The family is marketed as a safe space, a place of love and mutual care, but this is not supported by the data—How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society?

~ written by Alana Queer, original text in Spanish: El Salto ~

Something is wrong. We already struggle to imagine the end of capitalism, but abolishing the family? Feminism seems to have long since abandoned this old feminist demand, and this year the LGBTQIA+ movement in Spain will celebrate twenty years of equal marriage, that is, its inclusion in this patriarchal institution of marriage and family that marks a new “homonormativity,” which is primarily a copy of heteronormativity. We’re in trouble. We lack imagination, we lack visions of other forms of coexistence and parenting.

I write this article from my perspective as a family survivor. A survivor of sexual abuse, psychological and emotional abuse and neglect, abuse that has left me with complex trauma that I am still learning to live with. To live, not just survive, as I have done for decades of my life. Writing from a survivor’s perspective, in a way, is writing from the perspective of a child, providing a counterpoint to the debate dominated by adult-centric perspectives.

When I think of family, the first words that come to mind are violence, (sexual) abuse, abandonment, mistreatment, emotional blackmail… Not for a millisecond of my life have I considered starting a family. 

While I strongly agree with the diagnosis of the family’s role in the economic and political order, as put forward, for example, by Nuria Alabao in this article or Sophie Lewis in her book Abolish the Family, in a way, this diagnosis is unnecessary. I only have to think about my own experience, look at my surroundings, my friends, and what I see is violence, mistreatment, abuse, emotional neglect, and all the resulting traumas. Is it possible that so many of us have simply been unlucky? Perhaps there is a more structural problem, that it’s not something failing in some (many) individual families, but the family system itself that is at fault?

The family, a system of mistreatment and abuse

The family is marketed as a safe space, a place of love and mutual care. Above all, it is said that the family is the best place for children. This could not be further from the truth.  According to a meta-analysis of physical violence experienced or witnessed in the family at the global level, in Europe 12.7% of children have been victims of physical violence in their family, with a higher rate for boys compared to girls (girls are not included in the analysis), and 10.5% have witnessed physical violence in their family. Another global meta-analysis of more types of abuse and neglect reaches even higher results: 14.3% of girls and 6.2% of boys had suffered sexual abuse, 27% of boys and 12% of girls had suffered physical abuse, 6.2% of boys and 12.9% of girls had suffered emotional abuse, and 14.8% of boys and 13.9% of girls had suffered neglect during their childhood. Overall, boys suffer more physical abuse and neglect, and girls more emotional and sexual abuse. Fathers perpetrate more physical and sexual abuse, while mothers perpetrate more emotional abuse and neglect.

A study in the United Kingdom concluded that 41.7% of children were exposed to some form of child abuse—physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or physical or emotional neglect. Some 19.3% witnessed domestic violence between their parents or care-givers within the family. The famous ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study) of 1998 in the United States reached prevalence rates of 11.1% for psychological abuse, 10.8% for physical abuse, 22% for sexual abuse, and 12.5% ​​for exposure to domestic violence against the mother. Children often suffer more than one form of abuse at a time.

In Spain, an estimated 18.9% of the population has been a victim of sexual abuse in childhood (15.2% of men and 22.5% of women), more than half of whom were perpetrated by a family member. According to a report by Save the Children, more than 25% of children in Spain have been victims of abuse by their parents or care-givers.

Despite considerable variation across studies, all of them show the family as a site—the primary site—of abuse, mistreatment, and neglect. Studies that differentiate by sexual orientation, such as one from the United States, generally find much higher prevalence rates of abuse and mistreatment across all categories for LGBTQIA+ people compared to heterosexuals. And children who exhibit behaviours that do not conform to their assigned sex at birth suffer even more abuse of all kinds.

