Title: Society of the Spectacle;
Author: Guy Debord;
Written: 1967; +--------------------------------------+
Translation: Black & Red, 1977; | NOTES |
Transcription: Greg Adargo; +--------------------------------------+
Notes: Tresdon Jones;
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+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Humans participating in the modern mode of production are bound by having a |
| Chapter 1 “Separation Perfected” | ---------------------------> | hyper-specialized jobs. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | |
| This is presented to us as something desirable, especially when more capital is |
| involved, however this perverse specialization actually strips us of our potential. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | |
| But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to | | Modern workers are effective in only a small sliver of the spectrum of human |
| the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation | | activity that the skills we do have are no longer serviceable because we lack the |
| to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is | | prerequisite skills to put our knowledge into use. |
| sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so |
| that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest |
| degree of sacredness. - Feuerbach, Preface to the second |
| edition of The Essence of Christianity |
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1. | "modern conditions of production" is in reference to the hyper-specialized, |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | capital-focused work that has monopolized 'work' entirely in many places. |
| In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, | | |
| all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of | ---------------------------> | We can call this mode of production capitalism - an ideology which is already quite |
| spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away | | prevalent across the globe and gaining force. |
| into a representation. | | |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | We can contrast this with older modes of production wherein if we determined as a |
| community we need shelter then we build it, and we have it. |
2. | |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | The modern mode is that we determine we need shelter, so we make sandwiches, write |
| The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a | | software, build houses for others, until we are able to transact for a shelter. |
| common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer | | The difference between the old and the new is the production for the utility of the |
| be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in | | produced vs the production for the capital associated. |
| its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world |
| is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the |
| liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the |
| concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the |
| non-living. |
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3.
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| The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of |
| society, as part of society, and as instrument of |
| unification. As a part of society it is specifically the |
| sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. |
| Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the |
| common ground of the deceived gaze and of false |
| consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but |
| an official language of generalized separation. |
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4. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Guy clears up an understandable misconception that the spectacle is identical to the |
| The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social | ---------------------------> | artifacts which we can see in the world - |
| relation among people, mediated by images. | | The spectacle encompasses more than that, it determines how people relate to one |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | another as a result of these tangibles. |
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5.
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| The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world |
| of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass |
| dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung |
| which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world |
| vision which has become objectified. |
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6.
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| The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and |
| the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a |
| supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is |
| the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its |
| specific forms, as information or propaganda, as |
| advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the |
| spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It |
| is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in |
| production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s |
| form and content are identically the total justification of |
| the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is |
| also the permanent presence of this justification, since it |
| occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern |
| production. |
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7.
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| Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the |
| global social praxis split up into reality and image. The |
| social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is |
| also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the |
| split within this totality mutilates it to the point of |
| making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the |
| spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which |
| at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production. |
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8.
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| One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social |
| activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle |
| which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is |
| materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle |
| while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving |
| it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on |
| both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis |
| than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within |
| the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal |
| alienation is the essence and the support of the existing |
| society. |
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9.
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| In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment |
| of the false. |
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10.
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| The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great |
| diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the |
| contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, |
| the general truth of which must itself be recognized. |
| Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of |
| appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social |
| life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the |
| truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of |
| life, as a negation of life which has become visible. |
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11.
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| To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and |
| the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially |
| distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the |
| spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the |
| spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the |
| methodological terrain of the very society which expresses |
| itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other |
| than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic |
| formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in |
| which we are caught. |
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12.
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| The spectacle presents itself as something enormously |
| positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more |
| than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. |
| The attitude which it demands in principle is passive |
| acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of |
| appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. |
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13.
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| The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its | ---------------------------> | "The means of the spectacle are simultaneously its ends" - namely a distracted and |
| ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of | | ineffectual proletariat. |
| modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| and bathes endlessly in its own glory. |
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14.
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| The society which rests on modern industry is not | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is | ---------------------------> | "The goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other |
| fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the | | than itself" - The spectacle has no condition for termination. |
| image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. |
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15.
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| As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| today, as the general expose of the rationality of the | ---------------------------> | "The spectacle is the main production of modern day society." |
| system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the |
| main production of present-day society. |
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16.
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| The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more | ---------------------------> | "[The spectacle] is no more than the economy developing for itself". |
| than the economy developing for itself. It is the true | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| reflection of the production of things, and the false |
| objectification of the producers. |
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17.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| The first phase of the domination of the economy over social | ---------------------------> | The economy has dominated social life by the "degradation of being into having". The |
| life brought into the definition of all human realization the | | passive nature of having leads to a further "sliding of having into appearing". |
| obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results |
| of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into |
| appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its |
| immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same |
| time all individual reality has become social reality |
| directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is |
| allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not. |
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18.
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| Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple |
| images become real beings and effective motivations of |
| hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one |
| see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it |
| can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to |
| be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was |
| for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable |
| sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of |
| present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable |
| with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that |
| which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes |
| reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the |
| opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent |
| representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself. |
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19.
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| The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western |
| philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity |
| in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is |
| based on the incessant spread of the precise technical |
| rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle |
| does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The |
| concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a |
| speculative universe. |
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20.
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| Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of |
| separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The |
| spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious |
| illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the |
| religious clouds where men had placed their own powers | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly | | "Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed |
| base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and | ---------------------------> | their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly |
| unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters | | base." |
| within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of |
| human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within |
| the interior of man. |
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21.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream |
| becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of |
| imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing |
| more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian |
| of sleep. |
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22.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The fact that the practical power of modern society detached |
| itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can |
| be explained only by the fact that this practical power |
| continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with |
| itself. |
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23.
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| The oldest social specialization, the specialization of |
| power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus |
| a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is |
| the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to |
| itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most |
| modern is also the most archaic. |
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24.
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| The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse |
| about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the |
| self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian |
| management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, |
| purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals |
| the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a |
| second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our |
| environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product |
| of technical development seen as a natural development. The |
| society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which |
| chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in |
| the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring |
| superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere |
| equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the |
| very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social |
| needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can |
| only be satisfied through their mediation, if the |
| administration of this society and all contact among men can |
| no longer take place except through the intermediary of this |
| power of instantaneous communication, it is because this |
| “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration |
| of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of |
| the existing system’s administration, of the means which |
| allow it to carry on this particular administration. The |
| generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the |
| modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within |
| society, the product of the division of social labor and the |
| organ of class domination. |
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25.
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| Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The |
| institutionalization of the social division of labor, the |
| formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred |
| contemplation, the mythical order with which every power |
| shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified |
| the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the |
| interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished |
| that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has |
| been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile |
| image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary |
| prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still |
| largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on |
| the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this |
| expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the |
| possible. The spectacle is the preservation of |
| unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions |
| of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own |
| rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: |
| separate power developing in itself, in the growth of |
| productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the |
| division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are |
| then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and |
| working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all |
| critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which |
| the forces that could grow by separating are not yet |
| reunited. |
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26. | "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | world." - the proletariat points to the class of workers in an economic system which |
| With the generalized separation of the worker and his | | has only its labor power to trade. |
| products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all | | |
| direct personal communication among producers are lost. | | Not owning their own productions, workers become proletarian by definition. |
| Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate | ---------------------------> | They may have some money but even this is only a representation of labor-power |
| products and the concentration of the productive process, | | either past or future. |
| unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the | | |
| system’s management. The success of the economic system of | | For instance if somebody pays me $4 to make them a sandwich (labor), I can pay |
| separation is the proletarianization of the world. | | somebody $3 to make me some coffee (more labor). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | That person can then go ahead and pay somebody $9 to clean their house or 3 |
| cups-of-coffee-labor-units. |
27. | |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | We have been reduced to trading labor - this is the proletarianization of the world. |
| Due to the success of separate production as production of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive |
| societies is attached to a central task is in the process of | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by | | "Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, |
| non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way | | the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central |
| liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive | | task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system's development. |
| activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the | | by non-work, by inactivity." |
| necessities and results of production; it is itself a product | ---------------------------> | |
| of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of | | Primitive societies were marked by their success in focusing effort toward a goal |
| activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is | | and completing it. Nowadays needs and efforts are too fragmented for a society to |
| negated. just as real activity has been captured in its | | define itself by a central task, thus that which becomes common to all is non-work. |
| entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the | | This creates further fission in the ability for a society to produce for itself |
| present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is | | among itself, bolstering production of the separate. |
| in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in |
| labor can be regained in the submission to its result. |
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28. | The spectacle prefers goods that isolate with a facade of shared experience - cars, |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | TVs, internet, all these goods make us feel as though we're taking apart in a |
| The economic system founded on isolation is a circular | | communal experience (traffic, movie plot, memes) even though we're clearly |
| production of isolation. The technology is based on | | experiencing these things on our own and for ourself. |
| isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From | | |
| the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the | ---------------------------> | We can see this in the fact that schools do not teach how to grow food or build a |
| spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant | | house, it is presented as more important to learn "marketable" skills to purchase |
| reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely | | these isolating goods than to actually share experiences & goals. |
| crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| assumptions more concretely. |
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29. +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | All specific labor, production of goods for the produced good has been abstracted |
| The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the | | into "work" which is to say "making money". |
| world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle | | |
| expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all | | The spectacle, "whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction - reunites the |
| specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of | | separate, but reunites it as separate." |
| production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose | ---------------------------> | |
| mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the | | The spectacle gives us some idea that we're working toward something bigger because |
| spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the | | everybody is participating in this vague notion of "work" but as guy has made clear |
| world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more | | a few passages ago, there is no termination condition for the spectacle; we are not |
| than the common language of this separation. What binds the | | building toward anything but building itself. |
| spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| at the very center which maintains their isolation. The |
| spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. |
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30.
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| The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the |
| contemplated object (which is the result of his own |
| unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the |
| more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts |
| recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less |
| he understands his own existence and his own desires. The |
| externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man |
| appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his |
| but those of another who represents them to him. This is why |
| the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is |
| everywhere. |
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31.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| The worker does not produce himself; he produces an | | "The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. |
| independent power. The success of this production, its | | The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an |
| abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of | | abundance of dispossession." |
| dispossession. All the time and space of his world become | ---------------------------> | |
| foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated | | Guy would be taken back by the subscription economy we indulge in now in which we |
| products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map | | pay more and more to own less and less. Spotify owns our playlists, Dropbox owns our |
| which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which | | files, Netflix owns our movies. |
| escaped us show themselves to us in all their force. | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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32.
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| The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete |
| manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the |
| expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows |
| with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very |
| alienation which was at its origin. |
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33.
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| Separated from his product, man himself produces all the |
| details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus |
| finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more |
| his life is now his product, the more he is separated from |
| his life. |
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34.
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| The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation | ---------------------------> | The spectacle is a never ending game of trading capital (labor-units) and piling it |
| that it becomes an image. | | up or not having enough. |
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| Chapter 2 “Commodity as Spectacle” |
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| The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted |
| essence when it becomes the universal category of society as |
| a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced |
| by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for |
| the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted |
| by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become |
| crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the |
| forms in which this reification finds expression.... As labor |
| is progressively rationalized and mechanized man’s lack of |
| will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes |
| less and less active and more and more contemplative. - |
| Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness |
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35.
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| In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of |
| taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state |
| so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have |
| become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative |
| of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, |
| who knows so well how to seem at first glance something |
| trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex |
| and so full of metaphysical subtleties. |
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36.
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| This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination |
| of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which |
| reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the |
| tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which |
| exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as |
| the tangible par excellence. |
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37.
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| The world at once present and absent which the spectacle |
| makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all |
| that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for |
| what it is, because its movement is identical to the |
| estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their |
| global product. |
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38.
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| The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular |
| language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it |
| regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the |
| real production which brushes reality aside: the |
| commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the |
| category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the |
| commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the |
| quantitative. |
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39.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| This development which excludes the qualitative is itself, as |
| development, subject to qualitative change: the spectacle |
| indicates that it has crossed the threshold of its own |
| abundance; this is as yet true only locally at some points, |
| but is already true on the universal scale which is the |
| original context of the commodity, a context which its |
| practical movement, encompassing the Earth as a world market, |
| has verified. |
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40.
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| The development of productive forces has been the real |
| unconscious history which built and modified the conditions |
| of existence of human groups as conditions of survival, and |
| extended those conditions: the economic basis of all their |
| undertakings. In a primitive economy, the commodity sector |
| represented a surplus of survival. The production of |
| commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products |
| among independent producers, could for a long time remain |
| craft production, contained within a marginal economic |
| function where its quantitative truth was still masked. |
| However, where commodity production met the social conditions |
| of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, |
| it seized total domination over the economy. The entire |
| economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be |
| in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative |
| development. This incessant expansion of economic power in |
| the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into |
| commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an |
| abundance in which the primary question of survival is |
| undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly |
| rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a |
| higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the |
| natural pressure which required their direct struggle for |
| survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that |
| they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is |
| extended to the entire economy over which it rules. The |
| economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a |
| world of economy. The pseudo-nature within which human labor |
| is alienated demands that it be served ad infinitum, and this |
| service, being judged and absolved only by itself, in fact |
| acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts and |
| projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, |
| namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than |
| increased survival. |
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41.
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| The commodity’s domination was at first exerted over the |
| economy in an occult manner; the economy itself, the material |
| basis of social life, remained unperceived and not |
| understood, like the familiar which is not necessarily known. |
| In a society where the concrete commodity is rare or unusual, |
| money, apparently dominant, presents itself as an emissary |
| armed with full powers who speaks in the name of an unknown |
| force. With the industrial revolution, the division of labor |
| in manufactures, and mass production for the world market, |
| the commodity appears in fact as a power which comes to |
| occupy social life. It is then that political economy takes |
| shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
42.
