Видео

"In fact, even we two, when we converse, come to be reciprocally one in the other. Thus, in effect, when I grasp with the intellect that which you grasp with the intellect, I become your intellect and, in a certain way that I can't explain, I come to be created in you. Similarly, when you grasp purely with your intellect that which I clearly hold with my intellect, you become my intellect, and thus our two intellects become a single intellect, which takes form from the very fact that both of us, sincerely and without any uncertainty, enjoy the same intellection". - John Scotus Eriugena, 867 A.D. Dialogue is crucial for the development of the intellect. However, wisdom does not emerge by ignoring the force of circumstances.

Idk if this is just my modern misery speaking but I am getting the sense that the Society of the Spectacle does a great job of explaining the mechanisms of capitalism but any revolutionary energy has long ago been metabolized and commodified. Still is good to see it though, like seeing the workings of a terrifying machine, or behind the scenes of a horror movie.

Ken. I just wanted to clear up the confusion I was trying to express by absolute will power postulated by Julius evolas magical idealism the quote is from cologero salvo Everything I cannot act on, everything that resists my will, is only a privation of this very will, something negative, not a being, but a non-being, hence the realist must be rejected out of hand. He is in his reference to something else, God,noumenon, substance etc. Makes a being out of non-being. Calls real something that, being only a privation of my power, being nothing other than than a negation and a void in the un-multipliable body of my activity, should instead by right be called unreal. Thus he confirms his very privation, as he eschews it. Instead of the act by controlling and possessing them, and all those things that redeem the privation, he substitutes the act that recognizes them and certificately gives them being in an autonomous reality. To the former act, he instead applies the criterion of certainty of the third stage, that is, he demands that the free and naked eye of the individual can generally assert the principle of absolute idealism, and I will say, in truth, I myself am the cause and the order of this world in which I live. But when will it be possible to assert that? Obviously when the individual has redeemed the dark passion of the world in the body of freedom, when the form according to which he lives has left the representative activity, that is, the activity through which the spectacle of the universe is formed in him, has passed from spontaneity, from the harmony of the possible world, to bare unconditioned causality, that is, to potent will.

What is that beautiful violin music that plays periodically throughout the film? 31:06

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," Marx "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation." Debord There is an enormous accumulation of trash tied to the commodification of wealth produced through the irreversible time that we live as wage-slave producers and consumers of the Spectacle.

The student protestors in Bangladesh have pushed out their corporate dictator PM. A good situation to watch-their second independence-securing and stabilizing that freedom will surely be a challenge.

#70 23:53 is such an illuminating one for me (makes me giggle at the simple truth of it), and it seems relatively easy to convey to any rational person.

1:22:51 I think Ed Stres is noticing a significant structural element of the text. My take on it is that the frequent inversions of cause and effect is DeBord providing a method for examining an event (to look at the negative, by that I mean something like a film negative) and highlighting the mutual dependence of ideas that the spectacle objectifies and commodifies. Since one of the goals of the spectacle is to separate and to bring people together in their separation, training our minds to continually discover mutual dependence is a way of seeing the spectacle as something other.

One of the most influential books of the 20th century and yet ignored by the masses. Difficult though. Debord wasnt a pedagogist. Kind of cryptical and concentrated. Still a source of thought and inspiration.

