Environmental(?) Crisis and that Guy

Posted at Cominsitu  https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/a-sick-planet/

Debord, once again, decades ahead of his time.  And yet, one should ask, what is left of the idea of workers’ councils?  I do not mean to despair, but to ask in all fairness "What does the Left have in mind, if it has a mind at all, in imagining that such a thing might have any purchase in the present?"  If anything is clear right now, it is the lack of a revolutionary subjectivity presenting itself anywhere, in any way.

Like Debord at the end of his life, we should proceed recognizing that the police behave like revolutionaries and the revolutionaries are all police.  This is not to adore the police, but to recognize that the "radicals in balaclavas" were agent provocateurs and the radicals in balaclavas were "agent provocateurs". 

The potential is absolutely clear, and has been for five to six decades (Adorno and Horkheimer recognized it in the 1950's, and were not the first) that the way we live is insane, and that decency of life with a minimum of effort has long been present.  What Debord and Adorno took up was how such a potential could be repressed by a lifeless, a spectacular, a damaged, life.  The actuality of that crisis presents itself more virulently than ever before.

Arguably, in a piece filled with brilliant flashes of the brutal future-present, this passage struck me most profoundly:

"Nineteenth-century scientific optimism foundered over three main issues. The first was the claim that the advent of revolution was certain, and that it would ensure the happy resolution of existing conflicts; this was the left-Hegelian and Marxist illusion, the least acutely felt among the bourgeois intelligentsia, but the richest, and ultimately the least illusory. The second issue was a view of the universe, or even simply of matter, as harmonious. And the third was a euphorically linear conception of the development of the forces of production. Once we come to terms with the first issue we shall deal by extension with the third, thus enabling us, albeit much later, to address the second, to make it into that which is at stake for us. It is not the symptoms but the illness itself that must be cured. Today, fear is everywhere and we shall escape it only through our own strength, our own ability to destroy every existing kind of alienation and every image of the power that has been wrested from us: only by submitting everything except ourselves–to the sole power of workers’ councils, possessing and continually reconstructing the totality of the world–by submitting everything, in other words, to an authentic rationality, a new legitimacy."

The first illusion, richest and most profound indeed, at the time.  Today, even more difficult to feel among any part of the population except the intelligentsia. 

The second illusion, the view of the universe as harmonious is the foundation of the fetish of the natural sciences that is supposed to guide us today against the impending, the already-overwhelming, irrationalism.  And yet its predicate is a nature reducible to mathematics, to a logos only comprehensible through a Logos of God, a certainty of quantification outside of historicial specificity only in a deity-dominated universe.

The last presents itself in complete self-negation: the certainty of overproduction as our self-destruction alongside the certainty of production as our only way out.

All that is missing from Debord's piece, impossible for it was only emerging in his day and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk", is the simultaneous hagiography and demonology of financialization as the end-all and save-all of our crisis, of finance as cause and salvation.