The Society of the Spectacle

“With the generalized separation of the worker from his product every unitary viewpoint of accomplished activity and all the direct personal communication among producers, are lost. Accompanying the progress of the accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become exclusively the attribute of the directorate of the system. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.” 

What Debord has in mind in this passage is Marx’s insight that as capital expands and develops across the globe, there will be an increasing need for workers, or what Marx calls ‘labor-power.’ It is in this sense that the “success” of capitalism to have become globally integrated means the “proletarianization of the world.”

“However, when commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized the total domination of the economy […] This incessant deployment 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 posed over again each time at a higher level.” 

This passage builds upon Debord’s earlier argument that what is definitive of the capitalist economy and the society of the spectacle is not simply exploitation of labor for profit. Rather, what defines capitalist economies from previous economic forms throughout history is its ability to organize all of a society’s capacities towards the singular end of ever-increasing accumulation and expansion. 

“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 considering him ‘in his leisure, in his humanity,’ this [...] worker suddenly washed of the total scorn which is clearly shown to him by all the modalities of organization and surveillance of production, finds himself each day, outside of production, seemingly treated as a grown up, with a zealous politeness under the mask of a consumer. Then the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the ‘leisure and humanity’ of the worker, simply because political economy can and must now dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the ‘perfect denial of man’ has taken charge of the totality of human existence.” 

For Debord, the “humanism of the commodity” testifies to a person’s growing separation between their position within capitalist society as exploited labor and the images and aspirations this society encourages people to identify with. Insofar as people continue to identify with the images of upward mobility,they continue to deny the fact that capitalism is organized in such a way that there will always be a need for a division between rich and poor, between workers and capitalists; a division that reveals the fundamental inequality at the heart of a supposedly equal and free society. 

“The struggle of powers constituted for the management of the same socio-economic system spreads as an official contradiction but is in fact a real unity—on a world scale as well as within every nation.” 

In this quote, Debord is providing a summary analysis of the Leninist model of revolution, which viewed the aim of socialist revolution as the seizure of State power by a working-class party, backed by its unions, and an organized mass and popular base within the nation’s people. However, it should be noted that Debord’s summary is meant as a criticism. For Debord, whether the party was capitalist or communist, they inevitably played the role as the managers of globally-integrated capitalism and the expansion of the alienation at the heart of the spectacle into all facets of everyday life. 

“The concentrated spectacle essentially belongs 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 [...] The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself must choose everything; external choices, whether they concern food or music, already represent the choice of the total destruction of the bureaucracy [...] Everyone must magically identify with this absolute celebrity, or disappear. Master of non-consumption, he is the heroic image of an acceptable direction for absolute exploitation which is in fact primitive accumulation accelerated by terror. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, the police also rules.” 

The connection Debord is making between the Spectacle and the police comes from the history of the French Statecraft, which understood policing as originally meaning the administration and surveillance of the everyday life of its citizens. For Debord, the reign of commodity production and laboring for the sake of the expansion and reproduction of capital accumulation becomes the new logic by which the everyday lives of citizens is organized and arranged.     

“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 […] 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 reason, the specific of the commodity-form moves on towards its absolute realization.” 

Here, Debord is describing the character of capitalist economies taken as a whole. The personification of a commodity that competes against other commodities is Debord’s way of saying that every individual and corporation is subject to the demand of accumulation and expansion, and this is both produced by, and the logic of, capitalist society today.

“The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle is the mask of the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production rests.” 

What is at issue in this passage for Debord is the relationship between the Spectacle and capitalism. For Debord, the logic of the spectacle, which defines the condition of life under capitalism, translates to the fact that while capitalist society appears and proclaims itself to be a unified and free society, it is, in reality, structurally founded upon economic inequality. The society of the spectacle is defined, then, by this discrepancy between what capitalism appears to be and how it actually functions and impacts individuals’ livelihoods. 

“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.” 

Debord’s claim here is that the kind of knowledge that is required for changing the world isn’t of the type that simply confirms the reality of one’s experience. Rather, the kind of knowledge that is required is knowing the means necessary for social transformation. Hence, the kind of thought that arises from revolutionary movements is “a knowledge of the dissolution of all that is.”

“The deterministic-scientific side in the thought of Marx was precisely the gap through which the process of ‘ideologization’ penetrated into the theoretical heritage left to the workers’ movement when he was still alive. The coming of the historical subject is still pushed off until later, 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 the revolutionary practice which is the only truth of this negation. What becomes important is to patiently study economic development, and to continue to accept suffering with a Hegelian tranquility, so that the results remain a ‘cemetery of good intentions.’” 