I first encountered Situationist critiques when I was a student at Michigan State University, (1967-1971). Not amongst the faculty for sure, but amongst a few fellow students and friends. I've watched this film many times over the years and the more that I've matured in my thinking, the more I have discerned the underlying critique of Idealism inherent in both Debord's work and how much he owed to the materialist critique which Marx began in the 1840s all the way up until his death in 1883. When I saw it again this time via a Zoom discussion of it, the following thoughts came to my mind, even to be kind with my younger self, re-surfaced again: The split between the product and the producer. The commodity appears, the commodity is good. The commodity is the perception of the abstraction of labour time embodied in the use value of the commodity. The division of labour establishes bureaucratic top down political power within class ruled society. The alienated product of wage workers belongs to their employers. Separation is reproduced as the social relation of Capital is reproduced in everyday life. Words are abstract forms describing material content. Even God has material content within human belief that God is real. The living humans are the content of the concepts of their own creations. The images in the Zoom film are not corresponding in time with the dialogue as they would in the real film. Makes for interesting views for those, like me, who have seen this film a few times. Exchange-value is the perception of socially necessary labour time embodied in the perception of the use of the good or service. Debord was definitely 'in" to transgressive words and images.Bataille, another French writer. Banalisation goes hand in hand with the commodification of social relations between human beings. Why? Because the commodity must be produced with less and less labour time in order to become competitive in the market. The abundance of trash is not the abundance promoting the well being of human beings. Thee is no abundance of good education, good housing, healthy food and disposable time for the use of human desires. Planned obsolescence--analog to digital-to 2G-to 3G to 4g and on. Never forget that 'productivity' is measured by output of goods and services per hour. As productivity increases under the rule of Capital, so does the speed at which superficial life is lived. As Gandhi once quipped, “There’s more to life than increasing its speed.” Subjects create objects, including the images of women. The commodity is created by humans. The commodity is the image or perception of how much labour it took to produce something which you are willing to trade another commodity you own for. Money is the universal commodity used to trade all others. In the age of the Spectacle, images become commodities for sale with a view to profit. Interesting that viewers of this film get hung up about morality. Transgressive images are contrasted by Debord with the critique of political-economy. Transgressive behaviour is something Debord celebrated and used in his films and written work. Amazing how Debord's use of the transgressive acts are moralised by those who see his films or read his work. Images of burning cars are fine for the direct action, propaganda of the deed types, but the Puritan spirit of moral purity raises its voice in condemnation about sexualised imagery. The allegory of the cave is related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Form is reality. Actually existing, sensuous human life is just a shadow of reality. The critique of this upside-down mindset is fundamental to grasping what Debord is getting at in his critique of the Spectacle.

Dilettante

Dilettante

Debord wrote, "But when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the constant reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor but also in the form of the labor unions, political parties, and state powers that it had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified externalizations and all specializations of power." This has not happened. Why? The left never calls on workers to abolish wage labour, to emancipate themselves from class rule and to change the mode of production from commodified wealth for sale to production for use and need.The left is most interested in establishing top down political power through the best leaders with the most correct line. The class conscious proletariat would be the material content of the forms it creates for its emancipation i.e. 'councils', 'assemblies', 'committees', 'parties' or 'unions'. The working class is already the content of all those forms of organisation, but it remains politically ignorant about their production of the collective product of labour. The mystifications which are generated and reinforced by commodified labour power producing commodified wealth for sale by its owners all legitimised with moralistic notions about fair wages and achieving the Ideal of Justice by doing a fair day's work, lead to absurd conclusions e.g. 'wage-slavery is freedom' and dreams of becoming bourgeois. Meanwhile, there is no "abundance" of decent homes, decent food, decent healthcare, decent education. However, there is an 'abundance' of trash, desires for commodities which are planned to become obsolete. The question is: Why aren't the proles, even the 'rebels' amongst them, concentrating on the collective product of labour they produce? Debord wrote, "The appearance of workers councils during the first quarter of this century was the most advanced expression of the old proletarian movement, but it was unnoticed or forgotten, except in travestied forms, because it was repressed and destroyed along with all the rest of the movement. Now, from the vantage point of the new stage of proletarian critique, the councils can be seen in their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated movement. The historical consciousness that recognizes that the councils are the only terrain in which it can thrive can now see that they are no longer at the periphery of a movement that is subsiding, but at the center of a movement that is rising." All true and I should like to add that the IWW was a workers' council. The Preamble to its Constitution calls on workers to organise One Big Union with the strategic goal of abolishing the wage system. The IWW was first organised in 1905. Daniel DeLeon was at that first IWW Convention and spoke to workers gathered in Minneapolis after becoming an IWW member himself. DeLeon was also the editor of the Socialist Labor Party's newspaper. He said,: "It is exactly the reverse with the ;political power.' That is to be taken for the purpose of abolishing it. It follows herefrom that the goal of the political movement of labor is purely destructive. "Suppose that, at some election, the classconscious political arm of labor were to sweep the field; suppose the sweeping were done in such a landslide fashion that the capitalist election officials are themselves so completely swept off their base that they wouldn’t, if they could, and that they couldn’t, if they would, count us out; suppose that, from President down to Congress and the rest of the political redoubts of the capitalist political robber burg, our candidates were installed - suppose that, what would there be for them to do? What should there be for them to do? Simply to adjourn themselves, on the spot, sine die. Their work would be done by disbanding. "The political movement of labor that, in the event of triumph, would prolong its existence a second after triumph, would be a usurpation." full: www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1905/050710.htm One more thing which I would like to point out is that both Marx and Engels advised workers to abolish the wage system. Marx in an 1865 speech to workers said: "Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system." full: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14 Engels wrote in 1877: "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." full: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm After Engels carked it in 1896, Bernstein and the rest of the left basically erased what Marx and Engels were trying to get across, namely that socialism or communism (they used those concepts interchangeably) could be envisioned like this: "Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution." from CAPITAL volume I, chapter one

