30 pages • 1 hour read
Guy DebordThe Society of the Spectacle
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
Proletariat
The figure of the proletariat, which appears throughout Debord’s text, is used in the sense Marx and Engels originally intended: namely, the self-organization of the working class that transforms society and thereby renders it as truly equal and free. However, Debord breaks with the way the term was understood by Lenin and Stalin insofar as both understood the proletariat as a collective subject that is to be guided and represented by a worker’s Party-State. For Debord, the Leninist and Stalinist error is to envision class struggle as a struggle over electoral representation, since he views electoral politics as inherently incapable of providing the type of societal change originally desired by Marx and Engels: “the representation of the working class has opposed itself radically to the working class” (Section 100). It is for this reason that just as Debord celebrates the figure of the proletariat, he also criticizes leftists who continue to view the status of the proletariat as a class that can liberate itself by means of parliamentary politics.
The Commodity
When Debord speaks of the commodity, he is referring to Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form as found in Capital. In the opening chapters of this text, Marx argues that commodities, or goods that are purchased and that satisfy basic needs, have a dual character. On the one hand, commodities are defined by their use-value, or by the material properties that satisfy human necessities, such as housing, food, water, and so forth. On the other hand, commodities are defined by their exchange-value, or by the fact that they are objects that circulate and are traded on the market.
These two aspects of the commodity are significant for Marx precisely because knowing the use-value and exchange-value of a commodity still does not tell us anything about the laboring conditions required to produce the project. Thus, for Marx and for Debord, commodities are also defined as congealed labor power, given in the form of an exchangeable or consumable object.
The conclusion that is reached by Marx, and that Debord takes as his starting point, is that without any account of the conditions required for the production of commodities, we fail to provide a complete analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Moreover, by revealing the fact that commodities erase the trace of the labor that has gone into their production, Marx and Debord claim that any true analysis of capitalism must not simply begin with the circulation and consumption of commodities but with labor and its conditions, since it is this that is lacking from the analyses that arise from classical political economics.
