boredom is always counter-revolutionary

Amsterdamers!

The asphault terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough. Human sacrifices are made daily to this latest idol of the idiots: car power. Choking carbon monoxide is its incense, its image contaminates thousands of canals and streets.

PROVO’S BICYCLE PLAN will liberate us from the car monster. PROVO introduces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of PUBLIC PROPERTY.

The first white bicycle will be presented to this Press and public on Wednesday July 28 at 3pm near the statue of the Lieverdje, the addicted consumer, on the Spui.

The white bicycle is never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal transport. The white bicycle is a provocation against capitalist private property, for the white bicycle is anarchistic.

The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it and then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white bicycles until everyone can use white transport and the car peril is past. The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car. In other words:

A BIKE IS SOMETHING, BUT ALMOST NOTHING!

From the Dutch Provos, 1965. Stewart Home reports on the success of this move in his Assault on Culture:

The PROVOS hatched a series of ‘white plans’, as solutions to ecological and social problems facing the city, and which simultaneously acted as ‘provocations’ to the Dutch authorities. Among the more famous of these was the ‘White Bicycle Plan’. The PROVOS announced in a leaflet that white bicycles would be left unlocked throughout the city for use by the general population. The prototype of this ‘free communal transport’ was presented to the press and public on 28th July 1965 near the statue of Lieverdja. The plan proved an enormous success as a ‘provocation against capitalist private property’ and ‘the car monster’, but failed as a social experiment. The police, horrified at the implications of communal property being left on the streets, impounded any bicycle that they found left unattended and unlocked.

Its interesting how this gesture reappears forty years later - although funded by advertising and most certainly not ‘public property’ - in Paris’ Velib scheme, which also became a much-vaunted proposal from most sides during the recent London mayoral elections (I haven’t noticed any mention of it since, though). It was also tried out, I believe, in Cambridge in 1993, but abadoned after all 300 bikes were stolen on the first day. Ironically, it would seem that the measures that have made the Parisian scheme successful are the very regulations that the anarchistic Provos opposed.

I don’t understand football. I mean this in the very literal sense, of not understanding the rules (I am overstating this, of course), but also in the wider sense of not really understanding why people invest so much energy and enthusiasm in it.

Nor do I fully understand the historical influences behind football supporters, particularly the sectarian identity of Rangers supporters; and nor do I condone futile violence or hooliganism-as-ritual.

But yesterday’s events in Manchester offer an example of a (misguided) contemporary form of public anti-authoritarian mobilisation. King Mob - a British amalgam of European Situationist and American Black Mask/Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker influences - proposed the politicisation of football hooligans as a means of giving an anti-capitalist movement some muscle. For anyone who now asks whether mass social uprisings are possible in advanced capitalist countries (a la May 68): here is one answer, but its not so pretty as a poster on the Sorbonne and some hip students.

Manchester, May 2008

Paris, May 1968

“If you go inside you will see a corpse, and mummies embalming this corpse. We were kindly invited to this mass but we have refused to take part. However we are here - outside, as their bad conscience.”*

The above quote was the first sentence of a flyer I was handed upon arriving at the conference “1968 and all that” last Saturday. I stuffed it into my bag along with numerous other papers and pamphlets also thrust at me, variously declaring what bastards coppers are, or how the struggle is apparantly continuing. This rhetoric and posturing proved much more interesting for me than the event itself, which was a little lacklustre. Perhaps I made poor decisions in which talks to attend. The pattern of the event, as I experienced it, was that in trying to figure out what really happened in May 68, the buck was always being passed, which seems like a common theme in looking back at this particular historical moment. For example, the organised speakers generally downplayed the significance of whatever they were supposed to be talking about: the King Mob guys reduced British Situationism to the desire to “fuck shit up”, or something; Astrid Proll seemed a little embarrassed and reluctant to speak about the RAF and her youth; and Stewart Home’s opinions on Banksy were brushed aside pretty quickly - “Banksy is not subversive” - in favour of an extended commentary on the May 68 commemorative programme.

On the other hand, regardless of the specific talk’s topic, most attendees seemed primarily interested in reminiscing about their personal involvement at the time, and their claims of how May 68 has affected their lives ever since unfortunately reminded me of that history of May that locates it as an early stage of the individualism and excess of self-interest that is imagined to have culminated in the 1980s - a version of events that Kristin Ross, for one, has contested. I was also very aware of how May seems to have become a generational event - an “I was there” moment, comparable to the Sex Pistols at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 - in spite of another reductive understanding of May 68 as a generational conflict of children versus parents, young students (and workers) versus fatherly De Gaulle. Whether or not this is fair to say, that the average age at the event must have been over forty certainly says something about what May 68 means today.

Perhaps this process of personalisation rather than politicisation of May 68 isn’t so surprising: the conference was at times unclear whether it was celebrating - and it was celebrating, rather than critiquing - May 68 or Situationism, two separate yet often-conflated things. Whilst the Situationists were undeniably involved in May 68, their influence was far less than Guy Debord would later make out, and most of the texts and discourse that we can now go back to are actually of a more orthodox, yet very sectarian, Left-libertarian perspective. Of course, Maoist tracts are somewhat less appealing than punchy posters and witty slogans. Likewise, I suspect that those who now commemorate May 68 are those who either were of the more Situationist bent to begin with - as opposed to the, ahem, Party guys - or have since found a watered-down Situationist version of the history of the events more appealing, whereby the manifest failures of May 68 are justified by this same individualistic, almost hippy, sense of a generation who liberated their minds from alienation if not their bodies. May 68 as the Festival rather than the Revolution.

A secondary effect of this move away from an immediate political scenario - notwithstanding the presence of the SWP-types and the posturings of the Class War-types - is that commemorating May 68 becomes increasingly a “Class of 68″ reunion. Walking around as an unaffiliated visitor, you sense that everyone present has been going through this type of ritual for so long that it is now a social event, an opportunity to catch up with friends and gossip about the celebrities of the radical Left. Those once involved on a more activist level now endlessly play out petty squabbles and self-constructed dramas, imagining themselves perhaps as Guy Debord rebuffing the ICA, as mentioned in my previous post. Revisiting May 68 becomes a ritual in itself: confrontational, but enclosed; safe skirmishes that distract attention from higher forms of alienation. And, in this way, probably representative of wider ruptures in Left identities.

By Sam, Marxist-Pessimist Youth

*Interestingly, this flyer was against the mythologisation of the SI, although to make its point it utilised decidedly Situationist language: I thought this quote sounded much like Vaneigem’s, “Those who speak of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life… have a corpse in their mouths”. As far as I can tell, principiadialectia is responsible for the flyer, whose main reason for being at the conference, it seemed, was to decry Stewart Home’s presence there, with whom it would seem that a spat has been continuing for some time now. Much to the delight of the latter, I imagine.

“It is difficult to recall the shock with which we realised our alienation from the events which were taking place in front of us. Robinson’s first reaction was one of spleen. There were, he said, no mitigating circumstances: the press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory party funding, none of these could explain away the fact that the Middle Classes in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.

Robinson began to consider what the result would mean for him. His flat would continue to deteriorate and its rent increase. He would be intimidated by vandalism and petty crime. The bus service would get worse. There would be more traffic and noise pollution, and an increased risk of getting knocked down crossing the road. There would be more drunks pissing in the street when he looked out of the window, and more children taking drugs on the stairs when he came home at night. His job would be at risk and subjected to interference. His income would decrease. He would drink more, and less well. He would be ill more often. He would die sooner.”

(From London by Patrick Keiller)