“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified,
the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence,
. . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is
sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth
decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes
to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.”

—Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition
of The Essence
of Christianity

1

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented
as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly
lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in
which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of
reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world
that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has
culminated
in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The
spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the
nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society,
and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal
point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is
separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false
consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language
of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between
people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by
mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized,
that has become an objective reality.

6

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.

7

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global
social praxis split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by
an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which
contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the
point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. The language of the spectacle
consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs
which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that
system.

8

The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided. The spectacle that falsifies
reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality, while lived reality is
materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing
it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. Each
of these seemingly fixed concepts has no other basis than its
transformation into its opposite: reality emerges within the spectacle, and the
spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the
existing society.

9

In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a
moment of the false.

10

The concept of “the spectacle” interrelates and explains a wide range of
seemingly unconnected phenomena. The apparent diversities and contrasts of these
phenomena stem from the social organization of appearances, whose essential
nature must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is
an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social
life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s
essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a
negation that has taken on a visible form.

11

In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the
forces that work against it, it is necessary to make some artificial
distinctions. In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain
extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to
operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the
spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of
our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we
are caught.

12

The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can
never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good
appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already
effectively imposed by its monopoly of
appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.

13

The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its
means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of
modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking
in its own glory.

14

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially
spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle — the
visual reflection of the ruling economic order — goals are nothing, development
is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15

As indispensable embellishment of currently produced objects, as general
articulation of the system’s rationales, and as advanced economic sector that
directly creates an ever-increasing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the
leading production of present-day society.

16

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the
economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than
the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of
the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.

17

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an
evident degradation of being into having
— human fulfillment was no
longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present
stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated
productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having
to appearing — all “having” must
now derive its immediate prestige and
its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality
has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is
directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar
as it
is not actually real.

18

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real
beings — figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic
behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in
order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it
naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied
by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily
adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the
spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It
is whatever escapes people’s activity, whatever eludes their practical
reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever
representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself.

19

The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical
project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the categories of
vision, and it is based on the relentless development of the particular
technical rationality that grew out of that form of thought. The spectacle does
not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete
life to a universe of speculation.

20

Philosophy — the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power
—
was never by itself able to supersede theology. The spectacle is the material
reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not
dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own
alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point
that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and
unbreathable. The illusory paradise representing a total denial of earthly
life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life
itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human
powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal
separation.

21

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain
necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and
ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the
guardian of that sleep.

22

The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from
that society and established an independent realm in the spectacle can be
explained only by the additional fact that that powerful practice continued to lack cohesion and
had remained in contradiction with itself.

23

The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the
specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of
speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s
ambassador to itself, delivering its messages at a court where no one
else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also
the most archaic.

24

The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its
never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of
totalitarian domination of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of
pure objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true character as
relations between people and between classes: a second Nature, with its own
inescapable laws, seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not
the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development.
On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own
technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the
“mass media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be
invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be
understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been
developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics. If the social
needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only
through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact
between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous
communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral.
The concentration of these media thus amounts to concentrating in the hands of
the administrators of the existing system the means that enable them to carry on
this particular form of administration. The social separation reflected in the
spectacle is inseparable from the modern state — that product of the
social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the
concentrated expression of all social divisions.

25

Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The
institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class
divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the
mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion
justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of
the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not
deliver. In this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But this
earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only a shared
belief in an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete
social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition. In
contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in
so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.
The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through
practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it
engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an
autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity
resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures
dictated by the independent movement of machines and working for an
ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all
critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by
separating from each other have not yet been reunited.

26

The general separation of worker and product tends to eliminate any
direct personal communication
between the producers and any comprehensive sense of what they are producing. With the increasing accumulation of separate products and the
increasing concentration of the productive process,
communication and comprehension are monopolized by the managers of the system. The triumph of this
separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.

27

Due to the very success of this separate production of separation, the
fundamental experience that in earlier societies was associated with people’s
primary work is in the process of being replaced (in sectors
near the
cutting edge of the system’s evolution) by an identification of life with
nonworking time, with inactivity. But such inactivity is in no way liberated
from productive activity. It remains dependent on it, in an uneasy and admiring
submission to the requirements and consequences of the production system. It is
itself one of the products of that system. There can be no freedom apart
from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified
— all real
activity having been forcibly channeled into the global
construction of the
spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a “liberation from work,” namely the
modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation within work itself nor a
liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity
stolen through work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced.

28

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its
technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation.
From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to
produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions
that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing
concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.

29

The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of unity, and the immense
expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss.
The
abstractifying of all individual labor and the general abstractness of what is
produced are perfectly reflected in the spectacle, whose manner of being
concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, a part of the
world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle
is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their
one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each
other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only
in their separateness.

30

The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects
that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this:
the more he
contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images
of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The
spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that
the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of
someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does
not feel at home anywhere,
because the spectacle is everywhere.

31

Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of
themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates,
is experienced by the producers as an abundance of dispossession. As
their alienated products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to
them. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the
territory it represents. The forces that have escaped us
display themselves to us in all their power.

32

The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation.
Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector
of industrial production. The “growth” generated by an economy developing for
its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was
at its origin.

33

Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce
every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find
themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes
to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.

34

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes
images.

“The commodity can be understood in its undistorted essence only when
it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context
does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive
importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the attitudes
that people adopt toward it, as it subjugates their consciousness to the forms
in which this reification finds expression. . . . As labor is
increasingly
rationalized and mechanized, this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that
people’s activity becomes less and less active and more and more
contemplative.”

—Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

 

35

In the spectacle’s basic practice of incorporating into itself all the
fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in a congealed form,
and of inverting living values into purely
abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which seems at
first glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so
complex and full of metaphysical subtleties.

36

The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “imperceptible as
well as perceptible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle,
where the perceptible world is replaced by a selection of images which is projected
above it, yet which at the same time succeeds in making itself regarded as
the perceptible par excellence.

37

The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view
is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the
commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its development is
identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from everything
they produce.

38

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular
language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from
the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form
reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it
develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

39

Despite the fact that this development excludes the qualitative, it is itself
subject to qualitative change. The spectacle reflects the fact that this
development has crossed the threshold of its own abundance. Although this
qualitative change has so far taken place only partially in a few local areas,
it is already implicit at the universal level that was the commodity’s original
standard — a standard that the commodity has lived up to by turning the whole
planet into a single world market.

40

The development of productive forces has been the unconscious history that
has actually created and altered the living conditions of human groups — the
conditions enabling them to survive and the expansion of those conditions. It
has been the economic basis of all human undertakings. Within natural economies,
the emergence of a commodity sector represented a surplus survival. Commodity
production, which implies the exchange of varied products between independent
producers, tended for a long time to retain its small-scale craft aspects,
relegated as it was to a marginal economic role where its quantitative reality
was still hidden. But wherever it encountered the social conditions of
large-scale commerce and capital accumulation, it took total control of the
economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had already shown
itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative
development. This constant expansion of economic power in the form of
commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor,
and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial
problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is
continually regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated
societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle
for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The
commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now
dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed
it into a world dominated by the economy. The pseudo-nature within which human
labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain forever in its
service; and since this demand is formulated by and answerable only to
itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects and
endeavors into its own reinforcement. The abundance of commodities — that is,
the abundance of commodity relations — amounts to nothing more than
an
augmented survival.

41

As long as the economy’s role as material basis of social life was neither
noticed nor understood — remaining unknown precisely because it was so familiar
—
the commodity’s dominion over the economy was exerted in a covert manner. In
societies where actual commodities were few and far between, money was the
apparent master, serving as plenipotentiary representative of
the greater power
that remained unknown. With the Industrial Revolution’s manufactural division of
labor and mass production for a global market, the commodity finally became
fully visible as a power that was colonizing all social life. It was at
that point that political economy established itself as the dominant science,
and as the science of domination.

42

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally
colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer
see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity. Modern
economic production extends its dictatorship both extensively and intensively.
In the less industrialized regions, its reign is already manifested by the
presence of a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by
the more industrially advanced regions. In the latter, social space is blanketed
with ever-new layers of commodities. With the “second industrial
revolution,” alienated consumption has become as much a duty for the
masses as alienated production. The society’s entire sold labor has
become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at
all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in
fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the
overall operation of the productive forces. To this end, the specialized science
of domination is itself broken down into further specialties such as sociology,
psychotechnology, cybernetics, and semiology, which oversee the self-regulation of
every phase of the process.

43

Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation “political
economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,” who only needs to
be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never
considers him “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling-class perspective is
revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires
an additional
collaboration from him. Once his workday is over,
the worker is suddenly
redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every
aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds
himself
seemingly treated like a grown-up, with a great show of politeness,
in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity
takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity” simply because political
economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The
“total denial of man” has thus taken charge of all human existence.

44

The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate
goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according
to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never
ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a
resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because
it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot
transcend it.

45

Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the
epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following
contradiction: the technological
developments that objectively tend to eliminate
work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity,
because labor is the only
creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less
extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s
total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army
of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector,
reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest
commodities at a time when
increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy
increasingly unnecessary commodities.

46

Exchange value could arise only as a representative of use value, but the
victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the conditions for its
own autonomous power. By mobilizing all human use value and monopolizing its
fulfillment, exchange value ultimately succeeded in
controlling use. Use has
come to be seen purely in terms of exchange value, and is now completely at its
mercy. Starting out like a condottiere in the service of use value, exchange value
has ended up waging the war for its own sake.

47

The constant decline of use value that has always characterized the
capitalist economy has given rise to a new form of poverty within the realm of
augmented survival — alongside the old poverty which still persists,
since the vast majority of people are still forced to take
part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the system’s ends and each
of them knows that they must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail — the fact
that even in its most impoverished forms (food, shelter) use value now has no
existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival — accounts for the
general acceptance of the illusions of modern commodity consumption. The real
consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized
illusion and the spectacle is its general expression.

48

Use value was formerly understood as an implicit aspect of exchange value.
Now, however, within the upside-down world of the spectacle, use value must be
explicitly proclaimed, both because its actual reality has been eroded by the
overdeveloped commodity economy and because it serves as a necessary
pseudo-justification for a counterfeit life.

49

The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general
equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money has dominated society as the
representation of universal equivalence — the exchangeability of different
goods whose uses remain uncomparable — the spectacle is the modern complement
of money: a representation of the commodity world as a whole which serves as a
general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle
is money one can only look at, because in it all use has already been
exchanged for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just
a servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself a pseudo-use of life.

50

With the achievement of economic abundance, the concentrated result of
social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to the appearances that are
now that labor’s primary product. Capital is no longer the invisible center
governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of
the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its
portrait.

51

The economy’s triumph as an independent power at the same time spells its
own doom, because the forces it has unleashed
have eliminated the economic
necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that
necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development can only mean
replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) with an
incessant fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which ultimately come down to the
single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy. But that
economy loses all connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges from the
social unconscious that unknowingly depended on it. “Whatever is
conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once it is
freed, does it not fall to ruin in its turn?” (Freud).

52

Once society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy in fact
depends on the society. When the subterranean power of the economy grew to the
point of visible domination, it lost its power. The economic Id must be
replaced by the I. This subject can only arise out of society, that is,
out of the struggle within society. Its existence depends on the outcome of the
class struggle that is both product and producer of the economic foundation of
history.

53

Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project,
the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the
workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite
of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity
contemplates itself in a world of its own making.

 

“An intense new polemic is unfolding on the philosophical front in
this country, focusing on the concepts ‘one divides into two’ and
‘two fuse into one.’
This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against
the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions of the world:
the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. Those who maintain
that ‘one divides into two’ is the fundamental law of things are on the side
of the materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the fundamental law of
things is that ‘two fuse into one’ are against the materialist dialectic. The
two sides have drawn a clear line of demarcation between them, and their
arguments are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on the
ideological level, of the acute and complex class struggle taking place in
China and in the world.”

—Red Flag (Beijing), September 21, 1964

 

54

The spectacle, like modern society itself, is at once united and divided. The
unity of each is based on violent divisions. But when this contradiction
emerges in the spectacle, it is itself contradicted by a reversal of its
meaning: the division it presents is unitary, while the unity it presents is
divided.

55

Although the struggles between different powers for control of the same
socio-economic system are officially presented as fundamental antagonisms,
they actually reflect that system’s fundamental unity, both internationally and
within each nation.

56

The sham spectacular struggles between rival forms of separate power are at
the same time real, in that they reflect the system’s uneven and conflictual
development and the more or less contradictory interests of the classes or
sections of classes that accept that system and strive to carve out a role for
themselves within it. Just as the development of the most advanced economies
involves clashes between different priorities, totalitarian state-bureaucratic
forms of economic management and countries under colonialism or semicolonialism
also exhibit highly divergent types of production and power. By invoking any
number of different criteria, the spectacle can present these oppositions as
totally distinct social systems. But in reality they are nothing but particular
sectors whose fundamental essence lies in the global system that contains them,
the single movement that has turned the whole planet into its field of
operation: capitalism.

57

The society that bears the spectacle does not dominate underdeveloped regions
solely by its economic hegemony. It also dominates them as the society of the
spectacle. Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has
already used the spectacle to invade the social surface of every continent.
It sets the stage for the formation of indigenous ruling classes and frames
their agendas. Just as it presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it offers false
models of revolution to local revolutionaries. The bureaucratic regimes in power
in certain industrialized countries have their own particular type of spectacle,
but it is an integral part of the total spectacle, serving as its
pseudo-opposition and actual support. Even if local manifestations of the
spectacle include certain totalitarian specializations of social communication
and control, from the standpoint of the overall functioning of the system those
specializations are simply playing their allotted role within a global
division of spectacular tasks.