Beyond abuse, 40% of children never develop a secure attachment to one of their care-givers. According to research by the Sutton Trust in the United Kingdom, “Many children lack secure attachment relationships. Around 1 in 4 children avoid their parents when they are upset because they ignore their needs. Another 15% resist their parents because they cause distress.” According to the same research, insecure parental attachment is the most important risk factor; that is, insecure attachment is reproduced from generation to generation if parents with insecure attachment do not work on their own attachment styles and traumas.

To these figures of child abuse and neglect, we can add the high prevalence of intimate partner violence, gender violence, and domestic violence. Witnessing this violence also has negative consequences for children.

Is the family a safe place of love and care? The numbers debunk this myth. We can say that for children, the least safe and most dangerous place is their family home. With these figures—a prevalence of abuse between 15% and 40%—how can we think that something is wrong at the individual level, that the problem isn’t the structure (the family), but a lack of education, resources, etc.?

I invite you to a thought experiment. Let’s imagine a society wants to choose between several models of coexistence and parenting: tribal or community parenting, other models I have no idea what they might be, and family parenting. Predictions of child abuse are estimated for each model. Can we imagine that a model with a 25% prediction of abuse would be chosen? I doubt it.

Child abuse: lifelong damage

Child abuse leaves lifelong damage, I know this from my own experience. For example, complex trauma refers to early negative experiences involving neglect and/or abuse that occur within an attachment relationship with the primary care-giver. This means that the figure who is supposed to provide affection, love, and protection to the child is, at the same time, a source of anxiety, threat, neglect, and/or abuse, resulting in distressing experiences such as verbal abuse, abandonment, bullying, emotional invalidation, abandonment, and so on.

Because of their ongoing nature, such abuse generates a stress response that leaves a mark on the brain. Furthermore, these situations go unnoticed externally and are cumulative. In many ways, complex trauma is related to “non-events,” things that didn’t happen when they should have—a look, a smile, being considered, or a comforting hug. These non-events have a significant impact, although they don’t remain as memories beyond emotional sensations.

I know all this very well. It’s estimated that up to 7.7% of adults suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD or complex PTSD) and up to 20% suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. To me, these numbers seem too low. However, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t a simple binary—either you have PTSD or complex PTSD according to strict diagnostic criteria, or you’re fine. Problems with emotional regulation, forming close relationships, behaviour, trust, and a negative self-image can all be present and can cause considerable problems without meeting all the diagnostic criteria for PTSD or complex PTSD.

Complex trauma, often also called complex developmental trauma or developmental trauma, is in the vast majority of cases the result of prolonged emotional abuse and neglect in childhood and adolescence. Here we see many of the 15% of children who avoid their parents because they cause distress: survivors of sexual abuse and other forms of prolonged maltreatment.

There are also other consequences for mental and physical health: eating disorders, depression, other mental disorders, substance use and abuse, and much more. From the ACE study in the United States, we know that adverse childhood experiences have a profound impact on many areas of adult health.

Towards other models

So, we abolish the family. Okay! But what do we put in its place? Sophie Lewis says: “Nothing.” Perhaps an overly simplistic answer. 

It’s true that in the current system, the family fulfils functions for which the best answer is “nothing”. As Nuria Alabao says, “The family is not a neutral institution: it is still sustained by hierarchical relations of subordination based on gender, age, and race/migration origin. […] As an institution, the family has a central economic function; it has always been essential to the reproduction of classes in capitalism, to allocate inheritances, transmit property, or guarantee the payment of debts”. These are the functions we don’t want to replace. Enough with Sophie Lewis’s “nothing.” We don’t need a gender police force, we don’t need an institution that reproduces patriarchy and prepares children to function well under capitalism.

However, there are other functions of the family in the current system, such as parenting and caregiving, which the family performs quite poorly, as I’ve shown above, but which are nonetheless necessary. We need other models of living together, of relating, of parenting, and of organising caregiving.

Today, mainstream feminism has nothing more to offer than promoting “co-responsibility” in parenting, that is, equal participation of fathers in childrearing. Where are the more radical visions?

I don’t mean that children need their mother, father or biological parent, but they do need adults who allow them a safe and stable attachment.

