The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord & Donald Nicholson-Smith

Author:Guy Debord & Donald Nicholson-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: 1995-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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BETWEEN THE TWO world wars the revolutionary workers movement was destroyed by the action, on the one hand, of the Stalinist bureaucracy and, on the other, of fascist totalitarianism, the latter having borrowed its organizational form from the totalitarian party as first tried out in Russia. Fascism was an attempt of the bourgeois economy to defend itself, in extremis, from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion; it was a state of siege in capitalist society, a way for that society to survive through the administration of an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive State intervention in its management. Such rationalization, however, inevitably bore the stamp of the immensely irrational nature of the means whereby it was imposed. Even though fascism came to the aid of the chief icons (the family, private property, the moral order, the nation) of a bourgeois order that was by now conservative, and effectively mobilized both the petty bourgeoisie and unemployed workers panic-stricken because of the crisis or disillusioned by the impotence of revolutionary socialism, it was not itself fundamentally ideological in character. Fascism presented itself for what it was — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a cult of the archaic completely fitted out by modern technology. Its degenerate ersatz of myth has been revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus one factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, as well as being, thanks to its part in the destruction of the old workers' movement, one of the founding forces of present-day society. But inasmuch as fascism happens also to be the costliest method of maintaining the capitalist order, it was normal enough that it should be dislodged by more rational and stronger forms of this order — that it should leave the front of the stage to the lead players, namely the capitalist States.

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