Thank heavens, soon you will be out of the hands of your rebellious subjects [...] On that matter, my Cousin, I share all of your sentiments, as you see, and pray to God that He maintains you; but I can't approve of your repugnance for the kind of government that some call "representative" and I call "recreational." There's nothing in the world as diverting, not to mention as useful, for a king [...] The representative [kind of government] suits me wonderfully [...] There is money in abundance. Ask my nephew, Angouleme: here we count by the billions or, to tell the truth, by my word, we don't count at all, since we have deputies who do it for us, a majority agreement, as one calls it; there are expenses, but they are small [...] I'm sure that a hundred votes doesn't cost me in one year what Mme. de Cayla [1] costs me in a month [...] Before my trip to England, I truly thought as you do; I didn't at all like the representative; but here I've seen what it is [...] All these words, liberty, publicity, representation, shouldn't frighten you. They all work to our benefit, the product is immense, the danger nothing, although one says so [...]"
(This extract, here translated into Italian for the first time, comes from a secret letter that Louis XVIII sent to Ferdinand VII in August 1823; this letter fell into the hands of one of Canning's secret agents at Cadix, and its publication caused a controversy in England -- cf. The Morning Chronicle, October 1823.) [2]
What constitutes the most notable trait of our century isn't the fact that capitalism, in a reiterated and bloody fashion, has tried the workers of all industrialized countries, and also in certain countries in which the economy is predominantly agrarian (which are not at all unexpected phenomena, save for those who underestimated the warnings carried by the first, unfinished revolutions of the last century); nor the fact that serious economic and monetary crises (seriously inconvenient, but inevitable in all economically complex systems) have cyclically shaken capitalism's internal stability; nor the fact that errors made in the management of power in all countries have been numerous and costly (a fact that is inseparable from all historic forms of domination).
On the contrary, what appears notable to us in our century is the fact that the capitalist system has been able to survive; that, everywhere and across different and even apparently contradictory manifestations, it is the only form of domination in the world capable of not only overcoming its crises, but also strengthening itself to the point that it can successfully extend and impose its modes of production, exchange and distribution of commodities upon the entire planet: even in the Communist countries, the economic-technological system of modern capitalism long ago won over the dominant bureaucratic class.
For the first time in universal history, a particular system has been imposed everywhere by annihilating the archaic forms of domination that have been opposed to it, while, at the same time, by successfully confronting the questions posed by new social forces, such as the class of industrial workers and salaried workers in general, [3] who are necessary for the production and consumption of commodities, but have a tendentious disposition, in the name of their own "emancipation," to fight against the world in which they work and live.
It appeared necessary to us, and fitting, as well, that, at the beginning of a Report devoted to the critique of the current management of our system, to recognize that system's unquestionable historic successes and objective merits (which we see at risk of being compromised in the near future due to current errors). It is important to know clearly what to conserve when, here and now, [4] we are in combat, and what we have to lose, at this moment when we must decide how to comport ourselves and which weapons we should use, if we are going to survive the very grave crisis that is the object of our worries and the origin of this Report.
According to Thomas Carlyle, the essential meaning of the French Revolution [5] was the demand for truth: the Revolution was the historic proclamation of the fact that lies, upon which one had, until then, founded all harmoniously organized social hierarchies, would thenceforth be rejected. If this idea has proven correct over the last two centuries, we have known how to avoid the majority of the consequences that were harmful to us.
All forms of society that have been historically dominant have been imposed upon the masses, who must be made to work, either by force or illusion. The biggest success of our modern civilization is the fact that an incomparable power of illusion has been placed at the service of our leaders. But this is also a defect that becomes truly menacing at moments in which our power is in serious crisis; because this illusion must never be shared by the elite leadership that produces and is served by it. Cumulative and speedy economic development, despite the positive technological upheavals that have always accompanied it as its corollaries, has resulted in an extreme concentration in and a nearly absolute control over the totality of production and distribution. That this control has not possessed a strategy matching its immense means is, unfortunately, what undermines the current state of the world; and we will return to it. But, without a doubt, it is economic development itself that has demanded and brought about the separation and passivity of the agents of production to previously unimaginable degrees; this is the same phenomenon that one can read about in the chapters of social sciences, under the figures of the "consumer" and the "citizen."
