"Such inactivity, however, is by no means emancipated from productive activity: it remains in thrall to that activity, in an uneasy and worshipful subjection to production's needs and results; indeed it is itself a product of the rationality of production. There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. So what is referred to as "liberation from work," that is, increased leisure time, is a liberationneitherwithinlaboritselfnorfrom theworldlaborhasbroughtintobeing."
Where the fuck is the justification for this? Is this the typical Marxist claim that reaping the benefits of the system solidifies it's grasp over us?
>fantasizing about leisure without also having to do any work I mean, Debord could go starve on a hillside any time he wants. It's not like outside capitalism you cease having to work for goods.
Isaac Torres
Who's attacking reality more: Debord or the spectacle
Ethan Smith
I think the main idea is that as long as the profit motive and the idea of productivity exists you can never be free from the pressure to consume more and more and be more and more "efficient" even in your spare time.
Gavin Allen
>he thinks there is an outside of capitalism
That is one of Debord's main points. He thinks the idea of productivity has taken on a life of its own and brought all of humanity under its yoke.
Ayden Gomez
I get the point, but I mean in terms of ancient past and the imaginary communist future. That paragraph is meaningless when you realize the masses never have been able to and never will possibly be able to just chill all the time and get all they need.
Jacob Hill
What it lost is the ability to subject the system of organization to the will of its members. The entirety of capitalism has distributed and decentralized itself so that non-participation (leisure) is just as essential as participation (work).
Basically we can never revolt and the rest of what he memes about orgasmic situations is a gigantic self-contradiction
Thomas Thomas
>The entirety of capitalism has distributed and decentralized itsel how can have something distributed but decentralized?. what you mean?. what is oppresive or bad of that?.
>non-participation (leisure) is just as essential as participation (work). what is the alternative?, full work? full leisure?.
Austin Howard
Still reading book so will just quote his claim
"Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate. The spectacle is a map of this new world map drawn to the scale of the territory itself. In this way the very powers that have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us intheirfullforce."
Liam Fisher
i think he understimate the mind of workers and people in general. (its like we are alienate ourselves when we start to plow and cultivate)
this is a philosopical problema of largest weight. what is a non alienated person?.
Sebastian Young
Haven't you seen any of the countless texts that go semi-viral from time to time about leisure time in the middle ages? What about the fact that we live in a post-work world in which merely browsing Veeky Forums is somehow working for data agregator sites?
Henry Lee
I don't know why OP choose such weird wordings, but Debord (and other situationists) always compare the spectacle to mist or polen, in that it's decentralized but still ubiquitous.
Then again, this isn't that hard to see and you're just having some petty arguments against the text because Debord was a marxist (oooooooooooooooh how scareeeeeey)
Jose Adams
How does this separation into the Director take place. Surely Debord (and Marx) has something more to say about alienation than muh specialization and factories
James Sanchez
Into the spectacle*
Eli Ward
>Is this the typical Marxist claim that reaping the benefits of the system solidifies it's grasp over us?
Yes. It's not "typical Marxist", it's typical common sense. Reaping the "benefits" of smoking cigarettes, for example, perpetuates addiction. Attending your master's banquet perpetuates your slavery, probably even more than just being a slave does. The roller coaster of dukkha, so on and so forth. There are many descriptions and analogies for this process. It's only alien to STEMlords.
Wyatt Lee
>Alien to STEMlords Intuitive concept for anyone with two braincells unless you voted for Mike Huckabee
Point of contention is the definition of liberty which non-marxist positions seem to define as TV time
Brandon Green
I like to pretend the book is about a society where all wear spectacles, and these on the cover are they, the spectacled, in their society where they must wear spectacles at all times, or face the grim ritual of Carousel
Ethan Bennett
What, alienation comes from the worker not having access to the profit of his production, this is very simple.
Separation is alienation to the next level, the individual gives away his self in exchange for participation in consumerist society (you are no longer yourself, but part of a specific type of individual to which consumer goods must be sold).
Just think about the relationship between subcultures and the market, for example.
Jeremiah Richardson
What is the justification for believing that having "access to his production" will make the worker happier/more free? Do communists really think that people didn't do hard work when they were hunter-gatherers or farmers?
Carter Brooks
Your leisure is someone else's labor and there is no escape from this. Any time you spend not farming for food is time someone else spent producing things for you so you don't have to.
One of the only smart things Alain Soral said was about women's liberation/careerist feminism, that the wealthy middle-class women being "liberated" here are really just shunting the necessary labor off to other people.
For one, her liberation from home work is just subjugation to work work, she gets to die a wage slave just like the men now (congrats!), and in addition to that her liberation was paid for by other women who don't get it so easy.
Someone has to take care of the kids, clean the house, etc. and for many wealthy liberated women that ends up being some less fortunate woman who gets to do her own mother-work plus this lady's.
Also, and this is mainly a thing you see today and perhaps not as much on Debord's radar, but look how much of today's entertainment is labor-based.
How many shows on TV nowadays are reality shows about other people doing work? Usually really shitty work?
We work all day, we encourage people to break free of oppression and get to work all day like us, and when we get home we watch other people work all day.
The spectacle is the dominant mode of production's eternal psalmody for itself, regenerating itself by propagating its memes into each successive generation.
Lincoln Watson
Debord was post-marxist, he understood that at this point there's no longer any such thing as having access to your production.
A big part of Debord's theory was the idea that the proles can no longer reclaim the means of production from the bourgeoisie because the bourgeoisie doesn't control it either anymore. The car is driving itself now.
Christian Wright
Marx wasn't worried about happiness as much as he was about logistics and sovereignty. And if you can't see how workers controlling themselves and their production isn't a step towards absolute self-sovereignty, you're just being obtuse. As for the logistics, I don't really care about it and can only point you to the capital.
