The Spectacle and the Fetishism of stuff

1968 Barricades in Bordeaux 

 The lessons of "I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!" requires us to look at the night of May 10th, morning of May 11th 1968. It was the Night of the Barricades, when French Students and French Riot Police engaged in a battle of astonishing fury which resulted in a wave of public sympathy for the student cause and great dishonor for highly armed and brutish Police. French Industrial Unions declared a General Strike. In anticipation of the confrontation the students had built obstacles some of which could be set on fire, they tore up cobble stones, these were the paving stones of the "I love you" slogan.

 The Next two slogans refine the Situationist influences on 1968 relate to the workers and their unions:

 "Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."

 "Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century."

 In 1968 there were a number of large production facilities in and around Paris employing a huge numbers of unionized workers. Many of these workers had a Marxist sympathies, they were inclined toward a more socialist society and had been since the second half of the 1800's. There was an active Communist Party in France which had made up a high percentage of the French Resistance fighters in the Second World War. The French Communist Party along with other European Communist Parties had traditional and fraying ties with the Soviet Union. By 1968 Marxist thinkers had moved on from the corruptions of the Soviet Union and French Students contemptuously referred to members of the French Communist Party as The Stalinists. 

 "Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!"

Recuperator cells in this context came from the Situationist understanding of the way in which often subversive and radical ideas were co-opted, absorbed, basically neutralized by mainstream, bourgeois society. And indeed, in the years that followed the uprisings of May '68 was widely commercialized.

 When thinking about the differences between student and worker action in that year, the workers addressed the desire to improve terms and conditions of work. The students many of whom were aware they were bound for middle management, not greatness, wanted society to change.

 The French Sociologist Alain Touraine, who taught at a new university built in the 1950's outside Paris called Nanterre, in his study of 1968 made the observation that as the structure of the Economy moved away from Industrial Production to Services, a post industrial society would be characterized by Social Movements rather than the industrial actions of unions looking for better working conditions.

 "In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society."

 We have the stuff, the Situationist influence suggested, what we want is a different sort of Spectacle. What's a spectacle, you ask. It's an understanding of stuff that doesn't see it as the work, the hopes, dreams, the essence of a man, but as an appearance, a spectacle, an image that can be both fetishized and as a commodity it can be bought and sold in a market place. It traps us in an eternal present by breaking down time and history and putting us in a continuous, unchanging, superficial now.

"We are pacified by distractions!" Alain Touraine saw in the revolt of his students, not a struggle for the power of the state but demands for cultural autonomy and a fight for self-management. It was an uprising against conservative cultural norms.

  

Bypassing the State

May '68 Poster:

"Start of a prolonged struggle"

 We've come a long way from the irredeemable doom of "The Children of Sodom Cannot Petition Fate," but let's try not to vomit, hold our noses and continue to address the habit of far too many German Romantics to devote their later years to the radicalization of White Christian Nationalism by continuing our deep dive into the stone tablet of "Conservative Social Norms" by rejoining our memories of May 1968's Situationist Slogans and the social uprising they gave rise to.

 In our world today, where literacy in history is very limited and more often than not written by Hollywood screen writers, there's a good chance May '68 and the Night of the Barricades means nothing in the English speaking world, the Situationist International means even less and meanwhile Conservative Social Norms and White Christian Nationalism have been redefined as MSOs or "Merch Selling Opportunities." 

 The French, refer to the years between 1945 and 1975, when France rose from the ashes of the Second World War, as The Thirty Glorious Years. Their country had experienced rapid modernization and economic growth, but inequality of income and opportunity along with increased urbanization had resulted in the sort of social tensions Conservative Social Norms were ill-equipped to manage especially in a country with a glorious tradition of street protest. This time it was anti-imperialist, counter cultural, passionate French students and workers protesting De Gaulle's repressive government, stagnant wages, poor working conditions, the universities overcrowded, academia a bunch of stuffy old farts. In those days of course "students and workers" meant exactly the same to the social conservatives of our world as they do today, free-wheeling troublemakers who if they didn't know how lucky they were should be rounded up and publicly flogged.

