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(Draft, final version here)
Guy Debord 194X to 1994
Today's publicity machine is gorged on its own falsehoods. Like a drunken gambler, each successful distortion and spectacular event only spurs it to greater absurdity. Within last ten summers, the media has shown us some large explosions with only the barest rational explanation and with numerous people dying in them. The 747 that exploded over the Atlantic in the summer of 96 was only the start of this drama. The bombing of the American embassies in Africa a murderous preamble. You could almost draw a line of increasing provocation from the WACO massacre to the bombing of Kosova (with the bombing of Iraq held in the sidelines).
These spectacles are ironically intended to announce that this world does not intend to change.
"Terrorist today do not have announce their aims or even their existence to achieve their goals" babbles one illustrious expert quoted in all the papers. "How do you fight a terrorist who has no demands?" responds last year's movie poster. Obviously whoever is producing the various explosions must feel well served by the publicity machine since they have not issued any correction to the media's story.
This terrorism is at the vanguard of the unexplainable and unmentionable. Whenever there has been stop to the explosions, it has only been to focus attention on equally absurd trials around accused bombers. But the trial of Timothy McVeigh and the Lockerbie trial somehow neither showed the logistical support nor the larger motives for whatever horror was on display.
The most advanced tendencies of this society are writ large in this terrorism - especially the advanced state of decay of human relations. We can see how the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building and the American Embassies in Africa shared tremendous structural similarities. In Nairobi, Kenya, massive numbers of bystanders were butchered without a single serious US government decision maker being touched. In Oklahoma, all ATF officials were absent on the day of the bombing. And the retaliation attack after the African bombing was rehearsal for the further punishment bombing against Iraq and Serbia.
All official explanations of the current terror system trail off into indecipherable fine-print. If a supposed terrorist is caught, as in the Oklahoma city bombing, their trial is first postponed into the dim and unmentionable future and is then based on off-hand comments made to neighbors.
Dictators and "freedom fighters" can be conjured into the public spot-light one month only to vanish within another couple months. The thugs of the Kosovo Liberation Front being only the latest in a series of "good guys" who are naturally interchangeable with the "bad guys" of other such gangs.
If reality today is different from Wag The Dog, it is primarily in terms of things being more boring and incompetent. Each ruler has so much in common with each other ruler that elaborate stunts aren't necessary except against the peasants. Hollywood tricks are unnecessary because Washington has always been Hollywood anyway.
Like any of the big lies of capitalism, the absurdity of exploding buildings and airplanes, of wars appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, serves to justify the absurdity of the entire enterprise of this life. This world wants to be judged not on its qualities but on its enemies (to paraphrase Guy Debord). The system of the big lie is the model for any large industrial project today (see section titled Falsified Material).
The fake wars - the war on drugs, on AIDS, on crime, on terrorism - these wars reinforce the true wars that happen from time to, in Serbia perhaps.
American terrorism follows the same recipe as the terrorism secretly organized by the French or Italian states. The only addition of the American state has been to locate the nexus of terrorist aspirations within some indefinite middle-eastern nation - but recently even this has changed.
In "Operation Gladio", a program whose existence was publicly admitted by the Italian state a few years ago, the Italian secret services with NATO and the CIA organized "left-wing and right-wing terrorism" to distract awareness from growing social unrest centered in series of wildcat strikes.
By casting any dissent as utterly barbaric, France and Italy achieved an otherwise unattainable nirvana of cooperation from the population. Now it is natural that the level of cooperation will now used to sell anything - terrorist threat breakfast cereal.
Any objection to the terror which justifies the organization of things today has retreated into the substratum of the unmentionable. This is the same place where our awareness of the poverty of life today lies. The misery of daily life has the same hidden quality as a sexual taboo.
Where does today's terrorism flow from? Terrorism is an integral product of this world's fragile perfection. What does a "faceless terrorist," an efficient manager of a far Eastern Internet startup, the utterly corrupt Mobuto or a touchy-feely leader of a 12-step program have in common?
They each take part fully in the senseless sensibility and sensible senselessness that is the modern order. Mobuto organized the corrupt, senseless rape of an entire country for the immediately understandable goal of money. A more modern manager makes money more sensibly but sees that money vanish within the higher senselessness of international currency and stock speculation. Certainly, every manager today agrees that the stock market must be maintained. Beyond this, every manager today takes an active part in the free-market of lies. The glory and purpose of this market is to assure that each lie supports both the stock market and every other lie.
All institutions come closer to merging into generic bureaucracy. Today the Clinton administration uses "PC" race quotas to fill cabinet posts while ruthlessly tossing the poorest people of color out of housing projects and intensifying the policing of America.
These generic bureaucrats flow in the stream of images that we are calling the spectacle. They each turn the wheel of publicity with a reasonable faith that the whole ball of lies will turn around and give them profits in their fiefs.
The unity of the spectacle and the world market occurs at the point of circulation. Each moment where life is falsified by someone selling their life to buy back their survival is a moment that is turned to the advantage of today's rulers. Today's advertising often boils down to the question "would you rather die of boredom or starvation?". The giant and deadly lies of today - terrorism, the drug-war, AIDS, and national liberation - all rest on a series of seemingly harmless falsifications. Each moment that taste is controlled by advertising, thought is moved by mediocrity, and each moment a bored person toils to bring Diamond Jim profits, is a moment where a person's intentions are turned against them.
For the owners, the quite-reasonable principle is that once people accept an over-all absurd organization of life, they will just as easily accept the absurd scams sold by each particular entrepreneur. And vice-versa.
One of the principles of Norbert Wiener's old cybernetics is that every chunk of information is equal to every other chunk of information. While nearly forgotten within modern babble of "computer science," this principle is more and more put into practice by the operation of the market.
Within spectacular circulation, any piece of official nonsense has the same legitimacy as any other words produced by experts. Moreover, the primary activity of the vast mass of generic bureaucrats is the simple rewriting and fusion of existing documents into further new documents having neither more interest nor more information. College textbooks recycle news stories which recycle scientists press conferences and government press releases. News article cobble together corporate press releases written by scientists paid to make the companies look good. Experiments based on twins share equal space in Time with the empty homilies of Dear Abby clones.
In one particular absurd incident, former US cabinet official Pierre Salinger certainly looked silly for having picked-up an Internet document of uncertain origin and then claimed that it proved the downing of flight 800 was a US military conspiracy. But what does it really mean that Pierre Salinger's "secret document" had been on the Internet for months? Only that NBC feeds more selectively from the trough of press releases than the Internet.
The rise of the Internet thus has only automated the existing spectacular packet-switching system. The net allows the automatic flow of a mishmash of rumour, observation, statistics, innuendo, and half-truth. This reduces the money paid to scientists, journalists and government workers for producing it.
But the Internet is not necessarily the most sophisticated version of spectacular "spin doctoring." The old media forms are quite happy to look more reasonable by denouncing this less sophisticated form of rehashing old news.
Crisis as a permanent institution was well illustrated when the four-year long stage-managed Starr investigation - then known as the "Whitewater Crisis" - itself had a crisis. A few years before the end, Kenneth Starr actually got tired of the job and announced his retirement to a comfy college presidency. But enough pressure was then exerted on Starr to allow this institution to weather it's own temporary crisis and go on to it's seamy, steamy finish.
Managed crisis is the alchemy that this entire system is set on brewing today. It is a two-edged sword that is wielded more and more often. The basic rule is "crisis control always becomes normal control." Indeed, this is the most reliable motor of change today.
Crisis is critical for today's system of apolitical politics. When all activities are organized around the current panic, any talk of the larger situation must be abandoned - in America only snatches of right-wing rhetoric survive to constitute America's "political dialogue".
For example, whether the Afghan groups currently blamed for the bombings of the US Embassies in African are now rogue or merely seem rogue is irrelevant for the general circulation of panic and control. These armed groups were initially set-up by the CIA in its effort to attack Russian influence in Afghanistan. While this information was openly stated in the US press at that time, through the spectacle's mix-master memory, such information can now be treated as dubious and subversive.
The paradigm of terror has taught today's managers the secret of being "proactive." It is not merely the broadcast media that has become a "seamless stream of images." Real events merge into the theater of crisis which is also the theater of total submission to inscrutable necessity.
Terrorists are one of the natural carriers of pure crisis. Like Nazis and child molesters, they constitute a reason to abandon all reason - a hot button that must be pressed at an ever quickening pace.
And the terrorist cell itself is the distillation of panic, irrationalism and sexual repression. So the evolution of terrorism from Marxist-Leninist to Christian and Moslem merely follows the general movement of managed repression of urges.
Just as terrorist tactics are the ideal justification of state power, the terrorist cell is the ideal method of generic state organization. The terrorist cell can be infiltrated much more easily than it can be smashed. So police have naturally learned the methods of utilizing the action demanded by a group for their own purposes.
The terrorist cell moreover is the most modern addition to bureaucratic society. Terrorism is more than just a product of the bureaucracy. It is an ideal form of the most advanced bureaucracy.
The state wishes to impart the Frankenstein autonomy of the terrorist cell to all of it's pieces. The "Year 2000 problem" is being treated as a world wide fire drill. In the US, each institution is expected to achieve some short term autonomy. While altogether, this has all the logic of continuing to produce light bulbs during a black out. The crisis for capitalism actually comes as it's logic doubles back on it.
And so what exactly do we mean by bureaucracy? Schools, offices, factories, courts and prisons are today more and more interchangeable social factories - different variations on the human machine.
Max Weber documented the progression of bureaucracy as the automation of authority. All those qualities of authority which might have been invested in either tradition or individual personalities can be invested in the possessor of the role of boss, manager and so-on. The cloth of authority makes the man.
Bureaucracy itself is the natural corollary of wage labor. The buying and selling of human labor power implies that a society's rulers must have the means to process people like cogs and process people into cogs.
Just as much as this society is fully capitalist, it is fully bureaucratic. Everyday, we see instances where just the sweep of pen gives someone qualities of power and desirability that people none-the-less think of as innate.
Everything is for sale and those in power are interchangeable bureaucrats. The bureaucrat's power comes from the entire power machine rather than any extraordinary ability they might have. Movie star's claims of unique personalities or powerful presence are so many publicity stunts - well practiced routines.
Bureaucracy is certainly an old story (for at least a hundred years). But all of the dispersed resistance to modern life has served as proof that bureaucracy by itself has neither been able to stop rebellion nor fully control its crises. From the sixties to the nineties longer or shorter explosions of spontaneous mass power have wracked this society.
The measures that we see the present rulers taking today show just as well show their desire to strengthen the iron rule of bureaucracy.
As a left capitalist outfit operating in the harshest possible condition, the Peruvian Maoist group "Sendero Luminoso" had to discover new methods of organizing a progressive capitalism against the massively corrupt forces of backward Peruvian Latifundian capitalism.
The drug trade has provided a large enough base of semi-prosperous peasants for Sendero (which itself does not deal drugs).
Faced with the Peruvian and American states working in concert with the drug "selling" cartels, Sendero has protected the capitalist economic interests of the drug growing peasants through innovative "parallel" forms of organization.
Sendero controls a portion of the Peruvian countryside on both a village-by-village basis and in their own armed camps. When Sendero takes control of a village, they create two things. One thing is an open ostensible government apparatus - mayor, vice-mayor, village council, etc. The other thing is a secret committee which directs the actions of everyone in the open government - no one in the village is supposed to know the identity of the committee but the committee's decisions are backed by the threat of other Sendero terrorists in camps in the hills.
This parallel system makes it hard for government forces from Lima to root-out Sendero control from villages. This system is also a ideal, simplified picture of the most modern form of bureaucracy, which could well be called postmodern bureaucracy.
Classical bureaucracy is based on a strict hierarchy. Postmodern bureaucracy is based on small teams from above organizing appearances and terrorizing the standard order. But this swirl is create to increase production and decrease dissent. Order and chaos flow into each for the benefit of order.
It fortifies the hierarchical bureaucracy using invisible agents that as catalysts of the change desired by those closest to the center.
At the same time, survival is no longer guaranteed nor is the meaning of any the orders certain. The reformers, the intelligence services, the media, the outside investors each appear suddenly to provide a sudden extra meaning to something that previously seemed certain.
Spectacular diseases, energy shortages, social welfare cuts, sudden wars, depressions or company takeovers are described as if they are acts of nature. Naturally, while some of these involve capitalism absurd production system, capital encourages a general chaos within people's efforts to order their lives.
In one example, the original meaning of the Social Security fund was that it would be safe. This original safety meant the government had the obligation to make the fund safe. But now safety means that social security having enough for everyone in fifty years. So this means that this fund must be gambled on the stock market to earn enough for everyone (But, of course this whole line of reasoning is simply a shell game around various funds controlled by the government).
But this "multiplicity of meanings" only demands a greater conservatism. Each worker is coached to serve many masters. Each of us is expected to hold many jobs and plan and pay now for all future stages in our submission to the order of exchange. TV news tells college or high school students to consider themselves already workers, home owners, parents, retirees and invalids. Each point of escape is sealed off. Pay now for career training, health insurance, auto insurance and retirement and burial costs - soon it will be required (but this insurance still won't guarantee protection from anything).
Reform is constant now that no part of the system can be questioned ("The good news is that you can find out about electrical rate reform here!"). The form of the postmodern bureaucracy is the vacant center. When a real power is willing to manipulate the direction of panic, incompetence, and ignorance, this power must remain obscure. Not only does power today remain hidden, it's immediate agenda equally remains hidden.
The modern corporation is a fusion of the corporation of the fifties and the Manson family. The "cults" of the seventies and beyond were an expression of the moment when the liberated fragments of human existence could be resold back to the highest bidder.
A fragmented self - a total commitment to lies, to absurdity or to cruelty - is the most valuable quality of a manager today. The highest points the spectacle engenders are moments when it engenders a passionate commitment to an acronym, a product or a TV show.
The movement of life into the obscurity of bureaucratic speech is an expression of the capitalization of confusion and schizophrenia. The marketing of fragments of human existence is a natural conclusion to the marketing of everything needed to live.
The flip side of this is that human existence is always at play in all of these possibilities. The Internet is full of the strange schemes of uprooted individuals. These schemes have the same ambiguous quality of weapon or illusion that every contested arena has today.
In Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, the dark lord possesses unassailable power but can only direct that power to the point which attracts his attention. Power today approaches this level of fragile omnipotence.
The success of a hacker like Kevin Poulsen or Kevin Mitnick is based on the absolute apathy that permeates all levels of this society. As the order of things becomes more impersonal, the average person feels less and less real desire to enforce society's rules. Even mid-level bureaucrats sleep-walk through their jobs. And sleep-walkers are not good gate keepers.
While the powers-that-be try to counter this with an ever-accelerating array of direct policing and suppression of knowledge, this still leaves an incredible realm of possibilities in between the visible categories of this society.
Modern social machinery is hated consciously or unconsciously by such a large percentage of people that it can only be protected by systems of counter-attack, whirlpools of fear manipulation. Indeed, the hacker plays a similar role to the terrorist - decoy, enemy, cat's paw and excuse.
The imperfection of this control is generally tolerable, often desirable, to the system. At best, today's absurdity functions through a self-justifying randomness - "Don't be at the wrong place at the wrong time." Altogether, this randomness works as a snitch factory.
It's been documented how in the eighties, the Los Angeles court system explicitly cultivated a group of criminals who were permitted to get away with murder specifically so that they would always be on the court's leash. This group of felons was always available to come up with testimony damaging to the cases of those targeted by the police (we say documented because the court system on a larger, more "fair" level is just as much a snitch factory - with the more explicit 'quid pro quos' just being a natural temptation).
Through computers, the law is gaining more and more resources to place folks within the realm of judicial control. But this is not a linear increase in repression. The spectacle classifies more and more parts of social life within the illegal sector.
Much of adolescent social life revolves around illegal drugs. Most suburban social life happens in indoor malls which explicitly do not grant the "right" to free expression or free association. Here everything is illegal once the owners of the space tell you to stop.
The randomness and the game of control is encapsulated in the good cop/bad cop dialogue that permeates every part of this society. The constant presence of soft cop social workers in the lives of adolescents can be seen in the fusion of hip phrases and clinical vocabularies.
While the liberals and "the left" are no match for the right as a social force in America, both left and right have made important contributions to today's ideology of repression - the left appearing to demand more social workers while right demands more police.
Feminists have joined with right wing ideologists to use genetic testing as a way of forcing fathers to pay for a mother's welfare. And both right and left have pushed an ideology of enforced community as the answer modern society's alienation. "weed and seed" = "stick and (drugged) carrot."
In the conservative, "bad cop" version of reality, all those who are convicted of the smallest crimes are tortured in prison - but that would leave too few workers to keep society going. The law has sufficient records to place a good percentage of the entire population in jail. In the liberal, "good cop" version of reality, each person would be rehabilitated from each of their sins by their own social worker (These characters even go to length of holding demonstrating for each person's right to rehabilitation - which is essentially protecting their jobs).
These lies fuse to create the (real) racket version of reality. The uncertainty of each person's position is used to intimidate them into a submission to every scheme of this society. "Legal limbo" is very calculated. Everyone winds-up subject to many flavors of threat, harassment and conformity.
The courts cry crocodile tears about "inefficiency" yet this serves the powers-that-be perfectly, more perfectly even through it's having coming about by accident. The "break-up of the American family" is often blamed for the present judicial invasion of daily life. While we want no part of the nuclear family, we know the police state takes part in the break-down of human rapport even more so than the nuclear family.
What really happens is that just the need to survive puts a large number of people in "legal limbo." This limbo ranges from being in jail, to being on the streets but always subject to arrest to being out but always needing to "watch your back" to being on the street and force-administered "mind healing" drugs.
