Social Democracy and the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle, Social Democracy, and the Economy
Since 1967 it has become more and more common to hear that we’re living in a spectacle. Matt Christman, for instance, mentions this often. Chris Hedges has talked about the Empire of illusion. Even the New York Times has referred to Debord’s concept as a way to explain the Trump years.
But just what is the Spectacle? According to Debord, the Spectacle is nearly everything.
“Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content, the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.”
The dominance of the Spectacle can perhaps most easily be discerned in the realm of politics, it can be seen whenever political activity appears as a struggle for change even as what is accomplished is the maintenance of the present conditions. Conversely, the Spectacle can also appear as an attempt to preserve liberal bourgeois society at the precise moment when bourgeois values are disintegrating or being overturned.
The concept of the Spectacle emerged when the ruling ideology of capitalism shifted from Fordism into the so-called information age, but according to Debord, the Spectacle is not merely a collection of images and information but is the way our social relationships are mediated by images and communication technologies.
In this video, we’ll be considering just what those social relationships between people really are in themselves, and asking if images and information are the primary mediators. We’ll take up the question of the culture war as Spectacle by turning to Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies,” as we quote from Steven Paxton’s “Unlearning Marx,” and we’ll examine Debord’s critique of economism as we attempt to develop at least the beginnings of a new understanding of how the economy influences our cultural and political expression.
In 2017 when we published Angela Nagle’s “Kill All Normies” we aimed to intervene in the leftist discourse and discourage participation in the culture war. Taking up a position on the woke side of this battle would, we thought, only mean accepting a right-wing frame that would lead the left into an anti-politics. Becoming fully woke would we feared, ultimately lead to the dissolution of the left as a liberatory project. However, Nagle’s book itself was not written with this aim in mind. It was not written as a warning against participation in the culture war but was instead an analysis of the culture war and a critique of the left’s tactics in the fight.
We felt that Nagle’s call to reject the prevailing left tactics in the culture war was a necessary, but insufficient, step towards rediscovering working-class politics. What is also necessary, but possibly not sufficient, is to consider how economic conditions influence our politics and our culture.
For instance, let’s entertain the idea that the January 6th uprising at the Capitol was ultimately caused by the economic crises of 2008 and the repeat of the crisis in 2020. Imagine that the Brexit vote and the election of Trump can both be traced back to the kind of precarity and often real poverty that the 2008 crisis wrought. Consider that both the BLM riots and the Capitol Riot both arose in response to social isolation and massive unemployment. The sense of hopelessness that sprang from COVID 19 and the lockdowns, the looming evictions, bankruptcies, joblessness, and death along with the anti-social but entirely rational fear of other human beings as vectors for the disease, “radicalized” different people in different ways. In the case of BLM, young people of many different races were radicalized against the State’s instruments of repression. They targeted the agents of State-sanctioned violence, as they sought the immediate cause of their own distress and as they reacted to the murder of George Floyd.
The Trumpists, meanwhile, found a different target, a more fantastic and ethereal culprit. Rather than blame the agents of State authority that were ready to hand, they blamed the elites they could see on television, and most especially the elites who justified their rules and rule, not by the threat of the use of force, but through a claim to moral righteousness and indirect coercion. The Trumpists blamed the media personality, the politician, the “deep state,” and when they pierced the final veil, a group of pedophilic extra-dimensional beings or demons.
What neither group could manage, however, was to blame themselves collectively for the problems they were facing. Atomized, caught up in Debord’s Spectacle,” even when they could manage to attempt to think systematically and materially, they could only act spontaneously through the culture war that had replaced politics in America.
In his book “Unlearning Marx” Steve Paxton notes that not everyone in a class society is in a position to contribute to the struggle for socialism.
“It is important to recognize that the potential for revolutionary action is not a necessary feature of all class locations. Marx never predicted a necessary revolutionary role for the petty-bourgeoisie, for example.” In fact, Marx did think that neither the petty-bourgeoisie nor the lumpenproletariat could lead a revolutionary movement.
The difficulty for Marxists today is not only the rise of the petty-bourgeois but also is taking in the reality of the defeat of proletarian struggle that did exist historically and accepting that partial or seeming victories have ended up strengthening the hold that capital, and the various classes that align with capital, has or have on society. And when we consider Debord’s theory of the Spectacle, we have to analyze the hold Capital (and the economic conditions it brings) has on the workers and on their consciousness.
For American Marxists, the question that arises in this New Year, under this new American President, is a long-standing one: What has become of the proletariat?
The Second International was formed in October of 1881 in Chur, and for the sake of convenience, we’ll designate it as the definitive expression of working-class political power or subject. There had been working-class organizations before of course, for instance, the Chartist movement in England, the Communist League, The Communards, the Levelers, and the Diggers, but the Second International while more than a century gone, is both more proximate to us than the others, and the most recognizably political organization. It was closest to being truly proletarian in so much as it aimed to develop a strictly working-class politics of liberation.
