Longer Articles
From the NYRB:
Capitalism Beyond the Crisis
By Amartya Sen
1.
2008 was a year of crises. First, we had a food crisis, particularly threatening to poor consumers, especially in Africa. Along with that came a record increase in oil prices, threatening all oil-importing countries. Finally, rather suddenly in the fall, came the global economic downturn, and it is now gathering speed at a frightening rate. The year 2009 seems likely to offer a sharp intensification of the downturn, and many economists are anticipating a full-scale depression, perhaps even one as large as in the 1930s. While substantial fortunes have suffered steep declines, the people most affected are those who were already worst off.
The question that arises most forcefully now concerns the nature of capitalism and whether it needs to be changed. Some defenders of unfettered capitalism who resist change are convinced that capitalism is being blamed too much for short-term economic problems-problems they variously attribute to bad governance (for example by the Bush administration) and the bad behavior of some individuals (or what John McCain described during the presidential campaign as “the greed of Wall Street”). Others do, however, see truly serious defects in the existing economic arrangements and want to reform them, looking for an alternative approach that is increasingly being called “new capitalism.”
The idea of old and new capitalism played an energizing part at a symposium called “New World, New Capitalism” held in Paris in January and hosted by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, both of whom made eloquent presentations on the need for change. So did German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who talked about the old German idea of a “social market”-one restrained by a mixture of consensus-building policies-as a possible blueprint for new capitalism (though Germany has not done much better in the recent crisis than other market economies).
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Ideas about changing the organization of society in the long run are clearly needed, quite apart from strategies for dealing with an immediate crisis. I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a “new world”-to use the other term mentioned at the Paris meeting-that would take a different form?
The second question concerns the kind of economics that is needed today, especially in light of the present economic crisis. How do we assess what is taught and championed among academic economists as a guide to economic policy-including the revival of Keynesian thought in recent months as the crisis has grown fierce? More particularly, what does the present economic crisis tell us about the institutions and priorities to look for? Third, in addition to working our way toward a better assessment of what long-term changes are needed, we have to think-and think fast-about how to get out of the present crisis with as little damage as possible.
2.
What are the special characteristics that make a system indubitably capitalist-old or new? If the present capitalist economic system is to be reformed, what would make the end result a new capitalism, rather than something else? It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?
All affluent countries in the world-those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others-have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.
Also, the market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services-some of which have taken people well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions-publicly funded education, medical care, and mass transportation are just a few of many-that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.
Underlying this issue is a more basic question: whether capitalism is a term that is of particular use today. The idea of capitalism did in fact have an important role historically, but by now that usefulness may well be fairly exhausted.
For example, the pioneering works of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century showed the usefulness and dynamism of the market economy, and why-and particularly how-that dynamism worked. Smith’s investigation provided an illuminating diagnosis of the workings of the market just when that dynamism was powerfully emerging. The contribution that The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made to the understanding of what came to be called capitalism was monumental. Smith showed how the freeing of trade can very often be extremely helpful in generating economic prosperity through specialization in production and division of labor and in making good use of economies of large scale.
Those lessons remain deeply relevant even today (it is interesting that the impressive and highly sophisticated analytical work on international trade for which Paul Krugman received the latest Nobel award in economics was closely linked to Smith’s far-reaching insights of more than 230 years ago). The economic analyses that followed those early expositions of markets and the use of capital in the eighteenth century have succeeded in solidly establishing the market system in the corpus of mainstream economics.
However, even as the positive contributions of capitalism through market processes were being clarified and explicated, its negative sides were also becoming clear-often to the very same analysts. While a number of socialist critics, most notably Karl Marx, influentially made a case for censuring and ultimately supplanting capitalism, the huge limitations of relying entirely on the market economy and the profit motive were also clear enough even to Adam Smith. Indeed, early advocates of the use of markets, including Smith, did not take the pure market mechanism to be a freestanding performer of excellence, nor did they take the profit motive to be all that is needed.
Even though people seek trade because of self-interest (nothing more than self-interest is needed, as Smith famously put it, in explaining why bakers, brewers, butchers, and consumers seek trade), nevertheless an economy can operate effectively only on the basis of trust among different parties. When business activities, including those of banks and other financial institutions, generate the confidence that they can and will do the things they pledge, then relations among lenders and borrowers can go smoothly in a mutually supportive way. As Adam Smith wrote:
When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.[1]
Smith explained why sometimes this did not happen, and he would not have found anything particularly puzzling, I would suggest, in the difficulties faced today by businesses and banks thanks to the widespread fear and mistrust that is keeping credit markets frozen and preventing a coordinated expansion of credit.