Moreover, when a person is in this limbo, one duty they have is as cat's-paws to lure more people into the rackets. Each DUI convict is strongly pressured to join the ideology of alcoholic anonymous - and thus to pull more "users" in with them. Homeless people who "get off the street" by gaining employment within the homeless service provider apparatus need to mouth the recovery jargon derived from AA. Each convict is pushed to testify against another to lessen their sentence. And the chronic fatigue sufferer must search for more victims.
Obscurity is the leading edge of capitalism. The churning of social life is absolutely the organization of conformity through infinite lie and infinite atomization.
Obscurity as a system is spread equally through every layer of society, from corporations which hide their hierarchy from their own minions to an ambiguous, all-encompassing illegality that those on the bottom use to survive.
This is the spectacle's most modern form, which is reproduced in all systems of administration. Behind whatever tawdry story is coming from the White House, the Senate or the papers in a given week, confusion and incompetence as methods are visible as the marching orders.
This twilight world meshes perfectly with bureaucracy and capitalism because the "ideal" of equal protection is kept. Every dollar of a bribe is approximately equal to every other dollar.
The world of police records, credit records and security systems is a caste system by default, by a "happy accident." In theory, someone without much money, without insurance, credit, a driver's license and so forth could function without breaking the law. But in reality, they can't. The churning chaos of capitalism makes it both impossible and absurd for the majority to do so.
The modern system aspires to fulfill the promise of the original thirteen American colonies - a community of constant moral surveillance. But this program naturally fights an undeclared war with the public's increasing unconscious hostility.
Public housing is one critical point where the system is presently activating an internal "project phoenix" - destroying housing in order to save it. Everywhere, capital manages small, bureaucratic holocausts for a community of exchange.
This is not a matter of complaining about an unjust system. Surveillance as in scientific investigation and surveillance as in police spying come closer and closer to really meaning the same thing. Certainly, the present police system is massively corrupt but by no means entirely corrupt.
In the end, we are not concerned with it's exact level of integrity. Surveillance now always determines success of a bureaucratic project. AIDS drug effectiveness surveillance indeed involves a death scale ten or many more times the level of the police assassinations involved in the surveillance of the Black Panther Party in the sixties (see Peter Duesberg).
One can say the police are simply a bureaucracy like any other. And we oppose even the "best" work the cops do - resolving disputes, solving domestic violence and other activities that merge with the role of parent and social work.
The bureaucratization of people's lives is not a matter of bad laws or bad controls but a matter viewing people as subjects of the system. The "big parent" of the law and bureaucracy naturally focuses on all the little bumps and mistakes that life consists of. And indeed are quite willing to abolish life to abolish non-conformity. The AZT model: Kill the patient to kill the virus.
Within the legal control system, each aspect of people's lives is considered separately. A driver must be able to make reasonable amends for the possible harm the dangerous activity of driving will cause. A parent must show they won't harm their child. A patient must take reasonable pre-cautions not to spread their disease.
All this sounds most logical to ears conditioned to the orders of today. Each of the control systems correctly presents itself as a matter of choice and the "reasonable" effort to make sure that people do not "abuse" their right to choose.
It is only when one looks at the total condition of life today as that the choice scam becomes clear. In reality, many worker have to drive to work just based on where they have to live. It isn't a matter of choice. A dispossessed person does not create the world where cars, war, alcohol or disease dominate life but they are expected to "take responsibility" for this situation.
The choice ideology becomes merely a pry-bar that opens more and more of life to the attention of a police bureaucracy.
In Philadelphia PA, in early 1996, miss Veronica Jones was arrested in open court in retaliation for her refusal to put forward the prosecution's version of it's case against the well-known framed leftist journalist Mumia Abu Jamal.
Jones was arrested on an "open warrant." It seems that she had been charged with writing bad checks two years previously in New Jersey. However, the judicial machinery had made no particular effort to find her up until the point of Abu Jamal's hearing.
This situation is the situation of many, many poor people and people of color. From warrants to parole violation, court ordered ten-step programs, restraining orders, child protective services regulations, psychiatric interventions, welfare regulations, there are an uncountable number of control systems arange around the lives of the poor.
Modern bureaucratic society has enough absurd complexity that a large percentage of people have a certain number of various "strikes" against them. But class, race and the strategies of capital's bureaucrats together determine whether these strikes will be fatal or ignored.
An "open warrant" can sit for year if a person does not attract the attention of the authorities. It is only one part of the obscure judicial bureaucracy that many people can thankfully ignore only as long as they either fail to attract the attention of authorities or if they kiss the asses of said authorities.
We can see how the expansion of the present order makes repression the only real new product. The world of judicial repression also creates a new terrain of struggle, one in which our side is still fighting for it's voice. Certainly the attack on the justice system had much expression in the LA riots.
Another example is "People's Park" in Berkeley, California. People's Park is a hang-out of the unemployed, social drop-outs and low level drug dealers. This group is at the center of an entire social vortex. This low-level drug economy is the center of the unsaid, the accumulation of outlawed activity everywhere in this society.
Telegraph Ave., in that same area, is patrolled by uniformed police, under-cover police, roving "mental health councilors" and assorted other obscure human relations professionals.
This repression laboratory points to a future where the normal citizen will at the same time have a job, be in school, and be under some kind of judicial sentence.
This less controlled area of Berkeley allows experiments where the role of cop, salesman, teacher and social worker grow closer together. And agent provocateur also grows as a job - the police must herd a noticeable number of the disturbed onto telegraph to fully sell their repression.
The aura of Telegraph Ave. is "the weird", that which is different from "the real world." But each part of this world, factory, office, mall and bohemian hang-out, feed off of the other. Telegraph is one of the main outlet's for social interaction for working middle-class people for a twenty or fifty mile radius. The absolute zero of social interaction make Telegraph critical as a zone of social interaction and as a zone of managed contestation.
The hierarchy of social privilege enforced by the judicial system is the defining quality of the present real world. In People's Park, the regular police patrols stop various individuals whose terms of probation allow them to be searched arbitrarily or whose terms of probation prevent them from going to People's Park at all. This is similar to the order of Serbia, Bosnia or Kosova, where the police both make sure that different groups fight each and make sure that everyone has the different rights assigned to them.
As the arbitrary power of the police/social service sector expands, those at both the top and the bottom of society have more ways and more incentive to break the law. And this allows the authorities to exercise wider arbitrary power over those who can be justly arrested for their violations.
This power is naturally unleashed whenever the planners issue a new order: During the time when the University Of California was installing a volley ball court in People's Park in Berkeley CA, police arrested several people for breaking the rules during a ball game. (Breaking the rules of the volley ball game disrupted the intentions of the civic planners. At that time, they planned to improve the quality of the park by expelling homeless people and attracting athletic yuppies - recently, these same volleyball courts were removed due to their failure as a tool of social reconstruction).
In earlier issues of this zine, we talked often of the symbiotic relationship between suburb and city for constructing shopping-mall social peace.
When the geography of outlying areas has been altered, the context of Berkeley and of any "college town" also changes. The semi-official permission given for weirdness justifies the highly sophisticate repression that constitutes "Berzerkeley."
The police more and more hold the electrodes for these experiments. The churning quality of the modern urban area softens people up for repression.
Certainly, the authorities tollerate the various milieus partly because they have to and partly because they serve as something of a laboratory to see how well the control systems work.
The informal milieu is at the knife's edge of the possibilities of world change. Certainly, the fact that critical people are get together by itself guarantees nothing. This group must decide to act.
On one hand, capital's world incredibly fragile. the LA riots showed how much this dreary world is held together only by people's inability to simultaneously think of an alternative.
On the other hand, this informal opposition must systematically oppose the system, otherwise it merely winds up as an experiment in discovery what and how much is tolerable: "direct democracy", "self expression," or "community empowerment" have all be given a part within capital's final frontier; the self-policing society.
An encounter during a "TV smash" is instructive. Several park regulars, mostly white, are loading television onto the stage in People's park. They are accosted by a black, City Of Berkeley paid "caretaker." He claims to have a mandate for authority from the city and "the activists" and mentions the name of a long-time activist. He especially notes that while the university "is bad," the city has been working with the activists and "now everyone is together on this."
The various folks there wind up confused and paralyzed by this little speech until a certain communist militant asks the caretaker what he will do if his authority is broken. He mentions calling the police and thus is exposed for what interests he really serves.
It should be noted that the speech this fellow had the quality of a bit of freeze-dried ideology dreamed up by a committee and most-likely dished at a "park sensitivity" workshop given for Berkeley City social workers (social cops). It should noted that activist mentioned by the caretaker had no connection with these Berkeley City schemes - her name was merely picked out as part of the illusion of participation.
Since we live in the world of conspiracy/anti-conspiracy theory, we should note that within this scenario, there is no absolute difference between the open activities of social workers and the hidden, "conspiratorial" activities of the police. The supposedly benign activities of social workers always include the perspective of treating a group of people as patients to be cured of their ills - "mainstreaming," giving people "the choice to enter normal life" (as if this society ever offers any other choice). The difference between social worker and the cop who secretly attends a meeting is then only a matter of degrees and public relations. The social worker is just as likely to take any communication as a tool to be used for control.
Note here that various freeze-dried ideologies are fragile and can disintegrate when challenged in even a small way.
This incoherence within this society means there is often situations where a single challenge can become widespread mayhem.
At eight o'clock this, while you are driving to work; the Dow Jones industrial average drops precipitately, silver mining and photography stocks are particularly hard hit. At ten o'clock, while you are at a meeting, Kodak Corp. raises the price of film three hundred percent to make up losses. At three O'clock, your bosses' boss at the Lazy Days Portrait Studio Inc. walks in and demands across the board staff cuts to make up for added costs. At five O'clock, as you are leaving work your bosses tells you to take at least a week off...
Jim Noriss' first novel "Our Fondest Dreams" will soon be published by Random House.
Jim flows in a vast river of literary entrepreneurship. Since college he undoubtedly has been working to get any sort of writing into recognized publications. He fights to combine his own vision with the official vision of this world.
One image rests on another image which altogether rest on the stream of images. Today's metaphors built on clichés show the mechanism of social construction that an aspiring author must become part of. The cliché today is the foundation of a whole system of attention channeling - cliché are images, arguments, and attitudes that are remembered in bunches. So attaching a product to a cliché gives the product automatic name recognition. For that reason, clichés themselves have great value and being able to create them is valuable in itself: the final art.
Common portraits of this society, from both it friends and it's most extreme foes, focus on technology and economics as external objects. In one common frame, technology and economics are simply neuteral means of getting things done. On an other common frame, technology or economics are incomhensible forces, coming out of nowhere, and unquestionably controling human actions.
Neither of these frameworks is helpful for us. An important point of the development of this society is that it has transformed people, people's experiance of themselves and the way that they relate to themselves. Everything in the past is now interpretted in light of the present - just as Star Trek space aliens today always speak English, the modern imagination project the world as it is now onto all
Certainly this society present itself as imense accumulation of things. And like Marx, the task for all of us is to translate this pile of junk back into a series of ways that people relate.
Since each person only has one life, obviously it is not possible for them to really have more experiances, only different experiances.
Given the tremendous complexity of the arrangement of society, this discussion must naturally be an over-view. But a good overview may be what we need most. A good overview can essential be the knife that each person can to cut through the gordonian knot of false choices presented to them.
Karl Marx described how, in the transition to capitalism, the process of exchanging goods for money for goods (G-M-G) became the process of exchanging money for goods for money (M-G-M) and reflected a qualitative change in social relations.
The peasant sold grain to get some money and then get back some goods. Money only mattered as one part of how his rural existence continued.
The capitalist starts out with money, buys stuff, then sells it for more money - money is what matters. The capitalist can even short-circuit the whole process and just earn interest on his or her money. The capitalist was different not because he used money but because his ultimate goal was just more money. The money was not a mean to support a large or small land hold, it was an end something would grow indefinitely.
The change that happened when capitalism became dominant reflected on everything that happened within this new society - when money existed to recreate itself, it was able to move to occupy the dominant position that it presently has. This created the broad framework of today - the world where everything is for sale. (An immediate result of dominance of this circuit of money was the rise of factories where proletarians toiled a dispossessed pure sellers of labor).
The dislocation caused by capitalism has allowed the world of images to take a similar sort of false freedom. The spectacle reflects a refinement of how images and representation relates to the capitalist domination of life. In the most ideal "early capitalist" situation, there is only wage work that does not directly impinge the "culture" of workers.
In most "advanced" conditions, capitalists directly markets the largest parts of the wage laborers' culture. From sports to ideas to trends, everything is on the auction block. Of course, the ruling class never sells or controls everything. But quantitative increase in the level of marketing results in a qualitative change in the relationship of people to their representations. It a greater number of streamlined shlock is produced.
Previously, people created a culture that in the balance belonged to them, even if there were many parts created by particular specialists. Even those representations that were externally manufactured had to make reference to this culture. Today, the spectacle more and more refers to an area autonomous from the masses where the most important representations lie. In this reversal, even self-originated ideas have to make reference to this stream of representations. Television becomes an important topic of conversation.
The Situationist International formulated a concept of the spectacle. We will be describing the development of the spectacle as a parallel system to the accumulation of capital.
For the situationists, the spectacle was the sum of all looking, and all representation. The spectacle was in contradiction and similarity to tendencies of earlier systems, where deviations from the norm still found their own truth within a mediation of a collectivity. In the spectacle, all apparent authenticity on the level of surface in this sense is a false statement about the conditions of today.
This isn't just a matter of an image being a reflection a further image. Just as every commodity has basic use value, every image has some sort of relation to non-reflexive reality. (Web site must publicize themselves with TV advertisements etc., average people can have some real relationship with newscasters, etc.)
Provisionally, we might say life becomes spectacular when the balance of the social value in image tips in favor of the stream of self-referential images.
Capital is a system that traps the flow of human creative energy. Living labor is turned into dead labor - capital. And this is turned against the interests of the laborer.
By the same logic, the spectacle is a system that colonizes the social relations. As a whole, thoughts and social relations go from being immediate results of authentic relations to being controlled by the logic of the flow of images.
Images simultaneously are commodities and capital at the level of monetary relations. Capital is an essentially quantitative. It is measurable as a mass of investment (though this measurement is limited by uncertainties of investment price and the general secrecy around trade, etc.).
The spectacle, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of subjective experiance. The labor of ideologists and specialists in communication is united by vast variety of links. The color and design themes that link the major appliances built in a particular year are dictated by the American Color Council. Newspapers are linked together through their rewriting of the same news wires and press releases. The links are limitless.
The tenuous quality of these links forces each spectacular laborer to redouble their efforts to maintain their position within the entire flow of the spectacle. This same tenuous quality makes it impossible for us to totally map of the spectacle. But the crucial thing is dominance of the spectacle as a whole. It is impossible to determine how spectacular the latest movie is compared to say a punk rock show.
The main thing is the effort and incentive of the many specialist to enlist themselves in this very palpable "seamless stream of image."
Naturally, the spectacle did not spring full-formed as kind of new parasite on society but is an evolution of the realms of culture of dead labor and no culture - no organic unity.
Arguments about the exact point of initiation of the Society Of The Spectacle misses the point in the same way arguments about the exact point of origin of capitalism. If some qualities of the spectacle can be applied "universally" to various realms of culture of culture, it says no more than the partial applicability of market logic to pre-economic societies. Anyway, while television, shopping malls, or the internet are only symptoms of the condition of life today, they still pretty well distinguish 1999 from the 1599.
Steam and coal a hundred years ago gave society the means to conquer the globe purely quantitatively. Once it reached a quantative mastery of the environment, the alteration of the qualities of environment became the key underlying project of capitalism. And within this, controlling the qualities of the world it builds has become key. And this increase in control has naturally happened first obviously, then subtly.
The qualities of the spectacle were first seen in the hypnotic power of mass communication - in radio, television and movies. And when these technologies first appeared, they had the appearance of integrated forces. The magic of Hollywood involved prestige and glamor (words associated with magic).
From Hitler to Sadam Huessain to Franklin Roosevelt, the power of centralized mass communication has reached it's apex under all the varieties of war capitalism.
It is only the further extension of the domination of exchange that the spectacle can be seen as an integrated aspect of alienated labor.
In a previous issue, we described a view of the concept of spectacle[1] which situated it as most focused on the process of consumption. The perspective of both Jean Barrot and those who view the Situationist International as being "media critics" is that the spectacle is only the experiance of "consumers", professional and skilled workers. It is viewed as merely a suppliment to the consumption side of the production-consumption process.
The position of viewing the spectacle as an accumulation of circulating appearances might appear similar to this but ultimately it is more.
We will describe instead, how spectacle can be seen to permeates all aspects of the capitalist relations - the entire circuit of production, consumption and reproduction.
Altogether the reign of the spectacle comes just as capital's manipulation of the conditions of circulation process moves from the obvious to the subtle, moving to conquer first the objective and then the subjective.
Capital does not just add advertising or packaging at the end of the assembly line. The assembly line itself is coated with a layer of "team spirit" ideology, the production process is packaged for the investor, the regulator and the competitor. All activity is encapsulated within ideologies.
This also results in a situation where the true and the false coexist simply in realm of the predictable. Half of a companies revenues come from a gigantic factory while the other half may involves five people selling cocaine. As long as each has statistically verifiable track record, each will incorporated into a commodity.
One of the main systems of capitalist management theory is "TQM" - Total Quality Management. TQM is doctrine which exorts each company to find a niche where the sale of it's unique "quality" can bring it profits.
