"By means of the
spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon
itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The
spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of
power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence."1a
"It is not just that the
relationship to commodities is now plain to see -- commodities
are now all that there is to see: the world we see is
the world of the commodity."1a
" . . . Stalin, just like
any obsolete product, can be cast aside by the very forces that
promoted his rise. Each new lie of the advertising industry
implicitly acknowledges the one before."1a
"For Marx it is the
struggle -- and by no means the law
-- that has to be understood. "We know only a single science,"
says The German Ideology, "the science of history.""1a
" . . . [N]o jacquerie
of serfs ever overthrew the barons and no slave revolt in the
ancient world ever ended the rule of freemen. The first thing the
linear model loses sight of is the fact that the
bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever been
victorious; the only class, also, for which the
development of the economy was the cause and consequence of its
capture of society."1a
"As a proponent of the
replacement of subject by predicate, following Feuerbach's
systematic practice of it, The young Marx achieved the most cogent
use of this insurrectional style: thus
the philosophy of poverty became the poverty of
philosophy. The device of détournement
restores all their subversive qualities to past critical
judgments that have congealed into respectable truths
-- or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies."1a
"The principle which
Hegel enunciated in the Jenenser Realphilosophie as
that of money -- "the life, moving of itself, of that
which is dead" -- has now been extended by the spectacle
to the entirety of social life."1a
"The spectacle erases .
. . the dividing line between true and false,
repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence
of the falsehood maintained by the organization of
appearances."1a