It is also worth mentioning in this context, especially since the “welfare state” emerged long after Smith’s own time, that in his various writings, his overwhelming concern-and worry-about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.
Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has been responsible for some misunderstandings of Smith’s assessment of the market mechanism by many who would claim to be his followers. For example, Smith’s defense of the food market and his criticism of restrictions by the state on the private trade in food grains have often been interpreted as arguing that any state interference would necessarily make hunger and starvation worse.
But Smith’s defense of private trade only took the form of disputing the belief that stopping trade in food would reduce the burden of hunger. That does not deny in any way the need for state action to supplement the operations of the market by creating jobs and incomes (e.g., through work programs). If unemployment were to increase sharply thanks to bad economic circumstances or bad public policy, the market would not, on its own, recreate the incomes of those who have lost their jobs. The new unemployed, Smith wrote, “would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities,” and “want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail….”[2] Smith rejects interventions that exclude the market-but not interventions that include the market while aiming to do those important things that the market may leave undone.
Smith never used the term “capitalism” (at least so far as I have been able to trace), but it would also be hard to carve out from his works any theory arguing for the sufficiency of market forces, or of the need to accept the dominance of capital. He talked about the importance of these broader values that go beyond profits in The Wealth of Nations, but it is in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published exactly a quarter of a millennium ago in 1759, that he extensively investigated the strong need for actions based on values that go well beyond profit seeking. While he wrote that “prudence” was “of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual,” Adam Smith went on to argue that “humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others.”[3]
Smith viewed markets and capital as doing good work within their own sphere, but first, they required support from other institutions-including public services such as schools-and values other than pure profit seeking, and second, they needed restraint and correction by still other institutions-e.g., well-devised financial regulations and state assistance to the poor-for preventing instability, inequity, and injustice. If we were to look for a new approach to the organization of economic activity that included a pragmatic choice of a variety of public services and well-considered regulations, we would be following rather than departing from the agenda of reform that Smith outlined as he both defended and criticized capitalism.
3.
Historically, capitalism did not emerge until new systems of law and economic practice protected property rights and made an economy based on ownership workable. Commercial exchange could not effectively take place until business morality made contractual behavior sustainable and inexpensive-not requiring constant suing of defaulting contractors, for example. Investment in productive businesses could not flourish until the higher rewards from corruption had been moderated. Profit-oriented capitalism has always drawn on support from other institutional values.
The moral and legal obligations and responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace, thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments. A subprime lender who misleads a borrower into taking unwise risks can now pass off the financial assets to third parties-who are remote from the original transaction. Accountability has been badly undermined, and the need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger.
And yet the supervisory role of government in the United States in particular has been, over the same period, sharply curtailed, fed by an increasing belief in the self-regulatory nature of the market economy. Precisely as the need for state surveillance grew, the needed supervision shrank. There was, as a result, a disaster waiting to happen, which did eventually happen last year, and this has certainly contributed a great deal to the financial crisis that is plaguing the world today. The insufficient regulation of financial activities has implications not only for illegitimate practices, but also for a tendency toward overspeculation that, as Adam Smith argued, tends to grip many human beings in their breathless search for profits.
Smith called the promoters of excessive risk in search of profits “prodigals and projectors”-which is quite a good description of issuers of subprime mortgages over the past few years. Discussing laws against usury, for example, Smith wanted state regulation to protect citizens from the “prodigals and projectors” who promoted unsound loans:
A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.[4]
The implicit faith in the ability of the market economy to correct itself, which is largely responsible for the removal of established regulations in the United States, tended to ignore the activities of prodigals and projectors in a way that would have shocked Adam Smith.
The present economic crisis is partly generated by a huge overestimation of the wisdom of market processes, and the crisis is now being exacerbated by anxiety and lack of trust in the financial market and in businesses in general-responses that have been evident in the market reactions to the sequence of stimulus plans, including the $787 billion plan signed into law in February by the new Obama administration. As it happens, these problems were already identified in the eighteenth century by Smith, even though they have been neglected by those who have been in authority in recent years, especially in the United States, and who have been busy citing Adam Smith in support of the unfettered market.
4.