This doctrine represent more than a single scheme to make a buck. It represents the present of capital to turn the crisis of profitability. Basically, the crisis of profitability is felt by the inability of those companies which "generic" products to make a profit - in world where capital massive capital moves with utmost rapidity, companies that sell something that many other companies will sell quickly loose their ability to obtain a profit (for a more detail description, see Karl Marx, Capital v:I-III).
The alternative to this today is a series of angles, of scams. In the modern market, since production no longer consists of fixed commodities but of ever-varying gizmos of uncertain value, marketting must permeate the process to assure a market once production happens - internet start-ups are simply the latest within this racket.
Lying about production and the production of lies is everywhere. We will be showing the form of the economy where each feeds into the other.
This society is the product of the failure of each possibility for liberation, from the Paris Commune to the IWW of 1920's to the upheavals of the sixties - but even without explicit revolts, even the smallest moments of ungovernability must be stepped on.
An electronic-parts store owner described the advance of electrical parts to ASAN.
"Twenty years ago, if a ten cent diode went out in a radio, you could just buy a replacement and keep the radio going. These days, all the electrical appliances have parts that are specially designed by the manufacter and no available anywhere."
We can roughly described capital as "revolutionizing" production in two different phrase. In the first stage, interchangeable parts, automation and research are used to reduce the price as much as is practical. Once the manufacterer has most savings out of production things enter the second stage. In this stage, the manufacter rearranges production so the ways he makes things brings the greatest profits and control even though things aren't made more efficient. The product is designed to break down more, so people will buy more. Spare parts are controled more so the manufacter will control the repair market. A thousands and one tricks are used.
Essentially, we move from traditional production to automated production to ideological production.
I. Traditional Industry: The small scale methods used to produce handicrafts. These advance but only so-far as the structure of individuals. The single woodworker or iron worker would fit into this category.
II. Interchangable parts, automation and the Scientific production: This begins with automation and larger scale production, most industry till recently fit into the broad category.
III Ideologized production: The further revolutionizing of the entire production process using psychology, cybernetics, systems theory, model and all ideological machinery of modern bureaucracy. The happens in the context of the increased unification of the various fields of spectacular ideologies.
Goals of Ideologized production seldom are simply increases in production but rather by a need to fine-tune the entire shape of production. Indeed Ideologized production requires the basic framework of production to be set. In ideologized production, the shape of product is changed to allow easy shipping, or to allow for an assembly line where union organizing is more difficult or for a thousand interlocked levels.
As capital evolves, each industry has evolved from one phase the next. But different industries and processes are still at different levels. Steel is still mostly a simple commodity after three hundred year. Software now is produced massive ideology contained within.
The cybernetics of managing an enterprise is be no means a dry, rational, scientific matter but a blending of production management and the creation of ideologizies for the unification of marketting, production and human-resource management.
Software tools that permit the combination of production control and flexibility still involve an inefficient customization of processes. Each corporate entity builds tools and techniques for similar purposes, yet not of these consistantly inter-operate - indeed, the presence or lack of inter-operation is part of production strategies.
Now each of the phases we've discussed follows from the last. For us, the transition from stage II to stage III is what matters most for understanding the society's present condition.
Ideological production, then, is production once the immediate pay-off of transformation of the world have been reached.
Car production is a good example. Henry Ford's assembly line and the improvements to that, reached the level of maximum efficiency in simple car production by the fifties. After that, small changes the nature of cars themselves became key. The final, numerical output of production is now only one of many aspect which must be managed.
Auto companies have looked in detail at what parts of production are most profitable to control directly and which are most profitable to control indirectly. They have added layers of "features," of assesories to the basic automobile. They manage the credit system which spurs people to buy new cars with money not yet earned and so-forth.
As production efficience have reached diminshing returns except in a few key industries, managing production by controlling the price of parts, the level of fixed capital (parts and finished inventory), the price of repairs and the structure of the labor process all a key aspects which ideological-cybernetic management attempts to solve.
Final products now are assembled out of pieces which are crafted for their many ideological conveniences - for planned obsellecence, parts are no longer interchangable or available (except at high prices from the manufacturer).
A tool has functionality, a gadget has a purpose. A tool is at least somewhat general purpose, a gadget has often intentionally hadicaped to be only capable of a single purpose. A drill is a tool, an electric beard trimmer is a gadget.
A tool may require training and even more is often used by those who are skilled in their activity. A gadget is designed to for no training and indeeed, thwarts those who are trained - it is too poorly made or too cumbersome.
The production of gadgets and transformation of tools into gadgets can be used to gauge the progress of ideological production. A mason of many years ago had a simple hammer and chisel but used for very particular purposes. An autmatic of forty years ago had main general purpose tools with a special tools. Most of his tools could be on boats or any machinary. A mechanic of today has an array of devices made only for the electronics and close tolerances of today's automobiles.
A milestone was reached in computer chip production when Intel corporation began to sell it's 80386SX math coprocessor chip. This was ordinary chip that had certain abilities removed by damaging it after production. Intel sold this for less money. By artificially creating a hierarchy of qualities in it's products, Intel aimed to gain the sales from those with less money and the higher prices from those with more money (while the diagnostic devices require skill in terms of specialized knowledge, they don't require dexterity or a "feel" for the situation - for good or ill).
This was the kind of differentiation that existed in automobile or vacuum-cleaner sales for years. Engineers, who were some of the main computer buyer in the time of 80387SX, were shocked at that point only because they had a history buying chips as tools rather than as gadgets. They didn't expect buy something crippled for marketing purposes. Gadgets, things sold with "the sizzle" were thought to be the realm of only the stupified "end user."
But today, the produciton of pure information is the frame within which all production lives. And here, the changing of products to suit a multitude of hidden agendas is becoming most developed.
Wholesale and retail, news, education, training, documentation, advertising, features, parts and production are somewhat separate. But they are more and more coordinate, more and more each aspect is coordinated with the other. More and more all can be seen within the framework of pure information flow.
The national security released the "Clipper" encryption chip years ago - the chip's algorythm, it's method of encryption, was still kept secret. Thus it was a product designed to make communication secret to most people and to allow communication to be intercepted by some.
Today, the NSA has released an public algorythm whose implications are secret. This method serves as ideal pure mathematical trojan horse commodity.
But the area where the use of secret framing and secret implication is perhaps most developed is news production. Not only do "spin doctors" provide after-the-fact framing for news, public relations agencies craft large sections of the news for their particular clients (not to mention the many intelligence agencies who also employ journalists).
We have seen how ideologized production no longer considers the single "output" of a factory but instead manages the entire conditions of production and ultimately the entire conditions of society as a factory.
Now the substitution of one or another big lie for some aspect of a large project is aspect that has evolved in lock step with the total management of production.
Part of this is the inevitable result of the "programming" paradigm. When the management of a project is subject to the control of a single will, a single focus of attention, it is always possible for this focus to drift and those destroy the entire project (witness the failure of Bill Gate's much balyhooed "Project Iridium").
Part of this is a natural considering the management of a total project. In a larger sense, every large project is a lie in the sense that it must support the framework within which it is produced. And aspect goes from the mundane to abstract.
The automobile is a real object and millions are produced each year to the destriment of the soul and the environment. But in a larger sense, automobile culture is a lie. The apparent gain in convenience of having a source of transportation is eaten by up destruction of the landscape by car culture.
And the large automobile manufactorers entered the business of managing the imposition of the automobile on the landscape and have only increased their role in what has become to the management of both life and lies.
The circulation of images abstracted from their particular origin, and the total management of ideologized production really are same phenomenon viewed on different levels. Detached images, the hollowing out of former systems of community, of former notions of truth or decency, is both a by-product of the totalitarian management of the system of production and a means to accomplish it.
Matching something concrete like wheaties and something abstract like success is the beginning of the universal circulation and mangement of anything and everyting.
One thing to remember is that no matter how far the system pushes into the terrain subjectivity, all terrain that it hold is contested territory.
The present system is a dog chasing its tail. It succeeds fairly often. The trick is that capital's trajectory is an ever-expanding network of psychological management systems.
From wage-price management to maintain the survival system to freedom-repression management to allow information production while repressing dessent to the large scale management of investment fraud, the system repairs many apparently unworkable situations by maintaining multiple levels of lies, of multiple levels of participant, producing lies more further up-stream, and so-forth.
Talk of secret technologies or powers of the powers-that-be should be done with exactness. In too many cases, the secrecy of technology really turns out to be simply the technology of secrecy, a methodology whose implications have already been well explored in the past - though perhaps the present day is going furthest in wrapping it within the fabric of life.
It is well known that secrecy corrodes the ability of science to function exactly. Open criticism is at the heart of development of science even the powers-that-be move to occasionally rip this heart out.
The horror of biomedical industry or even the auto industry, often the only certain thing is that an elaborate deception is going on. For example, if auto production is more efficient than ever before, why are cars more expensive? (After all the price of computers has gone down in over the last twenty years).
The transition to ideologized production is often ironically a freezing of the actual conditions of life.
A computer programmer talked to ASAN about his efforts to automate the processes of Canadian tariffs. The regulation involved were far too complicated for modern trade. However, by using a computer, the authorities were able to automate these ancient regulations, thereby preserving into the indefinite future an otherwise unmanageable mess.
This pattern is repeated everywhere in the contemporary world - not only in terms of computer systems but in terms of all large-scale systems. Old things can be redesigned, stream-lined and marketed as new to the simultaneous delight of the market-place and the bureaucracy. And this casts the old in stone.
While the spectacle is in the abstract a seamless stream of arbitrary images, it's actual production is depressingly predictable. This is in the same way that television seems to promise you a chance to show you almost anything and winds-up showing you almost nothing.
Indeed, while capitalism seems to promise the possibility of endless variety, it produces more and more of the same stuff.
All movies these days are produced as combination of previous forms. Religion, psychics and gambling are all easily computerized. Every TV show of the past must have it's movie version. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Elvis Presley have each had comebacks as soon as there was time for them to be unfashionable.
Today's automobile has essentially the same arrangement as the automobile of 1950. It's tremendously greater complexity has only marginally changed this. And the inside of a car has indeed become massively more complicated. But all the automated factories, computer chips and ultra-exact engineering has not made the car cost less and has only slightly increased it's gas mileage and durability.
Ideologized production happens at the point where the general shape of the product and it's environment have become fixed. Once capital has given up changing the situation and can instead engineer it. Of course, this condition of fixing the old is not essentially a matter of technological limitations but of dead labor dominating living labor. The accounting of wage labor requires that old value must be retrieved. "The dead weigh upon the living like a nightmare." Now that petroleum-based technologies have become absolute, the
One way to describe the present system is that all earlier systems of domination have been combined and can now compete on the open market place.
Catholics compete with pornography for our attention. Touchy-feeling managers "from the sixties" compete with rigid authoritarians to manage fortune 500 companies. Stalinists compete with anarchists and Christians for the right to manage drug counseling houses.
In the same way, each social fragment is frozen. The accumulation of dead labor is the accumulation of failed efforts to live. Deadheads, hippies, punks and rappers are merely chosen lifestyles and remain nearly the same choice as twenty years ago. All rebellion is described as being "stuck in the sixties." Reactionaries are describing as being " stuck in back in the cold-war."
All music today is classic rock.
[Perhaps this belongs at the end]
Socialigically, the world has been utterly transformed. The comentary of those who celebrate the present, however, is especially idiotic considering their lack of understanding of all that has been lost.
Even more difficult is discovering what has remained constant within the continual
This magazine has published sporadically over the last ten years. The last issue of ASAN, now maybe five years old, with only few provisions and examples changed, could serve revolutionary purposes as well as this one (though it deals with different details). The publications of the Situationist International or even Marx and Engles could lead a reasonably attentive reader to the entire structure of today's capitalism. Indeed, only a few notes about capital's growth might be needed if Marx himself were to emerge from his grave.
The fundamental story of today of the pot not yet boiling over. A vast sea of potential human communities exist within the operation of this inhuman system - and this potential is constantly crushed. Each crowd, each dance has possibilities, potential life beyond anything any previous society created. And all the possibilities negate each other in the swarm of the marketplace.
Publishing a whole new issue on a schedule is something of a concession to today's need for constant newness. But certainly the ends justify the means. The latest absurdities certainly make the mess more obvious. We use every tactic of today to the extent that it will actually take us to the goal of communism.
We must always leave our readers with the uncharted vistas of what could be. For that reason, filling in every detail would be undesireable even if it were possible.
Our target audience is those readers who are creating their own tools to act with. And we are not so whether you like as whether we provoke you to further action within life.
As Brecht noted, the cycle of tension, action and climax in drama can leave a person passified and ready to accept daily route further. For that reason, revolutionaries must use different tactic. Creating tension and action but leaving the climax for the proletariat is one tactic.
What has happened in the time since we started publishing is interesting despite being dwarfed by what hasn't happened.
The rhythm of capital's production does indeed have different qualities at different times. The struggle between the historical proletariat and the economy has driven each towards dominating all of social life. The LA riots showed how a quick and complete transformation is necessary and possible once the program of our power appears. And the amnesia afterwards is just as good a lesson (though the amnesia is getting harder to maintain with the current wave of mini-riots).
Certainly the system has reached a different state than it was at ten years ago - the "end of the cold war" having only the barest shred of a relation to this movement.
What keeps The phase both perfect and fragile is the way that all information "providers" must repress any concept of a different organization of life.
If the present phase calls itself "The End Of History" and can date its reign from the fall of the Soviet Union, then that moment of victory was simply a matter of the already fake opposition openly accepting the most brazen form of capitalist rule - international bankers and the world market.
The fall of the Soviet was didn't represent "the end of communism" - Russia hadn't represented anything liberatory for more than seventy years. The USSR had already taken IMF loands long before it's break-up. The break-up was not a change in itself, but an intensification of the present world order.
So one thing that's important to remember is how today, there just aren't two sides of capitalism. There aren't two sides even in senses where you don't support either of them. There aren't two sides in the sense of two competing roads leading to the same destination.
There is only one road with competition about deciding the details, and proving who is pushing harder. But each group ultimately embraces not just the end but the means, not just the means but the need for loyalty to the means.
The end of Stalinism was simply that signal that now the world market has become so fragile that it has to be implacably policed as a single world order for the survival of the world market.
This policing takes the form of both direct repression and the organization of all contact and sociality into information. This most specifically means the total willingness of the "mass media" to submit to the dictates of the higher authorities.
And the image of an expanding economy is certainly being defended with as much totalitarian effort as the honor of the west (the financial collapses in the recent past have made "recovery forever" challenging to defend but it seems certain the media will defend their images up to it being absurd and beyond).
The more specific link to terror in accounting comes as the substitute for Keynesianism. The history of the last fifty years has been the history of constructing monumental false fronts. This society must produce more and more lies just to stay in the same place. The modern marketing system has to constantly stretch the "ladder of success" - moving each rung further from the last. While a good percentage of folks live on $1000/month, professionals can make $5,000/month and save nothing. Reproducing this ladder of success is critical part of the system. All commentators hail the advancing economy, as this economy crushes the average person surviving inside it.
After saying for twenty years that America is a "class-less society," America's masters have no trouble suddenly openly celebrating the power of the rich. The average mood has switched to hopelessness. Anyone who believed the media's world is too dazed ever to act.
Never before has capital more appeared to have a clear field of action. The efforts to frame Richard Jewel after the Atlanta Olympic bombing gave a hint of the energy that is being expended to maintaining this appearance of omnipotence. The Jewel framing showed a low level official framing a suspect choosen more or less at random to blame for a separate terrorist event. The main motive was to quickly show they could catch such criminals. The most telling thing about the framing was that it only was caught at random and that nothing changed to prevent such efforts in the future.
The total big investments of the modern time have been based on "throwing bad money after bad." The untenability of capital's present phase will first be visible within capital's desperate race to plug the both minor and major cracks in it's image. The Dow Jones average has been altered lately to exclude poorly performing stocks, such as Westinghouse, and add better performing stocks, such as Hewlett Packard.
In the fifties, the military industrial complex was the locus of the "American Dream." The mix of "guns versus butter" was the boundary between the working class and the ruling class in that workers traded off the insanity of nuclear blackmail for the promise that a certain number of mostly white, mostly male, "good" jobs would continue to exist.
Essentially, the model guaranteed survival in exchange for no longer living. To maintain the system of exchange, consumption would be guaranteed to increase as much as production, even if the consumption meant building planes and burying them in the desert.
The military industrial complex was basically the way that American society tossed it's vast factory production into a hole in the ground. This allowed the economy to maintain a fairly steady clip while keeping workers from getting so comfortable they didn't actually want to work. The military industrial complex was financed by the government which printed and borrowed money for this purpose.
Today, the military industrial complex is growing much less slowly. Yet the average person has even less. Several other massive scams have taken its role in the economy today. The two biggest are the medical industry and the police/prison industry. The medical industry has grown at the rate of 10% per year for the last twenty years (this is adjusted for inflation). This winds up with people paying more than seven times as much as they did twenty years ago.
The racket of the military industrial complex was based on Keynesianism. Excess government spending soaked up the excess production of industry and pushed further consumption.
John Meynard Keynes had a simple answer to a simple problem. The problem capitalists had was that once they produced a huge amount of stuff in their factories, no one could really buy much more and the whole of working, producing and consuming got harder to organize. Keynes' answer was for the government to print money to buy all the extra stuff.
The way that Keynesianism maintains production is to create an industry whose expansion cannot be questioned. In the fifties, sixties and seventies this was defense. In the eighties this was real estate. In the nineties, this is the medical industry These are industries whose production increases more and more without the average person choosing to spend any money on them. Defense was and is directly government supported. The real estate boom was supported by the government ignoring investment scams and by corupt diversions Savings And Loan money to commercial Real Estate. The medical industry is supported on the surface by the government allowing prices to increase indefinitely and paying the ever-increasing bill for the poor. Beyond, this, investors can see the obvious princeple that a sick person has no choice but to pay for medical treatment and patients are captive consumers, ready to be fleeced of everything.