58

Although this division of spectacular tasks preserves the existing order as a
whole, it is primarily oriented toward protecting its dominant pole of
development. The spectacle is rooted in the economy of abundance, and the
products of that economy ultimately tend to dominate the spectacular market and
override the ideological or police-state protectionist barriers set up by local
spectacles with pretensions of independence.

59

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward
banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more
advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of
roles and objects to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family
(the latter is still the primary mechanism for transferring class power from one
generation to the next), along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by
those two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly
gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains repressive
and offers nothing but pseudo-gratifications. Complacent acceptance of the status
quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness
— dissatisfaction
itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the
capacity to process that particular raw material.

60

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings
— project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As
specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that
people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive
specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act
out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a
full, totally free manner.
They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the
by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate
goals: power and vacations — the decision-making and consumption
that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned.
On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudo-star;
on the other, a star of consumption
may campaign for recognition as a
pseudo-power over life. But the activities of these stars are
not really free and they offer no real choices.

61

The agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of
an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the
individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified
with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with
the general law of obedience to the flow of things. The stars of consumption,
though outwardly representing different personality types, show each of
these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the
entire realm of consumption. The stars of decision-making must possess the full
range of admired human qualities: official differences between them are thus
canceled out by the official similarity implied by their supposed excellence in
every field of endeavor. As head of state, Khrushchev retrospectively became a
general so as to take credit for the victory of the battle of Kursk twenty years
after it happened. And Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering
his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorensen continued to write speeches for
his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead
man’s public persona. The admirable people who personify the system are well
known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the
reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.

62

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance — choices based on the
juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct
yet interconnected roles (signified and embodied primarily by objects) — develop
into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent
allegiance to quantitative trivialities. Fallacious archaic oppositions are
revived — regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the
hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority — and
subplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of farcical competitions, from sports to
elections. Wherever abundant consumption is
established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of
illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But
real adults — people
who are masters of their own lives — are in fact nowhere to be found. And a
youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who
are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of
capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each
other and constantly replacing each other.

63

Spectacular oppositions conceal the unity of poverty. If different
forms of the same alienation struggle against each other in the guise of
irreconcilable antagonisms, this is because they are all based on real
contradictions that are repressed. The spectacle exists in a concentrated
form or a diffuse form, depending on the requirements of the particular
stage of poverty it denies and supports. In both cases it is nothing more than
an image of happy harmony surrounded by desolation and
horror, at the calm center of
misery.

64

The concentrated spectacle is primarily associated with bureaucratic
capitalism, though it may also be imported as a technique for reinforcing state
power in more backward mixed economies or even adopted by advanced capitalism
during certain moments of crisis. Bureaucratic property is itself concentrated,
in that the individual bureaucrat takes part in the ownership of the
entire
economy only through his membership in the community of bureaucrats. And
since commodity production is less developed under bureaucratic capitalism, it
too takes on a concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy appropriates is
the total social labor, and what it sells back to the society is that society’s
wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave
the exploited masses any significant margin of choice because it has had to make
all the choices itself, and any choice made independently of it, whether
regarding food or music or anything else, thus amounts to a declaration of war
against it. This dictatorship must be enforced by permanent violence. Its
spectacle imposes an image of the good which subsumes everything that officially
exists, an image which is usually concentrated in a single individual, the
guarantor of the system’s totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically
identify with this absolute star or disappear. This master of everyone else’s
nonconsumption is the heroic image that disguises the absolute exploitation
entailed by the system of primitive accumulation accelerated by terror. If the
entire Chinese population has to study Mao to the point of identifying with Mao,
this is because there is nothing else they can be. The
concentrated spectacle implies a police state.

65

The diffuse spectacle is associated with commodity abundance, with the
undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each individual commodity is
justified in the name of the grandeur of the total commodity production, of
which the spectacle is a laudatory catalog. Irreconcilable claims jockey for
position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different
star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The
automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing
the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to
preserve those districts as tourist attractions. The already dubious
satisfaction alleged to be obtained from the consumption of the whole
is thus constantly being disappointed because the actual consumer can directly
access only a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven, fragments
which
invariably lack the quality attributed to the whole.

66

Each individual commodity fights for itself. It avoids acknowledging
the
others and strives to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one in
existence. The spectacle is the epic poem of this struggle, a struggle that no
fall of Troy can bring to an end. The spectacle does not sing of men and their
arms, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle each
commodity, by pursuing its own passion, unconsciously generates something beyond
itself: the globalization of the commodity (which also
amounts to the commodification of the globe).
Thus, as a result of the cunning of the commodity, while each
particular manifestation of the commodity
eventually falls in battle, the general commodity-form
continues onward toward its absolute realization.

67

The satisfaction that no longer comes from using the commodities
produced in abundance is now sought through recognition of their value as
commodities. Consumers are filled with religious fervor for the sovereign
freedom of commodities whose use has become an end in itself. Waves of
enthusiasm for particular products are propagated by all
the communications media. A film sparks a fashion craze; a magazine publicizes
night spots, which in turn spin off different lines of products. The
proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of
commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity.
Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some
luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued
collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to
commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been
manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity
indulgences — glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the
faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the
commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and
miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of
fervent arousal. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual
submission.

68

The pseudo-needs imposed by modern consumerism cannot be contrasted with any
genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by this society and
its history. Commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic
development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an
unlimited artificiality
which overpowers any living desires. The cumulative
power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.

69

The image of blissful social unification through consumption merely
postpones the consumer’s awareness of the actual divisions until his next
disillusionment with some particular commodity. Each new product is
ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the
promised land of total consummation. But as with the fashionable
adoption of seemingly aristocratic first names which end up being given to
virtually all individuals of the same age, the objects that promise uniqueness can
be offered up for mass consumption only if they are numerous enough to have been mass-produced. The
prestigiousness of mediocre objects of this kind is solely due to the fact that
they have been placed, however briefly, at the center of social life and hailed
as a revelation of the unfathomable purposes of production. But the object that
was prestigious in the spectacle becomes mundane as soon as it is taken home by
its consumer — at the same time as by all its other consumers. Too late it reveals its
essential poverty, a poverty that inevitably reflects the poverty of its production.
Meanwhile, some other object is already replacing it as justification of the
system and demanding its own moment of acclaim.

70

The fraudulence of the satisfactions offered by the system is exposed by
this continual replacement of products and of general conditions of production.
In both the diffuse and the concentrated spectacle,
entities that have brazenly asserted their definitive perfection nevertheless end up
changing, and only the
system endures. Stalin, like any other outmoded commodity, is denounced by the
very forces that originally promoted him. Each new lie of the advertising
industry is an admission of its previous lie. And
with each
downfall of a personification of totalitarian power, the illusory community
that had unanimously approved him is exposed as a mere conglomeration of loners
without illusions.

71

The things the spectacle presents as eternal are based on change, and must
change as their foundations change. The spectacle is totally dogmatic, yet it is
incapable of arriving at any really solid dogma. Nothing stands still for it.
This instability is the spectacle’s natural condition, but it is completely
contrary to its natural inclination.

72

The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division
underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the
producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what
excludes
them from it. What brings people
into relation with each other
by liberating them from
their local and national
limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality
is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and
repression. What produces society’s abstract power also
produces its concrete lack of
freedom.

73

The real movement that transforms existing conditions has been the dominant social
force since the bourgeoisie’s victory within the economic sphere,
and this dominance
became visible once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development
of productive forces shattered the old production relations, and all static order crumbled
into dust.
Everything that was absolute became historical.

74

When people are thrust into history and forced to take part in the work and struggles
that constitute history, they find themselves obliged to view their relationships in a
clear and disabused manner. This history has no object distinct from what it creates
from out of
itself, although the final unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era
considered the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the
object of history. As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than
the self-production of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of
their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.

75

The class struggles of the long
era of revolutions initiated by the rise of
the bourgeoisie have developed in tandem with the dialectical thought of
history — the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning of what
exists, but which strives to comprehend the dissolution of everything that exists and in this process breaks
down every separation.

76

For Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world, but to interpret the transformation
of the world. But because he limited himself to merely interpreting that
transformation, Hegel only represents the philosophical culmination of
philosophy. He seeks to understand a world that develops by itself. This
historical thought is still a consciousness that always arrives too late,
a consciousness that can only
formulate retrospective justifications of what has already happened. It has thus gone beyond
separation only in thought. Hegel’s paradoxical stance — his
subordination of the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination while at the
same time proclaiming that his own system represents that culmination — flows from
the simple fact that this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries sought in his philosophy only a reconciliation with the
results of those revolutions. “Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it
does not reflect the entire process of that revolution, but only its concluding phase.
It is thus a philosophy not of the revolution, but of the restoration” (Karl Korsch,
“Theses on Hegel and Revolution”). Hegel performed the task of the philosopher
— “the glorification of existing conditions” — for the last time; but already
what existed for him could be nothing less than the entire movement of history. Since he
nevertheless maintained the external position of thought, this externality could
be masked only by identifying that thought with a preexisting project of the Spirit —
of that absolute heroic force which has done what it willed and willed what it has done,
and whose ultimate goal coincides with the present. Philosophy, in the process of being
superseded by historical thought, has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its
world only by denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total
history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and that the only
tribunal where truth could be judged is closed.

77

When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical thought
has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at
the same time a confirmation of its method.

78

Historical thought can be salvaged only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of
the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be nothing less than historical consciousness
operating on the totality of its world. All the theoretical currents of the revolutionary
working-class movement — Stirner and Bakunin as well as Marx — grew out of a
critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.

79

The inseparability of Marx’s theory from the Hegelian method is itself inseparable
from that theory’s revolutionary nature, that is, from its truth. It is in this
regard that this initial relation has generally been ignored or
misunderstood, or even denounced as the weak point of what became fallaciously transformed
into a doctrine: “Marxism.” Bernstein implicitly revealed this
connection between the dialectical method and historical partisanship when in his
book Evolutionary Socialism he deplored the 1847
Manifesto’s
unscientific predictions of imminent proletarian revolution in Germany: “This
historical self-deception, so erroneous that the most naïve political visionary could
hardly have done any worse, would be incomprehensible in a Marx who at that time had
already seriously studied economics if we did not recognize that it reflected the
lingering influence of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic, from which Marx, like Engels,
could never completely free himself. In those times of general effervescence this
influence was all the more fatal to him.”

80

The radical transformation carried out by Marx in order to “salvage” the thought of the
bourgeois revolutions by “transplanting” it into a different context does not trivially consist
of putting the materialist development of productive forces in place of the journey of the
Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter with itself — the Spirit whose
objectification is identical to its alienation and whose historical wounds leave no scars.
For once history becomes real, it no longer has an end. Marx demolished
Hegel’s position of detachment from events, as well as passive contemplation
by any supreme external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theory’s concern is simply to
know what it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day society’s passive
contemplation of the movement of the economy is an untransformed holdover from
the undialectical aspect of the Hegelian attempt to create a circular system;
it
is an approval that is no longer on the conceptual level and that no longer needs a
Hegelianism to justify itself, because the movement it now praises is a sector of a world
where thought no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical development effectively
dominates everything. Marx’s project is a project of conscious history, in which
the quantitativeness that arises out of the blind development of merely economic
productive forces must be transformed into a qualitative appropriation of history. 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

Marx’s theory is closely linked with scientific thought insofar as it seeks a
rational understanding of the forces that really operate in society. But it ultimately
goes beyond scientific thought, preserving it only by
superseding it. It seeks to understand struggles, not laws.
“We recognize only one science: the science of history” (The German Ideology).

82

The bourgeois era, which wants to give history a scientific foundation, overlooks the
fact that the science available to it could itself arise only on the foundation of the
historical development of the economy. But history is fundamentally dependent on this
economic knowledge only so long as it remains merely economic history. The extent
to which the viewpoint of scientific observation could overlook history’s effect on
the economy (an overall process
that modifies its own scientific premises) is shown
by the vanity of those socialists who thought they had calculated the exact periodicity of
economic crises. Now that constant governmental intervention has managed to counteract
some of the effects of
the tendencies toward crisis, the same type of mentality sees this delicate balance as a
definitive economic harmony. The project of transcending the economy and mastering history
must indeed grasp and incorporate the science of society, but it cannot itself be a scientific
project. The revolutionary movement remains bourgeois insofar as it thinks it can
master current history by means of scientific knowledge.

83

The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically grounded in criticism
of the existing social system, can rightly be called utopian insofar as they ignore
history — that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking place and any passage of
time outside the immutable perfection of their image of a happy society — but not because
they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers were completely dominated by
the scientific thought of earlier centuries. They sought the completion and fulfillment of
that general rational system. They did not consider themselves unarmed prophets, for they
firmly believed in the social power of scientific proof and even, in the case of
Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “Why,” Sombart asked,
“would they want to seize through struggle what merely needed to be proved?”
But the utopians’ scientific understanding did not include the awareness that some
social groups have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, forces to maintain it,
and forms of false consciousness to reinforce it. Their grasp of reality thus lagged far
behind the historical reality of the development of science itself, which had been largely
oriented by the social requirements arising from such factors, which determined
not only what findings were considered acceptable, but even what topics might or might not become
objects of scientific research. The utopian socialists remained prisoners of the
scientific manner of expounding the truth, viewing this truth as a pure abstract image
such as had prevailed at a much earlier stage of social
development. As Sorel noted, the utopians took astronomy as their model for
discovering and demonstrating the laws of society. Their unhistorical conception of
harmony was the natural result of their attempt to apply to society the science least
dependent on history. They described this harmony as if they were new Newtons discovering
universal scientific laws, and the happy ending they constantly evoked “plays a
role in their social science analogous to the role of inertia in classical physics” (Materials
for a Theory of the Proletariat).