While Adam Smith has recently been much quoted, even if not much read, there has been a huge revival, even more recently, of John Maynard Keynes. Certainly, the cumulative downturn that we are observing right now, which is edging us closer to a depression, has clear Keynesian features; the reduced incomes of one group of persons has led to reduced purchases by them, in turn causing a further reduction in the income of others.
However, Keynes can be our savior only to a very partial extent, and there is a need to look beyond him in understanding the present crisis. One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes’s rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who, like Keynes, was also in Cambridge, indeed also in Kings College, in Keynes’s time. Pigou was much more concerned than Keynes with economic psychology and the ways it could influence business cycles and sharpen and harden an economic recession that could take us toward a depression (as indeed we are seeing now). Pigou attributed economic fluctuations partly to “psychological causes” consisting of
variations in the tone of mind of persons whose action controls industry, emerging in errors of undue optimism or undue pessimism in their business forecasts.[5]
It is hard to ignore the fact that today, in addition to the Keynesian effects of mutually reinforced decline, we are strongly in the presence of “errors of…undue pessimism.” Pigou focused particularly on the need to unfreeze the credit market when the economy is in the grip of excessive pessimism:
Hence, other things being equal, the actual occurrence of business failures will be more or less widespread, according [to whether] bankers’ loans, in the face of crisis of demands, are less or more readily obtainable.[6]
Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. Other businesses also continue to fail, partly in response to already diminished demand (the Keynesian “multiplier” process), but also in response to fear of even less demand in the future, in a climate of general gloom (the Pigovian process of infectious pessimism).
One of the problems that the Obama administration has to deal with is that the real crisis, arising from financial mismanagement and other transgressions, has become many times magnified by a psychological collapse. The measures that are being discussed right now in Washington and elsewhere to regenerate the credit market include bailouts-with firm requirements that subsidized financial institutions actually lend-government purchase of toxic assets, insurance against failure to repay loans, and bank nationalization. (The last proposal scares many conservatives just as private control of the public money given to the banks worries people concerned about accountability.) As the weak response of the market to the administration’s measures so far suggests, each of these policies would have to be assessed partly for their impact on the psychology of businesses and consumers, particularly in America.
5.
The contrast between Pigou and Keynes is relevant for another reason as well. While Keynes was very involved with the question of how to increase aggregate income, he was relatively less engaged in analyzing problems of unequal distribution of wealth and of social welfare. In contrast, Pigou not only wrote the classic study of welfare economics, but he also pioneered the measurement of economic inequality as a major indicator for economic assessment and policy.[7] Since the suffering of the most deprived people in each economy-and in the world-demands the most urgent attention, the role of supportive cooperation between business and government cannot stop only with mutually coordinated expansion of an economy. There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion. Families threatened with unemployment, with lack of medical care, and with social as well as economic deprivation have been hit particularly hard. The limitations of Keynesian economics to address their problems demand much greater recognition.
A third way in which Keynes needs to be supplemented concerns his relative neglect of social services-indeed even Otto von Bismarck had more to say on this subject than Keynes. That the market economy can be particularly bad in delivering public goods (such as education and health care) has been discussed by some of the leading economists of our time, including Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. (Pigou too contributed to this subject with his emphasis on the “external effects” of market transactions, where the gains and losses are not confined only to the direct buyers or sellers.) This is, of course, a long-term issue, but it is worth noting in addition that the bite of a downturn can be much fiercer when health care in particular is not guaranteed for all.
For example, in the absence of a national health service, every lost job can produce a larger exclusion from essential health care, because of loss of income or loss of employment-related private health insurance. The US has a 7.6 percent rate of unemployment now, which is beginning to cause huge deprivation. It is worth asking how the European countries, including France, Italy, and Spain, that lived with much higher levels of unemployment for decades, managed to avoid a total collapse of their quality of life. The answer is partly the way the European welfare state operates, with much stronger unemployment insurance than in America and, even more importantly, with basic medical services provided to all by the state.
The failure of the market mechanism to provide health care for all has been flagrant, most noticeably in the United States, but also in the sharp halt in the progress of health and longevity in China following its abolition of universal health coverage in 1979. Before the economic reforms of that year, every Chinese citizen had guaranteed health care provided by the state or the cooperatives, even if at a rather basic level. When China removed its counterproductive system of agricultural collectives and communes and industrial units managed by bureaucracies, it thereby made the rate of growth of gross domestic product go up faster than anywhere else in the world. But at the same time, led by its new faith in the market economy, China also abolished the system of universal health care; and, after the reforms of 1979, health insurance had to be bought by individuals (except in some relatively rare cases in which the state or some big firms provide them to their employees and dependents). With this change, China’s rapid progress in longevity sharply slowed down.
