Benjamin Britton’s Reviews > Society of the Spectacle > Status Update

“In the language of contradiction, the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture — its knowledge as well as its poetry — and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality. This unified theoretical critique is on its way to meet a unified social practice.”

“In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure society without community.”

“Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.”

“Feudal society was born from the merging of “the organizational structures of the conquering armies that developed in the process of conquest” with “the productive forces found in the conquered regions” (The German Ideology), and the factors contributing to the organization of those productive forces included the religious language in which they were expressed.”

“Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it knows it.”

“It bears a revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution.”

“The social democrats’ scientific ideology confidently affirmed that capitalism could not tolerate these economic reforms, but history repeatedly proved them wrong.”

“What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.”

“Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.”

“The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.”