De la misère en milieu étudiant considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier

by Internationale Situationniste, Mustapha Khayatti

This scathing analysis of student duplicity was prepared and published by the Situationist International and the students at the University of Strasbourg (using student union funds). While claiming to be revolutionaries, students prepare themselves for a professional career "just in case." An important read for people arguing with their grad-school-headed friends or anyone surrounded by the argument that academia is the best place for radicals.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Essays, 20th Century

59 pages, Paperback

First published November 22, 1966

About the author

The Internationale Situationniste (I.S) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.

Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through images. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.

The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Karl Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation. In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture. They rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased productive capacity, and a raised general quality of life when compared to previous systems, such as feudalism—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.

When the Situationist International was first formed, it had a predominantly artistic focus; emphasis was placed on concepts like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. Gradually, however, that focus shifted more towards revolutionary and political theory. The Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem. The expressed writing and political theory of the two aforementioned texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the uprisings.

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Art is dead, but the student is a necrophiliac".

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The central role of products in our society rarely gets questioned. Our societies are so concerned with the surface of things that a look at the larger picture seems impossible as we continue to obsess over what gadgets to buy next."

[Roxy The Bolshevik Girl · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Situationist International were the original quirked up, but sensitive, white boys.

[Amirsaman · Rating 3 out of 5]

پمفلتی که در 1966 منتشر شد توسط مصطفی خیاطی، و درش بسیاری از جنبش‌ها و پراکسیس‌های دانشجوییِ موجود و سابق دنیا تقبیح شد، و عملا راهی نو را به میِ شصت‌وهشتی‌ها نشان داد.
ترجمه‌ی بهروز صفدری از اصل فرانسوی متن را اینجا بخوانید:
http://www.behrouzsafdari.com/wp-cont...

«منطقِ کالا عقلانیتِ مبتدایی و غایی جوامعِ کنونی است، بنیانِ خودتنظیم‌شوندگیِ توتالیتری این جوامع است که شبیه پازل‌هایی هستند که قطعات‌شان، با همه‌ی تقاوت‌های ظاهری، در واقع معادل و هم‌ارزِ یکدیگرند. شیئ‌واره‌سازی کالایی مانعِ اساسی بر سر راهِ رهایی تمام‌عیار و ساختنِ آزادانه‌ی زندگی است.»
«آن‌چه امروزه باید هدفِ حمله باشد خودِ کار است. امحای کار نه فقط یک 'اتوپیا' نیست، بلکه نخسین شرط است برای فراگذری واقعی از جامعه‌ی کالایی، و الغای جدایی --در زندگی روزانه‌ی هر فرد-- میان 'وقتِ آزاد' و 'وقتِ کار'، این بخش‌های مکمل یک زندگیِ ازخودبیگانه، جدایی‌ای که تضادِ درونیِ کالا میانِ ارزشِ کاربرد و ارزشِ مبادله بازتابی بی‌حدومرز در آن می‌یابد.»

[Freddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have probably given this a two-star rating until I read the last two thirds of it. A real lovely read towards the end, reflective of the unrestrained desire and ambition that was prevalent throughout the best pockets of the French student movements in the 60s, an exercising of the truly revolutionary cell within yourself that everyone is capable of.

[Lóri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li pra um grupo de estudo da filosofia agora durante a greve :)
BOM PRA CARALHO, é tão bom que até me senti pessoalmente atacada em alguns trechos. Muito revoltante ver que muitas atitudes que eles criticam ainda estão na ordem do dia do movimento estudantil. A primeira parte até achei que talvez tenham algumas críticas exageradas (apesar de não conhecer direito o cenário estudantil da época), mas a terceira parte é linda demais!!! os soviets são até hoje um ótimo exemplo de organização democrática e não alienada de trabalhadores e isso tem que ser resgatado!

[Tyrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seems like the perfect dead ideology for me tbqh (docking a point for speaking ill of Comrade Mao)

[Skog · Rating 4 out of 5]

studenten är precis lika mycket en produkt av sin tid som Godard eller Coca-Cola

[Jonah Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

There are parts of this that are mega interesting but it's crazy that French people are just like this.

"Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest... The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event “in the future.”"

"the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile paradise"

The part about being "Bohemian" is interesting.