According to Nuria Alabao, “In 19th-century socialism linked to the labour movement, and later in the 1970s, class-based feminism called for the socialisation of social reproduction: soup kitchens, 24-hour day-care, or innovated experiences of nurturing or support on the margins”. However, even these proposals don’t question the family itself in a deeper way. They are proposals more focused on allowing women to participate in the labour market. Ultimately, they are adult-centric proposals. And, regarding the miserable figures of children with secure attachments, I fear that these proposals could even worsen the situation for children if the nuclear family model is maintained. By this, I don’t mean that children need their biological mother, father, or parent, but they do need adults who allow them a secure and stable attachment.

In this sense, it might even be helpful to “de-centre” biological parents, to think about care and parenting in a community, a tribe, parenting models that include a network, a community of adults in the children’s lives. The African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” points in this direction. Children need more secure and stable relationships with adults, beyond their parents, a “village.”

There is some research on the perspectives of children raised in consensually non-monogamous relationships. According to Elisabeth Sheff, “The presence of more than two adults in the family provides several advantages to children, such as receiving more attention, nurturing, and time from significant adults, receiving more gifts for special occasions, and being exposed to a greater number of positive role models. It also allows them to form family bonds with other children beyond biogenetic kinship and to have more siblings”.

The parenting network does not have to be limited to the sexual and emotional bonds of the parents: I am thinking of networks of relational anarchy, networks that decentralize love and the couple.

Other recent research with children says: “Children living in polyamorous households often view their parents’ romantic partners as resource persons, which fosters the development of a positive view of these adults in the child. Many children explained their affection for their parents’ partners by highlighting how these adults cared for them and supported them, emotionally and materially. This echoes studies conducted with parents practicing NMC, who described their extra-dyadic romantic partners as supportive, loving, and understanding, not only for them but also for their children.”  Thinking further, in terms of the concept of “village” or community, the nurturing network need not be limited to the parents’ sexual affective ties. I’m thinking of networks of relational anarchy, networks that de-centre love and the couple (or couples).

This isn’t so simple. Myriam Rodríguez del Real and Javier Correa Román say in an article in El Salto: “The central issue is understanding that friendship has been emptied of material content in order to centralize the couple. Societies construct systems of kinship and affinity that determine which bonds are recognized and which are left on the margins. The heterosexual monogamous couple constitutes the center of these systems, and the rest of the relationships (including friendship) are reconfigured in response to it”.

And: “Therefore, it is not simply a matter of ‘giving more importance to friends,’ but of rejecting the current configurations of both the couple and friendship to create new relational forms. We need to ‘disorient’ (…) the normative notions of affection in order to imagine other forms of relational inhabitation. Only to the extent that we think of other forms of friendship does the couple cease to make sense as the organising centre of our lives”.

In a talk about abolishing the family in Seville two years ago, considering alternatives to the family, Nuria Alabao spoke about building relationships with a reciprocal obligation (in order to assume caregiving), and that these types of relationships take time to build. We already have this obligation in today’s family, and I seriously doubt it contributes to adequate care, neither for children nor for adults or the elderly. For me, caregiving out of obligation isn’t care, but rather a sacrifice. And, today, the vast majority of women have to make this sacrifice to care for their parents or another relative.

How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society? How do we change our perceptions so that we see ourselves as capable of trusting these networks?

Personally, I think more about making commitments—that is, I voluntarily make a commitment in a relationship (of any kind) that doesn’t require reciprocity. It’s more about trusting the network (of relational anarchy, of my community), that when I need care or support, there will be a person in the network (or several) who can take it on, and they don’t have to be the same people who previously received support from me. I feel like this is something we’re already trying to practice in my network.