In this passage, Debord is criticizing a particular aspect of Marx’s critique of political economy. According to Marx, the revolutionizing tendencies of the capitalist economy logically develop into a situation that signals the dissolution of capitalism itself (this is what Debord has in mind when he speaks of Marx’s deterministic-scientific side). For Debord, what this ultimately translates into is a form of political quietism where the most significant action a revolutionary can take is to undertake a careful study of the economy and nothing more. The limitation of this position, for Debord, is that the aspiration of political change is now replaced with academic scholasticism.

“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.” 

What Debord is referring to here is the famous thesis put forward by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. What is more, for Marx and Engels, history has progressively simplified this antagonism and, with the advent of modern capitalism, has reduced this antagonism to a struggle between two classes: those who own the means of production (bourgeoisie) and those who do not own the means of production and must sell their labor for a wage (proletariat). Following this line of thinking, Debord draws the conclusion (like many Marxists of his time) that the key difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is that while the former were the class who succeeded and benefit most from the transition from feudalism into capitalism, it is the latter who will be the beneficiaries of the social transformation of capitalism into socialism.

“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, who thought that a maturing process inseparable from economic contradictions, and democratic education of the workers, would reduce the role of the proletarian State to a simple phase of legitimating the new social relations imposing themselves objectively, 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 in 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 greatly different from what had been desired.”

This is a key passage, one in which Debord engages with the historical split between the Marxist and the Anarchist currents of the International Workingmen's Association (also known as the First International). The split occurred over a disagreement regarding the role of the State in revolutionary struggle. For Marx and his supporters (communists), the State was seen as a tool that was to be seized and used by the workers movement in order to inaugurate the socioeconomic measures that would lead to a truly emancipated society. For Bakunin and his supporters (anarchists), the State was not simply a neutral institution that can be used by whatever political party; rather the State inherently functioned as an obstacle to societal progress. This disagreement would come to solidify the historical divergence between communists/marxists, on the one hand, and anarchists/libertarian-communists, on the other.

“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.’ […] 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 simultaneously adopted.” 

Debord is making the claim that to think and understand the world of capitalism does not mean to hold an objective or impartial perspective. Rather, for Debord (and also for Marx), to theorize capitalism means to take a specific perspective in relation to the object of one’s analysis. It is only when thought is understood as partial and oriented that theory and action can fuse together to become revolutionary practice. 

“The same historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and when social-democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the complete birth of the state of affairs which is at the heart of the domination of the modern spectacle: the representation of the working class has opposed itself radically to the working class.” 

With the success of the October Revolution of 1917, the notion of party representation was transformed into an immutable fact of politics. For Debord, however, given the errors and terrors of Soviet Russia, his claim is that perhaps what is needed today is a fundamentally-different image of revolutionary politics, an image no longer tied to that of the Party-State, backed by professional revolutionaries and union leaders. However, because of the lack of critical attempts at engaging with an alternative model of revolution, this notion of working class representation, which was once seen as an avenue for liberation, is now, in fact, an obstacle to be overcome.

“The seizure of a state monopoly of representation and of the defense of the workers’ power, which justified the Bolshevik party, made the party become what it was, the party of the proprietors of the proletariat, essentially eliminating the earlier forms of property.” 

In this passage, Debord is referring to the fact that after the Bolshevik Party seized State power during the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks decided to collective individual property, effectively rendering the State the sole owner and proprietor of the land, instead of allowing for the people themselves to decide, at a local level, what would be done with the land, and by and for whom.

“Man, ‘the negative being who is uniquely to the extent that he suppresses Being,’ is identical to time. Man’s appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his seizure of the deployment 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 […] 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.”

In this passage, Debord is defining the essence of human being as temporal and does so for a number of reasons. Human essence is fundamentally temporal not simply because humans are capable of memory and of making history, but because each individual can only be conceived according to the time of their own personal existence. To take away the time of existence from an individual is to fundamentally take away their existence. It is for this reason that Debord argues that time is the essence of human beings. 

“The social appropriation of time, the production of man by human labor, develop within a society divided into classes. The power which constituted itself above the penury of the society of cyclical time, the class which organizes this social labor and appropriates the limited surplus value, at the same time appropriates the temporal surplus value of its organization of social time: it possesses for itself alone the irreversible time of the living. The only wealth which can exist in concentrated form within the realm of power is materially spent in sumptuous feasts and also in the form of a squandering of the historical time at the surface of society [...] This time, separated from the collective organization of time which predominates with the repetitive production at the basis of social life, flows above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war in which the masters of the cyclical society traverse their personal history, 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.”

In this passage, Debord is highlighting the fact that within capitalist societies, exploitation and alienation take the form of exchanging one’s time, which is something one will never get back, for a wage, such that one can reproduce themselves on a daily basis. Thus, in a society that is divided along class lines, where some individuals must work harder and longer than others, the economic inequalities experienced by individuals take on a distinctly temporal quality.