Hi, your videos are great, you work so hard to make videos, and your videos are supposed to get thousands of views, why so few? It's sad to see if you want to do something good here or take this channel to a better place in the future, then I will help you as your partner.

The official view of the Soviet wage system and commodity production can be found here: Reference is made to Engels' Anti-Duhring, to his formula which says that, with the abolition of capitalism and the socialization of the means of production, man will obtain control of his means of production, that he will be set free from the yoke of social and economic relations and become the "master" of his social life. Engels calls this freedom "appreciation of necessity." And what can this "appreciation of necessity"(1) mean? It means that, having come to know objective laws ("necessity"), man will apply them with full consciousness in the interests of society. That is why Engels says in the same book: "The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him."(2) As we see, Engels' formula does not speak at all in favour of those who think that under socialism existing economic laws can be abolished and new ones created. On the contrary, it demands, not the abolition, but the understanding of economic laws and their intelligent application. It is said that economic laws are elemental in character, that their action is inavertible and that society is powerless against them. That is not true. It is making a fetish of laws, and oneself the slave of laws. It has been demonstrated that society is not powerless against laws, that, having come to know economic laws and relying upon them, society can restrict their sphere of action, utilize them in the interests of society and "harness" them, just as in the case of the forces of nature and their laws, just as in the case of the overflow of big rivers cited in the illustration above. Reference is made to the specific role of Soviet government in building socialism, which allegedly enables it to abolish existing laws of economic development and to "form" new ones. That also is untrue. The specific role of Soviet government was due to two circumstances: first, that what Soviet government had to do was not to replace one form of exploitation by another, as was the case in earlier revolutions, but to abolish exploitation altogether; second, that in view of the absence in the country of any ready-made rudiments of a socialist economy, it had to create new, socialist forms of economy, "starting from scratch," so to speak. That was undoubtedly a difficult, complex and unprecedented task. Nevertheless, the Soviet government accomplished this task with credit. But it accomplished it not because it supposedly destroyed the existing economic laws and "formed" new ones, but only because it relied on the economic law that the relations of production must necessarily conform with the character of the productive forces. The productive forces of our country, especially in industry, were social in character, the form of ownership, on the other hand, was private, capitalistic. Relying on the economic law that the relations of production must necessarily conform with the character of the productive forces, the Soviet government socialized the means of production, made them the property of the whole people, and thereby abolished the exploiting system and created socialist forms of economy. Had it not been for this law, and had the Soviet government not relied upon it, it could not have accomplished its mission. full: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm

For me, it was interesting to hear Stephen Kotkin's take on Lenin's 'Testament'. Kotkin is a conservative professor who does a lot of work at the Hoover Institution. Kotkin has written a three volume biography of Stalin. ruclips.net/video/sXutg47BwEU/видео.html&ab_channel=TheFinnishBolshevik "On the basis of socialised production the scale must be ascertained on which those operations - which withdraw labour-power and means of production for a long time without supplying any product as a useful effect in the interim - can be carried on without injuring branches of production which not only withdraw labour-power and means of production continually, or several times a year, but also supply means of subsistence and of production. Under socialised as well as capitalist production, the labourers in branches of business with shorter working periods will as before withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while branches of business with long working periods continually withdraw products for a longer time before they return anything. This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate." CAPITAL Volume II, chapter 18, page 358 And here's Engels on what socialism would first look like: With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom. Anti-Dühring, 1877 Neither commodity production or commodified labour power i.e. wage labour, were ever abolished during the existence of the Soviet Union or the copy cat States which emerged in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Bonjour, avez vous connaissance des groupes politiques français actuelles, comme les appelistes, qui se retrouvent autour de la revue Tiqqun, ou des ouvrages comme à Nos amis, l’insurrection qui vient etc… Que l’on retrouve aussi à la Zad de notre dame des landes. Connaissez vous ce mouvement que l’on pourrait appeler le mouvement autonome contemporain Français ?