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| The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained |
| the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation |
| to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world |
| one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its |
| dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least |
| industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few |
| star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by |
| regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. |
| In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a |
| continuous superimposition of geological layers of |
| commodities. At this point in the “second industrial |
| revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a |
| duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the |
| sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total |
| commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to |
| be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to |
| the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the |
| productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that |
| the specialized science of domination must in turn |
| specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, |
| psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over |
| the self-regulation of every level of the process. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
43.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, |
| “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” |
| who must receive the minimum indispensable for the |
| conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in |
| his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class |
| are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches |
| a level of abundance which requires a surplus of |
| collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed |
| from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the |
| varieties of organization and supervision of production, |
| finds himself every day, outside of production and in the |
| guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with |
| zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the |
| commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and |
| humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must |
| dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the |
| “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of |
| human existence. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
44.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make |
| people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with |
| survival that increases according to its own laws. But if |
| consumable survival is something which must always increase, |
| this is because it continues to contain privation. If there |
| is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point |
| where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond |
| privation, but because it is enriched privation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
45.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Automation, the most advanced sector of modern industry as |
| well as the model which perfectly sums up its practice, |
| drives the commodity world toward the following |
| contradiction: the technical equipment which objectively |
| eliminates labor must at the same time preserve labor as a |
| commodity and as the only source of the commodity. If the |
| social labor (time) engaged by the society is not to diminish |
| because of automation (or any other less extreme form of |
| increasing the productivity of labor), then new jobs have to |
| be created. Services, the tertiary sector, swell the ranks of |
| the army of distribution and are a eulogy to the current |
| commodities; the additional forces which are mobilized just |
| happen to be suitable for the organization of redundant labor |
| required by the artificial needs for such commodities. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
46.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Exchange value could arise only as an agent of use value, but |
| its victory by means of its own weapons created the |
| conditions for its autonomous domination. Mobilizing all |
| human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, |
| exchange value has ended up by directing use. The process of |
| exchange became identified with all possible use and reduced |
| use to the mercy of exchange. Exchange value is the |
| condottiere of use value who ends up waging the war for |
| himself. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
47.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The tendency of use value to fall, this constant of |
| capitalist economy, develops a new form of privation within |
| increased survival: the new privation is not far removed from |
| the old penury since it requires most men to participate as |
| wage workers in the endless pursuit of its attainment, and |
| since everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of |
| this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the |
| illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern |
| commodities: use in its most impoverished form (food and |
| lodging) today exists only to the extent that it is |
| imprisoned in the illusory wealth of increased survival. The |
| real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity |
| is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its |
| general manifestation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
48.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value (which |
| was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be |
| explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality |
| is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because |
| counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
49.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general |
| abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated |
| society as the representation of general equivalence, namely, |
| of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could |
| not be compared. The spectacle is the developed modern |
| complement of money where the totality of the commodity world |
| appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for what the |
| entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money |
| which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the |
| totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of |
| abstract representation. The spectacle is not only the |
| servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the pseudo-use |
| of life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
50.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| At the moment of economic abundance, the concentrated result |
| of social labor becomes visible and subjugates all reality to |
| appearance, which is now its product. Capital is no longer |
| the invisible center which directs the mode of production: |
| its accumulation spreads it all the way to the periphery in |
| the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society |
| is its portrait. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
51.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The victory of the autonomous economy must at the same time |
| be its defeat. The forces which it has unleashed eliminate |
| the economic necessity which was the immutable basis of |
| earlier societies. When economic necessity is replaced by the |
| necessity for boundless economic development, the |
| satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an |
| uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced |
| to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the |
| autonomous economy. The autonomous economy permanently breaks |
| away from fundamental need to the extent that it emerges from |
| the social unconscious which unknowingly depended on it. “All |
| that is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains |
| unalterable. But once freed, does it not fall to ruins in |
| turn?” (Freud). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
52.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| As soon as society discovers that it depends on the economy, |
| the economy, in fact, depends on society. This subterranean |
| force, which grew until it appeared sovereign, has lost its |
| power. That which was the economic it must become the I. The |
| subject can emerge only from society, namely from the |
| struggle within society. The subject’s possible existence |
| depends on the outcome of the class struggle which shows |
| itself to be the product and the producer of the economic |
| foundation of history. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
53.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness |
| are identically the project which, in its negative form, |
| seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct |
| possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is |
| the society of the spectacle, where the commodity |
| contemplates itself in a world it has created. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 3 “Unity and Division Within Appearance” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| A lively new polemic about the concepts “one divides into |
| two” and “two fuse into one” is unfolding on the |
| philosophical front in this country. This debate is a |
| struggle between those who are for and those who are against |
| the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions |
| of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois |
| conception. Those who maintain that “one divides into two” is |
| the fundamental law of things are on the side of the |
| materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the |
| fundamental law of things is that “two fuse into one” are |
| against the materialist dialectic. The two sides have drawn a |
| clear line of demarcation between them, and their arguments |
| are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on |
| the ideological level, of the acute and complex class |
| struggle taking place in China and in the world. - Red Flag, |
| (Peking), 21 September 1964 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
54.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and |
| divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the |
| disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the |
| spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its |
| meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while |
| the demonstrated unity is divided. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
55.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The struggle of powers constituted for the management of the |
| same socio-economic system is disseminated as the official |
| contradiction but is in fact part of the real unity–on a |
| world scale as well as within every nation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
56.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacular sham struggles of rival forms of separate |
| power are at the same time real in that they translate the |
| unequal and antagonistic development of the system, the |
| relatively contradictory interests of classes or subdivisions |
| of classes which acknowledge the system and define themselves |
| as participants within its power. Just as the development of |
| the most advanced economy is a clash between some priorities |
| and others, the totalitarian management of the economy by a |
| State bureaucracy and the condition of the countries within |
| the sphere of colonization or semi-colonization are defined |
| by specific peculiarities in the varieties of production and |
| power. These diverse oppositions can be passed off in the |
| spectacle as absolutely distinct forms of society (by means |
| of any number of different criteria). But in actual fact, the |
| truth of the uniqueness of all these specific sectors resides |
| in the universal system that contains them: the unique |
| movement that makes the planet its field, capitalism. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
57.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The society which carries the spectacle does not dominate the |
| underdeveloped regions by its economic hegemony alone. It |
| dominates them as the society of the spectacle. Even where |
| the material base is still absent, modern society has already |
| invaded the social surface of each continent by means of the |
| spectacle. It defines the program of the ruling class and |
| presides over its formation, just as it presents pseudo-goods |
| to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local |
| revolutionaries. The spectacle of bureaucratic power, which |
| holds sway over some industrial countries, is an integral |
| part of the total spectacle, its general pseudo-negation and |
| support. The spectacle displays certain totalitarian |
| specializations of communication and administration when |
| viewed locally, but when viewed in terms of the functioning |
| of the entire system these specializations merge in a world |
| division of spectacular tasks. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
58.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The division of spectacular tasks preserves the entirety of |
| the existing order and especially the dominant pole of its |
| development. The root of the spectacle is within the abundant |
| economy the source of the fruits which ultimately take over |
| the spectacular market despite the ideological-police |
| protectionist barriers of local spectacles aspiring to |
| autarchy. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
59.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, |
| banalization dominates modern society the world over and at |
| every point where the developed consumption of commodities |
| has seemingly multiplied the roles and objects to choose |
| from. The remains of religion and of the family (the |
| principal relic of the heritage of class power) and the moral |
| repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of this |
| world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than |
| repressive pseudo-enjoyment. The smug acceptance of what |
| exists can also merge with purely spectacular rebellion; this |
| reflects the simple fact that dissatisfaction itself became a |
| commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend |
| production to the processing of such raw materials. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
60.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living |
| human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of |
| a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the |
| seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification |
| with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the |
| fragmented productive specializations which are actually |
| lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living |
| and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves |
| globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor |
| by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it |
| as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, |
| which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In |
| one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in |
| another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power |
| over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are |
| not really global, they are not really varied. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
61.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the |
| opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in |
| himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a |
| model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous |
| qualities in order to identify himself with the general law |
| of obedience to the course of things. The consumption |
| celebrity superficially represents different types of |
| personality and shows each of these types having equal access |
| to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness |
| there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock |
| of accepted human qualities. Official differences between |
| stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the |
| presupposition of their excellence in everything. Khrushchev |
| became a general so as to make decisions on the battle of |
| Kursk, not on the spot, but at the twentieth anniversary, |
| when he was master of the State. Kennedy remained an orator |
| even to the point of proclaiming the eulogy over his own |
| tomb, since Theodore Sorenson continued to edit speeches for |
| the successor in the style which had characterized the |
| personality of the deceased. The admirable people in whom the |
| system personifies itself are well known for not being what |
| they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality |
| of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
62.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| False choice in spectacular abundance, a choice which lies in |
| the juxtaposition of competing and complimentary spectacles |
| and also in the juxtaposition of roles (signified and carried |
| mainly by things) which are at once exclusive and |
| overlapping, develops into a struggle of vaporous qualities |
| meant to stimulate loyalty to quantitative triviality. This |
| resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and |
| racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of |
| consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In |
| this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set |
| up again. from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a |
| sub-ludic interest. Wherever there is abundant consumption, a |
| major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes |
| to the fore among the false roles–false because the adult, |
| master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the |
| transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of |
| those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the |
| dynamism of capitalism. Things rule and are young; things |
| confront and replace one another. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
63.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| What hides under the spectacular oppositions is a unity of |
| misery. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of |
| the same alienation confront each other, all of them built on |
| real contradictions which are repressed. The spectacle exists |
| in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the |
| necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies |
| and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more |
| than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation |
| and fear at the tranquil center of misery. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
64.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The concentrated spectacle belongs essentially to |
| bureaucratic capitalism, even though it may be imported as a |
| technique of state power in mixed backward economies or, at |
| certain moments of crisis, in advanced capitalism. In fact, |
| bureaucratic property itself is concentrated in such a way |
| that the individual bureaucrat relates to the ownership of |
| the global economy only through an intermediary, the |
| bureaucratic community, and only as a member of this |
| community. Moreover, the production of commodities, less |
| developed in bureaucratic capitalism, also takes on a |
| concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy holds on to |
| is the totality of social labor, and what it sells back to |
| society is wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the |
| bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any |
| significant margin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself |
| has to choose everything and since any other external choice, |
| whether it concern food or music, is already a choice to |
| destroy the bureaucracy completely. This dictatorship must be |
| accompanied by permanent violence. The imposed image of the |
| good envelops in its spectacle the totality of what |
| officially exists, and is usually concentrated in one man, |
| who is the guarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must |
| magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear. |
| This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic |
| image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute |
| exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by |
| terror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus |
| be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the |
| concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
65.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The diffuse spectacle accompanies the abundance of |
| commodities, the undisturbed development of modern |
| capitalism. Here every individual commodity is justified in |
| the name of the grandeur of the production of the totality of |
| objects of which the spectacle is an apologetic catalogue. |
| Irreconcilable claims crowd the stage of the affluent |
| economy’s unified spectacle; different star-commodities |
| simultaneously support contradictory projects for |
| provisioning society: the spectacle of automobiles demands a |
| perfect transport network which destroys old cities, while |
| the spectacle of the city itself requires museum-areas. |
| Therefore the already problematic satisfaction which is |
| supposed to come from the consumption of the whole, is |
| falsified immediately since the actual consumer can directly |
| touch only a succession of fragments of this commodity |
| happiness, fragments in which the quality attributed to the |
| whole is obviously missing every time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
66.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge |
| the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it |
| were the only one. The spectacle, then, is the epic poem of |
| this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall |
| of any Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of men |
| and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In |
| this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, |
| unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world |
| of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the |
| world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what’s |
| specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while |
| the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
67.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of |
| abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of |
| their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes |
| sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious |
| fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of |
| enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all |
| the media of communication, are thus propagated with |
| lightning speed. A style of dress emerges from a film; a |
| magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing |
| fads. Just when the mass of commodities slides toward |
| puerility, the puerile itself becomes a special commodity; |
| this is epitomized by the gadget. We can recognize a mystical |
| abandon to the transcendence of the commodity in free gifts, |
| such as key chains which are not bought but are included by |
| advertisers with prestigious purchases, or which flow by |
| exchange in their own sphere. One who collects the key chains |
| which have been manufactured for collection, accumulates the |
| indulgences of the commodity, a glorious sign of his real |
| presence among the faithful. Reified man advertises the proof |
| of his intimacy with the commodity. The fetishism of |
| commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to |
| the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old |
| religious fetishism. The only use which remains here is the |
| fundamental use of submission. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
68.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption clearly cannot |
| be opposed by any genuine need or desire which is not itself |
| shaped by society and its history. The abundant commodity |
| stands for the total breach in the organic development of |
| social needs. Its mechanical accumulation liberates unlimited |
| artificiality, in the face of which living desire is |
| helpless. The cumulative power of independent artificiality |
| sows everywhere the falsification of social life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
69.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In the image of the society happily unified by consumption, |
| real division is only suspended until the next |
| non-accomplishment in consumption. Every single product |
| represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised |
| land of total consumption and is ceremoniously presented as |
| the decisive entity. But as with the diffusion of seemingly |
| aristocratic first names carried by almost all individuals of |
| the same age, the objects which promise unique powers can be |
| recommended to the devotion of the masses only if they’re |
| produced in quantities large enough for mass consumption. A |
| product acquires prestige when it is placed at the center of |
| social life as the revealed mystery of the ultimate goal of |
| production. But the object which was prestigious in the |
| spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by its |
| consumer–and by all its other consumers. It reveals its |
| essential poverty (which naturally comes to it from the |
| misery of its production) too late. But by then another |
| object already carries the justification of the system and |
| demands to be acknowledged. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
70.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The fraud of satisfaction exposes itself by being replaced, |
| by following the change of products and of the general |
| conditions of production. That which asserted its definitive |
| excellence with perfect impudence nevertheless changes, both |
| in the diffuse and the concentrated spectacle, and it is the |
| system alone which must continue: Stalin as well as the |
| outmoded commodity are denounced precisely by those who |
| imposed them. Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal |
| of the previous lie. The fall of every figure with |
| totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which had |
| approved him unanimously, and which had been nothing more |
| than an agglomeration of solitudes without illusions. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
71.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and |
| must change with its base. The spectacle is absolutely |
| dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid |
| dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition is |
| natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
72.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class |
| division on which the real unity of the capitalist made of |
| production rests. What obliges the producers to participate |
| in the construction of the world is also what separates them |
| from it. What brings together men liberated from their local |
| and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What |
| requires a mare profound rationality is also what nourishes |
| the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression. |
| What creates the abstract power of society creates its |
| concrete unfreedom. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 4 “The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The equal right of all to the goods and enjoyment of this |
| world, the destruction of all authority, the negation of all |
| moral restraints – these, at bottom, are the raison d’etre of |
| the March 18th insurrection and the charter of the fearsome |
| organization that furnished it with an army. - Enquete |
| parlementaire sur l’insurrection du 18 mars |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
73.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The real movement which suppresses existing conditions rules |
| over society from the moment of the bourgeoisie’s victory in |
| the economy, and visibly after the political translation of |
| this victory. The development of productive forces shatters |
| the old relations of production and all static order turns to |
| dust. Whatever was absolute becomes historical. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
74.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| By being thrown into history, by having to participate in the |
| labor and struggles which make up history, men find |
| themselves obliged to view their relations in a clear manner. |
| This history has no object distinct from what takes place |
| within it, even though the last unconscious metaphysical |
| vision of the historical epoch could look at the productive |
| progression through which history has unfolded as the very |
| object of history. The subject of history can be none other |
| than the living producing himself, becoming master and |
| possessor of his world which is history, and existing as |
| consciousness of his game. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
75.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The class struggles of the long revolutionary epoch |
| inaugurated by the rise of the bourgeoisie, develop together |
| with the thought of history, the dialectic, the thought which |
| no longer stops to look for the meaning of what is, but rises |
| to a knowledge of the dissolution of all that is, and in its |
| movement dissolves all separation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
76.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Hegel no longer had to interpret the world, but the |
| transformation of the world. By only interpreting the |
| transformation, Hegel is only the philosophical completion of |
| philosophy. He wants to understand a world which makes |
| itself. This historical thought is as yet only the |
| consciousness which always arrives too late, and which |
| pronounces the justification after the fact. Thus it has gone |
| beyond separation only in thought. The paradox which consists |
| of making the meaning of all reality depend on its historical |
| completion, and at the same time of revealing this meaning as |
| it makes itself the completion of history, flows from the |
| simple fact that the thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of |
| the 17th and 18th centuries sought in his philosophy only a |
| reconciliation with the results of these revolutions. Even as |
| a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express |
| the entire process of this revolution, but only its final |
| conclusion. In this sense, it is “not a philosophy of the |
| revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl Korsch, Theses on |
| Hegel and Revolution). Hegel did, for the last time, the work |
| of the philosopher, “the glorification of what exists”; but |
| what existed for him could already be nothing less than the |
| totality of historical movement. The external position of |
| thought having in fact been preserved, it could he masked |
| only by the identification of thought with an earlier project |
| of Spirit, absolute hero who did what he wanted and wanted |
| what he did, and whose accomplishment coincides with the |
| present. Thus philosophy, which dies in the thought of |
| history, can now glorify its world only by renouncing it, |
| since in order to speak, it must presuppose that this total |
| history to which it has reduced everything is already |
| complete, and that the only tribunal where the judgment of |
| truth could be given is closed. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
77.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When the proletariat demonstrates by its own existence, |
| through acts, that this thought of history is not forgotten, |
| the exposure of the conclusion is at the same time the |
| confirmation of the method. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
78.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The thought of history can be saved only by becoming |
| practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a |
| revolutionary class cannot be less than historical |
| consciousness operating on the totality of its world. All the |
| theoretical currents of the revolutionary workers’ movement |
| grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian |
| thought–Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
79.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The inseparability of Marx’s theory from the Hegelian method |
| is itself inseparable from the revolutionary character of |
| this theory, namely from its truth. This first relationship |
| has been generally ignored, misunderstood, and even denounced |
| as the weakness of what fallaciously became a marxist |
| doctrine. Bernstein, in his Evolutionary Socialism: A |
| Criticism and Affirmation (Die Voraussetzungen des |
| Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie), perfectly |
| reveals the connection between the dialectical method and |
| historical partisanship, by deploring the unscientific |
| forecasts of the 1847 Manifesto on the imminence of |
| proletarian revolution in Germany: “This historical |
| self-deception, so erroneous that any political visionary |
| could hardly have improved on it, would be incomprehensible |
| in a Marx, who at that time had already seriously studied |
| economics, if we did not see in this the product of a relic |
| of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic from which Marx, no |
| less than Engels, could never completely free himself. In |
| those times of general effervescence, this was all the more |
| fatal to him.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
80.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The inversion carried out by Marx to “recover through |
| transfer” the thought of the bourgeois revolutions does not |
| trivially consist of putting the materialist development of |
| productive forces in the place of the journey of the Hegelian |
| Spirit moving towards its encounter with itself in time, its |
| objectification being identical to its alienation, and its |
| historical wounds leaving no scars. History become real no |
| longer has an end. Marx ruined Hegel’s position as separate |
| from what happens, as well as contemplation by any supreme |
| external agent whatever. From now on, theory has to know only |
| what it does. As opposed to this, contemplation of the |
| economy’s movement within the dominant thought of the present |
| society is the untranscended heritage of the undialectical |
| part of Hegel’s search for a circular system: it is an |
| approval which has lost the dimension of the concept and |
| which no longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself, |
| because the movement which it praises is no more than a |
| sector without a world view, a sector whose mechanical |
| development effectively dominates the whole. Marx’s project |
| is the project of a conscious history. The quantitative which |
| arises in the blind development of merely economic productive |
| forces must be transformed into a qualitative historical |
| appropriation. The critique of political economy is the first |
| act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments of |
| production the greatest productive power is the revolutionary |
| class itself.” |
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81.
