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Riot and Representation, by
“Herbert Marcuse”
Pamphlet Fake, Says Marcuse
by Herbert Marcuse
____
The Significance of the Chicano Riot
In the wake of the riot of Mexican-Americans in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970
(with an encore on September 16), the various mouthpieces of the “left” have as
usual raised their tiresome duststorm of protest, which never fails to bury the real
significance of events. Hidden by shows of outrage at the police, by pleas that power
better give the Chicano his share of the pie or else things might get out of hand again,
by the martyrdom of a newspaper reporter who ducked into one too many bars, is the real
event, the burning and looting, the riot. The noise of the left, and the media in general,
serves to direct attention away from, reduce to insignificance, or apologize for the
attack on bourgeois property rights. The left is so concerned with defending its right to
arrange demonstrations and speeches, as boring to the participants as they are
inconsequential to power, that it fails to celebrate the spontaneous activity of the
people and to reveal its theoretical content.
The riot covered a three-square-mile area. Windows were smashed in virtually every
store along a twelve block area and people felt free to loot and burn: one hundred
seventy-eight businesses were hit, seven extensively damaged by fire. Police radio cars
were burned and a bus of police reinforcements was attacked. Let the mystifyers talk about
the “issue” of violence. A riot is a practical critique of the system, while a
demonstration can serve to perpetuate what it seems to oppose. This riot interrupted a
“Chicano moratorium” demonstration “against the war” which a coalition
of Mexican-American groups had organized. Here the shared opposition of an ethnic group
whose human potentialities are especially denied is falsified by being directed into
demands for a more equitable share in the hierarchical system which dominates life
generally. The demonstration was represented by its official organizers as a bid for fewer
Chicano boys in Vietnam and more Chicano capitalists in East Los Angeles. The people were
handled as constituents, brought together over particular issues. This false unity
channels dissent into fragmentary opposition as it dissimulates the possibility of
transforming the world totally. The so-called issue, whether it be the ratio of Chicanos
in Vietnam, or the war itself, or United States foreign policy, serves to direct
consciousness away from the totality and the possibility of liberating every aspect of
daily life. Issue consciousness perpetuates hierarchical perception, concentrating on one
aspect of the social conditions without revealing the whole. Demonstrations perpetuate
hierarchical relationships. Twenty thousand bodies showed up to march and then to submit
themselves to the boredom of listening to leaders speak about the designated issues which
were to give the gathering its apparent unity.
But after the march, as the speakers were to begin, a crowd of thirsty demonstrators
filled a nearby liquor store and began to help themselves to soft drinks and beer. The
owner quickly locked the front door and when sheriff’s deputies arrived, “they
let everyone out of the store one by one only after they had paid for their refreshments.
Because of the anger of the crowd the deputies at the door were the first to be hit by
rocks, the witness said” (Los Angeles Times).
Here the cops appear in their familiar and essential role as watchdogs of the
commodity.(1) Poised in readiness, they attack to protect
the chastity of the commodity, to disallow its rules being violated by some who, on this
occasion, in the spirit of celebration, would not submit to its rationality. Acts which
challenge bourgeois property rights have a clarity which could not be imagined by those
who, thinking of themselves as representatives of the people, organize the passivity of
the people by arranging monitored demonstrations for them. These representatives really
serve the masters. In fact, the parade officials, true to their intentions to preserve
hierarchical order, revealed their own collusion with the watchdogs. “Rosalio Munoz,
chairman of the committee that organized the parade, said Sunday that deputies could have
prevented much of the violence had they contacted parade officials before attempting to
disperse the crowd. He said he and other parade organizers had been working closely with
the Sheriff’s Department before the parade and that a plan had been developed to
prevent trouble.” The plan was not put into effect, said a Lt. Wallace, because
“there was not time to contact Munoz or other parade officials.”