Many people, if not most that I have ever known who have opposed socialism, say that we're not equal and that everyone is not the same and that it is natural for some people to have power over others. Having power over others, seen as a genetic drive, is considered normal by many, many people. They see it in other animals thus, they conclude that it is natural. True that chickens have pecking orders. Are humans just chickens with larger brains? Social Darwinists might believe this. Fascists certainly do. My view is that we are capable of establishing equal political power between all adult human beings, but that cannot be done within the social relation of class rule. In other words, we cannot establish more than a belief in an equality of classes.The bourgeois revolutionaries claim that we can all be equal under the law. But they forget which class is empowered to make the laws. How are our rulers empowered? Through our own acquiescence to the notion that our rulers are the producers of the wealth, wealth we, the bottom 90% actually produce. Upside-down perceptions are rife in the reified conceptions of religion and Idealism running through the canyons of our minds. As the history of class rule demonstrates, the ruling classes have always owned and controlled the lion's share of the wealth. Those material facts are what class rule rests on and where the belief by the majority of wealth producers stems from to wit: that they are in debt to the bond holders. In America 'herself', 93% of all the stocks and bonds are owned by the upper 10%, the bourgeoisie. We should socially own and democratically manage the wealth we produce and that which lies in natural resources so that we can have the power to distribute it on the basis of need and live in harmony with the Earth. Agree or disagree? Most people disagree. Most people might think that a college professor's time is worth more and they should own more wealth than a daycare worker, even though each depends on the other for their existence within a society wide division of labour. Other examples abound within the wages system of slavery: plumber vs neurosurgeon, librarian vs. janitor... Thus, the commodification of social relations exists and it exists not just because of repressive organs of class power like the police, but also because we reproduce them as being part of chicken....no, I mean human nature. Seems to me that the corrosion of what might be seen as, revolutionary upsurges or just plain rebellions, around the world may continue to exist until the majority are willing to impose reverse dominance hierarchy on those few who would presume to be entitled to more wealth and more political power than the many within an industrialized division of labour in order to reproduce the wealth necessary for abandoning the commodity and producing good and services for our own uses and needs. I think that that desire is key to establishing social ownership and democratic control over the collective product of labour. But that's only one aspect. Another is for the many to see the bondage and misery that the commodification of wealth brings with it, thus seeing the opposite in the abolition of wage labour, another key to more freedom and well being. From those premises, the workers can emancipate themselves from class rule. I think Debord understood this.

Thanks for continuing to record these sessions, Ken! I've missed the last two but I feel like I'm still in the loop.

sometimes i feel as though this book's prescience has come to work practically against it in a strange way it's as though society has gone on to conform to many of its observations so *caricaturally* that in reading this book there is a risk of having one's interpretation only magnetize onto the most egregious correspondences between it & modern life, & miss the more essential things being observed: those most primordial contradictions & tendencies at the heart of things, which bleed out to produce the superficial effects i once saw a picture likening the proliferation of Bored Ape Yacht Club directly to thesis 34 - [ "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." ] - & it bamboozles me to even try to articulate myself the way this feels like kind of a misapplication! i just feel like there's a lot of layers of abstraction being skipped over there! (tangentially to all the above: Thesis 31 - "a map that is identical to the territory it represents." i think that's beautiful & perhaps quite useful. how many maps identical to the territory they represent might anyone be caught up in?)

