Chapter 2: Commodity as spectacle

“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.