Report on the Construction of the Situationist International

The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect it implies, is a recent product of the historical conditions that are simultaneously giving rise to the necessity for a coherent revolutionary program in culture and to the necessity to struggle against the forces that impede the development of such a program.

1) Abstraction, or art that is unmaterial, is often lauded as anti-marxist since it is inherently based in notions not connected to the physical world. However it is important to know that his materialist conception of the world is also a critique in of it's self. Under all other social systems, mankind is nothing but the sum of his material surroundings, all of his actions are determined by his material necessities, and his very being is determined by the limitations that capitalism has placed on the individual's power (his lack of power is the lack of democracy, he is isolated without any control over the world that surrounds him, he is a frisbee of god) and made the individual whose aspirations reach the heavens themselves a mere speck of dust. Materialism holds that to abolish this order we must recognize it. The proper goal of revolutionary socialism then should be to abolish materialism and the distinction between the real and the unreal. Therefore Abstraction is a distinctly Marxist form and only true abstraction can be reached under socialism