i've often wished i could hear Debord's thoughts on social media & the way it controverts the unilateral quality that communications media might have once displayed very consistently, but no longer does with the same consistency... you have a situation even like this video, where a very much participatory discussion of this text is recorded & presented quite unilaterally, yet presents an opportunity for participation down here in the comments, or even the opportunity to join in a later Zoom call there is always a lot of ambiguity in how much revolutionary potential might lie in these communicative tools. is there something there even in this discussion of such an important text? & what structural biases might these platforms have against the meaningful formation of revolutionary intent? the proliferation of disinformation comes readily to mind, but might there be something more subtle in the particular ways a website is constructed & conditions the interactions on it? & is it possible that even our participatory discussions of these issues could have a kind of "interpassive" element, fostering the promise of eventually percolating into a concrete action that never quite actually manifests? even in the worst case i'm quite grateful for this stuff as i think looking into it can really disentangle many elements of existence in this sociohistorical position, make it a lot less confusion & help one orient themselves. there's always a kind of regret though about seeking merely to understand & learn from a text like Debord's while knowing it was intended expressly to motivate some kind of tangible action

i'm surprised there wasn't more discussion on thesis eight! i always found it to be one of the most crucial, fascinating, & implicative theses. it's possible my interpretation takes some undue liberties, but i always felt that it referred not simply to illusory unities & divisions between people, but rather to a kind of relentless diffusion of things between the spheres of the real & the fictional, until a decisive & meaningful distinction can no longer be made between the two. this solidifies the spectacle as a seamless element of our reality & forces us to recognize & abide by it for instance, actual events in our world are translated into news coverage, which spectacularly asserts itself as a common cultural referent for us to relate around & discuss, & then through this discussion we make it a true element of our actual, tangible lives perhaps i'm just mistaking the content of this thesis for Baudrillard's later concept of "hyperreality" though ?

US Tech business model is built off of data theft, and cycling conflict and war sensitivities for attention based ad revenue.

RUclips uses A.I and Data theft to recommend content that cycles conflict globally. Attention based ad revenue leverages (destruction for profit). It's a clever business model.

US is more centralized than people think, it's far more like a totalitarian communist party, based on patriotism for the state (state worship, clown colored flag waving), and Tech based control of society.

Stirner, Bakunin, Debord and Marx were all making arguments for agency, for humans to consciously make history for themselves as opposed to being unconscious participants in history made by and for the few, the ruling classes and their systems of wealth extraction from labour and nature. Thus, the reference to 'broken wretches' and need for strike action in this except from a speech Marx gave to a gathering of left oriented workers in 1865: These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement. At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!" full: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14 Hegel says that philosophers can only reflect on history. At the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right he writes: 'when philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk." Marx is not opposed to reflection, but he writes: The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. full: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm Revolutionary practice is what Debord refers to as 'praxis', the unity of theory and practice. Theory comes from a critical examination of history and change. Practice comes now in our everyday life. Thus, when and if the workers organise as a class to emancipate themselves from the wage system in order to establish a classless society, where wealth is not commodified for sale with a view to profit, prehistory ends and history consciously made begins. 🥳

The act of negating the negation of our lives is connected to a kind of animal desire to be free from spending our lives producing stuff we don't really need. The Spectacle is the attempt to keep us consuming our lives away buying commodities, the products of our labour which we don't need. What we need is to expand disposable time in connection with reducing the time necessary to produce food and shelter. The expansion of disposable time can only be the result of the desires of the immense majority.

Loving the videos.

We humans are producing a lot of garbage these days, at the behest of those who buy our labour time. We're even producing and using more greenhouse gases as the days go on and as we continue to march into the greenhouse gas chamber of climate change. Imagine what life could be like if we used our time to produce what we needed and used the rest of our time for our individual selves to do whatever or, to get together to produce what we needed. I think these notions may have been behind the desire to end dead time and replace it with us using our imaginations to live the moments of our everyday lives. Why not make it so?