This was problem enough when China’s aggregate income was growing extremely fast, but it is bound to become a much bigger problem when the Chinese economy decelerates sharply, as it is currently doing. The Chinese government is now trying hard to gradually reintroduce health insurance for all, and the US government under Obama is also committed to making health coverage universal. In both China and the US, the rectifications have far to go, but they should be central elements in tackling the economic crisis, as well as in achieving long-term transformation of the two societies.
6.
The revival of Keynes has much to contribute both to economic analysis and to policy, but the net has to be cast much wider. Even though Keynes is often seen as a kind of a “rebel” figure in contemporary economics, the fact is that he came close to being the guru of a new capitalism, who focused on trying to stabilize the fluctuations of the market economy (and then again with relatively little attention to the psychological causes of business fluctuations). Even though Smith and Pigou have the reputation of being rather conservative economists, many of the deep insights about the importance of nonmarket institutions and nonprofit values came from them, rather than from Keynes and his followers.
A crisis not only presents an immediate challenge that has to be faced. It also provides an opportunity to address long-term problems when people are willing to reconsider established conventions. This is why the present crisis also makes it important to face the neglected long-term issues like conservation of the environment and national health care, as well as the need for public transport, which has been very badly neglected in the last few decades and is also so far sidelined-as I write this article-even in the initial policies announced by the Obama administration. Economic affordability is, of course, an issue, but as the example of the Indian state of Kerala shows, it is possible to have state-guaranteed health care for all at relatively little cost. Since the Chinese dropped universal health insurance in 1979, Kerala-which continues to have it-has very substantially overtaken China in average life expectancy and in indicators such as infant mortality, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. So there are opportunities for poor countries as well.
But the largest challenges face the United States, which already has the highest level of per capita expenditure on health among all countries in the world, but still has a relatively low achievement in health and has more than forty million people with no guarantee of health care. Part of the problem here is one of public attitude and understanding. Hugely distorted perceptions of how a national health service works need to be corrected through public discussion. For example, it is common to assume that no one has a choice of doctors in a European national health service, which is not at all the case.
There is, however, also a need for better understanding of the options that exist. In US discussions of health reform, there has been an overconcentration on the Canadian system-a system of public health care that makes it very hard to have private medical care-whereas in Western Europe the national health services provide care for all but also allow, in addition to state coverage, private practice and private health insurance, for those who have the money and want to spend it this way. It is not clear just why the rich who can freely spend money on yachts and other luxury goods should not be allowed to spend it on MRIs or CT scans instead. If we take our cue from Adam Smith’s arguments for a diversity of institutions, and for accommodating a variety of motivations, there are practical measures we can take that would make a huge difference to the world in which we live.
The present economic crises do not, I would argue, call for a “new capitalism,” but they do demand a new understanding of older ideas, such as those of Smith and, nearer our time, of Pigou, many of which have been sadly neglected. What is also needed is a clearheaded perception of how different institutions actually work, and of how a variety of organizations-from the market to the institutions of the state-can go beyond short-term solutions and contribute to producing a more decent economic world.
-February 25, 2009
Notes
[1]Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Clarendon Press, 1976), I, II.ii.28, p. 292.
[2]Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, I.viii.26, p. 91.
[3]Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 189-190.
[4]Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, II.iv.15, p. 357.
[5]A.C. Pigou, Industrial Fluctuations (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 73.
[6]Pigou, Industrial Fluctuations, p. 96.
[7]A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920). Current works on economic inequality, including the major contributions of A.B. Atkinson, have been to a considerable extent inspired by Pigou’s pioneering initiative: see Atkinson, Social Justice and Public Policy (MIT Press, 1983).
rom the LRB:
Crack Open the Shells
Hal Foster
* Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale. Semiotext(e), 397 pp., £12.95, February, ISBN 978 1 58435 055 2
Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together in radical fashion. Yet, as these early letters of the young Guy Debord, the leader of the group, make clear, they were the stuff of legend from the start. In late July 1957, in a little town in the Ligurian Alps called Cosio d’Arroscia, Debord met with a motley crew of seven other alienated souls – including two artists, the Dane Asger Jorn and the Italian Giuseppe Gallizio (aka Pinot), the core of a momentary movement called the Imaginist Bauhaus – in order to found the Situationist International (SI), a grand name for such a small gathering in such a remote place. Even the vote to start it up was not overwhelming: a surviving scrap of paper shows a tally of five in favour – Debord, Michèle Bernstein (his first wife), Jorn, Ralph Rumney (an English ‘psychogeographer’ who soon goes missing) and Walter Olmo (an experimental composer whose name is followed by a question mark) – with one opposed and two abstaining (including Pinot). Yet, schooled in the history of avant-gardes, Debord seized on this occasion as the requisite origin-myth: ‘We should present the “Cosio conference” as a point of departure,’ he writes to Jorn a month later, ‘and, from now on, move quickly (a new legend must be created immediately around us).’
