“The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. 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. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: "To each according to their false needs" - needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.”
—Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” (1966)
“I have wanted to write this letter for two weeks now, but I have been preoccupied. I wanted to enlarge upon some of the things we discussed when you were here. First, men want to own things, to possess material goods to make themselves comfortable today, and to secure themselves against the unpredictable tomorrows. This is self-preservation, a natural thing found in all animals. It is only latent in some men but it is still there all the same. When this instinct works on a man without his full understanding, he does radical things. Now read carefully, Georgia. When the peasant revolts, the student demonstrates, the slum dweller riots, the robber robs, he is reacting to a feeling of insecurity, an atavistic throwback to the territorial imperative, a reaction to the fact that he has lost control of the circumstances surrounding his life. Whether he knows it or not, it is all the same. This system, its economics, its politics, was formed around an age that is past. It was inadequate even then. Men can no longer stake out land or section off a part of the earth and say to themselves, "I will use this as a guarantee," mainly because of the monopolistic stranglehold of those who have already established themselves and who pretend to know what is best for the rest of the world. Wealth is land. By having only labor without land and its potential products, we lose independence. We must sell our labor. Then because of today's specialization and complicated division of labor, it follows that the only way man's natural urges and the modern industrial society can be brought into agreement is by all people possessing everything in common through a representative government. Only in this way can all men satisfy the ungovernable urge to secure things and control their existence.”
—George Jackson to his mother, June 14, 1968, Soledad Brother
“Capital now produces, for the majority of the population in the metropoles, not so much material privation as steered satisfaction of material needs, while making the entire human being - intelligence and senses - into an object of administration, geared to produce and reproduce not only the goals but also the values and promises of the system, its ideological heaven. Behind the technological veil, behind the political veil of democracy, appears the reality, the universal servitude, the loss of human dignity in a prefabricated freedom of choice. And the power structure is no longer "sublimated" in the style of a liberalistic culture, no longer even hypocritical (thus retaining at least the "formalities," the shell of dignity), but brutal, throwing off all pretensions of truth and justice.
This change is indicated by the growth in "discretionary income," that is, income not required for the satisfaction of basic needs (Fortune magazine, December 1967, estimated this part as one third of all personal income). See David Gilbert's paper "Consumption: Domestic Imperialism"; prepared as a talk for the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union Institute. At the same time, poverty in the United States is rising, reversing in 1970, a ten-year trend (Bureau of the Census, reported in the New York Times, May 8, 1971).
True and false, good and bad, openly become categories of the political economy; they define the market value of men and things. The commodity form becomes universal, while at the same time, with the disappearance of free competition, the "inherent" quality of the merchandise ceases to be a decisive factor in its marketability. A President is sold like an automobile, and it seems hopelessly old-fashioned to judge his political statements in terms of their truth or falsehood - what validates them is their vote-keeping or vote-getting quality. To be sure, the President must be able to perform the function for which he is bought: he must be able to assure business as usual. In the same way, the quality of an automobile is determined (and limited) by the margin of profit. The automobile, too, must perform the function for which it is bought, but this "technical" quality is "overlaid" with the qualities required by the sales policy (excessive power, debilitating comfort, shiny but bad material, etcetera).
As the commodity form becomes universal and integrates branches of the material and "higher" culture which previously retained a relative independence, it reveals the essential contradiction of capitalism in its most extreme concentration: capital versus the mass of the working population as a whole.
Within this dependent mass, the hierarchy of positions in the process of production makes for persistent class conflicts - conflicts of immediate interests, for example, between the highly paid technicians, experts, and all sorts of specialists on one side, and on the other, the worker who suffers from this application of technology; between organized labor and the subproletariat of national and racial minorities. The "unproductive" intelligentsia enjoys a greater freedom of movement than the productive laborer. And yet, the separation from control over the means of production defines the common objective condition of the wage and salary earners: the condition of exploitation - they reproduce capital. The extension of exploitation to a larger part of the population, accompanied by a high standard of living, is the reality behind the facade of the consumer society; this reality is the unifying force which integrates, behind the back of the individuals, the widely different and conflicting classes of the underlying population.
This unifying force remains a force of disintegration. The total organization of society under monopoly capital and the growing wealth created by this organization can neither undo nor arrest the dynamic of its growth: capitalism cannot satisfy the needs which it creates. The rising standard of living itself expresses this dynamic: it enforced the constant creation of needs that could be satisfied on the market; it is now fostering transcending needs which cannot be satisfied without abolishing the capitalist mode of production. It is still true that capitalism grows through growing impoverishment, and that impoverishment will be a basic factor of revolution - although in new historical forms.”
—Herbert Marcuse, “The Left Under the Counterrevolution,” Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972)
“Looting takes intentionality, foresight, and quick decision-making, and directly results (unless you get arrested) in your acquiring the things that you are seeking. Because poor people often cannot afford to waste their time engaging in symbolic forms of protest, and because they rarely expect to be heard by those in power anyways, they are much more likely to engage in practical, direct action than in symbolic political protest. Things like stealing food from work, not paying taxes, and calling in sick to work when you’re not actually sick are actions that produce clear results. By contrast, holding a sign and marching in circles for hours is admittedly a lot more abstract and requires free time that only some of us can afford. A mass “die-in” like those engaged in by many across the country is indubitably a valuable political action, but we would be deluding ourselves if we did not admit that the link between such symbolic acts and concrete political change can be painfully unclear, abstract, and slow-moving in its effectiveness.”
—Delio Vasquez, “The Poor Person’s Defense of Riots” (2014)
