While it turns out that the Rexroth essay was protected by copyright, Knabb’s permission to reprint from his website still applies to everything else to be found there, and so I choose this quick letter by Knabb as a replacement.
The situationists on economic crises
[Response to a query about “the extent to which Debord subscribed to the notion that capitalism had solved its objective, or economic contradictions.”]
Debord (and the situs in general) did not believe that capitalism had definitively resolved all of its contradictions. They pointed out that it had partially or temporarily resolved some of them — e.g., “objectively” through New Deal-type state intervention that served as a corrective to the previously unregulated economic anarchy, and “subjectively” through the development of the spectacle and the general reorientation toward “consumer” concerns (see SOS #43).
Contrary to the ignorant and mendacious pseudocritiques by Dauvé [Gilles Dauvé, a.k.a. Jean Barrot] and others, it is clear that Debord was quite knowledgeable about Marxian economic theory, even if he didn’t yap about it all the time or clutter up his writings with lengthy undigested excerpts from Capital.
In SOS #82 he ridicules the notion that economic crises are scientifically predictable, and in SOS #88 he notes that, predictable or not, such crises alone will not suffice to bring about a revolution. In SIA p. 228 [Situationist International Anthology, new edition pp. 291-292] he ridicules the ultraleftists who are locked into this fetish (he is talking about people’s retrospective debate on what “caused” May 68):
Overcome by their shock in May, all the researchers of historical nothingness have admitted that no one had in any way foreseen what occurred. We must acknowledge a sort of exception to this in the case of all the sects of “resurrected Bolsheviks,” of whom it is fair to say that for the last thirty years they have not for one instant ceased heralding the imminence of the revolution of 1917. But they too were badly mistaken: this was not at all 1917 and in any case they were hardly equal to Lenin. As for the remains of the old non-Trotskyist ultraleft, they still needed at least a major economic crisis. They made any revolutionary moment contingent on its return, and saw nothing coming. Now that they have admitted that there was a revolutionary crisis in May they have to prove that some sort of invisible economic crisis was taking place in early 1968. As clueless and complacent as always, they are earnestly working on this problem, producing diagrams of increases in prices and unemployment. For them an economic crisis is no longer that terribly conspicuous objective reality that was so extensively experienced and described up through 1929, but rather a sort of eucharistic presence that is one of the foundations of their religion.
See also SIA 269-270 [new ed. 346-347].
I express the same point in Joy of Revolution (Public Secrets, pp. 11-12):
If history followed the complacent opinions of official commentators, there would never have been any revolutions. In any given situation there are always plenty of ideologists ready to declare that no radical change is possible. If the economy is functioning well, they will claim that revolution depends on economic crises; if there is an economic crisis, others will just as confidently declare that revolution is impossible because people are too busy worrying about making ends meet. The former types, surprised by the May 1968 revolt, tried to retrospectively uncover the invisible crisis that their ideology insists must have been there. The latter contend that the situationist perspective has been refuted by the worsened economic conditions since that time. Actually, the situationists simply noted that the widespread achievement of capitalist abundance had demonstrated that guaranteed survival was no substitute for real life. The periodic ups and downs of the economy have no bearing on that conclusion. The fact that a few people at the top have recently managed to siphon off a yet larger portion of the social wealth, driving increasing numbers of people into the streets and terrorizing the rest of the population lest they succumb to the same fate, makes the feasibility of a postscarcity society less evident; but the material prerequisites are still present. The economic crises held up as evidence that we need to “lower our expectations” are actually caused by over-production and lack of work. The ultimate absurdity of the present system is that unemployment is seen as a problem, with potentially labor-saving technologies being directed toward creating new jobs to replace the old ones they render unnecessary. The problem is not that so many people don’t have jobs, but that so many people still do. We need to raise our expectations, not lower them.
See also SIA 332 [new ed. 423]:
While the Stalinist monster haunted working-class consciousness, capitalism was becoming bureaucratized and overdeveloped, resolving its internal crises and proudly proclaiming this new victory to be permanent. [i.e. the implication is that this resolution/victory is not permanent]
And SIA 337-338 [new ed. 430-431]:
The developing concentration of capitalism and the diversification of its global operation have given rise, on one hand, to the forced consumption of commodities produced in abundance, and on the other, to the control of the economy (and all of life) by bureaucrats who own the state; as well as to direct and indirect colonialism. But this system is far from having found a permanent solution to the incessant revolutionary crises of the historical epoch that began two centuries ago, for a new critical phase has opened: from Berkeley to Warsaw, from the Asturias to the Kivu, the system is being refuted and combated. . . . The factors involved in this historical problem are the rapid extension and modernization of the fundamental contradictions within the present system and between that system and human desires. The social force that has an interest in resolving these contradictions — and the only force that is capable of resolving them — is the mass of workers who are powerless over the use of their own lives, deprived of any control over the fantastic accumulation of material possibilities that they produce. Such a resolution has already been prefigured in the emergence of democratic workers councils that make all decisions for themselves. The only intelligent venture within the present imbecilized world is for this new proletariat to carry out this project by forming itself into a class unmediated by any leadership.
Here and there there are other similar statements to the effect that there are still contradictions of various sorts (not just economic) and that they will not be definitively resolved short of a revolution.