Its
existence depends on the outcome of the class struggle that
is both product and producer of the economic foundation
of history.
=====

Here we end today. It is pleased it got to articulate some thoughts on class composition & unity. This is probably one of its own greatest & most satisfying breaks with marxist thought.

Marxists think that class struggle shapes history because class is the division that deal most directly deals with material conditions. Naturally, this is insufficient to account for all the other sorts of ideology that arise alongside or independently of class. These ideologies have a relationship with class at some point, of course, but just as the features of a culture cannot be strictly predicted from that culture's material conditions--even less so can the ideologies that arise out of a culture be predicted out of material conditions. Nevertheless, the two bear upon one another. There's no real singular or predictable reason an ideology like "race" should have emerged from the alliances & conflicts from that little Asian subcontinent called "europe," but it did, & it became a globally organizing force that radically reshaped material conditions & led to massive & lasting cultural changes.

Hence class transcendence alone will not "fix" human society into a post-economic subject. To cite Debord contra Debord, the economy will instead fall into ruin. It is a passing historical phase. Its end is close at hand. Capitalism is a finite relationship predicated on cheap & efficient non-renewable fuel, & soon that fuel will be gone.

The coming Commune (not communism) represents nothing more than an egalitarian survival principle for weathering the transition back into the anti-economical world. Those who embrace it may experience the kingdom of heaven, while those who reject it will have to sleep with one eye open for fear of their workers & slaves.

See you next time for the conclusion of Book 2, gentle mages.

This subject can only arise out
of society, that is, out of the struggle within society.
=====

Debord's unity, his idea of a post-economic "I," arises from social conflicts.

You may remember from Book 1 that Debord imagines society was more unified in the past. Many, perhaps most, marxists believe the past was a classless society & that communist society will be classless again. However, this is based on an over-simplification Marx published in The Communist Manifesto wherein all history was characterized as the struggle between classes & reduced, in his era, to a duality: Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat.

As others have gone on to theorize--especially Gramsci, among the marxists--class society is much more complicated. Even Marx, in Capital, did some work to acknowledge that accountants, landlords, farmers, & clerks constitute their own forces to be reckoned with. Your humble creature does not stand for two-class reductionism, although it acknowledges the bourgeoisie to be one of history's leading villains, as classes go.

But wherever Debord comes down on this articulation of society's classes, here he asserts that such a struggle can lead to a world-historical subject, an "I" of classes, which is probably a globally united proletariat.

Mutiny disagrees, suggesting the procedural order writ large looks less like 1. organize proletariat; 2. seize the state; 3. state withers away into classless society & more like 1. organize dual power through mutual aid; 2. pillage capital for resources; 3. imagine new social classes & relationships.

We need to be choosier about when & how we seek unity, & have less of it & of higher quality, & cease this fruitless quest for large-scale answers that only lead to squabbling. More factions--more sectarianism--more temporary alliances built on shared goals & interests, & fewer hollow abstractions about peace or states or whatever.

The economic Id
must be replaced by the I.
=====

Debord says we can assert some manner of agency, as if by identifying what is at work in the economy, we can take control of it. As if by some process of social psychoanalysis we can move from unconscious reaction to conscious control.

Such an assertion strikes this creature as untrue, however.

Between Marx's Capital & this work of Debord there passes some 80 years. Between Debord & our day, another 60.

Simply put, this has not happened, this "realization" of communism. Something called the spectacle has not caused something called the economy to simply wither away--has not put the means of production into the control of the masses. Analysis, consciousness, alone does not effect this.

This is too much emphasis on "progress," the idea that communism is a historical victory of human consciousness *over* its machines to harness control of the productive force. Typically marxists think of this victory as one of rational organization, a one-world state divided into hundreds or thousands of intricate federations, all pulling for the development of well-apportioned societies for the good of humankind.

Mutiny's position proclaims this unity impossible, unnecessary, & undesirable.

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Section 2:52

Once society discovers that it depends on the economy,
the economy in fact depends on the society. When the
subterranean power of the economy grew to the point
of visible domination, it lost its power.
=====

Aligning with what Debord said last time about Freudian social psychology: "the economy" only really had power when humans were not thinking about it. Once analysis began, once it became an object of attention & conversation & policy, then it actually comes under human control.