Ken Knabb on RUclips. 🥵 Now we are cooking. 🔥

"Philosophy - the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power - was never by itself able to supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise representing a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation." Debord's thesis number 20 "The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man - state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion." Marx www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm Humans have the power to create and produce ideas and inanimate material objects. Humans may perceive that these ideas and objects have a life of their own, but that perception is fundamental to what both Debord and Marx critique, 'reification'. By consciously giving over their power of creation to the ideas and objects they create, humans unconsciously separate themselves from their own power. This is the key to unlocking the mental chains which both religion and Idealist philosophy stimulate and lead humans to perceiving reality camera-obscura, most especially the realities of power. See y'all next time and remember: "As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities." - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

Dead time is the socially necessary labour time crystalised in the commodification of wealth. From the Marx's theses on Feuerbach: VII Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society. VIII All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Yes. the masses love fascism because they enjoy the repressions of their own desires. paradoxical? Schizoanalysis seeks to show how "in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression-whence the role of the death instinct in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere."[13] Desire produces "even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction."

Yes, The limit experience is well worth the divine ecstasy and extreme horror i.w. oscar ichazo's initiation rites happened to him by the group tying him to a poll until he had a complete personality breakdown; but ego collapse is necessary to experience re-birth as far as I can tell.........en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit-experience

Omg I started reading the situationist's international and lighting bolts started to come out of my head..the view point i come from can be related to julius evola's magical idealism where objective imagination becomes REAL.... in fact a total revision of society would be an interested experiment through Objective willing,feeling, and thinking..i'll leave you with this: n the mid to late 1920s, Julius Evola- the Italian idealist, esotericist, and political philosopher- came up with a system he termed magical idealism. Magical idealism is so called because of its idealistic component and its esoteric component. Later on, Evola actually ended up becoming a full blown esotericist, but that is another story. Unfortunately, these books on magical idealism are some of the only books written by Evola that are not translated into English. Magical idealism is a metaphysical doctrine that has applications both to the arts (which Evola was involved in) and politics. In the arts, Evola was involved in the dadaism movement, which eventually grew into the surrealism of which Picasso and Dali were major figures. Here we give a description of magical idealism coming from Evola’s The Path of Cinnabar- an intellectual autobiographical book written when Evola was in his 60s. Julius Evola in his magical idealism proves four fundamental metaphysical principles: (a) solipsism, (b) projection of the past from the present, (c) absolute freedom, and (d) oscillatory relationship between the subject and the physical world. We treat each in turn. (a) To advance past Fichte, Evola uses nondiscursive intuition. The world- like a dream- is full of creatures that appear real and even terrorize us, but are mere projections of our fancy. Thus there is nothing truly objective and which does not submit to one’s own conditionality- thus the world collapses into one’s own position. The “I” is thus a pure and detached “I” which is a pure being and an absolute form of self-evidence, and an absolute principle onto itself. The “I” becomes truth, action, and will. (b) As the only perception that exists, the past becomes a creation of the present moment. One sees a one-to-one correlation between the present circumstances and past events and it becomes equally likely that the present is creating the past than that the past is creating the present. Using nondiscursive intuition, one can come to the immediate certainty that he is creating the past. (c) the mind has the ability to act purely spontaneously in a matter unhindered by psychological considerations. Evola thus defines a type of freedom which is pure will, and which can unconditionally to choose both an option and the negation of that option; in other words, the “I” can choose both value and nonvalue as two equally available options. The I thus has an ability to act in a purely spontaneous manner free from existential and psychological deficiency; or rather to acknowledge the existence of this deficiency but render oneself superior to this deficiency and facing it and enduring all its weight. (d) I will later attempt to give a defense of this version of causality. However a mystery remains and that is how to explain the condition of “privation”, that is why the “I” initially does not experience itself as an absolute individual. This privation, however, exists only as a potentiality and has the power to unfold into something greater. This results in a dialectical procedure In which the individual transforms himself into the absolute individual. Thus, a thing is not true because it submits to the law of causality, but a thing is true because it has been WISHED

