Anarchy, Animal Rights and the Society of the Spectacle: Anarchist Ramsey Kanaan Interviewed

By Claudette Vaughan

Ramsey Kanaan works for the collective AK Press in California. Their goal is to supply radical words and images to as many people as possible. How? By distributing for independent presses and  bypassing the corporate publishing houses. We invited Ramsey to speak on Guy DeBord's anti-consumerism work, “The Society of the Spectacle”, as we were interested to see him put it into an animal rights context for us. Here's that interview.

Claudette:  In an age of affluence and consumerism has the West learnt the lesson: Things deplete. You can't have it all. The sky is not the limit; the earth is?

Ramsey: Of course not. But in some ways I think even using such phrases as the ‘age of affluence and consumerism' confuse the real issues. Affluence and consumerism are, firstly, only applicable to a tiny percentage of the earth's population. Certainly not the quarter or so starving. Or the more than half below the poverty line. And I don't mean just those folks in the so-called Third World. Poverty, and lack of the basic material necessities (clean air, water, shelter, health, education) are plentiful in the 'West' too. It tends to shift blame from those that actually control the world, and its resources (and hence who benefit from the exploitation of them) to some amorphous 'all of us'. To be responsible, one has to have, to a large extent, power, and influence. If the only way to commute to work is via a vehicle, and the typical driver has no control/power over the transport system, I find it difficult to blame that driver. If the local supermarket is stocked with only GMO/non-organic foods, is that the fault of the consumer?

Claudette: How do you interpret Guy Debord's work, ‘The Society of the Spectacle'?

Ramsey:  I think its probably the most important Marxist work (and update of Marx's theories) to have appeared since Lukac's "History And Class Consciousness". As such, it is a profound theoretical (and practical) tool with which one can use to both understand, and change the world.

 Debord was concerned with two main themes - The 'Spectacle', the simulation of everyday life – i.e., the concept that our lives are not really 'real', but are merely acted out for us, while we remain the spectators to our lives, misery, and immiseration. The spectacle itself encompasses the totality of everyday life - i.e., it is all encompassing. But equally important to Debord, as this analysis of modern life, was his belief in the self-emancipation and self-management of ordinary folks. I.e. the ability and necessity of people to self-manage their own lives without hierarchy, bosses, leaders and/or political parties.

Claudette: How would you put ‘The Society of the Spectacle' into an animal rights framework?

Ramsey: For me, the most important lesson read into Debord's work is that of the totality of everyday life. For me, it means that animal rights/liberation is meaningless as a single issue. It can only come about with a total, i.e., revolutionary change in all of society.  That other great situationist theorist, Vaneigem, said a revolution in everyday life must occur for permanent change to take root.

Animal liberation is indivisible from human liberation, from self-management, from worker-control, from 'saving the planet'. You can't have one without the other. Indeed, one without the other is merely applying a band-aid to the running sore of capital and exploitation. Authors such as Marjorie Spiegel and Carol Adams have done a fine job in drawing out the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women...Debord & Vaniegem paint the even bigger picture, and draw even more of the dots together...

"Everywhere the Spectacle organises our passivity while selling us the image of revolt" - The Society of the Spectacle.

Claudette: Animals as commodities. The Animal Liberation Front has escalated the conflict of animal usage for the broader community to redefine their consumer power status thus inviting the community to become nonviolent ‘ cruelty-free' participants in the fight for a better world yet this hasn't happened to any significant degree. Why do you think this is?

Ramsey: The media has done its best to ridicule ("nutters"), ignore (typically ALF actions are never reported) or demonise ("terrorists") the actions of the ALF, so it's hardly surprising that the larger community hasn't come to embrace, or ride on the coat tails, of such activity.

Claudette:  Larry Law from ‘Spectacular Times' had this to say:

" The critique of speciesism is also a critique of hierarchical power. In Britain the movement generated around anti-speciesism has, in the past ten years, risen from being a source of jokes and sniggers to an example of physical opposition which has surprised its friends and foes alike. It has risen from quagmire of the reformist animal welfare organisations, building as it went a national network of autonomous groups. It's commitment to direct action and a refusal to compromise or negotiate has enabled it to cause more damage and grief to its enemies than the entire British revolutionary left put together"

- from ‘Bigger Cages, Longer Chains.'

What are your thoughts on this Ramsey?

Ramsey: Larry Law was a genius (unfortunately dying at a relatively early age). His series of Spectacular Times pamphlets ought to be mandatory reading. One of the problems of Guy Debord and Situationist ideas in general is that to 'get it', you have to get a handle on the jargon they use. Their ideas are in fact, very simple, and very applicable, but the language often doesn't help. The genius of Larry was twofold.

First, he was able to present situationist ideas in an easily understandable way (typically illustrated by newspaper clippings, quotes, and references to current events). Second, he skillfully explored the totality of the situationist critique, and how it applied to all aspects of life - whether it be animal rights, the media, women, hierarchy, the state, pirates, pranks etc etc. I recommend his series of pamphlets to anyone/everyone above all else. The above quote hints at the application of the totality of such ideas...Larry was one who joined more dots than most, and painted pictures with them that everyone could understand...

