>Well, the SI had a term for the re-integration of
>dissent or critical trends into capitalism/the
>Spectacle: recuperation. And they held that
>recuperation would occur whenever dissent or critical
>trends would refuse to engage capitalism.
>Their activities that the cultural studies crowd so
>overemphasizes and places only in the context of other
>art movements of the time -- dervive, detournement,
>the construction of situations -- had a political
>component, and a Marxian one at that.
What has happened in cultural studies is exactly to take Debord, Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Gramsci, and even Marx himself & to drain Marxist _politics_ out of their thoughts. Minus Marxist politics, their ideas can be made to seem compatible with liberal democracy & capitalism (and formalist art & art criticisms to decorate them). When class is discussed at all, it's turned into a question of Weberian statuses and life chances. According to this prevailing view, social relations are understood as if they were a matter of ranking: "upper class, middle class, working class, and underclass." And they dare to reduce capitalism to "classism"! As if it were a matter of removing a false sense of superiority and criticizing one another's privileges endlessly! Now, this party line has had a deleterious effect on the tenor of political discussion. Carrol noted a while ago: "I rather think this list should be renamed Uriah-Heep-talk. Everyone is so 'umble and so insistent that everyone else be so 'umble."
Yoshie