The general principle of Keneysianism has worked reasonably well for capital. But there were sometimes a few problems, like money getting less valuable since so much gets printed and so-forth. Still most of the world has been running on various versions of this system for the last fifty years. The problem is that by producing so much stuff, the absurdity of Keynesianism often shows through.
Ronald Reagan officially abandoned Keynesianism when he was president. But this only perfected the most modern accounting system - which is Keynesianism fortified with lies. "Supply side economic" advocated the same policies as Keynesianism but had absurd assumptions and absurd conclusions but this falseness was it's useful element.
Falsifying the value of money is the most powerful force today in this "new economy." The most obvious example is that government "inflation figures" stay constant while the price for food, gasoline and housing increase wildly. Once their numbers are fudged, the government plans seem to workout perfectly - and exactly against the proletariat. From secret currency transactions to bank and government collusion to the falsification of social security figures to vast scams, money is pushed in and out of the economy wildly and for the benefit of the largest controllers.
Indeed, whether the government formally balances it's budget is mostly a matter of organizing appearances since so many "para-government" institutions like banks also serve to manage the economy by running deficits and surpluses. And the size of budget or even the results of arithmetic can altered by decree (though all these measures have a cost to them).
"The mix" of social policy today has changed. The mix was once enough discipline to keep people working and happy. The "American Dream" designated that an obedient working class would not be pushed beyond a certain lowering of income, humiliation etc.. Now the mix consists of enough poverty and confusion to throw people off balance but not so much that the system itself has trouble controlling things. This mix heads toward more absurdity as more charlatans gain more skill in getting "cash from chaos."
For twenty five years, modern society has not had to make much of a fuss about the way that machines produce more and more each year yet the average person has less and less each year. The social contract rests on permanent distraction.
Rather than balancing the level of consumption with the level of exploitation, the modern system of negative consumption must constantly increase the level of deception, fear and anger. It sells more protection that no longer promises survival.
The most immediate motor of the long "recovery" was the large scale falsifying of cost-of-living figures and the expansion of the far East. It depends on the ability of businesses to secretly pay people less and less even while unemployment goes down.
This situation was as unstable as the real estate bubbles of the eighties but naturally based on more complete falsification. Still, the "boom" lacks even the feel of optimism of ten years ago.
At the same time, the rhythm of terror must be maintained. To keep people's attention, the dictator and the terrorist must alternate with television's other phantoms of absolute evils. And since no lie lasts forever, the system has it's itinerary for admitting to different lies - Operation Gladio came out ten years after it's effects, American civilian radiation experiments were admitted forty years after the fact, Reagan's sending of crack into the ghetto's was partly admitted ten years later (though we can hope the real story of AIDS will come out much too soon for them).
The economy of this negative consumption is real - it's need for lies is very concrete. Capitalism remains an economy based on exchange. Some entity must pay for all of the stuff that is now produced. Scams have a limited life - often the life-cycle of a given scam is managed by the higher authorities. These same folks clean up after the BCCIs of the world.
The system requires that lies be spread in even, predictable layers. And this is not guaranteed. World capital lost about 30% of it's value at the end of October of 97 as the balance different lies reached a less controlled level. But even 1998, capital has been able to reconstruct an image of prosparity. The final end is uncertain yet closer.
The more interdependent a system is, the more a system's truth depends on that system itself.
In the case of the spectacle, the truth of the world depends on systematically falsifying the conditions of life for the benefit of capital.
The endless of production and defense of absurd products and the need to create the impression that these are either the epitome of a life well lived or simply all that's on offer, now drives the most visible as well as the most obscure fields of knowledge.
Today many naked emperors can be denounced without their edifices falling apart. Selective media systems, Babylonian complexity and vast networks of common interests let this happen.
The San Jose Mercury News carried a series of pieces concerning the importing of cocaine into the US ghettos by the CIA using Nicaraguan "contra" and other suppliers. These articles caused a stir within the dominating "mainstream" media world until the publisher was forced to disavow the stories (without any serious evidence contradicting these stories).
In fact the basic fact of the Mercury News story had been available for ten years within the alternative media. Garry Web, The Mercury News' reporter, did have more resources to flesh out the details more completely than the previous alternative reports but the situation was essentially known to those who cared to look. Now this thoroughness still didn't stand a chance against the general interest of capital's media in suppressing such embarrassing details. The mainstream naturally was able to cook-up doubting and ad-homonym arguments as their ostensible arguments against the Mercury News Stories. But this kind of canned argument can be cooked-up against anything (and certainly journalism classes encourage the skill of arguing the truth of arbitrarily choosen position). The ultimate message was "don't say this because it's not permitted."
Altogether, the way that this hole in capital's image was closed-up is one powerful indication of the many lies capital rests on - most of which never get to the surface.
The job of teachers, scientists and journalist is to gloss any of these obvious points which make the system look at all bad. They instead insert freeze-dried ideas which crawl out of laboratories or rhetoric factories. The average newspaper produces almost no news. The journalists and editor merely rewrite news from the national wire services. And these wire services themselves more and more recycle press releases paid for by corporations seeking to influence current thought. Remarkable genetic experiments, announced with much fan-fare, are among the biggest hood-winks of this game.
The theorists of advertising and military intelligence agree. You must find those forces powerful enough to influence the trend-setters. The rest will be carried along. The system of exchanging images is not a matter of forcing ideas onto the masses (though it can be simplified as having that result). Rather, each capitalist attempts to benefit by injecting their interests into the entire stream of images and ideas. Trend-setters pick up these ideas and in turn persuade others. Direct and indirect methods together assure that an information product will be embedded in the whirlpool.
In the case of medicine, pharamapseudical products, medical products and genetic ideology can and must be defended not just on the level of selling junk but on the level of the theory of medicine.
A look at Peter Duesberg's book Inventing The AIDS Virus shows the vast array of common interests that come into play in the process of protecting the obscure object of bureaucratic/ideological desire.
"AIDS dissidents" have caught official medicine in the act of falsifying the nature of the disease at various times. Despite this, Mainstream medicine still retains a stranglehold on the press. David Ho's "pioneering research" that earned "Time Man Of The Year" has been quietly set aside in the years after was touted as the missing link proving the HIV hypothesis. Despite this or more like because of this, our ability to determine the exact cause of the spectrum of conditions known as AIDS is quite limited. Duesberg and other "AIDS dissidents" (including the Internationalist Communist Group) give plausible arguments about this but, as we've said before, obscurity is natural property of such large-scale phenomenon of bureaucratic society
Duesberg's book makes it clear how AIDS has been product of the modern medical-bureaucratic agenda - with "genetic engineer" leading the way.
The power of many of existing official lies comes as medicalization becomes an primary element of ideology. Medicalization is strongly aided by the centralization of all scientific research today.
The stamp of research on findings about AIDS, genetic links, drug addictions, psychiatric medication or other social-medical ideologies appear incontestable. By that very fact, they turn out to be the most patent lies when viewed closely (see later section for more on the medical-industrial complex).
The magic of the modern spectacle comes from it's hiding a total perspective. Anything can happen when no one knows what's happening in the next village. The destruction of community and the falsification of daily allows all other falsifications to take place. And we can judge the degree of media falsification by the degree of this falsification.
There are many parts of reality whose truth everyone knows but which one cannot proven in a laboratory; cops are jerks, work is unpleasant, stress can make you sick and so-on. Chemical pollution is ever-present today and clearly has a part in the rising cancer rate. But research controlled by capital more and more orients itself to finding the genetic cause of all of these problems. Corporate feminists wonder what mysterious force destroys the confidence of teenage girls. While the spirit destroying qualities of school as such were well known to protesters in the 60's, today we need something more mysterious and encapsulatable.
Given all this, our task is producing a position which doubts every roll of capital's loaded dice.
Given the universal secrecy of today, conspiracy theory is naturally becoming a larger part of oppositional politics. And in many ways it becomes the final spectacular wrinkle.
This is not only because everything is as it seems - though many "conspiracies" of today hide in plain sight. As we've said, many "conspiracies" have little fear of discovery but instead only fear publicity.
The concept of conspiracy also ignores the real texture of the spectacle. A spectacular ideology today requires that who use it also embrace - the tellers of the lies become the fervent believers. This is not simply to be convincing but in order to hide the truth more utterly they hide it from themselves.
Conspiracy theory gives a false impression of a ruling class that is united and super-naturally powerfull. In reality, the ability of the police, pharmapseudical, intelligence and prison complexes requires a gloss of accepted ideology rather than some single "command center." This isn't saying these forces won't come in the night for those they perceive as threatening their interests. This is simply saying that ideology constitutes something of the limits of their ability to cooperate.
After World War II, every new industry aspired to the condition of the nuclear industry, which represented a point of absolute concentration and power. In the fifty years since then, the nuclear industry produced no net value beyond the whole-sale destruction of land and people (even mainstream scientists question whether a nuclear power plant can produce more energy in its life than will be used in its creation and destruction).
But nuclear ideology always used the logic of destruction to reproduce itself. Nuclearization was sold as the only defense for the nuclear. And moreover, the real value of the nuclear system was that it sucked up resources.
After 1970, every new industry has also aspired to the conditions of the software industry. Each company aims to have as its product a fixed code, a single series of signs, so as to be able to sell this code over and over again.
An earlier issue of ASAN looked at this, the economic logic driving the expansion of information. As the information economy expand to different aspects of existence, it follows a natural cycle of surveillance, repression, falsification, and colonization - from software piracy to software cops. All code must be given a price. Many of the projects of modern capitalist development reduce to this struggle to turn activity into information and to buy, sell and control this information. From music to education to medicine, information is the universal product.
But the form of information is, in fact, pure obscurity. The use of code for capital is to create unquestionable organization within each person's life. There is the code of world pricing, the tax code, software code, the coded racism around "welfare mothers" or crime, the code of universal product seals.
Nuclear energy was sold not on the basis of producing value but ultimately on the basis of tremendous money having been invested in - if it is not necessary for the world, then the world will be remade for it. Any code, any piece of information that people are being paid to produce and consume becomes the ultimate authority by the logic of survival. The same logic is followed by computer programming, art, biotechnology or surveying. Capital knows that "the map is not the territory."
The marketing of "genetic engineering" has followed the same logic of enforced survival. The workings or supposed workings of life must be altered to conform to the logic of control systems. A valuable product is genes for the alteration of seeds so they cannot produce further seeds. This allows seed companies to maintain their monopolies. "We had to destroy this life to make it sellable."
The rise of the medical industrial complex shows all of these trends rather baldly. The cost of health car has risen %10/year for the last twenty years - yet health has not increased to the slightest degree. Indeed, naturally health must continually grow worse to allow doctors the possibility of selling further cures.
The sky-rocketing cost of medical care has happened on the surface through various corrupt schemes over the last twenty years. The immediate convenient principle for the medical capitalist is that no one can complain about cost once they've been strapped into the hospital bed.
Mandating "minimum standards of care" for each particular disease forces each hospital to purchase a new machine for each medical "advance." The decreasing ability of many people to pay for medical insurance has caused more and more people to use the emergency room as their "medical provider of first resort" while the emergency rooms themselves increase in cost by the need for fancy gadgets. Legal maneuvering over nursing home deaths forces nursing homes to take dying residents to hospitals to allow them to die more slowly, using the latest expensive "life support system" (more accurately called death support systems). Hospitals speculate, build extra hospital beds and then can pass the cost onto patients. Finally, to maintain constant corporate profits, direct medical care to patient must be rationed and hospital worker's salaries attacked.
Still in larger terms, this vast money extraction complex has come as medical commodities have shown themselves to be the ideal model of modern consumption. The patient is forced to consume medical care while they themselves become the product through research performed on them and the patents thereby obtained.
The model of the medical system is the programming of the body. Naturally, it is absurd that the system can charge us seven times for care without anyone getting seven times as well (in fact, people are getting notably sicker today than twenty years ago. Note a recent Canadian study which found pharmapsuedical side-effects as the fourth leading cause of death in America - ahead of homocide, suicide, and AIDS. And even this is likely an under-estimate).
We have defined a negative commodity as one that creates more misery while being sold as the releif from that misery. While a drug like heroin is the most obvious example, the entire medical industry perfects this model.
The negative commodity is not simply a matter of people being hoodwinked into various panics and rackets. It is a principle of the capitalist world. The commodity already dominate the landscape. If the process of marketing is reworked to involve buying death - whether poisonous AZT, toxic christmas toys or equally poisonous schemes - the hapless consumer must simply keep consuming what is in front of him. More than this, the consumer even at Disney Land ultimately accepts that their life is worthless simply by the fact that they buy their existence - their life is just things. From the easy acceptance of Nazi death camps by German Jewish leaders to modern day radiation experiments, this has meant that consumer is expected to buy their death as the ultimate product and natural result of normal life. Of course, those most wiling to accept death consumerism are the ideologues of consumption and not average consumer.
Here we remark that "The world of the supermarket is the world of the concentration camp", in solidarity with Gile Deauve (Jean Barrot) who has been ruthlessly hounded in the French media for this insight.
Another important part of hospital marketing is reconstructing the human body in the image of capital. This reconstruction ranges from the materially "useful" laser surgery to the utterly fraudulent chronic fatigue syndrome. All of these are part of a seamless web of medicalization/commodification.
The initial principle of big science marketing for medicine was that the body consisted of parts needing replacement with the hospital as the point of replacement. This was back in the sixties when transplants were seen as the wave of the future and before the dire consequences of these procedures became widely understood.
Naturally, this image has given way to the body as a repository of codes with those owning and altering the codes as the masters. Here we can see the rise of genetic engineering as the ultimate industry. It is quite useful to look at Peter Duesberg again to see how spectacular genetic engineering ultimately created the present landscape.
We cannot say for certain the degree to which modern genetics has falsified its own results but there are many examples of substantial lying. Certainly, the principles of original science - proof and evidence - have been replaced with the principles of specialization and feedback. Specialization: The power of related specialists must be respected. Statistically verified results are blended with whatever big lies happen to be related. Feedback: If the result can be defended with evidence and fits the financial agenda of the your masters, then it is a truth of the moment. In this world, organizations producing massively complex and effective machinery can co-exist with massive lies, illusions and fabrications.
AIDS "science" consists of a blend of panic, simplistic generalities, incomprehensible results and moral calls. But it is surely also real contemporary science just because it has been recycled quickly into the science curriculum and is what up-coming student believe.
But the haphazard approach actually has a unity. The spectacle must code on the principle of maximal obscurity. One technology may truly meet it's amazing publicity while another may be simply the tissue of lies. This circulation of code is the purest production of spectacle.
The modern techno-structure has essentially abadonned the original spirit of science - moving towards the truth through observation. It's princeples of feedback and specialization merely produce short-term proscriptions lacking a coherent over-view of even the system it studies. And naturally, this seamless organization of blind alleys is unchallengable except for it's total lack of historical sense.
The prison industrial complex in itself is one of the more obvious of the systems of unified commercial interests today.
The ability of this system to maintain itself is very much dependent on the universality of individual authoritarian character complexes. Essentially, the police still very much depend on the obdience of the average person. And that obdience stems out of a complex of fears. These fears derive from many sources. Altogether, the primary source of these is the isolation, poverty and uncertainty of modern life. Anger towards the inability to achieve love, tenderness, relaxation, security, or freedom is displaced into an anger towards those who fail to conform, those threaten to bring out the total emptiness of life by disrupting it.
Now, the prison industrial complex, powerful as it is, is the big lie having the greatest level of sincere opposition to it. And for this
The character position of admiring prisoners has serious problem. Those who look towards the prisoner occupation a position of absolute powerlessness cannot think of using the power that they do against the system.
Prisoner struggle have been some of the most critical struggles. And in this spirit of opposition has come from the opposite direction. The ability of those who are permitted little to rebell is a call those out, those who a wider range to rattle the bars of their cages as well.
The
When considering say, the medical industrial complex, is important to see how it slides toward bio-argicultural complex, the prison industrial complex, the media complex and the information technology complex and so-forth.
Big chunk of each of these industries are based flat, unvarnished lies. And this can be demonstrated as such in many cases. Other cases, the real situation is difficult to determine but
More and More, these complexes
Capitalism produces an entire dynamic of twisted mind-body relations that are in harmony with its system of producing and consuming misery.
The unconscious mind has never ceased playing. But the permitted social field of today consists of weakness, abasement and revenge. It is natural then that symptoms today have become the main social tokens. Misery is exchanged in every form. The conveniance of being punished as an alcoholic who has an instant social scene in AA is merely the most obvious example.
But keep in mind that this is not necessarily a matter of a punishment or a reward but an identity granted by cybernetic slave morality. The brain creates the mind in the play of the present.
The body is socially constructed - both health and disease become poses, life-styles and death-styles. Each way that people externalize their state of being can then be a commodity sold back to them.
Moral and disease panics are perfect examples of this situation. The angels of bland normalcy and the demons of "disease" are two poles of the present unconsciousness.
We neither glorify or condemn "addiction", "life on the streets" or "chronic fatigue syndrome." Each point of isolated, unconscious, friction within the normal order is equally valid and equally defeated when isolated. Today, the world of social churning has created an entire satellite system of control-related measures for different people to line up behind. From welfare to half-way houses to permanent "recovery", this is the life of many people today. Asking whether these are a product of mind or body is the most irrelevant question. There is no question they are a product of capitalism.
Medical specialization is the voice medicalizing all of daily life. The doctor is the ultimate specialist. At his call, one or another parts of a person will stand up and demand more goods. An entire dynamic of life impels those who are isolated to believe in a bug-a-boo like Satanic child abuse.