84

The scientific-determinist aspect of Marx’s thought was precisely what made it
vulnerable to “ideologization,” both during his own lifetime and even more so in
the theoretical heritage he left to the workers movement. The advent of the historical
subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics, the historical science
par
excellence, which is increasingly seen as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own
future negation. In this way revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this
negation, tends to be pushed out of theory’s field of vision. Instead, it
is seen as essential to patiently study economic
development, and to go back to accepting with a Hegelian tranquility the suffering
which that development
imposes. The result remains “a graveyard of good
intentions.” The

science of revolutions then concludes that consciousness always comes too
soon, and has
to be taught. “History has shown that we, and all who thought like us, were
wrong,” Engels wrote in 1895. “It has made it clear that the state of economic
development on the Continent at that time was far from being ripe . . .” Throughout his
life Marx had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but the exposition
of his theory was carried out on the terrain of the dominant thought insofar as
it took the form of critiques of particular disciplines, most notably the critique of that
fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was in this mutilated
form, which eventually came to be seen as definitive, that Marx’s theory was
transformed into “Marxism.”

85

The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally linked to the weakness of the
revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The German working class failed to
initiate a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune was defeated in isolation. As
a result, revolutionary theory could not yet be fully realized. The fact that Marx was
reduced to defending and refining it by cloistered scholarly work in the British Museum
had a debilitating effect on the theory itself. His scientific conclusions
about the future development of the working class, and the organizational practice
apparently implied by those conclusions, became obstacles to proletarian consciousness
at a later stage.

86

The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian
revolution, both in its content and in
its form of exposition, all ultimately result
from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the
revolutionary seizure of power.

87

As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marx’s effort to demonstrate the
scientific legitimacy of proletarian power by citing a repetitive sequence of precedents led
him to oversimplify his historical analysis into a linear model of the
development of modes of production, in which class struggles invariably resulted
“either in a revolutionary transformation of the entire society or in the mutual ruin
of the contending classes.” The plain facts of history, however, are that the
“Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere)
maintained
its immobility despite all its class conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the
feudal lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of
the free men. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the
only revolutionary class that has ever won; and that it is also the only class for
which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking
control of society. The same oversimplification led Marx to neglect the economic role of
the state in the management of class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed to liberate
the economy from the state, this was true only to the extent that the previous state was
an instrument of class oppression within a static economy. The bourgeoisie
originally developed its independent economic power during the Medieval period when the
state had been weakened and feudalism was breaking up the stable equilibrium between
different powers. In contrast, the modern state
— which began to support the
bourgeoisie’s development through its mercantilist policies and which developed into the
bourgeoisie’s own state during the laissez-faire era
— was eventually to
emerge as a central power in the planned management of the economic process. Marx
was nevertheless able to describe the “Bonapartist” prototype of modern statist
bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and state to create a “national power of capital
over labor, a public force designed to maintain social servitude” — a form of
social order in which the bourgeoisie renounces all historical life apart from what has
been reduced to the economic history of things, and would like to be
“condemned to the same political nullity as all the other classes.” The
socio-political foundations of the modern spectacle are already discernible here, and this
result negatively implies that the proletariat is the only pretender to historical
life.

88

The only two classes that really correspond to Marx’s theory, the two pure classes
that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes in history, but
operating under different conditions. The bourgeois revolution has been
accomplished. The
proletarian revolution is a yet-unrealized project, born on the foundation of the earlier
revolution but differing from it qualitatively. If one overlooks the originality
of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one also tends to overlook the specific originality
of the proletarian project, which can achieve nothing unless it carries its own banners
and recognizes the “immensity of its tasks.” The bourgeoisie came to power
because it was the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot
embody its own
new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of
productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence of such a power — not
even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession which that growth entails. Nor can
a Jacobin-style seizure of the state be a means to this end. The proletariat cannot make
use of any ideology designed to disguise partial goals as general goals,
because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality that is truly its own.

89

If Marx, during a certain period of his participation in the proletarian struggle,
put too great an emphasis on scientific prediction, to the point of creating the
intellectual basis for the illusions of economism, it is clear that he himself did not
succumb to those illusions. In a well-known letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an
article reviewing Capital which he himself had written but which he wanted
Engels to present to the press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly indicated the
limits of his own science: “The author’s subjective tendency (imposed
on him, perhaps, by his political position and his past), namely the manner in which he
presents to himself and to others the ultimate outcome of the present movement,
of the present social
process, has no connection with his actual analysis.” By thus disparaging the
“tendentious conclusions” of his own objective analysis, and by the irony of the
“perhaps” with reference to the extra-scientific choices supposedly
“imposed” on him, Marx implicitly revealed the methodological key to fusing the
two aspects.

90

The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical struggle
itself, in such a way that each depends on the other for its validation. The proletarian
class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing revolutionary struggles and in
its reorganization of society at the moment of revolution. This is where
the practical conditions of consciousness must exist, conditions in which the
theory of praxis is confirmed by becoming practical theory. But this crucial question of
organization was virtually ignored by revolutionary theory during the period
when
the workers movement was first taking shape — the very period when that theory still possessed the unitary
character it had inherited from historical thought (and which it had rightly vowed to
develop into a unitary historical practice). Instead, the organizational question
became the weakest aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the
revival of hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The
forms of organization of the workers movement that were developed on the basis of this
theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit the maintenance of a unitary theory by
breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented disciplines. This ideologically
alienated theory was then no longer able to recognize the practical verifications of the
unitary historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications emerged in spontaneous
working-class struggles; instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and
memory of them. Yet those historical forms
that took shape in struggle
were precisely the practical terrain that was needed in order to validate the theory. They were
what the theory needed, yet that need had not been formulated theoretically. The soviet,
for example, was not a theoretical discovery. And the
most advanced
theoretical truth of the International Working Men’s Association was its own existence
in practice.

91

The First International’s initial successes enabled it to free itself from the
confused influences of the dominant ideology that had survived within it. But the defeat
and repression that it soon encountered brought to the surface a conflict between two
different conceptions of proletarian revolution, each of which contained an authoritarian
dimension that amounted to abandoning the conscious self-emancipation of the working class.
The feud between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, which eventually became irreconcilable,
actually centered on two different issues — the question of power in a future revolutionary
society and the question of the organization of the current movement
— and each of the
adversaries reversed their position when they went from one aspect to the other. Bakunin
denounced the illusion that classes could be abolished by means of an authoritarian
implementation of state power, warning that this would lead to the
formation of a new
bureaucratic ruling class and to the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable (or of those
reputed to be such). Marx, who believed that the concomitant maturation of economic
contradictions and of the workers’ education in democracy would reduce the role of
a proletarian state to a brief phase needed to legitimize the new social relations
brought into being by objective factors, denounced Bakunin and his supporters as an
authoritarian conspiratorial elite who were deliberately placing themselves above the
International with the harebrained scheme of imposing on society an irresponsible
dictatorship of the most revolutionary (or of those who would designate themselves as
such). Bakunin did in fact recruit followers on such a basis: “In the midst of the
popular tempest we must be the invisible pilots guiding the revolution, not through any
kind of overt power but through the collective dictatorship of our Alliance — a
dictatorship without any insignia or titles or official status, yet all the more powerful
because it will have none of the appearances of power.” Thus two ideologies
of working-class revolution opposed each other, each containing a partially true critique,
but each losing the unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority.
Powerful organizations such as 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 sought.

92

The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately
present represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist
struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously — the pretensions
of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous). From the historical
thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and
its constant harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to
any consideration of methods. Its critique of political struggle has
thus remained abstract, while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled
toward the mirage of a definitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by a single
blow on this terrain, on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists
strive to realize an ideal. Anarchism is still an
ideological negation of the state and of class society — the very social
conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the ideology of pure
freedom, an ideology that puts everything on the same
level and eliminates any
conception of

historical evil. This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand
has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the
name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical
specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been
envisaged only in the absolute, in
accordance with individual whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed
anarchism to an all too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular
struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing lesson, because
this lesson has from the beginning been considered the be-all and end-all of the movement.
This is reflected in Bakunin’s 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura
Federation: “During the past nine years the International has developed more than
enough ideas to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to
come up with a new one. It’s no longer the time for ideas, it’s time for
actions.” This perspective undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thought’s
recognition that ideas must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical terrain
by assuming that the appropriate forms for this transition to practice have already been
discovered and will never change.

93

The anarchists, who explicitly distinguish themselves from the rest of the workers
movement by their ideological conviction, reproduce this separation of competencies within
their own ranks by providing a terrain that facilitates the informal domination of each
particular anarchist organization by propagandists and defenders of their ideology,
specialists whose mediocre intellectual activity is largely limited to the constant
regurgitation of a few eternal truths. The anarchists’ ideological reverence for
unanimous decision-making has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled manipulation of
their own organizations by specialists in freedom; and revolutionary anarchism
expects the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means, from the masses once they
have been liberated. Furthermore, the anarchists’ refusal to take into account the
great differences between the conditions of a minority banded together in present-day
struggles and of a postrevolutionary society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the
isolation of anarchists when the moment for collective decision-making
actually arrives, as is shown
by the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and crushed at a
local level.

94

The illusion more or less explicitly maintained by genuine anarchism is its constant
belief that a revolution is just around the corner, and that the instantaneous
accomplishment of this revolution will demonstrate the truth of anarchist ideology and of
the form of practical organization that has developed in accordance with that ideology. In
1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a
revolution that was the most advanced
expression of proletarian power ever realized. But even in that case it should be noted
that the general uprising began as a merely defensive reaction to the army’s
attempted coup. Furthermore, inasmuch as the revolution was not carried to completion
during its opening days (because Franco’s forces controlled half the country and were being strongly
supported from abroad, because the rest of the international proletarian movement had
already been defeated, and because the camp of the Republic included various bourgeois forces
and statist working-class parties), the organized anarchist movement proved incapable of
extending the revolution’s partial victories, or even of defending them. Its
recognized leaders became government ministers, hostages to a bourgeois state that was
destroying the revolution even as it proceeded to lose the civil war.

95

The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International is the scientific ideology
of socialist revolution, an ideology which identifies its whole truth with objective
economic processes and with the progressive recognition of the inevitability of those
processes by a working class educated by the organization. This ideology revives the faith in pedagogical demonstration that was found among the utopian socialists, combining that faith with a contemplative invocation of the course of history.
But it has lost both the Hegelian dimension of total history and the static image
of totality presented by the utopians (most richly by Fourier). This type of scientific
attitude, which can do nothing more than resurrect the traditional dilemmas between
symmetrical ethical choices, is at the root of Hilferding’s absurd conclusion that
recognizing the inevitability of socialism “gives no indication as to what practical
attitude should be adopted. For it is one thing to recognize that something is inevitable,
and quite another to put oneself in the service of that inevitability” (Finance
Capital).
Those who failed to realize that for Marx and for the revolutionary proletariat unitary
historical thought was in no way distinct from a practical attitude to be adopted
generally ended up becoming victims of the practice they did adopt.

96

The ideology of the social-democratic organizations put those organizations under the
control of the professors who were educating the working class, and their
organizational forms corresponded to this type of passive apprenticeship. The
participation of the socialists of the Second International in political and economic
struggles was admittedly concrete, but it was profoundly uncritical. It was a
manifestly reformist practice carried on in the name of an illusory
revolutionism. This ideology of revolution inevitably foundered on the very successes
of those who proclaimed it. The elevation of socialist journalists and parliamentary
representatives above the rest of the movement encouraged
them to become habituated to a
bourgeois lifestyle (most of them had in any case
been recruited from the bourgeois intelligentsia), while industrial workers who had been recruited out of struggles
in the factories were transformed by the labor-union bureaucracy into brokers of
labor-power, whose task was to make sure that that commodity was sold at a
“fair” price. For the activity of all these people to have retained any
appearance of being revolutionary, capitalism would have had to have turned out to be
conveniently incapable of tolerating this economic reformism, despite the
fact that it had no trouble tolerating the legalistic political expressions of the same
reformism. The social democrats’ scientific ideology confidently affirmed that
capitalism could not tolerate these economic reforms, but history repeatedly proved
them wrong.

97

Bernstein, the social democrat least attached to political ideology and most openly
attached to the methodology of bourgeois science, was honest enough to point out this
contradiction (a contradiction which had also been revealed by the reformist movement
of the English workers, who never bothered to invoke any revolutionary ideology). But it was historical development itself which ultimately provided the
definitive demonstration. Although full of illusions in other regards, Bernstein had
denied that a crisis of capitalist production would miraculously force the hand of the
socialists, who wanted to inherit the revolution only by way of this orthodox
ritual. The profound social upheaval provoked by World War I, though it led to
widespread awakenings of radical consciousness, twice demonstrated that the
social-democratic hierarchy had failed to provide the German workers with a revolutionary
education capable of turning them into theorists: first, when the overwhelming
majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; then, following the German defeat,
when the party crushed the Spartakist revolutionaries. The ex-worker Ebert, who had become
one of the social-democratic leaders, apparently still believed in sin since he admitted
that he hated revolution “like sin.” And he proved himself a fitting precursor
of the socialist representation that was soon to emerge as the mortal enemy of
the proletariat in Russia and elsewhere, when he accurately summed up the essence of this
new form of alienation: “Socialism means working a lot.”

