Radicalism in Form and Content in Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel

 

 

     The three novels of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy on my shelves had not been opened in decades, but I was not the only reader neglecting their author.  As far back as 1961 critic John Wrenn opened his biography of Dos Passos by asking “What’s happened to John Dos Passos?” [1]  Many are now unfamiliar with the writer whom Sartre lauded as “the greatest writer of our time” and the work that Edmund Wilson said “may well turn out to be the most important that has yet been produced by any American of Dos Passos’ generation” [2].  A novel which was named to the Modern Library’s list of the one hundred most important novels of the twentieth century has for many little more than historical interest.

     Whatever his own merits, Dos Passos’ reputation may have suffered from a double-edged extra-literary handicap.  He was most certainly a leftist writer of the ‘thirties, though some critics strive to play down his political engagement [3].  Oddly, though vulgar Marxist criticism abounds today under a variety of methodological names and artists are held to a politically defined standard of behavior even in their personal lives, the proletarian novels of the Depression are at a discount in the literary marketplace, due in part to the tendency toward reductive simplistic portrayals by some leftist fiction writers.  Today’s taste is likely to reflect a counterbalancing preference for experimental avant-garde techniques such as those very different strategies employed by, say, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Merrill.  A reader with a taste for elegant obscurity is unlikely to tolerate tales of put-upon workers. 

     Furthermore, Dos Passos’ innovations which so impressed early readers of the U. S. A. trilogy strike the twenty-first century reader as shallow.  To Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction  to my 1969 Signet classic edition, he was alone among his cohort in his exploitation of “radical technique, the language of Joyce, and ‘the religion of the word’” [3].  According to Kazin Dos Passos confronted the nastiness of modern capitalism not with social protest but with art.  His energy arises not from social protest and the hopes for a better world but from an aesthete’s Lost Generation “disenchantment” and a resulting retreat into aestheticism.  Similarly, he was primarily to Wrenn the creator of “brilliant technical innovations” [4].

     A contemporary reader may find it strange to see Dos Passos classed with Joyce as an experimenter.  It is true that The 42^nd Parallel is not a linear narration; it is, rather five people’s stories provided a chapter at a time, interspersed with brief biographies of culturally significant figures such as Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Thomas Edison, and two other sorts of passages.  The first of these, “The Camera’s Eye,”  probably the basis for Kazin’s mentioning Joyce, contains autobiographical sketches done in a very loose stream-of-consciousness (all in lower case to emphasize the self-consciously experimental character of the writing).  The second, “Newsreel,” contains fragments from the Chicago Tribune interspersed with popular song lyrics and other materials, reminiscent of techniques in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Pound’s Cantos. 

     The principal characters are defined in terms reflecting economic class.  Thus Mac is a lumpenproletarian Wobbly with the interests of the entire working class in mind while J. Ward Moorehouse is a public relations consultant seeking only his own enrichment.  Likewise, most of the featured historical figures are politically significant: on the one hand there are two socialists (Eugene Debs under the title “The Lover of Mankind” and Big Bill Haywood) and two representatives of Progressive formations (William Jennings Bryan and Robert LaFollette).  Balancing these Americans who sought to benefit the masses are profiteers like the notoriously anti-union Andrew Carnegie and pioneer imperialist in Mesoamerica Minor Keith [5]. 

     While this arrangement of the text into four kinds of writing would ideally coalesce into a unified vision by the novel’s end, the memoirs (“The Camera’s Eye”) have very little relation to the main narratives and the “Newsreel” sections often seem even more tenuously linked to any governing pattern that would lend each fragment significance.  They sometimes approach incoherence in themselves.  Following the headlines “PLUMBER HAS HUNDRED LOVES” and “BRINGS MONKEYS HOME,” for instance, one reads “missing rector located losses in U. S. crop report let baby go naked if you want it to be healthy if this mystery is ever solved you will find a woman at the bottom of it said Patrolman E. B. Garfinkle events leading up to the present war run continuously back to the French Revolution.”  The verbal sequence scarcely seems to hang together. 