During the late eighties, more than a thousand people were emprisoned on the charge of ritual Satanic child abuse. Some are still in jail. They were charged with organized, ritualized, sexual assault of entire classrooms of children. These were essentially the same sorts of crimes that witches of the seventeenth century and up were charged with. These sorts of charges are absurd on their face and no more credible when investigated in detail ( See Nathan & Snedeker, Satan's Silence. Note that no physical evidence for these rituals has ever been obtained).
Hysteria, fascism, and every kind of irrationalism are certainly a natural result of normal living under capitalism. The satanic abuse scares also reflect the real situation that there is a dark secret in life today. But it hides the secret horror of the poverty of daily life by blaming powerless day-care workers for an "unspeakable" crime.
One critical clue to all these dynamics can be seen simply in the way that the medical system involve no concept of a healthy person (Just as the "DSM V," (the official manual of psychological conditions), has five thousand ways to be crazy but not a single way to be sane).
Pharmaceutical companies capitalize the world of symptoms. And thus the cult of pharmaceuticals has been very much an accumulation of a wealth of symptoms. Value, images, symptoms or code represent the ideal infinitely interchangeable parts of this system. Indeed, the interchangeability of these parts is far more important than their effectiveness. Disease must be given its viruses and its medicines no matter how little this helps the patient. The spirit of AZT appears here - kill the patient to preserve the virus.
We stand between believing the official pronouncement of the technocrats and believing secret communiques.
Thomas Kuhn discussed the variation of scientific paradigms. He described how one replaced another with neither being comparable to the other.
In this view, a paradigm is a conceptual framework. One framework cannot be said to be absolutely closer to the truth than another. But a given framework can embrace the lie, embrace falsehood and repeting ideas received ideas.
We can admit that those scientific disciplines which developed in earlier stages of capital engaged in a rather struggle for the truth, whatever other consequences they allowed.
In more, recent synthetic fields of bureaucratic science (medical-ethics, counciling, sociology), the final paradigm more and more converges into explicit embrace of the spectacle itself.
We must develop positions that assume only the information that we have but which still serve us.
It is more complicated than simply assuming a nebulous conspiracy is concealing information or even has access to this information. Indeed, the opporation of bureaucracy involves the cybernetic circulation of the less and more true.
The constant churning of the spectacle still permits a point of view which can discern some useful truths, truths that can be used for destroying this entire endifice.
Indeed, our most certain truths indeed become our model of the modern world. The categories of capital, bureaucracy, spectacle, commodity, and so-forth are created by action of the present system. These are the stage on which other objects appear as players.
1) Distrust all medical products and ideologies.
2) Learn which are the product of out-right falsehood.
3) Realize that a large amount of the conditions of this society are a product of life being what it is. Admit that we will not disentangle the web of falsehood and ignorance that aims to bind people tighter and tighter to capital itself. Instead, the way out is self-created health along with a self-created life. And all of these must expend outward to maintain their integrity.
This is not the same as a claim of immortality.
If the system has changed little qualitatively, it has reached a quantitatively extreme. The system has certainly piled on victory on victory today. While it has added some finer points, it has used essentially the same tactics in the last fifty.
Today, social stasis has reached the point where the ten people acting for themselves represent a major and the only real cultural event.
And this fragility forces the system to always intensify its efforts. The image of internet capitalism currently hold up the entire world market.
The key illusions of the market are too crucial to be subject to simple debunking. Too many integrated interests defend them.
What is dangerous is when a number of people begin to use a suppressed truth. The world of infinite cynicism today indeed has made the use of truth inseperable from it's power.
The American hamster wheel is surely turning faster and faster.
The period following the LA riots has seen continues economic recovery, no doubt fueled by a desperate need for recovery.
Today, the forces of repression have become massively obvious.
The lengths to which these forces will have become obvious.
And the degree to which they arayed again any of those who fail to accept of the conditions of modern production and consumption is also more and more obvious.
The construction of pseudo rewards - people are trained not to save money but to attain credit, win more lottery tickets at the lottery.
There are two ways not to work. Be pennyless or be a millionaire.
On July 25th, 1997, 5,000 cyclists on "Critical Mass" put a serious dent in the power of the San Francisco police department. They refused the mediation offer by the instant leaders of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition while sneering at the cop's promises to act as tour guides.
Critical Mass is an informal gathering of bicycles where people gatoher on the last Friday of every month with goals varrying from disrupting traffic to "bicycle visibility. This event came out of the anarchist, downwardly mobile, hipster milieu in San Francisco and has helped to spawn much "ecological", and "bicycle-oriented" activism around the country.
Once the smallest disruption and the smallest truths appears, repression is often wholly powerless. Cyclists rode through SF in the biggest disruption of City routine since the LA riots. But in these break-points, today the system has so far correctly counted on the false-consciousness and confusion of the spectators to carry it through any problem.
The following critical mass (August 97) was the opposite of the previous month's healthy explosion. In an excercise of "civil obedience" - cyclists not did not challenge police authority but went out of their to reinforce the rule of traffic.
Before each mass, a small group of agitators had spread propaganda demanding extreme action. Our apparent effect was much greater in the first than the second of these masses.
One factor in the rowdy July mass was that then Mayor Willie Brown provoked the anger of many San Francisco bohemians by threatening to end the mass. Critical mass has been very much a social event for SF bohemia for quite a few year. Thus a large number of radical trouble makers came of the wood-work for this ride.
But also, the second ride involved the operation of classical "psychological warefare" tactics on the part of the powers that be (not in a covertly but openly). The police did their homework, reading Chris Carlson's statements that critical mass is run by "xerography" - rule by whoever hads out leaflets before hand. So the cops were there handing out leaflets for the August Critical Mass. And more importantly, the authorities were able to mobilized their cadre of civic minded bicycle activists who wishing to redeem the bicycle as a tool for smooth flowing commerce.
We do not pretend to have a crystal ball. Instead, the most important thing we can do is look how different challenges to one or another part of society can become a serious attacks on the whole of capitalism.
While intervening in the critical mass events, we were aware that the critical milieu itself constituted a cross-class, confused perspective. None-the-less, the blow to police authority was large enough that it was worth at least mentioning how to go further. And factor like the constantly increasing cost of living made going forward conceivable.
As communists, our task is to blow on whatever embers we find, regardless of exactly how likely they seem be to light. In this vein, the appearance of a few relatively large, union-led strikes, such as the UPS strike, might give the impression some class struggle is increasing. But these events on closer inspection have more to do with the quest of the unions to maintain their parasitic position defending capitalism.
Certainly moments of class struggle broke out around the UPS strike. But the strike just as certainly was fought only for the interests of the union - as was well known to UPS workers. American Unions, powerful defenders of capitalism, have been holding recruitment drives to begin playing a role more similar to an actual exist left in Britain or France. (Indeed, the disappearance of the unified left has opened the way to many penny-ante, "communitarian" leftisms. In a world where the capitalism promises nothing can seem credible while promising only the most paltry gains.)
It is useful to trace the smallest breaks in the world exchange system. But the actual level of working class combativity is often invisible in similarly organized spectacular pseudo-events. The many apparent conflicts you see are certainly important but what they mean for any more fundamental challenge to this system must be balanced against the continuing of capital's normal life.
Each point where a person submits to work, school or mall life is a real if invisible event. And many people fight invisibly against the order of things as well. Class struggle is constant because people constantly resist work and comodities. But to become a movement, this resistance must gain coherence.
When we actually see explosions of real activity, it often has little to do with the usual headline. It means many invisible refusals have come together.
If the world stock market is unstable after ten years of artificial growth, does this mean a period of explosions like the 89-92 recession is on the horizon? If world capital is paralyzed just as it must deal with it's self-sabotaging "year 2000 problem," does that mean that we are reaching the end of cycles of capital? We can't tell but predicting isn't our main job.
Much of the writing for this magazine happened during the long, horrible, "recovery" of the late nineties. Our activities within this spiraling collapse are something of a story for another time. A story which may well be available on our web site as well as many places.
We talk a lot about factors that might bring the system down but exactly when it ends is beside the point. Rather than predict an end, Against Sleep And Nightmare has described what is. The cycle of capital requires an ever-increasing cycle of misdirection and lies. Computerized stock trading on a world scale is very much the same old bubble effect. "Real investment" is driven by "false investment" (Productive investment is driven by the government and speculators injecting money and guarenteeing profits). And eventually the lies can no longer be shunted from one sector to another. The dramatic fall of Asian and Russian economies is just an example of such a process could start.
But we cannot know at any point that this will be the end. We only know that either this is the end or that a further violent cycle of lies will triumph.
The spectacle's exploits are altogether aimed to move the passion of the spectators into its prefabricated situations. Naturally, we want to escape such a trap. Beyond this, passion must move to a situation where it is a natural part of a self-creating society.
Human attention is a powerful thing. So powerful that it has been kept at the unconscious level for almost all of human existence. And it's a tribute to the unconscious mind that even with the intense effort today to mold attention, the essential occupation of the unconscious is still play.
But it's critical to see the importance that the conscious mind plays in this drama as well. The game of the present controllers is based on the limitations of even the most powerful unconscious when isolated against the whole. Using the logic of unconscious esthetics, the amazing qualities of various creative geniuses can well be channeled into creating schlock video games as creating a life worth living.
When the mind works consciously to satisfy the same need for a play as the unconscious mind, it immediately challenges a wider order. The power of the social fabric is amazing. Even the smallest waves within the ocean of social interactions can set all controllers to flight.
When a nuclear bomb hits a city, the process of burning itself can limit the size of the resulting fire storm. As the flammable materials burns, the oxygen in the area is consumed and hot air is propelled upwards. So a strong wind must blow towards the fire to replace the air lost. If the fire is intense enough, this wind becomes strong enough to blow-out the outer edges of the fire.
In many sorts of explosions, both chemical and social, this very process of quick burning limits the size that can be reached. The LA riots were a break where suddenly everything was possible again. But their failure to go past square zero was the moment where each possibility crushed every other possibility.
We are looking for guides to go towards the destruction of this society. The chemical analogies are more compelling than any building-block engineering model but no analogy is by itself complete.
Daily life is the organized defeat of the imagination. The power of the unconscious is both irresistible and is turned against itself. Constant picture of scantily clad women signal the impotence of desire. Within capital's messages to the unconscious, pleasure and desire are wedged helplessly against each other.
The unconscious of a single person acting for themselves can overwhelm the consciousness of thousands obeying orders. Yet under capitalism, each person faces odds of a million to one. The unconscious adapts to this.
One can invoke unique and spontaneous individual events under earlier stages of civilization or even under capitalism. But even when these unique moments overwhelm subjectively the power of the economy, the ability of the economy to undermine the basis of meaning has resulted in it's more and more common victory over subjective uniqueness.
An extrodinary person can indeed be more than a match for the order of things. Within the horrors of today, ecstatic adventures do open up for us at times. But the order of this society ultimately rests on the final results of our actions. This is where these actions enter the social arena.
Indeed, any adventures of today come as people understand the elaborate controls society uses against the imagination. Every flower of subjectivity must spread or die.
And conflict is happening in every suburb of America. From Shopping Mall to housing development to industrial park, the entire social factory is always being challenged. Everyday we play a game of double or nothing against society. We create desires, possibilitiesWhich explains why nearly always wind-up with nothing.
The communist perspective requires a balance of conscious and unconscious desire around our human ability to create our context. And this communist perspective is always forming as an idea and as material forces.
The self-help industry is a huge part of the present consumer world.
Whatever its limitations, it demonstrates the appetite of people today for self-realization, even in the impoverished frame of purchasing it from a stranger.
Like any sector of the capital's technologies, capital's development has engendered a contradition between the artisanal potential of the methods of persuasion and the functional, streamlined usages of modern persuasion.
The dynamics of capitalist management ipso facto involve the transformation of the qualitative into the quantitative
Thus ironically, the dynamics of capitalism do not involve creating better and better quality of anything, even propaganda. Like any other product it sells, capital aims instead to create the situation where only it's products are available.
Justifications for the system, even on a questionable level, no longer are made. The refutaters of propaganda need hardly pay attention to the structure of the weak arguments of today's functionaries - to refute the outright lies of the bureaucrats is sufficient for a logical refutation of most official statements. This is similar to the situation where a purely functionalist look at the conditions of production will show them to be both detrimental human life and unsustainable - a situation much more clear than fifty years ago.
While this lack of justification has not created any fundamental problems for capitalism. The conditions of life rather than progressing past any justification have retreated back the reframe of the small 19th century farmer - "life is hard and uncertain."
The present world's "slash and burn economy" is occasionally noted as such but with little understanding that this by itself makes most schemes for sustainability absurd.
And certainly, involves the same formulas which mass media has propagated for more than a hundred years, with the structures of specific ideologies hardly changed in the last twenty years.
(If something has changed, it is merely the intensity of exposure and increasing variety of separate interests attached to a single main interest).
The conditions of persuasion today naturally involve the uniform conditions in which the atomized finds themselves. The advertising jingle has not grown richer or more complex but statistical methodologies are systematically employed to determine the effectiveness of any heavily used jingle. Computers are used to synthasize this music but the algorythm is merely an attempt to fuse and perfect the existing melodies of top forty music.
We should remember that persuasion is ammoral, positive side of psychology, religion and theater.
Community is a key word for both the friends of this society and it's enemies. Certainly, most things called communities today are a total sham. We have no problem with being called "outside agitators" - those "intruding into an existing community." Because this all a myth. Today, the vast majority of people are outside of any coherent community. The seperation of those united only by watching common TV programs is nearly absolute. So bringing everyone together will require that each person sees that the struggle of "those people over there" is also their struggle.
Opposition today often does takes the form of various communities of opposition. But as long as they are alive, these communities are the opposite of the fixed categories that capitalist community organizers seek to shape. A nod while the teacher is not looking, A shout across a riot scene, a kiss given scandalously, the most powerful, alive gestures today are the most tentative.
Communties of opposition are constantly evolving. We constantly debating and reforming exactly how to deal with the immediate situation. We are constantly dealing with all the present systems for dividing loyalty.
A key of understanding of revolutionaries of the last fifty years is that there is no real correlation between the rise of communities under capitalism and the ultimate destruction of the capitalist relations within a region.
Any commonality people have today is split between tentative organic contacts that people give some ability to act autonomously and the pre-fabricated, capitalist categories that move them to react in ways that have already been calculated by the world market. Communities of resistance are a series of contacts, mutual actions and common human interests. These have a thousands variations and vary according to a thousand circumstances.
In America, the conditions of blacks are one key to the possibilities of revolt. Each of the moments of rebellion has shown how this can only happen when the capitalist controls of "community leadership" are broken.
In Germany, from 1870 to 1917, a vast Marxist union movement became the most powerful force in social life, yet the revolts after W.W.I were stopped by exactly this force while the revolt in Russia succeed (though only so far to destroy old capital relations before creating it's own state capitalist relations). (Modern unions at their most oppositional, are just as a way for workplace rebellion to have a calculated price on the world market. Of course, as soon as your action are calculated, your possibilities of resistance becomes zero. Thus the final meaning of unions is also the total destruction of workplace rebellion. Within the logic, it is still quite possible still for union organizers to be the one who fuel a struggle, Though they often start a losing struggle whose only purpose is getting union representation).
In America, the level of community is quite low. And many schemers work to keep these well policed communities. But within this reality, there still exists the possibility of mass insurrection. Once a struggle starts, ten days of riots can be worth more than ten years of speeches.
The method of destroing dialogue by destroying perspective is becoming one of the ultimate methodologies for spectacular communication.
The ability to amplify any statement made in any context into an earth shatter revelation has two parts. One is the continues surveilance and effort to find individual weaknesses made by controllers. The other is the lack of any platform which modulates communication.
The framework of High School, where any comment can be any way what-so-ever, instead of being a stunted situation, is general model of non-communication.
Categories like gangs or terrorists are both feared and undefined. Different organizations or individuals can be place in them based the needs of the "opinion makers."
The magic of the modern spectacle comes from it's hiding a total perspective. Anything can happen when no one knows what's happening in the next village.
There are many parts of reality whose truth everyone knows but which one cannot proven in a laboratory; cops are jerks, work is unpleasant, stress can make you sick and so-on. Chemical pollution is ever-present today and clearly has a part in the rising cancer rate. But research controlled by capital more and more orients itself to finding the genetic cause of all of these problems. Corporate feminists wonder what mysterious force destroys the confidence of teenage girls. While the spirit destroying qualities of school as such were well known to protesters in the 60's, today we need something more mysterious and focused.
The job of teachers, scientists and journalist is to gloss any of these obvious points which make the system look at all bad. They instead insert freeze-dried ideas which crawl out of laboratories or rhetoric factories. The average newspaper produces almost no news. The journalists and editor merely rewrite news from the national wire services. And these wire services themselves more and more recycle press releases paid for by corporations seeking to influence current thought. Remarkable genetic experiments, announced with much fan-fare, are among the biggest hood-winks of this game.
The theorists of advertising and military intelligence agree. You must find those forces powerful enough to influence the trend-setters. The rest will be carried along. The system of exchanging images is not a matter of forcing ideas onto the masses (though it can be simplified as having that result). Rather, each capitalist attempts to benefit by injecting their interests into the entire stream of images. Trend-setters pick up these ideas and in turn persuade others. Direct and indirect methods together assure that an information product will be embedded in the whirlpool.
Persuasion experts are paid equally for their advice on seducing woman and advice on selling to dry-clean supply wholesalers.
The biggest victory of the system comes when it is able inject it slave-speak into after-hours conversations about the misery of work. But this victory is never assured. The fate of the isolated spectator is to be thrown between the reality they face and the rush of miracles presented by science's mage's guild.
