“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

—  Guy Debord

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 1, sct. 1.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of s…" by Guy Debord?
Guy Debord photo
Guy Debord 29
French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding mem… 1931–1994

Related quotes

Thokozani Khuphe photo

“The time has come for us to move away from the corner and come to the centre which is where the game plan begins and where everything happens.”

Thokozani Khuphe (1963) Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe

Source: Zimbabwe: Gender Equality A Right (2010)

John Maynard Keynes photo

“The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Source: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter II, Section III, p. 19

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“The process has aroused much antagonism, a great part of which is wholly without warrant. It is not true that as the rich have grown richer the poor have grown poorer. On the contrary, never before has the average man, the wage-worker, the farmer, the small trader, been so well off as in this country and at the present time. There have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth; yet it remains true that a fortune accumulated in legitimate business can be accumulated by the person specially benefited only on condition of conferring immense incidental benefits upon others. Successful enterprise, of the type which benefits all mankind, can only exist if the conditions are such as to offer great prizes as the rewards of success.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, First Annual Message to Congress (1901)

Ho Chi Minh photo

“We want to build a new society, a free society where all men are equal, a society where industry, thrift, integrity and uprightness prevail hence we must wipe out all bad habits of the old society.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

"To Practice Thrift and Oppose Embezzlement (1952)
1950's

Florence Nightingale photo

“At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this?”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)
Context: At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.
And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

Friedrich Engels photo

“What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property? Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

Karl Marx photo

“In its beginnings, the credit system sneaks in as a modest helper of accumulation and draws by invisible threads the money resources scattered all over the surface of society into the hands of individual or associated capitalists. But soon it becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 687.
(Buch I) (1867)

Pablo Neruda photo

“Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

David McNally photo

“A society that has moved beyond commodification is one that has embraced the most thoroughgoing radical democracy in all spheres of social life.”

David McNally (1953) Canadian political scientist

Source: Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002), Chapter 7, Freedom Song, p. 234

Related topics