![]() In the West in that same year, French students and workers revolted against de Gaulle’s government and the whole post-war French state system. ![]() The crushing of the Prague Spring showed how terrified the system was of freedom of thought, and discredited, for once and for all, the Soviet system. ![]() It was this latter development that alarmed the Russians, and influenced their decision to send in troops. In Czechoslovakia, reformers within the Czech Communist Party were instituting a series of mild reforms, while, far more importantly, allowing an explosion of free speech all over the country. ![]() 1968 saw the crisis point of this system in both East and West. In the West, as the above quote from Raoul Vaneigem points out, a cunning system of free elections, consumer choice and growth of an entertainment culture served to keep the energies of the population in check, while actual freedoms were tightly governed by State control. Of course, none of the capitalist oligarchs and communist apparatchiks wanted to have anything to do with the “People’s Will.” In the Soviet sphere, the carrot-and-stick approach was dependent upon a rather big stick, the gulag. This was even true in the Soviet Bloc, as post-Stalinist leaders were able to hold out promises of consumer goods to ensure the smooth running of the state apparatus. The consumer society served to create an ideology of consumer capitalism based on the notion of the citizen as consumer and spectator, rather than participant, of events. In response, the expansion of the “consumer society” which had been developing steadily since the turn of the 19th century due to assembly-line mass-production techniques, was stepped up, partly as a response to the Cold War challenge of Stalinism and Communist theory. People knew their “rights” and one of these was the right to vote. Vestiges of old notions of tradition, privilege and precedent could no longer be appealed to. This is the position in which the Western industrial nations found themselves after the Second World War. The trouble with a state that purports to base its existence on the People’s Will, is that it then has to go some way in ensuring that the People’s Will is met, or at least pay lipservice to the idea. … The system has realised in the nick of time that a dead human being is more of a paying proposition than a dead human being – or one riddled by pollutants.” Raoul Vaneigem “The Western model has made tabula rasa of the old forms of oppression and instated a democracy of the supermarket, a self-service autonomy, a hedonism whose pleasures must be paid for. “…society becomes a mechanism and an organism which ceases to be comprehensible to the very people who participate in it, and who maintain it through their labour.” Henri Lefebvre, on the process of alienation. ![]() If, for example, we live in a deregulated monopoly capitalist society, then they way we use technology will serve the interests of that society, unless an effort is made to create the freedom, intellectually and psychologically, to that will allow us to use the technology the way we dream we are able to: to make a better world. We, and they, forget that it is purely a human and social decision as to how any technology is used. In our desperation to free ourselves we rush with open arms to the soothsayers of technical futures, to the Utopias made possible by technology. Eventually everything has to be subordinated to the illusion of leisure as information becomes “infotainment” and work becomes almost a luxury, a privilege. The expansion of industrial capitalism led to the realisation of the consumer society, which creates a society split between leisure and labour, a leisure society in which we work to obtain the instruments of leisure, the machines of pleasure, and this split organises our thoughts in every way. Author: Gillian Mciver MEDIA AND THE SPECTACULAR SOCIETY by Gillian McIver ![]()
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