Eleutherianism

A Suicidal Man, A Suicidal Man, et Marxism-Leninism

This will be expanded and rephrased later. Not a fan of it.
The spectacle is a social relation mediated by images, and it is most notably alienation (estrangement) present within the capitalist mode of production in an advanced form. Let me reiterate; the spectacle must not be reduced to simply a collection of images or the general concept of media - the idea of the spectacle is rather social relations mediated by images. With this mediation, social life has been reduced. Reduced to continuous cycles of passive consumption, and passive observation, rather than active cosumption/observation we religiously worship capitalism for providing. Why is the spectacle an advanced form of alienation? It is because of its abstraction of social relations into representations which mediate lived experience, through the commodity; the production of goods for exchange rather than for consumption, which is eternally present throughout capitalist societies transforms social relations into alienated relations between things. Through the spectacle, not only labour is alienated - human interaction itself has too suffered this alienation at the terror of the commodity. So, in summary, I think we can best describe the society of the spectacle as a society in which all social relations are mediated through images and, of course, the commodity. The consequence of the society of the spectacle is the detachment of ourselves from our direct experiences, presenting us with a life of passivity. The spectacle is special in that sense that it doesn't just alienate labor, but alienates life itself. (Yes I know that was a lot of repetition, fuck you and whatever football team you support..)

The concept of the spectacle can be drawn back to Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, as part of his social analysis of the capitalist mode of production. You probably already know this but commodity fetishism is that way in which the social relations within production appear as relations between commodities rather than between people, alienating labourer from their labour. Commodity fetishism obscures the social relations which produce the commodity, giving the commodities an appearingly independent, intrinsic value independent of the socially necessary labour time for their production. The spectacle is rampant and mad fetishism, fetishism to the extreme, whatever you may title it - it is commodity fetishism applied to an expanded idea of the commodity - social life is a commodity, experience is a commodity. The spectacle turns all aspects of our existence into something to be exchanged, or represented through imagery. In this fashion, the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor in capitalist society has evolved into the alienation of the individual from their own life under the society of the spectacle. Alienation has escaped the workplace.

Now then - Mark Fisher, my favorite suicide man, not to be confused with the best cigarette-smoking suicide man. I believe this idea of a passive experience present within the situationist's theory can be tied to Fisher's theory of capitalist realism. They of course share initial connections as they are both critiques of capitalist domination over social life, but digging deeper is necessary. Fisher speaks of the ideologically pervasive frontier of capitalism, where capitalism presents itself as the only viable economic system, whilst the situationists speak of the society of the spectacle where capital holds domination over social life. Two separate but connected frontiers. We can say that through the spectacle, capitalism reinforces its own legitimacy (this capitalist realism) by shaping how people perceive reality (as with the case of the fetishism of commodities), making it appear as if the capitalist mode of production is not just dominant but natural and inevitable. (like how business is seen as natural and obvious through business ontology.) The spectacle is a sociocultural as well as an ideological structure which supports capitalist realism, upholding the capitalist mode of production, and turning us into mere passive observers of what could be our own life. Both capitalist realism and the spectacle are able to naturalise alienation to the herd. There is no more political imagination, we cannot free our desire, we have lost our future through the eternalisation of this miserable present. Lost futures are futures that could have been, but the society of the spectacle has crippled reality.

Like passivity seen in modern capitalist society, Marxism-Leninism, capitalism's "only" viable, yet evil alternative, centralises state power in the hands of a vanguard party. This centralisation leads to a detachment from the masses in Marxist-Leninist regimes, where the proletariat had been reduced to a spectator in its own dictatorship. This is not the big, bad problem of Stalinism albeit. The true problem of Stalinism lies in the continuation of commodity production. Rather than dismantling the capitalist mode of production through the end of commodity production, marxism-leninism continues commodity production, allowing commodity fetishism to linger. Under Marxism-Leninism, social relations continued to be obscured by the commodification of life, this time in the name of communism. The vanguard party truly becomes a problem when rather than acting as the liberator of the proletariat, it instead maintains capitalist structures, it maintains State Capitalism. The centrally planned capitalist system forces production quotas meaning much like capitalism it alienates workers from the products of their labour, reducing the proletariat experience to one of being a spectator, disattached from your own reality. Marxism-Leninism remains a system of spectacular alienation.