Hil Malatino, in his book Trans Care  (Bellaterra, 2021) ,  offers this minimal definition of community: people who are re-weaving. And when I review my experience of the last nine years, facing my family traumas, it has been a constant re-weaving of my networks. Some people left my networks, others joined. Perhaps we should leave behind the idea of ​​a stable, lifelong mutual support network that should assume the care and support—emotional, financial, parenting, when we are sick—that today is assumed (often poorly) by the family, and instead rely on our networks, always fragile, always in reconfiguration, but capable of sustaining us when we need them? I don’t know. I’m still afraid of it myself, but, at the same time, my networks have sustained me over the past few years, and they continue to sustain me.

How do we bring our experiences of mutual support networks to the centre of society? How do we change our perceptions so that we see ourselves as capable of trusting these networks? How can we strengthen them?

I don’t have the answers. I think it’s about building by walking and experimenting. This is just a start. And, for me, building alternatives to family, new structures of mutual support and care, is a matter of survival. I’ve outlived my family, and I’ve gotten this far thanks to my networks.

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Source: Freedom Press

The post Abolishing the family: A survivor’s perspective appeared first on Void Network.

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There are three basic freedoms: freedom to say NO; freedom to move away; and freedom to change what does not work.

Individual freedom requires social support. To say NO, you need others to respect your choice and not force you to obey. To move freely, you need others to support your movement and not erect walls and roadblocks. To change what does not work, you need others who are affected to accept the change.

Basically, freedom is a social relationship, where me having my freedom depends on you having yours. A system is required to secure this social arrangement.

Systems shape us

We create systems in order to make things happen. A system has three elements: a purpose or goal; a set of rules, policies, and procedures designed to achieve the goal; and relationships that are shaped by applying the rules, policies, and procedures.

The systems we create are not separate from us; they organize us. Consider competitive sports. There is a goal (to win). There are rules of the game and penalties for violating them. And there are participants, whose behavior and relationships are shaped by the game.

The goal of the capitalist system is to extract capital from human labor. Achieving that goal requires a system with rules, penalties, and social relationships that all support the goal.

This three-part essay examines how the capitalist system robs us of all three basic freedoms; what blocks us from claiming our freedom; and how we can create a social system that supports freedom for all.

Part 1. My Body Is Not Your Capital-Producing Machine – Or Is It?

It is commonly believed that we have little control over our work lives, but that life outside of work – family and social relationships – is ours to shape.

In reality, time outside of work is largely consumed with two things: replacing the energy we put out on the job so we can work again the next day, and raising the next generation of workers to replace the current one. Production depends on this reproduction of the worker.

The tight connection between production and reproduction is difficult to see because they are organized differently. Production is organized socially, with billions of workers linked in global chains of manufacture and distribution. Reproduction is organized privately, with individuals and families expected to replenish and reproduce themselves with no outside support.

Employers benefit from privatized reproduction. They can hire workers to produce while avoiding the cost of replacing them, even though their business depends on it. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business,

Paid maternity leave is a totally ridiculous kind of demand to expect employers to pay. Those who want to have babies should pay for them.

Because production and reproduction are differently organized, it seems they exist in two different spheres: an economic sphere of work shaped by capitalism, where one has little control; and a personal sphere of friendship and family, not shaped by capitalism, where one is presumed to have total control.

In reality, work and life-outside-of-work are parts of a single capitalist system. Despite the relentless message that we make our own lives and ‘there is always a choice,’ it is impossible to have a personal life that is separate from, or exists outside of, the capitalist system. Lack of freedom on the job requires a lack of freedom outside it.

The more authorities restrict reproduction and individual behavior, the more the myth of two spheres breaks down to reveal only one sphere, capitalism, that dominates every aspect of life.

You cannot refuse, and you cannot leave

The goal of capitalist production is to produce capital. Capital is profit that is invested to extract more profit. Profit comes from paying workers less than the value of what they produce. The lower the wages, the higher the profit.

Jeff Bezos rakes in billions of dollars in profit by paying workers far less than the value of their work. He then uses this profit to purchase other businesses that enable him to exploit even more workers and make even more profit. Bezos is accumulating capital. The more capital he accumulates, the greater his power over society.