Now participants do not make unconscious choices about what they do economically: they make justifications.

Therein lies the economy's ruin--to Debord, at least.

"Whatever is conscious wears out. What is unconscious
remains unalterable. But once it is freed, does it not fall to
ruin in its turn?" (Freud).
=====

Anyway--enough about white people & their horrible little secrets.

Here's a Freud quote about something else!

Debord is reminding us that whatever we turn our conscious attention towards, we eventually let go. But what dwells in our unconscious persists. But that which we let out of our unconscious also falls to *ruin.*

This creature likes that, not just because it is invested in the idea of ruin, but because the implication is also that our everyday attention, certainly, just wear out--not unlike a commodity--but underneath our mundane experience a persistent system--an *economy* some (is it Lacan?) might say--operates, & when we turn our attention to it, the result is much worse than just a worn out idea. It becomes a whole system of disaster.

Fear not, gentle mages, but join me here next time, if you like. You will always find your Mutiny in the ruins, waiting on your call

But that economy loses all
connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges
from the social unconscious that unknowingly depended on
it.
=====

Despite any shrill insistence to the contrary, the economy has never been *fair,* it has never delivered. We know this because we ask for the receipts & the state would sooner burn the economy down than let us see what happens behind the ekon door.

The secret of the so-called free economy is its hierarchy, its patriarchy: its racist white male character & the paid-off traitors with whom it surrounds itself like a dictator surrounded by human shields.

This is why the spectacle shows us everywhere the image of Sylvia Plath's "daddy" as an avatar of untouchable, arbitrary power. To shut us up. To make us go away. Forever, if necessary.

Because the old white male, in the final analysis, remains the fundamental programmatic element of threat & authority. He has been hammered into our heads from birth, no matter our race, no matter our gender. We have *dared* to ignore Him & so the spectacle finds a Him to remind us of our "place."

It works.

You seem to speak of nothing else.

Replacing
that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic
development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of
primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant
fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come
down to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign
of the autonomous economy.
=====

Economic growth is limited on a limited planet, but capitalism retains a quasi-Platonist ideal wherein abstractions ("forever," "perfection," "success") drive social relationships.

Therefore, long after human needs & even desires could be satisfied, new needs must be made up. Meanwhile, the abstract relationship ideals capitalism could not deliver upon--equality, justice, freedom--it had to manage, & in doing so exposed the contradictions in its foundations.

This is why we have what this creature calls today our "gender renaissance." Capitalism made it possible & impossible at the same time, & has been unable to coopt us, not just because gender is simultaneously personal & collective but because it means "category."

To make sure we kept buying in, capitalism handed us the keys to the castle: the ability to collectively renegotiate meaning & ritual.

We *become* the spectacle today, & in doing so, transform performance into particiation.

At last, ia, ia, at last.

The economy's triumph as an independent power at the
same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has
unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity that
was the unchanging basis of earlier societies.
=====

We've looked in the past at how the idea of "the economy" grows out of the Greek & Roman household, with their slavery & their "familia." This has led us to look at the unhappy way economics reflects a Freudian economy of desire, & how the spectacle reflects the family back at us in order to retain countless microcosms of authority. It spreads into every corner of society & comes at us through every narrative--in even the way rainbow capitalism has sold queer folks on "found family."

But this big win of the spectacle over all our lives, which separates our lived experience & sells it back to us through ready-made scripts--

Debord rightly associates its victory with its defeat.

In many ways, its narratives, its communication webs, have made it easier than ever to see through the bullshit conditions which gave rise to it.

Because we could easily take care of everyone's needs, we slowly divest ourselves of the stories created by deprivation. They have remained, but the cracks show--much more every day today than even in the most brilliant flashes of the late 1960s.

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Section 2:51
=====

Over the last few chapters we have looked at how the spectacle grows out of economics & infiltrates our dreams. This is especially important as the commodification of culture in turn gives rise to the grey goo of AI.

Today, however, Debord begins to talk a little about the cracks which show. Admittedly, sometimes sharing analysis of this text feels like a bit of preaching to the choir here, because much of Debord's ideas have been firmly rooted in leftist thought for some decades. Nevertheless, your humble creature hopes that there might still lie some useful ideas in Debord that those of you following along can use.