     The most consistent themes are clearly the injustice of capitalism and the appeal of the socialist alternative.  The reader might well regard Dos Passos as engagé.  He supported Sacco and Vanzetti and was active in the First American Writers Congress of 1935 which had been organized by the Communist Party-dominated League of American Writers.  His visits to first the Soviet Union and then later to Spain did sour him on Stalin’s Comintern, and though he then lived long enough to support Joseph McCarthy, Nixon, and Goldwater, there can be doubt about his active support for a revolutionary alternative in his youth. 

     Critics had, at least since Hauptmann’s The Weavers, questioned whether an entire class or nation can be a satisfactory narrative subject.  Balzac had sought to present an encyclopedic panorama of French society in his Comédie humaine, but his canvas was sufficiently large to allow an accumulation of complex and individualized portraits, while Dos Passos’ characters remain shallow, with neither any single portrait nor the group substantial enough to support novelistic length.  There is little structural patterning in the design of The 42^nd Parallel and indeed in the trilogy as a whole, little in the way of governing image systems or productive ambiguities.  Once Dos Passos’ formula is determined, its completion is largely a matter of filling in the blanks.  Such matters of aesthetic evaluation are not subject to positive proof; at best they accurately convey subjective impressions, but they are quite real in the reading experience and can be decisive in determining a book’s worth.

     The widespread opinion among critics that the quality of Dos Passos’ fiction declined after the U. S. A. trilogy is surely justified, but perhaps the author’s chef d’oeuvre itself may have been overvalued due to its once-fashionable combination of progressive politics and avant-garde literary technique (particularly when the technique is considerably more digestible than, say, Finnegan’s Wake).  Dos Passos deserves, without a doubt, a place among those writers of his era who took to depicting the lives of ordinary Americans.  Following the nineteenth century local color writers like Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett and the next generation such as Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, an efflorescence of leftwing authors, many with Midwestern associations, succeeded.  Nelson Algren is quite correct when he said in 1951  “there has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.” [6]  Among the authors he may have had in  mind are Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Jack Conroy, James Farrell, and Richard Wright.  While Dos Passos may no longer be considered an artistic genius, as some had thought when U. S. A. was first published, he has a secure place in an important lineage.  The 42^nd Parallel remains worth reading, though I am not motivated to reread its two companion volumes which seem to provide only more quantity of the same content. 

 

  

1.  John Dos Passos, p. 2.

2.  See Sartre’s "John Dos Passos and 1919," reprinted in Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955), translated by Annette Michelson, p. 103 and Wilson’s “Dahlberg, Dos Passos and Wilson,” The Shores of Light, p. 449. 

3.  Alfred Kazin, for instance, in his introduction to the Mentor paperback goes to lengths to defend Dos Passos against the charge of social conscience, saying that he is erroneously assumed to be a “left-wing novelist,” whereas he has in fact always been “detached from all group thinking.”

4.  The 42^nd Parallel, vi.

5.  John Dos Passos, p. 8. 

6.  Three innovators are also included: Thomas Edison, August Steinmetz, and Luther Burbank who might be taken to simply signify technical progress. 

7.  In Chicago: City on the Make, p. 11.  “There has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.”  Surely thinking of Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair 1878-1968, Theodore Dreiser 1879-1945, Floyd Dell 1887-1968, Jack Conroy 1899-1990, James Farrell 1904-1979, Richard Wright 1908-1960.  At the same time a cohort of leftist writers, mostly Jewish, such Michael Gold, Max Eastman, and Josephine Herbst, were active in New York City.

Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi

    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.  

Situationism Remembered

 

 

     The nostalgia I feel thinking about Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968.  In America we have just eluded a fascist takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant.  In the sixties we told each other that Republicans were passé, that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the principal danger corporate liberalism.  Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet) that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs could be satisfied with very little work.  Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,”  The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.  Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible.  We little imagined that over fifty years later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses. 

