From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/126900/8008_FDTD.pdf
Chapter One - Facing Dictatorships realistically
"Political defiance” is nonviolent struggle (protest, noncooperation, and intervention) applied defiantly and actively for political purposes.
The term is used principally to describe action by populations to regain from dictatorships control over governmental institutions by relentlessly attacking their sources of power and deliberately using strategic planning and operations to do so.
By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly.
Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands.
When one wants to bring down a dictatorship most effectively and with the least cost then one has four immediate tasks:
One must strengthen the oppressed population themselves in their determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills;
One must strengthen the independent social groups and institutions of the oppressed people;
One must create a powerful internal resistance force; and
One must develop a wise grand strategic plan for liberation and implement it skillfully.
Against a strong self-reliant force, given wise strategy, disciplined and courageous action, and genuine strength, the dictatorship will eventually crumble. Minimally, however, the above four requirements must be fulfilled.
Chapter Two - The Dangers of Negotiations
The point here is that negotiations are not a realistic way to remove a strong dictatorship in the absence of a powerful democratic opposition.
The offer by a dictatorship of “peace” through negotiations with the democratic opposition is, of course, rather disingenuous. The violence could be ended immediately by the dictators themselves, if only they would stop waging war on their own people.
When the dictatorship is strong but an irritating resistance exists, the dictators may wish to negotiate the opposition into surrender under the guise of making “peace.” The call to negotiate can sound appealing, but grave dangers can be lurking within the negotiating room.
On the other hand, when the opposition is exceptionally strong and the dictatorship is genuinely threatened, the dictators may seek negotiations in order to salvage as much of their control or wealth as possible. In neither case should the democrats help the dictators achieve their goals.
Whatever promises offered by dictators in any negotiated settlement, no one should ever forget that the dictators may promise anything to secure submission from their democratic opponents, and then brazenly violate those same agreements.
“For the tyrant has the power to inflict only that which we lack the strength to resist,” wrote Krishnalal Shridharani.
Success is most often determined not by negotiating a settlement but through the wise use of the most appropriate and powerful means of resistance available.
Hitler often called for peace, by which he meant submission to his will. A dictators’ peace is often no more than the peace of the prison or of the grave.
People living under dictatorships need not remain weak, and dictators need not be allowed to remain powerful indefinitely. Aristotle noted long ago, “. . . [O]ligarchy and tyranny are shorter-lived than any other constitution. . . . [A]ll round, tyrannies have not lasted long.”
Recent history shows the vulnerability of dictatorships, and reveals that they can crumble in a relatively short time span.
The old preconception that violent means always work quickly and nonviolent means always require vast time is clearly not valid. Although much time may be required for changes in the underlying situation and society, the actual fight against a dictatorship sometimes occurs relatively quickly by nonviolent struggle.
Chapter Three - Whence Comes the Power?
Dictators require the assistance of the people they rule, without which they cannot secure and maintain the sources of political power. These sources of political power include:
Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
Human resources, the number and importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers;
Skills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers;
Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and noncooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.
All of these sources, however, depend on acceptance of the regime, on the submission and obedience of the population, and on the cooperation of innumerable people and the many institutions of the society. These are not guaranteed.
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.
Political scientist Karl W. Deutsch noted in 1953: If totalitarian power must be used at all times against the entire population, it is unlikely to remain powerful for long.
Niccolo Machiavelli had much earlier argued that the prince “. . . who has the public as a whole for his enemy can never make himself secure; and the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his re-
gime become.”
Three of the most important factors in determining to what degree a government’s power will be controlled or uncontrolled therefore are: (1) the relative desire of the populace to impose limits on the government’s power; (2) the relative strength of the subjects’ independent organizations and institutions to withdraw collectively the sources of power; and (3) the population’s relative ability to with- hold their consent and assistance.
One characteristic of a democratic society is that there exist independent of the state a multitude of nongovernmental groups and institutions. These include, for example, families, religious organizations, cultural associations, sports clubs, economic institutions, trade unions, student associations, political parties, villages, neighborhood associations, gardening clubs, human rights organizations, musical groups, literary societies, and others. These bodies are important in serving their own objectives and also in helping to meet social needs.
If the dictatorship has been largely successful in destroying or controlling the society’s independent bodies, it will be important for the resisters to create new independent social groups and institutions, or to reassert democratic control over surviving or partially controlled bodies. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956-1957 a multitude of direct democracy councils emerged, even joining together to establish for some weeks a whole federated system of institutions and governance.
NB: Hannah Arendt in On Revolution writes about this in the context of alternatives to party politics, notes at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2025/04/notes-on-hannah-arendts-on-revolution.html
Dictatorships in particular have specific characteristics that render them highly vulnerable to skillfully implemented political defiance.
Chapter Four - Dictatorships Have Weaknesses
Among the weaknesses of dictatorships are the following:
The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn.
The requirements and effects of the regime’s past policies will somewhat limit its present ability to adopt and implement conflicting policies.
The system may become routine in its operation, less able to adjust quickly to new situations.
Personnel and resources already allocated for existing tasks will not be easily available for new needs.
Subordinates fearful of displeasing their superiors may not report accurate or complete information needed by the dictators to make decisions.
The ideology may erode, and myths and symbols of the system may become unstable.
If a strong ideology is present that influences one’s view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs.
Deteriorating efficiency and competency of the bureaucracy, or excessive controls and regulations, may make the system’s policies and operation ineffective.
Internal institutional conflicts and personal rivalries and hostilities may harm, and even disrupt, the operation of the dictatorship.
Intellectuals and students may become restless in response to conditions, restrictions, doctrinalism, and repression.
The general public may over time become apathetic, skeptical, and even hostile to the regime.
Regional, class, cultural, or national differences may become acute.
The power hierarchy of the dictatorship is always unstable to some degree, and at times extremely so. Individuals do not only remain in the same position in the ranking, but may rise or fall to other ranks or be removed entirely and replaced by new persons.
Sections of the police or military forces may act to achieve their own objectives, even against the will of established dictators, including by coup d’état.
If the dictatorship is new, time is required for it to become well established.
With so many decisions made by so few people in the dictatorship, mistakes of judgment, policy, and action are likely to occur.
If the regime seeks to avoid these dangers and decentralizes controls and decision making, its control over the central levers of power may be further eroded.
Chapter Five - exercising power
Political defiance has the following characteristics:
It does not accept that the outcome will be decided by the means of fighting chosen by the dictatorship.
It is difficult for the regime to combat.
It can uniquely aggravate weaknesses of the dictatorship and can sever its sources of power.
It can in action be widely dispersed but can also be concen- trated on a specific objective.
It leads to errors of judgment and action by the dictators.
It can effectively utilize the population as a whole and the society’s groups and institutions in the struggle to end the brutal domination of the few.
It helps to spread the distribution of effective power in the society, making the establishment and maintenance of a democratic society more possible.
The common error of past improvised political defiance campaigns is the reliance on only one or two methods, such as strikes and mass demonstrations. In fact, a multitude of methods exist that allow resistance strategists to concentrate and disperse resistance as required.
About two hundred specific methods of nonviolent action have been identified, and there are certainly scores more. These methods are classified under three broad categories: protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and intervention. Methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion are largely symbolic demonstrations, including pa- rades, marches, and vigils (54 methods). Noncooperation is divided into three sub-categories: (a) social noncooperation (16 methods), (b) economic noncooperation, including boycotts (26 methods) and strikes (23 methods), and (c) political noncooperation (38 methods). Nonviolent intervention, by psychological, physical, social, econom- ic, or political means, such as the fast, nonviolent occupation, and parallel government (41 methods), is the final group. A list of 198 of these methods is included as the Appendix to this publication.
Four mechanisms of change
Nonviolent struggle produces change in four ways. The first mechanism is the least likely, though it has occurred. When members of the opponent group are emotionally moved by the suffering of repression imposed on courageous nonviolent resisters or are rationally persuaded that the resisters’ cause is just, they may come to accept the resisters’ aims. This mechanism is called conversion. Though cases of conversion in nonviolent action do sometimes happen, they are rare, and in most conflicts this does not occur at all or at least not on a significant scale.
Far more often, nonviolent struggle operates by changing the conflict situation and the society so that the opponents simply cannot do as they like. It is this change that produces the other three mechanisms: accommodation, nonviolent coercion, and disintegration. Which of these occurs depends on the degree to which the relative and absolute power relations are shifted in favor of the democrats.
If the issues are not fundamental ones, the demands of the opposition in a limited campaign are not considered threatening, and the contest of forces has altered the power relationships to some degree, the immediate conflict may be ended by reaching an agreement, a splitting of differences or compromise. This mechanism is called accommodation.
Although the opponents’ leaders remain in their positions, and adhere to their original goals, their ability to act effectively has been taken away from them. That is called nonviolent coercion.
The fourth mechanism of change, disintegration of the opponents’ system, is so complete that they do not even have sufficient power to surrender. The regime simply falls to pieces.
Below are several of the positive democratizing effects nonviolent struggle may have:
Experience in applying nonviolent struggle may result in the population being more self-confident in challenging the regime’s threats and capacity for violent repression.
Nonviolent struggle provides the means of noncooperation and defiance by which the population can resist undemocratic controls over them by any dictatorial group.
Nonviolent struggle can be used to assert the practice of democratic freedoms, such as free speech, free press, independent organizations, and free assembly, in face of repressive controls.
Nonviolent struggle contributes strongly to the survival, rebirth, and strengthening of the independent groups and institutions of the society, as previously discussed. These are important for democracy because of their capacity to mobilize the power capacity of the population and to impose limits on the effective power of any would-be dictators.
Nonviolent struggle provides means by which the population can wield power against repressive police and military action by a dictatorial government.
