“No one today can reasonably doubt the existence or the power of the spectacle; on the contrary, one might doubt whether it is reasonable to add anything on a question which experience has already settled in such draconian fashion.” – Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1989

Within five years of writing these lines, Guy Debord – author, filmmaker, and leader of a coterie of radical intellectuals known as the Situationist International[1] – despairing at the ever quickening advance of the society he opposed, brought his own life to an end. He had lived long enough to see the collapse of the bipolar world order of the Cold War and the Americanization of the world. He had lived long enough to see the development of a form of totalitarian power at once concentrated and diffuse, the marriage of persistent seduction and unrelenting violence from Washington to Moscow. He had lived long enough.

Were Debord alive to see the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus, The Society of the Spectacle[2] – his attempt to analyze the development and the function of late capitalist[3] consumer culture’s rigged game – he might well be taking up his pistol this very moment.

Ours is a moment in which a reality TV host and beauty pageant manager has managed to bluff his way (with the aid of every media institution) into the American presidency. Donald Trump’s reputation as master of the “Art of the Deal,” despite having declared bankruptcy four times, is proof enough of what Debord considered the defining characteristic of modern capitalist society; the slide from having to appearing.



Ours is a moment in which a new Cold War is brewing between the same old powers, albeit stripped of any trappings of ideological distinction. It is a moment in which carefully curated social media personas exist to promote products in the snapshots of their public but otherwise banal daily life; in which the commodification of one’s own identity is both the calling card of the savvy entrepreneur and the savvy consumer. It is a moment in which the language of proletarian class consciousness is not counterposed to racialized conceptions of cultural struggle but rather the latter is presented as the former and the former as the latter.



This is a moment demanding coronation as the ultimate victory of the spectacle.[4]



Were Debord alive today, he might take heart in the universalization of certain Situationist concepts. Young people implicitly understand what he considered the necessity of plagiarism so fully that a steady flow of memes utilize popular images in order to express the discontent, alienation[5] and radical impulses of a generation gripped by the fear of dying both of boredom and of starvation. Or perhaps Debord would instead, like Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, cash in on his former status as a cultural rebel and embrace the system’s total absorption of everything he once hurled at it.



In any case, Debord is dead and we are not. We are thus faced with the simple choice of either confronting and resisting the spectacular power of late capitalism or else being consumed by it. Debord and the Situationists developed a sophisticated analysis of the presently reigning system and worked to find methods of combating its unique features. These deserve serious engagement and incorporation as we endeavor to construct a dynamic new left which sees both the necessity and the joy of resistance.

I: We should read The Society of The Spectacle with fresh eyes

The term “Society of the Spectacle” sounds odd at first but upon inspection, it seems to encapsulate everything about late capitalist culture, and our lives within it, that cause us to despair. The language of Situationism is often somewhat obtuse – they were trying to describe new phenomena – but so too are terms like “proletarian” and “bourgeois” to anyone first acquainting themselves with Marxism.



Debord observed that as modern methods of production have enabled the mass accumulation of capital, so too have they changed the fundamental nature of the experience of living. The result is the complete degradation of social life. First, the condition of being is replaced by the condition of having. This is the rule of the commodity in capitalist society, observed and analyzed by Marx and Engels. Next, the condition of having is replaced by the appearance of having, something Lukács[6] recognized as a feature of modern capitalism. The spectacle, defined in the fewest possible words, is capitalist alienation and commodity fetishism universalized in every sphere of human activity.[7]



Debord wrote that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” By that it is meant our perception of events, our interactions with one another, our self perception, our imagination and vision for the future; the complex sum of our everyday reality is all filtered through a maliciously and impossibly fantastical presentation of life and life’s possibilities. Debord’s proposition was the logic of capital, has come to dominate not just labor but every single aspect of human existence.