The fast-accelerating world crisis is driving us towards barbarism and extinction. The capitalist system means ecological and social collapse. Mainstream politics, embedded in the system, has been reduced to irrelevance. Revolution has become an existential imperative. This book offers critical Marxist thinking about the nature of the crisis and what must be done to turn mass protest into the revolutionary transformation on which our survival depends.

The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

The Society of the Spectacle is a carefully considered effort to clarify the most fundamental tendencies and contradictions of the society in which we find ourselves—in order to facilitate its overthrow. Guy Debord was the founder of the Situationist International, the notorious avant-garde group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France, which brought the entire country to a standstill for several weeks. His book The Society of the Spectacle, originally published in Paris in 1967, has been translated into more than twenty other languages and is arguably the most important radical work of the twentieth century. Ken Knabb’s meticulous new translation is the first edition in any language to include extensive annotations, clarifying the historical allusions and revealing the sources of Debord’s quotations and “détournements.” Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord’s book is neither an ivory tower “philosophical” discourse nor a mere expression of “protest.” This makes the book more of a challenge, but it is also why it remains so pertinent more than half a century after its original publication, while countless other social theories and intellectual fads have come and gone. It has, in fact, become even more pertinent than ever, because the spectacle has become more all-pervading and glaringly obvious than ever. As Debord noted in his follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), “spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws.” Debord’s book remains the best guidebook to understanding that mold and breaking it.

Debord describes and critiques the way we live. The power in these ideas lies in their ability to question, identify, and name the common assumptions of the present. Developing the concept of The Spectacle, he describes the “gaze” of contemporary society. From its publication just before, and ultimately influencing the May 1968 revolt in Paris and Occupy Wall Street, this book continues to transform a wide range of progressive philosophical and political movements, most notably anti-capitalism, postmodernism, marxism, and anarchism. This new translation brings a concrete edge to the text, elaborating upon the original, and adding annotations. Bringing fifty years of prominent radical thinking back to the text, from Baudrillard to Odell to Zuboff—it’s clear that Debords’ book is more relevant in the era of social media, the attention economy, and the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism than ever before.

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

This book examines alienation from both a sociological and psychoanalytic perspective, revisiting classic treatments of the topic (Marx, Simmel, Weber) and exploring its relevance to understanding post-modern consumer society. It examines the escapist potentials for good and for ill in modern society - those fostered by commercial interests, and those maintained by individuals and groups as their form of resisting alienation.