Nonviolent struggle provides methods by which the population and the independent institutions can in the interests of democracy restrict or sever the sources of power for the ruling elite, thereby threatening its capacity to continue its domination.
Chapter 6 - The Need for Strategic Planning
In order to help us to think strategically, clarity about the meanings of four basic terms is important.
Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict.
Strategy is the conception of how best to achieve particular objectives in a conflict, operating within the scope of the chosen grand strategy. Strategy is concerned with whether, when, and how to fight, as well as how to achieve maximum effectiveness in struggling for certain ends. A strategy has been compared to the artist’s concept, while a strategic plan is the architect’s blueprint.
Tactics and methods of action are used to implement the strategy. Tactics relate to the skillful use of one’s forces to the best advantage in a limited situation. A tactic is a limited action, employed to achieve a restricted objective. The choice of tactics is governed by the conception of how best in a restricted phase of a conflict to utilize the available means of fighting to implement the strategy. To be most effective, tactics and methods must be chosen and applied with constant attention to the achievement of strategic objectives.
Tactics are always concerned with fighting, whereas strategy includes wider considerations.
Method refers to the specific weapons or means of action. Within the technique of nonviolent struggle, these include the dozens of particular forms of action
Chapter Seven - Planning Strategy
Though related, the development of grand strategy and campaign strategies are two separate processes. Only after the grand strategy has been developed can the specific campaign strategies be fully developed. Campaign strategies will need to be designed to achieve and reinforce the grand strategic objectives.
It is critical to determine the real objective of the struggle. We have argued here that overthrow of the dictatorship or removal of the present dicta- tors is not enough. The objective in these conflicts needs to be the establishment of a free society with a democratic system of government. Clarity on this point will influence the development of a grand strategy and of the ensuing specific strategies.
NB: Economics and social structures
Particularly, strategists will need to answer many fundamental questions, such as these:
What are the main obstacles to achieving freedom?
What factors will facilitate achieving freedom?
What are the main strengths of the dictatorship?
What are the various weaknesses of the dictatorship?
To what degree are the sources of power for the dictatorship vulnerable?
What are the strengths of the democratic forces and the general population?
What are the weaknesses of the democratic forces and how can they be corrected?
What is the status of third parties, not immediately involved in the conflict, who already assist or might assist, either the dictatorship or the democratic movement, and if so in what ways?
The following questions pose (in a more specific way than earlier) the types of considerations required in devising a grand strategy for a political defiance struggle:
How might the long-term struggle best begin? How can the oppressed population muster sufficient self-confidence and strength to act to challenge the dictatorship, even initially in a limited way? How could the population’s capacity to apply noncooperation and defiance be increased with time and experience? What might be the objectives of a series of limited campaigns to regain democratic control over the society and limit the dictatorship?
Are there independent institutions that have survived the dictatorship which might be used in the struggle to establish freedom? What institutions of the society can be regained from the dictators’ control, or what institutions need to be newly created by the democrats to meet their needs and establish spheres of democracy even while the dictatorship continues?
How can organizational strength in the resistance be developed? How can participants be trained? What resources (finances, equipment, etc.) will be required throughout the struggle? What types of symbolism can be most effective in mobilizing the population?
By what kinds of action and in what stages could the sources of power of the dictators be incrementally weakened and severed? How can the resisting population simultaneously persist in its defi- ance and also maintain the necessary nonviolent discipline? How can the society continue to meet its basic needs during the course of the struggle? How can social order be maintained in the midst of the conflict? As victory approaches, how can the democratic resis- tance continue to build the institutional base of the post-dictatorship society to make the transition as smooth as possible?
In planning the strategies for the specific selective resistance campaigns and for the longer term development of the liberation struggle, the political defiance strategists will need to consider various issues and problems. The following are among these:
Determination of the specific objectives of the campaign and their contributions to implementing the grand strategy.
Consideration of the specific methods, or political weapons, that can best be used to implement the chosen strategies. Within each overall plan for a particular strategic campaign it will be necessary to determine what smaller, tactical plans and which specific methods of action should be used to impose pressures and restrictions against the dictatorship’s sources of power. It should be remembered that the achievement of major objectives will come as a result of carefully chosen and implemented specific smaller steps.
Determination whether, or how, economic issues should be related to the overall essentially political struggle. If eco- nomic issues are to be prominent in the struggle, care will be needed that the economic grievances can actually be rem- edied after the dictatorship is ended. Otherwise, disillusion- ment and disaffection may set in if quick solutions are not provided during the transition period to a democratic society. Such disillusionment could facilitate the rise of dictato- rial forces promising an end to economic woes.
Determination in advance of what kind of leadership structure and communications system will work best for initiating the resistance struggle. What means of decision-making and communication will be possible during the course of the struggle to give continuing guidance to the resisters and the general population?
Communication of the resistance news to the general population, to the dictators’ forces, and the international press. Claims and reporting should always be strictly factual. Exaggerations and unfounded claims will undermine the credibility of the resistance.
Plans for self-reliant constructive social, educational, economic, and political activities to meet the needs of one’s own people during the coming conflict. Such projects can be conducted by persons not directly involved in the resistance activities.
Determination of what kind of external assistance is desirable in support of the specific campaign or the general liberation struggle. How can external help be best mobilized and used without making the internal struggle dependent on uncertain external factors? Attention will need to be given to which external groups are most likely, and most appropriate, to assist, such as non-governmental organizations (social movements, religious or political groups, labor unions, etc.), governments, and/or the United Nations and its various bodies.
People living under the dictatorship may be already familiar with this concept from a variety of sources. Even so, the democratic forces should deliberately spread and popularize the idea of noncooperation. The “Monkey Master” story, or a similar one, could be disseminated throughout the society. Such a story could be easily understood. Once the general concept of noncooperation is grasped, people will be able to understand the relevance of future calls to practice noncooperation with the dictatorship. They will also be able on their own to improvise a myriad of specific forms of noncooperation in new situations.
Chapter Eight - Applying Political Defiance
In situations in which the population feels powerless and frightened, it is important that initial tasks for the public be low-risk, confidence- building actions. These types of actions — such as wearing one’s clothes in an unusual way — may publicly register a dissenting opinion and provide an opportunity for the public to participate significantly in acts of dissent. In other cases a relatively minor (on the surface) nonpolitical issue (such as securing a safe water supply) might be made the focus for group action. Strategists should choose an issue the merits of which will be widely recognized and difficult to reject. Success in such limited campaigns could not only correct specific grievances but also convince the population that it indeed has power potential.
Selective resistance strategies should concentrate primarily on specific social, economic, or political issues. These may be chosen in order to keep some part of the social and political system out of the dictators’ control, to regain control of some part currently controlled by the dictators, or to deny the dictators a particular objective. If possible, the campaign of selective resistance should also strike at one weakness or more of the dictatorship, as already discussed. Thereby, democrats can make the greatest possible impact with their available power capacity.
The initial action is likely to take the form of symbolic protest or may be a symbolic act of limited or temporary noncooperation.
Phasing resistance campaigns by issue and population group will allow certain segments of the population to rest while resistance continues.
Selective resistance is especially important to defend the exis- tence and autonomy of independent social, economic, and political groups and institutions outside the control of the dictatorship, which were briefly discussed earlier. These centers of power provide the institutional bases from which the population can exert pressure or can resist dictatorial controls. In the struggle, they are likely to be among the first targets of the dictatorship.
The degree of loyalty of the military forces, both soldiers and officers, to the dictatorship needs to be carefully assessed and a determination should be made as to whether the military is open to influence by the democratic forces.
Early in the liberation struggle a special strategy should be developed to communicate with the dictators’ troops and functionaries. By words, symbols, and actions, the democratic forces can inform the troops that the liberation struggle will be vigorous, determined, and persistent.
Defiance strategists should remember that it will be exceptionally difficult, or impossible, to disintegrate the dictatorship if the police, bureaucrats, and military forces remain fully supportive of the dictatorship and obedient in carrying out its commands. Strategies aimed at subverting the loyalty of the dictators’ forces should therefore be given a high priority by democratic strategists.
Chapter Nine - Disintegrating the Dictatorship
As was discussed in Chapter Three, obedience, cooperation, and submission are essential if dictators are to be powerful.
Withdrawal of support is therefore the major required action to disintegrate a dictatorship.
Even while a dictatorship still occupies government positions
it is sometimes possible to organize a democratic “parallel government.” This would increasingly operate as a rival government to which loyalty, compliance, and cooperation are given by the population and the society’s institutions.
NB: Parallel FEMA, parallel weather and climate reports
Specific plans for the transition to democracy should be ready for application when the dictatorship is weakening or collapses. Such plans will help to prevent another group from seizing state power through a coup d’état. Plans for the institution of democratic constitutional government with full political and personal liberties will also be required. The changes won at a great price should not be lost through lack of planning.
Chapter Ten - Groundwork for Durable Democracy
The second basic principle of anti-coup defense is to resist the putschists with noncooperation and defiance. The needed cooperation and assistance must be denied. Essentially the same means of struggle that was used against the dictatorship can be used against the new threat, but applied immediately. If both legitimacy and cooperation are denied, the coup may die of political starvation and the chance to build a democratic society restored.
In the interests of maintaining internal democracy, serious consideration should be given to applying the basic principles of political defiance to the needs of national defense. By placing resis- tance capacity directly in the hands of the citizenry, newly liberated countries could avoid the need to establish a strong military capacity which could itself threaten democracy or require vast economic resources much needed for other purposes.
The effect of nonviolent struggle is not only to weaken and remove the dictators but also to empower the oppressed.
Summarization by ChatGPT
Here’s a structured summary of From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp, with direct quotes included for accuracy and emphasis.
