Adbusters or Adblusters?

Don’t get me wrong, I love Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine that first called for the occupation of Wall Street. They are “culture-jammers” by belief, which means they seek to disrupt the dominant image machinery and, in so doing, awaken a radical culture of resistance. In some ways they are descendants of Marshall McLuhan, also a Canadian, who fostered the 1960s concept that the “medium” itself is “the message” and, more particularly, they idealize the French Situationists who took to the barricades in 1968, and the Zapatistas who rose in 1994. Their roots go back further to their proud identification with the Paris Commune of 1871, which Karl Marx and many others extolled. Anarchists in particular celebrate the Commune as an early example of revolutionary direct action “prefiguring” the new society they imagined would come, with the emphasis on self-management from below. The Commune itself was decimated by the French Army with as many as 20,.000 killed and tens of thousands marched off to prison.