Gianfranco Sanguinetti, an active member of the Italian section of the Situationist International from January 1969 to the SI's auto-dissolution in April 1972, is someone about whom we English-speakers know relatively little. We know that he was a close friend of and collaborator with Guy Debord, with whom he authored Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time, the document that formally dissolved the SI in April 1972, and that Sanguinetti helped produce Debord's important 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle. As English translations of Section Italienne de L'Internationale Situationniste: Ecrits complets 1969-1972 (published in 1988 by Contre-Moule, Paris) become available, we will begin to know even more about Sanguinetti's contributions to the international situationist movement.
In July 1975, under the pseudonym Censor, Sanguinetti (with help from Debord) wrote, produced and distributed to 520 members of the ruling class a little-known pamphlet entitled Rapporto verdico sulle opportunita di salvare il capitalismo in Italia. Putatively written from the perspective of an educated, well-connected and ruthless member of Italy's economic elite, Censor's pamphlet announced its intention to be the saving of capitalism, not only in Italy but also all over the world. By October, 1975, the printing of three more editions were necessary to satisfy the public's interest in this pamphlet. After it was hypocritically praised by the bourgeois press, Sanguinetti published Prove dell 'inesistenza di Censor, enunciate dal suo autore (January 1976), which revealed that a situationist was in fact the author of the "Censor" pamphlet. A major public scandal ensued. As Sanguinetti reported in the preface to his 1979 book Remedy To Everything: discourses on the next chances of ruining capitalism in Italy -- in part translated as On Terrorism and the State and published in 1982 by Chronos Publications -- the owners of the world and their salaried critics were
exasperated and vexed at having to note that only their most indomitable enemies have the ability to really understand [the world]; and the ruling classes [saw], with justifiable anxiety, its veritable problems exposed only by these enemies, who work towards its subversion. Our ministers and all politicians [were] disturbed, not without reason, at having to read our writings in order to contemplate themselves with realism at last, but in the perspective of the destruction of their powers. The heads of the secret services of the bourgeoisie, appointed in the last ten years or so for the purpose of provocation, assassinations, and State terrorism, will understandably be infuriated at seeing their manoeuvres constantly unmasked by those very people against whom they were always conceived.
In 1976, Debord translated both Censor's Report and Sanguinetti's January 1976 exposure of it as a fake into French and got them published as Verdique rapport sur les dernieres chances de sauver le capitalisme en Italie. Censor's pamphlet remained a powerful influence on his writing, including his 1979 preface to the 4th Italian edition of The Society of the Spectacle, and especially his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), despite the fact that he broke with Sanguinetti around 1979, when Sanguinetti published Del Terrorismo E Dello Stato: La teoria e la practica del terrisomo per la prima volta divulgata, which was, as we've mentioned, in part translated as On Terrorism and the State.
With the exception of an excerpt that was published in Italy: Autonomedia: Post-political Politics (Semiotext[e], 1980), Sanguinetti's pamphlet has never been translated into English. And so Flatlands Books is right to say that Len Bracken's new translation of the pamphlet under the title The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (1997) is the first ever in English. According to Bracken's August 1996 translator's forward, this new translation "is based on the original Italian (in consultation with M.C. Quilter, the translator of Renzo Novatore), and, primarily, the French translation by Guy Debord." In a remark that should alarm any intelligent reader, but especially readers of his Guy Debord: Revolutionary, Bracken goes to say of Debord's translation, "Like many books, this one appears to have been bolstered through translation." One shudders at the idea that Bracken, who evidently does not speak Italian, tried to mimic Debord-the-translator and somehow "bolstered" Debord's translation of Sanguinetti's pamphlet.
It seems to us quite plainly inaccurate to translate either "verdico" or "verdique" as "real" (as opposed to "veritable"). (In their translation the SI's book La Veritable Scission dans L'Internationale -- which includes Debord & Sanguinetti's "Theses on the SI and Its Time" -- Forsyth and Prigent translate "veritable" as "veritable.") Bracken's unconvincing explanation for deliberately botching part of the pamphlet's title: "It was decided that fewer syllables would make the title a little less daunting to the U.S. reading public." Who exactly decided to dumb down the title? Was it Bracken or not? With this senseless alteration, the title is 19 syllables long instead of 22. Wotta difference those three BIG syllables make! eh, you easily daunted American members of the English-speaking world?