     History has kept grinding on at the usual inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single rule: “Do as thou wouldst.”  The role of Situationists who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in social upheaval since the origin of capitalism. 

     Situationism was always a minute coterie, a splinter of a splinter.  The group was sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing politics. [1]  In spite of the writers’ intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example, felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism.  In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit, shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!"  Guy Debord, the central figure of Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position. 

     Through street art the Lettrists spread slogans such as “Never work!”  Debord led demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a break with Isou.  In 1957 Debord and others announced the Situationist International.

     A few years later the “Situationist Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform crisis.”  The Situationist alternative is “a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.”  The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”  “Everyone will become an artist.”

    This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.”

     What such a liberating art would look like is not clear.  From Lettrisme the Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950, during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7]  Debord made several films with differing content.  His first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images whatsoever.  His second Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959) juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture. 

     Much of Situationist statements focus on social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art must be subversive to be genuine.  Whereas the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived experience.  Though posters and graffiti were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and dérive (drift).

     Détournement seeks to expose and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself."  Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6]  One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius or its commodifier.      

     Debord defined the dérive as the art of wandering through urban space.  “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [8]  The dérive was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders imposed by capitalist culture.

     The Situationist International was always very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968, during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential.  Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]

    In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E. F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.”  In politics, the students condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared “art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”   They point toward the possibility of liberation.  “The only poetry . . . is the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian 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 untrammelled desire.”

     Similar ideas swept through French campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the movement for total liberation.  This group lasted only a very short time.  In 1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved itself.  [10]

     The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."  The Situationists remind us that artists can influence history and that no demand is excessive.  Ask for everything.  We deserve it. 

 

 

1.      1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist views.

 2.  Reformist writing has sometimes attracted considerable readership.  The best American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.”

4.      In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).  The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. 

 5.      See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 6.      Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression.  It is doubtless significant that the comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists did.

 7.      Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican, in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Commune!  Down with the Church,” as well as when on November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.   The tradition continues with the performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012.

8.      Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958.  Despite the language of “psychogeography,” the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have taken for many  years after using cannabis.

 9.      Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.

 10.   The work of Situationist artists did not end.  In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].  Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent communism.  The text was taken to be genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.

 

 

 

Situationist and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968

 

The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm. 

These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).

     This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

 MAY 1968 GRAFFITI

  

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”

And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

 

We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

 

We want to live.

 

Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.

 

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

 

The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.

 

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

 

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

 

Masochism today takes the form of reformism.

 

Reform my ass.

 

The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.

 

I came, I saw, I was won over.

 

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

 

Quick!

 

If we only have enough time . . .

 

In any case, no regrets!

 

Already ten days of happiness.

 

At every moment something is happening.

 

Live in the moment.

 

Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .

 

We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

 

Down with the state.

 

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.  [Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]

 

Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

 

It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.

 

Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.

 

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

 

I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).  Let the people serve themselves.

 

Abolish class society.

 

Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.

 

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

 

“In revolution there are two types of people: those who make it and those who profit from it.” (Napoleon)

 

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

 

Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.

Socialism without freedom is a barracks.

 

All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.

 

The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.

 

Politics is in the streets.

 

Barricades close the streets but open the way.

 

Our hope can come only from the hopeless.

 

A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.

 

Never work.

 

People who work get bored when they don’t work.  People who don’t work never get bored.

 

Workers of all countries, enjoy!

 

Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.  My father before me fought for wage increases.  Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.  Yet my whole life has been a drag.  Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

 

The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.

 

By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.

 

Occupy the factories.

 

Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)

 

Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)

 

Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

 

Labor unions are whorehouses.

 

Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!  [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]

 

Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

 

Stalinists, your children are with us!

 

Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.  He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.

 

Conflict is the origin of everything.

(Heraclitus)

 

If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.

 

Be cruel.

 

Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.

 

When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

 

The passion of destruction is a creative joy. (Bakunin)

 

A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

 

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

 

This concerns everyone.

 

We are all German Jews.