98

As a Marxist thinker, Lenin was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist
who applied the revolutionary ideology of “orthodox Marxism” within the
conditions existing in Russia, conditions which did not lend themselves to the reformist
practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International. The
Bolshevik practice of directing the proletariat from outside, by means of a disciplined
underground party under the control of intellectuals who had become “professional
revolutionaries,” became a new profession — a profession that refused to
negotiate or compromise with any of the professional ruling strata of capitalist society. (The Czarist
regime was in any case incapable of offering any opportunities for such
compromise, which depends on an advanced stage of bourgeois power.) As a result of this
intransigence, the Bolsheviks ended up practicing the profession
of totalitarian social domination.

99

With the war and the collapse of international social democracy in the
face of that war, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able to
spread its influence 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 breakthrough engendered by this period of crisis, offered its
hierarchical and ideological model to the proletariat of all countries, urging them to
adopt it in order to “speak Russian” to their own ruling classes. Lenin did not
reproach the Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary ideology,
but for ceasing to be a revolutionary ideology.

100

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and
social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the
inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s
domination: the representation of the
working class has become
an enemy of the working class.

101

“In all previous revolutions,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne
of December 21, 1918, “the combatants faced each other openly and directly, class
against class, program against program. In the present revolution, the troops protecting
the old order are not fighting under the insignia of the ruling class, but under the
banner of a ‘social-democratic party.’ If the central question of revolution was
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 engendered by the whole process that had gone before (a development to
which the representation of the working class had greatly contributed): the spectacular
organization of the ruling order’s defense, 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 primary
cause and the central result of the general falsification of society.

102

The organization of the proletariat on the Bolshevik model resulted
from the backwardness of Russia and from the abandonment of revolutionary struggle by the
workers movements of the advanced countries; and those same backward conditions also tended to
foster the counterrevolutionary aspects that that form of organization had unconsciously
contained from its inception. The repeated failure of the mass of the European workers
movement to take advantage of the Hic Rhodus, hic salta of the 1918-1920 period (a failure
which included the violent destruction of its own radical minority) contributed
to the
consolidation of the Bolshevik development and enabled that fraudulent outcome to present
itself to the world as the only possible proletarian solution. By seizing a state monopoly
as sole representative and defender of working-class power, the Bolshevik Party justified
itself and became what it already was: the party of the owners of
the proletariat, a party ownership that essentially eliminated earlier forms of property.

103

For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had engaged in an
unresolved debate over all the conditions that might bear on the overthrow of
the Czarist regime
— the weakness of the bourgeoisie; the preponderance of the peasant majority;
and the
potentially decisive role of a proletariat which was concentrated and combative but which
constituted only a small minority of the population. This debate was eventually resolved
in practice by a factor that had not figured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary
bureaucracy that placed itself at the head of the proletariat, seized state power, and
proceeded to impose a new form of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution had
been impossible; talk of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” was
meaningless verbiage; and the proletarian power of the soviets could not simultaneously
maintain itself against the class of small landowners, against the national and
international White reaction, and against its own representation which had become
externalized and alienated in the form of a working-class party that maintained total
control over the state, the economy, the means of expression, and soon even over
people’s thoughts. Trotsky and Parvus’s theory of permanent revolution, which
Lenin adopted in April 1917, was the only theory that proved true for countries with
underdeveloped bourgeoisies, but it became true
only after this unforeseen factor of bureaucratic class power came into the picture. In the
numerous conflicts within the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin was the most consistent advocate
of concentrating dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological
representation. Lenin was right every time in the sense that he invariably supported the
solution implied by the earlier choices of the minority that now exercised absolute power:
the
democracy that was kept from the peasants by means of the state would have to be kept
from the workers as well, which led to denying it to Communist union leaders and to party
members in general, and finally to the highest ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth
Congress, as the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried under a barrage of
slander, Lenin attacked the radical-left bureaucrats who had formed a “Workers’
Opposition” faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin would
later extend to an absolute division of the world: “You can stand here with us, or
against us out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition.
. . . We’ve had enough opposition.”

104

After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy consolidated its power as sole owner of a system of state
capitalism — internally by means of a temporary alliance with the peasantry (the
“New Economic Policy”) and externally by using the workers regimented into the
bureaucratic parties of the Third International as a backup force for Russian diplomacy,
sabotaging the entire revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose
support it in turn hoped to secure in the sphere of international politics (the Kuomintang
regime in the China of 1925-1927, the Popular Fronts in Spain and France, etc.). The
Russian bureaucracy then carried this consolidation of power to the next stage by
subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror, implementing the most brutal primitive
accumulation of capital in history. The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy
by
preserving the essence of market society:
commodified labor.
It also demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy has come to
dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination
it needs for its own continued operation;
that is, the bourgeoisie
has created an
independent power that is capable of maintaining itself even without a
bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not “the last owning class in
history” in Bruno Rizzi’s sense; it was merely a substitute ruling class
for the commodity economy. A faltering capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder
version of itself — simplified, less diversified, and concentrated as the
collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped type of ruling class is
also a reflection of economic underdevelopment, and it has no agenda beyond overcoming
this underdevelopment in certain regions of the world. The hierarchical and statist
framework for this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided by the
working-class party, which was itself modeled on the hierarchical separations of bourgeois
organizations. As Ante Ciliga noted while in one of Stalin’s prisons, “Technical
questions of organization turned out to be social questions” (Lenin and the
Revolution).

105

Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology — a coherence
of the separate governing a reality that resisted it. With the advent of Stalinism,
revolutionary ideology returned to its fundamental incoherence. At that
point,
ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a lie that can no
longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological
pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says
exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confined to certain
underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential role in the
spectacle’s global development. This particular materialization of ideology did not
transform the world economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state
methods to transform people’s perception of the world.

106

The ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside down.
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its
power is employed
above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because
this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning
achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is
everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result,
all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this
fundamental contradiction.

107

Stalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The
terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class
itself, because this class has no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an
owning class which could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership has to be
masked because it is based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain
its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are
ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of
ownership over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have
to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be actors
faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot
actually participate in this counterfeit entity unless
their legitimacy is validated. No bureaucrat can individually
assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have
to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a
bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official line is that there is no
bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the
central seal of legitimacy
provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its
“socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate.
Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the
cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist
power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the
ruling
lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless
constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of
the ruling bureaucracy — who should be considered a “proletarian in power”
and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The
atomized bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin
— the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as
the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit
exists. “The lord and master of the world recognizes his
own nature — omnipresent power — through the destructive violence he exerts
against the contrastingly powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that
defines the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages
that terrain.”

108

When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and has
changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has been so
totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical
knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual
present in which whatever has previously happened
exists for it solely as a space accessible to its police. The project already envisioned by Napoleon of
“monarchically directing the energy of memory” has been realized in
Stalinism’s constant rewriting of the past, which alters not only the interpretations
of past events but even the events themselves. But the price paid for this
liberation
from all historical reality is the loss of the rational frame of reference that is
indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system. The Lysenko
fiasco is just one well-known example of how
much the scientific application of ideology gone mad has cost the Russian economy. This contradiction — the fact that a
totalitarian bureaucracy trying to administer an industrialized society is caught between
its need for rationality and its repression of rationality — is also one of its main
weaknesses in comparison with normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy
cannot resolve the question of agriculture as ordinary capitalism has done, it also proves
inferior to the latter in the field of industrial production, because its
unrealistic authoritarian planning is
based on omnipresent falsifications.

109

Between the two world wars the revolutionary working-class movement was destroyed by
the joint action of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of fascist totalitarianism (the
latter’s organizational form having been inspired by the totalitarian party that had
first been tested and developed in Russia). Fascism
was a desperate attempt to defend
the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion,
a state
of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose
of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention. But this
rationalization is hampered by the extreme irrationality of its methods. Although fascism
rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become
conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the
petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crises or
disillusioned by the socialist movement’s failure to bring about a revolution, it is
not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself
as what it is — a violent
resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic
pseudo-values: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a
technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular
context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus a significant
factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the
old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day
society. But since it is also the most
costly method of preserving the
capitalist order, it has generally ended up being pushed to the back of the
stage and replaced by the major capitalist states,
which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.

110

When the Russian bureaucracy has finally succeeded in doing away with the vestiges of
bourgeois property that hampered its rule over the economy, in developing this economy
for its own purposes, and in being recognized as a member of the club of great powers, it
wants to enjoy its world in peace and to disencumber itself from the arbitrariness to
which it is still subjected. It thus denounces the Stalinism
at its origin. But this
denunciation remains Stalinist — arbitrary, unexplained, and subject to continual
modification — because the ideological lie at its origin can never be revealed.
The bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically because its
existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly, which, for all its
cumbersomeness, is its sole title to ownership. This ideology has lost the passion of its
original expression, but its passionless routinization still has the repressive function
of controlling all thought and prohibiting any competition whatsoever. The bureaucracy is
thus helplessly tied to an ideology that is no longer believed by anyone. The power that
used to inspire terror now inspires ridicule, but this ridiculed power must still defend
itself with the threat of resorting to the terrorizing force it would like to be rid of.
Thus, at the very time when the bureaucracy hopes to demonstrate its superiority on the
terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to be a poor cousin of capitalism. Just
as its actual history contradicts its façade of legality and its crudely maintained
ignorance contradicts its scientific pretensions, its attempt to vie with the
bourgeoisie in the production of commodity abundance is stymied by the fact that such
abundance contains its own implicit ideology and is generally accompanied by the
freedom to choose from an unlimited range of spectacular
pseudo-alternatives — a
pseudo-freedom that remains incompatible with the bureaucracy’s ideology.

111

The bureaucracy’s ideological title to
ownership is already collapsing at the
international level. The power that established itself nationally
in the name of an ostensibly internationalist perspective is now
forced to recognize that
it can no longer impose its system of lies beyond its own national borders. The unequal
economic development of diverse bureaucracies with competing interests
that have succeeded
in establishing their own “socialism” in more than one country has led to an
all-out public confrontation between the Russian lie and the Chinese lie. From this point
on, each bureaucracy in power will have to find its own way, and the same is true for each
of the totalitarian parties aspiring to such power (notably those that still survive from
the Stalinist period among certain national working classes). This international collapse
has been further aggravated by the expressions of internal negation, which first
became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted
against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers” — a
negation which has in one case already gone to the point of sovereign workers
councils in Hungary. But in the final analysis, this crumbling of the global alliance
based on the bureaucratic hoax is also a very unfavorable development for the future of
capitalist society. The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the adversary that
objectively supported it by providing an illusory unification of all opposition to the
existing order. This division of labor between two mutually reinforcing forms of the
spectacle comes to an end when the pseudo-revolutionary role in turn divides. The
spectacular component of the destruction of the working-class movement is itself headed for
destruction.

112

The only current partisans of the Leninist illusion are the various Trotskyist
tendencies, which stubbornly persist in identifying the proletarian project with an
ideologically based hierarchical organization despite all the historical experiences that
have refuted that perspective. The distance that separates Trotskyism from a revolutionary
critique of present-day society is related to the
deferential distance the
Trotskyists maintain regarding positions that were already mistaken when they were acted on
in real struggles. Trotsky remained fundamentally loyal to the upper
bureaucracy until 1927, while striving
to gain control of it so as to make it resume a genuinely
Bolshevik foreign policy. (It is well known, for example, that in order to help conceal
Lenin’s famous “Testament” he went so far as to slanderously disavow his
own supporter Max Eastman, who had made it public.) Trotsky was doomed by his basic
perspective, because once the bureaucracy became aware that it had evolved into a
counterrevolutionary class on the domestic front, it was bound to opt for a similarly
counterrevolutionary role in other countries (though still, of course, in the name of
revolution). Trotsky’s subsequent efforts to create a Fourth International reflect
the same inconsistency. Once he had become an unconditional partisan of the Bolshevik form
of organization (which he did during the second Russian revolution), he refused for the
rest of his life to recognize that the bureaucracy
was a new ruling class. When
Lukács, in 1923, presented this same organizational form as the long-sought link between
theory and practice, in which proletarians cease being mere “spectators” of the
events that occur in their organization and begin consciously choosing and experiencing
those events, he was describing as merits of the Bolshevik Party everything that that
party was not. Despite his profound theoretical work, Lukács remained an
ideologue, speaking in the name of the power that was most grossly alien to the
proletarian movement, yet believing and pretending that he found
himself completely at home with it. As subsequent events demonstrated how that
power disavows and suppresses its lackeys, Lukács’s endless self-repudiations
revealed with caricatural clarity that he had identified with the total opposite
of himself and of everything he had argued for in History and Class Consciousness.
No one better than Lukács illustrates the validity of the fundamental rule for assessing
all the intellectuals of this century: What they respect is a precise
measure of
their own degradation. Yet Lenin had hardly encouraged these sorts of illusions
about his activities. On the contrary, he acknowledged that “a political party cannot
examine its members to see if there are contradictions between their philosophy and the
party program.” The party whose idealized portrait Lukács had so inopportunely drawn
was in reality suited for only one very specific and limited task: the seizure of state
power.