Too late. The potlatch of destruction had begun. Bands of demonstrators ran up Whittier
Boulevard smashing windows. A witness said: “It looked like wholesale looting. Whole
families would pull up in front of appliance stores and go in and pick out a television
set and drive away with it” (UPI). A fire station was attacked and the state and
national flags were torn down. Pedestrians on both sides of Whittier Boulevard played
target practice with patrol cars, having to aim their rocks just ahead of the cars as they
sped by — sometimes missing the cars and hitting those on the other side of the
street. It was a game and the commodity played its part, receiving its criticism in the
streets; TV and stereo consoles were rolled out from the stores and combined with bus stop
benches and logs in the construction of barricades for slowing down the targets. Here the
goods which encourage passivity are turned against the forces of pacification. They
acquire a new use in the hands of those who would not submit themselves to their logic,
but who find a superior logic in the game of subversion.
The looter takes the “affluent” society at its word. He accepts the
abundance, only doesn’t submit himself to the suffering that the society inflicts on
those who sacrifice themselves for what it encourages them to want. He wants to possess
the commodities shown to him everywhere, in the shop windows, in the media, while
rejecting the rules of exchange and the sacrifice they entail. He rejects the commodity
form which encloses goods in its grip and moulds them according to the motives of profit,
according to the false needs created by Madison Avenue.
Once the commodity is not paid for, it is open to practical criticism; it becomes a
toy, the principle of play takes over. Stealing as opposition to the organization of
society is the negation of the rationality of the commodity. The goods can be put to the
service of a radical subjectivity free from the sacrifices that perpetuate commodity
production and consumption and they find themselves on a new field, the field of play. The
commodity is freed to be used in the destruction of the bourgeois world and ipso facto in
its own destruction. Only when the means of production become toys for the manipulation of
the proletariat, the class which ends class society, will life be freed from hierarchical
subordination to commodity values.
The Chicanos of East Los Angeles — as the Blacks and the students — realize
themselves as the new proletariat as they recognize that they have no control over the use
of their lives. This recognition is penetrating ever more sections of a society which can
count only on numbing it by feeding it a spectacle of dissent so that the recognition,
caught in contemplation, may fail to translate itself into the coherent practical activity
which will destroy the spectacle itself: a panoply of images which everyone is encouraged
to contemplate so as to ignore the poverty of his own everyday life.
The commodity is the heart of the spectacle. In itself a TV or a refrigerator is a
passive, insensible thing in submission to the first comer to make use of it. In the
spectacle, its image parades, ever suggestively, for the admiration of a passive consumer
who submits himself more and more to his own passivity. Having no real power over material
abundance, he is reduced to choosing from among the false alternatives offered to him:
Ford or Chevy, Tide or Cheer, Humphrey or Nixon. The spectacle invades his life, emptying
it of self-activity. The people of East Los Angeles show by their actions the desire to
cease to be mere consumers; in their gaiety they betray a desire for life over and above
the “fair share” in abundance which their integration into the American
hierarchy would assure them. The prosperity they might share is not a static sphere, but
rather a ladder without end. Whatever buying power an individual may attain, he will still
not have power over his own life. Life remains subordinated to commodity values, most
clearly for minority groups because they suffer the humiliation of having their human
riches especially despised. The question is the control of material abundance, whether it
is to be dished out in ever fairer amounts according to the rationality of the commodity
form, or whether it is to come under the power of collective imagination, into the field
of play. The protest of the rioter is not Chicano protest or Black protest or student
protest, it is the protest of the real single individual unmediated, sacrificing himself
to no ideal absolute, whether party, nationality or community. A riot is an explosion of
radical subjectivity in which the identity of the claims of the individual and of the
collective begins to show itself practically. To the old world it is insanity.
“Everyone was crazy, just crazy,” said the owner of an appliance store in
Wilmongton, a town near LA where a riot broke out the next day. “Somebody would throw
a brick through a window and everyone would laugh and clap.” It is a superior logic
which will destroy the old world.
Let the capitalists grieve over the one million dollars in damage. By destroying
commodities, by burning the palaces of commodity consumption, the rioters assert their
human superiority over the dead things which dominate life.
* * *
The project of the subversion of the commodity and the transformation of the world
which it dominates is beginning again in earnest. It flames up in a riot. As repression
contains it, the sense of a riot may be lost even to the participants. The spontaneity of
the riot is replaced by the representation of it by the left; the memory of it is reified,
contained ideologically, catapulted into the spectacle as a special and specialized
phenomenon, “the Chicano riot,” with its own particular issues trailing it like
tails. In the spectacle it is just another riot to titillate the need for excitement, here
consumed passively. An exciting life is what remains to be constructed by the
revolutionary proletariat. Where authentic revolt does not recognize itself for what it
is, the routine of daily life reasserts itself and revolt fails to continue.
