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Prescient post from a decade ago
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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I thought modern communists agreed his work wasn't really the best?
Probably not but I personally think Debord is wildly underrated compared to Marx because I think Marx really underestimated the important of communications systems in capitalistic alienation and how to fight capitalism. Debord got it in spades. Society of the Spectacle is criminally fucking underrated.
Further, at this point with the Internet of Things, commodities are communications.
If Marx had predicted our current internet communication hellscape all the way back in 1870, he would be more than just an anti-capitalist boogeyman but a bonafide prophet
20% of Americans were illiterate in 1870
Telegraph was being widely used by 1870.
First transatlantic telegraph was 1858.
Many have argued that the telegraph was a qualitative shift from prior communications methods because it was truly the first that spanned the world in a short amount of time. The internet on the other hand is considered a quantitative shift that just adds more of what existed on top of the already existing framework.
In other words, the building blocks for that sort of thought were there.
Fair, but Marx wasn't a technocrat. He was primarily concerned with how the working class could overthrow capital, and the working class was primarily illiterate - transatlantic telegraphs wouldn't have been a relevant tool to them in their ceasing of capital from the bourgeoisie.
Marx specifically wrote the Communist Manifesto in easily-understood language so that the few literate members of the working class could organize and recruit those who wouldn't have been able to read it themselves. Even if he understood the telegraph to be a revolutionary technological innovation, it wouldn't have been relevant to an impoverished working class that did not have the luxury of basic education.
Not that it would have been impossible for anyone to see the potential significance of the telegraph back then, but that was never going to be a Karl Marx who optimistically thought the revolution could happen within his lifetime (and here we are almost 160 years later not even a step closer to that reality)
Absolutely, I was not dogging on Marx, just pointing it out.
And further, while I think Debord is really onto something, his work would not have existed had Capital not already been written. His work functions on literally copying Marx's (and others!) own words and changing the words to fit his own narrative. He called it detournement. The modern equivalent might be "culture jamming" where you're take a corporate message and twisting it into a message of freedom and rejection of corporate control.
And I would personally even detourne this statement from Debord. I think "false idea" and "right idea" are too strong. I would use "unhealthy idea" or "antisocial idea" and "healthy idea" or "prosocial idea." I think "right" is kind of tooting his own horn just a bit too much.