The history of the defeat of the Second International is the history of splits. After the SPD voted to support war credits there was a split between the Social Democrats and what called itself the Spartacus Group, and by 1918 the Sparts, following the lead of the newly ascendant Bolsheviks in Russia, renamed themselves, Communists. That same year the workers moved with spontaneity to overthrow the Constitutional Monarchy and the Social Democrats institute a more democratic Parliamentary form of government in Germany. The Social Democrats established a new constitutional republic that year, but the workers continued to riot and demonstrate. Some historians characterize this as the workers revolting against themselves. However, according to Reinhard Rurup in an essay entitled Problems of the German Revolution and published in the Journal of Contemporary History in 1968, the workers were acting on their conviction that democratization by evolutionary means had no chance of success.
However, it happened, there were two moments of revolutionary struggle in those years, the first in October of 1918 and the second in January of 1919. The first pushed out the old Imperial Monarchy and established what would become the Weimar Republic, and the second was, according to Rurup, “a protest movement without a real will to power... a series of unplanned mass demonstrations which took on a likeness to civil war.”
When describing the cause for the failure of the 1918 and 1919 German revolution, Rurup seems to echo the writings of the early Christopher Lasch, who described the failure of the American socialist movement in his book The Agony of the American Left. Lasch described how the American socialists split into left and right tendencies. And he insisted that the left tendency, with its revolutionary ambition and drawing inspiration from the Bolsheviks, became more and more cut off from the concerns and lives of working people.
Still, the example of the 1919 uprisings demonstrates that the workers can struggle and riot in response both to authoritarian governments and in response to the piecemeal and ineffective policies of social democrats. What we can’t answer is why, with the possible exception of the Russian Revolution (a revolution that distinctly did not rely on the working class alone to succeed, and that was NOT fought against capitalism per se, but overthrew an absolutist monarchical regime), the more radical tradition is nearly always out to lunch, disconnected, and seemingly utopian in the worst sense?
By the time Guy Debord wrote his Society of the Spectacle, the failure of the German revolution had brought on fascism and another world war. The failed revolution had set up circumstances that set the worst aspects of bourgeois society loose upon the world, and that helped the capitalist economy set itself right again during yet another depression.
Debord wrote during the post-war boom, at a time when the left was asking itself not why are the radicals always out to lunch, but rather why are the workers authoritarian.
Perhaps the first question answers the second?
In his Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord quoted the one-time Marxist economist Werner Sombart, the man who coined the term “late capitalism” with scorn. As part of his critique of scientism Debord attacked the economism of the Marxists, and quoted Sombart as an example of what had gone wrong, as an example of how the writings of Marx had become the basis of Marxism.
“Why,” Sombart asked, “would we want to seize through struggle what merely needs to be proved?”
But, Debord objectivizes the Spectacle in the same way that the Marxists objectivizes the economy. The Spectacle is, according to Marx, the ideological force that creates the idea that reality is objective, that it is out there beyond us operating its magic in secret, and that all that we can do is fatalistically observe the mechanism as it works itself out.
But, according to Debord the Spectacle is not a mere idea or even a world view but is also a practical and material reality.
“In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false.”
Even Debord claims that the economic realm really does operate out there, objectively. Workers, when they enter into economic production, are separated materially from what they make. As workers, they cannot change the world as it unfolds, but merely observe the way it changes.
Before Debord, revolutionaries like Rosa Luxembourg hoped that this objective process would change the workers themselves. Through an increase of production, through the development of transitional reforms, through the socialization of labor in the factories, the workers would be molded by capital itself into capital’s active adversaries. The working class was expected to find its way to politics, to the use of power by means of violence, authority, and will. But, unlike the bourgeois class who could see the world they wanted already in formation, the proles were expected to act on faith. They were expected to perform magic tricks.
After WW2 leftist theorists explained why the workers continued to fail to pull a rabbit out of a hat, failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
What Debord misses is the contradiction in his own theory and in Marxist theory in general. A theoretical proof for revolutionary socialism, a scientific or at least rational working out of how to transcend commodity production, can only be proved by the proletariat revolution and the proletariat revolution will only arrive once some sort of proof is already on offer.
As we’ve seen over the last year, the working class (along with many other classes) can easily be led into the streets or arrive there spontaneously, without any positive project. When the workers are unleashed spontaneously the reformers rush in, as do the grifters.
And when we think of the relationship between the failures of the left and the forces of reaction, when we consider how reaction tends to follow our failure, we can look at the Sanders campaign and Capitol Riots and see them as reflections of each other. A pseudo-social democratic political revolution was put down...twice. Each time it was followed by a cartoon parody of reactionary totalitarianism. Once in the form of Trump himself, and once as a pseudo-event staged by his most deluded followers.