The Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
Chapter 4 "The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation"
The equal right of all to the goods and enjoyment of this world,
the destruction of all authority, the negation of all moral restraints
-- these, at bottom, are the raison d'être of the March 18th insurrection
and the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an
army.
Enquête parlementaire sur l'insurrection du 18 mars
73
The real movement which suppresses existing conditions rules over society
from the moment of the bourgeoisie's victory in the economy, and visibly
after the political translation of this victory. The development of productive
forces shatters the old relations of production and all static order turns
to dust. Whatever was absolute becomes historical.
74
By being thrown into history, by having to participate in the labor and
struggles which make up history, men find themselves obliged to view their
relations in a clear manner. This history has no object distinct from what
takes place within it, even though the last unconscious metaphysical vision
of the historical epoch could look at the productive progression through
which history has unfolded as the very object of history. The subject
of history can be none other than the living producing himself, becoming
master and possessor of his world which is history, and existing as consciousness
of his game.
75
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.
76
Hegel no longer had to interpretthe world, but the transformation
of the world. By only interpreting the transformation, Hegel is
only the philosophical completion of philosophy. He wants to understand
a world which makes itself. This historical thought is as yet only
the consciousness which always arrives too late, and which pronounces the
justification after the fact. Thus it has gone beyond separation only in
thought.The paradox which consists of making the meaning of all reality
depend on its historical completion, and at the same time of revealing
this meaning as it makes itself the completion of history, flows from the
simple fact that the thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and
18th centuries sought in his philosophy only a reconciliation with
the results of these revolutions. Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois
revolution, it does not express the entire process of this revolution,
but only its final conclusion. In this sense, it is not a philosophy of
the revolution, but of the restoration" (Karl Korsch,Theses on Hegel
and Revolution). Hegel did, for the last time, the work of the philosopher,
" the glorification of what exists"; but what existed for him could already
be nothing less than the totality of historical movement. The external
position of thought having in fact been preserved, it could he masked only
by the identification of thought with an earlier project of Spirit, absolute
hero who did what he wanted and wanted what he did, and whose accomplishment
coincides with the present. Thus philosophy, which dies in the thought
of history, can now glorify its world only by renouncing it, since in order
to speak, it must presuppose that this total history to which it has reduced
everything is already complete, and that the only tribunal where the judgment
of truth could be given is closed.
77
When the proletariat demonstrates by its own existence, through acts, that
this thought of history is not forgotten, the exposure of the conclusion
is at the same time the confirmation of the method.
78
The thought of history can be saved only by becoming practical thought;
and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class cannot be
less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world.
All the theoretical currents of the revolutionary workers' movement
grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought--Stirner and
Bakunin as well as Marx.
79
The inseparability of Marx's theory from the Hegelian method is itself
inseparable from the revolutionary character of this theory, namely from
its truth. This first relationship has been generally ignored, misunderstood,
and even denounced as the weakness of what fallaciously became a marxist
doctrine. Bernstein, in his Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism
and Affirmation (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben
der Sozialdemokratie), perfectly reveals the connection between the
dialectical method and historical partisanship, by deploring the
unscientific forecasts of the 1847Manifesto on the imminence of
proletarian revolution in Germany: "This historical self-deception, so
erroneous that any political visionary could hardly have improved on it,
would be incomprehensible in a Marx, who at that time had already seriously
studied economics, if we did not see in this the product of a relic of
the antithet ical Hegelian d ialectic from which Marx, no less than Engels,
could never completely free himself. In those times of general effervescence,
this was all the more fatal to him."
80
The inversion carried out by Marx to "recover through transfer"
the thought of the bourgeois revolutions does not trivially consist of
putting the materialist development of produc- tive forces in the place
of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit moving towards its encounter with
itself in time, its objectification being identical to its alienation,
and its historical wounds leaving no scars. History become real no longer
has an end. Marx ruined Hegel's position as separate from
what happens, as well as contemplation by any supreme external agent
whatever. From now on, theory has to know only what it does. As opposed
to this, contemplation of the economy's movement within the dominant thought
of the present society is the untranscended heritage of the undialectical
part of Hegel's search for a circular system: it is an approval which has
lost the dimension of the concept and which no longer needs a Hegelianism
to justify itself, because the movement which it praises is no more than
a sector without a world view, a sector whose mechanical development effectively
dominates the whole. Marx's project is the project of a conscious history.
The quantitative which arises in the blind development of merely economic
productive forces must be transformed into a qualitative historical appropriation.
The critique of political economy is the first act of this end
of prehistory: "Of all the instruments of production the greatest productive
power is the revolutionary class itself."
81
What closely links Marx's theory with scientific thought is the rational
understanding of the forces which really operate in society. But Marx's
theory is fundamentally beyond scientific thought, and it preserves scientific
thought only by superseding it: what is in question is an understanding
of struggle, and not of law. "We know only one science: the
science of history" (The German Ideology).
82
The bourgeois epoch, which wants to give a scientific foundation to history,
overlooks the fact that this available science needed a historical foundation
along with the economy. Inversely, history directly depends on economic
knowledge only to the extent that it remains economic history. The
extent to which the viewpoint of scientific observation could overlook
the role of history in the economy (the global process which modifies its
own basic scientific premises) is shown by the vanity of those socialist
calculations which thought they had established the exact periodicity of
crises. Now that the constant intervention of the State has succeeded in
compensating for the effect of tendencies toward crisis, the same ty'pe
of reasoning sees in this equilibrium a definitive economic harmony'. The
project of mastering the economy, the project of appropriating history,
if it must know--and absorb--the science of society, cannot itself be scientific.