1. Facing Dictatorships Realistically
Dictatorships often seem invincible—but Sharp highlights their vulnerability when confronted by unified, mobilized people:
“Some of these dictatorships proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic, and social defiance of the people.” ETH Zurich Files
2. Why Not Violence, Coups, or Outside Help?
Violent resistance tends to cause immense suffering and usually strengthens the regime:
“Guerrilla warfare … rarely, if ever, benefits the oppressed population or ushers in a democracy.” ETH Zurich Files
Military coups merely replace one elite with another, often continuing tyranny.
Foreign intervention is unreliable—likely to serve external interests over democracy:
“Frequently foreign states will tolerate, or even positively assist, a dictatorship in order to advance their own … interests.” ETH Zurich Files
3. The Foundations of Political Power
Sharp asserts that dictators rely entirely on societal cooperation—from bureaucracy to soldiers:
“Without availability of those sources [of power], the rulers’ power weakens and finally dissolves.” ETH Zurich Files
He enumerates these as: authority, human resources, skills, ideology, material resources, and sanctions ETH Zurich Files.
4. Weakness of Dictatorships & the Power of Defiance
When citizens withdraw cooperation, regimes can unravel:
“If, despite repression, the sources of power can be restricted … the dictatorship may disintegrate.” ETH Zurich Files
Nonviolent resistance is especially effective when it targets these power structures.
5. Strategic Planning is Essential
Sharp emphasizes that unlike spontaneous protests, sustained liberation efforts require deliberate strategy:
“Strategic planning … is necessary to end a dictatorship and to achieve freedom.” ETH Zurich Files
He outlines a hierarchy—grand strategy, campaign strategy, and tactics—to guide coordinated resistance.
6. Methods and Nonviolent Discipline
Nonviolent action isn’t limited to marches; it includes hundreds of tactics across protest, noncooperation, and intervention:
“About two hundred specific methods of nonviolent action have been identified.” ETH Zurich Files
Maintaining discipline is crucial: violence undermines effectiveness and can erode public and institutional support.
7. Four Mechanisms of Nonviolent Change
Sharp argues nonviolent campaigns can succeed through:
Conversion – changing opponents’ minds
Accommodation – gaining concessions
Nonviolent coercion – shifting power through massive noncooperation
Disintegration – collapsing a regime by cutting its support
8. Campaign Stages & Symbolic Acts
Early, symbolic actions—like wearing a color or placing flowers—can build confidence.
Escalation then focuses on strategic noncooperation, targeting key sources of power.
Plans should cover continuity post-collapse: constitutions, transitional justice, and preventing coups.
9. Building Durable Democracy
Final work involves dismantling anti-democratic institutions and molding new ones: administrative, constitutional, decentralized — ensuring citizen oversight to guard against future authoritarianism.
Key Quotes
On dictatorships’ reliance:
“Dictators require the assistance of the people they rule, without which they cannot secure and maintain the sources of political power.” ETH Zurich Files
On strategy vs. spontaneity:
“Comprehensive strategic plans for liberation are rarely … developed; dictatorships appear much more durable than they in fact are.” ETH Zurich Files
Final Take
Sharp's manual highlights that dictatorships survive on systemic compliance. Nonviolent strategic defiance—planned, disciplined, and well-executed—can sever that compliance, weaken regimes, and enable a transition to sustainable democracy.
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Notes on Some Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
_Some Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_ by Guy DeBord
London, New York: Verso, 1988, 1990
ISBN 0-86091-520-4
(4) And since the spectacle today is certainly more powerful than it was before, what is it doing with this additional power? What point has it reached, that it had not reached previously? What, in short, are its present _lines of advance_? The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion, which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way, is now widespread; but this is experienced, rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say. What is more, many see it as a civilizing invasion, as something inevitable, and even want to collaborate. Such people would rather not know the precise purpose of this conquest, and how it is advancing.
(6) The empty debate on the spectacle – that is, on the activities of the world's owners – is thus organized by the spectacle itself: everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term “media". And by this they mean to describe a mirror instrument, a kind of public service which, with impartial “professionalism," would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through mass media – a form of communication, which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are _orders_; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.
(9-10) The integrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learned to employ both of these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost a full range of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this – but it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and university demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason's relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe. Beyond the legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continue a reduction and, moreover, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily accessible to the dominant social forces.
(11-12) The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
(15) History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events, whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. And thus, inseparably, history with knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding, at least, in part, what was to come: "an everlasting possession," according to Thucydides. In this way, history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interest of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee, a kind of a eternity of noisy insignificance.
(18-19) Thus, it is no longer possible to believe anything about anyone that you have not learned for yourself, directly.
(19) For the agora, the general community, has gone, along with communities restricted to intermediary bodies, or to independent institutions, to salons, or cafés, or to workers in a single company. There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse, and of the various forces organized it to relay it.
(20) ... men resemble their times more than their fathers. [An Arab proverb from the 14th century]
... We believe we know that in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous.
To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has proved negative: once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be lead strategically.
(21) Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacle, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally excepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and, indeed, is no longer open to attack, being perfect, as no other society before it. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society for governing; and the proof is that all those aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, changing hardly a thing. For the first time in contemporary Europe no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.
(24) Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is _to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results_. The story of terrorism is written by the state, and it is, therefore, a highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case, more rational and democratic.
(26-27) Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which,doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit again, since no one is interested in the subject anymore; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent claim to still want to change something in a society which has so far been only too kind and patient; but has had enough of being blamed.
(29-30) The primary cause of the decadence of contemporary thought evidently lies in the fact that spectacular discourse leaves no room for any reply; while logic was only socially constructed through dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak through the spectacle is so widespread, when they are held to be rich, important, prestigious, to be _authority itself_, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, thereby proudly displaying an individual reflection of this authority. And finally, logic is not easy, and no one has tried to teach it. Drug addicts do not study logic; they no longer need it, nor are they capable of it. The spectator's laziness is shared by all intellectual functionaries and overnight specialists, all of whom do their best to conceal the narrow limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with illogical authority.
(31) The individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished spectacular thought than by _any other aspect of his experience_ puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learn to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination's success.
(33-34) McLuhan himself, the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he finally discovered in 1976 that "the pressure of the mass media leads to irrationality," and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage. The sage of Toronto had formally spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms,created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom, and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity, in which it has become impossible to distinguish the Grimaldi-Monaco or Bourbon-Franco dynasties from those who succeeded the Stuarts. However, McLuhan's ungrateful modern disciples are now trying to make people forget him, hoping to establish their own careers in media celebration of all these new freedoms to “choose" at random from ephemera. And no doubt they will retract their claims even faster than the man who inspired them.
(34) The spectacle makes no secret of the fact that certain dangers surround the wonderful order it has established. Ocean pollution and the destruction of equatorial forests threaten oxygen renewal; the earth's ozone layer is menaced by industrial growth; nuclear radiation accumulates irreversibly. It merely concludes that none of these things matter. It will only talk about dates and measures. And on this alone, it is successfully reassuring – something which a pre-spectacular mind would have thought impossible.
(36-36) The nuclear industry, both military and civil, demands a far higher dose of secrecy than in other fields – which already have plenty, as we know. To make life – that is to say, lying - easier for the sages chosen by the system's masters, it has been found useful also to change measurements, to vary them, according to a large number of criteria, and refine them, so as to be able to juggle as necessary with a range of figures which are hard to convert. Hence to measure radioactivity levels, one can choose from a range of units of measurement: curies, becquerels, roentgens, rads alias centigrays, and rems, not forgetting, the humble millirads, and sieverts, which are worth 100 rems. It reminds one of the old subdivisions of British currency which foreigners found so confusing, back in the days when Sellafield was still called Windscale.
(37) In June 1987, Pierre Bacher, deputy director of installations at Electricité de France, revealed the latest safety doctrine for nuclear power stations. By installing valves and filters it becomes much easier to avoid major catastrophes, like cracks or explosions in the reactors, which would affect a whole “region." Such catastrophes are produced by excessive containment. Whenever the plant looks like blowing, it is better to decompress gently, showering only a restricted area of a few kilometers, an area which on each occasion will be differently and haphazardly extended depending on the wind. He discloses that in the past two years discrete experiments carried out at Cadarache in the Drôme, "clearly showed that waste – essentially gas – is infinitesimal, representing at worst 1% of the radioactivity in the power station itself." That's a very moderate worst case: 1%. Formerly, we were assured there was no risk at all, except in the case of accidents, which were logically impossible. The experience of the first few years changed this reasoning as follows: since accidents can always happen, what must be avoided is their reaching a catastrophic threshold, and that is easy. All that is necessary is to contaminate little by little, in moderation. Who would not agree that it is infinitely healthier to limit yourself to an intake of 140 centilitres of vodka per day for several years, rather than getting drunk right right away like the Poles?
(38) At the international conference of experts held in Geneva in December 1986 the question was quite simply whether to introduce a worldwide ban on the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the gases, which have recently and rapidly started to destroy the thin layer of ozone, which – as will be recalled - protects this planet against the harmful effects of solar rays. Daniel Verilhe, representing Elf-Aquitaine's chemical subsidiary, and in this capacity part of a French delegation firmly opposed to any ban made a sensible point: “It will take at least three years to develop substitutes, and the cost will be quadrupled." As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one has no market value. This industrial strategist could thus show his opponents the extent of their inexplicable disregard for economics: “It is highly dangerous to base an industrial strategy on environmental imperatives.”
(39) When an all-powerful economy lost its reason - _and that is precisely what defines these spectacular times_ – it suppressed the last vestiges of scientific autonomy, both in methodology, and, by the same token, in the practical working conditions of its “researchers.”