Remember the Hungarian revolution in the wake of the defeat of Austrai=Hunagry, the political State of the Emperor is WWI. from Wikipedia: In November 1918, Kun returned to Hungary with Soviet support and set up the Party of Communists in Hungary. Adopting Lenin's tactics, he agitated against the government of Mihály Károlyi and achieved great popularity despite being imprisoned. After his release in March 1919, Kun led a successful coup d'état, formed a Communist-Social Democratic coalition government and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Though the de jure leader of the republic was prime minister Sándor Garbai, the de facto power was in the hands of foreign minister Kun, who maintained direct contact with Lenin via radiotelegraph and received direct orders and advice from the Kremlin.[2] The new regime collapsed four months later in the face of Romanian advance and great dissatisfaction among the Hungarian populace.[citation needed] Kun fled to Soviet Russia, where he worked as a functionary in the Communist International bureaucracy as the head of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee from 1920. He organised and actively participated in the Red Terror in Crimea (1920-1921), following which he participated in the 1921 March Action, a failed Communist uprising in Germany. During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, Kun was accused of Trotskyism, arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed in quick succession. He was posthumously rehabilitated by Soviet leadership in 1956, following the death of Joseph Stalin and the De-Stalinization period under Nikita Khrushchev. end Wikipedia Idealists will always end up faction fighting over what the True Ideal is. Idealism is a pillar of class dominated society. Factions were banned by the Bolsheviks (themselves a faction) at the 10th Party Congress. And then, like Idealists, they formed factions, which in turn were murdered by the dominant faction. We have said that the workers must become dialecticians and themselves take care of all their theoretical and practical problems.(2) Those who are concerned with running their own affairs need only appropriate our methods, instead of lapping up the latest rumors about us, and they will become that much more independent from us. [...] SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL 1969 The proletariat are those who are dependent on selling their labour power to an employer in order to make a living. That's wages system of slavery. When the workers unite as a class to emancipate themselves from the wage system and start producing for use with distribution based on need, the proletariat abolishes itself as a class and class dominated society.. However, that has never occurred.

Workers' councils are the form, but what content do they reflect? I think we see what the content was in the Poland, France, Algeria and Hungary of today. Why? I think that about 99% of the socialist/communist and/or anarchist or union newspapers have NEVER mentioned the abolition of wage labour, commodity production/sale and classes as the Sits did in their communications. How can the workers emancipate themselves if they don't know what the solution is. The Sits at least spoke and wrote about those power dynamics before May 68. My view is that the workers can't create the material conditions and make it to the next step of an actually existing social revolution (not just another political revolution) without knowing beforehand why the system operates to enslave them. They may feel it, they may be exuberant about exercising some political power for a while, but they can't consciously pursue it because they have yet to be able to articulate how...."to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class." Unions officially only call for 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. The rank and file agree, even though, as Marx and Engels pointed out more than a century ago that wage labour produces all the wealth of nations, excepting the wealth already existing in 'natural resources'. The point is to challenge that conservative, Idealist slogan about 'fair' wages, but 99% of the left doesn't. The bottom 99% of the left never hammers away at the notions expressed by Marx way back in 1865 when he addressed a gathering of leftist oriented proles: "Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities. "Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages. "Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system." "They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"" So, what do the workers reproduce after the euphoric moments of a revolutionary upheaval? They reproduce conformity with the old social relations of top down power, the negative notion of freedom being dependent on the unfreedom of others who compete with them for dominance. They do not establish, "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." "Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking-and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority." ―Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving We should be asking, as the Sits did, some of the following questions: What are we conforming to? Do we all conform to the same thing? What is this thing? Do we conform to different things depending on how we were brought up, where we were brought up, which culture we were brought up in? Is the need to conform consistent with our need to survive? Can''t that need be effectively addressed from a communist perspective now that we face mega deaths by the end of this century. as the wage system we reproduce operates to spew ever more greenhouse gas into an ecosphere becoming a gas chamber?

"Who is the real ownerr of the Economy?. A classless society means that there is equal political power between all adults. Thus a communist society is a grassroots, democratic, reverse hierarchical association of free human beings where the economy is under common ownership. Engels in 1877. Marx died in 1883: This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognised, forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialisation of great masses of means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of communication are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form also becomes insufficient: the official representative of capitalist society - the state - will ultimately have to *10 undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication - the post office, the telegraphs, the railways. If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution. This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.