No one freely chooses to work all their life to produce capital to make others rich. The worker must be robbed of the freedom to say no, to leave, or to change the system. To maintain this social arrangement everyone, including the worker, must do their part.

Employers rely on the State to ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. As Braverman explained in Labor and Monopoly Capital,

In the most elementary sense, the State is guarantor of the conditions, the social relations, of capitalism, and the protector of the ever-more unequal distribution of property which this system brings about.

The State gives employers the legal authority to dictate the conditions of employment. Unionized workers can modify some of these conditions, but they have no legal right to challenge the nature of the work or how it is organized, to determine staffing levels, or to curb executive pay. All major work-related decisions fall under management rights. The State uses the legal system, the police, and the military to enforce those rights.

States allow employers to use, abuse, and discard workers as the cost of doing business. When hazardous working conditions cause sickness, injury, and death, the State sides with the employer. Workers’ claims for compensation are minimized or denied, fines levied against companies are too small to change anything, and no employer ever goes to jail for killing a worker.

States use legislation and monetary policy to prevent workers’ demands from cutting into profits. The legal minimum wage sets the bar so low that the average worker must go into debt to pay for basic essentials.

The only option for those who cannot work or refuse to do so is appeal to the State for support. Such support is notoriously difficult to get and kept miserably low to deter all but the most desperate. Ontario makes it easier to access euthanasia than to access social support.

States restrict travel in order to block workers from escaping to a better situation. Around the world, millions of people are incarcerated for the ‘crime’ of crossing a border in search of a better life.

Border restrictions trap workers in low-waged areas. Employers are free to move production in and out of these low-waged areas, giving them leverage to lower the pay of workers in higher-waged areas.

States use immigration controls to manage the size and composition of the workforce to benefit employers. Lower unemployment increases the pressure to raise wages, and importing more workers lowers that pressure. Denying equal rights to newcomers enables employers to underpay and overwork them, exerting a downward pressure on the pay and conditions of all workers.

All these measures ensure that, no matter how hard they labor or how much they protest, the worker is blocked from escaping their assigned role as a capital-producing machine.

What personal life?

The concept of ‘personal life’ ignores how much our lives are restricted outside work.

The modern family is a State-regulated institution. Laws dictate who can marry and who cannot, who is a family member and who is not, and how many unrelated people may live in a dwelling. Laws enforce gender norms, restrict access to contraception and abortion, and determine at what age a person may engage in adult activities.

One cannot leave a family at will. The State can forcibly return runaway youngsters to their families, place them in alternate families, or confine them in detention centers. Spouses who want to leave their marriages and parents seeking relief from childcare duties can be held financially responsible for ‘dependents.’

The State defines what it means to be a fit parent and can remove children from those it declares unfit. The State decides if families separated by national borders will be reunited or remain apart, and whether family members will be deported.

State laws compel young people to attend school, whether they want to or not, and parents are expected to enforce this law. In Jacksonville, Florida,

if a child has more than five unexcused absences [from school] in a calendar month or 15 unexcused absences in a 90-day period, parents can be arrested, charged with a misdemeanor, and face up to 60 days in jail.

Not free to be me

Organizing reproduction in family units demands distinct gender roles; men are cast as the primary producers, and women as the primary care-givers. Someone has to care for the young, sick, and infirm, and it’s typically the lower-paid woman who is paid less precisely because of her care-taking duties.

A family system based on reproducing couples allows no room for gender fluidity or for being intersex or trans. Those who do not conform to their socially assigned gender role risk punishment in the legal system or treatment in the medical system. As long as reproduction is rooted in the family, we cannot escape the pressure of binary gender roles and all the oppression they generate.

Capitalism favors standardized production, where large numbers of identical objects can be quickly produced with less labor and more profit. To produce uniform outcomes, the worker must make the same moves over and over again. This assembly-line model has been adopted in every industry, including hospitals and schools. As one principal instructed his teachers,

When I stand in the hallway, I should be able to hear all fourth grades saying the same thing. Do not deviate from the scripted program and do not fall behind in the pacing plan.

