In may 1967, Marxist Henri Lefebvre ridiculed Guy Debord’s situationist insistence that revolution was just around the corner. “Do they really imagine", he wrote:
“that one fine day or one decisive evening people will look at each other and say, 'Enough l We're fed up with work and boredom Let's put an end to them and that they will then proceed to the eternal Festival and the creation of situations?"
Although Lefebvre conceded that such a “situation” “happened once”, at the dawn of 18 March 1871, of which eye-witness accounts reported at the time that a : “tremendous surge of community and cohesion gripped those who had previously seen themselves as isolated and impotent puppets, dominated by institutions they could neither control nor understand”.
It’s unlikely to be the case again under present Capitalist condition of abundant consumerism Lefebvre added, one year later the whole of France stopped for a month, in the revolt of May 68 across all classes and divides, for: “We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom “: ...“great joy that we experienced for the first time in the streets of Paris during May 1968, that joy in the eyes and on the lips of all those who for the first time were talking to each other” (Alain Jouffroy).
The joy that is happening right now in the Arab world, with the big difference that people have died and are dying for it. For only death gives the seal authenticity to a revolution not sponsorised by Google or Coca Cola light. If there is no blood, no revolution, progress always rides the wrong way of violence and terror...
