The difference between Guy Debord and Moishe Postone’s critique of modern capitalism or: the limits of Guy Debord
October 28th, 2009HERE IS THE TEXT OF A TALK GIVEN AT THE ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR ON 25 OF OCTOBER 2009, WHICH WAS HELD AT WESTFIELD COLLEGE IN MILE END ROAD IN LONDON. THE TALK WAS DELIVERED AS PART OF A SYMPOSIUM ON THE CRISIS OF THE ECONOMY AND CREDIT CRUNCH AND ON CLIMATE CHANGE. THE TALKS TOOK PLACE IN THE PHYSICS DEPARTMENT OF THE COLLEGE.
On the difference between Guy Debord and Moishe Postone’s critique of modern capitalism or the Limits of Guy Debord.
In May 1988 Guy Debord’s COMMENTAIRES SUR LA SOCIETE DU SPECTACLE were published in Paris. Later in England the title was mistranslated , Malcolm Imrie had not noticed the reference to Julius Caesar. You can’t expect everything from so-called experts.
The continuous crisis in the Eastern Bloc and elsewhere in the late 1980’s spurred Guy Debord to update his critique, unfortunately he was well short of his 1967 LA SOCIETE DU SPECTACLE IN WHICH HE SAID :” that the modern spectacle was already essentially the autocratic reign of the commodity economy having reached an irresponsible sovereignty”, that was sharper than what he wrote in his Commentaries namely :” the secret dominates the world and firstly as secret of domination”. Debord neglected rereading the esoteric Marx of Capital and the Grundrisse where he develops his critique of value. Debord remained stuck in the exoteric Marx of class struggles. It was a fatal mistake. Another mistake of his was to say that he did not need to change a word to his 1967 book. Hence he could not supersede it. Thus he fell back unto retrograde positions, he adopted a 19th Century view of history which was held by many people at the time -from the left to the right- that is to say a police view of history also know as the Conspiracy Theory of History (CTH) for short. What he couldn’t criticize, supersede were class struggles as subject.
And yet he was aware that these struggles from 1968 onwards and possibly before that, had been coopted by the representation ie. the unions and political parties with the help of the State. Moishe Postone’s critique goes to the heart of the problem:” According to the logic of Marx’s analysis , the working class, rather than embodying a future society, is the necessary basis of the present under which it suffers; it is tied to the existing order in a way that makes it the object of history (TLSD, p.357).
Debord in his Commentaries continued to come out with backward ideas. He speaks of the proprietors of the world, when it is well known that they are mere servants of the commodity society. They too have to bow to value. And then Debord speaks of the americanisation of the world, another hot chestnut that seems to please many people , when in reality capital is international, like nuclear radio-activity it knows no frontiers!
In the late eighties Debord was really stuck when he told us :”There are no more agoras, no general community, nor even restricted or autonomous institutions, salons or cafes”. And to crown it all he adds:” The commodity can no longer be criticized by anyone nor as general system nor as trash”. He also speaks of the dissolution of logic. He was probably speaking of his own. As we have seen at the start of this intervention Debord could not supersede his 1967 book LA SOCIETE DU SPECTACLE. He failed to criticize the ideology of class struggles as subject. In fact Capital is the subject as Postone has developed and analysed in his 1993 book TIME, LABOR AND SOCIAL DOMINATION. A book that many do not want to consider, let alone read and agree with.
So Debord was immobilized , unable to move forward, he could only retreat to worse positions as we have seen. It was tragic. But on the chessboard attack is the best sort of defence. He forgot about it. He cut his own supply lines. Despite all this many people still gargle with Debord’s Commentaries and his Kriegspiel .Verso even listed that book as a masterpiece along with Louis Althusser and a few others. Some don’t mind being ridiculous. But as long as it sells it is a masterpiece.
It also seems that some people are quite content with The Society of the spectacle, no need for something more critical. Others are happy repeating a classist ortho-marxism to which they include a critique of value, but their main theoretical plank is still a rigid class analysis (Aufheben, the diverse Raya Dunayevskaya outfits, and Theorie Communiste in France come to mind.)
Even a future bureaucrat and statesman called Lenin could say before 1917: “There can’t be any revolution without theory.” No doubt the awful Lenin did not agree with the phrase after 1917!