The revolutionary viewpoint of a movement which thinks it can dominate
current history by means of scientific knowledge remains bourgeois.
83
The utopian currents of socialism, although themselves historically grounded
in the critique of the existing social organization, can rightly be called
utopian to the extent that they reject history--namely the real struggle
taking place, as well as the passage of time beyond the immutable perfection
of their picture of a happy society--but not because they reject science.
On the contrary. the utopian thinkers are completely dominated by the scientific
thought of earlier centuries. They sought the completion of this general
rational system: they did not in any way consider themselves disarmed prophets,
since they believed in the social power of scientific proof and even, in
the case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. "How did
they want to seize through struggle what must be proved?" asked Sombart.
The scientific conception of the utopians did not extend to the knowledge
that some social groups have interests in the existing situation, forces
to maintain it, and also forms of false consciousness corresponding to
such positions. This conception did not even reach the historical reality
of the development of science itself, which was oriented largely by the
social demand of agents who selected not only what could be admitted,
but also what could be studied. The utopian socialists, remaining prisoners
of the mode of exposition of scientific truth, conceived this truth
in terms of its pure abstract image--an image which had been imposed at
a much earlier stage of society. As Sorel observed, it is on the model
of astronomy that the utopians thought they' would discover and
demonstrate the laws of society. The harmony envisaged by' them, hostile
to history, grows out of the attempt to apply to society the science least
dependent on history. This harmony is introduced with the experimental
innocence of Newtonianism, and the happy destiny which is constantly postulated
"plays in their social science a role analogous to the role of inertia
in rational" (Materiaux pour une théorie du prolétariat).
84
The deterministic-scientific facet in Marx's thought was precisely the
gap through which the process of "ideologization" penetrated, during his
own lifetime, into the theoretical heritage left to the workers' movement.
The arrival of the historical subject continues to be postponed, 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 revolutionary
practice, the only truth of this negation. What becomes important is to
study economic development with patience, and to continue to accept suffering
with a Hegelian tranquility, so that the result remains "a graveyard of
good intentions." It is suddenly discovered that, according to the science
of revolution,consciousness always comes too soon, and has to be
taught. "History has shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were
wrong. History has clearly shown that the state of economic development
on the continent at that time was far from being ripe" Engels was to say
in 1895. Throughout his life, Marx had maintained a unitary point of view
in his theory, but the exposition of the theory was carried out
on the terrain of the dominant thought and became precise in the
form of critiques of particular disciplines, principally the critique of
the fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It is
this mutilation, later accepted as definitive, which has constituted "marxism."
85
The weakness of Marx's theory is naturally the weakness of the revolutionary
struggle of the proletariat of his time. The working class did not set
off the permanent revolution in the Germany of 1848; the Commune was defeated
in isolation. Revolutionary theory thus could not yet achieve its own total
existence. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and clarifying it
with cloistered, scholarly work, in the British Museum, caused a loss in
the theory itself. The scientific justifications Marx elaborated about
the future development of the working class and the organizational practice
that went with them became obstacles to proletarian consciousness at a
later stage.
86
All the theoretical insufficiencies of content as well as form of exposition
of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution can be traced
to the identification of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie from the
standpoint of the revolutionary seizure of power.
87
By grounding the proof of the scientific validity of proletarian power
on repeated past attempts, Marx obscured his historical thought,
from the Manifesto on, and was forced to support a linear
image of the development of modes of production brought on by class struggles
which end, each time, "with a revolutionary transformation of the entire
society or with mutual destruction of the classes in struggle." But in
the observable reality of history, as Marx pointed out elsewhere, the "Asiatic
mode of production" preserved its immobility in spite of all class confrontations,
just as the serf uprisings never defeated the landlords, nor the slave
revolts of Antiquity the free men. The linear schema Hoses sight of the
fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever
won; at the same time it is the only' class for which the development
of the economy was the cause and the consequence of its taking hold of
society. The same simplification led Marx to neglect the economic role
of the State in the management of a class society. If the rising bourgeoisie
seemed to liberate the economy from the State, this took place only to
the extent that the former State was an instrument of class oppression
in a static economy. The bourgeoisie developed its autonomous economic
power in the medieval period of the weakening of the State, at the moment
of feudal fragmentation of balanced powers. But the modern State which,
through Mercantilism, began to support the development of the bourgeoisie,
and which finally became its State at the time of "laisser faire,
laisser passer," was to reveal later that it was endowed with the central
power of calculated management of the economic process. With the
concept of Bonapartism, Marx was nevertheless able to describe the
shape of the modern statist bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and State,
the formation of a "national power of capital over labor, a public force
organized for social enslavement," where the bourgeoisie renounces all
historical life which is not reduced to the economic history' of things
and would like to "be condemned to the same political nothingness as other
classes," Here the socio-political foundations of the modern spectacle
are already established, negatively defining the proletariat as the
only pretender to historical life.
88
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. By neglecting
the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one masks
the concrete originality of the proletarian project, which can attain nothing
unless it carries its own banners and knows the "immensity of its tasks."
