[Reader-list] Veritable Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy (1975)

[Jeebesh]

http://www.notbored.org/texts.html

"In August 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 (December 1975), which revealed that a situationist was in  
fact the author of the "Censor" pamphlet. A major public scandal  
ensued."



Gianfranco Sanguinetti

Veritable Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy


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 August 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 (December 1975), which revealed that a situationist was in  
fact the author of the "Censor" pamphlet. A major public scandal ensued.

As Sanguinetti reported in a preface to On Terrorism and the State,  
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, got them published  
as Verdique rapport sur les dernieres chances de sauver le capitalisme  
en Italie and defended Sanguinetti when he was refused entry to  
France. Censor's pamphlet remained a powerful influence on his  
writing, including his 1979preface 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 1980.

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 ofRenzo 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, better than a Minister of the  
Interior like Giorgio Amendola, could weed out the delinquency which  
has spread to every level, and make the agitators shup up, by good  
methods, or not so good ones? We must undertake long-term governmental  
action, and to do so we must have a solid 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 princes, in order to  
flee present perils, most often follow this neutral path, and most  
often collapse.' (Macchiavelli) In order not to see the real peril, we  
pretend to see an accord with the P.C.I. as a peril, and we flee them  
both.
Bracken, p. 75:

And who better than the communists can now impose a period of  
convalescence on the country when the workers stop fighting and begin  
to work again? Who better than a Minister of the Interior like Giorgio  
Amendola could expirpate the spreading deliquency and silence the  
agitators by good, or less good, methods? What is necessary is  
government action for a long duration, and for this a solid and highly  
resolved government is required. Not to now accept the 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. Maybe Bracken's translation -- six choppy  
sentences instead of five flowing ones, in this instance -- is "less  
good" than it could have been, but is good enough. . . . Until someone  
else, Gardner perhaps, publishes a better translation, we are stuck  
with the one made by Len Bracken.

Too bad, because the Report itself, quite obviously, is a most unusual  
document: global in scope and yet subtle and nuanced. One is never  
quite sure how to contextualize what one is reading. Are we to  
concentrate 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 importantly, as an expose of terrorism  
conducted by the Italian State against its own people from 1969 to 1975.

We work in the absence of translations of reviews of Censor's pamphlet  
and responses to the announcement that Sanguinetti was in fact its  
author. (The Flatlands edition of Bracken's translation includes none  
of the latter and about a half-dozen of the former, but these are two- 
sentence-long excerpts from reviews of Censor's pamphlet, and are too  
short, arbitrarily chosen and arranged, and unrelated to each other to  
base any well-considered opinions upon them.) And so we are unable to  
say 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?") --  
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 few naked  
truths that we have decided to write about in this pamphlet cannot be  
killed; not without running the risk that someone else would put them  
into the service of seditious ends." One will see -- where? In what  
follows in the text, or in what follows after the text is revealed to  
be a subversive prank?


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