(40-41) The science of lying justifications naturally occurred with the first symptoms of bourgeois society's decadence, with the cancerous proliferation of those pseudo-sciences known as “human"; yet modern medicine, for example, had once been able to pass as useful, and those who eradicated smallpox or leprosy were very different from those who contemptibly capitulated in the face of nuclear radiation or chemical farming. It can readily be seen, of course, that medicine today no longer has the right to defend public health against a pathogenic environment, for that would be to challenge the state, or at least the pharmaceuticals industry. But it is not only by its obligation to keep quiet that contemporary science acknowledges what it has become. It is also by its frequent and artless outbursts. In November 1985, professors Even and Andreiu at Laënnac hospital announced that they had perhaps found an effective cure for Aids, following an experiment on four patients which had lasted a week. Two days later the patients having died, several other doctors, whose research was not so far advanced, or who were perhaps jealous, expressed certain reservations as to the professors' precipitate haste in broadcasting what was merely the misleading appearance of victory – a few hours before the patients' condition finally deteriorated. Even and Andreiu defending themselves nonchalantly, arguing that, after all, false hopes are better than no hope at all. Their ignorance was too great for them to recognize this argument as a precise and complete disavowal of the spirit of science; as the one which had historically always served to endorse the profitable daydreams of charlatans and sorcerers, long before such people were put in charge of hospitals.
(44-45) The relatively new concept of _disinformation_ was recently imported from Russia, along with another number of other inventions useful in the running of modern states. It is openly employed by particular powers, or, consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a _counter-offensive_ role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile, or at least rival powers, and would have been intentionally and malevolently falsified. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: this is called psychosis. Unlike the straightforward lie, disinformation must inevitably contain a degree of truth, but one deliberately manipulated by an artful enemy. This is what makes it so attractive to the defenders of the dominant society. The power which speaks of disinformation does not believe itself to be absolutely faultless, but knows that it can attribute to any precise criticism the excessive insignificance which characterizes disinformation; with the result that it will never have to admit to any particular fault.
(48) If occasionally a kind of unregulated, disinformation threatens to appear, in the service of particular interest temporarily in conflict, and threatens to be believed, getting out of control, and thus clashing with the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation, there is no reason to fear that the former involves other manipulators, who are more subtle or more skilled: it is simply because disinformation now spreads _in a world where there is no room for verification_.
(50-51) What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is _reconstructed_ as quickly as possible, to resemble the false. Being the richest and the most modern, the Americans have been the main dupes of this traffic in false art. And they are exactly the same people who pay for restoration work at Versailles or in the Sistine Chapel. This is why Michelangelo's frescoes will acquire the fresh, bright colors of a cartoon strip, and the genuine furniture at Versailles, the sparkling gilt which will make them resemble the fake Louis XIV suites imported by Texans at such great expense.
(56) It has most certainly been almost universally accepted that the geological explorations for oil-beds in the subsoil of the city of Paris, so noisily conducted in the autumn of 1986, had no other serious purpose than to measure the inhabitants' current level of stupid, stupid faction and submission; by showing them supposed research, so obviously devoid of economic reasons.
NB: The Madwoman of Chaillot
... More profoundly, in this world, which is officially so respectful of economic necessities, no one ever knows the real cost of anything which is produced. In fact, the major part of the real cost _is never calculated; and the rest is kept secret_.
(58) Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian phenomenom, this General Noriega, who _sells everything and fakes everything_, in a world which does precisely the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the integrated spectacle, and of the success is it allows the assorted managers of its internal and external politics: a sort of statesman. In a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist. He is the very model of _our modern prince_, and of those destined to come to power and stay there, the most able resemble him closely. It is not Panama, which produces such marvels, it is our times.
(59-60) When television has shown a fine picture and explained it with a brazen lie, idiots believe that everything is clear. The demi-elite is content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, “constructed" by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know what is true, hard as it is to distinguish in each particular case despite all their access to special knowledge, and confidences. Which is why they would like to get to know the method of truth, though their love usually remains unrequited.
(61) In his Discourse sur la servitude volontaire, La Boétie showed how a tyrant's power will be considerably reinforced by the concentric circles of individuals who believe, rightly, or wrongly, that it is in their interest to support it. In the same way many politicians and media professionals who are flattered not to be suspected of being _irresponsible_, learn a lot through their connections and confidences. Someone who is happy to be given confidential information is hardly likely to criticize it; nor to notice that in all that is confided to him, the principal part of reality is invariably hidden. Thanks to the benevolent protection of his deceivers, he sees a few more of the cards, false though they may be; he never learns the rules of the game. Thus he immediately identifies with a manipulators and scorns an ignorance which in fact he shares. For the titbits of information tossed to the familiars of a lying tyranny are usually poisoned with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. Yet they gratify those who get them, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing. Their only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. They are the privilege of _front-row spectators_ who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but _by believing what is revealed!_
(63) But Edgar Allan Poe had already discovered the real path to truth, in a well-known argument in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”:
“It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution – I mean for the outré character of its features… In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred', as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before’.”
(67) It is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals. Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life of all too easily shown. The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the _model_ of all advanced commercial enterprises.
NB: The revolution is over. The mafia has won. Tom Thompson, 1967
(69) The ubiquitous growth of secret societies and networks of influence answers the imperative demand of the new conditions for profitable management of economic affairs, at a time when the state holds a hegemonic role in the direction of production and when demand for all commodities depend strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular information/promotion, to which forms of distribution must also adapt. It is therefore only a natural product of the concentration of capital, production, and distribution. Whatever does not grow, must disappear; and no business can grow without adopting the values, techniques and methods of today's industry, spectacle and state. In the final analysis, it is the particular form of development chosen by the economy of our epoch which _dictates the widespread creation of new personal bonds of dependency and protection_.
(69-70) It is precisely here that we can see the profound truth of the Sicilian Mafia's maxim, so well appreciated throughout Italy: “when you've got money and friends, you can laugh at the law." In the integrated spectacle, the laws are asleep; because they were not made for the new production techniques, and because they are evaded in distribution by new types of agreement. With the public thinks, or prefers, is of no importance. This is what is hidden by the spectacle of all these opinion polls, elections, modernizing restructurings. No matter who are the winners are, the faithful customers _will get the worst of it_, because that is exactly what has been produced for them.
(74) Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, _conspiring in its favor_ is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its well-being. This conspiracy _is a part_ of it's very functioning.
(76-78) to this kind of counter-journalistic false critique can be added the organized practice of rumor which we know to be originally a sort of uncontrollable byproduct of spectacular information, since everyone, however vaguely, perceives something misleading about the latter and trusts it as little as it deserves. Rumor began as something superstitious, naïve, self-deluding. More recently, however, surveillance has begun introducing into the population people capable of starting rumors which suit it at the very first signal. It has been decided here to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some 30 years ago, whose origins origins lie in American sociology of advertising – the theory of individuals known as “pacemakers," that is, those whom others in their milieu come to follow and imitate – but this time moving from spontaneity to control. Budgetary, or extra-budgetary, means have also been released to find numerous auxiliaries; beside the former specialists of the recent past, academics and media professionals, sociologists and police. To believe in the continuing mechanical application of past models leads to,just as many errors as the general ignorance of the past. "Rome is no longer Rome," and the Mafia are no longer thieves. And the surveillance and disinformation services are as far removed from the police and informers of former times – for example, from the roussins and mouchards of the Second Empire – as the present special services in all countries are from the officers of the army,general staff’s Deuxième Bureau in 1914.
Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists. When the latest imitations of a recuperated neo-dadaism are allowed to pontificate proudly in the media, and thus also to tinker with the decor of official palaces, like court jesters to the kings of junk, it is evident that by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state's networks of persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centers on the work of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops. No doubt Arthur Cravan foresaw this world when he wrote in Maintenant: “Soon we will we will only see artists in the streets, and it will take no end of effort to find a single man." This is, indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian loafers: “Hello there, artists! Too bad if I've got it wrong.”
(79) The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; for it is in them that the features and force of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree. Moreover, they are always also the arbiters of that society's general interests, despite their modest title of “services." There is no corruption here, for they faithfully express the common morals of the spectacular century. Thus do watchers and watched sail forth on a boundless ocean. The spectacle has brought the secret to victory, and must be more and more controlled by _specialists in secrecy_ who are certainly not only officials who who have to different degrees managed to free themselves from state control; who are not only officials.
(79-80) A general working rule of the integrated spectacle, at least for those who manage its affairs, is that in this framework, _everything which can be done, must be done_. This means that every new instrument must be employed, whatever the cost. New machinery everywhere becomes the goal and the driving force of the system, and is the only thing which can significantly modify its progress, every time its use is imposed without further reflection. Society's owners indeed want above all to keep a certain "social relation between people," but they may must also maintain continual technological innovation; for that was one of the obligations that came with their inheritance. This law must also thus apply to the services which safeguard domination. When an instrument has been perfected it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions that favor this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.
(82-83) So it is that thousands of plots in favor of the established order tangle and clash, almost everywhere, as the overlap of secret networks and secret issues or activities grows ever more dense along with their rapid integration into every sector of economics, politics and culture. In all areas of social life the degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and security activities gets greater and greater. The plot having thickened to the point where it is almost out in the open, each part of it now starts to interfere with, or worry, the others, for all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without really knowing why, are colliding by chance yet not identifying each other with any certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate aims can barely be suspected and almost never understood. So that while no one can be sure he is not being tricked or manipulated, it is rare for the string-puller to know he has succeeded. And in any case, to be on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has chosen the right strategic perspective. Tactical successes can thus lead great powers down dangerous roads.
(84-85) It is in these circumstances that we can speak of domination's falling rate of profit, as it spreads to almost the whole social space, and consequently increases both its personnel, and its means. For now, each means aspires, and labors, to become an end. Surveillance spies on itself, and plots against itself.