Time will tell, hmm? Let's dig in.

The entire
expanse of society is its portrait.
=====

Here we end today, with the portrait of capital filling our every waking image & our every sleeping dream.

What wonder, our mental anguish, our emotional decrepitude, our moral malaise, our spiritual exhaustion, our cultural struggle, stared in the face with the dead gaze of slavery & abuse day in & out?

The wonder is that centuries later we still nurture the fire of resistance.

Those of us who cried foul about the system's bankruptcy were right & continue to be right, & because more resist than ever, those in charge peel off the plastic veneer & show us fascism's skull.

See you next time

Capital is no longer the invisible center governing
the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the
ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects.
=====

If Debord is right, then at some point capital was a pivot-point in production. Perhaps in many ways we still think of it in such terms, as if factories or banks were the center. But then, this would mean earlier in the globalization project (which began with the european invasion) banks & factories were once invisible.

In some ways, the historical record might bear that up. Here we might think of the young women working in textile mills once upon a time in the US. Theoretically some USians know they exist, but perhaps cannot place them on a timeline or know anything about them, despite recovery work that even brings us their letters home. If pressed, a USian might identify the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, or speak more generally about the horrors of child labor (they persist).

But perhaps so little is known--so much remains unknown--because they are private property. No one (not even federal inspectors, not really) go in without permission. It's worse still with the banks. Do we know their true origins? Or the role of financial infrastructure played in, say, land grabs & human trafficking (the purchase of enslaved people)?

Yet these are the origins of the "tangible objects" all around us today. We stand not on the backs of giants but on the corpses of the sacrificed.

Has it been worth it?

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Section 2:50

With the achievement of economic abundance, the concentrated
result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all
reality to the appearances that are now that labor's primary
product.
=====

Last time we spoke at some length about base & superstrucutre, & how money & spectacle correspond to material & cultural reality.

Today, Debord reminds us in 19-fucking-67 that manufacturing has more than enough power to provide everything to everyone. (We were so close, sometimes.) Already by then most labor was going to "keeping up appearances."

Has most technology since the invention of the photograph been mainly a matter of cultural manipulation towards market purposes?

We'll say yes, of course. We know & yet we participate anyway--because capitalist culture does not discourage cynicism. It allows for a cultural stratum of analysis--from us it plucks its subclass of directors.

It is the added gesture, the shrug that says "but what else can you do?" that has been the unassailable fortress of cultural capitalism--until recently.

The spectacle is not just a servant of pseudo-use, it is already
in itself a pseudo-use of life.
=====

Here we end for the day, dear ones.

Debord's major contribution, simply & restated. All the narratives around us get bent into a shape that funnels us towards capital, & that is the spectacle: it tells us how to live our lives as servants of value, which is, of course, no life at all.

Life has no inherent value. We are told--of course!--to give it value, but this is--of course!--a labor, & those who would have us make valued lives want to use it for making--what else?--a killing.

When there's no value left for them to wring out, they'll terminate the contract. Yet you still want to live? Does this not already prove there's something else to life than its abstract "value"? That reinhabiting your life means giving up on "its use"?

Here we reach the limits of language & culture, at least as your abominable companion knows them, so it turns back to you & invites you to roam free. Til next time

The spectacle is
money one can only look at, because in it all use has already
been exchanged for the totality of abstract representation.
=====

Living before the digital age, Debord assumes the spectacle to already be devoid of use. Looking around us, we assume now that things like NFTs represent peak uselessness.

Neither needs to be strictly true, of course. Utility still hangs onto a productivist framework in these statements, too. Consider:

"I bought a cheap plastic hammer but it broke right away! Alas. Tools used to be useful! Now they are worthless."

Such a line of argument still assumes that value adheres in use. Thus an old hammer with a strong wooden handle & a hearty metal head ought to fetch a better price, right? It would be "worth" it because it would be better suited to the "job" you must do with it.

Just in the same way, we complain that an NFT is worthless, mere capital accumulation without true value, because you can "use" it for nothing.

Many economists in Marx's time thought that if one could just append a price to utility instead of exchange--abracadabra!--the riddle of economics is solved, all hail socialism, &c. (That is why in texts such as "Critique of the Gotha Programme" Marx criticizes work vouchers--but also, in a way, this is why Foucault, arguing with Maoists in the 1970s, criticized them for wanting to institute "people's police," "people's courts," &c.--in similar ways, critics of capital try to merely move the emphasis without changing or addressing the core contradictions.)