The first of seven volumes of letters, this translation covers the period from the founding of the SI through to the resignation of Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Dutch painter turned visionary urbanist, who, like Jorn, was a central figure in Cobra, a collective of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam that was another key predecessor of Situationism. Although Debord later referred to this stage of the SI as ‘the supersession of art’ – it concluded in 1962 with the purging of all such practitioners – his chief interlocutors here are three artists: Pinot, who is most often addressed in 1957 and 1958; Constant, who is a principal recipient of letters in 1959 and 1960; and Jorn, who appears intermittently throughout. Affectively, intellectually and financially, Debord is closest to Jorn; with a market established for his paintings by the late 1950s, Jorn was able to bankroll many Situ projects, including the two short films made by Debord during that period. It is with real regret that Debord watches him recede from SI activities (he withdraws in April 1961), whereas Pinot is purged for art-world opportunism on 31 May 1960 (after copious letters in which Debord addresses him as ‘grande e nobile amico’), and Constant resigns a day later (though Debord entreats him to return to the fold several times). For a stage dedicated to its supersession, then, art is a persistent subject: there is much ado about how to stage a first exhibition of ‘industrial paintings’ by Pinot in Paris – he ‘has found an excellent formula,’ Debord writes as the show approaches, ‘to cover the entire gallery (the walls, the ceiling, the floor) with 200 metres of painting’ – and a survey of Cobra and Situationist manifestations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (after long and testy negotiations, it is finally abandoned); and also much ado about how to attract artist-collaborators (such as the Spur Group in Germany), how to keep them in line and ultimately how to ditch them. Commentators on the SI, it is often charged, play down its politics in favour of its art and its biographies, and this is true enough; the problem here is that this is what the correspondence is mostly about.
Debord launched his letters like directives, if not missiles. Amazingly, he is only 25 years old when this period begins; already a veteran of the Lettrist movement, another obscure predecessor of the SI, his voice is almost preternaturally cool and in control, except when he is provoked by the cerebral Constant, searches for the peripatetic Jorn (who roams in a near continual dérive or drift between Denmark, Alba and Paris), or flames the odd enemy or unsuspecting bureaucrat. At the same time, as Debord pulls together, among a myriad other projects, additional SI conferences in Paris (January 1958) and Munich (April 1959), with a fourth meeting in London on the horizon (September 1960), his letters are often animated by impassioned entreaties, instructions and calls to action (they sometimes serve as sketches for later texts). A few missives are intimate, though none is addressed to the person nearest Debord at this time, Bernstein, who refused her letters to the editor of the volume, Debord’s second wife, Alice Becker-Ho.
As McKenzie Wark suggests in his helpful introduction, Debord serves as ‘secretary’ of the SI in the sense of both party head and general assistant: philosopher and disciplinarian, he is also publicist and agent, debating with collaborators and tracking strays, promoting events and arranging rendezvous, sometimes at a clip of a couple of letters a day. Yet his own preferred designation, ‘strategist’, is also appropriate: the letters are laced with the rhetoric of battle (Debord was a devoted reader of Clausewitz, and with Becker-Ho he later devised a board game called Game of War). ‘Strategist’ has the right ambiguity, too, for the lines between actual politics, group positioning and individual posturing are not always clear to a reader now – were they, one wonders, to Debord then? What is clear, however, is his keen sense of how to make a movement that was more than an artistic ‘ism’; the SI might be the last avant-garde in Europe with a real claim to be an avant-garde at all – that is, again, one that articulated artistic and political revolt together, the one whetting the other (if momentarily so).
