‘The unique and the ordinary’

‘Critique of the economic policy followed by the Final Struggle’ is the Marx-echoing title of a Situationist paper by Asger Jorn published in 1960. ¹ As a ‘critique of Marxian reification’, ² it has often been regarded as an economics manifesto for the Situationist International. This is true enough for the initial phase of the SI (roughly 1957–61), with its elevation of play into free and creative activity and a membership where artists predominated. When Debord began to swing the SI away from art-oriented activity towards a political standpoint where art was only one instrument amongst others in a revolutionary praxis, this attempt to determine the locus of creative value was no longer relevant to situationism, and Jorn, having withdrawn from the SI, incorporates it in his own ‘revision of the existing philosophy’, publishing it in a re-edited version as the first part of the second SISV report, Value and Economics.