Debord in Watts

In this paper, I explore Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes by closely examining the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s lm The Society of the Spectacle (1973), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the uprising, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” Debord’s Marxist perspective on Watts understands the insurgents as potential revolutionary actors, primed for a “second proletarian assault against class society” (SotS, Thesis 47). To complicate Debord’s position, I look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, which understands anti-black violence not as contingent upon capitalist alienation but instead as gratuitous violence required to uphold the gure of Humanity within civil society. Do I think we can make it through rioting? Do you think we can make it through on promises!? —Watts man It is hard to explain to someone what it feels like to be black in a white world. The things that happen to you daily, that are very much a part of you, are hard to remember because they become so routine. There is really nothing I can tell you here that would fully let you know what it is like because it is too horrible and too deep to really communicate to anyone. —Watts woman Five months after the Watts Rebellion took place in August 1965, ABC News aired a report featuring interviews with several black Watts residents. The middle-aged white host informs us that by interviewing these residents, he hopes “to add understanding to the most dif cult of all domestic problems in America.” That problem was and is race. Beneath the populist tone, the television program re ected a tension that continues to pervade Marxism and most liberatory politics: Is race a division within the proletariat manufactured by the managerial class to fracture any revolutionary potential? Or does racism emerge from a premodern world, transforming alongside capitalism’s evolution? With this tension in mind, we can rephrase the two quotes that open this paper. In the rst quote, the Watts man suggests the Watts riot is, at least in part, a symptomatic manifestation of spectacle espousing toxic racisms and structural hierarchy. We can no longer make it on your promises—promises of jobs, wealth, proper housing, an end to police violence. No more promises of “progress.” To put it crudely, if one reads the quote from a strictly class-oriented Marxist perspective, the antidote to this man’s ailments are political-economic, and come with the overthrow of capitalism. In the second quote, a woman from Watts implicitly situates social death as central to her analysis of why the Watts uprising occurred. The explosion in Watts was white society’s chickens coming home to roost. Aware that she is speaking with ABC, she addresses the white world as Other in informing the listener—white society—they cannot understand. It is too terrible to communicate to anyone. Reading between the lines, one suspects she means that, as a black woman, she cannot be heard in this particular white venue for speech. This inability to be heard in a public venue signi es her social death. The 1