The bourgeoisie came to power because it is the class of the developing
economy. The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by becoming
the class of consciousness. The growth of productive forces cannot
guarantee such power, even by way of the increasing dispossession which
it brings about. A Jacobin seizure of power cannot be its instrument. No
ideology can help the proletariat disguise its partial goals as
general goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality
which is really its own.
89
If Marx, in a given period of his participation in the struggle of the
proletariat, expected too much from scientific forecasting, to the point
of creating the intellectual foundation for the illusions of economism,
it is known that he did not personally succumb to those illusions. In a
well-known letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an article where he
himself criticized Capital, an article which Engels would later
present to the press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly disclosed
the limits of his own science: " . . . The subjective tendency of
the author (which was perhaps imposed on him by his political position
and his past), namely the manner in which he views and presents to others
the ultimate results of the real movement, the real social process, has
no relation to his own actual analysis." Thus Marx, by denouncing the "tendentious
conclusions" of his own objective analysis, and by the irony of the "perhaps"
with reference to the extra-scientific choices imposed on him, at the same
time shows the methodological key to the fusion of the two aspects.
Chapter 4 "The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation"
90
The fusion of knowledge and action must be realized in the historical struggle
itself, in such a way that each of these terms guarantees the truth of
the other. The formation of the proletarian class into a subject means
the organization of revolutionary struggles and the organization of society
at the revolutionary moment: it is then that the practical conditions
of consciousness must exist, conditions in which the theory of praxis
is confirmed by becoming practical theory. However, this central question
of organization was the question least developed by revolutionary theory
at the time when the workers' movement was founded, namely when this theory
still had the unitary character which came from the thought of history.
(Theory had undertaken precisely this task in order to develop a unitary
historical practice.) This question is in fact the locus of inconsistency
of this theory, allowing the return of statist and hierarchic methods of
application borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of organization
of the workers' movement which were developed on the basis of this renunciation
of theory have in turn prevented the maintenance of a unitary theory, breaking
it up into varied specialized and partial disciplines. Due to the betrayal
of unitary historical thought, this ideological estrangement from theory
can no longer recognize the practical verification of this thought when
such verification emerges in spontaneous struggles of workers; all it can
do is repress every manifestation and memory of such verification. Yet
these historical forms which appeared in struggle are precisely the practical
milieu which the theory needed in order to be true. They are requirements
of the theory which have not been formulated theoretically. The soviet
was not a theoretical discovery; yet its existence in practice was already
the highest theoretical truth of the International Workingmen's Association.
91
The first successes of the struggle of the International led it to free
itself from the confused influences of the dominant ideology which survived
in it. But the defeat and repression which it soon encountered brought
to the foreground a conflict between two conceptions of the proletarian
revolution. Both of these conceptions contain an authoritarian dimension
and thus abandon the conscious self-emancipation of the working class.
In effect, the quarrel between Marxists and Bakuninists (which became irreconcilable)
was two-edged, referring at once to power in the revolutionary society
and to the organization of the present movement, and when the positions
of the adversaries passed from one aspect to the other, they reversed themselves.
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 thought that the growth of economic contradictions
inseparable from democratic education of the workers would reduce the role
of the proletarian State to a simple phase of legalizing the new social
relations imposing themselves objectively, and 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 on 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 very different from
what had been desired.
92
The strength and the weakness of the real anarchist struggle resides in
its viewing the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present
(the pretensions of anarchism in its individualist variants have always
been laughable). From the historical thought of modern class struggles
collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence
on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate contempt for method. Thus
its critique of the political struggle has remained abstract, while
its choice of economic struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion
of a definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this terrain--on
the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have
an ideal to realize. Anarchism remains a merely ideological
negation of the State and of classes, namely of the social conditions of
separate ideology. It is the ideology of pure liberty which equalizes
everything and dismisses the very idea of historical evil. This viewpoint
which fuses all partial desires has given anarchism the merit of representing
the rejection of existing conditions in favor of the whole of life, and
not of a privileged critical specialization; but this fusion is considered
in the absolute, according to individual caprice, before its actual realization,
thus condemning anarchism to an incoherence too easily seen through. Anarchism
has merely to repeat and to replay the same simple, total conclusion in
every single struggle, because this first conclusion was from the beginning
identified with the entire outcome of the movement. Thus Bakunin could
write in 1873, when he left the Fédération Jurassiene: "During
the past nine years, more ideas have been developed within the International
than would be needed to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and
I challenge anyone to invent a new one. It is no longer the time for ideas,
but for facts and acts." There is no doubt that this conception retains
an element of the historical thought of the proletariat, the certainty
that ideas must become practice, but it leaves the historical terrain by
assuming that the adequate forms for this passage to practice have already
been found and will never change.
93
The anarchists, who distinguish themselves explicitly from the rest of
the workers' movement by their ideological conviction, reproduce this separation
of competences among themselves; they provide a terrain favorable to informal
domination over all anarchist organizations by propagandists and defenders
of their ideology, specialists who are in general more mediocre the more
their intellectual activity consists of the repetition of certain definitive
truths. Ideological respect for unanimity of decision has on the whole
been favorable to the uncontrolled authority, within the organization itself,
of specialists in freedom;and revolutionary anarchism expects the
same type of unanimity from the liberated population, obtained by the same
means. Furthermore, the refusal to take into account the opposition between
the conditions of a minority grouped in the present struggle and of a society
of free in dividuals, has nourished a permanent separation among anarchists
at the moment of common decision, as is shown by an infinity of anarchist
insurrections in Spain, confined and destroyed on a local level.