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| What closely links Marx’s theory with scientific thought is |
| the rational understanding of the forces which really operate |
| in society. But Marx’s theory is fundamentally beyond |
| scientific thought, and it preserves scientific thought only |
| by superseding it: what is in question is an understanding of |
| struggle, and not of law. “We know only one science: the |
| science of history” (The German Ideology). |
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82.
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| The bourgeois epoch, which wants to give a scientific |
| foundation to history, overlooks the fact that this available |
| science needed a historical foundation along with the |
| economy. Inversely, history directly depends on economic |
| knowledge only to the extent that it remains economic |
| history. The extent to which the viewpoint of scientific |
| observation could overlook the role of history in the economy |
| (the global process which modifies its own basic scientific |
| premises) is shown by the vanity of those socialist |
| calculations which thought they had established the exact |
| periodicity of crises. Now that the constant intervention of |
| the State has succeeded in compensating for the effect of |
| tendencies toward crisis, the same type of reasoning sees in |
| this equilibrium a definitive economic harmony’. The project |
| of mastering the economy, the project of appropriating |
| history, if it must know–and absorb–the science of society, |
| cannot itself be scientific. The revolutionary viewpoint of a |
| movement which thinks it can dominate current history by |
| means of scientific knowledge remains bourgeois. |
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83.
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| The utopian currents of socialism, although themselves |
| historically grounded in the critique of the existing social |
| organization, can rightly be called utopian to the extent |
| that they reject history–namely the real struggle taking |
| place, as well as the passage of time beyond the immutable |
| perfection of their picture of a happy society–but not |
| because they reject science. On the contrary. the utopian |
| thinkers are completely dominated by the scientific thought |
| of earlier centuries. They sought the completion of this |
| general rational system: they did not in any way consider |
| themselves disarmed prophets, since they believed in the |
| social power of scientific proof and even, in the case of |
| Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “How did |
| they want to seize through struggle what must be proved?” |
| asked Sombart. The scientific conception of the utopians did |
| not extend to the knowledge that some social groups have |
| interests in the existing situation, forces to maintain it, |
| and also forms of false consciousness corresponding to such |
| positions. This conception did not even reach the historical |
| reality of the development of science itself, which was |
| oriented largely by the social demand of agents who selected |
| not only what could be admitted, but also what could be |
| studied. The utopian socialists, remaining prisoners of the |
| mode of exposition of scientific truth, conceived this truth |
| in terms of its pure abstract image–an image which had been |
| imposed at a much earlier stage of society. As Sorel |
| observed, it is on the model of astronomy that the utopians |
| thought they would discover and demonstrate the laws of |
| society. The harmony envisaged by them, hostile to history, |
| grows out of the attempt to apply to society the science |
| least dependent on history. This harmony is introduced with |
| the experimental innocence of Newtonianism, and the happy |
| destiny which is constantly postulated “plays in their social |
| science a role analogous to the role of inertia in rational” |
| (Materiaux pour une theorie du proletariat). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
84.
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| The deterministic-scientific facet in Marx’s thought was |
| precisely the gap through which the process of |
| “ideologization” penetrated, during his own lifetime, into |
| the theoretical heritage left to the workers’ movement. The |
| arrival of the historical subject continues to be postponed, |
| and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, |
| which tends increasingly to guarantee the necessity of its |
| own future negation. But what is pushed out of the field of |
| theoretical vision in this manner is revolutionary practice, |
| the only truth of this negation. What becomes important is to |
| study economic development with patience, and to continue to |
| accept suffering with a Hegelian tranquility, so that the |
| result remains “a graveyard of good intentions.” It is |
| suddenly discovered that, according to the science of |
| revolution, consciousness always comes too soon, and has to |
| be taught. “History has shown that we, and all who thought as |
| we did, were wrong. History has clearly shown that the state |
| of economic development on the continent at that time was far |
| from being ripe” Engels was to say in 1895. Throughout his |
| life, Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his |
| theory, but the exposition of the theory was carried out on |
| the terrain of the dominant thought and became precise in the |
| form of critiques of particular disciplines, principally the |
| critique of the fundamental science of bourgeois society, |
| political economy. It is this mutilation, later accepted as |
| definitive, which has constituted “marxism.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
85.
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| The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally the weakness of |
| the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. |
| The working class did not set off the permanent revolution in |
| the Germany of 1848; the Commune was defeated in isolation. |
| Revolutionary theory thus could not yet achieve its own total |
| existence. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and |
| clarifying it with cloistered, scholarly work, in the British |
| Museum, caused a loss in the theory itself. The scientific |
| justifications Marx elaborated about the future development |
| of the working class and the organizational practice that |
| went with them became obstacles to proletarian consciousness |
| at a later stage. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
86.
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| All the theoretical insufficiencies of content as well as |
| form of exposition of the scientific defense of proletarian |
| revolution can be traced to the identification of the |
| proletariat with the bourgeoisie from the standpoint of the |
| revolutionary seizure of power. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
87.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| By grounding the proof of the scientific validity of |
| proletarian power on repeated past attempts, Marx obscured |
| his historical thought, from the Manifesto on, and was forced |
| to support a linear image of the development of modes of |
| production brought on by class struggles which end, each |
| time, “with a revolutionary transformation of the entire |
| society or with mutual destruction of the classes in |
| struggle.” But in the observable reality of history, as Marx |
| pointed out elsewhere, the “Asiatic mode of production” |
| preserved its immobility in spite of all class |
| confrontations, just as the serf uprisings never defeated the |
| landlords, nor the slave revolts of Antiquity the free men. |
| The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the |
| bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever won; at |
| the same time it is the only class for which the development |
| of the economy was the cause and the consequence of its |
| taking hold of society. The same simplification led Marx to |
| neglect the economic role of the State in the management of a |
| class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed to liberate |
| the economy from the State, this took place only to the |
| extent that the former State was an instrument of class |
| oppression in a static economy. The bourgeoisie developed its |
| autonomous economic power in the medieval period of the |
| weakening of the State, at the moment of feudal fragmentation |
| of balanced powers. But the modern State which, through |
| Mercantilism, began to support the development of the |
| bourgeoisie, and which finally became its State at the time |
| of “laisser faire, laisser passer,” was to reveal later that |
| it was endowed with the central power of calculated |
| management of the economic process. With the concept of |
| Bonapartism, Marx was nevertheless able to describe the shape |
| of the modern statist bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and |
| State, the formation of a “national power of capital over |
| labor, a public force organized for social enslavement,” |
| where the bourgeoisie renounces all historical life which is |
| not reduced to the economic history of things and would like |
| to “be condemned to the same political nothingness as other |
| classes.” Here the socio-political foundations of the modern |
| spectacle are already established, negatively defining the |
| proletariat as the only pretender to historical life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
88.
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| The only two classes which effectively correspond to Marx’s |
| theory, the two pure classes towards which the entire |
| analysis of Capital leads, the bourgeoisie and the |
| proletariat, are also the only two revolutionary classes in |
| history, but in very different conditions: the bourgeois |
| revolution is over; the proletarian revolution is a project |
| born on the foundation of the preceding revolution but |
| differing from it qualitatively. By neglecting the |
| originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one |
| masks the concrete originality of the proletarian project, |
| which can attain nothing unless it carries its own banners |
| and knows the “immensity of its tasks.” The bourgeoisie came |
| to power because it is the class of the developing economy. |
| The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by |
| becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive |
| forces cannot guarantee such power, even by way of the |
| increasing dispossession which it brings about. A Jacobin |
| seizure of power cannot be its instrument. No ideology can |
| help the proletariat disguise its partial goals as general |
| goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial |
| reality which is really its own. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
89.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| If Marx, in a given period of his participation in the |
| struggle of the proletariat, expected too much from |
| scientific forecasting, to the point of creating the |
| intellectual foundation for the illusions of economism, it is |
| known that he did not personally succumb to those illusions. |
| In a well-known letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an |
| article where he himself criticized Capital, an article which |
| Engels would later present to the press as the work of an |
| adversary, Marx clearly disclosed the limits of his own |
| science: ” . . . The subjective tendency of the author (which |
| was perhaps imposed on him by his political position and his |
| past), namely the manner in which he views and presents to |
| others the ultimate results of the real movement, the real |
| social process, has no relation to his own actual analysis.” |
| Thus Marx, by denouncing the “tendentious conclusions” of his |
| own objective analysis, and by the irony of the “perhaps” |
| with reference to the extra-scientific choices imposed on |
| him, at the same time shows the methodological key to the |
| fusion of the two aspects. |
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90.
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| The fusion of knowledge and action must be realized in the |
| historical struggle itself, in such a way that each of these |
| terms guarantees the truth of the other. The formation of the |
| proletarian class into a subject means the organization of |
| revolutionary struggles and the organization of society at |
| the revolutionary moment: it is then that the practical |
| conditions of consciousness must exist, conditions in which |
| the theory of praxis is confirmed by becoming practical |
| theory. However, this central question of organization was |
| the question least developed by revolutionary theory at the |
| time when the workers’ movement was founded, namely when this |
| theory still had the unitary character which came from the |
| thought of history. (Theory had undertaken precisely this |
| task in order to develop a unitary historical practice.) This |
| question is in fact the locus of inconsistency of this |
| theory, allowing the return of statist and hierarchic methods |
| of application borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The |
| forms of organization of the workers’ movement which were |
| developed on the basis of this renunciation of theory have in |
| turn prevented the maintenance of a unitary theory, breaking |
| it up into varied specialized and partial disciplines. Due to |
| the betrayal of unitary historical thought, this ideological |
| estrangement from theory can no longer recognize the |
| practical verification of this thought when such verification |
| emerges in spontaneous struggles of workers; all it can do is |
| repress every manifestation and memory of such verification. |
| Yet these historical forms which appeared in struggle are |
| precisely the practical milieu which the theory needed in |
| order to be true. They are requirements of the theory which |
| have not been formulated theoretically. The soviet was not a |
| theoretical discovery; yet its existence in practice was |
| already the highest theoretical truth of the International |
| Workingmen’s Association. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
91.
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| The first successes of the struggle of the International led |
| it to free itself from the confused influences of the |
| dominant ideology which survived in it. But the defeat and |
| repression which it soon encountered brought to the |
| foreground a conflict between two conceptions of the |
| proletarian revolution. Both of these conceptions contain an |
| authoritarian dimension and thus abandon the conscious |
| self-emancipation of the working class. In effect, the |
| quarrel between Marxists and Bakuninists (which became |
| irreconcilable) was two-edged, referring at once to power in |
| the revolutionary society and to the organization of the |
| present movement, and when the positions of the adversaries |
| passed from one aspect to the other, they reversed |
| themselves. Bakunin fought the illusion of abolishing classes |
| by the authoritarian use of state power, foreseeing the |
| reconstitution of a dominant bureaucratic class and the |
| dictatorship of the most knowledgeable, or those who would be |
| reputed to be such. Marx thought that the growth of economic |
| contradictions inseparable from democratic education of the |
| workers would reduce the role of the proletarian State to a |
| simple phase of legalizing the new social relations imposing |
| themselves objectively, and denounced Bakunin and his |
| followers for the authoritarianism of a conspiratorial elite |
| which deliberately placed itself above the International and |
| formulated the extravagant design of imposing on society the |
| irresponsible dictatorship of those who are most |
| revolutionary, or those who would designate themselves to be |
| such. Bakunin, in fact, recruited followers on the basis of |
| such a perspective: “Invisible pilots in the center of the |
| popular storm, we must direct it, not with a visible power, |
| but with the collective dictatorship of all the allies. A |
| dictatorship without badge, without title, without official |
| right, yet all the more powerful because it will have none of |
| the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies of the |
| workers’ revolution opposed each other, each containing a |
| partially true critique, but losing the unity of the thought |
| of history, and instituting themselves into ideological |
| authorities. Powerful organizations, like German |
| Social-Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation |
| faithfully served one or the other of these ideologies; and |
| everywhere the result was very different from what had been |
| desired. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
92.
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| The strength and the weakness of the real anarchist struggle |
| resides in its viewing the goal of proletarian revolution as |
| immediately present (the pretensions of anarchism in its |
| individualist variants have always been laughable). From the |
| historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist |
| anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive |
| insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate |
| contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political |
| struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic |
| struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a |
| definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this |
| terrain–on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. |
| The anarchists have an ideal to realize. Anarchism remains a |
| merely ideological negation of the State and of classes, |
| namely of the social conditions of separate ideology. It is |
| the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes everything and |
| dismisses the very idea of historical evil. This viewpoint |
| which fuses all partial desires has given anarchism the merit |
| of representing the rejection of existing conditions in favor |
| of the whole of life, and not of a privileged critical |
| specialization; but this fusion is considered in the |
| absolute, according to individual caprice, before its actual |
| realization, thus condemning anarchism to an incoherence too |
| easily seen through. Anarchism has merely to repeat and to |
| replay the same simple, total conclusion in every single |
| struggle, because this first conclusion was from the |
| beginning identified with the entire outcome of the movement. |
| Thus Bakunin could write in 1873, when he left the Federation |
| Jurassiene: “During the past nine years, more ideas have been |
| developed within the International than would be needed to |
| save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge |
| anyone to invent a new one. It is no longer the time for |
| ideas, but for facts and acts.” There is no doubt that this |
| conception retains an element of the historical thought of |
| the proletariat, the certainty that ideas must become |
| practice, but it leaves the historical terrain by assuming |
| that the adequate forms for this passage to practice have |
| already been found and will never change. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
93.
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| The anarchists, who distinguish themselves explicitly from |
| the rest of the workers’ movement by their ideological |
| conviction, reproduce this separation of competences among |
| themselves; they provide a terrain favorable to informal |
| domination over all anarchist organizations by propagandists |
| and defenders of their ideology, specialists who are in |
| general more mediocre the more their intellectual activity |
| consists of the repetition of certain definitive truths. |
| Ideological respect for unanimity of decision has on the |
| whole been favorable to the uncontrolled authority, within |
| the organization itself, of specialists in freedom; and |
| revolutionary anarchism expects the same type of unanimity |
| from the liberated population, obtained by the same means. |
| Furthermore, the refusal to take into account the opposition |
| between the conditions of a minority grouped in the present |
| struggle and of a society of free individuals, has nourished |
| a permanent separation among anarchists at the moment of |
| common decision, as is shown by an infinity of anarchist |
| insurrections in Spain, confined and destroyed on a local |
| level. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
94.
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| The illusion entertained more or less explicitly by genuine |
| anarchism is the permanent imminence of an instantaneously |
| accomplished revolution which will prove the truth of the |
| ideology and of the mode of practical organization derived |
| from the ideology. In 1936, anarchism in fact led a social |
| revolution, the most advanced model of proletarian power in |
| all time. In this context it should be noted that the signal |
| for a general insurrection had been imposed by a |
| pronunciamiento of the army. Furthermore, to the extent that |
| this revolution was not completed during the first days |
| (because of the existence of Franco’s power in half the |
| country, strongly supported from abroad while the rest of the |
| international proletarian movement was already defeated, and |
| because of remains of bourgeois forces or other statist |
| workers’ parties within the camp of the Republic) the |
| organized anarchist movement showed itself unable to extend |
| the demi-victories of the revolution, or even to defend them. |
| Its known leaders became ministers and hostages of the |
| bourgeois State which destroyed the revolution only to lose |
| the civil war. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
95.
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| The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International is the |
| scientific ideology of the socialist revolution: it |
| identifies its whole truth with objective processes in the |
| economy and with the progress of a recognition of this |
| necessity by the working class educated by the organization. |
| This ideology rediscovers the confidence in pedagogical |
| demonstration which had characterized utopian socialism, but |
| mixes it with a contemplative reference to the course of |
| history: this attitude has lost as much of the Hegelian |
| dimension of a total history as it has lost the immobile |
| image of totality in the utopian critique (most highly |
| developed by Fourier). This scientific attitude can do no |
| more than revive a symmetry of ethical choices; it is from |
| this attitude that the nonsense of Hilferding springs when he |
| states that recognizing the necessity of socialism gives “no |
| indication of the practical attitude to be adopted. For it is |
| one thing to recognize a necessity, and it is quite another |
| thing to put oneself at the service of this necessity” |
| (Finanzkapital). Those who failed to recognize that for Marx |
| and for the revolutionary proletariat the unitary thought of |
| history was in no way distinct from the practical attitude to |
| be adopted, regularly became victims of the practice they |
| adopted. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
96.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The ideology of the social-democratic organization gave power |
| to professors who educated the working class, and the form of |
| organization which was adopted was the form most suitable for |
| this passive apprenticeship. The participation of socialists |
| of the Second International in political and economic |
| struggles was admittedly concrete but profoundly uncritical. |
| It was conducted in the name of revolutionary illusion by |
| means of an obviously reformist practice. The revolutionary |
| ideology was to be shattered by the very success of those who |
| held it. The separate position of the movement’s deputies and |
| journalists attracted the already recruited bourgeois |
| intellectuals toward a bourgeois mode of life. Even those who |
| had been recruited from the struggles of industrial workers |
| and who were themselves workers, were transformed by the |
| union bureaucracy into brokers of labor power who sold labor |
| as a commodity, for a just price. If their activity was to |
| retain some appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism |
| would have had to be conveniently unable to support |
| economically this reformism which it tolerated politically |
| (in the legalistic agitation of the social-democrats). But |
| such an antagonism, guaranteed by their science, was |
| constantly belied by history. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
97.