Unfortunately, it appears that Bracken's approach to the pamphlet's title is also operative in his translation of the body of the text. Elsewhere in his foreward, he notes that "[Sanguinetti's] prose is not in the telegraphic style now favored in North America," and that "the words erupt and flow like molten rock, burning everything in their path and burying the lies of his times with the blazing truth." Here we are (again) in danger of being buried under a pile of Brackenish bullshit, for it is Bracken himself who prefers to use the "telegraphic style." You tell me which "flows" like molten rock and which is choppy and irregular -- the Semiotexte[e] translation (done by Richard Gardner) or the Bracken translation?
Gardner, p. 93:
And who better than the communists can today institute a period of convalescence in the country, during which the workers will have to stop fighting and resume working? Who, betted and resolute government: not accepting a 'compromise' like that in question today in reality signifies fatally compromising, for ourselves, the very existence of tomorrows. Let us remember that neutrality, in such an affair, is the daughter of irresolution, and that 'Irresolute pr compromise in question actually signifies, for us, accepting to fatally compromise the existence of our tomorrows. We always remember that neutrality in such affairs is the daughter of irresolution, and that 'To banish a present danger, irresolute princes most often follow the neutral path, and most often they lose themselves.' In order not to see the real peril, one pretends to view the accord with the PCI as a peril, and one banishes the peril before both of them.
Maybe this is quibbling.ate on what we know to be the hypothetical existence of Censor and his desire to save capitalism, or on the real existence and revolutionary perspective of Sanguinetti, "standing behind" Censor and occasionally winking at us?
The Report works on at least four levels: as a situationist prank; as a critique of capitalism and its communist "adversary"; as a call to revolutionary action; and, most importanay much about the pamphlet-as-prank, other than to observe that the text contains several barely-concealed, in-joke references to the Situationist International, something about which someone like Censor might or might not have known about. Appropriately enough, there is a sly reference to Debord's Society of the Spectacle -- "over the last ten years in all the democratic countries, it seems intelligent censorship would only have had to been applied to three or four books," books that "should have disappeared completely using all possible means," but did not, books that "are suspectible to creating adepts over a long period, and, finally, disturbing our power." There is also a reference to Sanguinetti's own "Advice to the Proletariat on the Present Occasions for Social Revolution" (not yet translated into English), of which Censor claims to have seen a copy in the very midst of the worker riots in Milan on 19 November 1969.
Sanguinetti's Report contains a short exposition on "the characteristics and permanent effects" of the "development and expansion of economic power" that has "changed the face of the world much more than any revolution in the past." There are five distinctive traits of contemporary capitalism with which "Censor" wishes his readers to become familiar:
1). the "quantitative and qualitative progress of political lies to a level of power that has never been seen in history." (Though political lies only serve the interests of the ruling class, Censor perceives a danger in relying upon them overmuch: "too often [the] results are not in accord with the higher interests of the whole of the economic order.")
2). "a grandiose reinforcement of State power as an increasingly sophisticated organism of surveillance."
3). "the isolation, or better said, the separation of people has been highly perfected."
4) "an unprecedented growth in the power of the economy and of industry" to the point that "nothing exists that cannot be industrially produced, that is to say, that does not conform to the exigencies of profit."
5) "the vertiginous growth in the complication of the everyday intervention of human society on all aspects of the production of life, and its replacement of every natural element with a new factor that one could call artificial," which justifies and requires "the unmitigated power of every expert who erects and corrects the new economic and ecological equilibriums outside of which people can no longer live."
Readers of Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (published in 1988) will find strong similarities between the five features of contemporary capitalism listed by Censor and the "five principal features" of what Debord calls "the society whose modernization has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle." For Debord, those features are 1) incessant technological renewal (which corresponds with #4 in Censor's list); 2) integration of state and economy (#2 in Censor's list); 3) generalized secrecy (#5 in Censor's list); 4) unanswerable lies (#1 in Censor's list); and 5) an eternal present (#3 in Censor's list).
Though an analysis of the influence of Sanguinetti's Report on Debord's Comments is too broad a topic to be adequately addressed here, we should note that this influence may account for the notoriously guarded tone and paranoid outlook of the latter book: Debord knew from the moment Censor revealed his true identity that the secret services in Italy (and perhaps France as well) would be paying very close attention to both of their activities and writings, if they were not doing so already. When Gerard Lebovici was murdered in 1984, the factual basis for Debord's paranoia in particular was brutally confirmed.
