Behind The Masks Of Total

Looting Is A Natural Response To The Unnatural And Inhuman Society Of Commodity Abundance. It Instantly Undermines The Commodity As Such, And It Also Exposes What The Commodity Ultimately Implies: The Army, The Police And The Other Specialized Detachments Of The State's Monopoly Of Armed Violence.

In Societies Where Modern Conditions Of Productions Prevail, All Of Life Presents Itself As An Immense Accumulation Of Spectacles. Everything That Was Directly Lived Has Moved Away Into Representation. The Images Detached From Every Aspect Of Life Fuse In A Common Stream In Which The Unity Of This Life Can No Longer Be Re-established. Reality Considered Partially Unfolds, In Its Own General Unity As A Pseudo-world Apart, An Object Of Mere Contemplation . . . The Spectacle Is Not A Collection Of Images, But A Social Relation Among People, Mediated By Images.

Behind The Masks Of Total Choice, Different Forms Of The Same Alienation Confront Each Other.

As Specialists Of Apparent Life, Stars Serve As Superficial Objects That People Can Identify With In Order To Compensate For The Fragmented Productive Specialisations That They Actually Live.

With The Destruction Of History, Contemporary Events Themselves Retreat Into A Remote And Fabulous Realm Of Unverifiable Stories, Uncheckable Statistics, Unlikely Explanations And Untenable Reasoning.