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| Bernstein, the social-democrat furthest from political |
| ideology and most openly attached to the methodology of |
| bourgeois science, had the honesty to want to demonstrate the |
| reality of this contradiction; the English workers’ reformist |
| movement had also demonstrated it, by doing without |
| revolutionary ideology. But the contradiction was |
| definitively demonstrated only by historical development |
| itself. Although full of illusions in other respects, |
| Bernstein had denied that a crisis of capitalist production |
| would miraculously force the hand of socialists who wanted to |
| inherit the revolution only by this legitimate rite. The |
| profound social upheaval which arose with the first world |
| war, though fertile with the awakening of consciousness, |
| twice demonstrated that the social-democratic hierarchy had |
| not educated revolutionarily; and had in no way transformed |
| the German workers into theoreticians: first when the vast |
| majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; next |
| when, in defeat, it squashed the Spartakist revolutionaries. |
| The ex-worker Ebert still believed in sin, since he admitted |
| that he hated revolution “like sin.” The same leader showed |
| himself a precursor of the socialist representation which |
| soon after confronted the Russian proletariat as its absolute |
| enemy; he even formulated exactly the same program for this |
| new alienation: “Socialism means working a lot”. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
98.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Lenin, as a Marxist thinker, was no more than a consistent |
| and faithful Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary |
| ideology of “orthodox Marxism” to Russian conditions, |
| conditions unfavorable to the reformist practice carried on |
| elsewhere by the Second International. In the Russian |
| context, the external management of the proletariat, acting |
| by means of a disciplined clandestine party subordinated to |
| intellectuals transformed into “professional |
| revolutionaries,” becomes a profession which refuses to deal |
| with the ruling professions of capitalist society (the |
| Czarist political regime being in any case unable to offer |
| such opportunities which are based on an advanced stage of |
| bourgeois power). It therefore became the profession of the |
| absolute management of society. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
99.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| With the war and the collapse of the social-democratic |
| international in the face of the war, the authoritarian |
| ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks spread all over the |
| world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions of the |
| workers’ movement transformed the entire world into a Russia, |
| and Bolshevism, reigning over the first revolutionary breach |
| brought on by this epoch of crisis, offered to proletarians |
| of all lands its hierarchic and ideological model, so that |
| they could “speak Russian” to the ruling class. Lenin did not |
| reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a |
| revolutionary ideology, but for ceasing to be one. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
100.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in |
| Russia and when social-democracy fought victoriously for the |
| old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs |
| which is at the heart of the domination of the modern |
| spectacle: the representation of the working class radically |
| opposes itself to the working class. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
101.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| “In all previous revolutions,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Rote |
| Fahne of December 21, 1918, “the combatants faced each other |
| directly: class against class, program against program. In |
| the present revolution, the troops protecting the old order |
| do not intervene under the insignia of the ruling class, but |
| under the flag of a ‘social-democratic party.’ If the central |
| question of revolution had been posed openly and honestly: |
| capitalism or socialism? the great mass of the proletariat |
| would today have no doubts or hesitations.” Thus, a few days |
| before its destruction, the radical current of the German |
| proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions which |
| had been created by the preceding process (toward which the |
| representation of the working class had greatly contributed): |
| the spectacular organization of defense of the existing |
| order, the social reign of appearances where no ” “central |
| question” can any longer be posed “openly and honestly.” The |
| revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this |
| stage become both the main factor and the central result of |
| the general falsification of society. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
102.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The organization of the proletariat on the Bolshevik model |
| which emerged from Russian backwardness and from the |
| abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the workers’ |
| movement of advanced countries, found in this backwardness |
| all the conditions which carried this form of organization |
| toward the counter-revolutionary inversion which it |
| unconsciously contained at its source. The continuing retreat |
| of the mass of the European workers’ movement in the face of |
| the Hic Rhodus, hic salta of the 1918-1920 period, a retreat |
| which included the violent destruction of its radical |
| minority, favored the completion of the Bolshevik development |
| and let this fraudulent outcome present itself to the world |
| as the only proletarian solution. By seizing state monopoly |
| over representation and defense of workers’ power, the |
| Bolshevik party justified itself and became what it was: the |
| party of the proprietors of the proletariat (essentially |
| eliminating earlier forms of property). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
103.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| During twenty years of unresolved theoretical debate, the |
| varied tendencies of Russian social-democracy had examined |
| all the conditions for the liquidation of Czarism: the |
| weakness of the bourgeoisie, the weight of the peasant |
| majority and the decisive role of a concentrated and |
| combative but hardly numerous proletariat. The debate was |
| resolved in practice by means of a factor which had not been |
| present in the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy which |
| directed the proletariat seized State power and gave society |
| a new class domination. Strictly bourgeois revolution had |
| been impossible; the “democratic dictatorship of workers and |
| peasants” was meaningless; the proletarian power of the |
| Soviets could not maintain itself simultaneously against the |
| class of small landowners, against the national and |
| international White reaction, and against its own |
| representation externalized and alienated in the form of a |
| workers’ party of absolute masters of State economy, |
| expression, and soon of thought. The theory of permanent |
| revolution of Trotsky and Parvus, which Lenin adopted in |
| April 1917, was the only theory which became true for |
| countries where the social development of the bourgeoisie was |
| retarded, but this theory became true only after the |
| introduction of the unknown factor: the class power of the |
| bureaucracy. In the numerous arguments among the Bolshevik |
| directors, Lenin was the most consistent defender of the |
| concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the |
| supreme representatives of ideology. Lenin was right every |
| time against his adversaries in that be supported the |
| solution implied by earlier choices of absolute minority |
| Power: the democracy which was kept from peasants by means of |
| the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which |
| led to keeping it from communist leaders of unions, from the |
| entire party, and finally from leading party bureaucrats. At |
| the Tenth Congress, when the Kronstadt Soviet had been |
| defeated by arms and buried under calumny, Lenin pronounced |
| against the leftist bureaucrats of the “Workers’ Opposition” |
| the following conclusion (the logic of which Stalin later |
| extended to a complete division of the world): “Here or there |
| with a rifle, but not with opposition. ... We’ve had enough |
| opposition.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
104.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy–sole proprietor of a State |
| Capitalism–consolidated its power internally by means of a |
| temporary alliance with the peasantry (with the “new economic |
| policy”) and externally by using workers regimented into the |
| bureaucratic parties of the Third International as supports |
| for Russian diplomacy, thus sabotaging the entire |
| revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments |
| whose aid it needed in international politics (the power of |
| the Kuonmintang in China in 1925-27, the Popular Front in |
| Spain and in France, etc.). The bureaucratic society |
| continued the consolidation by terrorizing the peasantry in |
| order to implement the mast brutal primitive capitalist |
| accumulation in history. The industrialization of the Stalin |
| epoch revealed the reality behind the bureaucracy: the |
| continuation of the power of the economy and the preservation |
| of the essence of the market society commodity labor. The |
| independent economy, which dominates society to the extent of |
| reinstituting the class domination it needs for its own ends, |
| is thus confirmed. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie |
| created an autonomous power which, so long as its autonomy |
| lasts, can even do without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian |
| bureaucracy is not “the last owning class in history” in the |
| sense of Bruna Rizzi; it is only a substitute ruling class |
| for the commodity economy. Capitalist private property in |
| decline is replaced by a simplified, less diversified |
| surrogate which is condensed as collective property of the |
| bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped ruling class is the |
| expression of economic underdevelopment, and has no |
| perspective other than to overcome the retardation of this |
| development in certain regions of the world. It was the |
| workers’ party organized according to the bourgeois model of |
| separation which furnished the hierarchical-statist cadre for |
| this supplementary edition of a ruling class. While in one of |
| Stalin’s prisons, Anton Ciliga observed that “technical |
| questions of organization turned out to be social |
| questions”(Lenin and the Revolution). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
105.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Revolutionary ideology, the coherence of the separate, of |
| which Leninism represents the greatest voluntaristic attempt, |
| supervising a reality which rejects it, with Stalinism |
| returns to its truth in incoherence. At that paint ideology |
| is no longer a weapon, but a goal. The lie which is no longer |
| challenged becomes lunacy. Reality as well as the goal |
| dissolve in the totalitarian ideological proclamation: all it |
| says is all there is. This is a local primitivism of the |
| spectacle, whose role is nevertheless essential in the |
| development of the world spectacle. The ideology which is |
| materialized in this context has not economically transformed |
| the world, as has capitalism which reached the stage of |
| abundance; it has merely transformed perception by means of |
| the police. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
106.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The totalitarian-ideological class in power is the power of a |
| topsy-turvy world: the stranger it is, the more it claims not |
| to exist, and its force serves above all to affirm its |
| nonexistence. It is modest only on this point, because its |
| official nonexistence must also coincide with the nec plus |
| ultra of historical development which must at the same time |
| be attributed to its infallible command. Extended everywhere, |
| the bureaucracy must be the class invisible to consciousness; |
| as a result all social life becomes insane. The social |
| organization of the absolute lie flows from this fundamental |
| contradiction. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
107.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stalinism was the reign of terror within the bureaucratic |
| class itself. The terrorism at the base of this class’s power |
| must also strike this class because it possesses no juridical |
| guarantee, no recognized existence as owning class, which it |
| could extend to every one of its members. Its real property |
| being hidden, the bureaucracy became proprietor by way of |
| false consciousness. False consciousness can maintain its |
| absolute power only by means of absolute terror, where all |
| real motives are ultimately lost. The members of the |
| bureaucratic class in power have a right of ownership over |
| society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental |
| lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat directing |
| a socialist society; they have to be actors loyal to a script |
| of ideological disloyalty. But effective participation in |
| this falsehood requires that it be recognized as actual |
| participation. No bureaucrat can support his right to power |
| individually, since proving that he’s a socialist proletarian |
| would mean presenting himself as the opposite of a |
| bureaucrat, and proving that he’s a bureaucrat is impossible |
| since the official truth of the bureaucracy is that it does |
| not exist. Thus every bureaucrat depends absolutely on the |
| central guarantee of the ideology which recognizes the |
| collective participation in its “socialist power” of all the |
| bureaucrats it does not annihilate. If all the bureaucrats |
| taken together decide everything, the cohesion of their own |
| class can be assured only by the concentration of their |
| terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides |
| the only practical truth of falsehood in power: the |
| indisputable permanence of its constantly adjusted frontier. |
| Stalin decides without appeal who is ultimately to be a |
| possessing bureaucrat; in other words, who should be named “a |
| proletarian in power” and who “a traitor in the pay of the |
| Mikado or of Wall Street.” The bureaucratic atoms find the |
| common essence of their right only in the person of Stalin. |
| Stalin is the world sovereign who in this manner knows |
| himself as the absolute person for whose consciousness there |
| is no higher spirit. “The sovereign of the world has |
| effective consciousness of what he is–the universal power of |
| efficacy–in the destructive violence which he exerts against |
| the Self of his subjects, the contrasting others.” Just as he |
| is the power that defines the terrain of domination, he is |
| “the power which ravages this terrain.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
108.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When ideology, having become absolute through the possession |
| of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into |
| totalitarian falsehood, the thought of history is so |
| perfectly annihilated that history itself, even at the level |
| of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The |
| totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual |
| present where everything that happened exists for it only as |
| a place accessible to its police. The project already |
| formulated by Napoleon of “the ruler directing the energy of |
| memory” has found its total concretization in a permanent |
| manipulation of the past, not only of meanings but of facts |
| as well. But the price paid for this emancipation from all |
| historical reality is the loss of the rational reference |
| which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism. |
| It is known how much the scientific application of insane |
| ideology has cost the Russian economy, if only through the |
| imposture of Lysenko. The contradiction of the totalitarian |
| bureaucracy administering an industrialized society, caught |
| between its need for rationality and its rejection of the |
| rational, is one of its main deficiencies with regard to |
| normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot |
| resolve the question of agriculture the way capitalism had |
| done, it is ultimately inferior to capitalism in industrial |
| production, planned from the top and based on unreality and |
| generalized falsehood. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
109.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Between the two world wars, the revolutionary workers’ |
| movement was annihilated by the joint action of the Stalinist |
| bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism which had borrowed |
| its form of organization from the totalitarian party tried |
| out in Russia. Fascism was an extremist defense of the |
| bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian |
| subversion. Fascism is a state of siege in capitalist |
| society, by means of which this society saves itself and |
| gives itself stop-gap rationalization by making the State |
| intervene massively in its management. But this |
| rationalization is itself burdened by the immense |
| irrationality of its means. Although fascism rallies to the |
| defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has |
| become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, |
| the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the |
| unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of |
| socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally |
| ideological. It presents itself as it is: a violent |
| resurrection of myth which demands participation in a |
| community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the |
| leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its |
| decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular |
| context of the most modern means of conditioning and |
| illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of |
| the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the |
| old workers’ movement makes it one of the fundamental forces |
| of present-day society. However, since fascism is also the |
| most costly form of preserving the capitalist order, it |
| usually had to leave the front of the stage to the great |
| roles played by the capitalist States; it is eliminated by |
| stronger and more rational forms of the same order. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
110.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Now that the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in |
| doing away with the remains of bourgeois property which |
| hampered its rule over the economy, in developing this |
| property for its own use, and in being recognized externally |
| among the great powers, it wants to enjoy its world calmly |
| and to suppress the arbitrary element which had been exerted |
| over it: it denounces the Stalinism of its origin. But the |
| denunciation remains Stalinist, arbitrary, unexplained and |
| continually corrected, because the ideological lie at its |
| origin can never be revealed. Thus the bureaucracy can |
| liberalize neither culturally nor politically because its |
| existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly |
| which, with all its weight, is its only title to property. |
| The ideology has no doubt lost the passion of its positive |
| affirmation, but the indifferent triviality which survives |
| still has the repressive function of prohibiting the |
| slightest competition, of holding captive the totality of |
| thought. Thus the bureaucracy is bound to an ideology which |
| is no longer believed by anyone. What used to be terrorist |
| has become a laughing matter, but this laughing matter can |
| maintain itself only by preserving, as a last resort, the |
| terrorism it would like to be rid of. Thus precisely at the |
| moment when the bureaucracy wants to demonstrate its |
| superiority on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to |
| be a poor relation of capitalism. Just as its actual history |
| contradicts its claims and its vulgarly entertained ignorance |
| contradicts its scientific pretentions, so its project of |
| becoming a rival to the bourgeoisie in the production of |
| commodity abundance is blocked by the fact that this |
| abundance carries its implicit ideology within itself, and is |
| usually accompanied by an indefinitely extended freedom of |
| spectacular false choices, a pseudo-freedom which remains |
| irreconcilable with the bureaucratic ideology. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
111.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| At the present moment of its development, the bureaucracy’s |
| title to ideological property is already collapsing |
| internationally. The power which established itself |
| nationally as a fundamentally internationalist model must |
| admit that it can no longer pretend to maintain its false |
| cohesion over and above every national frontier. The unequal |
| economic development of some bureaucracies with competing |
| interests, who succeeded in acquiring their “socialism” |
| beyond the single country, has led to the public and total |
| confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. |
| From this point on, every bureaucracy in power, or every |
| totalitarian party which is a candidate to the power left |
| behind by the Stalinist period in some national working |
| classes, must follow its own path. The global decomposition |
| of the alliance of bureaucratic mystification is further |
| aggravated by manifestations of internal negation which began |
| to be visible to the world with the East Berlin workers’ |
| revolt, opposing the bureaucrats with the demand for “a |
| government of steel workers,” manifestations which already |
| once led all the way to the power of workers’ councils in |
| Hungary. However, the global decomposition of the |
| bureaucratic alliance is in the last analysis the least |
| favorable factor for the present development of capitalist |
| society. The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the |
| adversary which objectively supported it by providing an |
| illusory unification of all negation of the existing order. |
| This division of labor within the spectacle comes to an end |
| when the pseudo-revolutionary role in turn divides. The |
| spectacular element of the collapse of the workers’ movement |
| will itself collapse. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
112.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The Leninist illusion has no contemporary base outside of the |
| various Trotskyist tendencies. Here the identification of the |
| proletarian project with a hierarchic organization of |
| ideology stubbornly survives the experience of all its |
| results. The distance which separates Trotskyism from a |
| revolutionary critique of the present society allows |
| Trotskyism to maintain a deferential attitude toward |
| positions which were already false when they were used in a |
| real combat. Trotsky remained basically in solidarity with |
| the high bureaucracy until 1927, seeking to capture it so as |
| to make it resume genuinely Bolshevik action externally (it |
| is known that in order to conceal Lenin’s famous “testament” |
| he went so far as to slanderously disavow his supporter Max |
| Eastman, who had made it public). Trotsky was condemned by |
| his basic perspective, because as soon as the bureaucracy |
| recognizes itself in its result as a counterrevolutionary |
| class internally, it must also choose, in the name of |
| revolution, to be effectively counter-revolutionary |
| externally, just as it is at home. Trotsky’s subsequent |
| struggle for the Fourth International contains the same |
| inconsistency. All his life he refused to recognize the |
| bureaucracy as the power of a separate class, because during |
| the second Russian revolution he became an unconditional |
| supporter of the Bolshevik form of organization. When Lukacs, |
| in 1923, showed that this form was the long-sought mediation |
| between theory and practice, in which the proletarians are no |
| longer “spectators” of the events which happen in their |
| organization, but consciously choose and live these events, |
| he described as actual merits of the Bolshevik party |
| everything that the Bolshevik party was not. Except for his |
| profound theoretical work, Lukacs was still an ideologue |
| speaking in the name of the power most grossly external to |
| the proletarian movement, believing and making believe that |
| he, himself, with his entire personality, was within this |
| power as if it were his own. But the sequel showed just how |
| this power disowns and suppresses its lackeys; in Lukacs’ |
| endless self-repudiations, just what he had identified with |
| became visible and clear as a caricature: he had identified |
| with the opposite of himself and of what he had supported in |
| History and Class Consciousness. Lukacs is the best proof of |
| the fundamental rule which judges all the intellectuals of |
| this century: what they respect is an exact measure of their |
| own despicable reality. Yet Lenin had hardly encouraged this |
| type of illusion about his activity, considering that “a |
| political party cannot examine its members to see if there |
| are contradictions between their philosophy and the party |
| program.” The real party whose imaginary portrait Lukacs had |
| inopportunely drawn was coherent for only one precise and |
| partial task: to seize State power. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
113.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The neo-Leninist illusion of present-day Trotskyism, |
| constantly exposed by the reality of modern bourgeois as well |
| as bureaucratic capitalist societies, naturally finds a |
| favored field of application in “underdeveloped” countries |
| which are formally independent. Here the illusion of some |
| variant of state and bureaucratic socialism is consciously |
| manipulated by local ruling classes as simply the ideology of |
| economic development. The hybrid composition of these classes |
| is more or less clearly related to their standing along the |
| bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. Their games on an |
| international scale with the two poles of existing capitalist |
| power, as well as their ideological compromises (notably with |
| Islam), express the hybrid reality of their social base and |
| remove from this final byproduct of ideological socialism |
| everything serious except the police. A bureaucracy |
| establishes itself by staffing a national struggle and an |
| agrarian peasant revolt; from that point on, as in China, it |
| tends to apply the Stalinist model of industrialization in |
| societies less developed than Russia was in 1917. A |
| bureaucracy able to industrialize the nation can set itself |
| up from among the petty-bourgeoisie, or out of army cadres |
| who seize power, as in Egypt. A bureaucracy which sets itself |
