Separation Perfected: Domination and Alienation in Stirner and Debord

From CounterPunch

We have allowed the American ruling class to abstract themselves almost entirely from their substantive political positions and practices. So deeply engrossed are we in their branding as products of consumption, in their spectacular representations, that we seem to have no capacity to grapple critically with the situation we find ourselves in. The moment calls for careful reengagement with French philosopher Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle, as well as one of its most important, if unsung, precursors, German philosopher (perhaps anti-philosopher) Max Stirner’s book The Ego and Its Own. These masterworks of critical theory, separated by more than one hundred years (Debord’s book was first published in 1967, Stirner’s in 1844), offer vital tools for helping us make sense of the present moment and for consciously cultivating an “ethos of non-domination.”

It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist, on Immediatism podcast

By request, Immediatism offers eleven new episodes continuing the theme of the Situationist International. Part of the project here is to make key concepts like "detournement" available to listeners who may be unfamiliar, hence the original texts from the Situationist International Anthology. Another goal was to offer a sample of the response gotten by the SI, and for this purpose (and because it was one of the texts requested by a listener!) Jean-Pierre Voyer's There Is No Society of the Spectacle was chosen from the book It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist.

Who do the passionate communards work for?

via Anarquía, translation by Anarchist News

"I will then become a worker: such is the idea that stops me, when the mad rages push me towards the battle of Paris - where, however, so many workers continue to die while I write to you! Work now, never again." 1 Rimbaud

Since 1871 - the year in which the "accursed poet" wrote this letter - it was not necessary to be a "seer" to see the obvious: the masses of workers who fought on the barricades in Paris continued to work. That "wildcat strike" in front of the Versailles authority was, in turn, a new job that produced new obligations and condemned them to perpetuate work in saecula saeculorum. Such deep reflection, in the midst of a necromancing trance, probably prompted Rimbaud to question: who were the passionate communards working for? prophesying a system of domination based on direct democracy as the axis of political-social management, which ensured the permanence of authority and continuity of work.

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