Critique of the Situationist International (1)
| Ideology and the Wage System |
| Capitalism transforms life into the money necessary for living. One tends to do any particular thing towards an end other than that implied by the content of the activity. The logic of alienation : one is an other; the wage system makes one foreign to what one does, to what one is, to other people. |
| Now, human activity does not produce only goods and relationships, but also representations. Man is not homo faber : the reduction of human life to the economy (since taken up by official marxism) dates from the enthronement of capital. All activity is symbolic : it creates, at one and the same time, products and a vision of the world. The layout of a primitive village : |
"summarizes and assures the relations between Man and the universe, between society and the supernatural world, between the living and the dead." (Levi-Strauss). |
| The fetishism of commodities is merely the form taken by this symbolism in societies dominated by exchange. |
| As capital tends to produce everything as capital, to parcelize everything so as to recompose it with the help of market relations, it also makes of representation a specialized sector of production. Stripped of the means of their material existence, wage-workers are also stripped of the means of producing their ideas, which are produced by a specialized sector (whence the role of the "intellectuals", a term introduced in France by the Manifesto of the [dreyfusite] Intellectuals, 1898). The proletarian receives these representations (ideas, images, implicit associations, myths) as he receives from capital the other aspects of his life. Schematically speaking, the nineteenth century worker produced his ideas (even reactionary ones) at the cafe, the bar or the club, while today's worker sees his on television - a tendency which it would certainly be absurd to extrapolate to the point of reducing to it all of reality. |
| Marx defined ideology as the substitute for a real but impossible change : the change is lived at the level of the imaginary. Modern man is in this situation as extended to every realm. He no longer transforms anything except into images. He travels so as to rediscover the stereotype of the foreign country; loves so as to play the role of the virile lover or the tender beloved etc. Deprived of labor (transformation of environment and self) by wage-labor, the proletarian lives the "spectacle" of change. |
| The present-day wage-worker does not live in "abundance" in relation to the nineteenth-century worker who lived in "poverty". The wage-worker does not simply consume objects, but reproduces the economic and mental structures which weigh on him. It is because of this, contrary to the opinion of Invariance, [1] that he cannot free himself of these representations except by suppressing their material basis. He lives in a community of semiotics which force him to continue : materially (credit), ideologically and psychologically (this community is one of the few available). One does not only consume signs : the constraints are as much, and first of all, economic (bills to be paid, etc.). Capital rests on the production and sale of objects. That these objects also function as signs (and sometimes as that above all) is a fact, but this never annuls their materiality. Only intellectuals believe themselves to be living in a world made purely of signs. [2] |
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[1] Translator's footnote :
Invariance : journal published by a group which split from the International Communist Party,
itself the most dogmatic and voluntarist by-product of the "Bordiguist" Italian left.
After several years of obscure, though occasionally brilliant theoretical involutions, Invariance's
editor Jacques Camatte arrived at the position that capital has "escaped the law of
value" and that therefore the proletariat has disappeared. For a presentation in English of
his views, see The Wandering of Humanity published by Black and Red, Detroit.
[John Gray note : A number of translated articles by Camatte including The Wandering of Humanity are available at the time of writing in "This World We Must Leave and Other Essays" (ed. Alex Trotter) (Autonomedia, New York, 1995) See also the links for Camatte on this site] |
| [2] Translator's footnote : The term "sign" is used in structuralist writing to mean a signifier (representation) that has become separated from what it originally signified (a phenomenon in the world). A "sign" thus implies a representation which refers only to itself, i.e. is "tautological". One example of a "sign" would be the credit extended in ever greater quantities to bankrupt nations by large banks, credit which cannot possibly be repaid : it is a representation of commodities which will never be produced.) |