Comments on the Society of the Spectacle Free online reading

First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle, has since acquired cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the revolutionary events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and capitalism continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite television and the soundbite.

In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returns to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrates how they were all the more relevant in a period where the “integrated spectacle” was dominant.

Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the obfuscation and tinfoil mystification offered by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society.

Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord’s final triumphant work conveys the revolutionary impulse at the heart of Situationism and later movements such as Occupy, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter.