street graffiti. Amongst the best are “Ne travaille jamais” (Never work); “We have a world of pleasures to win;” “Nous sommes le pouvoir” (We are the power); “Sous les paves, la plage” (Under the pavement, the beach.” Vaneigem had written in 1963 “What sign should we recognise as our own? Certain graffiti words of refusal or forbidden gestures inscribed with haste.” As we saw in a previous post, this was the very tactic adopted by Heathcote Williams to spread the word of Albion Free State. He was associated during the later 1960s and early ’70s with a group called King Mob, an art collective inspired by the Situationists who staged protests through a variety of activities- including graffiti. A certain Malcolm McLaren was another member, absorbing the ideas of outrage and provocation encapsulated in a neatly turned phrase…

Another idea generated and promoted by the Situationist was ‘unitary urbanism’ and the construction of a New Babylon. The concept imagines a new approach to metropolitan life, with a blending of art and technology so that the “resulting society, while it caters to fundamental needs, does so in an atmosphere of continual exploration, leisure, and stimulating ambience.” Plans for a new sort of city were drawn up by the Dutch SI member Constant Nieuwenhuys, along with Debord, in 1959. In early 1974, Heathcote Williams was working on his own ambitious plans for Free Cities of Life and Love, an idea he continued to promote through Albion Free State and a dream he tried for a while to realise in an actual settlement, somewhere in Britain.

Inevitably, French radical thought communicated itself across the Channel and around the entire world. Beyond the tight control that Guy Debord exercised over the SI, different cultures were free to take the ideas that attracted them and to create new interpretations. Certainly, Situationist thought was distilled by Jamie Reid and Malcolm McLaren into the presentation of the Sex Pistols in 1976-77, but this seems to me quite superficial, whereas the slightly earlier responses of Williams and others represent a more serious application of the SI ideas to British problems.