 

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

 

We are all “undesirables.”

 

We must remain “unadapted.”

 

The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.

 

Under the paving stones, the beach.

 

Concrete breeds apathy.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

 

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)

 

Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.

 

You are hollow.

 

You will end up dying of comfort.

 

Hide yourself, object!

 

No to coat-and-tie revolution.

 

A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.

 

Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

 

The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.

 

When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.

 

Happiness is a new idea.

 

Live without dead time.

 

Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.

 

Culture is an inversion of life.

 

Poetry is in the streets.

 

The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.

 

Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

 

Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.

 

Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.

 

Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.

 

Permanent cultural vibration.

 

We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.

 

Anarchy is me.

 

Revolution, I love you.

 

Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)

 

Don’t consume Marx, live him.

 

I’m a Groucho Marxist.

 

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

 

Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!

 

Practice wishful thinking.

 

I declare a permanent state of happiness.

 

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

 

Power to the imagination.

 

Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.

 

Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.

(Breton)

 

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.

 

Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.

 

Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.

 

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

 

Here, we spontane.

 

“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”  (Nietzsche)

 

Chance must be systematically explored.

 

Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

 

Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.

 

“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”  (Valéry)

 

Life is elsewhere.

 

Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.

 

Form dream committees.

 

Revolution is the active passage from dream to reality.

 

Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.  (Saint-Just)

 

Arise, ye wretched of the university.

 

Students are jerks.

 

The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.  (enragé women)

 

Professors, you make us grow old.

 

Terminate the university.

 

Rape your Alma Mater.

 

What if we burned the Sorbonne?

 

Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

 

We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.

 

We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.

 

Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.

 

When examined, answer with questions.

 

Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.

 

Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.

 

The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.  (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)

 

Thought that stagnates rots.

 

To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

 

Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.

 

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.

 

Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.

 

A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

 

Drive the cop out of your head.

 

Religion is the ultimate con.

 

Neither God nor master.

 

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

 

Can you believe that some people are still Christians?

 

Down with the toad of Nazareth.

 

How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?

 

We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.

 

I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

 

The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.

 

Going through the motions kills the emotions.

 

Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.  (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)

 

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

 

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.  The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

 

SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

 

Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.

 

Embrace your love without dropping your guard.

 

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

 

I’m coming in the paving stones.

 

Total orgasm.

 

Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

 

Revolutionary women are more beautiful.

 

Gilda, I love you! Down with work!

 

The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

 

Make love, not war.

 

Whoever speaks of love destroys love.

 

Down with consumer society.

 

The more you consume, the less you live.

 

Commodities are the opium of the people.

 

Burn commodities.

 

You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.

 

See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.

 

Are you a consumer or a participant?

 

To be free in 1968 means to participate.

 

I participate.

You participate.

He participates.

We participate.

They profit.

 

The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.

 

“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”  (St. Augustine)

 

Happiness is hanging your landlord.

 

Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.

 

The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!

 

How sad to love money.

 

You too can steal.

 

“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”  (Ambrose Bierce)

[The definition in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]

 

Abolish alienation.

 

Obedience begins with consciousness; consciousness begins with disobedience.

 

First, disobey; then write on the walls. 

(Law of 10 May 1968) 

I don’t like to write on walls.

 

Write everywhere.

 

Before writing, learn to think.

 

I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.

 

I don’t have time to write!!!

 

I have something to say but I don’t know what.

 

Freedom is the right to silence.

 

Long live communication, down with telecommunication.

 

You, my comrade, you whom I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.

 

Talk to your neighbors.

 

Yell.

 

Create.

 

Look in front of you!!!

 

Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.

 

Revolution is an INITIATIVE.

 

Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.

 

Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

 

Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.

 

Down with spectacle-commodity society.

 

Down with journalists and those who cater to them.

 

Only the truth is revolutionary.

 

No forbidding allowed.

 

Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.

 

The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.

 

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

 

Free our comrades.

 

Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.

 

Open the windows of your heart.

 

To hell with boundaries.

 

You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.

 

The future will only contain what we put into it now.