The demand for uniformity dominates every area of life. To maximize profit, the capitalist class engineer plants and animals to eliminate variation, reduce workers to the status of interchangeable cogs in a machine, and convince people of all nations to desire the same things and behave in the same ways.

Shut up and conform

Questioning makes progress possible; it invites us to examine what we are doing and why, and to consider different options. Capitalism makes questioning policies or those who make them a serious offense, even treasonous. We cannot speak freely or share vital information. The relentless persecution of whistle-blowers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Steven Donziger serves as a general warning not to question authority or hold it accountable.

A system that demands conformity cannot tolerate dissent or diversity. In the past, people who thought, felt, or behaved differently were considered interesting, odd, eccentric, colorful, or characters. Today, such people risk being labeled ‘mentally ill,’ forcibly drugged, and confined to a psychiatric institution, possibly indefinitely.

The social power of modern psychiatry cannot be explained on the basis of its scientific validity or clinical effectiveness, both of which are highly contested. Its influence comes from its usefulness to the capitalist system.

Since slavery days, the State has partnered with medicine and psychiatry to enforce conformity and obedience. Today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) catalogs unacceptable behavior in every area of life, with unacceptable behavior meaning protesting how things are, or disturbing others with your protest.

Being trapped in an oppressive social system is so painful that many people break down, lash out, use drugs, escape into fantasy, and so on. Mass misery cannot be acknowledged without bringing the entire capitalist system into question. Instead, modern medical systems practice damage control, where the sick and injured are patched up and returned to the same situations that harmed them.

Controlling fertility

States control reproduction to manage the size and composition of the workforce; minimize the cost of social support; and enforce social control. What the pregnant person wants or does not want is not considered.

To lower the birth rate, China imposed a limit of one child per family in 1980. Violators could be punished with fines, job loss, forced abortions, and loss of access to social services. As the birth rate fell, the one-child policy was replaced with a two-child policy in 2016, followed by a three-child policy in 2021.

To raise the birth rate, Nazi Germany outlawed all forms of birth control, including abortion, with stiff penalties for violators. ‘German-blooded’ women with large families were awarded the Mother’s Cross: bronze for up to five children; silver for six or seven; and gold for eight or more.

To increase the enslaved labor force in the US, Black women and girls were forcibly impregnated and compelled to bear their rapists’ children. When importing enslaved people was outlawed in 1808, forced reproduction became even more important to the slave economy.

Planters advertised for [Black women] as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogues. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen. They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to [do so].

To minimize the cost of social support and reduce the risk of rebellion, States sterilize those they consider ‘surplus’ or socially unfit, including Black, Indigenous, imprisoned, addicted, disabled, and poor people.

During the Great Depression, the International Congress of Eugenics met in New York City to discuss the mass sterilization of unemployed workers. One speaker declared,

A major portion of this vast army of unemployed are social inadequates, and in many cases mental defectives, who might have been spared the misery they are now facing if they had never been born.

The US-funded program to sterilize Puerto Rican women had two goals: to reduce the number of poor people on the island; and to promote the migration of women workers to New York, which would be easier if they had no children.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, approximately one-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was sterilized, making it highest rate of sterilization in the world.

In the US today, 31 states plus Washington, DC, legally allow the forced sterilization of people with disabilities

Forced birth

When the US Supreme Court abolished the legal right to abortion, it shattered the belief that our bodies belong to us, and that life-outside-of-work is ours to shape.

When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. By doing so, state lawmakers force their bodies into the service of state interests.

States typically prioritize the welfare of the fetus over that of the parent. Prospective parents are bombarded with advice on how to produce a healthy child and can be penalized for behaviors that risk fetal health. In the US today, a miscarriage can get you charged with manslaughter or murder. In El Salvador, a women was sentenced to 50 years in prison after a stillbirth.