At the same time the SI could not but emerge in a field defined by artistic groups, and Debord is not above old art-world tricks. ‘The paintings must be the most stunning, the most shocking possible,’ he tells Pinot in January 1958 in the long run-up to his Paris première; only ‘show the paintings in which the search for new materials has been pushed farthest,’ and ensure they are ‘very different from each other’. So, too, he is not reluctant to pit Situationism against other avant-gardes. First in this order come the historical precedents of Dada and Surrealism, to which the SI had a split Oedipal relationship, as Bernstein once remarked: ‘There was the father we hated, Surrealism. And there was the father we loved, Dada.’ For Debord both fathers, ideological complements, had failed, and Situationism was born to overcome them dialectically, as he puts it later in The Society of the Spectacle (1967): ‘Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.’ Less distant from the Situs, given the presence of Jorn and Constant among them, was ‘St Cobra’ (as Debord calls it in one letter), which he values for its commitment to ‘experimental research’ (its journal was punctuated by explorations of prehistoric art, folk motifs and universal forms like the spiral), but questions for its tendency to formalist ‘neoprimitivism’ (like other avant-gardes before it, Cobra emulated the impulsive picture-making of children and naifs). In the end Debord views St Cobra as a forerunner, an artistic St John to the political SI, a pivot to launch Situationism, which should be presented, he writes early on to Jorn, as ‘the necessary transcendence of that era’.
However, Situationism as such does not emerge very distinctly in these letters, largely because, in these early years, its definition was at once unstable for insiders and hermetic for outsiders. The primary thing to know, Debord writes in late summer 1957, is that ‘Situationism, as a body of doctrine, does not exist and must not exist.’ In part this occlusion was protective: ‘Yesterday, the police questioned me at length,’ he writes a year later; they ‘want to regard the SI as an association in order to set about its dissolution in France. I protested then and there . . . Not being declared, the SI cannot be officially dissolved.’ Yet this stance was also philosophical, in keeping with the Situ desire to be alert to the radical possibilities in any conjuncture. ‘Of course, never any doctrine,’ Debord reiterates in late autumn 1958; only ‘perspectives. A solidarity around these perspectives.’ This is inspiring, but how can solidarity be achieved with points of view that often shift and rarely intersect? Centrifugal in spirit, the SI was centripetal in design, and the letters show Debord struggling to inhabit – to embody – this centre. Only eight months into the SI he has begun to insist, ‘We should emphasise the centralised aspect of the movement,’ and by the time Constant resigns in summer 1960, Debord is defensive (albeit defiantly so) about his treatment of comrades (he has just expelled two Dutch architects for designing, of all things, a church): ‘I am with the SI and, as long as I am in it, I will keep a minimum of discipline that precludes all collaboration with uncontrollable elements.’ This prompts the question: if there was no doctrine, why so many apostates?
In these moments Debord the swashbuckler, the romantic hero of art schools to this day, comes centre-stage, and the letters are a fine study in the art of enmity. With a near aristocratic touch Debord sprinkles ridicule liberally on his pages, but at times he goes low and nasty. ‘Small-time hoodlum,’ he addresses one miscreant, and telegrams another, a journal editor who had sent him a token fee for an article: ‘save your nine florins imbecile it was a gift!’ For pseudo avant-gardists and rogue associates alike, Debord insists on ‘a clear attitude of insult and contempt’, and as the letters pile up, so do the bodies. At one point or another he deems such critics and artists as Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Yves Klein and Simon Hantaï, not to mention all the Angry Young Men, ‘apolitical and fascistic’, and even the once- recruited Spur artists are soon dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Sentiments like this one – ‘we already have amongst us too many young artistic elderly who have missed out on their own 19th century’ – also anticipate the purge of artists to come. That even a close ally like Jorn could feel the heat is evidenced by one letter included in the notes: ‘The economic surplus that my social situation as a painter offers me finds its best place in the situationist movement,’ Jorn writes in a self-critique of masochistic generosity, ‘even if the same movement is obliged to attack me so as to attack a situation from which I cannot escape, but which disrupts the movement.’
Yet Debord is hardly the show-trialling and Gulag-sentencing Situ-Stalinist that his detractors make him out to be. Nearly all of the ruptures remarked in his letters serve to clarify what is at stake in the SI – and to clarify the SI itself as a stake. This is true, for example, when Debord responds to Constant after his resignation, which followed hard on the purging of Pinot and the Dutch architects. ‘Let’s clearly distinguish the manner of the break,’ Debord writes.
I am sure that, here, we had reached the point where the SI had to make an instant choice (or had to be abandoned). Because you know well that I have always thought that ‘there are moments at which it is necessary to know how to choose’; that you don’t have to teach me this; and that, if there has been a certain opportunism in the SI, I have been among those (you, too) who have counterbalanced it.
