of Guy Debord -1971

“Pollution” is in vogue today, in exactly the same way as revolution: it takes over the whole of society’s life, and is illusorily represented in the spectacle. It is a tiresome chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writings and speeches, and it takes everyone by the throat in reality. It is exposed everywhere as an ideology, and it is gaining ground as a real process.

These two antagonistic movements, the ultimate stage of market production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in contradictions within themselves, are growing together. They are the two sides through which the same long-awaited historical moment is manifesting, a moment often foreseen in inadequate partial figures: the impossibility of capitalism continuing to function.

The era that has all the technical means to absolutely alter the living conditions on the entire Earth is also the era which, through the same separate technical and scientific development, has all the means of control and mathematically unquestionable forecasting to measure exactly in advance where – and by what date – the automatic growth of the productive forces alienated from class society is leading: that is to say, to measure the rapid deterioration of the very conditions of survival, in the most general and most trivial sense of the term.

While backward-looking fools still talk about, and against, an aesthetic critique of all this, and believe they are showing themselves to be lucid and modern by pretending to embrace their century, by proclaiming that the motorway or Sarcelles have their beauty that we should prefer to the discomfort of the “picturesque” old neighborhoods, or by seriously pointing out that the entire population eats better, despite those nostalgic for good food, the problem of the degradation of the entire natural and human environment has completely ceased to arise in terms of its alleged former quality, aesthetic or otherwise, to become radically the very problem of the material possibility of existence of the world pursuing such a movement. The impossibility is in fact already perfectly demonstrated by all the separate scientific knowledge, which now only discusses the deadline; and the palliatives which could, if applied firmly, slightly delay it. Such a science can only accompany the world that produced it and holds it towards destruction; but it is forced to do so with open eyes. It thus demonstrates, to a caricatural degree, the uselessness of knowledge without employment.

We measure and extrapolate with excellent precision the rapid increase in chemical pollution of the breathable atmosphere; of the water in rivers, lakes and already oceans, and the irreversible increase in radioactivity accumulated by the peaceful development of nuclear energy; the effects of noise; the invasion of space by plastic products that can expect to be a universal dumping ground for all eternity; the insane birth rate; the senseless adulteration of food; the urbanistic leprosy that is increasingly spreading in place of what were once town and country; as well as mental illness – including the neurotic fears and hallucinations that are bound to multiply soon on the theme of pollution itself, the alarming image of which is displayed everywhere – and suicide, the growth rate of which already exactly matches that of the construction of such an environment (not to mention the effects of atomic or bacteriological warfare, the means of which are in place like the sword of Damocles, but obviously remain avoidable).

In short, while the scale and the very reality of the “Terrors of the Year 1000” are still a controversial subject among historians, the terror of the Year 2000 is as obvious as it is well-founded; it is now a scientific certainty. However, what is happening is nothing fundamentally new: it is only the forced end of the old process.

An increasingly sick, but increasingly powerful society has concretely recreated the world everywhere as the environment and setting of its illness, as a sick planet. A society that has not yet become homogeneous and that is not determined by itself, but increasingly by a part of itself that places itself above it, that is external to it, has developed a movement of domination of nature that has not dominated itself. Capitalism has finally proven, through its own movement, that it can no longer develop the forces of production; and this not quantitatively, as many had thought, but qualitatively.

However, for bourgeois thought, methodologically, only the quantitative is serious, measurable, effective; and the qualitative is only the uncertain subjective or artistic decoration of the true real estimated at its true weight. For dialectical thought, on the contrary, therefore for history and for the proletariat, the qualitative is the most decisive dimension of real development. This is what we and capitalism will have ended up demonstrating.

The masters of society are now obliged to talk about pollution, and to combat it (because they live, after all, on the same planet as us; this is the only sense in which we can admit that the development of capitalism has effectively achieved a certain fusion of classes) and to conceal it: because the simple truth of the present nuisances and risks is enough to constitute an immense factor of revolt, a materialist demand of the exploited, just as vital as the struggle of the proletarians of the 19th century for the possibility of eating. After the fundamental failure of all the reformisms of the past – all of which aspired to a definitive solution to the class problem – a new reformism is emerging, which obeys the same necessities as its predecessors: greasing the wheels and opening up new opportunities for profit for cutting-edge companies. The most modern sector of industry is launching itself into the various palliatives for pollution, as if it were a new outlet, all the more profitable as a large part of the capital monopolized by the State is to be employed and maneuvered there. But while this new reformism is guaranteed to fail in advance, for exactly the same reasons as past reformisms, it differs radically from them in that it has no time to lose.

The development of production has so far been verified entirely as the accomplishment of “political economy: the development of misery, which has invaded and damaged the very environment of life. The society in which producers kill themselves at work, and have only to contemplate the result, frankly gives them the general result of alienated labor to see and breathe as a result of death. In the society of the overdeveloped economy, everything has entered the sphere of economic goods, even the water of springs and the air of cities, that is to say that everything has become economic evil, a “complete denial of man” that has now reached its perfect material conclusion. The conflict of modern productive forces and the bourgeois or bureaucratic relations of production of capitalist society has entered its ultimate phase. The production of non-life has continued its linear and cumulative process at an ever-increasing pace; having crossed a final threshold in its progress, it now directly produces death.

The final, admittedly essential function of today’s developed economy, throughout the world where labor-as-a-commodity reigns and ensures that its bosses hold all the power, is “job creation”. We are therefore a long way from the progressive ideas of the previous century on the possible reduction of human labor through the scientific and technical multiplication of productivity, which was supposed to ensure ever more easily the satisfaction of needs “previously recognized by all as real”, and without “fundamental alteration” of the very quality of the goods that would be available.