113

Since the neo-Leninist illusion carried on by present-day Trotskyism is constantly
being contradicted by the reality of modern capitalist societies (both bourgeois
and
bureaucratic), it is not surprising that it gets its most favorable reception in the
nominally independent “underdeveloped” countries, where the local ruling
classes’ versions of bureaucratic state socialism end up amounting to little more
than a mere ideology of economic development. The hybrid composition of these
ruling classes tends to correspond to their position
within the
bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. Their international maneuvering between those two poles
of capitalist power, along with their numerous ideological compromises (notably with Islam)
stemming from their heterogeneous social bases, end up removing from these degraded
versions of ideological socialism everything serious except the police. One type of
bureaucracy establishes itself by forging an organization capable of combining national
struggle with agrarian peasant revolt; it then, as in China, tends to apply the Stalinist
model of industrialization in societies that are even less developed than Russia was in
1917. A bureaucracy able to industrialize the nation may also develop out of the petty
bourgeoisie, with power being seized by army officers, as happened in Egypt. In other
situations, such as the aftermath of the Algerian war of independence, a bureaucracy that
has established itself as a para-state authority in the course of struggle may seek a
stabilizing compromise by merging with a weak national bourgeoisie. Finally, in the former
colonies of black Africa that remain openly tied to the American and European bourgeoisie,
a local bourgeoisie constitutes itself (usually forming around the traditional tribal
chiefs) through its possession of the state. Foreign imperialism remains the real
master of the economy of these countries, but at a certain stage its native agents are
rewarded for their sale of local products by being granted possession of a local state
— a state that is independent from the local masses but not from imperialism.
Incapable of accumulating capital, this artificial
bourgeoisie does nothing but squander the surplus value it extracts from local labor and the subsidies
it receives from the foreign states and international monopolies that are its
protectors. Because of the obvious
inability of these bourgeois classes to fulfill the normal economic functions of a
bourgeoisie, they soon find themselves challenged by oppositional movements based on the
bureaucratic model (more or less adapted to particular local conditions). But if such bureaucracies succeed
in their
fundamental project of industrialization, they produce the historical conditions for
their own
defeat: by accumulating capital they also accumulate a proletariat, thus creating
their own
negation in countries where that negation had not previously existed.

114

In the course of this complex and terrible evolution
which has brought the era of class
struggles to a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has lost
its ability to assert its own independent perspective. In a
fundamental sense, it has also
lost its illusions. But it has not lost its being. The proletariat has not been
eliminated. It remains irreducibly present within the intensified alienation of modern
capitalism. It consists of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over
their lives and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves as the
proletariat, the force working to negate this society from within. This proletariat is
being objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination of the peasantry and by the
increasing degree to which the “service” sectors and intellectual professions
are being subjected to factorylike working conditions. Subjectively, however, this
proletariat is still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes not
only for white-collar workers but also for blue-collar workers, who have yet to become
aware of any perspective beyond the impotence and deceptions of the old politics. But
when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the constant
reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor
but also in the form of the labor unions, political parties, and state powers
that it had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete
historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified
externalizations and all specializations of power. It bears
a
revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the
permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation;
and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution. No
quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized
system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction,
because the proletariat cannot
truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the righting of
any particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such
wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded from
any real life.

115

New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically advanced countries.
Although these signs are misunderstood and falsified by the spectacle, they
are sufficient proof that a new period has begun. We have already seen the failure of the first
proletarian assault against capitalism; now we are witnessing the
failure of capitalist abundance. On one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are being
repressed first of all by the unions; on the other, rebellious
youth are raising new protests, protests which are still vague and confused
but which clearly imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized

politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous struggle that is at first
taking on a criminal appearance. They foreshadow a second
proletarian assault against class society. As the lost children of this as yet immobile
army reappear on this battleground — a battleground which has changed and yet remains
the same — they are following a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to
attack the machinery of permitted consumption.

116

“The long-sought political form through which the working class could carry out
its own economic liberation” has taken on a clear shape in this century, in the
form of revolutionary workers councils that assume all decision-making and executive
powers and that federate with each other by means of delegates who are answerable to their base
and revocable at any moment. The councils that have actually emerged have as yet provided
no more than a rough hint of their possibilities because they have immediately been
opposed and defeated by class society’s various defensive forces, among which their
own false consciousness must often be included. As Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting for
the power of workers councils “poses problems” rather than providing a solution.
But it is precisely within this form of social organization that the problems of
proletarian revolution can find their real solution. This is the terrain where the
objective preconditions of historical consciousness are brought together — the
terrain where active direct communication is realized, marking the end of
specialization, hierarchy and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions
into “conditions of unity.” In this process proletarian subjects can emerge
from their struggle against their contemplative position; their consciousness
is equal to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves because this
consciousness has become inseparable from coherent intervention in history.

117

With the power of the councils — a power that must internationally supplant all
other forms of power — the proletarian movement becomes its own product. This product
is nothing other than the producers themselves, whose goal has become nothing other than
their own fulfillment. Only in this way can the spectacle’s negation of life be
negated in its turn.

118

The appearance of workers councils during the first quarter of this century was the
most advanced expression of the old proletarian movement, but it
was unnoticed or forgotten,
except in travestied forms, because it was repressed and destroyed along with all the rest
of the movement. Now, from the vantage point of the new stage of proletarian critique, the
councils can be seen in their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated
movement. The historical consciousness that recognizes that the councils are the only
terrain in which it can thrive can now see that they are no longer at the periphery of a
movement that is subsiding, but at the center of a movement that is rising.

119

A revolutionary organization that exists before the establishment of the power of
workers councils will discover its own appropriate form through struggle; but all these
historical experiences have already made it clear that it cannot claim to represent
the working class. Its task, rather, is to embody a radical separation from the
world of separation.

120

Revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory of praxis
entering into two-way communication with practical struggles, in the process of becoming
practical theory. Its own practice is to foster the communication and coherence of these
struggles. At the revolutionary moment when social separations are dissolved, the
organization must dissolve itself as a separate organization.

121

A revolutionary organization must constitute an integral critique of society, that is,
it must make a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated social life while
refusing to compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the world. In the
organization’s struggle against class society, the
combatants themselves are the fundamental weapons: a revolutionary organization must
thus see to it that the
dominant society’s conditions of separation and hierarchy are not reproduced within
itself. It must constantly struggle against its deformation by the ruling spectacle. The
only limit to participation in the organization’s total democracy is that each of its members must have
recognized and appropriated the coherence of the organization’s critique
— a coherence
that must be demonstrated both in the critical theory as such and in the relation between
that theory and practical activity.

122

As capitalism’s ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it
increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, putting them
in the position of having to reject that impoverishment in its totality or not at all,
revolutionary organization has had to learn that it can no longer combat alienation by
means of alienated forms of struggle.

123

Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time,
theory as understanding of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It
requires that workers become dialecticians and put their thought into practice. It thus
demands of “people without qualities” more than the bourgeois revolution
demanded of the qualified individuals it delegated to carry out its tasks, because the partial
ideological consciousness developed by a segment of the bourgeois class was based on the
economy, that central part of social life in which that class was already in
power. The development of class society to the stage of the spectacular
organization of nonlife is thus leading the revolutionary project to become visibly
what it has already been in essence.

124

Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it knows
it.

O, gentlemen, the time of life is short! . . .

An if we live, we live to tread on kings.

—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

125

Man, “the negative being who is solely to the extent that he suppresses
being,” is identical with time. Man’s appropriation of his own nature is at the same
time his grasp of the development of the universe. “History is itself a real part of natural
history, of the transformation of nature into man” (Marx). Conversely, this
“natural history” exists effectively only through the process of human
history, the only vantage point from which one can take in that historical totality, like
the modern telescope whose power enables us to look back in time at the receding
nebulas at the periphery of the universe. History has always existed, but not always in its
historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought
about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes
manifest and true within historical consciousness.

126

True (though still hidden) historical movement begins with the slow and
imperceptible development of the “real nature of man” — the “nature
that is born with human history, out of the generative action of human society.” But
even when such a society has developed a technology and a language and is already a
product of its own history, it is conscious only of a perpetual present. Knowledge is
carried on only by the living, never going beyond the memory of the
society’s oldest members. Neither death nor procreation is understood as a law of
time. Time remains motionless, like an enclosed space. When a more complex society finally
becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it, for it views time not as something
that passes, but as something that returns. This static type of society organizes
time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with its own direct experience of
nature.

127

Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples because they find the same
conditions repeated at each stage of their journey. As Hegel notes, “the wandering
of nomads is only formal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” When a society
settles in a particular location and gives space a content by developing distinctive areas
within it, it finds itself confined within that locality. The periodic return to similar
places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a sequence
of activities. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture marks the
end of an idle and contentless freedom and the beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of
production, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully developed
cyclical time. Eternity is within this time, it is the return of the same here on
earth. Myth is the unitary mental construct which guarantees
that the cosmic order
conforms with the order that this society has in fact already established within its frontiers.

128

The social appropriation of time and the production of man by human labor develop
within a society divided into classes. The power that establishes itself above the poverty
of the society of cyclical time, the class that organizes
this social labor and
appropriates its limited surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal
surplus value resulting from its organization of social time: it alone possesses the
irreversible time of the living. The wealth that can only be concentrated in the hands of
the rulers and spent in extravagant festivities amounts to a squandering of historical
time at the surface of society. The owners of this historical surplus value are the
only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective
organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life,
this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time
of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their
personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign
communities that disrupt the unchanging social order. History thus arises as something
alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves
protected. But it also revives the negative human restlessness
that had been at the very origin of this whole (temporarily dormant) development.

129

In itself, cyclical time is a time without conflict. But conflict emerges
even in this infancy of time, as history first struggles to become history in the practical
activity of the masters. This history creates a surface irreversibility; its movement
constitutes the very time it uses up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.

130

“Static societies” are societies that have reduced their historical movement
to a minimum, that have managed to maintain their internal conflicts and their
conflicts with the natural and human environment in a constant equilibrium. Although the
extraordinary diversity of the institutions established for this purpose bears eloquent
testimony to the flexibility of human nature’s self-creation, this diversity is
apparent only to the external observer, the ethnologist who looks back from
the vantage point of historical time. In each of these societies a definitive
organizational structure has eliminated any possibility of change. The total conformism of
their social practices, with which all human possibilities are identified for all time,
has no external limit but the fear of falling back into a formless animal condition. The
members of these societies remain human at the price of always remaining the same.

131

With the emergence of political power
— which seems to be associated with the last great
technological revolutions (such as iron smelting) at the threshold of a
period that would experience no further major upheavals until the rise of modern industry
— kinship ties begin to dissolve. The succession of generations
within a natural, purely cyclical time begins to be replaced by a linear succession of
powers and events. This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty
is its first unit of measurement. Writing is the
rulers’ weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independence as a mediation between
consciousnesses. But this independence coincides with the general independence of separate power,
the mediation that shapes society. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no
longer carried and transmitted directly among the living — an impersonal memory,
the memory of the administration of society. “Writings are the thoughts of the state;
archives are its memory” (Novalis).

132

The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of power. It also serves to
inspire the continued progression of that time by recording the past out of which it has
developed, since this orientation of time tends to collapse with the fall of each
particular power and would otherwise sink back into the indifferent oblivion of cyclical
time (the only time known to the peasant masses who, during the rise and fall of all the
empires and their chronologies, never change). The owners of history have given
time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning. But this history
develops and perishes separately, leaving the underlying society unchanged, because it
remains separated from the common reality. This is why we tend to reduce the history of
Oriental empires to a history of religions: the chronologies that have fallen to ruins
have left nothing but the seemingly independent history of the illusions that veiled them.
The masters who used the protection of myth to make history their private property
did so first of all in the realm of illusion. In China and Egypt, for example, they long
held a monopoly on the immortality of the soul; and their earliest officially recognized
dynasties were nothing but imaginary reconstructions of the past. But this illusory
ownership by the masters was the only ownership then possible, both of the common history
and of their own history. As their real historical power expanded, this illusory-mythical
ownership became increasingly vulgarized. All these consequences flowed from the simple
fact that as the masters played the role of mythically guaranteeing the
permanence of cyclical time (as in the seasonal rites performed by the Chinese emperors),
they themselves achieved a relative liberation from cyclical time.

133

The dry, unexplained chronology
that a deified authority offered to its
subjects, who were supposed to accept it as the earthly
fulfillment of mythic
commandments, was destined to be transcended and transformed
into conscious history. But for this
to happen, sizeable groups of people had to have experienced real participation in
history. Out of this practical communication between those who have recognized each
other as possessors of a unique present, who have experienced
a qualitative
richness of events in their own activity and
who are at home in their own era,
arises the general language of historical communication. Those for whom irreversible time
truly exists discover in it both the memorable and the
threat of oblivion:
“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his researches, so that
time will not abolish the
deeds of men. . . .”

134

Examining history amounts to examining the nature of power. Greece was
the moment when power and changes in power were first debated and understood. It was a democracy
of the masters of society — a total contrast to the
despotic state, where power settles accounts only with itself, within the impenetrable
obscurity of its inner sanctum, by means of palace revolutions, which are beyond the
pale of discussion whether they fail or succeed. But the shared power in the Greek
communities was limited to spending a social life whose production
remained the separate and static domain of the servile class. The only people who lived
were those who did not work. The divisions among the Greek communities and their struggles
to exploit foreign cities were the externalized expression of the internal principle of separation
on which each of them was based. Although Greece had dreamed of universal
history, it did not succeed in unifying itself in the face of foreign invasion, or even in
unifying the calendars of its independent city-states. Historical time became conscious in
Greece, but it was not yet conscious of itself.

135

The disappearance of the particular conditions that had fostered the Greek communities
brought about a regression of Western historical thought, but it did not lead to a
restoration of the old mythic structures. The clashes of the Mediterranean peoples and the
rise and fall of the Roman state gave rise instead to semihistorical
religions,
which became a new armor for separate power and basic components of a new consciousness of
time.

