We have a situation

Beware of the Spectacle!

John Michael Greer continues his discussion on Situationism. Not sure where he´s going with this, but I suppose we´ll see!

Here´s an excerpt: 

>>>In the first post on this sequence, I talked about the social function of Marxism in modern bureaucratic societies, which have already passed through the changes that Marxism brings about in practice (though not, of course, in theory). Since it’s hardly necessary to impose a metastatic bureaucratic system fusing politics and economics on a society that already has one, Marxists in bureaucratic societies—beta-Marxists, as I termed them in that post—have the function of providing dissatisfied youth with harmless ways to act out their fantasies of rebellion, before they sell out in the usual way and get the jobs in the corporate or bureaucratic worlds to which their class status entitles them.

>>>Beta-Marxists therefore tend to pursue an intriguing double agenda. On the one hand, they quite often craft extremely insightful critiques of the societies in which they function. On the other, they are exquisitely careful not to embrace any means of action that might actually pose the least threat to the status quo. Marxist rhetoric makes this last task easy. Read through Situationist books such as Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, for example, and you’ll find no shortage of stirring evocations of that imminent moment when the masses will rise up and take destiny into their hands, or what have you.

>>>Of course that moment is never going to happen, and that’s exactly the point. The masses aren’t interested in taking destiny into their hands.  Nor, to be a little more precise, are they interested in handing over their destinies to a cadre of downwardly mobile bourgeois intellectuals who want to play at being revolutionaries. When the masses take to the streets, it’s because they want an end to specific burdens or the provision of specific benefits, which can be provided quite handily by any modern bureaucratic system that isn’t hopelessly sunk in incompetence. I’m sure that beta-Marxists are quite well aware of this, but daydreaming about the supposedly inevitable proletarian revolution allows them to evade the whole question of how to turn their fine ideas into something other than a head-trip to entertain denizens of the political fringes. 

Situationism: Where domination ends