And so was born, as a natural product of our stage of historical development, a social necessity for contemplation, of which Bergson in his time called, in Creative Evolution, "a luxury":[6] a contemplation that a certain, privileged element of technology dedicated to the creation and diffusion of images opportunely positions as an indication of satisfaction. Reason can't abandon someone of good faith: the objective and measurable success of our society is entirely economic and technological. There isn't any more to see than what this society produces. Certain people ask us, dawdling upon a sentimentalism that is completely irrelevant to the subject: "Is it necessary that one should also love this form of production?" But the question is vain; if one admits, by virtue of posing such a question -- from no matter which transcendant point of view -- that a real society would be a complete absurdity, then the question is vain to the extent that it has already found its answer, as soon as it was posed in terms of real society, that is to say, in terms of social class. One must ask, who must also love this specific form of production? Those who appropriate surplus value necessarily love it. As for the others, why would they love it? Production in itself appears to them as a simple necessity, and what is good about it, is what is real about it. As for the debate about which particular form this necessity should assume, the capitalists have nothing on their side that is more defensible than any of the others, and so can't take for granted the advantages they have gained. One blushes to appeal to such truisms, when the excessive hypocrisy of the social thought of our era has done so much shuffling and hiding of the cards that, always on the cheat, it ends up incapable of cheating intelligently. Our workers don't in any way decide on what they produce. And, given that what they have decided to produce is what they are, is this fortunate? Undoubtedly it is and, among an infinite variety of conceivable responses, a single truth is constant: it is what the workers don't produce that suits the society we manage. And because, like us, the workers aren't dazzled by the good fortune of a multinational corporation extending its organizational chart or by the upswing in the growth of sales of war planes to countries in the Middle East, and because the workers find themselves deprived of absolutely all real compensation, it is necessary that one distributes to them some other form of compensation; and this corresponds with the massive diffusion of images for contemplation, which no longer constitues the "luxury" of which Bergson spoke, but a contemplative necessity, diversions [7] as comparable to Roman circuses [8] as to those of Pascal.
Despite the importance, even gravity, of what we critique here as perilous defects in our power, one must not lose sight of all that is subordinate to its resounding success. One defends a social order as long as it is living. And, if bourgeois society doesn't win a victory of universal significance, we won't be here to discuss its defense, because this society will be as dead as the Empire of Darius. [9]
If, as a healthy propaedeutic to current struggles, we remind ourselves that, for a hundred years, the world risked everything to give us a brief delay, then we can measure the importance of the reprive that we have obtained and that has, moreover, permitted us to execute a profound transformation all of the conditions of this strategy -- a transformation that we can thus define: the deployment of a new terrain of battle, in which one finds a disoriented adversary who increasingly approaches recognition and is thus forced to advance against the defensive powers that we have cleverly arranged.
One can say that, after the frightening revolutions of 1848, the 19th century discovered political economy. Society divided into classes was put into question: the critique of it seemed inextricably tied to the progress of knowledge, most notably among the working class. But if the ruling class feared (with some apparent legitimacy) the instruction of the popular masses and universal suffrage, it defended itself from the standpoint of the past, with a continually accentuated attitude of retreat; modern industry required instruction (a summary one, at the least), and so, as it spread, it necessarily involved universal suffrage. The bourgeoisie -- reminding itself that the progress of the Enlightenment had accompanied its march to political power -- feared that the same route would be taken by the proletarians. By luck, there were those who believed in the identification of the respective destinies of the two classes; and each deceived itself in this, because the two revolutionary projects are so different that they couldn't serve the same interests, nor could they use analogous means. Thus, in vain were fears of one and the hopes of the other.
