But capital is also all of those things bought for the sake of the accumulation of capital. There is a inequality between the value produced by labor and the value received in wages. For example, a worker produces $100 worth of value for the capitalist but only gets $80 in wages. According to Marx, capital augments itself, produces profits, through workers producing more value for the capitalist than the capitalist reimburses them for in their wages. Capital can consist of raw materials, instruments of labor (technology), means of subsistence (food, clothing, shelter, etc., that is, all the stuff workers need in order to be able to come back to work the next day), social relations between capitalists and proletariats, the sum of commodities (exchange values), wages, surplus value, etc. Now, capital is this process but it can also be things. For example, the capitalist starts the day with $1,000 but ends the day with $1,200. A capitalist starts with a certain amount of value but comes to grow that value through the “wizardry” of economic exchanges. Capital is the process through which value augments itself. I’ll be using the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith.īefore we get to the exegesis of chapter one, I want to give a brief introduction to the important Marxist concepts I just mentioned. The theses will be in bold, whereas my commentary will never be. Here’s the format: I’ll quote one of the theses and, then, provide my commentary below it. In what follows, I’ll be doing a line-by-line commentary on all 34 theses in chapter one of The Society of the Spectacle (I plan on doing this for more of the chapters in the future). On top of this difficulty, he also presupposes that the reader has a deep familiarity with the Marxist concepts of capital, alienation, commodity fetishism, ideology and reification. He opted to write out his ideas in the form of short theses, which is why he had to pack so much conceptual content into them. Debord’s style of writing was highly condensed. However, it’s also notoriously difficult. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is an enormously influential book - one of the most influential in the Marxist tradition.

Debord guy society of the spectacle