| up as a para-statist leadership during the struggle can, on |
| certain questions, seek the equilibrium point of a compromise |
| in order to fuse with a weak national bourgeoisie, as in |
| Algeria at the beginning of its war of independence. Finally, |
| in the former colonies of black Africa which remain openly |
| tied to the American and European bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie |
| constitutes itself (usually on the basis of the power of |
| traditional tribal chiefs) by seizing the State. These |
| countries, where foreign imperialism remains the real master |
| of the economy, enter a stage where the compradores have |
| gotten an indigenous State as compensation for their sale of |
| indigenous products, a State which is independent in the face |
| of the local masses but not in the face of imperialism. This |
| is an artificial bourgeoisie which is not able to accumulate, |
| but which simply squanders the share of surplus value from |
| local labor which reaches it as well as the foreign subsidies |
| from the States or monopolies which protect it. Because of |
| the obvious incapacity of these bourgeois classes to fulfill |
| the normal economic function of a bourgeoisie, each of them |
| faces a subversion based on the bureaucratic model, more or |
| less adapted to local peculiarities, and eager to seize the |
| heritage of this bourgeoisie. But the very success of a |
| bureaucracy in its fundamental project of industrialization |
| necessarily contains the perspective of its historical |
| defeat: by accumulating capital it accumulates a proletariat |
| and thus creates its own negation in a country where it did |
| not yet exist. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
114.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In this complex and terrible development which has carried |
| the epoch of class struggles toward new conditions, the |
| proletariat of the industrial countries has completely lost |
| the affirmation of its autonomous perspective and also, in |
| the last analysis, its illusions, but not its being. It has |
| not been suppressed. It remains irreducibly in existence |
| within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism: it is |
| the immense majority of workers who have lost all power over |
| the use of their lives and who, once they know this, redefine |
| themselves as the proletariat, as negation at work within |
| this society. The proletariat is objectively reinforced by |
| the progressive disappearance of the peasantry and by the |
| extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of |
| “services” and intellectual professions. Subjectively the |
| proletariat is still far removed from its practical class |
| consciousness, not only among white collar workers but also |
| among wage workers who have as yet discovered only the |
| impotence and mystification of the old politics. |
| Nevertheless, when the proletariat discovers that its own |
| externalized power collaborates in the constant reinforcement |
| of capitalist society, not only in the form of its labor but |
| also in the form of unions, of parties, or of the state power |
| it had built to emancipate itself, it also discovers from |
| concrete historical experience that it is the class totally |
| opposed to all congealed externalization and all |
| specialization of power. It carries the revolution which |
| cannot let anything remain outside of itself, the demand for |
| the permanent domination of the present over the past, and |
| the total critique of separation. It is this that must find |
| its suitable form in action. No quantitative amelioration of |
| its misery, no illusion of hierarchic integration is a |
| lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat |
| cannot truly recognize itself in a particular wrong it |
| suffered nor in the righting of a particular wrong. It cannot |
| recognize itself in the righting of a large number of wrongs |
| either, but only in the absolute wrong of being relegated to |
| the margin of life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
115.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The new signs of negation multiplying in the economically |
| developed countries, signs which are misunderstood and |
| falsified by spectacular arrangement, already enable us to |
| draw the conclusion that a new epoch has begun: now, after |
| the workers’ first attempt at subversion, it is capitalist |
| abundance which has failed. When anti-union struggles of |
| Western workers are repressed first of all by unions, and |
| when the first amorphous protests launched by rebellious |
| currents of youth directly imply the rejection of the old |
| specialized politics, of art and of daily life, we see two |
| sides of a new spontaneous struggle which begins under a |
| criminal guise. These are the portents of a second |
| proletarian assault against class society. When the last |
| children of this still immobile army reappear on this |
| battleground which was altered and yet remains the same, they |
| follow a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to |
| destroy the machines of permitted consumption. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
116.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| “The political form at last discovered in which the economic |
| emancipation of labor could be realized” has in this century |
| acquired a clear outline in the revolutionary workers’ |
| Councils which concentrate in themselves all the functions of |
| decision and execution, and federate with each other by means |
| of delegates responsible to the base and revocable at any |
| moment. Their actual existence has as yet been no more than a |
| brief sketch, quickly opposed and defeated by various |
| defensive forces of class society, among which their own |
| false consciousness must often be included. Pannekoek rightly |
| insisted that choosing the power of workers’ Councils “poses |
| problems” rather than providing a solution. Yet it is |
| precisely in this power where the problems of the proletarian |
| revolution can find their real solution. This is where the |
| objective conditions of historical consciousness are |
| reunited. This is where direct active communication is |
| realized, where specialization, hierarchy and separation end, |
| where the existing conditions have been transformed “into |
| conditions of unity.” Here the proletarian subject can emerge |
| from his struggle against contemplation: his consciousness is |
| equal to the practical organization which it undertakes |
| because this consciousness is itself inseparable from |
| coherent intervention in history. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
117.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In the power of the Councils, which must internationally |
| supplant all other power, the proletarian movement is its own |
| product and this product is the producer himself. He is to |
| himself his own goal. Only there is the spectacular negation |
| of life negated in its turn. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
118.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The appearance of the Councils was the highest reality of the |
| proletarian movement in the first quarter of this century, a |
| reality which was not seen or was travestied because it |
| disappeared along with the rest of the movement that was |
| negated and eliminated by the entire historical experience of |
| the time. At the new moment of proletarian critique, this |
| result returns as the only undefeated point of the defeated |
| movement. Historical consciousness, which knows that this is |
| the only milieu where it can exist, can now recognize this |
| reality, no longer at the periphery of what is ebbing, but at |
| the center of what is rising. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
119.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| A revolutionary organization existing before the power of the |
| Councils (it will find its own farm through struggle), for |
| all these historical reasons, already knows that it does not |
| represent the working class. It must recognize itself as no |
| more than a radical separation from the world of separation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
120.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of |
| the theory of praxis entering into non-unilateral |
| communication with practical struggles, in the process of |
| becoming practical theory. Its own practice is the |
| generalization of communication and of coherence in these |
| struggles. At the revolutionary moment of dissolution of |
| social separation, this organization must recognize its own |
| dissolution as a separate organization. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
121.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The revolutionary organization can be nothing less than a |
| unitary critique of society, namely a critique which does not |
| compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the |
| world, and a critique proclaimed globally against all the |
| aspects of alienated social life. In the struggle between the |
| revolutionary organization and class society, the weapons are |
| nothing other than the essence of the combatants themselves: |
| the revolutionary organization cannot reproduce within itself |
| the dominant society’s conditions of separation and |
| hierarchy. It must struggle constantly against its |
| deformation in the ruling spectacle. The only limit to |
| participation in the total democracy of the revolutionary |
| organization is the recognition and self-appropriation of the |
| coherence of its critique by all its members, a coherence |
| which must be proved in the critical theory as such and in |
| the relation between the theory and practical activity. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
122.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels |
| makes it increasingly difficult for workers to recognize and |
| name their own misery, forcing them to face the alternative |
| of rejecting the totality of their misery or nothing, the |
| revolutionary organization has to learn that it can no longer |
| combat alienation with alienated forms. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
123.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition |
| that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human |
| practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires |
| workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought |
| into practice. Thus it demands of men without quality more |
| than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men |
| which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial |
| ideological consciousness constructed by a part of the |
| bourgeois class was based on the economy, this central part |
| of social life in which this class was already in power). The |
| very development of class society to the stage of spectacular |
| organization of non-life thus leads the revolutionary project |
| to become visibly what it already was essentially. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
124.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary |
| ideology and knows it. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 5 “Time and History” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!... And if we live, |
| we live to tread on kings. - Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
125.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Man, “the negative being who is only to the extent that he |
| suppresses Being,” is identical to time. Man’s appropriation |
| of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the |
| unfolding of the universe. “History is itself a real part of |
| natural history, of the transformation of nature into man” |
| (Marx). Inversely, this “natural history” has no actual |
| existence other than through the process of human history, |
| the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like |
| the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the |
| retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe. History |
| has always existed, but not always in a historical form. The |
| temporalization of man as effected through the mediation of a |
| society is equivalent to a humanization of time. The |
| unconscious movement of time manifests itself and becomes |
| true within historical consciousness. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
126.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Properly historical movement, although still hidden, begins |
| in the slow and intangible formation of the “real nature of |
| man,” this “nature born within human history–within the |
| generating action of human society,” but even though that |
| society developed a technology and a language and is already |
| a product of its own history, it is conscious only of a |
| perpetual present. There, all knowledge, confined within the |
| memory of the oldest, is always carried by the living. |
| Neither death nor procreation is grasped as a law of time. |
| Time remains immobile, like an enclosed space. A more complex |
| society which finally becomes conscious of time devotes |
| itself to negating it because it sees in time not what |
| passes, but only what returns. A static society organizes |
| time in terms of its immediate experience of nature, on the |
| model of cyclical time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
127.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic |
| populations because they find the same conditions repeated at |
| every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that “the |
| wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to |
| uniform spaces.” The society which, by fixing itself in place |
| locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized |
| places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. |
| The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure |
| return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series |
| of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to |
| sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without |
| content, the beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of |
| production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the |
| seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. |
| Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here |
| on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought |
| which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the |
| order which this society has in fact already realized within |
| its frontiers. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
128.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The social appropriation of time, the production of man by |
| human labor, develops within a society divided into classes. |
| The power which constituted itself above the penury of the |
| society of cyclical time, the class which organizes the |
| social labor and appropriates the limited surplus value, |
| simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value of its |
| organization of social time: it possesses for itself alone |
| the irreversible time of the living. The wealth that can be |
| concentrated in the realm of power and materially used up in |
| sumptuous feasts is also used up as a squandering of |
| historical time at the surface of society. The owners of |
| historical surplus value possess the knowledge and the |
| enjoyment of lived events. Separated from the collective |
| organization of time which predominates with the repetitive |
| production at the base of social life, this time flows above |
| its own static community. This is the time of adventure and |
| war, when the masters of the cyclical society travel through |
| their personal histories, and it is also the time which |
| appears in confrontations with foreign communities, in the |
| derangement of the unchangeable order of the society. History |
| then passes before men as an alien factor, as that which they |
| never wanted and against which they thought themselves |
| protected. But by way of this detour returns the human |
| negative anxiety which had been at the very origin of the |
| entire development that had fallen asleep. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
129.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict. But |
| conflict is installed within this infancy of time: history |
| first struggles to be history in the practical activity of |
| masters. This history superficially creates the irreversible; |
| its movement constitutes precisely the time it uses up within |
| the interior of the inexhaustible time of cyclical society. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
130.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| “Frozen societies” are those which slowed down their |
| historical activity to the limit and maintained in constant |
| equilibrium their opposition to the natural and human |
| environment as well as their internal oppositions. If the |
| extreme diversity of institutions established for this |
| purpose demonstrates the flexibility of the self-creation of |
| human nature, this demonstration becomes obvious only for the |
| external observer, for the anthropologist who returns from |
| historical time. In each of these societies a definitive |
| structuring excluded change. Absolute conformism in existing |
| social practices. with which all human possibilities are |
| identified for all time, has no external limit other than the |
| fear of falling back into formless animality. Here, in order |
| to remain human, men must remain the same. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
131.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The birth of political power which seems to be related to the |
| last great technological revolutions (like iron smelting), at |
| the threshold of a period which would not experience profound |
| shocks until the appearance of industry, also marks the |
| moment when kinship ties begin to dissolve. From then on, the |
| succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclical |
| nature in order to become an event-oriented succession of |
| powers. Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, |
| and dynasties are its first measure. Writing is its weapon. |
| In writing, language attains its complete independent reality |
| as mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence |
| is identical to the general independence of separate power as |
| the mediation which constitutes society. With writing there |
| appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and |
| transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, |
| the memory of the administration of society. “Writings are |
| the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory” |
| (Novalis). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
132.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of |
| power and also the instrument that preserves the |
| voluntaristic progression of this time from its predecessor, |
| since this orientation of time collapses with the fall of |
| every specific power and returns to the indifferent oblivion |
| of cyclical time, the only time known to peasant masses who, |
| during the collapse of empires and their chronologies, never |
| change. The owners of history have given time a meaning: a |
| direction which is also a significance. But this history |
| deploys itself and succumbs separately, leaving the |
| underlying society unchanged precisely because this history |
| remains separated from the common reality. This is why we |
| reduce the history of Oriental empires to the history of |
| religions: the chronologies which have fallen to ruins left |
| no more than the apparently autonomous history of the |
| illusions which enveloped them. The masters who make history |
| their private property, under the protection of myth, possess |
| first of all a private ownership of the mode of illusion: in |
| China and Egypt they long held a monopoly over the |
| immortality of the soul, just as their famous early dynasties |
| are imaginary arrangements of the past. But the masters’ |
| possession of illusion is at that moment the only possible |
| possession of a common history and of their own history. The |
| growth of their real historical power goes together with a |
| popularization of the possession of myth and illusion. All |
| this flows from the simple fact that, to the extent that the |
| masters took it upon themselves to guarantee the permanence |
| of cyclical time mythically, as in the seasonal rites of |
| Chinese emperors, they themselves achieved a relative |
| liberation from cyclical time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
133.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The dry unexplained chronology of divine power speaking to |
| its servants, which wants to be understood only as the |
| earthly execution of the commandments of myth, can be |
| surmounted and become conscious history; this requires that |
| real participation in history be lived by extended groups. |
| Out of this practical communication among those who |
| recognized each other as possessors of a singular present, |
| who experienced the qualitative richness of events as their |
| activity and as the place where they lived–their epoch–arises |
| the general language of historical communication. Those for |
| whom irreversible time has existed discover within it the |
| memorable as well as the menace of forgetting: “Herodotus of |
| Halicarnassus here presents the results of his study, so that |
| time may not abolish the works of men...” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
134.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Reasoning about history is inseparably reasoning about power. |
| Greece was the moment when power and its change were |
| discussed and understood, the democracy of the masters of |
| society. Greek conditions were the inverse of the conditions |
| known to the despotic State, where power settles its accounts |
| only with itself within the inaccessible obscurity of its |
| densest point: through palace revolution, which is placed |
| beyond the pale of discussion by success or failure alike. |
| However, the power shared among the Greek communities existed |
| only with the expenditure of a social life whose production |
| remained separate and static within the servile class. Only |
| those who do not work live. In the division among the Greek |
| communities, and in the struggle to exploit foreign cities, |
| the principle of separation which internally grounded each of |
| them was externalized. Greece, which had dreamed of universal |
| history, did not succeed in unifying itself in the face of |
| invasion–or even in unifying the calendars of its independent |
| cities. In Greece historical time became conscious, but not |
| yet conscious of itself. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
135.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| After the disappearance of the locally favorable conditions |
| known to the Greek communities, the regression of western |
| historical thought was not accompanied by a rehabilitation of |
| ancient mythic organizations. Out of the confrontations of |
| the Mediterranean populations, out of the formation and |
| collapse of the Roman State, appeared semi-historical |
| religions which became fundamental factors in the new |
| consciousness of time, and in the new armor of separate |
| power. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
136.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and |
| history, between cyclical time which still dominated |
| production and irreversible time where populations clash and |
| regroup. The religions which grew out of Judaism are abstract |
| universal acknowledgements of irreversible time which is |
| democratized, opened to all, but in the realm of illusion. |
| Time is totally oriented toward a single final event: “The |
| Kingdom of God is at hand.” These religions arose on the soil |
| of history, and established themselves there. But there they |
| still preserve themselves in radical opposition to history. |
| Semi-historical religion establishes a qualitative point of |
| departure in time (the birth of Christ, the flight of |
| Mohammed), but its irreversible time–introducing real |
| accumulation which in Islam can take the form of a conquest, |
| or in Reformation Christianity the form of increased capital |
| is actually inverted in religious thought and becomes a |
| countdown: the hope of access to the genuine other world |
| before time runs out, the expectation of the last Judgment. |
| Eternity came out of cyclical time and is beyond it. Eternity |
| is the element which holds back the irreversibility of time, |
| suppressing history within history itself by placing itself |
| on the other side of irreversible time as a pure punctual |
| element to which cyclical time returned and abolished itself. |
| Bossuet will still say: “And by means of the time that passes |
| we enter into the eternity which does not pass.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
137.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The Middle Ages, this incomplete mythical world whose |
| perfection lay outside it, is the moment when cyclical time, |
| which still regulates the greater part of production, is |
| really chewed away by history. A certain irreversible |
| temporality is recognized individually in everyone, in the |
| succession of stages of life, in the consideration of life as |
| a journey, a passage with no return through a world whose |
| meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the man who leaves |
| cyclical time and becomes in reality the traveller that |
| everyone is symbolically. Personal historical life still |
| finds its fulfillment within the sphere of power, within |
| participation in struggles led by power and in struggles over |
| disputed power; but the irreversible time of power is shared |
| to infinity under the general unification of the oriented |
| time of the Christian era, in a world of armed faith, where |
| the game of the masters revolves around fidelity and disputes |
| over owed fidelity. This feudal society, born out of the |
| encounter of “the organizational structure of the conquering |
| army as it developed during the conquest” with “the |
| productive forces found in the conquered country” (German |
| Ideology) and in the organization of these productive forces |
| one must count their religious language divided the |
| domination of society between the Church and the state power, |
| in turn subdivided in the complex relations of suzerainty and |
| vassalage of territorial tenures and urban communes. In this |
| diversity of possible historical life, the irreversible time |
| which silently carried off the underlying society, the time |
| lived by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities, in |
| the foundation and expansion of cities and in the commercial |
| discovery of the earth–practical experimentation which |
| forever destroyed all mythical organization of the |
| cosmos–slowly revealed itself as the unknown work of this |
| epoch when the great official historical undertaking of this |
| world collapsed with the Crusades. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
138.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| During the decline of the Middle Ages, the irreversible time |
| which invades society is experienced by the consciousness |
