SPECTACLE is an institutionally independent political alignment. We are a Situationist Local.

We stand by the assertion that "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

We also likely stand with many of Debord's other 220 theses in The Society of the Spectacle, and many other notions brought forth by the cluster of folks in and around the Situationist International.

SPECTACLE serves as a supplement to movement. There is no replacement for the head-on organizing confronting the contradictions and horrors of our time. Rather, this alignment serve as a conduit for experimentation and reflection. When we take the streets, who will design our banners?

Our elements of dissonance, reading list, and situations (past and present) will guide you deciding if SPECTACLE is right for you.

Liberal democracy is rooted in equality under the law - "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

Our contemporaries rightly diagnosis that our conditions under liberal democratic capitalism have a lot more to do with capitalism and liberalism than it does democracy. The legitimacy of capitalist states are based in the most pervasive act of recuperation - that some chunk within a chunk of the citizenry of a state demand changes...so long as they do not break the liberal capitalist order.

The triangulating centrist, the hopeful social democrat, and the forceful fascist often serve the same end. They adjust the dial of brutality of the state, fine tuning to just the right level for their base. There have been attempts at subverting the state model to serve a revolutionary purpose (though for now we will carefully avoid commenting on whether we view any current existing attempts as serving that purpose).

We do see democracy manifest in many forms elsewhere. Partisan candidates are overjoyed to see 55% in an election, while it is not unheard of for unions to take decisive action with near unanimous decision making. In a rupture from normalcy, we saw shrewd decision making constructed across encampments standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In libraries, community centers, and whatever other spaces will take them, we see groups like the DSA working out methods to build a movement for the working class.

We must reject the notion that democracy is a visit to the ballot box every few years, and instead is a massively varied mechanism in which we can build and exercise power.

II. Accumulation and Awareness