94
The illusion entertained more or less explicitly by genuine anarchism is
the permanent imminence of an instantaneously accomplished revolution which
will prove the truth of the ideology and of the mode of practical organization
derived from the ideology. In 1936, anarchism in fact led a social revolution,
the most advanced model of proletarian power in all time. In this context
it should be noted that the signal for a general insurrection had been
imposed by a pronunciamiento of the army. Furthermore, to the extent
that this revolution was not completed during the first days (because of
the existence of Franco's power in half the country, strongly supported
from abroad while the rest of the international proletarian movement was
already defeated, and because of remains of bourgeois forces or other statist
workers' parties within the camp of the Republic) the organized anarchist
movement showed itself unable to extend the demi-victories of the revolution,
or even to defend them. Its known leaders became ministers and hostages
of the bourgeois State which destroyed the revolution only to lose the
civil war.
95
The "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International is the scientific ideology
of the socialist revolution: it identifies its whole truth with objective
processes in the economy and with the progress of a recognition of this
necessity by the working class educated by the organization. This ideology
rediscovers the confidence in pedagogical demonstration which had characterized
utopian socialism, but mixes it with a contemplative reference to
the course of history: this attitude has lost as much of the Hegelian dimension
of a total history as it has lost the immobile image of totality in the
utopian critique (most highly developed by Fourier). 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" (Finanzkapital).
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
adopted.
96
The ideology of the social-democratic organization gave power to professors
who educated the working class, and the form of organization which was
adopted was the form most suitable for this passive apprenticeship. The
participation of socialists of the Second International in political and
economic struggles was admittedly concrete but profoundly uncritical.
It was conducted in the name of revolutionary illusion by means
of an obviously reformist practice. The revolutionary ideology was
to be shattered by the very success of those who held it. The separate
position of the movement's deputies and journalists attracted the already
recruited bourgeois intellectuals toward a bourgeois mode of life. Even
those who had been recruited from the struggles of industrial workers and
who were themselves workers, were transformed by the union bureaucracy
into brokers of labor power who sold labor as a commodity, for a just price.
If their activity was to retain some appearance of being revolutionary,
capitalism would have had to be conveniently unable to support economically
this reformism which it tolerated politically (in the legalistic agitation
of the social-democrats). But such an antagonism, guaranteed by their science,
was constantly belied by history.
97
Bernstein, the social-democrat furthest from political ideology and most
openly attached to the methodology of bourgeois science, had the honesty
to want to demonstrate the reality of this contradiction; the English workers'
reformist movement had also demonstrated it, by doing without revolutionary
ideology. But the contradiction was definitively demonstrated only by historical
development itself. Although full of illusions in other respects, Bernstein
had denied that a crisis of capitalist production would miraculously force
the hand of socialists who wanted to inherit the revolution only by this
legitimate rite. The profound social upheaval which arose with the first
world war, though fertile with the awakening of consciousness, twice demonstrated
that the social-democratic hierarchy had not educated revolutionarily;
and had in no way transformed the German workers into theoreticians: first
when the vast majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; next
when, in defeat, it squashed the Spartakist revolutionaries. The ex-worker
Ebert still believed in sin, since he admitted that he hated revolution
"like sin." The same leader showed himself a precursor of the socialist
representation which soon after confronted the Russian proletariat
as its absolute enemy; he even formulated exactly the same program for
this new alienation: "Socialism means working a lot."
98
Lenin, as a Marxist thinker, was no more than a consistent and faithful
Kautskyist who applied the revolutionary ideology of "orthodox
Marxism" to Russian conditions, conditions unfavorable to the reformist
practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International. In the Russian
context, the external management of the proletariat, acting by means
of a disciplined clandestine party subordinated to intellectuals transformed
into "professional revolutionaries," becomes a profession which refuses
to deal with the ruling professions of capitalist society (the Czarist
political regime being in any case unable to offer such opportunities which
are based on an advanced stage of bourgeois power). It therefore became
the profession of the absolute management of society.
99
With the war and the collapse of the social-democratic international in
the face of the war, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks
spread all over the world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions of
the workers' movement transformed the entire world into a Russia, and Bolshevism,
reigning over the first revolutionary breach brought on by this epoch of
crisis, offered to proletarians of all lands its hierarchic and ideological
model, so that they could "speak Russian" to the ruling class. Lenin did
not reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary
ideology, but for ceasing to be one.
100
The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia
and when social-democracy fought victoriously for the old worldmarks
the inauguration of the state of affairs which is at the heart of the domination
of the modern spectacle: the representation of the working class
radically opposes itself to the working class.
101
"In all previous revolutions," wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Rote Fahne of December
21, 1918, "the combatants faced each other directly: class against class,
program against program. In the present revolution, the troops protecting
the old order do not intervene under the insignia of the ruling class,
but under the flag of a 'social-democratic party.' If the central question
of revolution had been posed openly and honestly: capitalism or socialism?
the great mass of the proletariat would today have no doubts or hesitations."
Thus, a few days before its destruction, the radical current of the German
proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions which had been
created by the preceding process (toward which the representation of the
working class had greatly contributed): the spectacular organization of
defense of the existing order, the social reign of appearances where no
" "central question" can any longer be posed "openly and honestly." The
revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this stage become
both the main factor and the central result of the general falsification
of society.