Protecting the pregnant person is not a priority. There are no public warnings that pregnancy can cause severe pain, traumatic injury, hemorrhage, sepsis, sterility, disability, and death.

Women in the US are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. In Mississippi, a Black woman is 118 times as likely to die from carrying a pregnancy to term than from an abortion. The United States is the most dangerous place in the industrialized world to give birth, ranking 55th overall in the world.

Because staying pregnant is more dangerous than having an abortion, a complete abortion ban in the US would increase the number of pregnancy-related deaths by an estimated 21 percent overall, and 33 percent for Black women. These figures do not include the rise in deaths from unsafe abortions.

The Supreme Court refused to consider these matters. Justice Alito wrote,

We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision.

It seems counter-productive for capitalism to restrict abortion. Women need to control their fertility so they can work outside the home. Denying this control has a devastating impact on their earning potential, as well as disrupting industries that depend on female labor.

The capitalist class are not united on all things. For some sections, social control is the highest priority. They rightly fear that people who are free to choose in any area of life will push for freedom on the job. To prevent that, they claim the right to dictate what people can and cannot do, and use the State to impose their beliefs on society.

Authoritarian

A tiny elite can only rule a large majority by robbing them of the choice to live any other way. By definition, such rule is authoritarian.

As the gap grows between the wealthy capitalist class and the impoverished working class, the risk of rebellion rises. To maintain social control, governments all over the world are becoming more authoritarian. Two recent US examples include the Trump insurrection and the proliferation of forced-birth laws.

In Canada, a seemingly liberal government has adopted an unprecedented number of Secret Orders-in-Council that are never published and cannot be accessed by Parliament or the public. Secret decision-making enables elites to enact policies that ordinary people would reject, such as exporting billions of dollars in weaponry to the US and Saudi Arabia. A genuine democracy has no need for secret policies.

Technological advances make it easier to enforce authoritarian control. A 2011 report warned,

Within the next few years, it will be technically possible and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.

Fear of majority rebellion has spurred increased funding for police and expanded police powers.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true.

That is how afraid of us they are.

Fed Up

Having suffered through a lethal pandemic, most people are working harder and longer for less, while profits and executive pay soar. Inflation is rapidly rising, yet the modest demand that wages at least match inflation is rejected as excessive and inflationary. Corporate profiteers get no such criticism, even though fatter profits account for more than 50 percent of increased prices.

A US report found, “markups and profits skyrocketed in 2021 to their highest recorded level since the 1950s.” The average price markup was 72 percent higher than a company’s costs, pushing net profits to the highest value on record. The authors conclude,

Since markups are unusually and suddenly so high, there is room for reversing them with little economic harm and likely societal benefit, including lower prices and less inequality.

They must have missed the capitalist memo that profits are sacred and workers are expendable.

Instead of forcing corporations to lower prices or raise wages, officials are jacking up interest rates on loans and mortgages. This has the effect of undercutting wages, driving workers deeper into debt, and making it more difficult to pay for essentials, such as food, housing, and medical care.

Understandably, confidence in capitalist institutions is falling. Only 36 percent of Americans think the US system of government is sound, and only 13 percent of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in the US.

When the majority lose faith that the existing system can solve their problems, they look for alternatives. One result is a global resurgence of working-class rebellion with millions of people protesting their suffering and demanding fundamental social change.

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Written by Susan Rosenthal

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Source: https://susanrosenthal.com/capitalism/my-body-is-not-your-capital-producing-machine-or-is-it/

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In his “Cool Memories” on America, the French writer Jean Baudrillard discusses through his anectodes some of the problems that contemporary societies of mass consumption are facing: In an endless schema of frustration/gratification, is human desire kidnapped and turned into a hostage without exchange? Aren’t we sacrificing something through the model of affluent society in which we are trapped in a vicious cycle of coping up with the others? Isn’t our obsession to compare our desires with those of the others reducing the ambivalent character of it to a “natural” and “naked” state so that our only pleasure resides in the act of watching? Isn’t this commensurate spectacle leading to the impoverishment of the ambivalent character of human desire? Or better, is ambivalent symbolism itself becoming a parody through the system of signs of social standing as an only way of existing in the society? Are the orgies, feasts, potlatches, in short, ecstatic states of mind where the people could forget their self consciousness and transgress the limits of reason in order to be a part of the other, becoming a simple pornography, a simulacrum, a hyperreality, a reality more real than real? Are our irrational passions continously captured and programmed into a hyperrational order? Are we living in a permanent state of surveilled dream?