| attached to the ancient order in the form of an obsession |
| with death. This is the melancholy of the demise of a world, |
| the last world where the security of myth still counterpoised |
| history, and for this melancholy everything worldly moves |
| only toward corruption. The great revolts of the European |
| peasants are also their attempt to respond to history–which |
| was violently wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal |
| sleep that had guaranteed their feudal tutelage. This |
| millenarian utopia of achieving heaven on earth revives what |
| was at the origin of semi-historical religion, when Christian |
| communities which grew out of Judaic messianism responded to |
| the troubles and unhappiness of the epoch by looking to the |
| imminent realization of the Kingdom of God and brought a |
| disquieting and subversive factor into ancient society. When |
| Christianity reached the point of sharing power within the |
| empire, it exposed what still survived of this hope as a |
| simple superstition: that is the meaning of the Augustinian |
| affirmation, archetype of all the satisfecit of modern |
| ideology, according to which the established Church has |
| already for a long time been this kingdom one spoke of. The |
| social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself |
| naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church. But |
| millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on |
| the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations are |
| not irrational continuations of the religious passion of |
| millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in |
| The Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary, it is |
| millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the |
| language of religion for the last time, which is already a |
| modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the |
| consciousness that it is only historical. The millenarians |
| had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution |
| as their own operation. The fact that they waited to act on |
| the basis of an external sign of God’s decision is the |
| translation into thought of the practice of insurgent |
| peasants following chiefs taken from outside their ranks. The |
| peasant class could not attain an adequate consciousness of |
| the functioning of society or of the way to lead its own |
| struggle: because it lacked these conditions of unity in its |
| action and consciousness, it expressed its project and led |
| its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
139.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The new possession of historical life, the Renaissance, which |
| finds its past and its legitimacy in Antiquity, carries with |
| it a joyous rupture with eternity. Its irreversible time is |
| that of the infinite accumulation of knowledge, and the |
| historical consciousness which grows out of the experience of |
| democratic communities and of the forces which ruin them will |
| take up, with Machiavelli, the analysis of desanctified |
| power, saying the unspeakable about the State. In the |
| exuberant life of the Italian cities, in the art of the |
| festival, life is experienced as enjoyment of the passage of |
| time. But this enjoyment of passage is itself a passing |
| enjoyment. The song of Lorenzo di Medici considered by |
| Burckhardt to be the expression of “the very spirit of the |
| Renaissance” is the eulogy which this fragile feast of |
| history pronounces on itself: “How beautiful the spring of |
| life which vanishes so quickly.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
140.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The constant movement of monopolization of historical life by |
| the State of the absolute monarchy, transitional form toward |
| complete domination by the bourgeois class, brings into clear |
| view the new irreversible time of the bourgeoisie. The |
| bourgeoisie is attached to labor time, which is liberated for |
| the first time from the cyclical. With the bourgeoisie, work |
| becomes labor which transforms historical conditions. The |
| bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which labor is a |
| value. And the bourgeoisie which suppresses all privilege, |
| which recognizes no value that does not flow from the |
| exploitation of labor, has justly identified with labor its |
| own value as a dominant class, and has made the progress of |
| labor its own progress. The class which accumulates |
| commodities and capital continually modifies nature by |
| modifying labor itself, by unleashing its productivity. All |
| social life has already been concentrated within the |
| ornamental poverty of the Court, the tinsel of the cold state |
| administration which culminates in “the vocation of king”; |
| and all particular historical liberty has had to consent to |
| its defeat. The liberty of the irreversible temporal game of |
| the nobles is consumed in their last lost battles, the wars |
| of the Fronde and the rising of the Scotch for |
| Charles-Edward. The world’s foundation has changed. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
141.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of profoundly |
| historical time, because this is the time of economic |
| production which transforms society, continuously and from |
| top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the |
| central activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base |
| of society nourishes the coalesced forces of tradition which |
| fetter all movement. But the irreversible time of the |
| bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner |
| of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only |
| the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was |
| written as the history of events, is now understood as the |
| general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals |
| are sacrificed. This history which discovers its foundation |
| in political economy now knows of the existence of what had |
| been its unconscious, but this still cannot be brought to |
| light and remains unconscious. This blind prehistory, a new |
| fatality dominated by no one, is all that the commodity |
| economy democratized. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
142.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The history which is present in all the depths of society |
| tends to be lost at the surface. The triumph of irreversible |
| time is also its metamorphosis into the time of things, |
| because the weapon of its victory was precisely the mass |
| production of objects according to the laws of the commodity. |
| The main product which economic development has transferred |
| from luxurious scarcity to daily consumption is therefore |
| history, but only in the form of the history of the abstract |
| movement of things which dominates all qualitative use of |
| life. While the earlier cyclical time had supported a growing |
| part of historical time lived by individuals and groups, the |
| domination of the irreversible time of production tends, |
| socially, to eliminate this lived time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
143.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed on it |
| an irreversible historical time, but kept its use from |
| society. “There was history, but there is no more,” because |
| the class of owners of the economy, which cannot break with |
| economic history, is directly threatened by all other |
| irreversible use of time and must repress it. The ruling |
| class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who |
| are themselves therefore a possession of things, must link |
| its fate with the preservation of this reified history, with |
| the permanence of a new immobility within history. For the |
| first time the worker, at the base of society, is not |
| materially a stranger to history, because it is now the base |
| that irreversibly moves society. In the demand to live the |
| historical time which it makes, the proletariat finds the |
| simple unforgettable center of its revolutionary project; and |
| every attempt (thwarted until now) to realize this project |
| marks a point of possible departure for new historical life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
144.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie in power at first |
| presented itself under its own name, as an absolute origin, |
| Year One of the Republic. But the revolutionary ideology of |
| general freedom which had destroyed the last remnants of the |
| mythical organization of values and the entire traditional |
| regulation of society, already made visible the real will |
| which it had clothed in Roman dress: the freedom of |
| generalized commerce. The commodity society, now discovering |
| that it needed to reconstruct the passivity which it had |
| profoundly shaken in order to set up its own pure reign, |
| finds that “Christianity with its cultus of abstract man ... |
| is the most fitting form of religion” (Capital). Thus the |
| bourgeoisie establishes a compromise with this religion, a |
| compromise which also expresses itself in the presentation of |
| time: its own calendar abandoned, its irreversible time |
| returns to unwind within the Christian era whose succession |
| it continues. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
145.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is |
| unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality |
| because the entire world is gathered under the development of |
| this time. But this history, which is everywhere |
| simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within |
| history of history itself. What appears the world over as the |
| same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal |
| abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time is the time of |
| the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
146.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The irreversible time of production is first of all the |
| measure of commodities. Therefore the time officially |
| affirmed over the entire expanse of the globe as the general |
| time of society refers only to the specialized interests |
| which constitute it and is no more than a particular time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 6 “Spectacular Time” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| We have nothing that is ours except time, which even those |
| without a roof can enjoy. - Baltasar Gracian, Oraculo Manual |
| y Arte de Prudencia |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
147.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite |
| accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is the abstraction |
| of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the |
| chronometer their merely quantitative equality. This time is |
| in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character. |
| In this social domination by commodity-time, “time is |
| everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of |
| time” (Poverty of Philosophy). This is time devalued, the |
| complete inversion of time as “the field of human |
| development.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
148.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The general time of human non-development also exists in the |
| complementary form of consumable time which returns as |
| pseudo-cyclical time to the daily life of the society based |
| on this determined production. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
149.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more than the consumable |
| disguise of the commodity-time of production. It contains the |
| essential properties of commodity-time, namely exchangeable |
| homogeneous units and the suppression of the qualitative |
| dimension. But being the by-product of this time which aims |
| to retard concrete daily life and to keep it retarded, it |
| must be charged with pseudo-valuations and appear in a |
| sequence of falsely individualized moments. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
150.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pseudo-cyclical time is the time of consumption of modern |
| economic survival, of increased survival, where daily life |
| continues to be deprived of decision and remains bound, no |
| longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature |
| developed in alienated labor; and thus this time naturally |
| reestablishes the ancient cyclical rhythm which regulated the |
| survival of preindustrial societies. Pseudo-cyclical time |
| leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and also uses |
| it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, |
| work and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
151.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The |
| time which has its basis in the production of commodities is |
| itself a consumable commodity which includes everything that |
| previously (during the phase of dissolution of the old |
| unitary society) was differentiated into private life, |
| economic life, political life. All the consumable time of |
| modern society comes to be treated as a raw material for |
| varied new products which impose themselves on the market as |
| uses of socially organized time. “A product which already |
| exists in a form which makes it suitable for consumption can |
| nevertheless in its turn become a raw material for another |
| product” (Capital). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
152.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In its most advanced sector, concentrated capitalism orients |
| itself towards the sale of “completely equipped” blocks of |
| time, each one constituting a single unified commodity which |
| integrates a number of diverse commodities. In the expanding |
| economy of “services” and leisure, this gives rise to the |
| formula of calculated payment in which “everything’s |
| included”: spectacular environment, the collective |
| pseudo-displacement of vacations, subscriptions to cultural |
| consumption, and the sale of sociability itself in the form |
| of “passionate conversations” and “meetings with |
| personalities.” This sort of spectacular commodity, which can |
| obviously circulate only because of the increased poverty of |
| the corresponding realities, just as obviously fits among the |
| pilot-articles of modernized sales techniques by being |
| payable on credit. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
153.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as |
| the time of consumption of images in the narrow sense, and as |
| the image of consumption of time in the broad sense. The time |
| of image-consumption, the medium of all commodities, is |
| inseparably the field where the instruments of the spectacle |
| exert themselves fully, and also their goal, the location and |
| main form of all specific consumption: it is known that the |
| time-saving constantly sought by modern society, whether in |
| the speed of vehicles or in the use of dried soups, is |
| concretely translated for the population of the United States |
| in the fact that the mere contemplation of television |
| occupies it for an average of three to six hours a day. The |
| social image of the consumption of time, in turn, is |
| exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation, |
| moments presented at a distance and desirable by definition, |
| like every spectacular commodity. Here this commodity is |
| explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the |
| point is to wait for its cyclical return. But even in those |
| very moments reserved for living, it is still the spectacle |
| that is to be seen and reproduced, becoming ever more |
| intense. What was represented as genuine life reveals itself |
| simply as more genuinely spectacular life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
154.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially |
| the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch |
| without festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the moment of |
| a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of |
| life is impossible for the society without community or |
| luxury. When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the |
| dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic |
| expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated |
| by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the |
| lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly |
| it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the |
| advertisement of time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
155.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies |
| was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the |
| pseudo-cyclical consumption of the developed economy is in |
| contradiction with the abstract irreversible time of its |
| production. While cyclical time was the time of immobile |
| illusion, really lived, spectacular time is the time of |
| self-changing reality, lived in illusion. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
156.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| What is constantly new in the process of production of things |
| is not found in consumption, which remains the expanded |
| repetition of the same. In spectacular time, since dead labor |
| continues to dominate living labor, the past dominates the |
| present. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
157.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is |
| that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events |
| which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been |
| lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in |
| the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of |
| the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, what is really lived |
| has no relation to the official irreversible time of society |
| and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of |
| the consumable by-product of this time. This individual |
| experience of separate daily life remains without language, |
| without concept, without critical access to its own past |
| which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It |
| is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false |
| spectacular memory of the unmemorable. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
158.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The spectacle, as the present social organization of the |
| paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of |
| history built on the foundation of historical time, is the |
| false consciousness of time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
159.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The preliminary condition required for propelling workers to |
| the status of “free” producers and consumers of commodity |
| time was the violent expropriation of their own time. The |
| spectacular return of time became possible only after this |
| first dispossession of the producer. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
160.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The irreducibly biological element which remains in labor, |
| both in the dependence on the natural cycle of waking and |
| sleep and in the existence of irreversible time in the |
| expenditure of an individual life, is a mere accessory from |
| the point of view of modern production; consequently, these |
| elements are ignored in the official proclamations of the |
| movement of production and in the consumable trophies which |
| are the accessible translation of this incessant victory. The |
| spectator’s consciousness, immobilized in the falsified |
| center of the movement of its world, no longer experiences |
| its life as a passage toward self-realization and toward |
| death. One who has renounced using his life can no longer |
| admit his death. Life insurance advertisements suggest merely |
| that he is guilty of dying without ensuring the regularity of |
| the system after this economic loss; and the advertisement of |
| the American way of death insists on his capacity to maintain |
| in this encounter the greatest possible number of appearances |
| of life. On all other fronts of the advertising onslaught, it |
| is strictly forbidden to grow old. Even a “youth-capital,” |
| contrived for each and all and put to the most mediocre uses, |
| could never acquire the durable and cumulative reality of |
| financial capital. This social absence of death is identical |
| to the social absence of life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
161.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Time, as Hegel showed, is the necessary alienation, the |
| environment where the subject realizes himself by losing |
| himself, where he becomes other in order to become truly |
| himself. Precisely the opposite is true in the dominant |
| alienation, which is undergone by the producer of an alien |
| present. In this spatial alienation, the society that |
| radically separates the subject from the activity it takes |
| from him, separates him first of all from his own time. It is |
| this surmountable social alienation that has prohibited and |
| petrified the possibilities and risks of the living |
| alienation of time. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
162.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Under the visible fashions which disappear and reappear on |
| the trivial surface of contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the |
| grand style of the age is always located in what is oriented |
| by the obvious and secret necessity of revolution. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
163.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The natural basis of time, the actual experience of the flow |
| of time, becomes human and social by existing for man. The |
| restricted condition of human practice, labor at various |
| stages, is what has humanized and also dehumanized time as |
| cyclical and as separate irreversible time of economic |
| production. The revolutionary project of realizing a |
| classless society, a generalized historical life, is the |
| project of a withering away of the social measure of time, to |
| the benefit of a playful model of irreversible time of |
| individuals and groups, a model in which independent |
| federated times are simultaneously present. It is the program |
| of a total realization, within the context of time, of |
| communism which suppresses “all that exists independently of |
| individuals.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
164.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The world already possesses the dream of a time whose |
| consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live |
| it. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 7 “The Organization of Territory”. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| And he who becomes master of a city used to being free and |
| does not destroy her can expect to be destroyed by her, |
| because always she has as pretext in rebellion the name of |
| liberty and her old customs, which never through either |
| length of time or benefits are forgotten, and in spite of |
| anything that can be done or foreseen, unless citizens are |
| disunited or dispersed, they do not forget that name and |
| those institutions... - Machiavelli, The Prince |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
165.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Capitalist production has unified space, which is no longer |
| bounded by external societies. This unification is at the |
| same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization. |
| The accumulation of commodities produced in mass for the |
| abstract space of the market, which had to break down all |
| regional and legal barriers and all the corporative |
| restrictions of the Middle Ages that preserved the quality of |
| craft production, also had to destroy the autonomy and |
| quality of places. This power of homogenization is the heavy |
| artillery which brought down all Chinese walls. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
166.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as |
| close as possible to motionless monotony, the free space of |
| the commodity is henceforth constantly modified and |
| reconstructed. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
167.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| This society which eliminates geographical distance |
| reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
168.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a |
| by-product of the circulation of commodities, is |
| fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see |
| what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to |
| different places is already in itself the guarantee of their |
| equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from |
| the voyage also removed from it the reality of space. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
169.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The society that molds all of its surroundings has developed |
| a special technique for shaping its very territory, the solid |
| ground of this collection of tasks. Urbanism is capitalism’s |
| seizure of the natural and human environment; developing |
| logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must |
| now remake the totality of space into its own setting. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
170.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The capitalist need which is satisfied by urbanism in the |
| form of a visible freezing of life can be expressed in |
| Hegelian terms as the absolute predominance of “the peaceful |
| coexistence of space” over “the restless becoming in the |
| passage of time.” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
171.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| If all the technical forces of capitalism must be understood |
| as tools for the making of separations, in the case of |
| urbanism we are dealing with the equipment at the basis of |
| these technical forces, with the treatment of the ground that |
| suits their deployment, with the very technique of |
| separation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
172.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Urbanism is the modern fulfillment of the uninterrupted task |
| which safeguards class power: the preservation of the |
| atomization of workers who had been dangerously brought |
| together by urban conditions of production. The constant |
| struggle that had to be waged against every possible form of |
| their coming together discovers its favored field in |
| urbanism. After the experiences of the French Revolution, the |
| efforts of all established powers to increase the means of |
| maintaining order in the streets finally culminates in the |
| suppression of the street. “With the present means of |
| long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has |
| proved an even more effective method of keeping a population |
| under control,” says Lewis Mumford in The City in History, |
| describing “henceforth a one-way world.” But the general |
| movement of isolation, which is the reality of urbanism, must |
| also include a controlled reintegration of workers depending |
| on the needs of production and consumption that can be |
