Together these things generated a pro-capitalist ‘common sense’. This is in addition to direct bourgeois control of the state apparatus, which, together with the family, also relays bourgeois ideology.
the Church, the education system, the popular press and other media, the legal system, and the mass political parties. For Gramsci, this consent is gained by capitalist domination of ‘civil society’, which includes the mechanisms of ideological domination, e.g. Bourgeois hegemony is exercised both by force and by gaining the consent (grudging or otherwise) of the masses, who are made to see capitalist society as being either just or inevitable. These efforts effectively began with Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony (more or less, domination). Michael Löwy ĭebord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967 ) represents the culmination of efforts by 20 th century Marxists to theorise the ideological means by which the capitalist class dominates, or attempts to dominate, the consciousness of significant sections of the masses – in advanced capitalist countries to start with, and now worldwide. The dynamite is still there, and it might explode in the hands of anyone who picks it up and tries to render it inoffensive. They try to neutralise him, to water him down, to aestheticise him or to deny his originality. Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.
We live in a world of virtual reality and social media, a rabbit hole of somebody else’s design, unable to see the virtual wood for the virtual trees.
Now the Spectacle has turned in on itself. In 2001 the Spectacle became terrorism, as in a terrorist ‘Spectacular’. The Spectacle of consumerism, entertainment, escapism, work, politics. A society whose desires are neutered and put to sleep by the Spectacle. Undoubtedly, Debord’s greatest achievement was his theory of ‘the Spectacle’ first aired in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle.
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