To say a "nice" hammer has value because it has use & to measure all commodities by their use retains the idea that they have a generally universal equivalence, that they have some quality called "worth" that can be measured & exchanged.

For the moment Debord misses the point. Marx, too, may have missed this point.

Value cannot be an inherent property of anything.

In other words:

Money tells us how to value commodities.

Spectacle tells us how to value stories around them.

But whereas money
has dominated society as the representation of universal
equivalence-the exchangeability of different goods whose
uses remain uncomparable-the spectacle is the modern
complement of money: a representation of the commodity
world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for
what the entire society can be and can do.
=====

First, a careful explanation, & then next an aside for the very simple take-away.

Money means you can exchange one thing for another even if those things have very different uses. Is this not the lesson drilled into our heads by "econ 101"? If, somehow, Chi ends up with two lawn mowers, this is illogical if Chi owns only one lawn (or even multiple lawns, really!). But if Chi wants to get rid of one lawn mower, how will they recapture the value of what is lost, or even know what that value could be? If Qen comes by with a box of scented candles for barter, how is Chi supposed to know if that is a good deal? Money gives everything measure. A supposedly neutral arbitrator, an objective intervention--between what?--wants & needs of course, & never mind the fuzzy nature of--desire.

So, too, the spectacle assumes a neutral, arbitrating position. It has many names & functions like "common sense" & "values" & "logic" & "rights," but just as it does not matter if you call money "cash" or "moolah" or "dinero" or "ATM tampons" the function has generally been made invisible.

All scripts provided by the spectacle bend towards the singular act of payment. All courts, all churches, all television shows & newspapers, all dinner-time conversations, all the elaborate wedding rituals & going to therapy & arguments about whose purse-snatching gets televised--it all comes down to one moment. It all directs us to a singular cultural act, the consummation for which capitalism holds its breath:

When you stick your card in the chip reader.

It, too, is an abstract
general equivalent of all commodities.
=====

Thus Debord gets us into some complicated territory vis-a-vis his Marxist inspiration with statements like these, & if you are an anarchist & have followed your Mutiny thus far, perhaps this provides some recompense for having to hold your nose while we spoke of such things as commodity circuits & capital valuation. (More likely, however, this is the very technical Marxism which few anarchists take issue with--precisely because avowed marxists rarely put it forward for attack--because even among marxists, few enough have read this! Ha.)

What, precisely, the fuck does it mean for the spectacle to be the "flip side" of the universal equivalent & *also* be "an" abstract general equivalent of all commodities?

This is Debord's weird, quasi-mystical approach to Marxist ideas.

To get into it, perhaps let us think of two Marxist levels in society: base & superstructure.

Base refers to the immediate mode of production: factories, capital, money, circulation, valuation, market prices, transactions, the general body of labor, the reproduction of workers.

Superstructure refers to the part of society which "sits on top" of the base & exerts an influence upon it but nonetheless also depends on that base for material support: courts, churches, the affordability of housing, the prevalent cuisine, how one says Good Morning, which neighborhoods end up with the brunt of pollution, the wastewater company, what people do when they run out of tea.

You will no doubt notice right away that the latter category includes what we think of as institutions & culture (but remember "work" in the strictly production-distribution sense remains the base, because capitalist society requires it to be arranged a certain way). Spectacle is the "flip side" to money because money:base::spectacle:superstructure.

In other words, spectacle is the cultural equivalent of money.

What some call "cultural capital" today.

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Section 2:49

The spectacle is the flip side of money.
=====

Welcome back, gentle mages. Last we spoke, it was of commodities. Now we speak of money, about which it may be altogether too easy to glide over.

Marx--to whom Debord owes a debt (ha)--speaks ad nauseam about money, its evolution, its forms. The only phrase from Capital that matters to your humble creature is "universal equivalent."

By pretending all things can be equated to money, money pretends that all things can be equated: universal equivalent.

Uni = one
versal = wordish
equi = equal
valent = value

One word for everything, then: money.

In the beginning there was money; from money all phenomena issue & to money all phenomena return: this is capital's sole scripture.