Guy Debord: A Sick Planet

A Sick Planet collects three pamphlets by Debord (two of which are also included in the Situationist International Anthology), repackaging the separate texts as one well-designed commodity. The first pamphlet, “The Decline and Fall of the ‘Spectacular’ Commodity-Economy,” takes as its subject the Watts riots of 1965, offering what has since become the standard romantic-anarchist account of ghetto revolt. Debord attempts to defend what was characterized on almost all sides as senseless, aimless theft and destruction by offering Situationist theory as “the truth sought implicitly by [the rioters’] practical action.” “Our theory of survival and of the spectacle is illuminated by these actions, as unintelligible as they may be to America’s false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.” Debord explains, “The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity, against a world of commodities and of worker-consumers hierarchically subordinated to the measuring-rod of the commodity.” Deprived of any hope for future integration into society and conscious of the degraded nature of the minority spectacle aimed at them, blacks in Los Angeles rejected the idea of entering into the capitalist exchange relation and simply seized upon the world of abundance promised by modern marketing. “The blacks of Los Angeles . . . take modern capitalist propaganda, with its touting of affluence, at its word. They want all the objects displayed, and available in the abstract, right now—because they want to use them.” Circumventing “the rat-race of alienated labour and increasing, ever-deferred social needs,” they also freed themselves from subordination to and fetishization of the commodity, and were therefore free to play with and even destroy commodities. The role the police played in fighting looting, which Debord considers “the natural response to the affluent society,” reveals that the policeman “is the active servant of commodities . . . whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mere fridge or rifle—a mute, passive, insensible thing, captive to the first comer to make use of it.” Debord concludes by defending the “excesses” of the Watts rioters, claiming, “Any rebellion against the spectacle occurs at the level of the totality, because—even if it is confined to a single neighborhood, such as Watts—it is a human protest against an inhuman life; because it begins at the level of the real single individual, and because community, from which the individual in revolt is separated, is the true social nature of man, true human nature: the positive transcendence of the spectacle.” The second pamphlet collected here, “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China,” examines the causes and development of the Cultural Revolution in China. Exhibiting a strong debt to Cornelius Castoriadis (see the three volumes of his Political and Social Writings: I, II, III), Debord attacks Maoism and shows how “accelerating disintegration of bureaucratic ideology” across the globe has eliminated any remaining illusions about the supposed revolutionary nature of the communist parties. Rather than a genuine attack on the party bureaucracy, the conflicts in China are the consequence of a ruling class divided in two, a dispute at the top of the political hierarchy. Despite being masters of ideology, the Maoists pulled back and entered into a truce when the Cultural Revolution threatened the Party itself, revealing their separation from the peasants-workers. Debord concludes, “Wherever China may be headed, the image of the last revolutionary-bureaucratic regime is now shattered.” The third pamphlet in the collection, ”A Sick Planet,” is a new translation of a text from 1971. The pamphlet is of interest primarily because Debord integrates ecological issues into revolutionary theory. According to Debord, the discussion of pollution in the spectacle registers but distorts a serious materialist problem, the fact that we have reached “the moment when it becomes impossible for capitalism to carry on working.” Modern capitalist production has advanced to the point where its science and technology can even predict “the rapid degradation of the very conditions of survival.” Debord explains, “A society that is ever more sick, but ever more powerful, has recreated the world—everywhere and in concrete form—as the environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a sick planet. A society that has not yet achieved homogeneity, and that is not yet self-determined, but instead ever more determined by a part of itself positioned above itself, external to itself, has set in train a process of domination of Nature that has not yet established domination over itself. Capitalism has at last demonstrated, by virtue of its own dynamics, that it can no longer develop the forces of production.” The serious threat posed by pollution, which even the “masters of society” must acknowledge, might act as a revolutionary catalyst. “[T]he plain fact that such harmful and dangerous trends exist constitutes an immense motive for revolt, a material requirement of the exploited just as vital as the struggle of nineteenth-century proletarians for the right to eat.” But the spectacle focuses only on a new kind of reformism. Modern industries hope to profit from fighting pollution (think of today’s “green” technologies). Constrained by the imperative to create new jobs (“that is to say for the sake of using human labour as alienated labour, as wage-labour”), governments choose conservative responses that do not question the system. However, the problem of pollution (as well as of hierarchy, spectacle, and capitalism) can be solved “only by submitting everything—except ourselves—to the sole power of workers’ councils, possessing and continually reconstructing the totality of the world—by submitting everything, in other words, to an authentic rationality, a new legitimacy.” Debord beautifully concludes, “Alienated industrial production makes the rain. Revolution makes the sunshine.”