136

The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between the
cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that
was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples. The religions that
evolved out of Judaism were abstract universal acknowledgments of an irreversible time
that had become democratized and open to all, but only in the realm of illusion. Time is
totally oriented toward a single final event: “The Kingdom of God is
coming soon.”
These religions were rooted in the soil of history, but they remained
radically opposed to history. The semihistorical religions establish a qualitative point
of departure in time (the birth of Christ, the flight of Mohammed), but their irreversible
time — introducing an accumulation that would take the form of conquest in Islam and
of increasing capital in Reformation Christianity — is inverted in religious
thought and becomes a sort of countdown: waiting for time to run out before
the Last Judgment and the advent of the other, true world. Eternity
has emerged from cyclical
time, as something beyond it. It is also the element that
restrains the irreversibility of time,
suppressing history within history itself by positioning itself on the other side of
irreversible time as a pure point into which cyclical time returns and disappears.
Bossuet will still say: “By way of time, which passes, we enter eternity, which does
not pass.”

137

The Middle Ages, an incomplete mythical world whose consummation lay outside itself, is
the period when cyclical time, though still governing the major part of production, really
begins to be undermined by history. An element of irreversible time is recognized in the
successive stages of each individual’s life. Life is seen as a one-way journey
through a world whose meaning lies elsewhere: the pilgrim is the person who
leaves cyclical time behind and actually becomes the traveler that everyone else is
symbolically. Personal historical life still finds its fulfillment within the sphere of
the ruling powers, in struggles waged by those powers or in struggles over disputed power; but
the rulers’ irreversible time is now shared to an unlimited degree due to the general
unity brought about by the oriented time of the Christian Era — a world of
armed faith, where the adventures of the masters revolve around fealty and disputes over
who owes fealty to whom. Feudal
society was born from the
merging of
“the organizational structures of the conquering armies that developed in the process
of conquest” with “the productive forces found in the conquered regions” (The
German Ideology), and the factors contributing to the organization of those
productive forces included the religious language in which they were expressed.
Social domination was divided between the Church and the state, the latter
power being in turn subdivided in the complex relations of suzerainty and vassalage within
and between rural domains and urban communities. This
diversification of potential historical life reflected the gradual emergence (following
the failure of that great
official enterprise of the Medieval world, the Crusades) of
the era’s unnoticed
innovation: the irreversible time that was silently undermining the society,
the time experienced by the bourgeoisie in the production of commodities, in the foundation
and expansion of cities, and in the commercial discovery of the planet — a practical
experimentation that destroyed every mythical organization of the cosmos once and for all.

138

With the waning of the Middle Ages, the irreversible time that had invaded society was
experienced by a consciousness still attached to the old order as an obsession with death.
This was the melancholy of a world passing away, the last world where the security of myth
still counterbalanced history; and for this melancholy all earthly things move inevitably
toward decay. The great peasant revolts of Europe were also an attempt to respond
to history — a history that was violently wresting the peasants from the
patriarchal slumber that had been imposed by their feudal guardians. The
millenarians’ utopian aspiration of creating heaven on earth revived a dream
that had been at the origin of the semihistorical religions, when the early Christian
communities, like the Judaic messianism from which they had sprung, responded to the troubles
and misfortunes of their time by envisioning the imminent realization of the Kingdom of
God, thereby adding an element of unrest and subversion to ancient society. When
Christianity reached the point of sharing power within the Empire, it denounced whatever
still remained of this hope as mere superstition. This is what Augustine was doing
when, in a formula that can be seen as the archetype of all the modern ideological
apologetics, he declared that the Kingdom of God had in fact already
come long ago — that it was nothing other than the established Church. The social
revolts of the millenarian peasantry naturally began by defining their goal as the
overthrow of that Church. But millenarianism developed in a historical world, not on the
terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary hopes are not irrational continuations of the
religious passion of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in The
Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary, millenarianism, revolutionary class
struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern
revolutionary tendency, a tendency that lacked only the consciousness that it was
a purely historical movement. The millenarians were doomed to defeat
because they were unable to recognize their revolution as their own
undertaking. The fact that
they hesitated to act until they had received some external sign of God’s will was an
ideological corollary to the insurgent peasants’ practice of following leaders from
outside their own ranks. The peasant class could not attain a clear understanding of the
workings of society or of how to conduct its own struggle, and because
it lacked these conditions for unifying its action and consciousness, it expressed its project and waged
its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise.

139

The Renaissance was a joyous break with eternity.
Though seeking its heritage and
legitimacy in the ancient world, it represented a new form of
historical life. Its
irreversible time was that of a never-ending accumulation of knowledge, and the historical
consciousness engendered by the experience of democratic communities and of the forces
that destroy them now took up once again, with Machiavelli, the analysis of secularized
power, saying the previously unsayable about the state. In the exuberant life of the
Italian cities, in the creation of festivals, life is experienced as an enjoyment of the
passage of time. But this enjoyment of transience is itself transient. The song of Lorenzo
de’ Medici, which Burckhardt considered “the very spirit of the
Renaissance,” is the eulogy this fragile historical festival delivers on itself:
“How beautiful the spring of life — and how quickly
it vanishes.”

140

The constant tendency toward the monopolization of historical life by the
absolute-monarchist state — a transitional form on the way to complete
domination by the bourgeois class — brings into clear view the nature of the
bourgeoisie’s new type of irreversible time. The bourgeoisie is associated with labor time,
which has
finally been freed from cyclical time. With the bourgeoisie, work becomes work that
transforms historical conditions. The bourgeoisie is the first ruling class for which
work is a value. And the bourgeoisie, which suppresses all privilege and recognizes no
value that does not stem from the exploitation of labor, has appropriately identified its
own value as a ruling class with labor, and has made the progress of labor the measure of
its own progress. The class that accumulates commodities and capital continually modifies
nature by modifying labor itself, by unleashing labor’s productivity. At the stage of
absolute monarchy, all social life was already concentrated within the ornamented poverty of the
Court, the gaudy trappings of a bleak state administration whose apex was the
“profession of king.” All particular historical freedoms had to surrender to
this new power. The free play of the feudal lords’ irreversible time came to an end
in their last, lost battles — in the Fronde and in the Scottish uprising in support
of Charles Edward. The world now had a new foundation.

141

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time,
because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously
transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remained the
predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remained at the base of society
reinforced
the joint forces of tradition, which tended to hold back any historical
movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges
throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of
individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been
recorded as a mere chronology
of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement
that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy,
history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains
unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate
that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

142

The history that is present in all the depths of society tends to become invisible at
the surface. The triumph of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis into a
time of things, because its victory was brought about by the mass production of
objects in accordance with the laws of the commodity. The main product that economic
development has transformed from a luxurious rarity to a commonly consumed item is thus
history itself — but only in the form of the history of the abstract movement of
things that dominates all qualitative aspects of life. While the earlier cyclical time had
supported an increasing degree of historical time lived by individuals and groups, the
irreversible time of production tends to socially eliminate such lived time.

143

The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on
society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once
there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which
is inextricably tied to economic history,
must repress every other irreversible use
of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the
possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to
link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the
preservation of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile the worker at the base
of society is for the first time not materially estranged from history, because
the irreversible movement is now generated from that base. By demanding to live
the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable
core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this
project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life.

144

The irreversible time of the bourgeoisie that had just seized power was at first called
by its own name and assigned an absolute origin: Year One of the Republic. But the
revolutionary ideology of general freedom that had served to overthrow the last remnants
of a myth-based ordering of values, along with all the traditional forms of social
control, was already unable to completely conceal the real goal that it had draped in
Roman costume: unrestricted freedom of trade. Commodity society, discovering
its need to restore the passivity that it had so profoundly shaken in order to establish
its own unchallenged rule, now found that, for its purposes, “Christianity with its
cult of man in the abstract . . . is the most fitting form of religion” (Capital).
The bourgeoisie thus entered into a compromise with that religion, a compromise
also reflected
in its presentation of time: the Revolutionary Calendar was abandoned and irreversible
time returned to the straitjacket of a duly extended Christian Era.

145

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become
globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under
the sway of this time’s development. But this history that is everywhere
simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history.
What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic
production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time
is the time of the global market, and thus also the time of the global spectacle.

146

The irreversible time of production is first of all the measure of commodities. The
time officially recognized throughout the world as the general time of society
actually only reflects the specialized interests that constitute it, and thus is merely
one particular type of time.

“We have nothing of our own except time, which even the homeless can
experience.”

—Baltasar Gracián, The Art of
Worldly Wisdom

147

The time of production — commodified time
— is an infinite accumulation of
equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract, in which each
segment need only demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with
all the others. It has no reality apart from its exchangeability. Under
the social reign of commodified time, “time is everything, man is nothing; he
is at most the carcass of time” (The Poverty of Philosophy). This
devalued time is the complete opposite of time as “terrain of human
development.”

148

This general time of human nondevelopment also has a complementary aspect
— a
consumable form of time based on the present mode of production and
manifesting itself in everyday life as a pseudocyclical time.

149

This pseudocyclical time is in fact merely a consumable disguise of
the production system’s commodified time. It exhibits the latter’s essential
traits: homogenous exchangeable units and suppression of any qualitative
dimension. But as a by-product of commodified time whose function is to promote
and maintain the backwardness of everyday life, it is loaded with pseudo-valorizations and
manifests itself as a succession of pseudo-individualized moments.

150

Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic
survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from
decision-making and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the
pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes
the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies,
incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new
variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations.

151

Pseudocyclical time is a time that has been transformed by industry.
The time based on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity, one
that recombines everything that the disintegration of the old unitary societies
had differentiated into private life, economic life, political life. The
entire consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as a raw material
for various new products put on the market as socially controlled uses of time.
“A product that already exists in a form suitable for consumption may
nevertheless serve as raw material for some other product” (Capital).

152

In its most advanced sectors, concentrated capitalism is increasingly tending
to market “fully equipped” blocks of time, each functioning as a unified
commodity combining a variety of other commodities. In the expanding economy of
“services” and leisure activities, the payment for these blocks of time is
equally unified: “everything’s included,” whether it is a matter of
spectacular living environments, touristic pseudo-travel, subscriptions to
cultural consumption, or even the sale of sociability itself in the form of
“exciting conversations” and “meetings with celebrities.” Spectacular
commodities of this type, which would obviously never sell were it not for the
increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody, just as obviously
reflect the modernization of sales techniques by being payable on credit.

153

Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both in the narrow sense
as time spent consuming images and in the broader sense as image of the
consumption of time. The time spent consuming images (images
which
in turn serve to
publicize all the other commodities) is both the particular terrain where the
spectacle’s mechanisms are most fully implemented and the general goal that
those mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular consumptions.
Thus, the time that modern society is constantly seeking to “save” by
increasing transportation speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by
the American population in watching television three to six hours a day. As for the
social image of the consumption of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure
time and vacations — moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at
a distance and as desirable by definition. These
commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life, whose
cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really
happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher
level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more
truly spectacular life.

154

Although the present age presents its time to itself as a series of frequently recurring
festivities, it is an age that knows nothing of real festivals. The moments
within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious
expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and
luxury. Its vulgarized pseudo-festivals are parodies of real dialogue and
gift-giving; they may incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they lead
to nothing but disillusionments, which can be compensated only by the promise of some
new disillusion to come. The less use value is present in the time of modern
survival, the more highly it is exalted in the spectacle. The reality of time
has been replaced by the publicity of time.

155

While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent
with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of
developed economies contradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their
system of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging
illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly
changing reality.

156

The production process’s constant innovations are not echoed in consumption,
which presents nothing but an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labor continues to dominate
living labor, in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present.

157

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet
has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular
dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in
any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement
at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really
lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time,
and clashes with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable
by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains
without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past,
which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated,
misunderstood and
forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.

158

The spectacle, considered as the reigning society’s method for paralyzing
history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time,
represents a false consciousness of time.

159

In order to force the workers into the status of “free” producers and
consumers of commodified time, it was first necessary to violently
expropriate their time. The imposition of the new spectacular form of time
became possible only after this initial dispossession of the producers.

160

The unavoidable biological limitations of the work force — evident both in
its dependence on the natural cycle of sleeping and waking and in the
debilitating effects of irreversible time over each individual’s lifetime — are
treated by the modern production system as strictly secondary
considerations. As such, they are ignored in that system’s official
proclamations and in the consumable trophies that embody its relentless
triumphant progress. Fixated on the delusory center around which his world seems
to move, the spectator no longer experiences life as a journey toward
fulfillment and toward death. Once he has given up on really living, he can no
longer acknowledge his own death. Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he
may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of
the system following the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the
“American way of death” stress his capacity to preserve most of the
appearances of life in his post-mortem state. On all the other fronts of
advertising bombardment it is strictly forbidden to grow old. Everybody is urged
to economize on their “youth-capital,” though such capital, however carefully
managed, has little prospect of attaining the durable and cumulative properties
of financial capital. This social absence of death coincides
with the social
absence of life.

161

As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the terrain where
the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes other in order to become
truly himself. In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on
the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation,
the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals
from him is in reality separating him from his own time. This potentially
surmountable social alienation is what has prevented and paralyzed the
possibilities and risks of a living alienation within time.

162

Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the
spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of
an era can always
be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.

163

The natural basis of time, the concrete experience of its passage, becomes
human and social by existing for humanity. The limitations of human
practice imposed by the various stages of labor have humanized time and also
dehumanized it, in the forms of cyclical time and of the separated irreversible
time of economic production. The revolutionary project of a classless society,
of an all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social
measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times
— a
federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that
are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic
communism, which “abolishes everything that exists independently of
individuals.”

164

The world already dreams of such a time.
In order to actually live it, it only needs to become fully conscious of it.

“Whoever becomes the ruler of a city that is accustomed to freedom
and does not destroy it can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always
find a pretext for rebellion in the name of its former freedom and age-old
customs, which are never forgotten despite the passage of time or any
benefits it has received. No matter what the ruler does or what precautions
he takes, the inhabitants will never forget that
freedom or those customs
— unless they are separated or dispersed . . .”

