The Indian Bolshevik

  Guy Debord's  La société du spectacle  ( The Society of the Spectacle ) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-driven consumer culture. He examines the “Spectacle,” the term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity. Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments while encouraging us to focus on appearances. Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs daily; advertising manufac...

 Commodity fetishism is one of Marx’s most consistently enduring ideas, and it is surprisingly accessible. Commodity fetishism is the condition in which production is no longer seen as a social endeavour but as the simple exchange of money and commodities. Under commodity fetishism, commodities themselves compete with each other, and commodity fetishism ends up transforming the entire social order or “the world.” Commodity fetishism ends up obfuscating the true relationship of humans to production and of the capitalist to the worker. (NYU Edu) Once a good is produced and enters the market, the monetary value that is ascribed to the product works to sever its ties from the production process. Potential buyers no longer equate the product with the work that was put into it. Instead, its value comes from its price tag. The consumer, in turn, sees only one glowing perspective of the product, while a veil is cast over the hard, sometimes dreary, labour that is put into it.  For exa...