‘What primarily constitutes the SI,’ Debord concludes, ‘is this group control, expressed by expulsion – or, more rarely, resignation.’ Sadly, Debord might be right here – ‘what is revolutionary organisation?’ is an implicit question throughout this volume – but so too is Constant in his reply: ‘In what presently remains of the SI, it would be too ridiculous to speak of expulsion or of resignation.’ In its 15 years of life – the SI dissolved in 1972 – it had a grand total of 72 members.
The pathos of these letters is that Situationism is falling apart even as it is coming together, and that, in the complicated machinations of his scattered group, Debord is able to perform as many acts of friendship as he does of malice. To borrow the title of the film he made in 1959 about his Lettrist friends, the letters trace a ‘passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time’, a tracing again triangulated by three comrades above all – Pinot, Jorn and Constant. Along with Debord’s own essay-films, in which he montages found images and hidden citations with home movies and pithy aphorisms, these three figures also represent key practices of the SI in this period.
Both the ‘industrial paintings’ by Pinot and the ‘modifications’ of found paintings by Jorn came to a head in May 1959 when the two had shows in Paris. Pinot covered the Galerie René Drouin with rolls of canvas painted in lurid colours as if automatically; he then added lights, mirrors, sounds and smells to create a total environment. A ‘shrewd mix of chance and mechanics’, as Bernstein once described it, ‘industrial painting’ was intended to prefigure a world of play that automation, once diverted from capitalism, would allow; at the same time it parodied the current world of capitalist production and consumption, for not only were the canvases made on a mock assembly line with paint machines and spray-guns, but they could also be cut up and sold by the metre. The Jorn ‘modifications’ bear the stigmata of capitalism in another way. The source pictures were kitschy landscapes and city views, produced for petit-bourgeois decoration, that he scavenged in flea markets and painted over with primitivist figures and abstract gestures à la Cobra. ‘Painting is over,’ Jorn writes in a statement for the 1959 show. ‘You might as well finish it off. Détourn. Long live painting.’ Like kingship, Jorn suggests, painting is dead, but it might live again in a new guise: ‘Our past is full of becoming,’ he concludes, ‘one needs only to crack open the shells.’ Finally, the ‘unitary urbanism’ advanced by Constant developed two practices dear to the Lettrists and the Situationists alike: the dérive, defined in the SI journal as ‘a transient passage through varied ambiances’; and ‘psychogeography’, defined as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment’. In effect, ‘universal urbanism’ was a radical proposal for new modes of collective experience in metropolitan space, as exemplified by the ‘New Babylon’ project in which Constant models the future city of automation as a stage for nomadic movement and mass play, with high-tech elements refitted by residents like giant toys. Ultimately, all these practices were specific variations on the Situationist theme of détournement, or ‘the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu’. Derived from avant-garde models of collage and montage, détournement extended from the refashioning of individual words and images to the reimagining of entire cities; it was a general theory of radical culture that anyone might practise.
These techniques were never ends for Debord. ‘If we fail to effectively use the new experimental conceptions that we have already defined,’ he warns one comrade in early summer 1958, ‘we will always fall back into the art market, yet another pseudo-school of the same outdated artistic kind.’ In the same vein, he writes to Constant in early autumn the same year, ‘if the artistic present does manage to make some of its values prevail within the SI, the true cultural experiences of the period will be undertaken elsewhere.’ So it is that Debord cast the SI as ‘a total project’, not in the old Modernist sense of a Gesamtkunstwerk, but as a movement that transcends art altogether so to intervene in the social world at large. ‘Our necessary activity is dominated by the question of the totality,’ he cautions Constant in spring 1959. ‘Take note of it.’ A Hegelian Marxist in the line of Georg Lukács, Debord looked for art to be superseded not by philosophy but into praxis. ‘Nothing has ever interested me beyond a certain practice of life,’ he comments more than once in these letters, and clearly he does not mean at the level of individual or group alone. ‘When one feels powerless about other things,’ Debord writes in an implicit critique of existentialism and phenomenology, ‘there is a tendency to remain on a level of a discourse on experience.’ This discourse was obviously insufficient for him: first and last, ‘a practice of life’ involved political practice. ‘What can intellectuals do without ties to an enterprise that brings comprehensive change to social relations?’ he asks Constant.