Censor's critique of the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) is practical, not theoretical: that is to say, he bases his remarks on what the PCI had actually done and not done, rather than on the PCI's "theories" or propaganda. "In France and Czechoslovakia, where the revolutionary movement was on the best footing," Censor asks, "who favored or imposed the return to normal in the factories and streets?" The "first lesson to be learned from these events" was that "in both cases it was the communists: in Paris thanks to the unions, and in Prague thanks to the Red Army." According to Censor, "it was in the middle of 1969 that the Italian Communist Party was explicitly asked what guarantees it would offer the government to work with it to stop the [workers'] movement before Autumn, and what they wanted in return." But because both the Christian Democrats (the politicians in power) and the PCI were mistaken in their respective calculations, a formal deal between them wasn't made at that time. However, as Censor reports, "the force of the communist party and unions has already been useful to us, and it has been our principle support since the Autumn of 1969." (When Sanguinetti wrote and published his pamphlet, the possibility of a formal "historic compromise" between the Christian Democrats and the PCI was again in the offing, because the government still could not contain the continuing labor unrest in Italy.)
As a call to revolutionary action, the Report is very powerful, precisely because Sanguinetti has Censor speak more honestly about class society than any member of the elite ever has (at least in public). "From the point of view of the defense of our society, there only exists one danger: that workers succeed in speaking to each other about their condition and their aspirations without intermediaries," Censor writes. "All other dangers are secondary, or proceed directly from the precarious situation in which we place, in multiple respects, this unavowable problem." This sort of honest appraisal of both the "unavowable" problem and its solution -- especially when the appraisal is celebrated by newspaper reviewers and other political commentators ignorant of the real identity of "Censor" -- calls for equal honesty on the part of the workers. With the same ruthlessness shown by Censor, the workers must collectively and totally "deny the right to property" and "contest the necessity of work."
Precisely because the Report was a situationist prank, it no doubt made the undertaking of these projects in earnest seem like fun. "The principal irrationality of contemporary capitalism," Sanguinetti has Censor say, "is that it does not do all that it can do to defend itself from the dangerous attacks against it." All too true, especially when the one who is ostensibly proposing that this irrationality be corrected, is actually taking the greatest advantage of it! (It is perhaps fitting that we share a little laugh before approaching the most serious level upon which the Report works.)
In the deadly game of social poker known as class struggle, the Report called the Italian state's bluff. When the Italian state pretended that 1) starting in 1969 it did not perpetrate acts of terrorism against its own people, and 2) somebody else, perhaps an ultra-leftist or an ultra-rightest group (it need not matter which one), had in fact been the perpetrator of acts of terrorism such as the bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan on 12 December 1969, Sanguinetti knew that the state was bluffing. He knew as early as the end of 1969 -- when he and the other members of the Italian section of the SI wrote and distributed "Il Reichstag Bruccia?" ("Is the Reichstag Burning?" [not yet translated into English]) -- that the state's secret services were the real culprits, and he knew why they had been called into service in this fashion.
"It was necessary," Censor reports, "to launch a diversionary tactic during the summer [of 1969]: artificial tension, the principal goal of which was to momentarily distract public opinion from real tensions that destroy the country." Elsewhere in the Report, Censor relates that,
disoriented and shaken to a stupor by the number of innocent victims, the workers remained hypnotized by this unforeseen event, and were distracted by the rumors that followed [...] As if by magic, a strike movement that was so widespread and so prolonged forgot itself and stopped.
Thus, the initial bombings immediately achieved their desired effects. But precisely because after 1969 the Italian state continued to use the "strategy of tension," as it became known, its bluff could be called at any time. The genius of the card played in the Report is not so much the fact that it called the state's bluff, but the confident manner in which it did it.
Sanguinetti called the State's bluff by having Censor think, write and act as if it was an established fact, not a matter for speculation (among the members of the elite), that the secret services were responsible for the Milan bombing, and that this bombing was desirable. "We can see the undeniable, long term advantages of such a tactic," Sanguinetti has ruthless Censor say, "and [also] the harm it entails in transforming itself into strategy." And so -- as far as Censor and the interests for which he speak are concerned -- the problem with artificial tension was not its use as a tactic in 1969, but its continuing use as strategy in all of Italy since then. "We argue that the theatrical killing (the scenic protagonists of decadence and of its political chronicle in Italy) demonstrated the weakness of those who govern as much as it displayed the general desire to change the scene, intrigue and actors," Censor writes. "We will say it for once and for all, and clearly: the time has come to put an end to the uncontrollable use of this parallel action that is brutal, useless and dangerous for order itself."
The brilliance of Sanguinetti's use of tactics (his manner of calling the bluff) was that the State could neither answer it nor ignore it. To answer the call to show its cards -- either by folding (admitting that the state's secret services were indeed the perpetrators of the Milan bombing) or by showing its cards (admitting that the people the state had prosecuted for the crime could not and did not commit it) -- would be too risky in either case. But to ignore the call would be too risky, as well, for as Censor writes, "One will see that the BUSE]
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[LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE] [SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE]