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What spectacular society cannot admit is that the crisis is, root and branch, an example of the functioning of the capitalist economy as such: the black hole of the finance sector is a dysfunction inherent in the market economy and not an anomaly in an otherwise healthy system.
The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.
‘People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.’
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
This constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities transformed human labor itself into a commodity, into wage labor, and ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival — but only in such a way that the same problem is continually being regenerated at a higher level.
Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else;
a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane.