Guy Debord describes the modern upper working stratum as having characteristic of both peasants and slave - while they may have considerable material goods, their total wealth is often negative.
In America, the management of labor has taken the dual form of debt and police. The whip-hand of student loans today guarentees twenty years of quasi-surfdom for those graduating from four year colleges.
At the same time, the expansion of the police prison system serves to absorb those who otherwise would otherwise be unemployered. And those who do become unemployed are moderately likely to join thee million now in American prisons.
All of the intensification is taking place in what is officially an economic recovery.
We have indeed, experianced barely interupted recovery since the LA uprising in 1992.
And given the horror of this recovery, it seems quite likely that any relapse towards recession could fairly quickly spiral down towards economic depression and massive social upheaval.
On the other hand, this does no mean that any such collapse is imminent, however favorably or unfavorably it might be viewed.
The twenty hour work week is a revolutionary demand only in so-far as twenty hours of forced activity permits enough extra-time for workers on a mass scale to produce the demands for a life truly worth living.
This situation is known certainly in the US and it is not surpising then that the workweek is instead being increased towards fifty hours per week.
Of course, in a situation where leisure and seperation have been perfected to such an extent that twenty hours still resulted in mass despair, twenty hours would no longer be a particularly positive demand. Even today, polls have shown a significant fraction of Americans prefer work to their experiance at home or shopping. And this horrible yet unsurprising. The consumption of pleasure without activity or power is as empty as activity alienated from a person immediate needs or desires. And of course, the details of each person's work varies, only coming close the basic formula of "selling your time to buy back your survival."
The "marxian framework" of the economy and its the most key within all of our tools. The formula of alienated labor isn't that it is always unpleasant, it isn't that it is always out of each person's control, it isn't that it is always low or minimally paid, it isn't that it's routine and results are utterly mediocre and lacking in spark. Each of these is usually true - thought how true varies from person to person, region to region and period to period.
The first basic point is that labor, the results of people's activity taken as a whole, becomes something outside of their conscious intent, outside of any collective community, and ultimately controlled by its own dynamic. And considering that "the results of human activity" empasses a vast, uncountable array of actions, this formula encompasses all the particular complaints of the work listed earlier - as well as the opposite side, leisure.
To be revolutionary is take these things seriously and thus apply them to exactly what is happening. Thus denounciations of the boredom of work, etc., are absolutely justified.
A second basic point, beyond simply the nature of alienation, is the nature of the economy and production. Marx observed that while the economy involve increasely privative, individual relations, production itself was becoming an increasing social endevour - social production meaning that any particular event in the economy is becoming more of the result of the entire conditions of life rather than simply springing out of one person's isolated activity. The factory was the first model of this view. But today, rather than a single factory, we have the interdependence of ideas, of interlocked "information technology" and the flow of information itself as the commodity - "Reality TV" illustrates society itself as the alienated product.
The point of the over-throw of wage relations isn't just to destroy wage labor but to seize this socialized production. And this production in a "wider sense" does not mean running environment-destroying factories as before but taking advantage, leveraging the entirety of our rich social relations for our benefit - creating a life worth living.
Both capitalism and communism are "total systems." Today, we can see the tendency of this society to reduce all of activity to the smallest measurement. "Intellectual property" and the patenting of life are some of the more visible horrors within this.
People create their own lives, but they do so on the basis of conditions they begin with. Our tendency naturally seeks every psychological, mystical or analytical insight into the incredible workings of human processes. And we know quite a bit. But the nearly unlimited ability of the mind to adapt to different situations makes the material situation incredibly critical.
The present organization of human relations is more important for capital's technological miracles than are the accumulated understandings of science (though neither could fully exist without the other). And it is just as critical for allowing the series of horrors that accompanies the present progress.
The cement mixer, the bulldozer, the Internet, the liver transplant and the newspaper ultimately are nothing more than the expressions of the large scale use of human beings as a raw material, the modern social factory.
But as Lewis Mumford points out, The modification of the human mind and body has been as much a crucial part of the evolution of civilization as the modification of inanimate objects.
Gustav Lebon and other inventors of crowd psychology noticed the great similarity of those acting in a crowd and those a deep trance (those affected by "animal magnetism"). The present liberation of the unconscious of this crowd is at the heart of modern society. Atomized individuals, the swarm of people in the lonely crowd, are a chemical substance that has broken down all traditions and moved the worlds mountains.
Certainly, the human creature is indeed the ultimate fly in the soup of the ideologists of genetic determination. The trajectory of humanity has moved more completely towards a self-alteration far beyond the tin-pot dreams of evolutionary theorists. The human knee itself is problems simply because humans haven't existed long enough to adapt to walking.
Just as inspiring is the ability of human society to integrate the "conditioning substances" introduced by theorists of "mind control." The development of LSD culture after it's use by the CIA is the most well known example but every drug intended for a smooth use by doctors/thought controls has been integrated into the unified social system of "drug abuse" (still with some awful consequences for the individual drug abuser). Indeed, the process of social adaptation to drugs is well known enough that the psycho-cop author of "Listening To Prozac" defines a beneficial drugs as one which a patient has no control over.
Altogether, the condition of human self-modifying biology makes all the blather about "biology versus environment" obsolete. Human relations, the way people relate to each other, thus emcompasses technology and is more than technology.
In contradiction to this, modern society presents itself merely as an arbitrary array of technologies. The arrangement of inanimate objects is the main force determining the condition of a passive human. In many ways, the proponents of progress and the anti-technologists have the same concepts and views of humanity. "Anti-technology theory" flattens all these results of human relations into the rubric of technology. Capitalist merely label such blind progress as a good.
We certainly know that presently the many possibilities unleashed by capitalism are used primarily against us. But in the present world of the deaf and dumb, it's even more important to understand how we've only made the most partial steps to really use our self-modifying biology. For us, human relations are, over-all, the determining factor for the condition of society.
Today is absolutely the calm before the storm. The capitalism and democracy of today are very much the self-canceling freedom of atomized humanity. But by the same token, self-created social relations as much a potential force that lurks within informal, haphazard relations and which can drawn of the them.
Modern, atomized human relations are powerful generators of activity. By the break-up and recombination of every earlier or "traditional" activity, the activity of atomized and recombining humans creates a society with more possibilities than ever before.
And these relations also appear as potential methods of creation. Today, there are indeed remarkable, questionable, methods lying about the present battle grounds of social ruin. These range from the Situationist International to the Internet to fantasy role-playing games to Neuro-linguistic Programming and hypnosis to Rap to mind-altering drugs and computer hacking. Moreover, everywhere, small anti-systemic tendencies have sought to use these means.
While the manifestations of these possibilities are generally flailingly ineffectual, their distribution around the globe speaks to the condition of modern society. Drug "abuse," as a process of self-reconstruction, certainly immiserates many people as this self-reconstruction flows back into the whole of capitalist economic relations. But this cycle is no different than every cycle where a person sells or gambles their life to merely wind-up getting back their survival. All commodities are an "addiction."
In a construct as simple and juvenile as the Fantasy Role Playing Games of high school lies the process of imagining and altering new worlds beyond the imagination of any hard-boiled leftist.
If we encounter from across the globe, at absolute random, Korean High School students constituting a revolutionary tendency using the writings of the Situationist International, it means that the number of aspiring movements are much more numerous than otherwise expected. Poetry is waiting to happen.
We must deal with these simultaneously as tools and as social relations. In the end, all these various tools can be picked-up and become irresistible weapon only at the point where we realize the collectivity as the pivot point of power. The point where play can become real.
The world of infinite possibilities today dies within the world of each imagination canceling out each other imagination. Any tools thus can only enter the realms of social power at the point of the mass action of the proletariat.
The total perspective, the historical perspective, is the only weapon that can leverage the situation of the working class into world revolution. The explosion that rocked Los Angeles showed the limits and possibilities in all this. We can hardly look at a natural existence but a single accelerating trajectory. The masters of the electrodes serve their interests by pointing out the chemical basis of many behaviors. Beyond the fact that all scientific understanding of hormonal/chemical activity is in it's infancy, we can look to popular chemical self-modification as a means that allows the whole social animal to adapt beyond the schemes of the psycho-doctors.
Note, for example, that author of "Listening To Prozac" defines a "good drug" as being one which prevents the patient from controlling dose or frequency of intake.
As materialists, we do not look at human beings as either programmable automatons or platonic souls without physical processes and desires. The point is that every living thing is always filtering the chemical, physical and mental information. Any being has the ability to calibrate for the condition of immediate environment. The question of whether certain genes or types might tend to initially calibrate to different levels than others can easily explain certain observed societal types but is full irrelevant to ultimate direction society is going, given the constant recalibration (in order to do "twins studies" for example, scientist must exclude those twin who grow up together. Such twins in general tend to have partially or completely opposite personalities. But the entire reasoning then is flawed, since unseparated twins easily prove a human's tremendous ability to differentiate and to differentiate starting with a basis of nearly nothing).
The revolutionary abolition of specialization must go hand in hand with the development of those mental "technologies" and relations that allow any person to grasp the essence of the most obscure fields instantly. Current psychological methodologies, such as Neuro-linguistic programming, "photo-reading" and such are certainly part of the answer. But the simple belief that a person can do this anything is quite useful in the abolition of specialization.
Note also, even the needs of capitalism has done much to eliminate useful specialized knowledge as inaccessible art (while the use of inaccessible terms and procedures is ever more common but tends to be for the purpose of selling purely irrational ideologies). The exploits of most engineers and scientists are available to those with a reasonable exposure to college math, physics and chemistry.
Revolutionaries are not utopians. Unlike the pure "radical" posture, we do not expect to be at the leading edge of all capital's transformations of self. A critical mastery of virology, psychology, artistic media, computer science, military science, and many other fields is needed. Yet, it's not likely to happen in a fully oppositional way. Instead, we intend to loot these things in the most intelligent manner possible.
The movement of specialization and fragmentation today naturally extends to the fragmentation of ourselves. Here as everywhere, the most promising technology is a two-edged sword for the proletariat. Neuro-linguistic Programming is the form the positive utilization of this fragment takes under capitalism.
It's creator's, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, recognized the revolutionary principle that human being's change quickly or not all and that the unconscious mind adopt it's approach to the real conditions of today. They surely fall down in not recognizing the economy as that realm wherein human activity will always escape human intentions and so fall into the realm of self-help.
True revolutionary practice is always an incomplete prescription. The Situationist International was correct to test many available schemes for altering the total social terrain but also correct to reject fixing on any single scheme versus revolution. Our revolutionary practice and those of the past knew of techniques that could be used for the construction of new social terrain. Thus the simple negative principles of communism - the abolition of wage labor, commodity production, exchange and the nation state express the positivity of each moment of human activity.
Also. Beware recuperators! Although these tactics get their power by looking at the possibilities unleashed beyond the market economy. But capital's servants have been quite active in using these same possibilities to reinforce capital itself. We must be uncompromising in refusing to either market our tactics or compromise with those who would do so.
The projects we're talking about basically are finding new tactics against the ruling class and seeing the ways where the capitalists are vulnerable right now.
The section of this magazine where we discussion our projects are by shorter and more abstract than where we discuss the present order. That is because these project have yet to be done. And that is also what makes them especially important.
Still, the actual struggle against the system doesn't end with particular efforts but is being fought by the entire dispossessed everywhere. Like any member of the working class, we won't be able to challenge capitalism as a whole until the proletariat reaches that crucial moment of unity.
If you find the language in this magazine puts you into a state where you jump from one of abstraction to another, it's possible this opening up of possibilities may extend itself to all parts of your experience.
Things that seem meaningless on the surface are often the most interesting for all of the fruitful meanings that they have implicitly can have.
If we wish to escape the condition of being order givers, it is not a matter of renouncing power but of finding powerful tactics. We use every tool liberated from capital to build organic relations between those seeking the power to create a life worth living.
As capital seeks to value each piece of code, we seek communications that goes beyond any coding. Our trick is to provide critical information to those who are no longer passive.
One weapon here is presupposition. We assume that the reader can see the invisible ocean of human relationships. We assume that the reader can see the underlying flow of resistance permeating this society. This comprises all moments where people relate outside the market economy - whether it is bus drivers letting people ride for free or youths torching liquor stores with the implicit understanding that they are attacking all commodity relations. And moreover, these actions themselves often come to presume more to come.
We aim to provide a way for an entire subversive current to become explicit. Our approach is the opposite of rote education, which tries to wheedle people into the first steps of change. We know that while the dispossessed are not even standing now, they must not only stand but walk and then dance over obstacles. We will not pull anyone to their feet. Instead we will start fiddling a jig.
The language that presumes a real understanding of life, the language that starts moving at fifty miles per hour and accelerates from there will certainly be one of several weapons in the hands of the proletariat (Certainly, exact statements of positions will be another, different weapon here).
Against Sleep And Nightmare has not appeared for approximately four years. Some may have applauded this and others may have regretted this.
As theoretical anti-capitalist zine in an era where capital suppresses both thought and understanding, the need for reprinting basic points is limited. In general, those who are serious can and must update the "classics" themselves. The greatest poetry is written by riots and revolts themselves - which indeed a cheap way to get me off the hook but still true.
So this issue comes hopefully with some points that help advance our understanding concerning the total situation of today - naturally without claiming the absolute knowledge of any speciality. Instead I have focused on those activities which undermine the domination of specialists, wage-labor and the domination of past over the present.
Some parts of this magazine may be difficult to understand. I am satisfied with this as long as we appropriately difficult. We live in difficult times. If we are to suceed
Hopefully, the material will provide readers ideas and possibilities they can growth as all of our understandings of this society advance.
Today, the acceleration of repression is part-and-parcel of the expansion of bureaucracy. From the control of the poor to overt political repression to the control of information, distinct repressive
Rob Thaxton
Kevin Mitnick/2600 Magazine/Bernie S.
Ted Kzynsky,
Mummia Abu Jamal
We, on the outside, not yet facing the system's repression, have the luxury of not having to make any claims about which of these individuals actually committed the "crimes" imputed to them. Still, some have been documented as doing the acts, other most certainly did not.
In the case of Kevin Mitnick, Kevin was imprisoned without trial literally for years until he agreed to plead guilty to certain charges against him. The laughable concept of justice present by this should perhaps discredit all acts by this system.
Still, many people in the distinction between political prisoner and ordinary prisoners. This distinction comes as the expansion of the justice into more and more social repression.
Social repression is essentially the repression of all those who fail to satisfy sociel norms - it is a wider category than political repression and aims to destroy any realm of the political, indeed any realm where ideas can be debated.
makes it imperative for us to actively oppose it's very existence.
Immediately after the fall of the regime of Nicoli Chow-ches-que of Romania, this tyrant was arrested and tried for his numerous acts of mass-murder. His and His wife was then rather quickly executed.
Now, the dictator noted during the trial that the main motive of his judges was hiding their complicity in the acts he was being tried for. Since Chow-ches-que's judges were the bureaucrats of the old regime, this was judged to be true. Indeed, the glare of world publicity and these bureaucrats' lack of allies, caused the world press to come to this conclusion.
In a present at the University Of Oregon, Native Scholare Ward Churchill spent an hour formulating the legal definition of genocide and it's ramifications to American legal practices. Among other things, he noted how The Allies in Germany did not restrict their acts to judging Nazi officials but also included racist journalists who propaganda was seen as enabling the Nazi regime.
Even here, it can be argued that to judge journalist still lets off those who believed the journalists. And so forth.
But certainly, regardless of the particular mass-murders of the Nazis and regardless of how many old official were tried, the motive of the Allies in Germany was essentially what the Axis would has if they had conquered America. They wished to revive production and capital in Germay for their benefit.
The British in Allying with the Haitian ruling class in the ninteenth century actually demanded the whole-sale slaughter of the remain French former slave owners - this was not a matter of accepting white guilt but of seeing that without this group, the Haitians would be tied more strongly to British imperialism.
The point of these examples is that the justice, the mass murder, and justifications of capital essentially spring from the same motivations - to maintain commerce. Certainly, the American ruling class has very concrete reason not to accept the convention of international law banning Genocide - the acts of the Ku-Klux-Klan as well as white settlers terrorizing Indians off their land would certainly qualify under this legalism.
But just as much, the smorgasboard of legalisms within international law is simply a toolkit of justifications. Various interests and desires to test weapons-systems naturally ally with a defense of "human rights" in Kosova while protecting sovereinty in Indonesia.
As the most visible inter-critique,
It seems perhaps moderately useful to challenge retroactively the predictable "critiques" of Not Bored publisher Bill Brown as well as other representative radical intellectuals.
One common empty critique often involves citing a particular active or position as "amateurish", "frozen", "pathetic", or "not authentically radical". One can see a distinct weakness in these approaches simply by their failure to ever connect all the way to the actually project of the revolutionary over-throw of this society.
Essentailly, I would challenge this "Situationist" to critique this magazine from the point of view of the creation of a revolutioanry milleau or not. Would it be possible to critique this not from the point of view of "inaccurate in it's view of the SI" but in terms of how it or other projects might actually contribute to a revolutionary practice. Indeed, I would challenge Mr. Brown to make a critique of any group in this fashion. And certainly, the qualities of ASAN, whether professional or amature, pompous or humble, novel or repetative, etc., all intended for creating an new society, a society which does away with the present order. How well we suceed at this is the ultimate yardstick - any other yardstick must ultimately measured by this.
Today's terrorism products can be seen in another way. As a part of the iceberg of automated stupidity.
The results of the expansion of police commidity could well be seen during the anti-WTO protest and riot in Seattle. The violent protest and looting in Seattle, WA, showed both the acceleration of police ideology and usefulness of individual intiative.