| planned. Integration into the system requires that isolated |
| individuals be recaptured and isolated together: factories |
| and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing |
| developments are expressly organized to serve this |
| pseudo-community that follows the isolated individual right |
| into the family cell. The widespread use of receivers of the |
| spectacular message enables the individual to fill his |
| isolation with the dominant images–images which derive their |
| power precisely from this isolation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
173.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| For the first time a new architecture, which in all previous |
| epochs had been reserved for the satisfaction of the ruling |
| classes, is directly aimed at the poor. The formal poverty |
| and the gigantic spread of this new living experience both |
| come from its mass character, which is implicit in its |
| purpose and in modern conditions of construction. |
| Authoritarian decision, which abstractly organizes territory |
| into territory of abstraction, is obviously at the heart of |
| these modern conditions of construction. The same |
| architecture appears in all industrializing countries that |
| are backward in this respect, as a suitable terrain for the |
| new type of social existence which is to be implanted there. |
| The threshold crossed by the growth of society’s material |
| power alongside the lag in the conscious domination of this |
| power, are displayed as clearly by urbanism as by problems of |
| thermonuclear armament or of birth control (where the |
| possibility of manipulating heredity has already been |
| reached). |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
174.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The present is already the time of the self-destruction of |
| the urban milieu. The explosion of cities which cover the |
| countryside with “formless masses of urban residues” (Lewis |
| Mumford) is directly regulated by the imperatives of |
| consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile, |
| pilot-product of the first phase of commodity abundance, has |
| been stamped into the environment with the domination of the |
| freeway, which dislocates old urban centers and requires an |
| ever-larger dispersion. At the same time, stages of |
| incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric polarize |
| temporarily around “distribution factories,” enormous |
| shopping centers built on the bare ground of parking lots; |
| and these temples of frenzied consumption, after bringing |
| about a partial rearrangement of congestion, themselves flee |
| within the centrifugal movement which rejects them as soon as |
| they in turn become overburdened secondary centers. But the |
| technical organization of consumption is only the first |
| element of the general dissolution which has led the city to |
| the point of consuming itself. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
175.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Economic history, which developed entirely around the |
| opposition between town and country, has reached a level of |
| success which simultaneously cancels out both terms. The |
| current paralysis of total historical development for the |
| sake of the mere continuation of the economy’s independent |
| movement makes the moment when town and country begin to |
| disappear, not the supersession of their cleavage, but their |
| simultaneous collapse. The reciprocal erosion of town and |
| country, product of the failure of the historical movement |
| through which existing urban reality should have been |
| surmounted, is visible in the eclectic melange of their |
| decayed elements which cover the most industrially advanced |
| zones. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
176.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Universal history was born in cities and reached maturity at |
| the moment of the decisive victory of city over country. To |
| Marx, one of the greatest revolutionary merits of the |
| bourgeoisie was “the subjection of the country to the city” |
| whose very air emancipates. But if the history of the city is |
| the history of freedom, it is also the history of tyranny, of |
| state administration that controls the countryside and the |
| city itself. The city could as yet only struggle for |
| historical freedom, but not possess it. The city is the locus |
| of history because it is conscious of the past and also |
| concentrates the social power that makes the historical |
| undertaking possible. The present tendency to liquidate the |
| city is thus merely another expression of the delay in the |
| subordination of the economy to historical consciousness and |
| in the unification of society reassuming the powers that were |
| detached from it. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
177.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| “The countryside shows the exact opposite: isolation and |
| separation” (German Ideology). Urbanism destroys cities and |
| reestablishes a pseudo-countryside which lacks the natural |
| relations of the old countryside as well as the direct social |
| relations which were directly challenged by the historical |
| city. A new artificial peasantry is recreated by the |
| conditions of housing and spectacular control in today’s |
| “organized territory”: the geographic dispersal and |
| narrowmindedness that always kept the peasantry from |
| undertaking independent action and from affirming itself as a |
| creative historical force again today become characteristics |
| of the producers–the movement of a world which they |
| themselves produce remaining as completely beyond their reach |
| as the natural rhythm of tasks was for the agrarian society. |
| But when this peasantry, which was the unshakable foundation |
| of “Oriental despotism” and whose very fragmentation called |
| for bureaucratic centralization reemerges as a product of the |
| conditions of growth of modern state bureaucracy, its apathy |
| must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural |
| ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of |
| error. The “new towns” of the technological pseudo-peasantry |
| clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the |
| historical time on which they are built; their motto could |
| be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever |
| has.” It is obviously because history, which must be |
| liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the |
| forces of historical absence begin to compose their own |
| exclusive landscape. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
178.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| History, which threatens this twilight world, is also the |
| force which could subject space to lived time. Proletarian |
| revolution is the critique of human geography through which |
| individuals and communities have to create places and events |
| suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their |
| labor, but of their total history. In this game’s changing |
| space, and in the freely chosen variations in the game’s |
| rules, the autonomy of place can be rediscovered without the |
| reintroduction of an exclusive attachment to the land, thus |
| bringing back the reality of the voyage and of life |
| understood as a voyage which contains its entire meaning |
| within itself. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
179.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not |
| itself urbanistic, technological or esthetic. It is the |
| decision to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance |
| with the needs of the power of the Workers’ Councils, of the |
| anti-statist dictatorship of the proletariat, of enforceable |
| dialogue. And the power of the Councils which can be |
| effective only if it transforms existing conditions in their |
| entirety, cannot assign itself a smaller task if it wants to |
| be recognized and to recognize itself in its world. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Chapter 8 “Negation and Consumption Within Culture” |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Do you seriously think we shall live long enough to see a |
| political revolution? – we, the contemporaries of these |
| Germans? My friend, you believe what you want to believe.... |
| Let us judge Germany on the basis of its present history – |
| and surely you are not going to object that all its history |
| is falsified, or that all its present public life does not |
| reflect the actual state of the people? Read whatever papers |
| you please, and you cannot fail to be convinced that we never |
| stop (and you must concede that the censorship prevents no |
| one from stopping) celebrating the freedom and national |
| happiness that we enjoy... - Ruge to Marx, March 1843. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
180.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| In the historical society divided into classes, culture is |
| the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of the |
| lived; which is to say that culture is the power of |
| generalization existing apart, as division of intellectual |
| labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detaches |
| itself from the unity of the society of myth “when the power |
| of unification disappears from the life of man and when |
| opposites lose their living relation and interaction and |
| acquire autonomy... (Hegel’s Treatise on the Differences |
| between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling). By gaining its |
| independence, culture begins an imperialist movement of |
| enrichment which is at the same time the decline of its |
| independence. The history which creates the relative autonomy |
| of culture and the ideological illusions about this autonomy |
| also expresses itself as history of culture. And the entire |
| victorious history of culture can be understood as the |
| history of the revelation of its inadequacy, as a march |
| toward its self-suppression. Culture is the locus of the |
| search for lost unity. In this search for unity, culture as a |
| separate sphere is obliged to negate itself. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
181.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the |
| principle of internal cultural development in historical |
| societies, can be carried on only through the permanent |
| victory of innovation. Yet cultural innovation is carried by |
| nothing other than the total historical movement which, by |
| becoming conscious of its totality, tends to supersede its |
| own cultural presuppositions and moves toward the suppression |
| of all separation. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
182.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The growth of knowledge about society, which includes the |
| understanding of history as the heart of culture, derives |
| from itself an irreversible knowledge, which is expressed by |
| the destruction of God. But this “first condition of any |
| critique” is also the first obligation of a critique without |
| end. When it is no longer possible to maintain a single rule |
| of conduct, every result of culture forces culture to advance |
| toward its dissolution. Like philosophy at the moment when it |
| gained its full autonomy, every discipline which becomes |
| autonomous has to collapse, first of all as a pretention to |
| explain social totality coherently, and finally even as a |
| fragmented tool which can be used within its own boundaries. |
| The lack of rationality of separate culture is the element |
| which condemns it to disappear, because within it the victory |
| of the rational is already present as a requirement. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
183.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Culture grew out of the history which abolished the way of |
| life of the old world, but as a separate sphere it is still |
| no more than perceptible intelligence and communication, |
| which remain partial in a partially historical society. It is |
| the sense of a world which hardly makes sense. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
184.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The end of cultural history manifests itself on two opposite |
| sides: the project of its supersession in total history, and |
| the organization of its preservation as a dead object in |
| spectacular contemplation. One of these movements has linked |
| its fate to social critique, the other to the defense of |
| class power. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
185.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The two sides of the end of culture–in all the aspects of |
| knowledge as well as in all the aspects of perceptible |
| representations exist in a unified manner in what used to be |
| art in the most general sense. In the case of knowledge, the |
| accumulation of branches of fragmentary knowledge, which |
| become unusable because the approval of existing conditions |
| must finally renounce knowledge of itself, confronts the |
| theory of praxis which alone holds the truth of them all |
| since it alone holds the secret of their use. In the case of |
| representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s |
| former common language confronts its artificial recomposition |
| in the commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of |
| the non-lived. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
186.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When society loses the community of the society of myth, it |
| must lose all the references of a really common language |
| until the time when the rifts within the inactive community |
| can be surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical |
| community. When art, which was the common language of social |
| inaction, becomes independent art in the modern sense, |
| emerging from its original religious universe and becoming |
| individual production of separate works, it too experiences |
| the movement that dominates the history of the entirety of |
| separate culture. The affirmation of its independence is the |
| beginning of its disintegration. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
187.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The loss of the language of communication is positively |
| expressed by the modern movement of decomposition of all art, |
| its formal annihilation. This movement expresses negatively |
| the fact that a common language must be rediscovered no |
| longer in the unilateral conclusion which, in the art of the |
| historical society, always arrived too late, speaking to |
| others about what was lived without real dialogue, and |
| admitting this deficiency of life but it must be rediscovered |
| in praxis, which unifies direct activity and its language. |
| The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue |
| and the game with time which have been represented by |
| poetico-artistic works. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
188.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling |
| colors, a moment of life has grown old and it cannot be |
| rejuvenated with dazzling colors. It can only be evoked as a |
| memory. The greatness of art begins to appear only at the |
| dusk of life. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
189.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The historical time which invades art expressed itself first |
| of all in the sphere of art itself, starting with the |
| baroque. Baroque is the art of a world which has lost its |
| center: the last mythical order, in the cosmos and in |
| terrestrial government, accepted by the Middle Ages–the unity |
| of Christianity and the phantom of an Empire has fallen. The |
| art of the change must carry within itself the ephemeral |
| principle it discovers in the world. It chose, said Eugenio |
| d’Ors, “life against eternity.” Theater and the festival, the |
| theatrical festival, are the outstanding achievements of the |
| baroque where every specific artistic expression becomes |
| meaningful only with reference to the setting of a |
| constructed place, a construction which is its own center of |
| unification; this center is the passage, which is inscribed |
| as a threatened equilibrium in the dynamic disorder of |
| everything. The somewhat excessive importance given to the |
| concept of the baroque in the contemporary discussion of |
| esthetics is an expression of the awareness that artistic |
| classicism is impossible: for three centuries the attempts to |
| realize a normative classicism or neoclassicism were no more |
| than brief artificial constructions speaking the external |
| language of the State, the absolute monarchy, or the |
| revolutionary bourgeoisie in Roman clothes. What followed the |
| general path of the baroque, from romanticism to cubism, was |
| ultimately an ever more individualized art of negation |
| perpetually renewing itself to the point of the fragmentation |
| and complete negation of the artistic sphere. The |
| disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the |
| internal communication of an elite and had its |
| semi-independent social basis in the partly playful |
| conditions still lived by the last aristocracies, also |
| expresses the fact that capitalism possesses the first class |
| power which admits itself stripped of any ontological |
| quality, a power which, rooted in the simple management of |
| the economy, is equally the loss of all human mastery. The |
| baroque, artistic creation’s long-lost unity, is in some way |
| rediscovered in the current consumption of the totality of |
| past art. When all past art is recognized and sought |
| historically and retrospectively constituted into a world |
| art, it is relativized into a global disorder which in turn |
| constitutes a baroque edifice on a higher level, an edifice |
| in which the very production of baroque art merges with all |
| its revivals. The arts of all civilizations and all epochs |
| can be known and accepted together for the first time. Once |
| this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes |
| possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age |
| of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, |
| all the former moments of art can be admitted equally, |
| because they no longer suffer from the loss of their specific |
| conditions of communication in the current general loss of |
| the conditions of communication. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
190.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| As a negative movement which seeks the supersession of art in |
| a historical society where history is not yet lived, art in |
| the epoch of its dissolution is simultaneously an art of |
| change and the pure expression of impossible change. The more |
| grandiose its reach, the more its true realization is beyond |
| it. This art is perforce avant-garde, and it is not. Its |
| avant-garde is its disappearance. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
191.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Dadaism and surrealism are the two currents which mark the |
| end of modern art. They are contemporaries, though only in a |
| relatively conscious manner, of the last great assault of the |
| revolutionary proletarian movement; and the defeat of this |
| movement, which left them imprisoned in the same artistic |
| field whose decrepitude they had announced, is the basic |
| reason for their immobilization. Dadaism and surrealism are |
| at once historically related and opposed to each other. This |
| opposition, which each of them considered to be its most |
| important and radical contribution, reveals the internal |
| inadequacy of their critique, which each developed |
| one-sidedly. Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing |
| it; surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it. |
| The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists |
| has shown that the suppression and the realization of art are |
| inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
192.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Spectacular consumption which preserves congealed past |
| culture, including the recuperated repetition of its negative |
| manifestations, openly becomes in the cultural sector what it |
| is implicitly in its totality: the communication of the |
| incommunicable. The flagrant destruction of language is |
| flatly acknowledged as an officially positive value because |
| the point is to advertise reconciliation with the dominant |
| state of affairs–and here all communication is joyously |
| proclaimed absent. The critical truth of this destruction the |
| real life of modern poetry and art is obviously hidden, since |
| the spectacle, whose function is to make history forgotten |
| within culture, applies, in the pseudo-novelty of its |
| modernist means, the very strategy which constitutes its |
| core. Thus a school of neo-literature, which simply admits |
| that it contemplates the written word for its own sake, can |
| present itself as something new. Furthermore, next to the |
| simple proclamation of the sufficient beauty of the decay of |
| the communicable, the most modern tendency of spectacular |
| culture–and the one most closely linked to the repressive |
| practice of the general organization of society–seeks to |
| remake, by means of “team projects,” a complex neo-artistic |
| environment made up of decomposed elements: notably in |
| urbanism’s attempts to integrate artistic debris or |
| esthetico- technical hybrids. This is an expression, on the |
| level of spectacular pseudo-culture, of developed |
| capitalism’s general project, which aims to recapture the |
| fragmented worker as a “personality well integrated in the |
| group,” a tendency described by American sociologists |
| (Riesman, Whyte, etc.). It is the same project everywhere: a |
| restructuring without community. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
193.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must |
| also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. |
| Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this tendency, |
| has calculated that the complex process of production, |
| distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of |
| the yearly national product in the United States; and he |
| predicts that in the second half of this century culture will |
| be the driving force in the development of the economy, a |
| role played by the automobile in the first half of this |
| century, and by railroads in the second half of the previous |
| century. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
194.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| All the branches of knowledge, which continue to develop as |
| the thought of the spectacle, have to justify a society |
| without justification, and constitute a general science of |
| false consciousness. This thought is completely conditioned |
| by the fact that it cannot and will not investigate its own |
| material basis in the spectacular system. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
195.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The system’s thought, the thought of the social organization |
| of appearance, is itself obscured by the generalized |
| sub-communication which it defends. It does not know that |
| conflict is at the origin of all things in its world. |
| Specialists in the power of the spectacle, an absolute power |
| within its system of language without response, are |
| absolutely corrupted by their experience of contempt and of |
| the success of contempt; and they find their contempt |
| confirmed by their knowledge of the contemptible man, who the |
| spectator really is. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
196.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Within the specialized thought of the spectacular system, a |
| new division of tasks takes place to the extent that the |
| improvement of this system itself poses new problems: on one |
| hand, modern sociology which studies separation by means of |
| the conceptual and material instruments of separation itself, |
| undertakes the spectacular critique of the spectacle; on the |
| other hand, in the various disciplines where structuralism |
| takes root, the apology for the spectacle institutes itself |
| as the thought of non-thought, as the official amnesia of |
| historical practice. Nevertheless, the false despair of |
| non-dialectical critique and the false optimism of pure |
| advertising of the system are identical in that they are both |
| submissive thought. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
197.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| The sociology which began, first in the United States, to |
| focus discussion on the living conditions brought about by |
| present development, compiled a great deal of empirical data, |
| but could not fathom the truth of its subject because it |
| lacked the critique immanent in this subject. As a result, |
| the sincerely reformist tendency of this sociology resorts to |
| morality, common sense, appeals devoid of all relevance to |
| practical measures, etc. Because this type of critique is |
| ignorant of the negative at the core of its world, it insists |
| on describing only a sort of negative surplus which it finds |
| deplorably annoying on the surface, like an irrational |
| parasitic proliferation. This indignant good will, even if |
| genuine, ends up blaming only the external consequences of |
| the system, yet thinks itself critical, forgetting the |
| essentially apologetic character of its assumptions and |
| method. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
198.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Those who denounce the absurdity or the perils of incitement |
| to waste in the society of economic abundance do not |
| understand the purpose of waste. They condemn with |
| ingratitude, in the name of economic rationality, the good |
| irrational guardians without whom the power of this economic |
| rationality would collapse. For example, Boorstin, in |
| L’Image, describes the commercial consumption of the American |
| spectacle but never reaches the concept of spectacle because |
| he thinks he can exempt private life, or the notion of “the |
| honest commodity,” from this disastrous exaggeration. He does |
| not understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose |
| “honest” application leads to the distinct reality of private |
| life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social |
| consumption of images. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
199.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boorstin describes the excesses of a world which has become |
| foreign to us as if they were excesses foreign to our world. |
| But the “normal” basis of social life, to which he implicitly |
| refers when he characterizes the superficial reign of images |
| with psychological and moral judgments as a product of “our |
| extravagant pretentions,” has no reality whatever, either in |
| his book or in his epoch. Boorstin cannot understand the full |
| profundity of a society of images because the real human life |
| he speaks of is for him in the past, including the past of |
| religious resignation. The truth of this society is nothing |
| other than the negation of this society. |
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200.