102
The organization of the proletariat on the Bolshevik model which emerged
from Russian backwardness and from the abandonment of revolutionary struggle
by the workers' movement of advanced countries, found in this backwardness
all the conditions which carried this form of organization toward the counter-revolutionary
inversion which it unconsciously contained at its source. The continuing
retreat of the mass of the European workers' movement in the face of the
Hic Rhodus, hic salta of the 1918-1920 period, a retreat which included
the violent destruction of its radical minority, favored the completion
of the Bolshevik development and let this fraudulent outcome present itself
to the world as the only proletarian solution. By seizing state monopoly
over representation and defense of workers' power, the Bolshevik party
justified itself and became what it was: the party of the proprietors
of the proletariat (essentially eliminating earlier forms of property).
103
During twenty years of unresolved theoretical debate, the varied tendencies
of Russian social-democracy had examined all the conditions for the liquidation
of Czarism: the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the weight of the peasant
majority and the decisive role of a concentrated and combative but hardly
numerous proletariat. The debate was resolved in practice by means of a
factor which had not been present in the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy
which directed the proletariat seized State power and gave society a new
class domination. Strictly bourgeois revolution had been impossible; the
"democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" was mean- ingless; the
proletarian power of the Soviets could not maintain itself simultaneously
against the class of small landowners, against the national and international
White react ion, and against its own representation externalized and alienated
in the form of a workers' party of absolute masters of State economy, expression,
and soon of thought. The theory of permanent revolution of Trotsky and
Parvus, which Lenin adopted in April 1917. was the only theory which became
true for countries where the social development of the bourgeoisie was
retarded, but this theory became true only after the introduction of the
unknown factor: the class power of the bureaucracy. In the numerous arguments
among the Bolshevik directors, Lenin was the most consistent defender of
the concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the supreme representatives
of ideology. Lenin was right every time against his adversaries in that
be supported the solution implied by earlier choices of absolute minority
Power: the democracy which was kept from peasants by means of the state
would have to be kept from workers as well, which led to keeping it from
communist leaders of unions, from the entire party, and finally from leading
party bureaucrats. At the Tenth Congress, when the Kronstadt Soviet had
been defeated by arms and buried under calumny, Lenin pronounced against
the leftist bureaucrats of the "Workers' Opposition" the following conclusion
(the logic of which Stalin later extended to a complete division of the
world): "Here or there with a rifle, but not with opposition. . . We've
had enough opposition."
104
After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy--sole proprietor of a State Capitalism--consolidated
its power internally by means of a temporary alliance with the peasantry
(with the "new economic policy") and externally by using workers regimented
into the bureaucratic parties of the Third International as supports for
Russian diplomacy, thus sabotaging the entire revolutionary movement and
supporting bourgeois governments whose aid it needed in international politics
(the power of the Kuonmintang in China in 1925-27, the Popular Front in
Spain and in France, etc.). The bureaucratic society continued the consolidation
by terrorizing the peasantry in order to implement the mast brutal primitive
capitalist accumulation in history. The industrialization of the Stalin
epoch revealed the reality behind the bureaucracy: the continuation of
the power of the economy and the preservation of the essence of the market
society commodity labor. The independent economy, which dominates society
to the extent of reinstituting the class domination it needs for its awn
ends, is thus confirmed. Which is to say that the bourgeoisie created an
autonomous power which, so long as its autonomy lasts, can even do without
a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy is not "the last owning class
in history" in the sense of Bruna Rizzi; it is only a substitute ruling
class for the commodity economy. Capitalist private property in decline
is replaced by a simplified, less diversified surrogate which is condensed
as collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped ruling
class is the expression of economic underdevelopment, and has no perspective
other than to overcome the retardation of this development in certain regions
of the world. It was the workers' party organized according to the bourgeois
model of separation which furnished the hierarchical-statist cadre for
this supplementary edition of a ruling class. While in one of Stalin's
prisons, Anton Ciliga observed that "technical questions of organization
turned out to be social questions"(Lenin and the Revolution).
105
Revolutionary ideology, the coherence of the separate, of which
Leninism represents the greatest voluntaristic attempt, supervising a reality
which rejects it, with Stalinism returns to its truth in incoherence.
At that paint ideology is no longer a weapon, but a goal. The lie which
is no longer challenged becomes lunacy. Reality as well as the goal dissolve
in the totalitarian ideological proclamation: all it says is all there
is. This is a local primitivism of the spectacle, whose role is nevertheless
essential in the development of the world spectacle. The ideology which
is materialized in this context has not economically transformed the world,
as has capitalism which reached the stage of abundance; it has merely transformed
perception by means of the police.
106
The totalitarian-ideological class in power is the power of a topsy-turvy
world: the stranger it is, the more it claims not to exist, and its force
serves above all to affirm its nonexistence. It is modest only on this
point, because its official nonexistence must also coincide with the nec
plus ultra of historical development which must at the same time be
attributed to its infallible command. Extended everywhere, the bureaucracy
must be the class invisible to consciousness; as a result all social
life becomes insane. The social organization of the absolute lie flows
from this fundamental contradiction.
107
Stalinism was the reign of terror within the bureaucratic class itself.