It is useful to speculate further concerning the behavior of the police. It was both tremendoulsy brutal and notably ineffectual. The arsenal of weaponry displayed in Seattle was certainly part of a virtual arms race that accompanied the media-driven "war on crime" in the last ten years. Along with the rising war on crime, there has been the rise in a police-ideology. This ideology preaches violence and coercion as the solution to any number of problems and situations. The federal prison system has abdoned rehabilitation as a stated goals and now officials to manage prisons solely for the purpose of punishment.
The point is the police left to themselves are essentially lazy and stupid. Policing ideology has not really resulted in anything but groups of unfocused thugs wandering the streets.
We can define our truth as that which opens new doors, creates authentic new possibilities within a world which fore-closed the possibilities of the rich growth of a human being. By that exact point, the further we go, the more questions we can ask, the more vistas open up.
As a group which used Marx's framework seriously in the modern world, the Situationist International is an important touch-stone for us. For this reason, sorting where we are in relation to them is a key aspect of activity.
Among other things, the SI correctly saw the need to analyze the contradictions within certain apparently leading industries of their time - art essentially being both a locus of the meaning for a life after beyond capital and a part of the production system which integrated meanings into existing life.
More than anything else, our lesson is that the value of the SI is in seriously applying the framework of the negation of capitalism. We essentially reject both councilism and Reichian-Freudianism that under-lay the speicifics of situationist analysis. Despite this, the SI mostly succeed in taking ideas and making them serious.
There are no silver bullets which can automatically ignite a revolutionary upsurge. And such an upsurge will not follow a straight path but will most likely toter on the brink over and over - as has been the history of previous upsurges.
The methods of challenge, discipline, and refusal are key for any practice that seeks to situate itself beyond the modern world.
Any group attempting a serious effort against this society must utilize at minimum the discipline to lay it's positions in a way that refuses to compromise with any of the wings of capital and leaves open the door for the autonomous action of the proletariat.
This is more easily said than done, of course.
The spectacle's destruction of meaning naturally presents the problem of authentic communication more prominantly. With the systematic co-optation/control of speech, how does one express an authentic opposition to conditions of today. If a single person's "realization of desires" can just be the basis of their success as an artist or self-help guru, how does one express our collective need for realization, a need which naturally is left sorely lacking within this society?
As this society prgresses towards ever-greater falsification and social control, it's inhabitants, by force, develop more and more filters for sorting actual situations from the integrated slogans of media, advertising, psychology and education.
of this society towards both lies and control, the
For individuals or small groups today, the first answer would be congruence.
The words and the actions of those putting forward a critique, a statement of opposition, need to possess a unity to demonstrate the actual meaning.
A group that congruently expresses
We have seen how the exchange system creates a terrain of empty representations. Even more than just the creation of this well manicured desolation, this horror of this society is it's effect on the possibilities of human relations. Just as each spectacular image has no rational meaning and instead only represents a tribal membership in the stream of images, so the spectacle destroys communication outside statements of membership in subgroups. Hobbies, love affairs, or passions become assesories to fashion.
This is how the world of exchange creates the subjective conditions of today - on the level of horrifying shopping mall but even worse on the level of the options that people have for creating relations between each other, on the level of how small changes in existence happen.
Interpersonal relations are where we live our existence but these relations are factored away into nothing by the domination of exchange.
The circulation of disjointed images is managed through the circulation of spin. Since images themselves are disembodied from any set context, those who provide the context, provide the life of the image.
The net result of the present system is the continuous circulation of "spin." And with spin being the creation of larger meanings, the system moves systematically to destroy any fixed larger meanings.
While the spin that various interests put on a particular object is not necesarrily false, it essentially has little reason to be true.
Once spin circulates from one situation to the next, once a each spin has further spin added, then a absolute certainty of falsification prevails.
And this is the condition relative to every sort of production today.
At eight o'clock this, while you are driving to work; the Dow Jones industrial average drops precipitately, silver mining and photography stocks are particularly hard hit. At ten o'clock, while you are at a meeting, Kodak Corp. raises the price of film three hundred percent to make up losses. At three O'clock, your bosses' boss at the Lazy Days Portrait Studio Inc. walks in and demands across the board staff cuts to make up for added costs. At five O'clock, as you are leaving work your bosses tells you to take at least a week off...
Jim Noriss' first novel "Our Fondest Dreams" will soon be published by Random House.
Jim flows in a vast river of literary entrepreneurship. Since college he undoubtedly has been working to get any sort of writing into recognized publications. He fights to combine his own vision with the official vision of this world.
One image rests on another image which altogether rest on the stream of images. Today's metaphors built on clichés show the mechanism of social construction that an aspiring author must become part of. The cliché today is the foundation of a whole system of attention channeling - cliché are images, arguments, and attitudes that are remembered in bunches. So attaching a product to a cliché gives the product automatic name recognition. For that reason, clichés themselves have great value and being able to create them is valuable in itself: the final art.
Karl Marx described how, in the transition to capitalism, the process of exchanging goods for money for goods (G-M-G) became the process of exchanging money for goods for money (M-G-M) and reflected a qualitative change in social relations.
The peasant sold grain to get some money and then get back some goods. Money only mattered as one part of how his rural existence continued.
The capitalist starts out with money, buys stuff, then sells it for more money - money is what matters. The capitalist can even short-circuit the whole process and just earn interest on his or her money. The capitalist was different not because he used money but because his ultimate goal was just more money. The money was not a mean to support a large or small land hold, it was an end something would grow indefinitely.
The change that happened when capitalism became dominant reflected on everything that happened within this new society - when money existed to recreate itself, it was able to move to occupy the dominant position that it presently has. This created the broad framework of today - the world where everything is for sale. (An immediate result of dominance of this circuit of money was the rise of factories where proletarians toiled a dispossessed pure sellers of labor).
The dislocation caused by capitalism has allowed the world of images to take a similar sort of false freedom. The spectacle reflects a refinement of how images and representation relates to the capitalist domination of life. In the most ideal "early capitalist" situation, there is only wage work that does not directly impinge the "culture" of workers.
In most "advanced" conditions, capitalists directly market all parts of wage laborers' culture. From dances to ideas to trends, everything is on the auction block. Of course, the ruling class never sells or controls everything. But quantitative increase in the level of marketing results in a qualitative change in the relationship of people to their representations. It a greater number of streamlined shlock is produced.
Previously, people created a culture that in the balance belonged to them, even if there were many parts created by particular specialists. Even those representations that were externally manufactured had to make reference to this culture. Today, the spectacle more and more refers to an area autonomous from the masses where the most important representations lie. In this reversal, even self-originated ideas have to make reference to this stream of representations. Television becomes an important topic of conversation.
The Situationist International formulated a concept of the spectacle. We will be describing the development of the spectacle as a parallel system to the accumulation of capital.
For the situationists, the spectacle was the sum of all looking, and all representation. The spectacle was in contradiction and similarity to tendencies of earlier systems, where deviations from the norm still found their own truth within a mediation of a collectivity. In the spectacle, all apparent authenticity on the level of surface in this sense is a false statement about the conditions of today.
This isn't just a matter of an image being a reflection a further image. Just as every commodity has basic use value, every image has some sort of relation to non-reflexive reality. (Web site must publicize themselves with TV advertisements etc., average people can have some real relationship with newscasters, etc.)
Provisionally, we might say life becomes spectacular when the balance of the social value in image tips in favor of the stream of self-referential images.
Capital is a system that traps the flow of human creative energy. Living labor is turned into dead labor - capital. And this is turned against the interests of the laborer.
By the same logic, the spectacle is a system that colonizes the social relations. As a whole, thoughts and social relations go from being immediate results of authentic relations to being controlled by the logic of the flow of images.
Images simultaneously are commodities and capital at the level of monetary relations. Capital is an essentially quantitative. It is measurable as a mass of investment (though this measurement is limited by uncertainties of investment price and the general secrecy around trade, etc.).
The spectacle, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of subjective experiance. The labor of ideologists and specialists in communication is united by vast variety of links. The color and design themes that link the major appliances built in a particular year are dictated by the American Color Council. Newspapers are linked together through their rewriting of the same news wires and press releases. The links are limitless.
The tenuous quality of these links forces each spectacular laborer to redouble their efforts to maintain their position within the entire flow of the spectacle. This same tenuous quality makes it impossible for us to totally map of the spectacle. But the crucial thing is dominance of the spectacle as a whole. It is impossible to determine how spectacular the latest movie is compared to say a punk rock show.
The main thing is the effort and incentive of the many specialist to enlist themselves in this very palpable "seamless stream of image."
Naturally, the spectacle did not spring full-formed as kind of new parasite on society but is an evolution of the realms of culture of dead labor and no culture - no organic unity.
Arguments about the exact point of initiation of the Society Of The Spectacle misses the point in the same way arguments about the exact point of origin of capitalism. If some qualities of the spectacle can be applied "universally" to various realms of culture of culture, it says no more than the partial applicability of market logic to pre-economic societies. Anyway, while television, shopping malls, or the internet are only symptoms of the condition of life today, they still pretty well distinguish 1999 from the 1599.
Steam and coal a hundred years ago gave society the means to conquer the globe purely quantitatively. Once it reached a quantative mastery of the environment, the alteration of the qualities of environment became the key underlying project of capitalism. And within this, controlling the qualities of the world it was building was key. And this has happened first obviously, then subtly.
The qualities of the spectacle were first seen in the hypnotic power of mass communication - in radio, television and movies. And when these technologies first appeared, they had the appearance of integrated forces. The magic of Hollywood involved prestige and glamor (words associated with magic).
From Hitler to Sadam Huessain to Franklin Roosevelt, the power of centralized mass communication has reached it's apex under all the varieties of war capitalism.
It is only the further extension of the domination of exchange that the spectacle can be seen as an integrated aspect of alienated labor.
In a previous issue, we described a view of the concept of spectacle[2] which situated it as most focused on the process of consumption. The perspective of both Jean Barrot and those who view the Situationist International as being "media critics" is that the spectacle is only the experiance of "consumers", professional and skilled workers. It is viewed as merely a suppliment to the consumption side of the production-consumption process.
The position of viewing the spectacle as an accumulation of circulating appearances might appear similar to this.
We will describe instead, how spectacle can be seen to permeates all aspects of the capitalist relations.
Here, the spectacle is capital's manipulation of the subjective aspects of the production process. Capital does not just add advertising or packaging at the end of the assembly line. The assembly line itself is coated with a layer of "team spirit" ideology, the production process is packaged for the investor, the regulator and the competitor. All activity is encapsulated within ideologies.
This also results in a situation where the true and the false coexist simply in realm of the predictable. Half of a companies revenues come from a gigantic factory while the other half may involves five people selling cocaine. As long as each has statistically verifiable track record, each will incorporated into a commodity.
One of the main systems of capitalist management theory is "TQM" - Total Quality Management. TQM is doctrine which exorts each company to find a niche where the sale of it's unique "quality" can bring it profits.
This doctrine represent more than a single scheme to make a buck. It represents the present of capital to turn the crisis of profitability. Basically, the crisis of profitability is felt by the inability of those companies which "generic" products to make a profit - in world where capital massive capital moves with utmost rapidity, companies that sell something that many other companies will sell quickly loose their ability to obtain a profit (for a more detail description, see Karl Marx, Capital v:I-III).
The alternative to this today is a series of angles, of scams. In the modern market, since production no longer consists of fixed commodities but of ever-varying gizmos of uncertain value, marketting must permeate the process to assure a market once production happens.
Lying about production and the production of lies is everywhere. We will be showing the form of the economy where each feeds into the other.
Our society is the product of the failure of each possibility for liberation, from the Paris Commune to the IWW of 1920's to the upheavals of the sixties.
The present system is a dog chasing its tail. But it actually succeeds fairly often. The trick is that capital's trajectory is an ever-expanding network of psychological management systems.
From wage-price management to maintain the survival system to freedom-repression management to allow information production while repressing dessent to the large scale management of investment fraud, the system repairs many apparently unworkable situations by maintaining multiple levels of lies, of multiple levels of participant, producing lies more further up-stream, and so-forth.
One way to further answer this riddle is to look the various stages that most modern industries have gone through.
An electronic-parts store owner described the advance of electrical parts to ASAN.
"Twenty years ago, if a ten cent diode went out in a radio, you could just buy a replacement and keep the radio going. These days, all the electrical appliances have parts that are specially designed by the manufacter and no available anywhere."
We can roughly described capital as "revolutionizing" production in two different phrase. In the first stage, interchangeable parts, automation and research are used to reduce the price as much as is practical. Once the manufacterer has most savings out of production things enter the second stage. In this stage, the manufacter rearranges production so the ways he makes things brings the greatest profits and control even though things aren't made more efficient. The product is designed to break down more, so people will buy more. Spare parts are controled more so the manufacter will control the repair market. A thousands and one tricks are used.
Essentially, we move from traditional production to automated production to ideological production.
I. Traditional Industry: The small scale methods used to produce handicrafts. These advance but only so-far as the structure of individuals. The single woodworker or iron worker would fit into this category.
II. Interchangable parts, automation and the Scientific production: This begins with automation and larger scale production, most industry till recently fit into the broad category.
III Ideologized production: The further revolutionizing of the entire production process using psychology, cybernetics, systems theory, model and all ideological machinery of modern bureaucracy. The happens in the context of the increased unification of the various fields of spectacular ideologies.
Goals of Ideologized production seldom are simply increases in production but rather by a need to fine-tune the entire shape of production. Indeed Ideologized production requires the basic framework of production to be set. In ideologized production, the shape of product is changed to allow easy shipping, or to allow for an assembly line where union organizing is more difficult or for a thousand interlocked levels.
As capital evolves, each industry has evolved from one phase the next. But different industries and processes are still at different levels. Steel is still mostly a simple commodity after three hundred year. Software now is produced massive ideology contained within.
The cybernetics of managing an enterprise is be no means a dry, rational, scientific matter but a blending of production management and the creation of ideologizies for the unification of marketting, production and human-resource management.
Software tools that permit the combination of production control and flexibility still involve an inefficient customization of processes. Each corporate entity builds tools and techniques for similar purposes, yet not of these consistantly inter-operate - indeed, the presence or lack of inter-operation is part of production strategies.
Now each of the phases we've discussed follows from the last. For us, the transition from stage II to stage III is what matters most for understanding the society's present condition.
Ideological production, then, is production once the immediate pay-off of transformation of the world have been reached.
Car production is a good example. Henry Ford's assembly line and the improvements to that, reached the level of maximum efficiency in simple car production by the fifties. After that, small changes the nature of cars themselves became key. The final, numerical output of production is now only one of many aspect which must be managed.
Auto companies have looked in detail at what parts of production are most profitable to control directly and which are most profitable to control indirectly. They have added layers of "features," of assesories to the basic automobile. They manage the credit system which spurs people to buy new cars with money not yet earned and so-forth.
As production efficience have reached diminshing returns except in a few key industries, managing production by controlling the price of parts, the level of fixed capital (parts and finished inventory), the price of repairs and the structure of the labor process all a key aspects which ideological-cybernetic management attempts to solve.
Final products now are assembled out of pieces which are crafted for their many ideological conveniences - for planned obsellecence, parts are no longer interchangable or available (except at high prices from the manufacturer).
A tool has functionality, a gadget has a purpose. A tool is at least somewhat general purpose, a gadget has often intentionally hadicaped to be only capable of a single purpose. A drill is a tool, an electric beard trimmer is a gadget.
A tool may require training and even more is often used by those who are skilled in their activity. A gadget is designed to for no training and indeeed, thwarts those who are trained - it is too poorly made or too cumbersome.
The production of gadgets and transformation of tools into gadgets can be used to gauge the progress of ideological production. A mason of many years ago had a simple hammer and chisel but used for very particular purposes. An autmatic of forty years ago had main general purpose tools with a special tools. Most of his tools could be on boats or any machinary. A mechanic of today has an array of devices made only for the electronics and close tolerances of today's automobiles.
A milestone was reached in computer chip production when Intel corporation began to sell it's 80386SX math coprocessor chip. This was ordinary chip that had certain abilities removed by damaging it after production. Intel sold this for less money. By artificially creating a hierarchy of qualities in it's products, Intel aimed to gain the sales from those with less money and the higher prices from those with more money (while the diagnostic devices require skill in terms of specialized knowledge, they don't require dexterity or a "feel" for the situation - for good or ill).
This was the kind of differentiation that existed in automobile or vacuum-cleaner sales for years. Engineers, who were some of the main computer buyer in the time of 80387SX, were shocked at that point only because they had a history buying chips as tools rather than as gadgets. They didn't expect buy something crippled for marketing purposes. Gadgets, things sold with "the sizzle" were thought to be the realm of only the stupified "end user."
But today, the produciton of pure information is the frame within which all production lives. And here, the changing of products to suit a multitude of hidden agendas is becoming most developed.
Wholesale and retail, news, education, training, documentation, advertising, features, parts and production are somewhat separate. But they are more and more coordinate, more and more each aspect is coordinated with the other. More and more all can be seen within the framework of pure information flow.
The national security released the "Clipper" encryption chip years ago - the chip's algorythm, it's method of encryption, was still kept secret. Thus it was a product designed to make communication secret to most people and to allow communication to be intercepted by some.
Today, the NSA has released an public algorythm whose implications are secret. This method serves as ideal pure mathematical trojan horse commodity.
But the area where the use of secret framing and secret implication is perhaps most developed is news production. Not only do "spin doctors" provide after-the-fact framing for news, public relations agencies craft large sections of the news for their particular clients (not to mention the many intelligence agencies who also employ journalists).