“The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals […] This time is in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character. It is in this social domination by commodity-time that ‘time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time.’ (Poverty of Philosophy). It is devalued time, the complete inversion of time as ‘the field of human development.’” 

In this passage, Debord is elaborating upon a key Marxist insight regarding the kind of life that is made available to individuals who are compelled to sell their labor on the market in exchange for a wage. For Debord, capitalist society is organized according to the time needed to produce commodities. Consequently, the ability of people to develop a life for themselves is continuously subordinated to the spending of their time laboring according to the rhythm of economic production. It is for this reason that Debord, citing Marx, claims that under capitalism, there is a “complete inversion” of the field of human production, and that “time is everything, man is nothing.”

“The society which shapes its entire environment has constructed its special technique for working the concrete base of this collection of tasks—its own territory. Urbanism is this taking hold of the natural and human environment by capitalism; developing logically into absolute domination, it can and must now remake the totality of space as its own stage-setting.” 

Debord is arguing in this passage that alongside the global and local development of capitalist production comes the reorganization of public space; specifically, a reconfiguration of public space that is conducive to the expansion of the production and reproduction of capital accumulation. Such examples of this are the large tourist attractions in cities such as New York or in Debord’s own home city of Paris, France. In both, the majority of tourism and vacation time is centered around centers of consumption (i.e. shopping andrestaurants). Thus, when Debord speaks of urbanism, he is speaking about the construction of city planning that is conducive to the buying and selling of labor and commodities.

“The urbanism which destroys cities recomposes a pseudo-countryside which loses the natural relations of the ancient countryside as well as the direct social relations directly put into question by the historical city. It is a new artificial peasantry which is re-created by the conditions of dwelling and spectacular control within the present ‘organized territory;’ [...] But when this peasantry, which was the unmovable base of ‘Oriental despotism’ and whose very fragmentation called for bureaucratic centralization, reappears as the production of conditions of growth of the modern state bureaucracy, its apathy must now be historically fabricated and maintained; natural ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of error. The ‘new cities’ of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe into the ground their rupture with the historical time on which they were constructed; their motto could be: ‘On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing has ever happened.’ It is obviously because the 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.” 

In this passage, Debord is providing an analysis of the transformation of suburban space against the backdrop of capitalist society. For Debord, suburban space is severed from its historical role as town or countryside, tied to the history of its inhabitants as peasants. In place of this coincidence between town and peasantry comes the construction of suburban space that imitates urban space, which simultaneously renders the inhabitants of the city and the suburbs equivalent as citizens while maintaining the geographical difference that maintains a feeling that life in the suburbs is in some way qualitatively different from city life. 

“The critical truth of this destruction with reference to the real life of poetry and modern 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 depth.” 

Here, Debord is outlining the way in which the logic of the spectacle, which is the essence of how alienation manifests in our contemporary moment, functions through the production of culture, literature, and art. For Debord, the spectacle is clearest seen in the function of modern art and literature, insofar as what defines these artistic movements is the fact that their products (stories, poems, paintings, sculpture, etc.) erase the experience of history from aesthetic experience. For Debord, to erase history is essentially to erase the fundamental truth of capitalist society: that the history of capitalist development is the history of the struggle between Labor and Capital, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

“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 pre-existing unconscious structure over all social praxis was abusively drawn from models of structures elaborated by linguistics and ethnology […] models already abusively understood in these circumstances, simply because the academic imagination of average functionaries […] flatly reduces all reality to the existence of the system.” 

Debord’s discussion of structuralism in this passage refers to the intellectual movement that emerged in postwar France within the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. However, for Debord, the singular flaw at the core of the structuralist movement was its ahistorical method, which inevitably produced ahistorical analyses of social phenomena (language, human societies, social groups, ideas). Just as Debord criticized cultural production for abiding by the logic of the spectacle for erasing the history of class struggle from its products, so too does he criticize structuralism for perpetuating this blindspot at the level of theoretical analyses. 

“Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society within the conflictual course of history. Ideological facts have never been simple chimeras, but deformed consciousnesses of realities, and as such they have been real factors in turn exerting real deforming action.”

In this passage, Debord is giving a name to the kind of analysis of capitalist society that claims to grasp it in its totality but fails to include within itself any account of the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that serves as the very foundation of capitalism itself. In this way, bourgeois or pro-capitalist economic measures are those “deformed consciousnesses of realities” that have a real force and impact in the world.

“Ideology, whose internal logic led to ‘total ideology’ in Mannheim’s sense, the despotism of the fragment which imposes itself as a pseudo-knowledge of a frozen totality, the totalitarian vision, is now accomplished within the immobilized spectacle of non-history.” 

Here, Debord is building off his initial definition of ideology to argue that any account of capitalist society that ignores class struggle is fated to produce a static image of that society. This representation is static because it is history as class conflict that gives movement and development to societies throughout human history.