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�Then when we put the overalls aside, we clean up the muck from our faces and we take the boring bus or train home and they suddenly transform us into consumers. In other words when we are not working they make us buy�the same shit we produced.

The miserable wage packet they gave us they make us spend on useless food, on machines specially designed to break down and on houses we know look and feel like prisons.

Prisons we helped build. And paid (more specifically promised to pay over the next 20 years for - we don�t have enough dough to pay for a house or a car or anything for matter�they have to exploit us even more by making us pay interest) for them. We build the prisons then we live in them. We produce shit and then we eat it.

Producers of shit � consumers of shit.�

Post-modernist theorists have dwelt extensively on the carrots of consumer society. Much of these ideas have been derived from the Situationist concept of the �spectacle�, as put forth in their key text Debord�s The Society of the Spectacle.

� The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.�

Unlike the later post-modernists the Situationist critique of the new consumer society was coupled with the desire (and hope) to change this society. Much of their political ideas were further explorations of developments in Marxist thought. The Frankfurt School and Henri Lefevbre were obvious influences. The group �Socialisme Ou Barbarie� heavily influenced the leftist elements of the S.I.�s thoughts (such as the idea of workers� councils as a basis for post-revolutionary society. However in addition to these orthodox inspirations the S.I. also drew from the cultural traditions of currents such as Dada and the Surrealists. Indeed a stated aim of the S.I. was the �realisation and suppression� of these tendencies.

The S.I. retained a firm belief in the necessity of social revolution. They saw the �Spectacle� as the reason for revolution rather than an excuse for defeatism.

�Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life�

Whilst the S.I. emerged from the Lettrist International in the late 1950s, it wasn�t until the publication in 1966 of The Poverty of Student Life by Situationist influenced students in Strasbourg that the group�s ideas acquired wider notoriety. This was followed by the publication of Debord�s Society of the Spectacle and Vaniegem�s Revolution of Everyday Life. When the May events of 1968 broke out, contrary to most contemporary Marxist thinkers the S.I. not only predicted the insurrection but also played an active role in it.