In the course of the [19th] century, the development and expansion of economic and political power changed the face of the world, and went well beyond any past revolution. What are the permanent characteristics and effects of these changes? What was destroyed and what was created? It seems to us that the moment has come to define and formulate the distinctive traits of the new reality, because today we find ourselves at the precise point from which to evaluate the results of this series of upheavals. We are sufficiently distanced from its debut to be sheltered from the passions of those who made it, and yet sufficiently close to them to be able to distinguish the essential elements. It will soon be difficult to make an objective judgment of this matter, because these immense historical changes have been able, as a result of their successes, to erase the causes that have produced them, and so are these changes are nearly incomprehensible at the very time that they are successfully being made. We shall not search for some hollow consolation in or pride for the successes of past times, but rather to seize again -- in the midst of a new war, suddenly rekindled over the entire social field -- the secret of our victories in the old campaigns, so as to consciously use them in battles that we are now called upon to wage: in this era of old social war, what are our decisive battles, our Salamine and our Marengo? [10]
We can distinguish five of them. [11]
First, we have in a certain manner refuted the claim of Carlyle, by strengthening, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to a degree never seen before in history, the progress of the lie in politics, its contents growing hand-in-hand with the proliferation of its means. The lie has been developed by the "radical" bourgeoisie and its journalistic and parliamentary practices, which have in turn been adopted from the workers movement as it has been organized by Socialist parties. The process that started the parliamentary representation of the citizenry is naturally completed and considerably reinforced by the success of the unionized representation of the workers -- it is true that all representation plays our game. What one commonly calls brainwashing, [12] the propaganda of new falsehoods, diffused day after day by all governments during the first World War, later crossed a threshold beyond which one didn't believe, in normal times, literate citizens could be taken; the saying of Cardinal Carata, made at the time of the Inquisition, remains true today: As far as the people can be deceived, that is as far as one should go. [13] Fascism, then, was a pathological excess of unlimited lies, a bad remedy for a time of crisis; it is once again fitting to note that fascism completely failed because of this defect, on the terrain of its means of propaganda, to the point that Hitler [14] could theorize the fact that "the masses [...] will more easily be deceived by a big lie than by a small one." The publicity of the modern market exploits these possibilities, but in a more rational manner, and has proved its excellence as an autonomous power, though naturally we have critiqued the unilateral results produced by this autonomy, which too often doesn't take into consideration the elevated interests of the totality of our economic order. And, without any doubt, the most profitable result of this period was the identification of Communism with the totalitarian order that reigns in Russia and subsequently among Communism's partisans in other countries, who have for decades believed that Lenin and Stalin abolished capitalism. It pleases us to remember, many years before the [publication of an Italian] translation of Marx's Grundrisse, that our friend Piero Sraffa, an eminent economist, noted the passage in this book that decides the question: "To advocate letting salaried work continue to exist while, at the same time, suppressing capital is a claim that contradicts and destroys itself." Thus the social revolution desired in the 19th century has, today, effectively become utopian, because there is no longer any place in global society in which it can affirm what it can truly be.
Second, we have been present during a grandiose reinforcement of the power of the State, as economic power, political authority and always better-refined organisms of surveillance. One can say that, in this regard, the dream of the bourgeois economists of the 18th century, which drew hostility from the aristocrats of the time, has been realized, but under another aspect. The State formulated in theory by these economists didn't simply command the nation, but also formation and education according to certain modes; according to Turgot, Quesnay, Letronne, Mercier de La Riviere and many others, it was the task of the State to shape the spirits of its citizens, following a certain model that the State itself has proposed; to inculcate in the citizens certain ideas and sentiments that were judged useful and necessary for overcoming the obstacles that social reality opposed to its action. The State, said the economists of this era, must reform political and civil institutions and the conditions of the lives of the citizenry, so as to transform them as well. Bodeau summarized these ideas by advancing the prophecy, very radical for its time, according to which "the State makes men as it wishes." [15] In the last century, a very cultured aristocrat, but too turned toward the past, accused the economists of creating through imagination
"an immense social power that isn't only larger than all those who exist under its eyes; it also differs in origin and character. It doesn't proceed directly from God; it doesn't draw its origin from tradition; it is impersonal; it doesn't invoke the King but the State [...] This democratic despotism abolishes all hierarchy in society, all class boundaries, all fixed rank; a people composed of individuals similar and completely equal; this confused mass recognizes only one legitimate soveriegn (the State), but one carefully stripped of all faculties that would permit it to lead itself or even surveill its government on its own."
The economists defended themselves against these accusations by invoking public education: "Despotism is impossible," Quesnay said, "if the nation is enlightened." [16] The demands that he advanced were, in effect, the better founded: before the French Revolution, Letronne noted that, "For centuries, the nation has been governed by false principles; all seems to have been made by chance." That which they foresaw, we now see. [17] It is perhaps fitting to emphasize that contemporaries of these economists, going in the same direction, advanced -- a century before Marxism -- some instances of the current of thought that, later on, came to be called "Socialist." For example, in Morelly's Code of Nature, one already finds the doctrine of the necessity of reinforcing the power of the State and the establishment of "the right to work, absolute equality, uniformity of all, the mechanical regularity of movement in individuals." It is surprising to see that, in 1775, while Quesnay was founding his school, Morelly was advocating what, today, is on track to be fully realized everywhere: "The towns," one reads in Code of Nature, "will be built according to the same plan; all the buildings of similar usage will look the same [...] Children will be taken away from their families and raised in common, at the expense of the State, in uniform fashion." [18]
The centralization of the State effected by the bourgeoisie and the Socialist bureaucracies is the product of the same necessity and terrain; and each of these powers compares with the other the fruit it has cultivated from the same shrub. The State is becoming the protagonist that plans and programs, with more or less efficiency, the life of modern societies. Today, the State is the palladium [19] of commodity society, which converts its enemies into proprietors, as is happening in Russia and China, for example. And so we aren't afraid to return to the old and noble ways of commodity society: all the grandeur of the world was produced by markets and enlightened societies. Art, philosophy, scientific and technical knowledge, political liberty in really practicable modalities -- all this didn't appear in history, or didn't last long, until the advent of the merchant bourgeoisie and within the exact limits of its local and universal domination.
