Society of the Skeptical

As we examine the history of riots, we should recognize the importance of resisting racist ultra-leftism. Exhibit A: Guy Debord on the Watts riots.

Note the condescending tone, the proximity of his view of black culture to various contemporary right-wing talking points, and how quick he is to dismiss the legacy of political struggle waged by African-Americans themselves.

• “Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides.”
• “The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty.”
• “Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally.”
• “The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle.”
• “The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.”
• “The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland.”
• “The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron.”
• “The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond ‘marriage’ itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks)…”

It is quite clear that Debord read an article about the Moynihan report in an alcoholic stupor, then watched The Hate that Hate Produced and decided all the movements for black liberation were spectacular-Islamic authoritarianism. These unpleasant sentiments are interspersed between pseudo-insights that reduce every social formation to the commodity form. My leftist friends, we can do much better than this ridiculous drunken cracker.

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