the delirium of hype and spin… “Welcome Debord”

In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having.

The spectacle uses “image” to convey what people must need and must have… material needs, not biological needs.

Consequently, consumer life moves further, leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely, “the appearance of the image.”

The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation.

Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production.

The “growth” generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin.”
– paraphrased from Guy Debord, 1973.
For me this explains the basis of marketing spin, propaganda and advertising to create the hype – the peer pressure of social living is what creates need.

 

Debord wrote;

“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.”

Here he references Marx.

Debord’s analysis of time itself is as a series of epochs:

such ‘pseudo-festivities’ as sporting events (the Olympics springs to mind), act to convince the denizens of the Spectacle that they are still living in a cyclical and eternal go-round, while only the anointed few, the celebrities, are imbued with the attributes of money and power that signify the ability to make choices – to progress into a better future.

“Being a star,” Debord writes, “means specialising in the seemingly lived.”

 

I just came across this video in relation to Marx and alienation… 

 

Will Self – Guy Debord’s accurate prediction of the Shit we’re in!

A Nation of Helots – Progress Over Skulls

‘We make a nation of “helots”,
and have no free citizens.’

– Adam Ferguson said of the English industrialised working class. (quoted in Karl Marx Das Kapital)
* Adam Ferguson (known as Ferguson of Raith) was a Scottish philosopher and historian who was sympathetic to traditional societies. Influenced Karl Marx and Hegel, known as the father of Sociology.
* The “helots” were a subjugated population group that formed the main population of Laconia and Messenia (areas ruled by the Sparta warrior caste).

 

… This passage has really resonated with me from Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” for me this says everything you need to know about the state of crony Capitalism… this says everything about the depersonalising effect of the mechanisms of capitalist society…

In bourgeois society, the various forms of social relations are, as far as the ‘individual’ is concerned,
‘a mere means to his private ends, an outward necessity’

 Marx in, ‘Kapital’, p762, goes on…

The classical mode of small-scale production,
in so far as · it tended to prevent the development of productive forces · could not help but give way to the concentrationof property and the socialization of labour – the change had to be wrought by means of ‘progress over skulls’.

… progress over skulls… it sends a shiver down your spine… like the battle scenes in TERMINATOR. (Opening scenes of Terminator link)

“Has the bourgeoisie,” Marx asked, “ever effected progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?

– (Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, Jonathan Sperber, 2013, Liveright publishing, New York.)

Just look at this… this is how I can contextualise modern society under the Tories. It’s Tory PROGRESS OVER SKULLS!

This is what it’s about…

Mark Spencer Conservative MP, jaw-dropping response during a poverty speech in the Commons Feb 4th 2015

Jaw-dropping intervention during @lisanandy poverty sppech in Commons yesterday publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cm… http://t.co/gQTgE7PGxJ—
Declan Gaffney (@djmgaffneyw4) February 05, 2015

Man kills himself over £800 benefits debt that WASN’T his fault.

 

I’m reading Mikhail Lifschitz’ “The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx” it’s a short 120page pdf.

I think that this passage is brilliant…

The concentration of property in the hands of the few and the‘fearful and painful expropriation of the masses’ constitutes the prelude to the history of capital. ‘under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious’.
In consequence, all patriarchal relations, and all personal family and communal ties disintegrate. and in their place appears one strong bond-that of callous “cash payment”.

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“The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”

― Karl Marx, The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859