The Society of the Spectacle

What is at stake in this first chapter is the question of the alienated existence of human beings under the capitalist mode of production. For Debord, the separation that is perfected and referenced in this chapter’s title is a separation between the representation of the concrete lives of individuals and the actuality of those very same lives. Additionally, says Debord, this separation is termed as “the Spectacle” not because oppression today operates by way of images. Rather, the fact that individuals are exploited under capitalism is exacerbated by the fact that the very same individuals think themselves to be free. It is this doubling of the primary economic alienation at the social and political level that leads Debord to diagnose the quality of life as it’s lived in the era after World War II as being perfectly separated.

For Debord, this contemporary form of alienation that characterizes life in postwar capitalist economies is alienated from itself to the extent that all aspects of an individual’s life are structured according to the socially necessary labor time required for the production of commodities: “[…] the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time” (Section 11).

This fact of living according to the requirements of production ultimately leads to a situation where individuals no longer live for themselves but for the economy as a whole. Hence, Debord writes that the Spectacle is “the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living” (Section 2), since one no longer lives for themselves but for the sake of the continued expansion of the economy: “[The Spectacle] is no more than the economy developing for itself” (Section 16). For Debord, not only does Marx’s insight regarding the division of society into two classes—proletariat and bourgeoisie—continue to be proven correct in terms of the current organization of society, the problem has multiplied. Not only is the problem one of the worker’s failure to identify with their social position as the sole source of economic value in society; today, workers have increasingly identified with “the dominant images of need” that are represented by the world of advertising and mass communication: “the more [the worker] accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires” (Section 30). In the society of the spectacle, not only are we alienated from how society produces commodities, we are also alienated from the means by which we produce and reproduce our daily lives.

This chapter deals with the commodity and what it represents within capitalist society. Debord begins by arguing that commodities essentially represent a certain quantity of labor that has congealed in the form of an object. Debord mentions Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism,” which is defined as the “intangible as well as tangible things” (Section 36), with the intangible aspect of the commodity being the number of hours of labor that went into making the product while the tangible aspect is the commodity itself, and its material properties.

Debord states that economies where the commodity is the main unit of production and consumption (i.e. capitalist economies) differ in kind from previous historical economic forms because the production of commodities is no longer aimed at the satisfaction of human necessities and is geared toward endless accumulation of wealth and profit. With capitalist economies, it is the quantitative metric of ever-increasing accumulation that becomes the measure of a successful or unsuccessful cycle of production.

Debord writes that “economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development,” giving rise to a situation where “the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining” (Section 51) the ever-increasing expansion of capitalist production. Thus, individuals in a capitalist society are condemned to buy into a “real illusion” (Section 47)—the illusion that what individuals are selling their labor for is the satisfaction of basic necessities, when in reality individuals earn a wage in exchange for their participation in the expansion of increased capital accumulation. In this way, the economy of the society of the spectacle is revealed to serve interests other than those of human necessity.

In this chapter, Debord outlines his analysis of the coincidence between a globally-integrated world market (i.e. capitalism) and an ever-growing discrepancy between classes. Additionally, Debord provides an analysis of the limitations of the political and bureaucratic functions of individuals within global capitalism.

Regarding the former, Debord argues that what ultimately brings people together from across the globe is also that which produces and reproduces their unfreedom and economic inequality:

[T]he unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle is the mask of the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production rests [...] That which creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete non-liberty (Section 72).

Regarding the role of politicians and bureaucrats, Debord says each role is essentially limited in its power and is ultimately subservient to the demands of the market in the final analysis:

[B]ureaucratic property itself is concentrated in the sense that the individual bureaucrat relates to the ownership of the global economy only through an intermediary, the bureaucratic community, and only as a member of this community (Section 64).

For Debord, it is because classes remain divided in the false unity of the market, and because politicians remain powerless to ultimately resolve the problem of economic inequality, that the capitalist market is said to be the expression of all of society’s capacities, while simultaneously being the concrete realization of the fact of the fundamental absence of freedom as a condition of everyday life.