The terrorism at the base of this class's power must also strike this class
because it possesses no juridical guarantee, no recognized existence as
owning class, which it could extend to every one of its members. Its real
property being hidden, the bureaucracy became proprietor by way of false
consciousness. False consciousness can maintain its absolute power only
by means of absolute terror, where all real motives are ultimately lost.
The members of the bureaucratic class in power have a right of ownership
over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they
have to play the role of the proletariat directing a socialist society;
they have to be actors loyal to a script of ideological disloyalty. But
effective participation in this falsehood requires that it be recognized
as actual participation. No bureaucrat can support his right to power individually,
since proving that he's a socialist proletarian would mean presenting himself
as the opposite of a bureaucrat, and proving that he's a bureaucrat is
impossible since the official truth of the bureaucracy is that it does
not exist. Thus every bureaucrat depends absolutely on the central guarantee
of the ideology which recognizes the collective participation in its "socialist
power"of all the bureaucrats it does not annihilate. If all the
bureaucrats taken together decide everything, the cohesion of their own
class can be assured only by the concentration of their terrorist power
in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of
falsehood in power: the indisputable permanence of its constantly adjusted
frontier. Stalin decides without appeal who is ultimately to be a possessing
bureaucrat; in other words, who should be named "a proletarian in power"
and who "a traitor in the pay of the Mikado or of Wall Street." The bureaucratic
atoms find the common essence of their right only in the person of Stalin.
Stalin is the world sovereign who in this manner knows himself as the absolute
person for whose consciousness there is no higher spirit. "The sovereign
of the world has effective consciousness of what he is--the universal power
of efficacy--in the destructive violence which he exerts against the Self
of his subjects, the contrasting others." Just as he is the power that
defines the terrain of domination, he is "the power which ravages this
terrain."
108
When ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute
power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood, the
thought of history is so perfectly annihilated that history itself, even
at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The
totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present where everything
that happened exists for it only as a place accessible to its police. The
project already formulated by Napoleon of "the ruler directing the energy
of memory" has found its total concretization in a permanent manipulation
of the past, not only of meanings but of facts as well. But the price paid
for this emancipation from all historical reality is the loss of the rational
reference which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism.
It is known how much the scientific application of insane ideology has
cost the Russian economy, if only through the imposture of Lysenko. The
contradiction of the totalitarian bureaucracy administering an industrialized
society, caught between its need for rationality and its rejection of the
rational, is one of its main deficiencies with regard to normal capitalist
development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture
the way capitalism had done, it is ultimately inferior to capitalism in
industrial production, planned from the top and based on unreality and
generalized falsehood.
109
Between the two world wars, the revolutionary workers' movement was annihilated
by the joint action of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism
which had borrowed its form of organization from the totalitarian party
tried out in Russia. Fascism was an extremist defense of the bourgeois
economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian subversion. Fascism is
a state of siege in capitalist society, by means of which this society
saves itself and gives itself stop-gap rationalization by making the State
intervene massively in its management. But this rationalization is itself
burdened by the immense irrationality of its means. Although fascism rallies
to the defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has become
conservative (the family, property, the moral order, the nation), reuniting
the petty-bourgeoisie and the unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by
the impotence of socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological.
It presents itself as it is: a violent resurrection of myth which
demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values:
race, blood, the leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism.
Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context
of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. Thus it is one of
the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the
destruction of the old workers' movement makes it one of the fundamental
forces of present-day society. However, since fascism is also the most
costly form of preserving the capitalist order, it usually had to leave
the front of the stage to the great roles played by the capitalist States;
it is eliminated by stronger and more rational forms of the same order.
Chapter 4 "The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation"
110
Now that the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in doing away with
the remains of bourgeois property which hampered its rule over the economy,
in developing this property for its own use, and in being recognized externally
among the great powers, it wants to enjoy its world calmly and to suppress
the arbitrary element which had been exerted over it: it denounces the
Stalinism of its origin. But the denunciation remains Stalinist, arbitrary,
unexplained and continually corrected, because the ideological lie at
its origin can never be revealed. Thus the bureaucracy can liberalize
neither culturally nor politically because its existence as a class depends
on its ideological monopoly which, with all its weight, is its only title
to property. The ideology has no doubt lost the passion of its positive
affirmation, but the indifferent triviality which survives still has the
repressive function of prohibiting the slightest competition, of holding
captive the totality of thought. Thus the bureaucracy is bound to an ideology
which is no longer believed by anyone. What used to be terrorist has become
a laughing matter, but this laughing matter can maintain itself only by
preserving, as a last resort, the terrorism it would like to be rid of.
Thus precisely at the moment when the bureaucracy wants to demonstrate
its superiority on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to be a
poor relation of capitalism. Just as its actual history contradicts
its claims and its vulgarly entertained ignorance contradicts its scientific
pretentions, so its project of becoming a rival to the bourgeoisie in the
production of commodity abundance is blocked by the fact that this abundance
carries its implicit ideology within itself, and is usually accompanied
by an indefinitely extended freedom of spectacular false choices, a pseudo-freedom
which remains irreconcilable with the bureaucratic ideology.