—Machiavelli, The Prince

165

Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one
society and the next. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive
process of banalization. Just as the accumulation of commodities mass-produced
for the abstract space of the market shattered all regional and legal barriers and all the
Medieval guild restrictions that
maintained the quality
of craft production, it also undermined the autonomy and quality of places. This
homogenizing power is the heavy artillery that has battered down all
the walls of China.

166

The free space of commodities is constantly being modified and
rebuilt in
order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless
monotony.

167

While eliminating geographical distance,
this society produces a new internal distance in
the form of spectacular separation.

168

Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the
circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been
banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees
their equivalence. The modernization that has
eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously
eliminated any real space
from it.

169

The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own
special technique for
molding its very territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for
all the
facets of this project. Urbanism —
“city planning” — is capitalism’s method for
taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward
total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its
own particular decor.

170

The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s conspicuous
petrification of
life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful
coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the
progression of time.”

171

While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various
forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and
prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the
very technology of separation.

172

Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class
power by atomizing the workers, who had been dangerously brought together by the
conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against
anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most
effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the
experiences of the French
Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally
culminated in the suppression of the streets. Describing what he terms “a one-way
system,” Lewis Mumford points out that “with the present means of long-distance mass communication,
sprawling
isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” (The City in
History). But the
general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also
include a controlled reintegration of the workers in accordance with the planned needs of production
and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals
together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts
and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this type of
pseudo-community. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell,
where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the
dominant
images — images that derive their full power precisely from that isolation.

173

In all previous periods architectural innovations were designed exclusively for the
ruling classes. Now for the first time a new architecture has been designed specifically for
the poor. The aesthetic poverty and vast proliferation of this new experience in
habitation stem from its mass character, which character in turn stems
both from its function and from the modern conditions of construction. The obvious core of
these conditions is the authoritarian decision-making
which abstractly converts the
environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere
as soon as industrialization has begun, even in the countries that are furthest behind in
this regard, as an essential foundation for implanting the new type of social existence.
The contradiction between the growth of society’s material powers and the continued lack
of progress toward any conscious control of those powers is revealed as glaringly by
the developments of urbanism as by the issues of thermonuclear weapons or
genetic modification
(where the possibility of manipulating heredity is already on the horizon).

174

The self-destruction of the urban environment is already
well
under way. The explosion of
cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless
mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The
dictatorship of the automobile — the pilot product of the first stage of commodity
abundance — has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways,
which tear
up the old urban centers and promote an ever wider dispersal. Within this process
various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around
“distribution factories” — giant shopping centers erected in the middle of
nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. These temples of frenetic consumption
are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon
as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary
centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most
visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the
point of consuming itself.

175

Economic history, whose entire previous development centered around the
opposition between city and country, has now progressed to the point of nullifying both.
As a result of the current paralysis of any historical development
apart from the
independent movement of the economy, the incipient disappearance of city and country does
not represent a transcendence of their separation, but their simultaneous
collapse. The mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure of the
historical movement through which existing urban reality could have been overcome, is
reflected in the eclectic mixture of their decomposed fragments that blanket the most
industrialized regions of the world.

176

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city’s
decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest revolutionary merits of the bourgeoisie
was the fact that it “subjected the country to the
city,” whose “very air is liberating.” But if the history of the city is a
history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny — a history of state administrations
controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has
been the
historical battleground of the struggle for freedom, but it has yet to host its
victory. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a
concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a
consciousness of the past. The current destruction of
the city is thus merely one more
reflection of humanity’s failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical
consciousness; of society’s failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers
that have been alienated from it.

177

“The country represents the complete opposite: isolation and separation” (The
German Ideology). As urbanism destroys the cities, it recreates a pseudo-countryside
devoid both of the natural relations of the traditional countryside and of the
direct (and directly challenged) social relations of the historical city. The
conditions of habitation and spectacular control in today’s “planned
environment” have created an artificial neopeasantry. The geographical dispersal
and the narrow-mindedness that have always prevented the peasantry from
undertaking independent action and becoming a creative historical force are
equally characteristic of these modern producers, for whom a world of their own
making is as inaccessible as were the natural rhythms of work in
agrarian societies. The peasantry was the steadfast foundation of “Oriental
despotism,” in that its inherent fragmentation gave rise to a natural tendency toward
bureaucratic centralization. The neopeasantry produced by the increasing
bureaucratization of the modern state differs from the old peasantry in that its apathy
must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural ignorance has been
replaced by the organized spectacle of falsifications. The “new
cities” inhabited by this technological pseudo-peasantry are a glaring expression of
the repression of historical time on which they have been built. Their motto could be:
“Nothing will ever happen here, and nothing ever has.” The forces of historical
absence have begun to create their own landscape because historical liberation,
which must take place in the cities, has not yet occurred.

178

The history that threatens this twilight world could potentially subject space to a
directly experienced time. Proletarian revolution is this critique of human geography
through which individuals and communities will be able to create
places and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer just of their
work, but of their entire history. The ever-changing playing field of this new
world and the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game will
regenerate a
diversity of  local scenes that are independent without being insular,
thereby reviving the possibility of
authentic journeys — journeys within an authentic life that is itself
understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself.

179

The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological
or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance
with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of
the proletariat, of executory dialogue. Such councils, which can be effective only if they
transform existing conditions in their entirety, cannot set themselves any lesser
task if they wish to be recognized and to recognize themselves in a world of
their own making.

“Do you really believe that these Germans will make a political
revolution in our lifetime? My friend, that is just wishful thinking. . . .
Let us judge Germany on the basis of its present history — and surely you
are not going to object that all its history is falsified, or that all its
present public life does not reflect the actual state of the people? Read
whatever newspapers you please and you cannot fail to be convinced that we
never stop (and you must concede that the censorship prevents no one from
stopping) celebrating the freedom and national happiness that we enjoy.”

—Ruge to Marx, March 1843

 

180

Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived
experiences within historical societies divided into classes. As such, it is a
generalizing power which itself exists as a separate entity, as division
of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division. Culture detached
itself from the unity of myth-based society “when human life lost its unifying
power and when opposites lost their living connections and interactions and
became autonomous” (The Difference Between the Systems of
Fichte and Schelling). In thus gaining its independence, culture embarked on
an imperialistic career of self-enrichment that ultimately led to the decline of
that independence. The history that gave rise to the relative autonomy of
culture, and to the ideological illusions regarding that autonomy, is also
expressed as the history of culture. And this whole triumphant history of
culture can be understood as a progressive revelation of the inadequacy of
culture, as a march toward culture’s self-abolition. Culture is the terrain of
the quest for lost unity. In the course of this
quest, culture as a separate
sphere is obliged to negate itself.

181

In the struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic theme of
internal cultural development in historical societies, innovation always wins.
But cultural innovation is generated by nothing other than the total historical
movement — a movement which, in becoming conscious of itself as a whole, tends
to go beyond its own cultural presuppositions and toward the
suppression of all separations.

182

The rapid expansion of society’s knowledge, including the understanding that
history is the underlying basis of culture, led to the irreversible
self-knowledge reflected by the destruction of God. But this “first condition
of all critique” is also the first task of a critique without end. When there
are no longer any tenable rules of conduct, each result of culture pushes
culture toward its own dissolution. Like philosophy the moment it achieved full
independence, every discipline that becomes autonomous is bound to collapse —
first as a credible pretension to give a coherent account of the social
totality, and ultimately even as a fragmented methodology that might be workable
within its own domain. Separate culture’s lack of rationality is what
dooms it to disappear, because that culture already contains a striving
for the victory of the rational.

183

Culture grew out of a history that dissolved the previous way of life, but as
a separate sphere within a partially historical society its understanding
and sensory communication inevitably remain partial. It is the meaning of an
insufficiently meaningful world.

184

The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the
project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its
preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency
has linked its fate to social critique, the second to the defense of class
power.

185

Each of these two forms of the end of culture has a unitary existence, both
within all the aspects of knowledge and within all the aspects of sensory
representation (that is, within what was formerly understood as art in
the broadest sense of the word). In the case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches of
fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable because approval of existing
conditions ultimately requires renouncing one’s own knowledge, is opposed
by the theory of praxis which alone has access to the truth of all these forms
of knowledge since it alone knows the secret of their use. In the case of
sensory representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s former
common language is opposed by its artificial reconstruction within the
commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of nonlife.

186

Once society has lost its myth-based community, it loses all the reference
points of truly common language until such time as the divisions within the
inactive community can be overcome by the inauguration of a real historical
community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops
into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious
universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes
subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its
declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.

187

The positive significance of the modern decomposition and formal destruction
of all art is that the language of communication has been lost. The negative
implication of this development is that a common language can no longer take the
form of the unilateral conclusions that characterized the art of historical
societies — belated portrayals of someone else’s dialogueless life
which accepted this lack as inevitable — but must now be found in a praxis that
unifies direct activity with its own appropriate language. The point is to
actually participate in the community of dialogue and the game with time that up
till now have merely been represented by poetic and artistic works.

188

When art becomes independent and paints its world in dazzling colors, a
moment of life has grown old. Such a moment cannot be rejuvenated by dazzling
colors, it can only be evoked in memory. The greatness of art only emerges at
the dusk of life.

189

The historical time that invaded art was manifested first of all in the
sphere of art itself, beginning with the Baroque. Baroque was the art of
a world that had lost its center with the collapse of the last mythical order:
the Medieval synthesis of a unified Christianity with the ghost of an Empire
which had harmonized heavenly and earthly government. The art of change
inevitably embodied the same ephemerality that it discovered in the world. As
Eugenio d’Ors put it, it chose “life as opposed to eternity.” The outstanding
achievements of Baroque were in theater and festival, or in theatrical
festivals, where the sole purpose of each particular artistic expression was to
contribute to the composition of a scene, a scene which had to serve as its own
center of unification; and that center was passage, the expression of a
threatened equilibrium within the overall dynamic disorder. The somewhat
excessive emphasis on the concept of Baroque in contemporary aesthetic
discussions reflects the awareness that an artistic classicism is no longer
possible. The attempts to establish a normative classicism or neoclassicism
during the last three centuries have been nothing but short-lived artificial
constructs speaking the official language of the state, whether of the absolute
monarchy or of the revolutionary bourgeoisie draped in Roman togas. What
eventually followed Baroque, once it had run its course, was an ever more
individualistic art of negation which, from Romanticism to Cubism, continually
renewed its assaults until it had fragmented and destroyed the entire artistic
sphere. The disappearance of historical art, which was linked to the internal
communication of an elite and which had its semi-independent social basis in the
partially playful conditions still experienced by the last aristocracies, also
reflects the fact that capitalism produced the first form of class power that
acknowledges its own total lack of ontological quality — a power whose basis in
the mere management of the economy reflects the loss of all human
mastery. The comprehensive unity of the Baroque ensemble, which has long
been lacking in the world of artistic creation, has in a sense been
revived in today’s wholesale consumption of the totality of past art. As
all the art of the past comes to be recognized and appreciated historically, and
is retrospectively reclassified as phases of a single “world art,” it is
incorporated into a global disorder that can itself be seen as a sort of baroque
structure at a higher level, a structure that absorbs Baroque art itself along
with all its possible revivals. For the first time in history the arts of all
ages and civilizations can be known and accepted together, and the fact that it
has become possible to collect and recollect all these art-historical memories
marks the end of the world of art. In this age of museums in which
artistic communication is no longer possible, all the previous expressions of
art can be accepted equally, because whatever particular communication problems
they may have had are eclipsed by all the present-day obstacles to communication
in general.

190

Art in its period of dissolution — a movement of negation striving for its
own transcendence within a historical society where history is not yet directly
lived — is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the
impossibility of change. The more grandiose its pretensions, the further from
its grasp is its true fulfillment. This art is necessarily avant-garde,
and at the same time it does not actually exist. Its vanguard is its own
disappearance.

191

Dadaism and Surrealism were the two currents that marked the end of modern
art. Though they were only partially conscious of it, they were contemporaries
of the last great offensive of the revolutionary proletarian movement, and the
defeat of that movement, which left them trapped within the
very artistic sphere
whose decrepitude they had denounced, was the fundamental reason for their
immobilization. Dadaism and Surrealism were historically linked yet also opposed
to each other. This opposition involved the most important and radical
contributions of the two movements, but it also revealed the internal inadequacy
of their one-sided critiques. Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing
it; Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The
critical position since developed by the Situationists has shown that the
abolition and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single
transcendence of art.

192

The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form,
including co-opted rehashes of its negative manifestations, gives overt
expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the
communication of the incommunicable. The most extreme destruction of
language can be officially welcomed as a positive development because it amounts
to yet one more way of flaunting one’s acceptance of a status quo where all
communication has been smugly declared absent. The critical truth of this
destruction — the real life of modern poetry and art — is obviously concealed,
since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to
bury all historical memory,
applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic
pseudo-innovations. Thus, a school of neoliterature that baldly admits that it does
nothing but contemplate the written word for its own sake can pass itself off as
something new. Meanwhile, alongside the simple claim that the death of
communication has a sufficient beauty of its own, the most modern tendency of
spectacular culture — which is also the one most closely linked to the
repressive practice of the general organization of society — seeks by means of
“collective projects” to construct complex neoartistic environments out of
decomposed elements, as can be seen in urbanism’s attempts to incorporate scraps of
art or hybrid aesthetico-technical forms. This is an expression, in the
domain of spectacular pseudo-culture, of advanced capitalism’s general project of
remolding the fragmented worker into a “socially integrated personality,” a
tendency that has been described by recent American sociologists (Riesman,
Whyte, etc.). In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure
society without community.

