 By the mid-1970s – as the radical Left faltered and social democracy became increasingly instrumentalised – "Arena" contributors were focusing on the degree to which social life could be seen not through a base/superstructure/ideology model, but as nested levels of material abstraction, from the least abstract – face-to-face daily life – to the most abstract, such as global commodity and image/media circulation.A focus on material abstraction had its origins in a redirection of the implications of both the critique of technology by figures like Jacques Ellul and the extension of its range by Marshall McLuhan.Marx's analysis of the commodity, particularly as reconstructed by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, consolidated that movement.