"he is obliged to discover “modern culture” as an admiring spectator"

"A mechanically produced specialist is now the goal of the “educational system.” A modern economic system demands mass production of students"

"“high culture” has taken on the rhythm of the production line"

"The university is becoming, fairly smoothly, the honest broker of technocracy and its spectacle"

"He feels obliged to have general ideas on everything, to unearth a coherent world-view capable of lending meaning to his need for activism and asexual promiscuity"

"After years of slumber and permanent counterrevolution, there are signs of a new period of struggle, with youth as the new carriers of revolutionary infection. But the society of the spectacle paints its own picture of itself and its enemies, imposes its own ideological categories on the world and its history. Fear is the very last response. For everything that happens is reassuringly part of the natural order of things. Real historical changes, which show that this society can be superseded, are reduced to the status of novelties, processed for mere consumption. The revolt of youth against an imposed and “given” way of life is the first sign of a total subversion. It is the prelude to a period of revolt — the revolt of those who can no longer live in our society. Faced with a danger, ideology and its daily machinery perform the usual inversion of reality. A historical process becomes a pseudo-category of some socio-natural science: the Idea of Youth.
Youth is in revolt, but this is only the eternal revolt of youth; every generation espouses "good causes," only to forget them when "the young man begins the serious business of production and is given concrete and real social aims." After the social scientists come the journalists with their verbal inflation. The revolt is contained by overexposure: we are given it to contemplate so that we shall forget to participate. In the spectacle, a revolution becomes a social aberration--in other words a social safety valve--which has its part to play in the smooth working of the system. It reassures because it remains a marginal phenomenon, in the apartheid of the temporary problems of a healthy pluralism. In reality, if there is a problem of youth in modern capitalism it is part of the total crisis of that society. It is just that youth feels the crisis most acutely."

"The "young thug" despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle offers him - but now, with no down payment"

"American society needs its students, and by revolting against their studies they have automatically called that society in question. From the start, they have seen their revolt against the university hierarchy as a revolt against the whole hierarchical system, the dictatorship of the economy and the State. Their refusal to become an integrated part of the commodity economy, to put their specialized studies to their obvious and inevitable use, is a revolutionary gesture."

I the general idea is that students are workers like everyone else but have a specially isolated consciousness?

The note at the end by the judge condemning the article is so funny because it says exactly what universities want to say now.

[raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esse texto é uma das melhores coisas que eu já li na minha vida.
(…) A arte está morta, mas o estudante é necrófilo. Ele espia o cadáver em cineclubes e teatros, compra seus palitos de peixe no supermercado cultural. Consumindo sem reservas, ele está em seu elemento: ele é a prova viva de todas as platitudes da pesquisa de mercado americana: um consumidor conspícuo, completo com preferência irracional induzida pela Marca X (Camus, por exemplo) e preconceito irracional contra a Marca Y (Sartre, talvez).”

[M]

Scathing critique but wow, I wish leftists didn’t talk like this. The title pretty much describes the whole pamphlet: student life is a way to prepare for being integrated into society, it’s a meagre situation and, no matter how radical students seem to be, they are only so because of their student position (I think?? “His susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is an ample demonstration of his real impotence”/13). It’s an interesting read to go through in 2026.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slender pamphlet is associated with the student uprisings that shut down Paris, and ultimately much of the economy of France, in May of 1968. Printed just two years earlier, the “Situationists” who wrote it were quick to proclaim credit, but really had done much to articulate the frustrations of young radicals in a world divided between orthodox Marxism and reactionary capitalism. It is a book undeniably for intellectuals, it does not shy away from theory by any means, but it calls for action on new terms, and refuses to take “fun” out of the equation of revolt. For many, this is where the concept “the spectacle” (articulated later by the Situationist Guy De Bord in “Society of the Spectacle”) first came to stand in for hegemonic capital in its manifestation as and in the media. The Situationists bash their fellow student-unionists, along with their professors, the old lefty leadership, and the regime, and have fun doing it. A surprisingly lively text.

[Mehdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publie en 1966 aux frais de l'Universite de Strasbourg (vidant aux passages les caisses de l'association des etudiants), ce brulot est premonitoire des revoltes de Mai 1968. Un document historique.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strident in tone and at times as insightful as it is dated, it's most on-target (depressingly so) is the complaint with validity today that educational institutions indoctrinate the student in a complacent, consumerist rule.

All of them are guilty of what Fourier called a "systematic confusion" when fundamental questions are treated without considering any overall conception of modern society. A fetishism for facts masks the essential category, and details cause the totality to be forgotten. Everything is told about this society except what it really is: a society dominated by commodities and spectacles. In their study Les Héritiés: les étudiants et la culture, the sociologists Bourderon and Passedieu are baffled by the handful of partial truths they have managed to turn up. And despite their good intentions they fall back on professorial morality, the inevitable Kantian ethic of true democratization achieved by truly rationalizing the educational system (namely, by educating the system). Meanwhile their disciples, such as Kravetz¹, believing there are thousands experiencing a reawakening, compensate for their petty-bureaucratic bitterness with a pastiche of outdated revolutionary phraseology.

In modern capitalism, reification becomes a spectacle² where everyone is assigned a specific role within the collective passivity. The student is no exception to this rule. His is a temporary role, a rehearsal for his proper role when he will serve actively to preserve the commodity system. Being a student is just an initiation...

Some key arguments:

* The Student as Servant to the System: The text argues that the student role is not one of rebellion, but a temporary initiation designed to prepare individuals to actively maintain the capitalist commodity system later in life.

