Founders of the Situationist International at Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy, April 1957. From left to right: Guiseppe Pinot Gallizio, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Walter Olmo.
The Situationists were around from 1957 to 1972 - drawing on Marxism and Lettrism and inspiring anarchism since the 70s - in an attempt to breakdown restrictive hierarchical, capitalist, and consumerist structures. They hated the illusory nature of the mass media.
They proposed a number of alternatives to their contemporary society - play, freedom, critical thinking, community action, being aware of your context, but most importantly creating 'situations' that fused art and politics INTO everyday life.
One of the key players in the Situationist International group was Guy Debord - he wrote their core essay The Society of the Spectacle, where he argues that under advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles and appearances, instead of something 'directly experienced'.
May 1960, the Situationist manifesto was written and published in Internationale Situationniste No.4. It's short but quite heavy, so I've summarised a few of their points below.
(Note: the manifesto uses the word ludic which means 'being playful, in an aimless way' - something they wholeheartedly supported.)
Summary points:
1. We can't hold back our energy (we are motivated by a dissatisfaction with technology)
2. We have to fight alienation and oppression as a whole, not in bits and pieces
3. With production taken over by machines, we could be free from the value system that 'waged work' imposes on us. then, life could be freely constructed like a game, where there is no exploitation of man by man for want of power or money. leisure and work would no longer be separated
4. Playfulness is seen as scandalous by the church
5. We aim to bring game-sters of the world together to fight the structure of daily life as it has existed to this point
6. We are independent of political or union groups that only attempt to 'manage' things
7. We will take over all organisations (like UNESCO) that take all the life out of art and culture by reducing them to 'administrative processes'
8. Our new culture would be anti-spectacle, instead encouraging total participation
9. Our new culture would be anti-preserved-art, instead engaging in the 'lived moment'
10. We support anonymous collaborative production, not the need for the individual to leave his or her own traces
11. In the past, artists are separated from culture and from each other in competition, as a result of capitalism. our new approach will be one of dialogue and interaction, complete communication
12. One day, everyone will be an artist, producer and consumer all at once. this will remove the need for 'novelty' in artwork
13. We are against the concept of being a 'specialist' as it differentiates people into hierarchies again
14. You shall see: our goals are the future goals of humanity
intro taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
image from http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/si.html - this site also has more information on the Situationists.