Refusing capitalism
Capitalism
is based on addiction. It encourages people to crave for more and more
wealth and more and more products. Ridiculously wealthy people want even
more riches, resulting in war, exploitation and the immiseration of
working folk. In turn, ordinary people have been encouraged to take out
ever greater debts in order to purchase an endless stream of goods of
dubious worth. This addictive behaviour is ultimately ruinous for the
individual, humankind and the environment, which becomes stripped bare
in the process.
Edward
Bernays is regarded as the father of advertising, propaganda and public
relations. He knew how to manipulate the pleasure and pain centres of
the brain and how to get the masses hooked on the products of
capitalism. This type of manipulation has been developed and perfected
over the past century or so, and we are all subjected to it each and
every day. The American Academy of
Pediatrics has reported that young people see 3,000 advertisements a
day and are exposed to 40,000 different ones per year. It was not
without good reason that the late academic Rick Roderick said that
modern society would fall apart if it not were based on people’s
addictions, whether in the form of pharmaceutical drugs or consumer
products.
Capitalism
does not want a well-informed, educated populace that is aware of its
disfranchisement, exploitation and manipulation. It does not require
disenchantment and revolutionary murmurs, but acquiescence and passivity
from a population that is distracted by infotainment and the
advertising industry and its products and looks to its leaders to save
it from their fears and confusions.
Take Guatemala in the 1950s, for instance. The US people
were subjected to a successful government-backed media campaign of
propaganda to tarnish the regime as ‘communist’ and as part of the ‘red
threat’ from Soviet Russia. The fact was that Guatemala was not in any way connected to the USSR and was merely arranging its economy to benefit its own people, rather than elite US interests. From Guatemala to Congo and from Iran to Vietnam, nationalistic movements were branded ‘communist’ as an excuse for the US military or CIA to go in and try to overthrow them.
Instead of using propaganda to allay fears that the US public had about the USSR and its aims, the US government
used mass media to fuel fear and paranoia that were then manipulated in
order to garner support for militarism and empire building. And this
continues today. Replace communism, the USSR and
the ‘evil empire’ with al Qaeda, 9/11 and the ‘axis of evil’, and the
propagandist fear-mongering narrative about the ongoing ‘war on terror’
reads virtually the same.
A
similar propagandist model is also used to justify the prevailing
neo-liberal economic agenda. Think of the mantra ‘there is no
alternative’, which the media and politicians like to chime when people
question the efficacy of capitalism. This mantra has been accepted by
all the major political parties in places like the US and UK.
Individualism and ‘self-reliancy’ are endlessly promoted. Anyone
suggesting collectivism and equality is painted as an unrealistic
dreamer or a heretic.
Indeed,
it can be easy to look at the situation today and become excessively
pessimistic and negative. Cynicism and apathy can take hold: this is the
way of the world is and nothing can or should be done about it. And
this is the very stance that is encouraged through the media and by the
political system as a way of preventing people seeking out emancipatory
alternatives.
The
state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of
the public sector are undermined by platitudes about ‘individual
responsibility’ and the market constituting the best method for
supplying human needs. The same attitude prevails when it comes to
protecting the environment. Nothing must be allowed to stop the raping
of the land because this is positive, this is ‘growth’. The hallowed
‘greed is good’ mantra persists.
Much
of this indoctrination all too often it goes unnoticed. The most benign
method of propaganda can be the most effective. Take those 40,000
commercials that youngsters see each year. They are all underpinned by
free market dogma, which serves to bind the individual to the commodity
and portray social relations under capitalism as somehow natural, the
outcome of ‘human nature’. And this becomes engrained from an early age
as ‘common sense’ among many ordinary folk who sneer at those who
challenge capitalism, while embracing a system whose only aim is to stab
them in their collective back and bleed them dry for the benefit of the
few. The system promotes a mass mindset that is immune to the lies.
Traditional
media such as TV has much to answer for in conveying this dogma. And,
increasingly, so does digital technology. From Google to Facebook, and
from the surveillance obsessed UK to the unfolding surveillance
biometric-database-supporting Indian regime, we find ourselves spied on
and our everyday actions monitored and evaluated so that we can be
targeted more precisely for ever more PR, advertising and, if we step
out of line, police action.
Too
many people now see through the lies of economic neo-liberal hegemony
and capitalism, however, and realise that the encouragement of cynicism
and apathy and of trivializing or ridiculing dissent and dissenters is
part and parcel of the propaganda..
Herbert
Marcuse once wrote about the ‘great refusal’ as a strategy for not
participating in the rituals and beliefs of advanced capitalism.
Challenging the notion that freedom is to be found in craving for and
celebrating the products and icons that chain people to an enslaving
system in the belief that this constitutes freedom and happiness is also
part of that refusal.
“The
moment the slave resoles that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters
fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery
are mental states.” Mahatma Gandhi
More
people must come to understand that modern ‘liberal democracy’ has
nothing to do with empowering people and everything to do with enslaving
them and making them blind to the chains that bind them. It is the
powerful think tanks headed or funded by private corporations along with
government bodies populated with individuals from these companies that
drive policies (see Tony Catalucci’s article ‘Tipping the Balance of
Power’ [23 Sept] on his Land Destroyer website to see who runs the US
and determines policy there).
Who
but a misinformed and brainwashed public would think for one minute
that such people would let ordinary folk have any say in policies that
would adversely affect their power or enormous wealth? That is exactly
what they depend on – an ignorant and misinformed public.
The
challenge lies in developing communities that engender a sense of
camaraderie stemming from collective self-help and face-to-face
interaction. We must move away from the headlong drive towards
urbanization in places like India and
falsely equating well-being or ‘happiness’ with addiction to consumer
goods. This shift involves rejecting the goods and services being forced
upon us by large, powerful corporate interests, while placing more
emphasis on self-sustaining local communities in which bio-diverse,
organic agriculture and local food sovereignty is central and where
there is sustainable use of the environment. And this is as true for the
rich countries as it is for the poorer ones.
We must do this because if we don’t, we are in line for more of the same: an ever spiral of misery, war, subterfuge and deceit.
from here - by Colin Todhunter 2012
SOYMB would add that the essence of socialism lies within these words. An enlightened public empowered by the true democracy of common ownership working together for the benefit of all is the ultimate objective of 'refusing capitalism.'
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