This is just a guess, but I'd say McKenzie Wark will be updating his history of the Situationist International for the paperback edition. The parallels it draws between the troubles of May 68 and last year's student attack on Prince Charles's limo must have seemed up-to-the-minute when it went off to the printers a few short weeks ago. Now, though, les événements of early August are crying out for a mention. The powers that be may want us to dismiss the riots as criminality pure and simple, but just because the looters would no more understand the idea of ideology than the inside of an iPhone doesn't mean we need agree.

For one thing, the situationists would have argued, politics is about far more than what politicians like us to believe it is. For another, didn't Marx point out that wrong 'uns were as essential to growth as workers proper? "The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law," he wrote, "and with this the professor who lectures on criminal law and the inevitable compendium in which the same professor throws his lectures on to the general market as 'commodities'. This brings with it the augmentation of national wealth." Well, nothing else seems to be working, George.

Born in France a decade or so before the barricades went up in Paris, situationism is best seen as the lost love child of dadaism and surrealism. Like Breton and Magritte and so many other painters and writers of the interwar years, the situationists wanted to evoke  and thereby provoke  the idea of complete, unadulterated freedom. They were calling, they said, for "a revolution of everyday life".

Having no time for what they saw as the outmoded leftist ideas of seizing control of the economy and the state, they argued, instead, for an about-turn in cultural consciousness that would see off bourgeois mores and remodel our attitudes to love and work and even the very spaces we believe we move in but which actually move us. If all that sounds a tad abstract, then just remember May 68's most delicious graffito: "Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault with reality."

The fault was first diagnosed by Guy Debord. Writer, film-maker, agitator, aesthetic nihilist and self-styled "doctor of nothing", Debord was keen to "give the vague impression that I had great intellectual, even artistic qualities of which I preferred to deprive my era, which did not seem to merit their use". Fifty years on, I think we can agree that the strategy singularly failed. Debord may have been the most potent cultural inseminator of the second half of the 20th century. Without him there would have been no David Bowie, no Tracey Emin, no Sex Pistols, no Wachowski brothers. The list goes on.

Certainly there would have been no Jean Baudrillard and his contention that "the Gulf war did not take place". For Debord's essential idea was that the real business of late capitalism was to ensure the wholesale alienation of man by rendering invisible to him the reality of the world. To use the title of his most famous book, Debord said we were living in The Society of the Spectacle  that fiendish, fictive space the heroes of The Matrix are forever trying to burst out of. Two hundred years earlier, Kant had shatteringly proved that the world of our experience is not the world in itself. Which is all very well, said Debord, but the point isn't to see the world as it is but to see that it becomes the way we want it to be.

Hence Wark's title. "The beach beneath the street" was one of the battle cries of the soixante-huitards, and it was an invitation not only to arm yourself against les flics by tearing up the Parisian cobbles and exposing the sand below, but to sunder and thus subvert the controlling, consciousness-moulding arenas that capital was using to shape what you took for the empirical world. The road to heaven had to be paved with good intentions because there was nothing else left to walk on.

There is much to admire in this laudably brief (if occasionally prolix) book. For one thing, Wark is a fine aphorist. Everyone knows Hegel's owl of Minerva flies at dusk, but Wark says it doesn't any more "because the shotgun of Dick Cheney fired at first light". The property-owning democracy, meanwhile, "affords someone a house in which to be at home, at the price of being homeless in the world". Playful, angry, depressed, celebratory, this is a book for anyone not convinced that there is no alternative to the way we live now. There are lots of alternatives, Wark's heroes remind us, and to refuse to believe in their possibility is to accept the death in life that capital inters us in. The cartoon on the poster-sized fold-out dustjacket is a lot of fun, too.

Christopher Bray is the author of Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man (Faber)

The Situationist International (SI) was created on 27 July 1957 in Cosio di Arroscia in Italy. Its nine founding members were drawn from three groupuscules of the European avant garde: the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettrist International (a neo-surrealist outfit that had emerged in the early 50s bohemia of the Parisian Left Bank) and the London Psychogeographical Society which, in the person of its solitary member, Ralph Rumney, had brought the practice of dérive, or purposeful urban "drifting", to the streets of the English capital.

Rumney was expelled the next year  the first in a series of excommunications, defenestrations and resignations that would continue until 1972, when the SI's "secretary" and intellectual éminence grise, the Frenchman Guy Debord, wound the organisation up. In 1960, the situationists made a shambolic appearance at the ICA in London which was later described by one of the participants as a "big joke". As McKenzie Wark shows in his fascinating, if somewhat uneven, new book, it was also a turning point in the history of the SI.

For this was the moment that Debord, together with his lieutenants Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem, and under the influence of heterodox French Marxist groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie, began to concentrate his energies on the theoretical analysis of what he called the "spectacle". By this, Debord meant the relentless commodification of human experience that was, and indeed still is, the defining characteristic of late capitalism. The creation of "situations", or aesthetic shocks, and the détournement, or distortion, of the cultural products of the spectacle was left to the mostly German and Scandinavian artists who eventually formed a breakaway Second Situationist International in the early 60s. Here, albeit in new clothes, Wark writes, was "the old dilemma between romantic revolt and class struggle"  and, one might add, between theory and practice.

It was as romantic revolt rather than social critique that situationism survived in this country. Its principal anglophone representative was the writer Alexander Trocchi, whose novels of disaffected hipsterdom (notably Cain's Book) owe more to William Burroughs and the Beats than they do to, say, Bakunin. Today, Trocchi's influence is felt in the obsessive pamphleteering of the poète maudit Stewart Home, who revived Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association in the early 90s and continues to pledge his allegiance to "non-Debordist situationism". And a vestigial folk memory of situationist dérive ("street ethnography" Wark calls it), as it was practised by Debord and his lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 50s, is preserved in the literary peregrinations of Iain Sinclair and Will Self, where psychogeography is parlayed into a kind of Blakean metropolitan mysticism.

The British situationists of the late 60s thought Debord and the others had taken a wrong turn. SI apostate Christopher Gray, whose band of London-based provocateurs King Mob included the future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, opined: "What they [Debord et al] gained in intellectual power and scope they had lost in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives." The SI, Gray argued, "turned inward". "Cultural sabotage" and "drunken exuberance" had been replaced by theoretical austerity.

But that turning inward didn't prevent the Parisian situationists from exerting the most profound influence on the French student movement in May 1968. More than 300,000 copies were printed of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life, written by an SI cadre named Mustapha Khayati. And it was a protégé of Debord's, René Viénet, who was responsible for some of the more memorable of the graffiti that appeared all over Paris during that tumultuous month  including the one Wark has taken for the title of his book.

This is a story that has been told before, of course: not only by Gray, in his 1974 book Leaving the 20th Century, but also in Andrew Hussey's biography of Debord, The Game of War, and most exhilaratingly by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, his "secret history" of the 20th century. Because he doesn't want to tell that same tale over again, Wark decides to turn the focus away from Debord and to place it instead upon a "large cast of disparate characters"  artists, bohemians and sundry fellow-travellers of the situationist project. "To reduce a movement to a biography," he writes, "is to cut a piece away from what made it of interest in the first place."

Wark is probably right about the limitations of the great man theory of history. But he also declares at the start of the book that his aim is to find in situationism what is "specific to the demands of this present", to tease out its "contemporary resonance". To do that, you can't ignore Debord, who was described recently, without hyperbole, by political historian and theorist Jan-Werner Müller, as the "most innovative Marxist thinker in Europe after 1945".

"The spectacle," Debord wrote, "is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?