SUCKED: A verification of theses advanced in The Green Apocalypse which demonstrates the sad decomposition of a pro-situ hack by Unpopular Books.

Our recent publication Green Apocalypse contains an article 'The Sucking Pit'. This piece warns how Green Anarchism functions as a vortex, where those unfortunate enough to get sucked in suffer an accelerated decomposition. This was specifically linked to Mikhail Bakunin, the freemason who, over a hundred years ago, used the techniques of manipulating secret societies in an attempt to take over the First International. This same Bakunin is held up as a hero of the anarchist tradition, even though he was a proponent of an International Working-Men's State (see On the Question of Landed Property, speech to the Basle Congress of the International Working-men's Association, 1869).

Far from heeding our warning, Michel Prigent has confirmed its basic prognosis. We have had disagreements with Prigent for many years, and relations have hardly been cordial. But although we may have regarded him a fool, we never questioned his sincerity or his desire to transform this world for the better. However his latest sad critique, Desperately Seeking the SI, shows that his judgement has been so eaten away by personal bile that he has chosen to immerse himself in the same reactionary shit as Green Anarchist. In fact he has become a graduate of the Larry O'Hara school of distortion and falsification.

Over half of his pamphlet is focused on attacking the editors of London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter/Unpopular Books and Re:Action/Sabotage Editions. In this, he shows a certain understanding in that much of the conference was of little value ranging from Ben Watson's apologetics for the SWP to the organisers ill-considered article which appeared in The Independent. In his desire to retain a nostalgic attitude towards the Situationist International, Prigent quite rightly perceives our activities as a threat to such pro-situ posturing which have been his trade mark for so long.

A key element which indicates how Prigent has moved completely outside the revolutionary movement to side with reaction, is how he casually speculates whether these two individuals "are someone's valuable assets". Revolutionaries understand how such idle speculation undermines their struggle, sowing a minefield of suspicion, accusation and counter accusation. We may entertain suspicion about this or that person, but if we are to denounce them, then it is our responsibility to assemble proper evidence which shows our suspicions are well grounded. But here the ventilation of such empty and spurious suggestions serves as a cover for an inability to challenge those with which Prigent has political disagreements. When Prigent couples this with outright lies it his own lack of integrity he exposes, no-one elses.

Prigent recycles a lie circulated by the Lancaster Bomber, part of the Green Anarchist Network. An article appeared in The Observer which featured a masked person and discussed Decadent Action. This was transmogrified by Lancaster Bomber into a piece about Stewart Home in The Independent. Whilst it may be granted that their perception of Home behind the mask might simply be an hallucination, the switch of the relevant paper to The Independent is a deliberate lie, part of an attempt to pretend that Home regularly works for The Independent, when he has had nothing to do with them other than writing an article for the paper eighteen months ago. By recycling this lie, along with the sly innuendo of cop protection, serves to discredit Prigent, not those he attacks.

[In a previous leaflet (NOT a review of "Guy Debord Is Really Dead") he accuses Home and Unpopular Books of "collecting irrelevant gossip, obscure scraps of useless (and often inaccurate) information about the SI and those related to them". Yet this is the very process he now engages in.] Thus a bit of work as an extra to help raise money to repair the roof of a South London squatted social centre becomes a cameo-role organised through contacts in the media world. Some right-wing prat in France has a book put out under the name of Sol Invictus. This is then linked to the band of the same name based in the UK. As if the term isn't widely known throughout Europe as part of the Mithraic Cult that flourished under the Roman Empire. It is as if we were to speculate whether Guy Debord was striving for the restitution of the Stuarts to the British Monarchy because he liked to quote Bossuet, the seventeenth century Cardinal who delivered the Eulogy at Queen Henrietta-Maria's funeral!

But from all this mess we shall now attempt to clarify some certain points which Prigent touches upon. Prigent accuses us of being Bordiguists, followers of Amadeo Bordiga who Prigent stigmatises for never condemning Kronstadt Why he should have reached this conclusion is unclear. Certainly Unpopular Books has published and distributed texts by Jacques Camatte who was closely involved with Bordiga for many years. but what interested us about Camatte was his desire "to present the left [i.e. Left Communists] in its originality, to divide it from Leninism and Trotskyism, to make a real break with the Third International" (The Origin and function of the Party Form, Postface 1974, English translation published by Charlatan Stew 1977, p21) We value Camatte for his stress on communism as the realisation of a world human community. But this does not make us "Camattists". Unpopular Books is a communist publishing project.

It is ironic that Prigent involved himself in the publication of the English translation of Debord and Sanguinetti's Theses On The Situationist International And Its Time (1974) which strings fifty nine pearls of wisdom between Thesis 1: "The Situationist International imposed itself in a moment of universal history as the thought of the collapse of a world; collapse which has now begun before our eyes" and Thesis 61: "He who considers the life of the S.I. finds there the history of the revolution. Nothing has been able to make it sour". With this alpha and omega of self-inflation we see Debord and Sanguinetti appropriate for themselves Bordiga's notion of the historic party. From this it is not necessary to derive that Prigent is himself a Bordiguist. For that it would be necessary, at the very least, to demonstrate that Prigent understands the texts he publishes a task which would stretch even the ability of an expert in Jesuit Casuistry.

Published as part of a longer leaflet by Unpopular Books, London February 1996. This excerpt represents approximately 25% of the full document. Please note that the section in square brackets at the beginning of the sixth paragraph was scratched out on the plate before the leaflet was reprinted, see the 'Apology' at the end of Prigent - O'Hara: A Tale Of Two Shitheads, the next document in the present collection.

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