111
At the present moment of its development, the bureaucracy's title to ideological
property is already collapsing internationally. The power which established
itself nationally as a fundamentally internationalist model must admit
that it can no longer pretend to maintain its false cohesion over and above
every national frontier. The unequal economic development of some bureaucracies
with competing interests, who succeeded in acquiring their "socialism"
beyond the single country, has led to the public and total confrontation
between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. From this point on, every
bureaucracy in power, or every totalitarian party which is a candidate
to the power left behind by the Stalinist period in some national working
classes, must follow its own path. The global decomposition of the alliance
of bureaucratic mystification is further aggravated by manifestations of
internal negation which began to be visible to the world with the East
Berlin workers' revolt, opposing the bureaucrats with the demand for "a
government of steel workers," manifestations which already once led all
the way to the power of workers' councils in Hungary. However, the global
decomposition of the bureaucratic alliance is in the last analysis the
least favorable factor for the present development of capitalist society.
The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the adversary which objectively
supported it by providing an illusory unification of all negation of the
existing order. This division of labor within the spectacle comes to an
end when the pseudo-revolutionary role in turn divides. The spectacular
element of the collapse of the workers' movement will itself collapse.
112
The Leninist illusion has no contemporary base outside of the various Trotskyist
tendencies. Here the identification of the proletarian project with a hierarchic
organization of ideology stubbornly survives the experience of all its
results. The distance which separates Trotskyism from a revolutionary critique
of the present society allows Trotskyism to maintain a deferential attitude
toward positions which were already false when they were used in a real
combat. Trotsky remained basically in solidarity with the high bureaucracy
until 1927, seeking to capture it so as to make it resume genuinely Bolshevik
action externally (it is known that in order to conceal Lenin's famous
"testament"' he went so far as to slanderously disavow his supporter Max
Eastman, who had made it public). Trotsky was condemned by his basic perspective,
because as soon as the bureaucracy recognizes itself in its result as a
counterrevolutionary class internally, it must also choose, in the name
of revolution, to be effectively counter-revolutionary externally,just
as it is at home. Trotsky's subsequent struggle for the Fourth International
contains the same inconsistency. All his life he refused to recognize the
bureaucracy as the power of a separate class, because during the second
Russian revolution he became an unconditional supporter of the Bolshevik
form of organization. When Lukacs, in 1923, showed that this form was the
long-sought mediation between theory and practice, in which the proletarians
are no longer "spectators" of the events which happen in their organization,
but consciously choose and live these events, he described as actual merits
of the Bolshevik party everything that the Bolshevik party was not.
Except for his profound theoretical work, Lukacs was still an ideologue
speaking in the name of the power most grossly external to the proletarian
movement, believing and making believe that he, himself, with his entire
personality, was within this power as if it were his own. But the
sequel showed just how this power disowns and suppresses its lackeys; in
Lukacs' endless self-repudiations, just what he had identified with became
visible and clear as a caricature: he had identified with the opposite
of himself and of what he had supported in History and Class Consciousness.
Lukacs is the best proof of the fundamental rule which judges all the intellectuals
of this century: what they respect is an exact measure of their
own despicable reality. Yet Lenin had hardly encouraged this type
of illusion about his activity, considering that "a political party cannot
examine its members to see if there are contradictions between their philosophy
and the party program. The real party whose imaginary portrait Lukacs had
inopportunely drawn was coherent for only one precise and partial task:
to seize State power.
113
The neo-Leninist illusion of present-day Trotskyism, constantly exposed
by the reality of modern bourgeois as well as bureaucratic capitalist societies,
naturally finds a favored field of application in "underdeveloped" countries
which are formally independent. Here the illusion of some variant of state
and bureaucratic socialism is consciously manipulated by local ruling classes
as simply the ideology of economic development. The hybrid composition
of these classes is more or less clearly related to their standing along
the bourgeois- bureaucratic spectrum. Their games on an international scale
with the two poles of existing capitalist power, as well as their ideological
compromises (notably with Islam), express the hybrid reality of their social
base and remove from this final byproduct of ideological socialism everything
serious except the police. A bureaucracy establishes itself by staffing
a national struggle and an agrarian peasant revolt; from that point on,
as in China, it tends to apply the Stalinist model of industrialization
in societies less developed than Russia was in 1917. A bureaucracy able
to industrialize the nation can set itself up from among the petty-bourgeoisie,
or out of army cadres who seize power, as in Egypt. A bureaucracy which
sets itself up as a para-statist leadership during the struggle can, on
certain questions, seek the equilibrium point of a compromise in order
to fuse with a weak national bourgeoisie, as in Algeria at the beginning
of its war of independence. Finally, in the former colonies of black Africa
which remain openly tied to the American and European bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie
constitutes itself (usually on the basis of the power of traditional tribal
chiefs) by seizing the State. These countries, where foreign imperialism
remains the real master of the economy, enter a stage where the compradores
have gotten an indigenous State as compensation for their sale of indigenous
products, a State which is independent in the face of the local masses
but not in the face of imperialism. This is an artificial bourgeoisie which
is not able to accumulate, but which simply squanders the share
of surplus value from local labor which reaches it as well as the foreign
subsidies from the States or monopolies which protect it. Because of the
obvious incapacity of these bourgeois classes to fulfill the normal economic
function of a bourgeoisie, each of them faces a subversion based on the
bureaucratic model, more or less adapted to local peculiarities, and eager
to seize the heritage of this bourgeoisie. But the very success of a bureaucracy
in its fundamental project of industrialization necessarily contains the
perpsective of its historical defeat: by accumulating capital it accumulates
a proletariat and thus creates its own negation in a country where it did
not yet exist.
