As the new immigrant civil rights movement spilled into the streets in mass protest in the spring of 2006, the same Democratic Party leaders who previously joined the chorus of criminalization—such as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton—rushed to the front of demonstrations to “speak for immigrants.” They told the gathered crowds that the solution was not to build the movement in the streets, but rather to demobilize and vote Democrat. In other words, they urged immigrants to support the very same politicians and legislative proposals that would criminalize and segregate immigrant workers.

Even though he has cosponsored a bill that would create a second class group of workers and expand the border crackdown on future migrants, Kennedy did not even blink at a massive April 10, 2006, rally in Washington, D.C., when he quoted Martin Luther King Jr.—calling on the nation to “let freedom ring” for immigrants. So, as the immigrant working class goes about constructing a new civil rights movement aimed at democratizing society and winning equality for all workers, the Democrats have gone on the offensive to demobilize it.
When the movement coalesced into a national strike and boycott on May 1, 2006—in a direct confrontation with capital—the Democrats helped split the movement, and then turned their guns on those who joined the boycott. New Mexico’s Democratic governor Bill Richardson joined a throng of other Democratic leaders when he called Monday’s demonstrations “a distraction from what the real issue is, and that’s the need for comprehensive immigration reform. And I would rather have those demonstrators go to each of the congressional offices … and explain to their representatives how important this issue is.” In other words, the Democratic Party works to contain any self-activated protests of workers that operate outside of its control or challenge the absolute power of big business. In trying to demobilize immigrant workers, Democrats pass the initiative back to the Far Right.

The disclosure of the commodity’s “secret” was the key that revealed capital’s enchanted realm to our thought - a secret that capital always tried to hide by exposing it in full view.

Without the identification of this immaterial center - in which “the products of labor” split themselves into a use value and an exchange value and “become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social” - all the following critical investigations undertaken in Capital probably would not have been possible.

In the 1960s, however, the Marxian analysis of the fetish character of the commodity was, in the Marxist milieu, foolishly abandoned. In 1969, in the preface to a popular reprint of Capital, Louis Althusser could still invite readers to skip the first section, with the reason that the theory of fetishism was a “flagrant” and “extremely harmful” trace of Hegelian philosophy.

It is for this reason that Debord’s gesture appears all the more remarkable, as he bases his analysis of the society of the spectacle - that is, of a capitalism that has reached its extreme figure - precisely on that “flagrant trace.” The “becoming-image” of capital is nothing more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis, in which exchange value has completely eclipsed use value and can now achieve the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over life in its entirety, after having falsified the entire social production.

VI. Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past. The evidence for this is so glaring it hardly needs further explanation. With consummate skill the spectacle organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood.
[…]
In France, it is some ten years now since a president of the republic, long ago forgotten but at the time still basking on the spectacle’s surface, naively expressed his delight at “knowing that henceforth we will live in a world without memory, where images flow and merge, like reflections on the water.” Convenient indeed for those in business, and who know how to stay there. The end of history gives power a welcome break. Success is guaranteed in all its undertakings, or at least the rumor of success.
[…]
History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. And thus, inseparably, history was knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding, at least in part, what was to come: “an everlasting possession,” according to Thucydides. In this way history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interest of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance.

The precious advantage which the spectacle has acquired through the outlawing of history, from having driven the recent past into hiding, and from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society, is above all the ability to cover its own tracks — to conceal the very progress of its recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there. All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.