Its principle present contradiction, finally, is that it is spying on, infiltrating, and pressurizing _an absent entity_: that which is supposed to be trying to subvert the social order. But where can it actually be seen at work? Certainly conditions have never been so seriously revolutionary, but it is only governments who think so. Negation has been so thoroughly deprived of its thought that it was dispersed long ago. Because of this, it remains only a big, yet highly disturbing threat, and surveillance in its turn, has been deprived of its preferred field of activity. Surveillance and intervention are thus rightly led by the present exigencies, determining their terms of engagement to operate on the very terrain of this threat in order to combat it _in advance_. This is why surveillance has an interest in organizing poles of negation itself, which it can instruct with more than the discredited means of the spectacle, so as to manipulate, not terrorists this time, but theories.
(85) The French revolution brought great changes in the art of war. It was from that experience that Clausewitz could draw the distinction between tactics, as the use of forces in battle to obtain victory, and strategy, as the use of victories in battle to attain the goals of a war.
(87-88) Not only are the subjective led to believe that to all intents and purposes they are still living in a world which in fact has been eliminated, but the rulers themselves sometimes suffer from the absurd belief that in some respects they do too. They come to believe in a part of what they have suppressed, as if it remained a reality and had still to be included in their calculations. This backwardness will not last long. Those who have achieved so much so easily must necessarily go further. It should not be thought that those who have been too slow to appreciate the pliability of the new rules of their game and its form of barbaric grandeur, will last forever like some archaism in proximity to real power. It is certainly not the spectacle's destiny to end up as enlightened despotism.
We must conclude that a changeover is imminent, and ineluctable in the coopted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of the domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed on the spectacle's stage. It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes. This changeover, which will conclude decisively the work of these spectacular times, will occur discreetly, and conspiratorially, even though it concerns those within the inner circles of power. It will select those who will share the central exigency: that they clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are capable.
NB: My notes on DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html
London, New York: Verso, 1988, 1990
ISBN 0-86091-520-4
(4) And since the spectacle today is certainly more powerful than it was before, what is it doing with this additional power? What point has it reached, that it had not reached previously? What, in short, are its present _lines of advance_? The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion, which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way, is now widespread; but this is experienced, rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say. What is more, many see it as a civilizing invasion, as something inevitable, and even want to collaborate. Such people would rather not know the precise purpose of this conquest, and how it is advancing.
(6) The empty debate on the spectacle – that is, on the activities of the world's owners – is thus organized by the spectacle itself: everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term “media". And by this they mean to describe a mirror instrument, a kind of public service which, with impartial “professionalism," would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through mass media – a form of communication, which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are _orders_; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.
(9-10) The integrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learned to employ both of these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost a full range of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this – but it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and university demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason's relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe. Beyond the legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continue a reduction and, moreover, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily accessible to the dominant social forces.
(11-12) The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
(15) History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events, whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. And thus, inseparably, history with knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding, at least, in part, what was to come: "an everlasting possession," according to Thucydides. In this way, history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interest of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee, a kind of a eternity of noisy insignificance.
(18-19) Thus, it is no longer possible to believe anything about anyone that you have not learned for yourself, directly.
(19) For the agora, the general community, has gone, along with communities restricted to intermediary bodies, or to independent institutions, to salons, or cafés, or to workers in a single company. There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse, and of the various forces organized it to relay it.
(20) ... men resemble their times more than their fathers. [An Arab proverb from the 14th century]
... We believe we know that in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous.
To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has proved negative: once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be lead strategically.
(21) Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacle, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally excepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and, indeed, is no longer open to attack, being perfect, as no other society before it. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society for governing; and the proof is that all those aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, changing hardly a thing. For the first time in contemporary Europe no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.
(24) Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is _to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results_. The story of terrorism is written by the state, and it is, therefore, a highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case, more rational and democratic.
(26-27) Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which,doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit again, since no one is interested in the subject anymore; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent claim to still want to change something in a society which has so far been only too kind and patient; but has had enough of being blamed.
(29-30) The primary cause of the decadence of contemporary thought evidently lies in the fact that spectacular discourse leaves no room for any reply; while logic was only socially constructed through dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak through the spectacle is so widespread, when they are held to be rich, important, prestigious, to be _authority itself_, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, thereby proudly displaying an individual reflection of this authority. And finally, logic is not easy, and no one has tried to teach it. Drug addicts do not study logic; they no longer need it, nor are they capable of it. The spectator's laziness is shared by all intellectual functionaries and overnight specialists, all of whom do their best to conceal the narrow limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with illogical authority.
(31) The individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished spectacular thought than by _any other aspect of his experience_ puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learn to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination's success.
(33-34) McLuhan himself, the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he finally discovered in 1976 that "the pressure of the mass media leads to irrationality," and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage. The sage of Toronto had formally spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms,created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom, and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity, in which it has become impossible to distinguish the Grimaldi-Monaco or Bourbon-Franco dynasties from those who succeeded the Stuarts. However, McLuhan's ungrateful modern disciples are now trying to make people forget him, hoping to establish their own careers in media celebration of all these new freedoms to “choose" at random from ephemera. And no doubt they will retract their claims even faster than the man who inspired them.
(34) The spectacle makes no secret of the fact that certain dangers surround the wonderful order it has established. Ocean pollution and the destruction of equatorial forests threaten oxygen renewal; the earth's ozone layer is menaced by industrial growth; nuclear radiation accumulates irreversibly. It merely concludes that none of these things matter. It will only talk about dates and measures. And on this alone, it is successfully reassuring – something which a pre-spectacular mind would have thought impossible.
(36-36) The nuclear industry, both military and civil, demands a far higher dose of secrecy than in other fields – which already have plenty, as we know. To make life – that is to say, lying - easier for the sages chosen by the system's masters, it has been found useful also to change measurements, to vary them, according to a large number of criteria, and refine them, so as to be able to juggle as necessary with a range of figures which are hard to convert. Hence to measure radioactivity levels, one can choose from a range of units of measurement: curies, becquerels, roentgens, rads alias centigrays, and rems, not forgetting, the humble millirads, and sieverts, which are worth 100 rems. It reminds one of the old subdivisions of British currency which foreigners found so confusing, back in the days when Sellafield was still called Windscale.
(37) In June 1987, Pierre Bacher, deputy director of installations at Electricité de France, revealed the latest safety doctrine for nuclear power stations. By installing valves and filters it becomes much easier to avoid major catastrophes, like cracks or explosions in the reactors, which would affect a whole “region." Such catastrophes are produced by excessive containment. Whenever the plant looks like blowing, it is better to decompress gently, showering only a restricted area of a few kilometers, an area which on each occasion will be differently and haphazardly extended depending on the wind. He discloses that in the past two years discrete experiments carried out at Cadarache in the Drôme, "clearly showed that waste – essentially gas – is infinitesimal, representing at worst 1% of the radioactivity in the power station itself." That's a very moderate worst case: 1%. Formerly, we were assured there was no risk at all, except in the case of accidents, which were logically impossible. The experience of the first few years changed this reasoning as follows: since accidents can always happen, what must be avoided is their reaching a catastrophic threshold, and that is easy. All that is necessary is to contaminate little by little, in moderation. Who would not agree that it is infinitely healthier to limit yourself to an intake of 140 centilitres of vodka per day for several years, rather than getting drunk right right away like the Poles?
(38) At the international conference of experts held in Geneva in December 1986 the question was quite simply whether to introduce a worldwide ban on the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the gases, which have recently and rapidly started to destroy the thin layer of ozone, which – as will be recalled - protects this planet against the harmful effects of solar rays. Daniel Verilhe, representing Elf-Aquitaine's chemical subsidiary, and in this capacity part of a French delegation firmly opposed to any ban made a sensible point: “It will take at least three years to develop substitutes, and the cost will be quadrupled." As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one has no market value. This industrial strategist could thus show his opponents the extent of their inexplicable disregard for economics: “It is highly dangerous to base an industrial strategy on environmental imperatives.”
(39) When an all-powerful economy lost its reason - _and that is precisely what defines these spectacular times_ – it suppressed the last vestiges of scientific autonomy, both in methodology, and, by the same token, in the practical working conditions of its “researchers.”
(40-41) The science of lying justifications naturally occurred with the first symptoms of bourgeois society's decadence, with the cancerous proliferation of those pseudo-sciences known as “human"; yet modern medicine, for example, had once been able to pass as useful, and those who eradicated smallpox or leprosy were very different from those who contemptibly capitulated in the face of nuclear radiation or chemical farming. It can readily be seen, of course, that medicine today no longer has the right to defend public health against a pathogenic environment, for that would be to challenge the state, or at least the pharmaceuticals industry. But it is not only by its obligation to keep quiet that contemporary science acknowledges what it has become. It is also by its frequent and artless outbursts. In November 1985, professors Even and Andreiu at Laënnac hospital announced that they had perhaps found an effective cure for Aids, following an experiment on four patients which had lasted a week. Two days later the patients having died, several other doctors, whose research was not so far advanced, or who were perhaps jealous, expressed certain reservations as to the professors' precipitate haste in broadcasting what was merely the misleading appearance of victory – a few hours before the patients' condition finally deteriorated. Even and Andreiu defending themselves nonchalantly, arguing that, after all, false hopes are better than no hope at all. Their ignorance was too great for them to recognize this argument as a precise and complete disavowal of the spirit of science; as the one which had historically always served to endorse the profitable daydreams of charlatans and sorcerers, long before such people were put in charge of hospitals.