By the end of May, France's national government had ceased to function and when that happened the danger of government collapse became unnerving and there was a demand for someone to do something. Negotiations led to Concessions. De Gaulle's threat to resign led to a resurgence of support for De Gaulle's administration, almost a million supporters of the administration marched through Paris and this resulted in new elections which De Gaulle's Party, the Union of the Defense of the Republic won. It was a massive victory at the ballot, but something has changed, De Gaulle would soon retire, his party seen as having become tired, old and unimaginative.

For many May 1968 was the end of collective action as a revolutionary tool of the Industrial Age and the beginning of what are called New Social Movements. Many of the social movements born during the outrages of 1968 were inspired by Situationist ideas manifest in the slogans and Graffiti adorning the French Agora.

 So what do we have. On the one end we have Conservative Social Values on the other end we have what can be called Movement Culture. The one devoted to Professional Wrestling, blood sports getting fat and kicking-ass, the other devoted to quality of life and a post material world.

"I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!"

"Whos," "Whats" and "Ones."

Hamilton and Burr Duel 1804

 The Persia that produced Zarathustra had entities called Daevas, they were disagreeable gods of chaos, disunity and the lie. Daevas, as the monotheistic fevers of empire builders and farmers predicted their own bountiful and plentiful future through enforced unity, became Demons who had to be written out of the Zarathustrian Scriptures. To summarize, these "One God Freaks" represent a failure of imagination and of history.

 The questions to ask yourself is : What is Honor? If I am to be honorable do I need a heaven in my future to reward me for being honorable?

Let me put it this way. Honor is a quality of the "Who." The "What" of you can have high status and "Zero Honor," as in the banal CEO. Or, the "What" of you can have high honor and "Zero Status," as in a Luddite Weaver.

And yes! Of course Ned Ludd has been branded Daevas.

The God Atar and Eternal Fire

Snow and Ice

 Hominids, that's us and other Great Apes like us, have been playing with fire for almost two million years. It was back in the time of ice and Megafauna. Steppe Mammoth, Smilodon - Tigers with the saber teeth - and Giant Sloth. Meanwhile in Africa, where we began, there were Giant Rhino, Short Neck Giraffe, massive herbivores, some very rough looking baboons and some pretty big carnivores.

 In what is now Eastern England, there is respectable evidence of Neanderthals, using flint and pyrite to make fire four hundred thousand years ago. Can you imagine the wonder of those first acts of making fire. A magic sense of we can do this.

 For early Zarathustrians a burning fire remained a visible presence of a pre-Zarathustrian god of Fire called Atar, who under the care of the Zoroastrian pretense of Monotheism had become Ashar, a divine and eternal principle representing a human contribution to truth, cosmic order, righteousness and natural law. How to understand this today is to give a non-linear perspective to Fire by inquiring after the Who of fire, as well as  the What of fire.v

Ashar, morphed by priests from the more free-wheeling God, Atar, was once a who, a raw incomprehensible energy, a Limbic Emission with stories, passions and a childhood to remember. The Fire Keeper, or Fire Lighter, was a what with a set of administrative duties, rights and responsibilities that'd emerged over time through the long process of de-personalizing the Gods in the service of one God not many.

Establishment Zarathustrians, even after the technology of fire making had been well developed, maintained an Eternal Flame in their temple. It was, and might still be called the Fire of Victory, a reminder of the fire making story, a gratitude and respect for the who of Atar as he had been in the old days. He was wild, uncontrollable, often mean and spiteful. All very well giving him the status of a Divine Principle and calling him an Ashar amongst a list of other Ashars, and ignore the well known fact that Angry Gods, even those who may have been demoted, often came out of retirement especially when challenged by some upstart Hominid who'd come to the conclusion that God was a what that passeth all understanding.

All those things are true, and yet for Zarathustra there was no escaping the Fire of Victory as a necessary recognition of the human consciousness determined to rid itself of the title punching ball and take its place as an ally of Ahura Mazda. Determined to participate in the process of making the world wonderful through "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds."

 To be the builder of an Eternal Flame. a king had to go back to the days of the Fire Keepers and Fire Collectors, he had to source his flame from sixteen different places so everyone could see how authentic and genuinely deserving he was. He couldn't just conjure one up from Angie's List.