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| The sociology which thinks that an industrial rationality |
| functioning separately can be isolated from the whole of |
| social life can go so far as to isolate the techniques of |
| reproduction and transmission from the general industrial |
| movement. Thus Boorstin finds that the results he depicts are |
| caused by the unfortunate, almost fortuitous encounter of an |
| oversized technical apparatus for image diffusion with an |
| excessive attraction to the pseudo-sensational on the part of |
| the people of our epoch. Thus the spectacle would be caused |
| by the fact that modern man is too much of a spectator. |
| Boorstin fails to understand that the proliferation of the |
| prefabricated “pseudo-events” which he denounces flows from |
| the simple fact that, in the massive reality of present |
| social life, men do not themselves live events. Because |
| history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, |
| pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of |
| consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened |
| equilibrium of present frozen time. |
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201.
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| The assertion of the definitive stability of a short period |
| of frozen historical time is the undeniable basis, proclaimed |
| consciously and unconsciously, of the present tendency toward |
| a structuralist systematization. The vantage point from which |
| anti-historical structuralist thought views the world is that |
| of the eternal presence of a system which was never created |
| and which will never end. The dream of the dictatorship of a |
| preexisting unconscious structure over all social praxis |
| could be erroneously drawn from models of structures |
| elaborated by linguistics and anthropology (and even the |
| analysis of the functioning of capitalism)–models already |
| misunderstood in this context–only because the academic |
| imagination of minor functionaries, easily overwhelmed and |
| completely entrenched in the awestruck celebration of the |
| existing system, flatly reduces all reality to the existence |
| of the system. |
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202.
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| In order to understand “structuralist” categories, one must |
| keep in mind, as with every historical social science, that |
| the categories express forms as well as conditions of |
| existence. Just as one cannot appraise the value of a man in |
| terms of the conception he has of himself, one cannot |
| appraise–and admire–this particular society by taking as |
| indisputably true the language it speaks to itself; “...we |
| cannot judge such epochs of transformation by their own |
| consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must |
| rather be explained in the light of the contradictions of |
| material life...” Structure is the daughter of present power. |
| Structuralism is the thought guaranteed by the State which |
| regards the present conditions of spectacular “communication” |
| as an absolute. Its method of studying the code of messages |
| is itself nothing but the product, and the acknowledgement, |
| of a society where communication exists in the form of a |
| cascade of hierarchic signals. Consequently it is not |
| structuralism which serves to prove the transhistorical |
| validity of the society of the spectacle; it is on the |
| contrary the society of the spectacle imposing itself as |
| massive reality which serves to prove the cold dream of |
| structuralism. |
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203.
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| The critical concept of spectacle can undoubtedly also be |
| vulgarized into a commonplace hollow formula of |
| sociologico-political rhetoric to explain and abstractly |
| denounce everything, and thus serve as a defense of the |
| spectacular system. It is obvious that no idea can lead |
| beyond the existing spectacle, but only beyond the existing |
| ideas about the spectacle. To effectively destroy the society |
| of the spectacle, what is needed is men putting a practical |
| force into action. The critical theory of the spectacle can |
| be true only by uniting with the practical current of |
| negation in society, and this negation, the resumption of |
| revolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself |
| by developing the critique of the spectacle which is the |
| theory of its real conditions (the practical conditions of |
| present oppression), and inversely by unveiling the secret of |
| what this negation can be. This theory does not expect |
| miracles from the working class. It envisages the new |
| formulation and the realization of proletarian imperatives as |
| a long-range task. To make an artificial distinction between |
| theoretical and practical struggle since on the basis defined |
| here, the very formulation and communication of such a theory |
| cannot even be conceived without a rigorous practice it is |
| certain that the obscure and difficult path of critical |
| theory must also be the lot of the practical movement acting |
| on the scale of society. |
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204.
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| Critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It |
| is the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical |
| in form as it is in content. It is critique of the totality |
| and historical critique. It is not “the nadir of writing” but |
| its inversion. It is not a negation of style, but the style |
| of negation. |
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205.
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| In its very style. the exposition of dialectical theory is a |
| scandal and an abomination in terms of the rules and the |
| corresponding tastes of the dominant language, because when |
| it uses existing concrete concepts it is simultaneously aware |
| of their rediscovered fluidity, their necessary destruction. |
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206.
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| This style which contains its own critique must express the |
| domination of the present critique over its entire past. The |
| very mode of exposition of dialectical theory displays the |
| negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like a product in |
| which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made |
| it” (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness of movement, in |
| which the movement’s very trace must be evident, manifests |
| itself by the inversion of the established relations between |
| concepts and by the diversion of all the acquisitions of |
| previous critique. The inversion of the genetive is this |
| expression of historical revolutions, consigned to the form |
| of thought, which was considered Hegel’s epigrammatic style. |
| The young Marx, recommending the technique Feuerbach had |
| systematically used of replacing the subject with the |
| predicate, achieved the most consistent use of this |
| insurrectional style, drawing the misery of philosophy out of |
| the philosophy of misery. Diversion leads to the subversion |
| of past critical conclusions which were frozen into |
| respectable truths, namely transformed into lies. Kierkegaard |
| already used it deliberately, adding his own denunciation to |
| it: “But despite all the tours and detours, just as jam |
| always returns to the pantry, you always end up by sliding in |
| a little word which isn’t yours and which bothers you by the |
| memory it awakens” (Philosophical Fragments). It is the |
| obligation of distance toward what was falsified into |
| official truth which determines the use of diversion, as was |
| acknowledged by Kierkegaard in the same book: “Only one more |
| comment on your numerous allusions aiming at all the grief I |
| mix into my statements of borrowed sayings. I do not deny it |
| here nor will I deny that it was voluntary and that in a new |
| continuation to this pamphlet, if I ever write it, I intend |
| to name the object by its real name and to clothe the problem |
| in historical attire.” |
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207.
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| Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the |
| improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It |
| embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, |
| erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. |
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208.
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| Diversion is the opposite of quotation, of the theoretical |
| authority which is always falsified by the mere fate of |
| having become a quotation a fragment torn from its context, |
| from its movement, and ultimately from the global framework |
| of its epoch and from the precise choice, whether exactly |
| recognized or erroneous, which it was in this framework. |
| Diversion is the fluid language of anti-ideology. It appears |
| in communication which knows it cannot pretend to guarantee |
| anything definitively and in itself. At its peak, it is |
| language which cannot be confirmed by any former or |
| supra-critical reference. On the contrary, its own coherence, |
| in itself and with the applicable facts, can confirm the |
| former core of truth which it brings out. Diversion has |
| grounded its cause on nothing external to its own truth as |
| present critique. |
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209.
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| What openly presents itself as diverted in theoretical form, |
| denying the durable autonomy of the sphere of the |
| theoretically expressed by introducing there, through this |
| violence, the action which upsets and overthrows the entire |
| existing order, reminds us that the existence of theory is |
| nothing in itself, and that it can know itself only through |
| historical action and the historical correction which is its |
| real counterpart. |
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210.
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| Only the real negation of culture can preserve its meaning. |
| It can no longer be cultural. Thus it is what in some way |
| remains at the level of culture, but with a completely |
| different meaning. |
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211.
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| In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture |
| presents itself as a unified critique in that it dominates |
| the whole of culture, its knowledge as well as its poetry, |
| and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique |
| of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique |
| goes alone to meet unified social practice. |
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| Chapter 9 “Ideology Materialized” |
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| Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, |
| and by the fact that it exists for another |
| self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being |
| acknowledged or “recognized.” - Hegel, The Phenomenology of |
| Mind |
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212.
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| Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society in |
| the conflict-laden course of history. Ideological facts were |
| never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed consciousness |
| of realities, and in this form they have been real factors |
| which set in motion real deforming acts; all the more so when |
| the materialization, in the form of spectacle, of the |
| ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized |
| economic production in practice confounds social reality with |
| an ideology which has tailored all reality in terms of its |
| model. |
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213.
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| When ideology, the abstract will and the illusion of the |
| universal, is legitimized by the universal abstraction and |
| the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society, it |
| is no longer a voluntaristic struggle of the partial, but its |
| victory. At this point, ideological pretention acquires a |
| sort of flat positivistic exactitude: it is no longer a |
| historical choice but a fact. In this type of assertion, the |
| particular names of ideologies have disappeared. Even the |
| role of specifically ideological labor in the service of the |
| system comes to be considered as nothing more than the |
| recognition of an “epistemological base” that pretends to be |
| beyond all ideological phenomena. Materialized ideology |
| itself has no name, just as it has no expressible historical |
| program. This is another way of saying that the history of |
| ideologies is over. |
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214.
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| Ideology, whose whole internal logic led to “total ideology” |
| in Mannheim’s sense the despotism of the fragment which |
| imposes itself as pseudo-knowledge of a frozen totality, the |
| totalitarian vision–is now completed in the immobilized |
| spectacle of non-history. Its completion is also its |
| disintegration throughout society. With the practical |
| disintegration of this society, ideology–the final unreason |
| that blocks access to historical life–must disappear. |
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215.
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| The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes |
| and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological |
| systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real |
| life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the |
| separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the |
| “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the |
| spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings |
| to whom man is subservient... grows coextensively with the |
| mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion |
| which has turned need against life. “The need for money is |
| thus the real need produced by political economy, and the |
| only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical |
| Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the |
| principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) |
| conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what |
| is dead, moving within itself.” |
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216.
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| In opposition to the project summarized in the Theses on |
| Feuerbach (the realization of philosophy in praxis which |
| supersedes the opposition between idealism and materialism), |
| the spectacle simultaneously preserves, and imposes within |
| the pseudo-concrete of its universe, the ideological |
| characteristics of materialism and idealism. The |
| contemplative side of the old materialism which conceives the |
| world as representation and not as activity–and which |
| ultimately idealizes matter–is fulfilled in the spectacle, |
| where concrete things are automatically the masters of social |
| life. Reciprocally, the dreamed activity of idealism is |
| equally fulfilled in the spectacle, through the technical |
| mediation of signs and signals-which ultimately materialize |
| an abstract ideal. |
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217.
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| The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia, established |
| by Gabel (La Fausse Conscience) must be placed in this |
| economic process of materialization of ideology. Society has |
| become what ideology already was. The removal of praxis and |
| the anti-dialectical false consciousness which accompanies it |
| are imposed during every hour of daily life subjected to the |
| spectacle; this must be understood as a systematic |
| organization of the “failure of the faculty of encounter” and |
| as its replacement by a hallucinatory social fact: the false |
| consciousness of encounter, the “illusion of encounter.” In a |
| society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, |
| every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality. |
| Ideology is at home; separation has built its world. |
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218.
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| “In clinical charts of schizophrenia,” says Gabel, “the decay |
| of the dialectic of totality (with dissociation as its |
| extreme form) and the decay of the dialectic of becoming |
| (with catatonia as its extreme form) seem solidly united.” |
| The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened |
| universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which |
| his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers |
| who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the |
| politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its |
| entirety, is his “mirror image.” Here the stage is set with |
| the false exit of generalized autism. |
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219.
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| The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and |
| world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence |
| of the world and it obliterates the boundaries between true |
| and false by driving all lived truth below the real presence |
| of fraud ensured by the organization of appearance. One who |
| passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward |
| a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by |
| resorting to magical techniques. The acceptance and |
| consumption of commodities are at the heart of this |
| pseudo-response to a communication without response. The need |
| to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the |
| infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his |
| fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a |
| completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need |
| for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of |
| being on the margin of existence.” |
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220.
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| If the logic of false consciousness cannot know itself truly, |
| the search for critical truth about the spectacle must |
| simultaneously be a true critique. It must struggle in |
| practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle |
| and admit that it is absent where they are absent. The |
| abstract desire for immediate effectiveness accepts the laws |
| of the ruling thought, the exclusive point of view of the |
| present, when it throws itself into reformist compromises or |
| trashy pseudo-revolutionary common actions. Thus madness |
| reappears in the very posture which pretends to fight it. |
| Conversely, the critique which goes beyond the spectacle must |
| know how to wait. |
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221.
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| Emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth this |
| is what the self-emancipation of our epoch consists of. This |
| “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot |
| be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the |
| atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by |
| the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all |
| classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of |
| realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory |
| controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible |
| only where individuals are “directly linked to universal |
| history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own |
| conditions victorious. |
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| Guy Debord Archive |
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