(44-45) The relatively new concept of _disinformation_ was recently imported from Russia, along with another number of other inventions useful in the running of modern states. It is openly employed by particular powers, or, consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a _counter-offensive_ role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile, or at least rival powers, and would have been intentionally and malevolently falsified. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: this is called psychosis. Unlike the straightforward lie, disinformation must inevitably contain a degree of truth, but one deliberately manipulated by an artful enemy. This is what makes it so attractive to the defenders of the dominant society. The power which speaks of disinformation does not believe itself to be absolutely faultless, but knows that it can attribute to any precise criticism the excessive insignificance which characterizes disinformation; with the result that it will never have to admit to any particular fault.
(48) If occasionally a kind of unregulated, disinformation threatens to appear, in the service of particular interest temporarily in conflict, and threatens to be believed, getting out of control, and thus clashing with the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation, there is no reason to fear that the former involves other manipulators, who are more subtle or more skilled: it is simply because disinformation now spreads _in a world where there is no room for verification_.
(50-51) What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is _reconstructed_ as quickly as possible, to resemble the false. Being the richest and the most modern, the Americans have been the main dupes of this traffic in false art. And they are exactly the same people who pay for restoration work at Versailles or in the Sistine Chapel. This is why Michelangelo's frescoes will acquire the fresh, bright colors of a cartoon strip, and the genuine furniture at Versailles, the sparkling gilt which will make them resemble the fake Louis XIV suites imported by Texans at such great expense.
(56) It has most certainly been almost universally accepted that the geological explorations for oil-beds in the subsoil of the city of Paris, so noisily conducted in the autumn of 1986, had no other serious purpose than to measure the inhabitants' current level of stupid, stupid faction and submission; by showing them supposed research, so obviously devoid of economic reasons.
NB: The Madwoman of Chaillot
... More profoundly, in this world, which is officially so respectful of economic necessities, no one ever knows the real cost of anything which is produced. In fact, the major part of the real cost _is never calculated; and the rest is kept secret_.
(58) Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian phenomenom, this General Noriega, who _sells everything and fakes everything_, in a world which does precisely the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the integrated spectacle, and of the success is it allows the assorted managers of its internal and external politics: a sort of statesman. In a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist. He is the very model of _our modern prince_, and of those destined to come to power and stay there, the most able resemble him closely. It is not Panama, which produces such marvels, it is our times.
(59-60) When television has shown a fine picture and explained it with a brazen lie, idiots believe that everything is clear. The demi-elite is content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, “constructed" by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know what is true, hard as it is to distinguish in each particular case despite all their access to special knowledge, and confidences. Which is why they would like to get to know the method of truth, though their love usually remains unrequited.
(61) In his Discourse sur la servitude volontaire, La Boétie showed how a tyrant's power will be considerably reinforced by the concentric circles of individuals who believe, rightly, or wrongly, that it is in their interest to support it. In the same way many politicians and media professionals who are flattered not to be suspected of being _irresponsible_, learn a lot through their connections and confidences. Someone who is happy to be given confidential information is hardly likely to criticize it; nor to notice that in all that is confided to him, the principal part of reality is invariably hidden. Thanks to the benevolent protection of his deceivers, he sees a few more of the cards, false though they may be; he never learns the rules of the game. Thus he immediately identifies with a manipulators and scorns an ignorance which in fact he shares. For the titbits of information tossed to the familiars of a lying tyranny are usually poisoned with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. Yet they gratify those who get them, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing. Their only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. They are the privilege of _front-row spectators_ who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but _by believing what is revealed!_
(63) But Edgar Allan Poe had already discovered the real path to truth, in a well-known argument in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”:
“It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution – I mean for the outré character of its features… In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred', as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before’.”
(67) It is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals. Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life of all too easily shown. The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the _model_ of all advanced commercial enterprises.
NB: The revolution is over. The mafia has won. Tom Thompson, 1967
(69) The ubiquitous growth of secret societies and networks of influence answers the imperative demand of the new conditions for profitable management of economic affairs, at a time when the state holds a hegemonic role in the direction of production and when demand for all commodities depend strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular information/promotion, to which forms of distribution must also adapt. It is therefore only a natural product of the concentration of capital, production, and distribution. Whatever does not grow, must disappear; and no business can grow without adopting the values, techniques and methods of today's industry, spectacle and state. In the final analysis, it is the particular form of development chosen by the economy of our epoch which _dictates the widespread creation of new personal bonds of dependency and protection_.
(69-70) It is precisely here that we can see the profound truth of the Sicilian Mafia's maxim, so well appreciated throughout Italy: “when you've got money and friends, you can laugh at the law." In the integrated spectacle, the laws are asleep; because they were not made for the new production techniques, and because they are evaded in distribution by new types of agreement. With the public thinks, or prefers, is of no importance. This is what is hidden by the spectacle of all these opinion polls, elections, modernizing restructurings. No matter who are the winners are, the faithful customers _will get the worst of it_, because that is exactly what has been produced for them.
(74) Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, _conspiring in its favor_ is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its well-being. This conspiracy _is a part_ of it's very functioning.
(76-78) to this kind of counter-journalistic false critique can be added the organized practice of rumor which we know to be originally a sort of uncontrollable byproduct of spectacular information, since everyone, however vaguely, perceives something misleading about the latter and trusts it as little as it deserves. Rumor began as something superstitious, naïve, self-deluding. More recently, however, surveillance has begun introducing into the population people capable of starting rumors which suit it at the very first signal. It has been decided here to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some 30 years ago, whose origins origins lie in American sociology of advertising – the theory of individuals known as “pacemakers," that is, those whom others in their milieu come to follow and imitate – but this time moving from spontaneity to control. Budgetary, or extra-budgetary, means have also been released to find numerous auxiliaries; beside the former specialists of the recent past, academics and media professionals, sociologists and police. To believe in the continuing mechanical application of past models leads to,just as many errors as the general ignorance of the past. "Rome is no longer Rome," and the Mafia are no longer thieves. And the surveillance and disinformation services are as far removed from the police and informers of former times – for example, from the roussins and mouchards of the Second Empire – as the present special services in all countries are from the officers of the army,general staff’s Deuxième Bureau in 1914.
Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists. When the latest imitations of a recuperated neo-dadaism are allowed to pontificate proudly in the media, and thus also to tinker with the decor of official palaces, like court jesters to the kings of junk, it is evident that by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state's networks of persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centers on the work of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops. No doubt Arthur Cravan foresaw this world when he wrote in Maintenant: “Soon we will we will only see artists in the streets, and it will take no end of effort to find a single man." This is, indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian loafers: “Hello there, artists! Too bad if I've got it wrong.”
(79) The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; for it is in them that the features and force of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree. Moreover, they are always also the arbiters of that society's general interests, despite their modest title of “services." There is no corruption here, for they faithfully express the common morals of the spectacular century. Thus do watchers and watched sail forth on a boundless ocean. The spectacle has brought the secret to victory, and must be more and more controlled by _specialists in secrecy_ who are certainly not only officials who who have to different degrees managed to free themselves from state control; who are not only officials.
(79-80) A general working rule of the integrated spectacle, at least for those who manage its affairs, is that in this framework, _everything which can be done, must be done_. This means that every new instrument must be employed, whatever the cost. New machinery everywhere becomes the goal and the driving force of the system, and is the only thing which can significantly modify its progress, every time its use is imposed without further reflection. Society's owners indeed want above all to keep a certain "social relation between people," but they may must also maintain continual technological innovation; for that was one of the obligations that came with their inheritance. This law must also thus apply to the services which safeguard domination. When an instrument has been perfected it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions that favor this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.
(82-83) So it is that thousands of plots in favor of the established order tangle and clash, almost everywhere, as the overlap of secret networks and secret issues or activities grows ever more dense along with their rapid integration into every sector of economics, politics and culture. In all areas of social life the degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and security activities gets greater and greater. The plot having thickened to the point where it is almost out in the open, each part of it now starts to interfere with, or worry, the others, for all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without really knowing why, are colliding by chance yet not identifying each other with any certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate aims can barely be suspected and almost never understood. So that while no one can be sure he is not being tricked or manipulated, it is rare for the string-puller to know he has succeeded. And in any case, to be on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has chosen the right strategic perspective. Tactical successes can thus lead great powers down dangerous roads.
(84-85) It is in these circumstances that we can speak of domination's falling rate of profit, as it spreads to almost the whole social space, and consequently increases both its personnel, and its means. For now, each means aspires, and labors, to become an end. Surveillance spies on itself, and plots against itself.
Its principle present contradiction, finally, is that it is spying on, infiltrating, and pressurizing _an absent entity_: that which is supposed to be trying to subvert the social order. But where can it actually be seen at work? Certainly conditions have never been so seriously revolutionary, but it is only governments who think so. Negation has been so thoroughly deprived of its thought that it was dispersed long ago. Because of this, it remains only a big, yet highly disturbing threat, and surveillance in its turn, has been deprived of its preferred field of activity. Surveillance and intervention are thus rightly led by the present exigencies, determining their terms of engagement to operate on the very terrain of this threat in order to combat it _in advance_. This is why surveillance has an interest in organizing poles of negation itself, which it can instruct with more than the discredited means of the spectacle, so as to manipulate, not terrorists this time, but theories.
(85) The French revolution brought great changes in the art of war. It was from that experience that Clausewitz could draw the distinction between tactics, as the use of forces in battle to obtain victory, and strategy, as the use of victories in battle to attain the goals of a war.
(87-88) Not only are the subjective led to believe that to all intents and purposes they are still living in a world which in fact has been eliminated, but the rulers themselves sometimes suffer from the absurd belief that in some respects they do too. They come to believe in a part of what they have suppressed, as if it remained a reality and had still to be included in their calculations. This backwardness will not last long. Those who have achieved so much so easily must necessarily go further. It should not be thought that those who have been too slow to appreciate the pliability of the new rules of their game and its form of barbaric grandeur, will last forever like some archaism in proximity to real power. It is certainly not the spectacle's destiny to end up as enlightened despotism.