Third, the isolation and thus the separation of individuals has clearly been perfected. [20] All that could more or less directly disturb the tranquility of the social order, that could re-unite particular communities, guilds, neighborhoods in old towns or villages, even the habitual clienteles of cafes and churches, has been nearly completely dissolved by the putting in place of new conditions of everyday life and a new urbanistic landscape. One could say that, henceforth, each aims at finding itself in direct contact with the powerful center of the system that controls even the details of its existence; and this center can appear successively or simultaneously in its capacity as coercive governmental authority that programs the industrial products that will only be available on the market and selects the images available for contemplation. Thus the masses consume and watch what they want from a pre-programmed diversity; but they can only watch what's there to be seen.
Fourth, one has been present at an unprecedented increase in the power of the economy and industry. The modern economy has successfully assigned a value and a price to everything, permitting everyone to consume the commodities that industry has produced. One can say that, to the extent that the economy overwhelms the primordial needs of the population, it is able to offer what's superfluous; what was once superfluous becomes necessary, and in the double sense that, subjectively, it is felt as such by the consumer and, objectively, it constitutes a necessity for the growth of the industries that produce these specific commodities. At the moment that the citizen as consumer freely accedes to the superfluous, all that was appreciated by other cultures and was indispensible to guaranteeing their very poor and precarious existences has today become useless and has disappeared. There exists nothing that hasn't been produced industrially, that is to say, for economic profit: everything from nourishment to the diversions of free time and vacations.
We don't want to deny that this has caused a number of formerly unknown inconveniences, such as pollution-caused sicknesses, etc. But, in every case, this same scientific progress, for example, the science of pharmaceuticals, can provide industrially produced antidotes that can be sold as commodities to the affected populations.
As an attribute of its sovereignty, the economic system creates a gradually increasing distance between changing realities and the words and feelings that no longer correspond to appearances. Popular notions, held for generations, no longer correspond to the totally different realities that have been transformed by the most modern industrial techniques. When one speaks of work, vacations, meat, influenza, [and] home, [one must realize that] economic and State power controls all of the elements that allow one to recognize the modifications that have been introduced into these realities; sometimes they experiment with modifications, allowing chance or pre-set plans to determine what happens. And yet, all this time, people continue to speak of things that have disappeared, using the old words, even in debates of opinions on electoral platforms.
Fifth and finally -- and this result is like the concentration of the ones already enumerated -- the vertiginously growing complexity of human society's daily interventions into all aspects of the production of life, and the replacement of all elements that had been held as natural by a new factor that one calls "artificial," fully justify the undivided authority of the experts who construct or correct the new economic and ecological equilibria beyond which no one can live. Today, one must be an expert on the State and the economy; because, elsewhere, there is neither terrain nor diploma. Thus, the existing hierarchy is forced to fully develop secrecy and control, even when it doesn't want to. But then again, all hierarchies in history have wanted secrecy, even though it obviously wasn't in the interests of all. The double advantage that we have derived from this state of affairs is this: discontent with our society doesn't have any meaning at the very moment that it is more widespread than ever before and touches upon every detail. Today, only total refusal -- which is always difficult to formulate and put into practice -- has a meaning that is menacing for our social order. And this menance will be attentuated to the extent that such a refusal -- deprived of an exact understanding of the totality and little disposed to envision the repercussions of real historical confrontations -- is made to look foolish or contents itself with some kind of misleading, ideological illusion.