It is now in order to produce jobs, even in the countryside emptied of its peasants, that is to say, to use human labor as alienated labor, as wage labor, that “everything else” is done; and thus the foundations of the life of the species, currently even more fragile than the thinking of a Kennedy or a Brezhnev, are being stupidly threatened.

The old ocean is indifferent to pollution in itself; but history is not. It can only be saved by the abolition of labor as a commodity. And never has historical consciousness been in such urgent need of dominating its world, for the enemy at its door is no longer illusion, but its death.

When the poor masters of society, whose deplorable outcome we are now witnessing, far worse than any condemnation that the most radical utopians could once rail against, must now admit that our environment has become social; that the management of everything has become a directly political matter, right down to the grass in the fields and the possibility of drinking, the possibility of sleeping without too many sleeping pills or washing without suffering from allergies, at such a moment we can also see that the old specialized policy must admit that it is completely finished.

It is finished in the supreme form of its voluntarism: the totalitarian bureaucratic power of so-called socialist regimes, because the bureaucrats in power have not even shown themselves capable of managing the previous stage of the capitalist economy. If they pollute much less – the United States alone produces 50% of the world’s pollution – it is because they are much poorer. They cannot, as China can, for example, by blocking a disproportionate share of its poverty budget, only afford the prestige pollution of the poor powers; a few rediscoveries and improvements in the techniques of thermonuclear warfare, or more exactly of its threatening spectacle. So much poverty, material and mental, supported by so much terrorism, condemns the bureaucracies in power. And what condemns even the most modernized bourgeois power is the unbearable result of so much effectively poisoned wealth. The so-called democratic management of capitalism, in whatever country, offers only its resignation-elections which, as we have always seen, never changed anything overall, and even very little in detail, to a class society that imagined it could last indefinitely. They change nothing more when this management itself panics and pretends to want, to solve certain secondary but urgent problems, some vague directives from the alienated and cretinized electorate (USA, Italy, England, France).

All specialized observers had always noted – without bothering too much to explain it – the fact that the voter almost never changes his “opinion” : it is precisely because he is the voter, the one who assumes, for a brief moment, the abstract role that is precisely intended to prevent him from being himself, and from changing (the mechanism has been dismantled a hundred times, both by demystified political analysis and by the explanations of revolutionary psychoanalysis). Voters do not change either when the world around them changes ever more precipitously, and as voters they would not change even on the eve of the end of the world. All representative systems are essentially conservative, while the conditions of existence of capitalist society have never been able to be conserved: they are constantly changing, and ever more quickly, but the decision – which is ultimately always a decision to let the very process of market production take its course – is left entirely to publicized specialists; whether they are alone in the race or in competition with those who are going to do the same thing, and indeed loudly announce it. However, the man who has just voted “freely and openly” for the Gaullists or the PCF, just as much as the man who has just voted, forced and compelled, for a Gomulka, is capable of showing what he really is the following week, by taking part in a wildcat strike or an insurrection.

The so-called “fight against pollution”, through its state and regulatory aspect, will first create new specializations, ministerial services, jobs, and bureaucratic advancement. And its effectiveness will be entirely commensurate with such means. It can only become a real will by transforming the current productive system at its very roots.

And it can only be applied firmly when all its decisions, taken democratically by producers in full knowledge of the facts, are at all times controlled and implemented by the producers themselves (for example, ships will inevitably spill their oil at sea as long as they are not under the authority of real sailors’ soviets).

To decide and execute all this, the producers must become adults: they must all seize power.

Nineteenth-century scientific optimism collapsed on three essential points. First, the claim to guarantee revolution as a happy resolution of existing conflicts (this was the Hegelian-leftist and Marxist illusion; the least felt in the bourgeois intelligentsia, but the richest, and ultimately the least illusory). Secondly, the coherent vision of the universe, and even simply of matter. Thirdly, the euphoric and linear feeling of the development of the productive forces. If we master the first point, we will have resolved the third; and much later we will be able to make the second our business and our game. We must not treat the symptoms but the disease itself. Today fear is everywhere, and we will only escape it by trusting in our own strengths, in our capacity to destroy all existing alienation, and all images of power that have eluded us. By handing everything over, except ourselves, to the sole power of the Workers’ Councils possessing and constantly reconstructing the whole world, that is to say to true rationality, to a new legitimacy.

In terms of the “natural” and constructed environment, birth rates, biology, production, “madness”, there will be no choice between celebration and misfortune but consciously and at every crossroads, between a thousand happy or disastrous possibilities, relatively correctable and, on the other hand, nothingness. The terrible choices of the near future leave only this alternative: total democracy or total bureaucracy. Those who doubt total democracy must make an effort to prove it to themselves, giving it the opportunity to prove itself by walking; or else they have no choice but to buy their grave on installments, for “we have seen authority at work, and its works condemn it” (Joseph Déjacque).

“Revolution or death” is no longer a lyrical expression of rebellious conscience, but the final word of scientific thought in our century. This applies to the dangers facing the species as well as to the impossibility of individual adherence. In this society where suicide is on the rise, as we know, specialists have had to acknowledge, with a certain degree of annoyance, that it had fallen to almost zero in May 1968. That spring also saw, without exactly storming the heavens, a beautiful sky, because a few cars had been burned and all the others lacked the fuel to pollute. When it rains, when there are fake clouds over Paris, never forget that it’s the government’s fault. Alienated industrial production makes it rain.

Revolution makes it sunny.”

Guy Debord – 1971

Guy Debord