Chapter 2:
The 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 progressively 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 so as to transform them into purely abstract
values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which seems
at first glance to be something trivial and obvious, yet which is actually
so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.
36
The fetishism of the commodity,
the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,”
attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world
is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet
which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the
epitome of reality.
37
The world at once present
and absent which 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 as yet 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 is 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 whenever 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
being 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 yet to be 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 pseudonature
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 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 a 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 this 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 advent
of the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption
has become just 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 broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology,
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 attains a level
that requires a surplus collaboration from the workers. Once their workday
is over, workers are suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward
them that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization
and surveillance of production, and find themselves seemingly treated
like grownups, with a great show of politeness and solicitude, in their
new role as consumers. 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 “perfected 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 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 equipment that objectively tends to eliminate jobs
must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity and as the
only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or
any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from
reducing the 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;
and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that 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 ruling
it. Usefulness has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange
value, and is now completely at its mercy. Starting out like a mercenary
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 and which is expressed
in the fact that the vast majority of people are forced to take part
as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the system’s ends, and
that each of them knows 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, it must be explicitly proclaimed, both because
its actual reality has been eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy
and because it serves as a necessary pseudojustification 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 doom, because the
forces it has unleashed are eliminating 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 a constant
fabrication of pseudoneeds, all of which ultimately come down to the
single pseudoneed 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, it too falls to ruin” (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 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.
Chapter 2 of Guy Debord’s The Society
of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). Translated by Ken Knabb.
This translation is not copyrighted.
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