We must conclude that a changeover is imminent, and ineluctable in the coopted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of the domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed on the spectacle's stage. It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes. This changeover, which will conclude decisively the work of these spectacular times, will occur discreetly, and conspiratorially, even though it concerns those within the inner circles of power. It will select those who will share the central exigency: that they clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are capable.
NB: My notes on DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Notes on Hannah Arendt's On Revolution
On Revolution by Hannah Arendt
NY: The Viking Press, 1963
(5) Under modern circumstances, however, this appearance or reappearance of total war has a very important political significance insofar as it contradicts the basic assumptions upon which the relationship between the military and the civilian branches of government rests: it is the function of the army to protect and to defend the civilian population. In contrast, the history of warfare in our century could almost be told as the story of the growing incapacity of the army to fulfill this basic function, until today the strategy of deterrence has openly changed the role of the military from that of a protector into that of a belated and essentially futile avenger.
(9) The point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence.
(10-11) The tale [Cain & Abel, Romulus & Remus] spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origins in crime.
(13) …revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
(15) appanage - a gift of land, an official position, or money given to the younger children of kings and princes to provide for their maintenance; a necessary accompaniment.
(23) The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy.
NB: Isonomy - the principle that all citizens or subjects of a state are equal before the law, or that they have equal civil or political rights
…The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.
(28) But violence is no more adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change; only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution.
(46) Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy [post-Kantian Hegel?] is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But the fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories began and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.
NB: DeBord; multiple points of view - actor, spectator
(49) The sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.
(58) [Marxism] Not freedom but abundance became now the aim of revolution.
(65) Since then [French Revolution], the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution.
(80) For compassion, to be striken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related.
(85) Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their “principles,” or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.
(5) Under modern circumstances, however, this appearance or reappearance of total war has a very important political significance insofar as it contradicts the basic assumptions upon which the relationship between the military and the civilian branches of government rests: it is the function of the army to protect and to defend the civilian population. In contrast, the history of warfare in our century could almost be told as the story of the growing incapacity of the army to fulfill this basic function, until today the strategy of deterrence has openly changed the role of the military from that of a protector into that of a belated and essentially futile avenger.
(9) The point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence.
(10-11) The tale [Cain & Abel, Romulus & Remus] spoke clearly: whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origins in crime.
(13) …revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
(15) appanage - a gift of land, an official position, or money given to the younger children of kings and princes to provide for their maintenance; a necessary accompaniment.
(23) The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy.
NB: Isonomy - the principle that all citizens or subjects of a state are equal before the law, or that they have equal civil or political rights
…The equality of the Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.
(28) But violence is no more adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change; only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution.
(46) Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy [post-Kantian Hegel?] is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But the fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories began and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.
NB: DeBord; multiple points of view - actor, spectator
(49) The sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.
(58) [Marxism] Not freedom but abundance became now the aim of revolution.
(65) Since then [French Revolution], the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution.
(80) For compassion, to be striken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related.
(85) Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their “principles,” or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.
NB: Not just Left revolutionists either
(95) It was the war upon hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre's dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding characteristic of this period was the self-purging of the rulers.
(135-136) For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor; they are the mirage in the desert of misery. In this sense, affluence and wretchedness are only two sides of the same coin; the bonds of necessity need not be of iron, they can be made of silk. Freedom and luxury have always been thought to be incompatible, and the modern estimate that tends to blame the insistence of the Founding Fathers on frugality and “simplicity of manners” (Jefferson) upon a Puritan contempt for the delights of the world much rather testifies to an inability to understand freedom than to a freedom from prejudice.
(136) The hidden wish of poor men is not “To each according to his needs,” but “To each according to his desires.” And while it is true that freedom can come only to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires.
(140) If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution, because all the dramatic aspects of his story seem to be contained in the first stage and, perhaps, also because the turmoil of liberation has so frequently defeated the revolution.
(152) In this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.
(154) Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.
(155) The singular good fortune of the American Revolution is undeniable. It occurred in a country which knew nothing of the predicament of mass poverty and among a people who had a widespread experience with self-government; to be sure, not the least of these blessings was that the Revolution grew out of a conflict with a “limited monarchy.” In the government of king and Parliament from which the colonies broke away, there was no potestas legibus soluta, no absolute power absolved from laws.
(170) in nuce - in a nutshell
(180) To the eighteenth century, as to the seventeenth before it and the nineteenth after it, the function of laws was not primarily to guarantee liberties but to protect property; it was property, and not the law as such, that guaranteed freedom.
(182) They themselves still knew very well what made them succeed where all other nations were to fail; it was, in the words of John Adams, the power of “confidence in one another, and in the common people, which enabled the United States to go through a revolution.”
(95) It was the war upon hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre's dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding characteristic of this period was the self-purging of the rulers.
(135-136) For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor; they are the mirage in the desert of misery. In this sense, affluence and wretchedness are only two sides of the same coin; the bonds of necessity need not be of iron, they can be made of silk. Freedom and luxury have always been thought to be incompatible, and the modern estimate that tends to blame the insistence of the Founding Fathers on frugality and “simplicity of manners” (Jefferson) upon a Puritan contempt for the delights of the world much rather testifies to an inability to understand freedom than to a freedom from prejudice.
(136) The hidden wish of poor men is not “To each according to his needs,” but “To each according to his desires.” And while it is true that freedom can come only to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their desires.
(140) If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution, because all the dramatic aspects of his story seem to be contained in the first stage and, perhaps, also because the turmoil of liberation has so frequently defeated the revolution.
(152) In this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.
(154) Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.
(155) The singular good fortune of the American Revolution is undeniable. It occurred in a country which knew nothing of the predicament of mass poverty and among a people who had a widespread experience with self-government; to be sure, not the least of these blessings was that the Revolution grew out of a conflict with a “limited monarchy.” In the government of king and Parliament from which the colonies broke away, there was no potestas legibus soluta, no absolute power absolved from laws.
(170) in nuce - in a nutshell
(180) To the eighteenth century, as to the seventeenth before it and the nineteenth after it, the function of laws was not primarily to guarantee liberties but to protect property; it was property, and not the law as such, that guaranteed freedom.
(182) They themselves still knew very well what made them succeed where all other nations were to fail; it was, in the words of John Adams, the power of “confidence in one another, and in the common people, which enabled the United States to go through a revolution.”
NB: Another side of the "confidence" concept from Melville's The Confidence Man to The Confidence Game (https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-confidence-game-guide-to-2016.html)
(186) It is all the more noteworthy that John Adams - who even before the outbreak of the Revolution had insisted on “rights antedecedent to all earthly government… derived from the great Legislator of the universe” and who then became instrumental in “retaining and insisting on [the law of nature] as a recourse to which we might be driven by Parliament much sooner than we were aware” - should have believed that “it was general opinion of ancient nations that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men.” For the point of the matter is that Adams was in error, and that neither the Greek νόμος nor the Roman lex was of divine origin, that neither the Greek nor the Roman concept of legislation needed divine inspiration.
(235) The perplexity was very simple and, stated in logical terms it seemed unsolvable: if foundation was the aim and the end of revolution, then the revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning something new but of starting something permanent and enduring; a lasting institution, embodying this spirit and encouraging it to new achievements, would be self-defeating. From which it unfortunately seems to follow that nothing threatens the very achievements of revolution more dangerously and more acutely than the spirit which has brought them about.
(239) Hence, they could hear with approval, though perhaps not entirely without misgivings, when Benjamin Rush proposed the new and dangerous doctrine that although “all power is derived from the people, they possess it only on the days of their elections. After this it is the property of their rulers.”
(250-251) However, this sad familiarity should not prevent us from recognizing that we are confronted even in the midst of the French Revolution with the conflict between the modern party system and the new revolutionary organs of self-government. These two systems, so utterly unlike and even contradictory to each other, were born at the same moment. The spectacular failure of the council system were both due to the rise of the nation-state, which elevated the one and crushed the other, whereby the leftist and revolutionary parties have shown themselves to be no less hostile to the council system than the conservative or reactionary right.
(257) Jefferson’s ward system: Hence, the ward system was not meant to strengthen the power of the many but the power of “every one” within the limits of his competence; and only by breaking up “the many” into assembles where every one could count and be counted upon “shall we be as republican as a large society can be.” In terms of the safety of the citizens of the republic, the question was how to make everybody feel “that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.”
NB: Oscar Wilde's trouble with Socialism was all the meetings but there are a variety of meetings and ways to do so
(265) There are certain paragraphs in the writing of the Utopian Socialist, especially in Proudhon and Bakunin, into which it has been relatively easy to read an awareness of the council system. Yet the truth is that these essentially anarchist political thinkers were singularly unequipped to deal with a phenomenon which demonstrated so clearly how a revoliution did not end with the abolition of state and government but, on the contrary, aimed at the foundation of a new state and the establishment of a new form of government. More recently, historians have pointed to the the rather obvious similarities between the councils and the medieval townships, the Swiss cantons, the English seventeenth-century “agitators” - or rather “adjustators,” as they were originally called - and the General Council of Cromwell’s army, but the point of the matter is that none of them, with the possible exception of the medieval town, had ever the slightest influence on the minds of the people who in the course of a revolution spontaneously organized themselves in councils.
NB: Wards, councils, communes, coops, soviets, mutual aid, no Kropotkin?!
