Debord in Watts: Race and Class Antagonisms Under Spectacle
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I explore Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes by closely examining the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle (1973), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the uprising, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” Debord’s Marxist perspective on Watts understands the insurgents as potential revolutionary actors, primed for a “second proletarian assault against class society” (SotS, Thesis 47). To complicate Debord’s position, I look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, which understands anti-black violence not as contingent upon capitalist alienation but instead as gratuitous violence required to uphold the figure of Humanity within civil society.
Do I think we can make it through rioting? Do you think we can make it through on promises!? —Watts man1
It is hard to explain to someone what it feels like to be black in a white world. The things that happen to you daily, that are very much a part of you, are hard to remember because they become so routine. There is really nothing I can tell you here that would fully let you know what it is like because it is too horrible and too deep to really communicate to anyone. —Watts woman2
Five months after the Watts Rebellion took place in August 1965, ABC News aired a report featuring interviews with several black Watts residents. The middle-aged white host informs us that by interviewing these residents, he hopes “to add understanding to the most difficult of all domestic problems in America.” That problem was and is race. Beneath the populist tone, the television program reflected a tension that continues to pervade Marxism and most liberatory politics: Is race a division within the proletariat manufactured by the managerial class to fracture any revolutionary potential? Or does racism emerge from a premodern world, transforming alongside capitalism’s evolution?3 With this tension in mind, we can rephrase the two quotes that open this paper. In the first quote, the Watts man suggests the Watts riot is, at least in part, a symptomatic manifestation of spectacle espousing toxic racisms and structural hierarchy. We can no longer make it on your promises—promises of jobs, wealth, proper housing, an end to police violence. No more promises of “progress.” To put it crudely, if one reads the quote from a strictly class-oriented Marxist perspective, the antidote to this man’s ailments are political-economic, and come with the overthrow of capitalism.
In the second quote, a woman from Watts implicitly situates social death as central to her analysis of why the Watts uprising occurred. The explosion in Watts was white society’s chickens coming home to roost. Aware that she is speaking with ABC, she addresses the white world as Other in informing the listener—white society—they cannot understand. It is too terrible to communicate to anyone. Reading between the lines, one suspects she means that, as a black woman, she cannot be heard in this particular white venue for speech. This inability to be heard in a public venue signifies her social death. The interviewee uses “anyone” as a stand-in for the whole of white folks because they have access to the public sphere or civil society; through this popular television program, they will hear her words and see her picture but never understand her. The routine quality of this racist horror that constitutes black life in Watts is beyond words. Inversely, it is implied that many black people understand this horrible-ness that exceeds description. This second interviewee requires not the end of capitalism but the end of white civil society.
In this paper, I will explore this tension in Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes. This project is overdue. Debord’s oeuvre continues to inform many academics, artists, and activists, yet there remains little scholarship on Debord’s understanding of race within the spectacle.4 I will closely analyze the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle (hereafter SotS), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the rebellion, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” To complicate Debord’s Marxist perspective, I will look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, in particular the work of Frank Wilderson, which posits anti-black violence as gratuitous violence. For Wilderson, anti-blackness is required to uphold the figure of humanity within white civil society and Western civilization.
Finally, I hope to show that Debord foreshadows an anti-state Marxism, particularly what is known as “communization” current, and may not be entirely at odds with anti-blackness as is suggested by Afropessimism.5 Communization is a theoretical elaboration of Marxism emerging out 1968 uprisings. While there are significant divergences within the current, communization generally shares a rejection of the Party form and a rejection of the seizure of the means of production. Instead, it views revolution as an “immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production.”6 With the destruction of capitalist relations, communization rejects the affirmation of the proletariat as a subject and works toward its abolition. I contend that this shift in theoretical vision from affirmation to abolition offers a non-conflictual relation to anti-blackness and allows for multiple grammars of suffering within a struggle against capital and anti-blackness.
Do I think we can make it through rioting? Do you think we can make it through on promises!? —Watts man1
It is hard to explain to someone what it feels like to be black in a white world. The things that happen to you daily, that are very much a part of you, are hard to remember because they become so routine. There is really nothing I can tell you here that would fully let you know what it is like because it is too horrible and too deep to really communicate to anyone. —Watts woman2
Five months after the Watts Rebellion took place in August 1965, ABC News aired a report featuring interviews with several black Watts residents. The middle-aged white host informs us that by interviewing these residents, he hopes “to add understanding to the most difficult of all domestic problems in America.” That problem was and is race. Beneath the populist tone, the television program reflected a tension that continues to pervade Marxism and most liberatory politics: Is race a division within the proletariat manufactured by the managerial class to fracture any revolutionary potential? Or does racism emerge from a premodern world, transforming alongside capitalism’s evolution?3 With this tension in mind, we can rephrase the two quotes that open this paper. In the first quote, the Watts man suggests the Watts riot is, at least in part, a symptomatic manifestation of spectacle espousing toxic racisms and structural hierarchy. We can no longer make it on your promises—promises of jobs, wealth, proper housing, an end to police violence. No more promises of “progress.” To put it crudely, if one reads the quote from a strictly class-oriented Marxist perspective, the antidote to this man’s ailments are political-economic, and come with the overthrow of capitalism.
In the second quote, a woman from Watts implicitly situates social death as central to her analysis of why the Watts uprising occurred. The explosion in Watts was white society’s chickens coming home to roost. Aware that she is speaking with ABC, she addresses the white world as Other in informing the listener—white society—they cannot understand. It is too terrible to communicate to anyone. Reading between the lines, one suspects she means that, as a black woman, she cannot be heard in this particular white venue for speech. This inability to be heard in a public venue signifies her social death. The interviewee uses “anyone” as a stand-in for the whole of white folks because they have access to the public sphere or civil society; through this popular television program, they will hear her words and see her picture but never understand her. The routine quality of this racist horror that constitutes black life in Watts is beyond words. Inversely, it is implied that many black people understand this horrible-ness that exceeds description. This second interviewee requires not the end of capitalism but the end of white civil society.
In this paper, I will explore this tension in Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes. This project is overdue. Debord’s oeuvre continues to inform many academics, artists, and activists, yet there remains little scholarship on Debord’s understanding of race within the spectacle.4 I will closely analyze the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle (hereafter SotS), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the rebellion, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” To complicate Debord’s Marxist perspective, I will look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, in particular the work of Frank Wilderson, which posits anti-black violence as gratuitous violence. For Wilderson, anti-blackness is required to uphold the figure of humanity within white civil society and Western civilization.
Finally, I hope to show that Debord foreshadows an anti-state Marxism, particularly what is known as “communization” current, and may not be entirely at odds with anti-blackness as is suggested by Afropessimism.5 Communization is a theoretical elaboration of Marxism emerging out 1968 uprisings. While there are significant divergences within the current, communization generally shares a rejection of the Party form and a rejection of the seizure of the means of production. Instead, it views revolution as an “immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production.”6 With the destruction of capitalist relations, communization rejects the affirmation of the proletariat as a subject and works toward its abolition. I contend that this shift in theoretical vision from affirmation to abolition offers a non-conflictual relation to anti-blackness and allows for multiple grammars of suffering within a struggle against capital and anti-blackness.
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