‘The SI,’ Debord writes towards the end of this volume, ‘possesses nothing – except its demand for totality.’ Philosophically as well as politically, Debord made his greatest contribution here, but in a way that has attracted the criticism of others on the left (Althusserians, Foucauldians, feminists, neo-Gramscians) ever since. I mean his theory of ‘spectacle’, which recovers Lukács on ‘the riddle of the commodity-structure’ in History and Class Consciousness (1923), first translated into French in full in 1960. ‘The problem of commodities,’ Lukács writes early in his essay, is ‘the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.’ Debord agreed, but he also understood that in consumer capitalism ‘the phantom objectivity’ of the commodity had grown exponentially, and that it had effectively merged with media-forms in such a way as to produce a world of spectacle, which he defines in his 1967 text as ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’. This commodity-image had also proliferated like mad, colonising once protected areas of social life, and it was in these fields that the SI took up the fight – in ‘the battle for leisure’, above all – using strategies first sketched in these letters. The Situationists, Debord writes in June 1958, must indicate ‘the transition between the artistic commodity-object of today and the free experimental activity in a new dimension of culture’. But how to do so? Here as elsewhere Debord tended to swing between calls for immediate action – ‘a direct construction of a liberated, affective and practical existence’, as he puts it in On the Passage of a Few People . . . – and hopes for dialectical magic: ‘the alienating satisfactions of the spectacle can at the same time be outlines, in negative, for a planned development of affective life.’
Sometimes in these letters Debord seems overwhelmed by the very totalisation that he otherwise seeks to achieve, in a way that produces blockages that he then blames on the ‘non-achievement’ of the age at large; here his critics on the left have what salience they do. At these moments a note of resignation sounds in his letters, and it is heard intermittently from On the Passage of a Few People . . . (evoked here as a ‘realistic description of a way of life devoid of coherence and importance’) through his ‘anti-memoir’ Panegyric (1989/97) until his suicide, after a difficult illness, on 30 November 1994. A telling scene in All the King’s Horses, a roman à clef about this period written by Bernstein in 1960 to make money for the SI (it has also been newly translated into English), captures this feeling of futility, leavened a little by a sense of absurdity.[*] In the scene, the mistress Carole enters the lair of Gilles, the protagonist modelled on Debord, for the first time; the narrator, based on Bernstein, is also present. Carole begins the conversation:
‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’
‘Reification,’ he answered.
‘It’s an important job,’ I added.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said.
‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’
‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’
Of course not all was resignation in the SI, certainly not in the early days chronicled in these letters. ‘Neither Paradise, nor the end of history,’ Debord writes in December 1958. ‘We will have other misfortunes (and other pleasures), that’s all.’ And again in June 1959: ‘Life in France is still heading in a very unpleasant direction. But we have our fun too.’ At one moment in May 1960 Debord has to rebut a charge levelled by Henri Lefebvre that the SI indulges in ‘revolutionary romanticism’. Surely some of us today remain interested in the SI for its critique – after all, if spectacle is alive and well, its diagnosis must be too – but there is romance here as well, and in part it is one of failure. Early in Lipstick Traces (1989), his ‘secret history of the 20th century’ in which the Situationists figure centrally, Greil Marcus limns a phantom community in the shadows:
Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured – new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers – or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?
In this sense the SI is not finished.
Then, too, there is the move, sometimes made by Debord and associates, whereby failure is recouped as success, as, for example, in the ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’, published in 1962: ‘Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.’ This seems to hold for Debord and company too. Yet even here there is a fatalism that contradicts the Situ language of ‘situation’ and ‘construction’. This fatalism is voiced most vividly in a scene from the movie Mr Arkadin (1955), which Debord would use to conclude his own film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic would prevent such an outcome, for he too would then perish with his partner. Convinced, the frog agrees to assist the scorpion, but midway across he feels a deadly sting. Arkadin takes over from here: ‘“Logic?” cried the dying frog as he started pulling the scorpion down with him. “Where is the logic in this?” “I know,” said the scorpion, “but I can’t help it, it’s my character.”’ ‘Let’s drink to character!’ Arkadin cries, while on the screen Debord shows us found footage of a doomed cavalry charge. In these letters Debord is sometimes the scorpion and sometimes the frog – and always the cavalry charge.
Note
* All the King’s Horses by Michele Bernstein, translated by John Kelsey (Semiotext(e), 128 pp., £9.95, October 2008, 978 1 58435 065 1).
Hal Foster, a co-editor of October, chairs the department of art and archaeology at Princeton.