* Reification and Spectacle: Reification—treating people as objects—becomes a "spectacle" where individuals are assigned roles within a "collective passivity".

[ayşe · Rating 3 out of 5]

half of this was really interesting and its criticism of student life and students in the eyes of the ruling ideology was extremely well worded. the second half was self-indulgent anarchist ramblings on movements around the world and how terrible said leninist parties are, which was so off topic lmao.

"Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation, an initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event “in the future.” Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance."

[Laynie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Like everyone else, [the student] takes pride in buying the paperback reprints of important and difficult texts that 'mass culture' is disseminating at an accelerating pace. Since he doesn't know how to read, he contents himself with fondly gazing at them."

when an author writes on a subject with this much passion, the presence of a few contradictions and biases is almost inevitable. but aside from a handful of misguided conclusions, i found the contents of this little pamphlet to be very convincing and challenging to my own beliefs. it also functions as a pretty good introduction to situationist ideology (for lack of a better word) once you're familiar with all the philosophical jargon. you have to appreciate a short text that leaves you thinking for a long time

[Lucía Libremente · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing political essay and proposal. I value the importance of collective writing by the Internationale Situationniste and the need to understand the crisis of education systems, which has been denounced since the 20th century. I strongly support the main argument that the transformation of students into consumers, and the obligation placed on educators to primarily serve elite and upper-class students, represents a perversion of the purpose of education. Instead of being emancipatory and a path to self-discovery, education becomes a market commodity

[Jude Burrows · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. dated, yet still undoubtedly poignant and holds angry truths applicable to current society. the discussions on student revolutionary habits - and how illusory this often are - as well as the failures of communism and previous revolutions were particularly fascinating. ‘the tradition of the dead generations still weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.’

[Dimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ανορθόδοξο, ριζοσπαστικό, ρηξικέλευθο, ωμό και πνευματώδες. Μετά από αυτή την εμπειρία, θα διαβάσω σίγουρα και το Ξεπέρασμα της Τέχνης, και γενικά, θα ασχοληθώ με τους Καταστασιακούς.
Πολιτικός σουρεαλισμός στα καλύτερά του.

[Ian Wraga · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book very precisely couched in its context, still very stimulating and practical. Situationists definitely have something to teach those who are trying to make sense of how and why direct action must be intertwined with real, large scale change in political systems.

[Yves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most enduring SI literature & the funniest not written by Vaneigem

[Starrunner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Multi-Level-Marketers can stay mad at the MLM critiques in here as if anarchists are not also equally critiqued. lawl

[Laurens Monster · Rating 1 out of 5]

i both despise situationists and somewhat adore their quirkiness. this pamphlet is drab. all but one good line, that being;

art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked it so good. Art in politics never made it that far

[Dušan Stevanović]

on est les communists mieux que tous les autres et on est tres faché!!! >:(

[c h r i s · Rating 1 out of 5]

pn4 On the poverty of the poverty of student life

According to this pamphlet, to succeed, everyone must be less similar to the people who were successful in defeating the Nazis and their capitalist backers:

“The principal platitude of all future revolutionary organization must be the theoretical and practical denunciation of Stalinism in all its forms.” (Situationist International, On the Poverty of Student Life 1966, p.32, Active, 2023)

Bold strategy, let us see how it pans out (it does not). Instead, the author instructs us to imitate:

“Japan [...] the only industrialized country where this fusion of student youth and working class militants has already taken place.” (Situationist International, p.27)

That is correct “be more similar to the country that got nuked”, and is now basically US territory with troops stationed there. The author of this pamphlet turns defeats into successes! This patented “success” is now to be worshipped and repeated:

“The first great ‘failure’ of workers’ power, the Paris Commune, is in fact its first great success” (Situationist International, p.28)

Unfortunately when les communards were “storming heaven” they stopped short of the bank:

“in the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune -- this would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favour of peace with the Commune [….] the Commune, composed as it was of Blanquists and Proudhonists” (F. Engels, Introduction 1891, in: K. Marx, The Civil War in France, p.13, FLP, Peking, 1970)

But, to do otherwise would be so-called:

“Stalinist counter-revolution” (Situationist International, p.14)

----------------------

Read this outstanding “masterpiece” :

“edulcorated Stalinism: Togliatti’s, Garaudy’s, Khrushchev[!!!], Mao’s, etc.” (Situationist International, p.15)

Now this is a “situation”, and not at all an unholy garbling of ideas. The whole text is just breaking down. Here we have a veritable “revolution” in logic: “Stalin = Khrushchev” (don’t laugh!)

[Miloš · Rating 4 out of 5]

Begins with very attractive, pleasing, energetic critique of student life and then falls into being a review of other student movements and in my opinnion looses the sharpness it had in the frist chapter. Still, an intriguing piece that apparently made history.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This piece is cryptic and witty, and the problem that it identifies has evolved with time.