193

As culture becomes completely commodified it tends to become the star
commodity of spectacular society. Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of
this tendency, has calculated that the complex process of the production,
distribution and consumption of knowledge already accounts for 29% of the
gross national product of the United States; and he predicts that in the second
half of this century culture will become the driving force of the American
economy, as was the automobile in the first half of this century and the
railroad in the last half of the previous century.

194

The task of the various branches of knowledge that are in the process of
developing spectacular thought is to justify an unjustifiable society and
to establish a general science of false consciousness. This thought is totally
conditioned by the fact that it cannot recognize, and does not want to
recognize, its own material dependence on the spectacular system.

195

The official thought of the social organization of appearances is itself
obscured by the generalized subcommunication that it has to defend.
It cannot understand that conflict is at the origin of everything in its world.
The specialists of spectacular power — a power that is absolute within
its realm
of one-way communication — are absolutely corrupted by their experience of
contempt and by the success of that contempt, because they find their contempt
confirmed by their awareness of how truly contemptible spectators really
are.

196

As the very triumphs of the spectacular system pose new problems, a new
division of tasks appears within the specialized thought of that system. On one
hand, a spectacular critique of the spectacle is undertaken by modern
sociology, which studies separation exclusively by means of the conceptual and material
instruments of separation. On the other, the various disciplines where
structuralism has become entrenched are developing an apologetics of the
spectacle — a mindless thought that imposes an official amnesia
regarding historical practice. But the fake despair of nondialectical
critique and the fake optimism of overt promotion of the system are equally
submissive.

197

The sociologists who (first of all in the United States) have begun to raise questions about the living
conditions brought about by modern social developments have gathered a great deal of empirical data, but they have failed to
grasp the true nature of their object of study because they fail to recognize
the critique that is inherent in that object. As a result, those among them who
sincerely wish to reform these
conditions can only appeal to ethical standards, common sense, moderation,
and other measures that are equally inadequate for dealing with the problems
in question. Because this method of criticism is unaware of the negativity at
the heart of its world, it focuses on describing and deploring an excessive sort
of negativity that seems to blight the surface of that world like some
irrational parasitic infestation. This outraged good will, which even within its
own moralizing framework ends up blaming only the external consequences of the
system, can see itself as critical only by ignoring the essentially
apologetic character of its assumptions and methods.

198

Those who denounce the affluent society’s incitement to wastefulness as
absurd or dangerous do not understand the purpose of this wastefulness. In the
name of economic rationality, they ungratefully condemn the faithful irrational
guardians that keep the power of this economic rationality from collapsing.
And Boorstin, for example, whose book The Image describes
spectacle-commodity consumption in the United States, never arrives at the concept of the
spectacle because he thinks he can treat private life and “honest commodities”
as separate from the “excesses” he deplores. He fails to understand that the
commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads both to the
distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social
consumption of images.

199

Boorstin describes the excesses of a world that has become foreign to us as
if they were excesses foreign to our world. When, like a moral or psychological
prophet, he denounces the superficial reign of images as a product of “our
extravagant expectations,” he is implicitly contrasting these excesses to a
“normal” life that has no reality in either his book or his era. Because the
real human life that Boorstin evokes is located for him in the past, including
the past that was dominated by religious resignation, he has no way of
comprehending the true extent of the present society’s domination by images.
We can truly understand this
society only by negating it.

200

A sociology that believes that a separately functioning industrial
rationality can be isolated from social life as a whole may go on to view
the techniques of reproduction and communication as independent of general
industrial development. Thus Boorstin concludes that the situation he describes
is caused by an unfortunate but almost fortuitous encounter of an excessive
technology of image-diffusion with an excessive appetite for sensationalism on
the part of today’s public. This amounts to blaming the spectacle on modern
man’s excessive inclination to be a spectator. Boorstin fails to see that the
proliferation of the prefabricated “pseudo-events” he denounces flows from the
simple fact that the overwhelming realities of present-day social existence
prevent people from actually living events for themselves. Because history
itself haunts modern society like a specter, pseudo-histories have to be
concocted at every level of life-consumption in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the
present frozen time.

201

The current tendency toward structuralist systematization is based on
the explicit or unconscious assumption that this brief freezing of historical time
will last forever. The antihistorical thought of structuralism believes in the
eternal presence of a system that was never created and that will never come to
an end. Its illusion that all social practice is unconsciously determined by
preexisting structures is based on illegitimate analogies with structural models
developed by linguistics and anthropology (or even on models used for analyzing
the functioning of capitalism) — models that were already inaccurate even in
their original contexts. This fallacious reasoning stems from the limited
intellectual capacity of the academic functionaries
hired to expound this thought, who are so thoroughly
caught up in their awestruck celebration of the existing system that
they can do nothing but reduce all reality to the existence of that
system.

202

In order to understand “structuralist” categories, one must bear in mind
that such categories, like those of any other historical social science, reflect
forms and conditions of existence. Just as one does not judge an individual by
what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge or admire this particular society
by assuming that the language it speaks to itself is necessarily true. “We
cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the
contrary, that consciousness must be explained in the light of the
contradictions of material life . . .” Structure is the
daughter of present
power. Structuralism is thought underwritten by the state, a form of
thought that regards the present conditions of spectacular “communication” as
an absolute. Its method of studying code in isolation from
content is merely a
reflection of a taken-for-granted society where communication takes the form of
a cascade of hierarchical signals. Structuralism does not prove the
transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle; on the contrary, it is
the society of the spectacle, imposing itself in its overwhelming reality, that
validates the frigid dream of structuralism.

203

The critical concept of “the
spectacle” can also undoubtedly be turned
into one more hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric
used to
explain and denounce everything in the abstract, thus serving to
reinforce the spectacular system. It is obvious that ideas alone cannot lead
beyond the existing spectacle; at most, they can only lead beyond existing ideas
about the spectacle. To actually destroy the society of the spectacle, people
must set a practical force into motion. A critical theory of the spectacle
cannot be true unless it unites with the practical current of negation in
society; and that negation, the resumption of revolutionary class struggle, can
for its part only become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the
spectacle, which is the theory of its real conditions — the concrete conditions
of present-day oppression — and which also reveals that negation’s hidden potential. This
theory does not expect miracles from the working class. It envisages the
reformulation and fulfillment of proletarian demands as a long-term task. To
make an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle
(for
the formulation and communication of the type of theory envisaged here is
already inconceivable without a rigorous practice), it is certain that the
obscure and difficult path of critical theory must also be the
fate of the
practical movement acting on the scale of society.

204

Critical theory must communicate itself in its own language — the language of
contradiction, which must be dialectical in both form
and content.
It must be an all-inclusive
critique and it must be grounded in history. It is not a “zero degree of
writing,” but its reversal. It is not a negation of style, but the style of
negation.

205

The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the
prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those
standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it
simultaneously recognizes their rediscovered fluidity and their inevitable destruction.

206

This style, which includes a critique of itself, must express the domination of
the present critique over its entire past. Dialectical theory’s mode of
exposition reveals the negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like
some finished product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that
made it” (Hegel). This theoretical consciousness of a movement whose traces
must remain visible within it is manifested by the reversal of
established relationships between concepts and by the détournement of all the achievements of earlier critical efforts. Hegel’s
characteristic practice
of reversing the genitive was an expression of historical revolutions, though
that expression was confined to the form of thought. The young Marx, inspired by
Feuerbach’s systematic reversal of subject and predicate, achieved the most
effective use of this insurrectional style, which answers “the
philosophy of poverty” with “the poverty of philosophy.” Détournement
reradicalizes previous critical conclusions that have been
petrified into
respectable truths and thus transformed into lies. Kierkegaard already used it
deliberately, though he also denounced it: “But despite all your twists and
turns, just as jam always returns to the pantry, you always end up introducing
some little phrase which is not your own, and which awakens disturbing
recollections” (Philosophical Fragments). As he acknowledged
elsewhere in the same
book, this use of détournement requires maintaining one’s distance from
whatever has been perverted into an official truth: “One further remark regarding
your many complaints that I introduced borrowed expressions into my exposition.
I do not deny that I did so. It was in fact done deliberately. In the next section
of this work, if I ever write such a section, I intend to call this topic by its
true name and to clothe the problem in its historical attire.”

207

Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement.
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s
phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the
right one.

208

Détournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical
authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a
quotation — a fragment torn from its own context and development, and
ultimately from the general framework of its period and from the
particular option
(appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework.
Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in
communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty. It
is language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or
supracritical reference. On the contrary, its own internal coherence and
practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has
brought back into play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its
own truth as present critique.

209

The element of overt détournement in formulated theory refutes any notion
that such theory is durably autonomous. By introducing into the theoretical
domain the same type of violent subversion that disrupts and overthrows
every existing order, détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing
in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through
the historical correction that is its true allegiance.

210

The real values of culture can be maintained only by actually negating culture.
But this
negation can no longer be a cultural negation. It may in a
sense take place within culture, but it points
beyond it.

211

In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified
critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture — its knowledge as well as
its poetry — and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the
social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet
a
unified social practice.

“Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as
it exists in and for another self-consciousness; that is, it exists only by
being recognized.”

—Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

212

Ideology is the intellectual basis of class societies within
the conflictual course of history. Ideological expressions have never been pure
fictions; they represent a distorted consciousness of realities, and as such
they have been real factors that have in turn produced real distorting effects.
This interconnection is intensified with the advent of the spectacle
— the
materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of an
autonomized system of economic production — which virtually identifies social
reality with an ideology that has remolded all reality in its own image.

213

Once ideology — the abstract will to universality and the illusion
associated with that will — is legitimized by the universal abstraction and the
effective dictatorship of illusion that prevail in modern society, it is no
longer a voluntaristic struggle of the fragmentary, but its triumph. At that
point, ideological
pretensions take on a sort of flat, positivistic precision: they no longer
represent historical choices, they are assertions of undeniable facts. In such a
context, the
particular names of ideologies tend to disappear. The specifically
ideological forms of system-supporting labor are reduced to an “epistemological
base” that is itself presumed to be beyond ideology. Materialized ideology has
no name, just as it has no formulatable historical agenda. Which is another way of
saying that the history of different ideologies is over.

214

Ideology, whose whole internal logic led toward what Mannheim calls “total
ideology” — the despotism of a fragment imposing itself as pseudo-knowledge of
a frozen totality, as a totalitarian worldview — has reached its
culmination in the immobilized spectacle of nonhistory. Its culmination is also
its dissolution into society as a whole. When that society itself is
concretely dissolved, ideology — the final irrationality standing in
the way of historical life — must also disappear.

215

The spectacle is the epitome of ideology because in its plenitude it exposes and
manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment,
enslavement and negation of real life. The spectacle is the material
“expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” The “new
power of deception” concentrated in it is based on the production system in
which “as the quantity of objects increases, so does the realm of alien powers to which man is
subjected.” This is the supreme stage of an expansion that has turned need
against life. “The need for money is thus the true need produced by the modern
economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces” (Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts). Hegel’s characterization of money as “the life of
what is dead, moving within itself” (Jenenser Realphilosophie) has now been extended by the
spectacle to all social life.

216

In contrast to the project outlined in the “Theses
on Feuerbach” (the
realization of philosophy in a praxis transcending the opposition between
idealism and materialism), the spectacle preserves the ideological features of
both materialism and idealism, imposing them in the pseudo-concreteness of its
universe. The contemplative aspect of the old materialism, which conceives the
world as representation and not as activity — and which ultimately idealizes
matter — is fulfilled in the spectacle, where concrete things are automatic
masters of social life. Conversely, the dreamed activity of idealism is
also fulfilled in the spectacle, through the technical mediation of signs and
signals — which ultimately materialize an abstract ideal.

217

The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia demonstrated in
Gabel’s False Consciousness should be considered in the context of this
economic materialization of ideology. Society has become what ideology already
was. The fracturing of practice and the antidialectical false consciousness that
results from that fracturing are imposed at every moment of everyday life
subjected to the spectacle — a subjection that systematically destroys the
“faculty of encounter” and replaces it with a social hallucination: a
false consciousness of encounter, an “illusion of encounter.” In a society
where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual
becomes incapable of recognizing his own reality. Ideology is at home;
separation has built its own world.

218

“In clinical accounts of schizophrenia,” says Gabel, “the
deterioration of the dialectic of totality (with dissociation as its extreme
form) and the deterioration of the dialectic of becoming (with catatonia as its
extreme form) seem closely interrelated.” Imprisoned in a flattened universe
bounded by the screen of the spectacle, behind which his own life has been
exiled, the
spectator’s consciousness no longer knows anyone but the fictitious
interlocutors who subject him to a
one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities.
The spectacle as a whole is his “mirror sign,” presenting illusory escapes from a universal autism.

219

The spectacle, which obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing
the self besieged by the presence/absence of the world, also obliterates the
boundaries between true and false by repressing all directly lived truth beneath
the real presence of falsehood maintained by the organization of
appearances. Individuals who passively accept their subjection to an alien
everyday reality are thus driven toward a madness that reacts to that fate by
resorting to illusory magical techniques. The essence of this pseudo-response to
an unanswerable communication is the acceptance and consumption of commodities.
The consumer’s compulsion to imitate is a truly infantile need, conditioned by
all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. As Gabel puts it in describing
a quite different level of pathology, “the abnormal need for representation
here makes up for a torturing feeling of being on the edge of existence.”

220

In contrast to the logic of false consciousness,
which cannot truly know itself, the search for
critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must
struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle, and admit that it
is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or
pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for
immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws of thought,
adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this
way delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique
seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

221

The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases
of inverted truth. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world”
can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and
manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve
all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized
democracy — to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys
its own actions. Only there are individuals “directly linked to
world history” — there where dialogue has armed itself to impose its own conditions.