The commodity can be understood
in its undistorted essence only when it becomes the universal
category of society as a whole. Only in this context does
the reification produced by commodity relations assume
decisive importance both for the objective evolution of
society and for the attitudes that people adopt toward
it, as it subjugates their consciousness to the forms
in which this reification finds expression. . . .
As labor is increasingly rationalized and mechanized,
this subjugation is reinforced by the fact that peoples
activity becomes less and less active and more and more
contemplative.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
35
In the spectacles basic practice of incorporating
into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity
so as to possess them in a congealed form, and of inverting
living values into purely abstract values, we recognize
our old enemy the commodity, which seems at first
glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so
complex and full of metaphysical subtleties.
36
The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society
by intangible as well as tangible things — attains
its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real
world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected
above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves
regarded as the epitome of reality.
37
The world at once present and absent that the spectacle
holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating
all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus
shown for what it is, because its development
is identical to peoples estrangement from each
other and from everything they produce.
38
The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of
spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the
behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a
production system that shuns reality. The commodity form
reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative
is what it develops, and it can develop only within the
quantitative.
39
Despite the fact that this development excludes the qualitative,
it is itself subject to qualitative change. The spectacle
reflects the fact that this development has crossed the
threshold of its own abundance. Although this qualitative
change has as yet taken place only partially in a few local
areas, it is already implicit at the universal level that
was the commoditys original standard — a standard
that the commodity has lived up to by turning the whole
planet into a single world market.
40
The development of productive forces is the unconscious
history that has actually created and altered the living
conditions of human groups the conditions enabling
them to survive and the expansion of those conditions. It
has been the economic basis of all human undertakings. Within
natural economies, the emergence of a commodity sector represented
a surplus survival. Commodity production, which implies
the exchange of varied products between independent producers,
tended for a long time to retain its small-scale craft aspects,
relegated as it was to a marginal economic role where its
quantitative reality was still hidden. But whenever it encountered
the social conditions of large-scale commerce and capital
accumulation, it took total control of the economy. The
entire economy then became what the commodity had already
shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process
of quantitative development. This constant expansion of
economic power in the form of commodities transformed human
labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and
ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve
the initial problem of survival but only in such
a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated
at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies
from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate
struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated
from their liberator. The commoditys independence
has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This
economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed
it into a world dominated by the economy. The pseudonature
within which human labor has become alienated demands that
such labor remain forever in its service; and since
this demand is formulated by and answerable only to itself,
it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects
and endeavors into its own reinforcement. The abundance
of commodities that is, the abundance of commodity
relations amounts to nothing more than an augmented
survival.
41
As long as the economys role as material basis of
social life was neither noticed nor understood (remaining
unknown precisely because it was so familiar), the commoditys
dominion over the economy was exerted in a covert manner.
In societies where actual commodities were few and far between,
money was the apparent master, serving as plenipotentiary
representative of the greater power that remained unknown.
With the Industrial Revolutions manufactural division
of labor and mass production for a global market, the commodity
finally became fully visible as a power that was colonizing
all social life. It was at that point that political economy
established itself as the dominant science, and as the science
of domination.
42
The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded
in totally colonizing social life. Commodification
is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the
world we see is the world of the commodity. Modern economic
production extends its dictatorship both extensively and
intensively. In the less industrialized regions, its reign
is already manifested by the presence of a few star commodities
and by the imperialist domination imposed by the more industrially
advanced regions. In the latter, social space is blanketed
with ever-new layers of commodities. With the second
industrial revolution, alienated consumption has become
just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production.
The societys entire sold labor has become a
total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained
at all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has
to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals
who are completely cut off from the overall operation of
the productive forces. To this end the specialized science
of domination is broken down into further specialties such
as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology,
which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the
process.
43
Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation
political economy considers the proletarian only as
a worker, who only needs to be allotted the
indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and
never considers him in his leisure and humanity,
this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity
abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration
from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly
redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly
implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance
of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like
a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role
as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity
takes charge of the workers leisure and humanity
simply because political economy now can and must dominate
those spheres as political economy. The perfected
denial of man has thus taken charge of all human existence.
44
The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force
people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction
with a survival that expands according to its own laws.
Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never
ceases to include privation. If augmented survival
never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where
it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck
in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot
transcend it.
45
Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern
industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity
system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological
developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must
at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because
labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to
prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of
increasing labor productivity) from reducing societys
total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this
end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into
the tertiary or service sector, reinforcing
the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the
latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need,
in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary
to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.
46
Exchange value could arise only as a representative of
use value, but the victory it eventually won with its own
weapons created the conditions for its own autonomous power.
By mobilizing all human use value and monopolizing its fulfillment,
exchange value ultimately succeeded in controlling use.
Usefulness has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange
value, and is now completely at its mercy. Starting out
like a condottiere in the service of use value, exchange
value has ended up waging the war for its own sake.
47
The constant decline of use value that has always
characterized the capitalist economy has given rise to a
new form of poverty within the realm of augmented survival
alongside the old poverty which still persists, since
the vast majority of people are still forced to take part
as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the systems
ends and each of them knows that he must submit or die.
The reality of this blackmail the fact that even
in its most impoverished forms (food, shelter) use value
now has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented
survival accounts for the general acceptance of the
illusions of modern commodity consumption. The real consumer
has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this
materialized illusion, and the spectacle is its general
expression.
48
Use value was formerly understood as an implicit aspect
of exchange value. Now, however, within the upside-down
world of the spectacle, it must be explicitly proclaimed,
both because its actual reality has been eroded by the overdeveloped
commodity economy and because it serves as a necessary pseudo-justification
for a counterfeit life.
49
The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an
abstract general equivalent of all commodities. But whereas
money has dominated society as the representation of universal
equivalence the exchangeability of different goods
whose uses remain uncomparable the spectacle is the
modern complement of money: a representation of the commodity
world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for
what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle
is money one can only look at, because in it all
use has already been exchanged for the totality of abstract
representation. The spectacle is not just a servant of pseudo-use,
it is already in itself a pseudo-use of life.
50
With the achievement of economic abundance, the
concentrated result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting
all reality to the appearances that are now that labors
primary product. Capital is no longer the invisible center
governing the production process; as it accumulates, it
spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible
objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.
51
The economys triumph as an independent power at the
same time spells its own doom, because the forces it has
unleashed have eliminated the economic necessity
that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing
that necessity with a necessity for boundless economic development
can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human
needs (now scarcely met) with an incessant fabrication of
pseudoneeds, all of which ultimately come down to the single
pseudoneed of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy.
But that economy loses all connection with authentic needs
insofar as it emerges from the social unconscious
that unknowingly depended on it. Whatever is conscious
wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But
once it is freed, it too falls to ruin (Freud).
52
Once society discovers that it depends on the economy,
the economy in fact depends on the society. When the subterranean
power of the economy grew to the point of visible domination,
it lost its power. The economic Id must be replaced
by the I. This subject can only arise out of society,
that is, out of the struggle within society. Its existence
depends on the outcome of the class struggle that is both
product and producer of the economic foundation of history.
53
Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are
the same project, the project that in its negative form
seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers
direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The
opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle,
where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its
own making.
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