(265) There are certain paragraphs in the writing of the Utopian Socialist, especially in Proudhon and Bakunin, into which it has been relatively easy to read an awareness of the council system. Yet the truth is that these essentially anarchist political thinkers were singularly unequipped to deal with a phenomenon which demonstrated so clearly how a revoliution did not end with the abolition of state and government but, on the contrary, aimed at the foundation of a new state and the establishment of a new form of government. More recently, historians have pointed to the the rather obvious similarities between the councils and the medieval townships, the Swiss cantons, the English seventeenth-century “agitators” - or rather “adjustators,” as they were originally called - and the General Council of Cromwell’s army, but the point of the matter is that none of them, with the possible exception of the medieval town, had ever the slightest influence on the minds of the people who in the course of a revolution spontaneously organized themselves in councils.
NB: Wards, councils, communes, coops, soviets, mutual aid, no Kropotkin?!
(270-271) In order to prove what Odysse Barrot felt to be true [the federation was both liberal and republican], we must turn to the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia and to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, both of which lasted just long enough to show in bare outlines what a government would look like and how a republic was likely to function if they were founded upon the principles of the council system. In both instances councils or soviets had sprung up everywhere, completely independent of one another, workers', soldiers', and peasants' councils in the case of Russia, the most disparate kinds of councils in the case of Hungary: neighborhood councils that emerged in all residential districts, so-called revolutionary councils that grew out of fighting together in the streets, councils of writers and artists, born in the coffee houses of Budapest, students’ and youths’ councils at the universities, workers’ councils in the factories, councils in the army, among the civil servants, and so on. The formation of a council in each of these disparate groups turned a more or less accidental proximity into a political institution. The most striking aspect of these spontaneous developments is that in both instances it took these independent and highly disparate organs no more than a few weeks, in the case of Russia, or a few days, in the case of Hungary, to begin a process of coordination and integration through the formation of higher councils of a regional or provincial character, from which finally the delegates to an assembly representing the whole country could be chosen.
(277) The conflict between the two systems, the parties and the councils, came to the fore in all twentieth-century revolution. The issue at stake was representation versus action and participation. The councils were organs of action, the revolutionary parties were organs of representation, and although the revolutionary parties halfheartedly recognized the councils as instruments of “revolutionary struggle,” they tried even in the midst of revolution to rule them from within; they knew well enough that no party, no matter how revolutionary it was, would be able to survive the transformation of the government into a Soviet Republic. For the parties, the need for action itself was transitory, and they had no doubt that after the victory of the revolution further action would simply prove unnecessary or subversive.
(277-278) The fatal mistake of the councils has always been that they themselves did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest. In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure.
NB: Not sure that’s true with the variety of worker-ownership possibilities available. Mondragon Cooperatives for instance. Worker owner and investor models are now numerous and successful in many different forms.
(279) Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a universally valid principle but, again, applicable only with limitations and even within spatial limits.
(280) My quarrel with the “élite” is that the term implies an oligarchic form of government, the domination of the many by the rule of a few. From this, one can only conclude - as indeed our whole tradition of political thought has concluded - that the essence of politics is rulership and that the dominant political passion is the passion to rule or to govern. This, I propose, is profoundly untrue. The fact that political “élites” have always determined the political destinies of the many and have, in most instances, exerted a domination over them, indicates, on the one hand, the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity; and it indicates, on the other hand, the responsibility that falls automatically upon those who care for the fate of those who do not.
NB: "those who care for the fate of those who do not” - Milt Raymond’s for the benefit of all who are for the benefit of all
(282-283) But while, in all authoritarian government we know of, authority is filtered down from above, in this case [council or ward system] authority would have been generated neither at the top nor at the bottom, but on each of the pyramid's layers; and this obviously could constitute the solution to one of the most serious problems of all modern politics, which is not how to reconcile freedom and equality but how to reconcile equality and authority.
(277-278) The fatal mistake of the councils has always been that they themselves did not distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs and administration or management of things in the public interest. In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these attempts have ended in dismal failure.
NB: Not sure that’s true with the variety of worker-ownership possibilities available. Mondragon Cooperatives for instance. Worker owner and investor models are now numerous and successful in many different forms.
(279) Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a universally valid principle but, again, applicable only with limitations and even within spatial limits.
(280) My quarrel with the “élite” is that the term implies an oligarchic form of government, the domination of the many by the rule of a few. From this, one can only conclude - as indeed our whole tradition of political thought has concluded - that the essence of politics is rulership and that the dominant political passion is the passion to rule or to govern. This, I propose, is profoundly untrue. The fact that political “élites” have always determined the political destinies of the many and have, in most instances, exerted a domination over them, indicates, on the one hand, the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity; and it indicates, on the other hand, the responsibility that falls automatically upon those who care for the fate of those who do not.
NB: "those who care for the fate of those who do not” - Milt Raymond’s for the benefit of all who are for the benefit of all
(282-283) But while, in all authoritarian government we know of, authority is filtered down from above, in this case [council or ward system] authority would have been generated neither at the top nor at the bottom, but on each of the pyramid's layers; and this obviously could constitute the solution to one of the most serious problems of all modern politics, which is not how to reconcile freedom and equality but how to reconcile equality and authority.
(283-284) It would be tempting to spin out further the potentialities of the councils, but it certainly is wiser to say with Jefferson, "Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments” - but the best instruments, for example, for breaking up the modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass movements, or rather, the best, the most natural way for interspersing it at the grass roots with an “élite” that is chosen by no one but constitutes itself. The joys of public happiness and the responsibilities for public business would then become the share of those few from all walks of life who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be “happy” without it. Politically, they are the best, and it is the task of good government and the sign of a well-ordered republic to assure them of their rightful place in the public realm. To be sure, such an “aristocratic” form of government would spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today; for only those who as voluntary members of an “elementary republic” have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic. However, this exclusion from politics should not be derogatory, since a political élite is by no means identical with a social or cultural or professional élite. The exclusion, moreover, would not depend upon an outside body; if those who belong are self-chosen, those who do not belong are self-excluded. And such self-exclusion, far from being arbitrary discrimination, would in fact give substance and reality to one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world, namely, freedom from politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is politically perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian heritage.
NB: You might want freedom from politics but politics, and politicians, affect you whether you like it or not
(324) Oskar Anweiler on the Hungarian Revolution: The councils were "striving for the most direct, extensive and unrestricted participation of the individual in public life possible"
(324) Oskar Anweiler on the Hungarian Revolution: The councils were "striving for the most direct, extensive and unrestricted participation of the individual in public life possible"
Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet on The Russian Revolution translated by Bertram D Wolfe, 1940
(326) René Char, Feuilles d’Hypnos, Paris, 1946 translated as Hypnos Walking: Poems and Prose, NY 1956
(326) René Char, Feuilles d’Hypnos, Paris, 1946 translated as Hypnos Walking: Poems and Prose, NY 1956
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Thomas Paine's Age of Reason
Finally got around to reading a falling apart hardback copy of Paine's Age of Reason (published as three pamphlets in 1794, 1795, 1807) found at a Little Free Library long ago. It's a very modern book and Paine is very clear as a writer.
Paine deconstructs and demolishes the Bible but believes instead that
"The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of his existence and the immutability of his power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries."
Sounds like an ecological world view to me.
Reading Age of Reason led me to his pamphlet "Agrarian Justice" (1797) where he argued that the Earth itself belongs to all of us and that we are entitled to a just portion of that. The sums would be "fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: £1,599.00 ($1955.98)
"And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum: £1,066.00 ($1303.98)"
I like Tom Paine and grew up with people who liked him too. After I read the book, I found my grandmother's paperback copy among my books. I gave both copies to the various Little Free Libraries around town after I finished my notes.
Now Paine's Rights of Man goes on the reading list.
Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
(2) I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
(30) If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself; it is then no longer justice, it is indiscriminate revenge.
Editorial Comment: The plot of A Tale of Two Cities
(32) The word of God is the creation we behold and it is in _this world_, which no human can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.
(36) Almost the only parts in the book called the Bible that convey to us any idea of God, are some chapters in Job and the 19th Psalm; I recollect no other. Those parts are true deistical compositions, for they treat the Deity through his works. They take the book of Creation as the word of God, they refer to no other book, and all the inferences they make are drawn from that volume.
(40) That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.
(58) … and I moreover believe, that any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system.
(73) Religion, therefore, being the belief of a God and the practice of moral truth, cannot have connection with mystery. The belief of a God, so far from having anything of mystery in it, is of all beliefs the most easy, because it arises to us, as is before observed, out of necessity. And the practice of moral truth, or, in other words, a practical imitation of the moral goodness of God, is no other than our acting toward each other as he acts benignly toward all. We cannot _serve_ God in the manner we serve those who cannot do without such service; and, therefore, the only idea we can have of serving God, is that of contributing to the happiness of the living creation that God had made. This cannot be done by retiring ourselves from the society of the world and spending a recluse life in selfish devotion.
(101) It is a duty incumbent on every true Deist, that he vindicate the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible.
(133) … to priests and commentators, who are very learned in little things,…
(204) I am not one of those who are fond of believing there is much of that which is called willful lying, or lying originally, except in the case of men setting up to be prophets, as in the the Old Testament, for prophesying is lying professionally.
(219) A very numerous part of the animal creation preaches to us, far better than Paul, the belief of a life hereafter.
(229) The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity.
NB: The Catalans by Patrick O’Brian
Love your neighbor as yourself is not enough, nothing like enough, if you have a deep, well-founded dislike of yourself.
and
I will tell you what I mean by the death of the soul. When you no longer have the power to love, when there is no stir of affection anywhere in your being, then your soul is dead. That is the death of your soul. Your soul is dead, and you are damned: you are dead walking, and you are in hell in your own body.
and
I will tell you what I mean by the death of the soul. When you no longer have the power to love, when there is no stir of affection anywhere in your being, then your soul is dead. That is the death of your soul. Your soul is dead, and you are damned: you are dead walking, and you are in hell in your own body.
These two quotes explain much of the state of humanity, such as it is, these days.
(231) The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of his existence and the immutability of his power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.
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