The proletarian project will be realized as people who recognize their own
powerlessness begin to take power over their own lives. The proletariat has begun to
sketch its solution to the problem of the social organization of its power in the
historical experience of Workers Councils (Russia 1905, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936,
Hungary 1956), direct and total democracy in control of the means of production and all
aspects of life.
As the new revolutionary movement (marked for example by Hungary 1956, Watts 1965,(2) and France 1968, and as distinguished from the traditional
revolutionary proletarian movement) gains momentum, it cannot fail to gain consciousness
of itself as an international movement in opposition to a universally dominant system. A
local outburst adds its significance to a sequence of events which aims toward the
transformation of a world totally dominated by the rationality of the commodity, by
private or state capitalism, by bosses, by bureaucrats.
The terrain of struggle is no longer limited to work. As the rationality
of the commodity-spectacle reaches out into every aspect of daily life, so does the
struggle against it, its motive being nothing other than the will to live. Caught in the
vortex of consumption, many do not yet realize that the activities which fill up both work
and leisure destroy life as surely as poison. Those who imagine that any particular or
quantitative changes can ultimately satisfy the will to live in a world of material
abundance surely underestimate the power of human spontaneity and its hunger to take hold
of all things.
HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL
THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH
THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST
[NOTES]
1. A commodity is a good which is bought and sold; its value is
determined not by its usefulness but by its power to bring the capitalist profit.
2. For the best analysis of the Watts riot, see the pamphlet The
Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. I have drawn heavily on it.
—H.M.
Pamphlet published October 1970. Signed “by Herbert Marcuse.” Actually by the
Berkeley situationist group “1044.” 700 copies were circulated, some in Los
Angeles and San Diego.
No copyright.
Editor:
A pamphlet entitled “Riot and Representation, by Herbert Marcuse” (the
significance of the Chicano riots) is being distributed on campus. This pamphlet is an
outright forgery. I neither wrote it nor contributed to its writing, nor do I know who is
responsible.
—Herbert Marcuse
When interviewed by the TRITON TIMES, Professor Marcuse, who is now retired from the
Philosophy Department but has been continuing voluntarily to assist in graduate teaching,
stated that he would not comment further because “there is nothing further to
say.”
The pamphlet, eight pages long, appeared to be typed
on an IBM “Selectric” typewriter and offset-printed. It argued that rioting
“is the protest of the real single individual unmediated, sacrificing himself to no
ideal absolute,” using the recent disturbances in East Los Angeles to illustrate its
claims.
At the end of the pamphlet, hand-printed, are the
words, “HUMANITY WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS
OF THE LAST CAPITALIST” — an apparent take-off on a remark often incorrectly
attributed to Voltaire: “Humanity will not be free until the last monarch is
strangled in the entrails of the last priest.”
While Marcuse has consistently refused to advocate
violence, the pamphlet took the opposite viewpoint. In one place it stated, “those
who imagine that any particular or quantitative changes can ultimately satisfy the will to
live in a world of material abundance surely underestimate the power of human spontaneity
and its hunger to take hold of all things.” Upon examination, the pamphlet appeared
to have a strong undertone of right-wing, rather than left-wing ideology. It quoted
consistently from police accounts of the Los Angeles disturbances and began with the
statement, “the various mouthpieces of the ‘left’ have as usual raised
their tiresome duststorm of protest, which never fails to bury the significance of
events.”
Professor Avrum Stroll, Chairman of the Philosophy
Department told the TRITON TIMES that Marcuse “would never disavow anything he’s
written. It seems quite apparent to me that he has not writtern it (the pamphlet) and
knows nothing about it. I find it quite outrageous that where Herbert has volunteered to
help work with the education of graduate students, that some people should take advantage
of him in that way.” Stroll added that the pamphlet was “obviously intended to
embarrass Herbert.”
From the Triton Times (student newspaper of the University of
California at San Diego),
13 November 1970.
[Bureau Prehistory]
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