114
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: it is the immense majority
of workers who have lost all power over the use of their lives and who,once
they know this,redefine themselves as the proletariat, as negation
at work within this society. The proletariat is objectively reinforced
by the progressive disappearance of the peasantry and by the extension
of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of "services" and intellectual
professions.Subjectively the proletariat is still far removed from
its practical class consciousness, not only among white collar workers
but also among wage workers who have as yet discovered only the impotence
and mystification of the old politics. Nevertheless, when the proletariat
discovers that its own externalized power collaborates in the constant
reinforcement of capitalist society, not only in the form of its labor
but also in the form of unions, of parties, or of the state power it had
built to emancipate itself, it also discovers from concrete historical
experience that it is the class totally opposed to all congealed externalization
and all specialization of power. It carries the revolution which cannot
let anything remain outside of itself, the demand for the permanent
domination of the present over the past, and the total critique of separation.
It is this that must find its suitable form in action. No quantitative
amelioration of its misery, no illusion of hierarchic integration is a
lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat cannot truly
recognize itself in a particular wrong it suffered nor in the righting
of a particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself in the righting of
a large number of wrongs either, but only in the absolute wrong
of being relegated to the margin of life.
115
The new signs of negation multiplying in the economically developed countries,
signs which are misunderstood and falsified by spectacular arrangement,
already enable us to draw the conclusion that a new epoch has begun: now,
after the workers' first attempt at subversion,it is capitalist abundance
which has failed. When anti-union struggles of Western workers are
repressed first of all by unions, and when the first amorphous protests
launched by rebellious currents of youth directly imply the rejection of
the old specialized politics, of art and of daily life, we see two sides
of a new spontaneous struggle which begins under a criminal guise.
These are the portents of a second proletarian assault against class society.
When the last children of this still immobile army reappear on this battleground
which was altered and yet remains the same, they follow a new "General
Ludd" who, this time, urges them to destroy the machines of permitted
consumption.
116
"The political farm at last discovered in which the economic emancipation
of labor could be realized" has in this century acquired a clear outline
in the revolutionary workers' Councils which concentrate in themselves
all the functions of decision and execution, and federate with each other
by means of delegates responsible to the base and revocable at any moment.
Their actual existence has as yet been no mare than a brief sketch, quickly
opposed and defeated by various defensive farces of class society, among
which their awn false consciousness must often be included. Pannekoek rightly
insisted that choosing the power of workers' Councils "poses problems"
rather than providing a solution. Yet it is precisely in this power where
the problems of the proletarian revolution can find their real solution.
This is where the objective conditions of historical consciousness are
reunited. This is where direct active communication is realized, where
specialization, hierarchy and separation end, where the existing conditions
have been transformed "into conditions of unity." Here the proletarian
subject can emerge from his struggle against con- templation: his consciousness
is equal to the practical organization which it undertakes because this
consciousness is itself inseparable from coherent intervention in history.
117
In the power of the Councils, which must internationally supplant all other
power, the proletarian movement is its own product and this product is
the producer himself. He is to himself his own goal. Only there is the
spectacular negation of life negated in its turn.
118
The appearance of the Councils was the highest reality of the proletarian
movement in the first quarter of this century, a reality which was not
seen or was travestied because it disappeared along with the rest of the
movement that was negated and eliminated by the entire historical experience
of the time. At the new moment of proletarian critique, this result returns
as the only undefeated point of the defeated movement. Historical consciousness,
which knows that this is the only milieu where it can exist, can now recognize
this reality, no longer at the periphery of what is ebbing, but at the
center of what is rising.
119
A revolutionary organization existing before the power of the Councils
(it will find its own farm through struggle), for all these historical
reasons, already knows that it does not represent the working class.
It must recognize itself as no more than a radical separation from the
world of separation.
120
The revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory
of praxis entering into non-unilateral communication with practical struggles,
in the process of becoming practical theory. Its own practice is the generalization
of communication and of coherence in these struggles. At the revolutionary
moment of dissolution of social separation, this organization must recognize
its own dissolution as a separate organization.
121
The revolutionary organization can be nothing less than a unitary critique
of society, namely a critique which does not compromise with any farm of
separate power anywhere in the world, and a critique proclaimed globally
against all the aspects of alienated social life. In the struggle between
the revolutionary organization and class society, the weapons are nothing
other than the essence of the combatants themselves: the revolutionary
organization cannot reproduce within itself the dominant society's conditions
of separation and hierarchy. It must struggle constantly against its deformation
in the ruling spectacle. The only limit to participation in the total democracy
of the revolutionary organization is the recognition and self-appropriation
of the coherence of its critique by all its members, a coherence which
must be proved in the critical theory as such and in the relation between
the theory and practical activity.
122
When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels makes it increasingly
difficult for workers to recognize and name their own misery, forcing them
to face the alternative of rejecting the totality of their misery or
nothing, the revolutionary organization has to learn that it can no
longer combat alienation with alienated forms.
123
Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the
first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and
lived by the masses. It requires workers to become dialecticians and to
inscribe their thought into practice. Thus it demands of men without
quality more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified
men which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial ideological
consciousness constructed by a part of the bourgeois class was based on
the economy, this central part of social life in which this class was
already in power). The very development of class society to the stage
of spectacular organization of non-life thus leads the revolutionary project
to become visibly what it already was essentially.
124
Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology and
knows it.
Chapter
5 Time and History
voxfux