There, in brief, is how modern capitalism finds itself capable of making the whole population participate in the liberty constructed for it by this society. And there is cause to rejoice, because this enterprise has never been attempted previously and there were bad forebodings at the beginning. Perhaps a more lucid comprehension of history -- neglected for a century to the profit of economic studies that were intellectually badly disengaged from theology -- would have inspired more confidence in the elite, which certainly didn't exactly forsee the appearance of the particular forms of domination that we have sketched out, but could have deduced them by speculating upon the general line of evolution, which might have consciously hastened useful formulations. One might have been able to prevent a certain number of inconveniences from which we still suffer, such as the regressive mutation of capitalism in Russia. We reaffirm: despite the often legitimate but many times exaggerated worries that the subject has provoked in nearly all countries, capitalism must be democratic, because it can't be anything else. At first glance, but also under attentive and keen study, history undeniable shows that capitalism, in every place that it's been, has always grown into a democratic society: in the precise strata of society that lives a democratic life, and wants and needs it. To deploy itself fully and completely, to transform everything into commodities, and to incessantly renew the totality of commodities, it has been necessary to give the population a choice in which capialism has fixed the terms. One must choose between two deputies, since one chooses between two equivalent commodities. Those who remember fascism, who know how badly State capitalism is managed by the totalitarian bureaucracies of the East, or who consider the permanent atrophy of development of the merchant class in ancient oriental despotism, find proof of this axiom in its contrary.[21]
Those who don't understand the necessity of living free, simply don't have the taste for being; and it is necessary to renounce trying to bring sentience to mediocre spirits that have never known this sublime taste. The uncrossable limits that permit democratic liberty are its safeguards, and are the reality that is imposed on it. One can, however, conclude that the people have been more interested in the concrete reforms enacted by democratic capitalism than in the multitude of sermons in favor of an abstract and complete "liberty," a power than no one has ever seen because it has never been realized. One must understand the effective reality of democracy, without being frightened by or enthusiastic about the monotonous illusions concerning it. No sensible person would deny that, ever since its admirable appearance in history, participation in the political conduct of democracy has been a domain reserved for a class of rich merchants and proprietors, in Athens in the 5th century as in Florence is the 14th. We see nothing different in the famous year 1793 or since then -- except for the fact that the dominant class is currently much less well-served by the always larger numbers of people to whom it delegates the tasks of political administration; and nowhere as scandalously as in Italy, where this roguish and incompetent staff of domestic servants burns the toast and steals small change from their master's pockets and drawers. As for the other half, well-known in democratic republics, we want to say that the always-resurgent excesses of the infinite pretensions of the common people are very clearly the opposite of this democracy. The proof lies in the fact that, without delay, they always lose. But we are at a moment of world history in which real democracy, achieved in several cities, has succumbed under the weight of its pretensions and without impeding the general growth of capitalism, again sheltered within its anterior social relations. Capitalism has seized the world for its own account. The democratic order must be defended without retreating, [defended] "not only with the spear, but with the hatchet" [22] because at the moment democracy is defeated, capitalism will also definitely succumb.
Of those spirits and hearts that are discouraged because, for decades, they mistook the end of the troubles of a particular time for the end of the times of troubles, we ask, "Is it necessary to be resigned to the fact that all that has been successfully conquered will endlessly be placed in question? Is the crisis in society destined to last?" Coolly, we respond, "Yes." It is necessary to face head-on the oldest of truths, "the most true cause," as Thucydides called it, that this social war is unfortunately but inevitably permanent. Our world is not made for the workers, nor for the the other strata of poor salaried workers, who should all be placed in the simple category of "proletarians." But every day, our world is made by them, under our command. Here is the fundamental contradiction under which we live. It is always there, under the cinders, even on the most calm of days, the spark that can rekindle all of the masses' insatiable passions and limitless and unchecked hopes. This is why we never have the right to abstain from being intelligent for too long.
All notes and comments [in brackets] by NOT BORED! except where noted:
[1] Zoe de Cayla was Louis XVIII's mistress.
[2] As Sanguinetti points out in his December 1975 statement, "the letter attributed to Louis XVIII is in fact a celebrated literary fake by Paul-Louis Courier."
[3] The salariat (the proletariat of salaried workers).
[4] Latin in original.
[5] Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, A History, in two volumes, 1837.
[6] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907.
[7] French in original.
[8] Latin in original.
[9] Darius was a Persian Emperor who ruled from 522 BC to 486 BC.
[10] Darius (footnote [9]) suffered a crucial naval defeat by the Greeks at the Salamine Island. In 1800, Napoleon won an important battele in Marengo, Italy.
[11] Compare this list with the characteristics of the "integrated spectacle" adumbrated in Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988); see also Arnold Toynbee, "The Chief Features of the Revolution," in The Industrial Revolution (1881).
[12] French in original.
[13] Latin in original.
[14] Censor has made a mistake: it was Joseph Goebbels, not Adolph Hitler, was made this remark.
[15] French in original.
[16] French in original.
[17] "they" are the Physiocrats, a group of highly influential French Enlightenment thinkers who in the 1760s surrounded the French court physician, Francois Quesnay. They proposed to advance the interests of agriculture by adopting a system of economic freedom (laissez-faire).
[18] French in original.
[19] A protected, safe place. Cf. the ancient Greek goddess Athena, whose name in Latin was Pallas.
[20] Cf. "Separation Perfected" in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
[21] Latin in original.
[22] Note by Guy Debord: quotation from Herodotus. [This same remark is cited by the Situationist Situational in Investigations without a Guidebook, Internationale Situationniste #10, March 1966.]