Adbusters’ Rhetoric of Revolution

“Last week on Nov 27th [1998], our university campus saw the staging of a campaign for ‘Buy Nothing Day’, a campaign sponsored by Adbusters, a publication of the Media Foundation. For many on the left, the Media Foundation, it’s quarterly publication Adbusters, and it’s campaigns around ‘International Buy Nothing Day’ and ‘TV Turnoff Week’ are basically where it’s at in terms of resistance to the corporate takeover of our society. Indeed, the last several years have seen great improvements in terms of the slickness, circulation and political currency of Adbusters magazine and the promotion of its ‘new’ ideology of ‘anti-consumerism’.... Despite adapting revolutionary rhetoric and repackaging glossy pictures of Indonesian student protests, the liberal politics of Adbusters have come shining through as exemplified by their near total contempt of the power of ordinary people create revolutionary change. There are three main parts to the analysis that has led Adbusters to this political dead end: their privileging of resistance in the individual act of consumption over the collective organization of production, their view of revolution as consisting of a purely subjective and highly individualized ‘mindshift’, and their insistence that the ‘revolution’ will be made on behalf of the masses by a small group of ‘culture jammers’.”

Read the rest, from Tom Keefer.