Raoul Vaneigem was born in 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, a small town whose traditional claim to fame was the production of paving stones but which in the twentieth century also produced the Surrealist painter René Magritte and the Surrealist poet Louis Scutenaire. Vaneigem grew up in the wake of World War II in a working-class, socialist and anticlerical milieu. He studied Romance philology at the Free University of Brussels and embarked on a teaching career that he later abandoned in favor of writing.
In late 1960 Vaneigem was introduced to Guy Debord by Henri Lefebvre, and soon afterward he joined the Situationist International, which Debord and his comrades-in-arms had founded in 1957. He was a leading light in the group throughout the 1960s.
Vaneigem is a prolific writer and a relentless critic of late capitalism. Among his works translated into English are The Revolution of Everyday Life (PM Press, 2012 [1967]); The Totality for Kids (Christopher Gray/Situationist International, 1966 [‘Banalités de Base’, 1962–63]); Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle (Bratach Dubh, 1981 [De la grève sauvage à l’autogestion généralisée, 1974]); A Cavalier History of Surrealism (AK Press, 1999 [1977]); The Book of Pleasures (Pending Press, 1983 [1979]); The Movement of the Free Spirit (Zone Books, 1994 [1986]); and A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings (PM Press, 2019 [2001]).
PM Press plans soon to publish two more titles: The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).
John Holloway is a professor of sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. His books include We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader (2019); Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of Institutional Hope in Greece, What? (2019); In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures (2016); and Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (2002).
Donald Nicholson-Smith was born in Manchester, England, and is a longtime resident of New York City. Among his many translations are Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (revised ed., PM Press, 2012), Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Zone, 2012), and Guy Debord by Anselm Jappe (PM Press, 2018).