When you read Debord’s Commentaries you have the feeling that he wants to say something about the new relations of production :” In other times , I could have considered myself satisfied. But in the moment where we find ourselves, it seemed to me that no one would do it.” In fact his book The Society of the Spectacle had been superseded by capitalist society. His Commentaries did not match what was taking place and were not as sharp as his 1967 text. They fell short…It probably would have been better if he hadn’t written them.
Around 1982, he told me that his 1967 LA SOCIETE DU SPECTACLE would be valid for the next fifty years. I told him:” Are you sure?”. His answer was categorical, his book would last for that period of time. It wasn’t to be. Six years later he published his Commentaries, in which he says :” Negation has so perfectly been deprived of its thought , that it has been dispersed for a long time.” This quote seems to sum up his 1988 position and he adds :” the meaning has lost itself with the knowable center”.
Without critical theory it is difficult to make sense of anything. Debord was in a real labyrinth of his own making. Had he read Andre Gorz’s Adieux au Proletariat (1980) -tendentiously translated as Farewell to the Working Class (1982, Pluto Press), he would have found ideas on how to get out of the fetish of the working class/proletariat as subject. Debord could not consider Gorz, he had a frozen idea of him. Gorz had been around with Sartre and Beauvoir after the Second World War, he participated in their Temps Modernes magazine. Debord rightly could not stomach Sartre and Beauvoir’s ghastly politics (their unconditional support for all sorts of bureaucracies like Castro’s Cuba or Mao’s China etc.)
Eventually Gorz managed to crawl out of Sartre’s swamp. But Debord did not pay any attention to Andre Gorz’s critique. He had written him off for ever. A bad move!
In Farewell there is a chapter called :”The Proletariat as Replica of Capital: ” Proletarians thus work exclusively for society. They are suppliers of general abstract labour and, consequently , they have to buy all the concrete goods and services they consume. The totally alienated form of their work is matched by the fact that all their material needs express themselves as needs for commodities: that is needs to buy, needs for money. Everything that proletarians consume has to be bought and everything they produce is to sold. No visible link connects consumption with production or the goods bought with the work performed. Because of this absence of visible links it makes no difference to proletarians what they produce or what they work for. They have been stripped of all autonomous capacities by capital and compelled to work ‘with the immutable regularity of a giant automaton’. (…) The mechanised system does the work; you merely lend it your body, your brains and your time in order to get the work done.”
Anselm Jappe in his book The adventures of the Commodity (for a new critique of value) [not yet translated into English] says: “Marx expresses this fact with this formula that value is an “automaton subject” (CAPITAL, book 1) , where it has already been said in Marx’s GRUNDRISSE: “value presents itself as subject.”
Debord neglected the critique of value, since he still backed an advanced orthodox marxism which still saw class struggles as the motor for change, hence his inertia. Moishe Postone on the contrary started dismantling the entire orthodox-marxist classist structures. His studies of the Frankfurt School and Georg Lukacs were put to critical use.
In 1993 , Postone’s book Time, Labor and Social Domination (a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory) was published. It is the sort of book that Guy Debord ought to have written instead of his Commentaries. But you don’t make history with ifs as Hegel once taught us. In the end it did not count since it did not take place.
Debord’s anti-computer stance was another aberration. Others would extrapolate on that anti-technology backwardness. Primitivists like Ted Kacyinski and his awful Unabomber document turned him into a terrorist, he was even prepared to put a bomb an an airplane. Kacyinski was not able to articulate a critique of modern capitalism, hence he resorted to terrorism. It is tragic. Other primitivists include John Zerzan, and in France the Encyclopedie des Nuisances who translated Kacyinski. Primitivists remind us of Pol Pot. It is imperative to criticize that ideology that leads back to the ghastly past…
A new society where value has been abolished along with work will be able to harness technology for use-value instead of exchange-value. Commodity production and abstract labour are destroying the planet. What Postone says about abstract labour is to the point:” I am suggesting that what Marx means by it is that labour has a function in capitalist society as a socially mediating activity that is different from the function of labouring activity in any other society and that this is a point of departure for his whole analysis of capitalism.”
Dave Wise on his website called revoltagainstanageofplenty says that I have switched my allegiance from Guy Debord to Moishe Postone. To deal only with names is simplistic, for me ideas are important, I have found Moishe Postone’s critical theory to my liking, a sort of basis from which you can build a new world. Hence the agoras and conversations are not dead, we have the proof today. To update one’s theory is not a luxury, but a necessity.
M Prigent, October 2009
