Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle: PART TWO [Chapters 3-6]

"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[.]"

- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Welcome back readers! By popular request, we're bringing back (for a new generation of LMRG readers) an old favourite: the always-relevant Guy Debord and his masterful Society of the Spectacle.

This is meeting two, where we'll be reading the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters.

Find the classic text here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm

Or an alternative, possibly more readable translation here: https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf

Often maligned as theorymaxxed nonsense but little-read, this slim volume is certainly dense with ideas - all of which carry as much relevance today as those half-forgotten postwar years when the Situationist International made its mark on the world, if not more. With the rise of the Internet and social media, the decline of literacy and the closing of the mass mind, the endless doom-loop of doomscrolling and bed-rotting, increasingly performative protest, the commodification of everything, the Epstein-approved culture war, and the theatre of spectacular cruelty that is imperialist colonial policy from Gaza to Venezuela, we really are living an age where everything that was once directly participated in has passed into representation. Every hand-grip one searches for to get some kind of grasp on the world seems to be a mirage; "participation" in anything, from politics to culture, has been reduced to fandom - limited to nothing more than expressing approval or disapproval through totally mediated social media platforms.

Above it all stands an utterly corrupt, irresponsible elite class more and more transparent in how it relishes in conspiratorial play, power-games with unlimited stakes for us and no consequences for them. Such a world where power wears a shit-eating grin and keeps us off our balance by endlessly "flooding the zone" (in Steve Bannon's terms) with distractions so intricate they short-circuit the collective brain is exactly what Debord not only predicted but described in frightening detail, with more than a little bit of humour.

So let's dig in and find out: just what can we do to unplug from the spectacle? Is the spectacle even un-plug-from-able? Debord haters, cope and seethe: as a much more orthodox Marxist than he ever gets credit for, there really are some strategies in here. We just need to be creative.

Take care and happy reading!