As a young Anarchist Situationist were the biggest WANKERS we had to put up with. Yes we have idiots on the left they are called Post-modernists as in Situationists. "Just be outrageous, rebel against the boring", they were ignorant hedonists who now are Trumpists.

very interesting

Interesting as I was just re-reading this, from Marx's 1844 critique of Bruno Bauer and the commodification of everything, which is titled: ON THE JEWISH QUESTION: Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it … The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination. It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable “that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.” … Objectification is the practice of alienation. Just as man, so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egoistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money. full: www.marxists.org/.../works/1844/jewish-question/ MARXISTS.ORG On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx

As we bow to the abstractions we create, we alienate the use of our lives to the powers who control and own our time and the wealth we produce. The Spectacle is the reality of the political dominance of Form over content. We continue to plod on with camera-obscura mindsets thus, the quality of being boring, ordinary, and not original, in a word, 'banal'. Material reality continues to eat away at the perfections projected from the minds of Idealists. We make history, but not without the dead hand of previous abstractions weighing on our minds, not to mention that the ruling ideas of any epoch are ever the ideas of the ruling class. Freedom from this power matrix can only be gotten by the immense majority the bottom 90% wanting to emancipate themselves from a society where 'freedom' is defined negatively, as being based on others' unfreedom. Instead we need to desire to establish a society where the freedom of each is dependent on freedom for all. Apologies for failing to show up to this session. I was out with the gout.

Their SI journals at this point feature many pictures ironically used to illustrate their journals' point - life was not the primary concern of the systems

The urban environment is the site of capital class and dead labour and derive is living experience of it …. the positive and negative moods / events / experiences are both (a) dialectical and opposes desires of derive members to things like no entry signs that prevent access etc. : there is no chance , the smallest details has been planned but they imagine how they would like to use that space instead. Hence urban design of psychogeography - a revolutionary change in perspective from level of citizen /collective

@elizabethjones3865 0 seconds ago For the SI art - the domain of art - was a product of accumulated capital and abolition in dada is a return of that capital and creativity to life … Surrealism offrered strategies for engagement of DESIRE to create autonomous lives, not bourgeois life

Language is historical and re-use expresses a position An alternative one to the original use , thus expresses opposition in being outside of original perspective

My sense is first, collectivity is key. Once you collective drop bourgeois time - of work and profit etc. (society of spectacle on types of time cyclical and spectacular) then as a group you say what you do and don’t like, and how where and why you would like the space in city to be… for example - I don’t like that road there, there are no need for them, I want trams… That is a collective desire expressed to be used in redesign in psychogeography but is also has class and historical resonance because as a refusal it goes against the bourgeois use and is already engaged in struggle, pulling against that dominant use by the collective

Ken, you have been an inspiration and the Savior of this whole genre of philosophy that we few adherents over the years have maximum respect for your life work.

Debord was part of the Lettrist Movement and then split to go on to form the Sits. According to the entry in Wikepedia: Lettrism continued to grow as a movement, becoming less dependent on the work of Isou himself. Maurice Lemaître, Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J. Wolman and Serge Berna joined the group in 1950, with Guy Debord joining in early 1951, after meeting the Lettrists at the 4th Cannes Film Festival.[13] Debord quickly became an important figure in the so-called left wing of the Lettrists, which were more politically active and overtly "dedicated to Marxist teachings and the critique of capitalist societies".[14] In October 1952, while Charlie Chaplin was on an extensive publicity tour for his film Limelight, the Lettrist left wing, led by Debord, disrupted a press conference at the Hôtel Ritz Paris and distributed a pamphlet called “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) through which they espoused their belief that "the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they present themselves in the name of freedom", claimed that the "leaflet was an attack against a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" and that Chaplin was an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune".[15] Isou was an admirer of Chaplin's films and he considered the cinema legend to be undeserving of this attack.[14] The conflict that arose within the Lettrists because of this notorious incident led to Debord and his group becoming the first splinter group that separated from the Lettrists, forming the Letterist International.[14] Five years later, they would join others to form the Situationist International, an artistic and political organization that would go on to become more famous and influential than any of its predecessors by playing a major role in the events of May 1968.[16] This may be of interest: Orson Welles Interview - featuring Isidore Isou who was the more or less dictator of Lettrism. ruclips.net/video/uZayMaC4RLo/видео.html&ab_channel=DjuricaBogosavljev