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.  It is not mere decoration but lies at the very heart of real society's unreality”

– The Society of the Spectacle.

Claudette:  Guy Debord wrote that back in 1968 and yet today the emptiness of the hollow man must be filled and consumerism has learnt how to do it…

Ramsey: The process(es) that Debord described have merely accelerated since he wrote those words, but are part and parcel of capitalism. Part of the problem anti-capitalists face, is that capitalism has proven itself eminently adaptable. Its opposition is typically stuck short of ideas, initiative, and response. Debord and the Situationists were absolutely specific that they were not a party, a group, and definitely not an “ism”. They were a set of ideas, of practices, a praxis they wished to see implemented by ordinary folks in the here and now. Now more than ever.

" The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed"

- from The Society of the Spectacle.

Claudette: You live in America. In a culture based on looks, youth, image and the ridiculous trivial pursuit of fashion instructing the consumer towards teen breast implants, face-lifts and non-real foods etcetera - are people in capitalistic society hypnotised into internalising and expressing market logic through the process of 'self-branding' and logos?

Ramsey: The revolt and the struggle against the banality of everyday life and the rigors of capitalism is happening all the time. But, of course, it is rarely reported, or recorded. It is the role of capital, and the media, to not only turn us into atomised, isolated, consumers, but to convince us that this is both natural, just, and right.

The propaganda system is certainly more sophisticated in the so-called western democracies, as opposed to so called totalitarian regimes, but the results are pretty much the same..

Therein, of course, lies the challenge!

Claudette:  Will 'Real' rise again amid obsolescence, slave labour, global destruction, climate change, junk food and junk everywhere when we see the corporate sponsorship of Pepsi, MacDonalds and tobacco slogans, among thousands of others, defining ideals of human experience and who we think we are?

Ramsey: I would like to think so. The fightback against McCulture and McJobs is happening everywhere, all the time. Whether its the rejection of GMO crops by Indian farmers (and British consumers), or the campaigns against McDonalds in France, or the community efforts to stop the Walmartisation of the world, or the struggles of farmworkers for justice and dignity.....I could go on and on.

Claudette:  Debord says the Spectacle is a “concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”  Plato in his ‘Cave' analogy says humans are shadows dancing on the wall of the cave, existing without a moral imperative and deficient of freedom or true will power. What does Ramsey Kanaan say?

Ramsey: RK prefers Debord to Plato, for sure. But he's mainly interested in the myriad of ways that folks can, and do, take control of their own lives...self-management. He also believes it's eminently practical, and possible.

 "Grasping the spectacles essential nature; reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form"

- The Society of the Spectacle.

Claudette: I want to ask you about DARPA, the American bioengineering program turning soldiers into cyborgs. This program was devised by the military to 'enhance human performance'. An implantable brain chip is now under development which has demonstrated how rats are being turned into living robots through the manipulation of stimulus-response signals in the brain via electrodes.

James Meek in the Guardian wrote, "The use of animals in warfare is ugly enough without the further insult to their dignity in turning them into voluntary cyborgs.   A military command committed to the use of creatures which are part-animal- part-machine, is going to be that bit less reluctant to interfere in its soldiers in similar ways".     

The chief Frankenstein of the project, one Alan S. Rudolph, now wants to be able to transmit images or sound directly into the brains of rats - and of course, later, soldiers for prisoners of war. The torture potential here is mind boggling. Are we seeing the beginning of these macabre experiments with Guantanamo Bay interns?

Ramsey: For the military-industrial complex (and these days, the prison-industrial), it makes perfect sense. Is completely logical. And why not? Since when have men, or animals, gotten in the way of a potentially profitable idea. For the rest of us, of course, it's another nightmare. Much like patenting the seeds of life, or destroying the ozone, or nuclear power.

Claudette:  What impact will the New World Order and its escalating rush to form a one-world government have in this millennium with humans and nonhumans alike?

Ramsey: I'm not convinced, to be honest, that there will be the ushering in of (American) Empire. Well, of course, in one sense, its already here. But despite having troops stationed in over 100 countries of the world, America is already stretched too thin, and is failing.

 Failing bad.

Look at the situation in Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter) - two wars that America can never win. Or the fact that some countries are now starting to trade oil in Euros, as opposed to dollars...and the rise of China..

None of these developments are, of course, necessarily good (quite the opposite, in terms of most of the planets inhabitants). But, it does mean that the monolith that is America has had its 5 minutes in the sun (well, realistically, 60 years of dominance - ever since the Second World War).

The challenge is to destroy capitalism, domination, and hierarchy, in whatever forms it takes, national or otherwise. There's certainly plenty of work to do there!

AK Press is a worker-owned and run anarchist collective, which publishes and distributes books and other media. Their politics draw on the rich heritage of anarchist, anti-authoritarian and left-communist thought and action. AK Press publishes around 30 books, CDs and DVDs per year, and distributes 3,000+ other titles from independent presses and publishers to the book trade, individuals, radical spaces and other outlets.

Guy DeBord's works and Larry Law's ‘Spectacular Times' can be brought at AK Press.

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