Political motivation ... The influence of Debord, Vaneigem ... The Strasbourg scandal ... Nanterre, the May events

In his struggle to make some sense of the Carr bomb attack Habershon had the Special Branch to help him, to point him in the right direction. He had a lot of questions: just what kind of person would want to let off a bomb outside the home of a Cabinet minister? Where were they from? What were their politics? The Special Branch had very few of the answers. They did know of the existence of something called the Angry Brigade through communiqués the group had sent to the underground press in the previous month. But they had tended to dismiss them as cranks. Not any more though. The Carr bombs had made sure of that.

So, again, who were they? Was this the beginning of something big: the Revolution, perhaps, that some people had been predicting for so long? The Angry Brigade were certainly no part of the traditional trade union movement, despite the timing of their attack on the Employment Minister. Nor did they belong to any of the known political groupings. Special Branch informants right and left came up with nothing. If anything, the answer seemed to lie somewhere in a youthful, vaguely anarchistic circle so far unfamiliar to the security authorities. But how to identify it? The only slight clue was in an Angry Brigade communiqué already in the possession of the police which appeared to be a list of targets: "High Pigs, Judges, Embassies, Spectacles, Property." It was the word "Spectacles" that took the eye of one Special Branch Sergeant in particular. He decided to find out precisely what it meant, and to try to put it into its social and political context.

Through reading pamphlets, articles and by talking to his contacts in the anarchist world, the Sergeant soon discovered that the word "Spectacle" was a concept, emblem almost, of a group who called themselves Situationists. Two men were largely responsible for the ideas behind "Situationism" — Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. They took as a starting point the belief that the traditional working-class movement started by Marx and Bakunin in the nineteenth century had been defeated over the years, in the East by the Bolsheviks and in the West by the bourgeoisie. Organisations that were supposed to act on behalf of the workers — the trade unions and political parties had sold out to world capitalism. More than that: capitalism could now take over, "appropriate", even the most radical ideas and "return" them safely against the workers in the shape of harmless ideologies, like socialism or communism.

To remedy all this, in 1957 a group called the Situationist International, mainly artists, architects, intellectuals, set out to develop a new way of looking at, of interpreting, society. It was as part of this process that Debord developed his theory of the Spectacle. He argued that through computers, television, transport and other forms of advanced technology capitalism could control the very conditions of existence. This led to what Debord called the Society of the Spectacle. The world we see is not the real world, it is the world we have been conditioned to see. Life itself has become a show contemplated by an audience and that audience is the proletariat, whom he defined as anyone who had no control over the conditions of his existence. Reality was now something we merely looked at and thought about, not something we experienced.

The net effect of all this, because we have been brainwashed into substituting material things for real experience, was alienation, the separation of person from person. But Debord observed that sometimes the various methods used by the Spectacle to keep people apart — mass culture, commodities, advanced consumer goods — did not work. On the West Coast of the United States for example, thousands of young Americans had questioned the roles allotted to them by society.

They had run away from middle class, middle morality, middle America and hidden in the anonymous tenements of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. Another unconscious revolt against the Spectacle came with the riots in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts in 1965. Thousands of coloured Americans burnt down their own homes and smashed local shops and factories. To Debord these two incidents were evidence of the Spectacle's vulnerability. It could be defeated, but not without real difficulty because it had yet another weapon at its disposal, "Recuperation."

To survive, the Spectacle had to have social control. Recuperation was the way it attained it. Bourgeois society was able to "recuperate" a situation, or resist any challenge to itself, by shifting its ground, by creating new roles and cultural forms. One way of doing this was by encouraging "participation." People were to be allowed a greater say in "the construction of the world of their own alienation." Experimental life-styles were turned into a commodity. Even supposedly rebellious ways of living like the hippies in San Francisco were eventually packaged for cultural consumption. Another method the recuperators used was to deliberately inculcate a nostalgic yearning for the past, keeping people happy by encouraging them to follow the fashions of the twenties, the thirties or the fifties.

But if this sort of measure failed and anyone decided to reject the materialist values offered by the recuperators, then they had a way of coping with that, too. People bored with the mere possession of things were encouraged to possess experiences, through carefully controlled leisure industries and package tours.

The Spectacle not only filled people's time, though, it occupied their environment as well, with something the Situationists defined as "urbanism." That had come about when the recuperators realised that people would no longer accept, and were beginning to resist, the damage the growth of the Spectacle, industry, was doing to their physical surroundings....