The transition to ideologized production is often ironically a freezing of the actual conditions of life.
A computer programmer talked to ASAN about his efforts to automate the processes of Canadian tariffs. The regulation involved were far too complicated for modern trade. However, by using a computer, the authorities were able to automate these ancient regulations, thereby preserving into the indefinite future an otherwise unmanageable mess.
This pattern is repeated everywhere in the contemporary world - not only in terms of computer systems but in terms of all large-scale systems. Old things can be redesigned, stream-lined and marketed as new to the simultaneous delight of the market-place and the bureaucracy. And this casts the old in stone.
While the spectacle is in the abstract a seamless stream of arbitrary images, it's actual production is depressingly predictable. This is in the same way that television seems to promise you a chance to show you almost anything and winds-up showing you almost nothing.
Indeed, while capitalism seems to promise the possibility of endless variety, it produces more and more of the same stuff.
All movies these days are produced as combination of previous forms. Religion, psychics and gambling are all easily computerized. Every TV show of the past must have it's movie version. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Elvis Presley have each had comebacks as soon as there was time for them to be unfashionable.
Today's automobile has essentially the same arrangement as the automobile of 1950. It's tremendously greater complexity has only marginally changed this. And the inside of a car has indeed become massively more complicated. But all the automated factories, computer chips and ultra-exact engineering has not made the car cost less and has only slightly increased it's gas mileage and durability.
Ideologized production happens at the point where the general shape of the product and it's environment have become fixed. Once capital has given up changing the situation and can instead engineer it. Of course, this condition of fixing the old is not essentially a matter of technological limitations but of dead labor dominating living labor. The accounting of wage labor requires that old value must be retrieved. "The dead weigh upon the living like a nightmare." Now that petroleum-based technologies have become absolute, the
One way to describe the present system is that all earlier systems of domination have been combined and can now compete on the open market place.
Catholics compete with pornography for our attention. Touchy-feeling managers "from the sixties" compete with rigid authoritarians to manage fortune 500 companies. Stalinists compete with anarchists and Christians for the right to manage drug counseling houses.
In the same way, each social fragment is frozen. The accumulation of dead labor is the accumulation of failed efforts to live. Deadheads, hippies, punks and rappers are merely chosen lifestyles and remain nearly the same choice as twenty years ago. All rebellion is described as being "stuck in the sixties." Reactionaries are describing as being " stuck in back in the cold-war."
All music today is classic rock.
We have seen how the exchange system creates a terrain of empty representations. Even more than just the creation of this well manicured desolation, this horror of this society is it's effect on the possibilities of human relations. Just as each spectacular image has no rational meaning and instead only represents a tribal membership in the stream of images, so the spectacle destroys communication outside statements of membership in subgroups. Hobbies, love affairs, or passions become assesories to fashion.
This is how the world of exchange creates the subjective conditions of today - on the level of horrifying shopping mall but even worse on the level of the options that people have for creating relations between each other, on the level of how small changes in existence happen.
Interpersonal relations are where we live our existence but these relations are factored away into nothing by the domination of exchange.
The circulation of disjointed images is managed through the circulation of spin. Since images themselves are disembodied from any set context, those who provide the context, provide the life of the image.
The net result of the present system is the continuous circulation of "spin." And with spin being the creation of larger meanings, the system moves systematically to destroy any fixed larger meanings.
While the spin that various interests put on a particular object is not necesarrily false, it essentially has little reason to be true.
Once spin circulates from one situation to the next, once a each spin has further spin added, then a absolute certainty of falsification prevails.
And this is the condition relative to every sort of production today.
The political economy of chaos rests on the various balances of power within this entire society. Before capitalism, all empires had been based on slavery. The Romans had most labor done by slaves, as did the Incas. In medieval times, the nobles survived by extracting rent and food from the peasants, who were not allowed to leave the land they cultivated. Corruption naturally went with this arbitrary power in these empires.
The rise of capitalism, two to three hundred years ago, lessened the corruption of power somewhat. The rules of exchange required that laws respect each capitalist equally. Businessmen were only willing to risk their money if they knew they would be treated fairly. They expect to be able to exchange equal valued goods for equal goods.
In a global economy where every form of wealth is controlled by massive trusts and invisible Mafias, there is now no reason to offer any certainty. Holding onto money or gold is just as much speculation as buying stock. Every investor is forced to blindly bet on one or another unknown since all economic activity ultimately depends on flows moving from distant, unknown places.
There is an exclusive club of mega-capitalists, less than 1000 individuals, who control most of the world's resources. They have less need to worry about panic among other capitalists - indeed they often manage panics and are happy as long as things stay within bounds.
But this space of multiple reflection, this space of a mirror reflecting into itself, was actually the space of the domination of exchange.
All of the forms of capital first appear as a mighty new empire, rooting out the old. They then settled into forms of a streamlined archaicism, no longer having to present themselves as revolutionary and indeed, hide as being age-old forms.
The general outline of the modern state might be seen in the Nazi war machine. Industrial level production based on a mass of workers indoctrinated by mass society.
There is another interpretation this present late-to-be-destroyed capitalism. Rather than the ever-increasing falsification coming purely from the realm of consumption, it could just as much come from the realm of production.
Within this spectrum of slavery, what's missing is any self-created process of living. Politics, which apes the image of people creating their lives, naturally is the opposite. Debates are assembly lines for endorsing decisions already made. Government bodies have the same quality as student councils - everyone is scrambling to make the best speech supporting decisions that have already been made.
Thirty years ago, Raul Vaneigem wrote that this world reminded him of those cartoons where characters run off the cliff but do not fall until they look down.
Now that the limiting factors of community, integrity, and many forces giving individuals a broad understanding of reality have been removed, capital has played a game of blind man's bluff to discover how far it can go in profiting from the ridiculous.
Everywhere, working class people support a system that is absolutely against their interests. And they are only convinced to do this by a monologue of absurd misdirection that moves their attention outside the over-all situation of life today.
Terrorism, Andrew Cunnanen, or Satanic Child Abuse are only the most obvious examples. The absurdities come in different forms in different times. The most common form is capitalists selling the working class "nothing for something." Delusions have been created and recycled in different forms at an accelerating rate. Terrorism, AIDS, the republican revolution, the OJ trial, cold fusion, crime hysteria and a vast array of scams are sold with an ease that amazes even the charlatans doing the selling.
"And ain't that America. And there's winners and there's losers but it's all right!" John "Cougar" Melencamp (A "Winner")
Hope is the leash of every modern submission. For rulers, one of the most useful trances is the spectator's visceral identification with one or another spectacular images.
Consider, the surface of America "political life" is as predictable as a computer generated sitcom. Every few years, there is a "pendulum movement" with conservatives winding-up a little further ahead with each swing.
In the heat of a game, it is easy for each group of fans to feel that their team suffers from unfair referees, bad luck and every idignity whenever it is behind. And this feeling reoccurs as fate moves each team back and forth in randomly in position.
So for even the conservative spectator, there is always a feeling of being ill-served. Still, if George Orwell imagined the future as a boot stomping on a human face forever, Newt Gingrich must imagine the future as Rush Limbaugh heaping sneers on liberals forever. Seen through the eyes of the media, the only thing that is unexplained is why the liberals have any power at all - why they are not being torn apart by mobs at Greyhound stations.
But the show cannot go on without the liberals. Like villains in comic, they always reappear after being utterly defeated. The liberals indeed play just as much of a role as the conservatives in pushing this show. Bill Clinton at the point he played the liberal, was in open refusing to play "class war" against Newt Gingrich - though it could easily have gotten him political points.
The strange but absolute demands of the stock market and big companies are the may poles that all politicians dance around. Conservatism always must be shown gaining because it represents the realization of ruling class interests.
Republican attacks on Democrats are a plastic Jesus. They can seem plausible even once it is obvious they are mass produced. "We have created a whole class of dependent people" said one mid-level professional said about welfare recipients. He spoke in his beige air-conditioned office where he remained employed by brown-nosing his higher-ups and evading failure by evading work. But he still had no clue that he could have included himself in the "class of dependent people."
Conservatism as an ideology is strongest in a reactive mode. It can harness resentment much more easily than it can harness positive support. Thus conservative ideologists are much stronger under Clinton than under Bush - even though the basic way the country is run has hardly changed between the two.
Newt Gingrich calling Clinton a "Bolshevik" is as shocking as gambling in Rick's Casino. He was using the well calculated methods of anti-Communist demagoguery not only to irrationally rally the herd but also to rally business interests to his faction. (Certainly it's true that politicians have learned things from earlier anti-Communist witch hunts. But they haven't learned not to do them - instead, they've learned how long the witch-hunter can last and the ways the witch-hunter can back-out from the territory they have occupied).
Behind the simple situation of Gingrich making a bold sally, the liberals statically facing him and being defeated, lies another fairly simple situation. The liberals have no intention, ability or interest in doing more than hold their territory. In the logic of combat, like all who cannot advance, they must be swept away. The more intelligent among this group know this and go sadly to their inevitable destruction.
Liberals are the weakling that capitulate to the villains. But real villains, not the terrorist or Russians, are totally invisible. The real villains are us, the proletariat, all those who move to live real lives today. Liberals exist only to the extent the system can represent our efforts in terms of justice, democracy and "getting along."
The reason the left never fights seriously is that it has more interests in preserving the entire system than preserve it's political independence. All who occupy serious political power within the hermetically-sealed American spectacle are essentially under the thumb of inter-locking corporate-governmental-foundation interests. The framing of the debate from the beginning presumes the interests of capital to be unquestionable.
Clinton will occasionally tap the more left-ward of democratic think-tanks for schemes for soft-policing of the poor. But he has made it painfully clear that he will never match Gingrich's "class war" rhetoric. One problem is that there is enough real anger today to make any artificial mass-mobilization a messy situation. But Clinton's main motivation is that he has little interest in convincing the population as whole of his plan. He just needs to convince the powers-that-be of his value to them.
In all this, we can see that every conscious mass action outside the left is a blow to this entire script of manipulation. Every action outside capital's control forces capital to increase it's insurance - some of this insurance is in the form of police and some of this insurance is in the form of social programs. This "mix" of carrot and stick the main dimension of American political life.
The factor that determines "the mix" is essentially how conscious the masses are that capital is the enemy and on what level that consciousness is. The expansion of the police state in America today is the result of capital reacting to the dispossessed class being large, angry, and explosive but not capable acting consciously and collectively in it's own interests.
The apolitical politics of our time has become nothing but a matter of debates about choosing this right "mix." Each part of the mix, whether police or social services, sees the proletariat through the lens of wage labor.
In this sort of debate, the controllers often choose between various emotions in their quest to sell their products. But as capital forces us to deal with it's crisis, fear and hate become the biggest part of the sales pitch as well the repression.
The LA riots corresponded to a hiccup, a small detour in the plans of the rulers. The mob were large, consciously angry and against the system but not conscious of the sort of change it wanted (Still, America has not had a single recession since 1992).
Any mass organizing that can the total system has an exponential effect. Mass organization that creates it's own dialog and it's agenda is all that can force the powers-that-be to give anything and it is what the entire spectacle functions to extinguish.
This of course is exactly the opposite of the agenda of those who are extreme but remain within the left. Like a gambling addict, this group loves to present it's failures as heroic proofs that they should not change they're strategy one iota. But since their essential politics is to tail after the left-democrats who tail after the middle democrats who tail after the conservatives, they are essentially the left wing of the enemy, capital.
Most people who watch TV today are in a trance. The entire system of publicity requires that people have no control over their state of mind.
Modern society is based not on "mind control" but on mind-out-of-control. Each spectator trades unconsidered impulses with each other spectator.
The force of TV's spot-light is an offensive force, the ability of this spot-light to undo one life or another is very much a matter of the rootlessness of life itself today.
The eternal now of the spectacle is one inherent arm of Pomo bureaucracy. The present whirlpool exists as much in the average person's pell-mell movement towards they know-not what as it exists in media lies.
The spectacle is often honest in describing the world it defends - "This is the world, defend Nike and McDonald's because they are all you know." "You use %10 of your brain, that's way too much." But still, the spectacle must also rely on false motives to assure the degree of loyalty it needs.
Actually, with everything that I've been digesting in the world of psychology, I'm actually getting more sympathetic to the "inauthentic, split persona of modern people" perspective. This is very much the Vaneigem perspective but I think both NLP and the generally unquantifiability of alienation tended to make less certain of this particular phenomenon.
The trick is the noticing of how much of incongruety is roles and values conflicts. The human who makes one goal his paramount is really in much better shape than the one of who dillies around. Of course, the problem is that success is such a dubious achieving that those who seek it with their whole mind are rare.
But essentially, this involves a world where the truth is no longer taken seriously, where absurd articles go unquestioned. Not all articles are absurd, most are only medicre. But at strategic times the public relations of medical capital will produce theory of its choosing just as it sells the products of its convenience.
After Duesberg, Ho and Strecker, one can well believe the cause of AIDS is entirely obscure.
All the fundamental contradictions of this society ultimately come out of the domination of exchange, the dominance of the economy.
We have experianced both the success of the economy and the economy's developing ability to defend itself.
The production of interchangeable and generic items leads to a situation of products becoming cheaper and thus it quickly shows the contradiction between a society that forces everyone to work in order to live and a productive apparatus that creates more than a person needs.
Indeed, fifty, seventy, years ago, the system produces numerically already more than people needed.
The present system is product of capital-hazard efforts to solve these contradictions.
Ideologized production deals with this problem.
The immediate history of capital was of productive forces unleashed, for good and (more often for) ill.
Our present continues this expansion but also working to manage the horific results.
All of these can be seen in the large as counter-tendencies to Karl Marx's falling rate of profit. We can look at the situation on a smaller scale in terms of different rough stages of technological production. These stages are not meant to be more exact than others classification system but rather to illuminate a stage's relation to the whole of technological production.
The point is that stage does allow production to escape the limits of stage II in the sense of Marx's theory of crisis. But only in terms of continues deception, misdirection and so-forth.
Now the point is that production, exchange and circulation are being more and more organized on the basis of this type of system. The management of elements. And this type of operation requires security through obscurity.
In a world of constant secrecy and manipulation, there are two basic mistakes that can be made. It is a mistake to ignore the system of manipulation and pretend it does not exist. The other mistake is to focus exclusive on this system to the exclusion of your own ability to act.
The second mistake, what we could roughly label "paranoia politics," is more subtle but just as dangerous. And there are common further mistakes that accompany this particular mistake. One should never assume that, for example, if some group has a secret agenda that this will be the only agenda of the group. It should not assume that the existence of secret scientific and technological projects gives intelligence agencies and their like access to unlimited power and so forth. One should not assume that the more democratic or above-board groups would be the least infiltrated. Or that the least infiltrated groups would by that be the most intelligent.
This kind of thinking is especially dangerous because it disarms people. For example, urban police departments have been shown to practice infiltration, provocation and surveillance of those consider dissidents on a regular basis, (ignoring all claims of "civil liberties"). This does not prove these police have the ability to control and manipulate events in any demonstration or riot situation. Or even that if some fraction of these groups wished to provoke a riot in any given situation that such a riot would lack all legitimacy. We should remember how the Czarist governments massive infiltration of revolutionary organizations was unable to prevent that government's over-throw in 1917 (though, it is important to remember how this infiltration distorted the politics of the groups infiltrated as well).
The worst examples of paranoia can be seen the writings of Thomas Constanstaine or the group Brass Check. The most obvious absurdity is that these groups cite the LA riot or the anarchist Black Bloc in Seattle as effort to "undermine democracy." Yet the intelligence community really haven't had much trouble with democracy altogether.
The other reflex of these group involves the perception that by deduction, they can determine with certainty the actions of the secret groups. Even without secrecy, exact determinations of complex events are difficult to come by. Conspiracy and secret agenda only increase the complexities - they don't automatically mean that the secret agenda will carry the day (and they don't mean it won't either).
We can say that the acts of the
The situation of Seattle classic [insert base outline].
In many places, the obscrutity of the situation makes it difficult for proletarians to defend there interests.
And just as much, new tactics for cutting the Gordonian Knot, cutting shit, are created.
Indeed, the greater the level of circulation of lies, the more important it become to hold a territory that you can control.
Clinical paranoia is defined as an intense, unjustified belief in persecution. There is a particular sort of politics which partakes in a similar position. This no more irrational than the belief that no one is out to get you. However, paranoia politics generally involves a belief that a invisible forces have the power to control visible forces.
Paranoid theories today often note various acts designed to "destroy the constitution," "impose martial law" and so-forth.
The essential error made by paranoia thinkers is the believe that the unseen forces of today operate only against us.
First, while the unseen forces may involve collusion of various governmental and private authorities, they must still operate in the physical world with all those limitation.
The police-industrial complex, for example, operates on the ideology of repression regardless of the other facts involved.
The use of intensified repression in Seattle might have involved nothing more than a heightening of the use of repression as an answer to any situation.
Now, the thing is that the continues of progress of police fire power and technology doesn't really do to much when the police are essentially lazy and stupid.
The police fight the class war for the rich but their day-to-day existence involve a true fight but the swagger of the bulley.
[1] naturally, we aren't focusing how exactly faithful we are being to the Situationist International's original conception of spectacle but on how useful a term we're producing for revolutionary theory - in contrast to counter-revolutionary fundamentalist "Situationaists" such as fucking Bill Brown - people who's only frame of reference is a group now forty plus years old.
[2] naturally, we aren't focusing how exactly faithful we are being to the Situationist International's original conception of spectacle but on how useful a term we're producing for revolutionary theory - in contrast to counter-revolutionary fundamentalist "Situationaists" such as fucking Bill Brown - people who's only frame of reference is a group now forty plus years old.