The first aim of this presentation is to try to investigate the philosophical origins of our obssession to “discover” the human desire and to “colonize” it by turning it into “needs” and “wants”. Secondly, I will try to discuss how these “discoveries” and their utilization in their attempt to “educate” people are implicated in the modern societies. Last but not least, I will try to question the “success” of these implications in the process of disciplining the behavior of the consumer and shape the discipline of “consumer behavior”. Can we get a “well behaving” function of consumer behavior and does the consumer behave “well” as presupposed by the consumer researchers and mass-media?

PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS OF SUBJUGATED DESIRE

The colonization of passion by reason finds its philosophical origins in Socrates and Plato. Pre-Socratic mythological thought is a game of passions, emotions, imaginations, as well as a system of measured reason. Aesthetics and Ethics are not universalized in mythological Pantheon: each of the Gods and demi-Gods represent a part of the excellence and the weakness of human existence trying to find its way through the misty aura of the cosmos. Mythology is a magical dramatization of everyday events, it represents the imaginative appeal of instantenous, miraculous and capricious rythm and harmony of the cosmos (Beckman 1979; Richard 1982).

According to Socrates and his succesors, virtue is obedience to reason considered as the right use of the mind. Passion distorts reasoning; it is evil. The mind free from passions is a citadel- a refuge for men who desire. Desire must be subjected to reason:

“Wipe out imagination; check desire; extinguish appetite; keep the ruling faculty in its own power” (Marcus Aurelius in Dawson 1924, pp: 86)

Good man puts himself under the control of intellectual reasoning. The source of all the evil is ignorance. Whoever commits error in the choice of pleasure and pain -that is, good and evil- commits it through the lack of knowledge; knowledge of what eternally exists: science. Science is the basic of ethics because it searches for the divine order of what really exists. The opinions are immoral because they deal with the changing facts, appearances. Facts are not true in themselves, they must be refered to the harmony, which is the mathesis, the order of orders. We can reach scientific knowledge by the education of desire; by the subjugation of desire to the disinterested,and sublimated knowledge in search of eternal truth (Cristaudo 1991).

The real object of science is knowing the necessities which are indexed in the universal order. Logical intelligence is the faculty of thinking the necessities in terms of universal harmony. It is the guide which illuminates our everyday life distorted by passions. The right and duty of the citizens is to know the necessities of every day life, production and consumption, that is, the universal law and order of existence. And one should always keep in mind the “real” necessities during the consumption act (Ostenfeld 1987, Dawson 1924):

“In things that concern the body accept only so far as the bare need -as in food, drink, clothing, habitation, servants (!). But all that makes for glory or luxury thou must utterly proscribe” (Socrates, Encheiridon xxxiii, in Dawson 1924, pp: 64)

In his famous trial, Socrates was accused, by Alcibiades, of being hypocrite by means of an excellent mastering of words in order to justify his passions. Maybe he was right when we consider Socrates’ interest in “servants” as a bare need !

Passing through canonical monotheistic religions, subjugation of passion to reason finds its ultimate expression in Cartesian thought. According to Descartes, nature is a pre-set divine order and god gave us the reason as an instrument of understanding it for the general interest of the mankind. Freedom is the understanding of the divine order of things; the will must follow this order. The more one is inclined toward natural order, the more free he is (Cristaudo 1991).

Nevertheless, man is not only a rationally thinking being; he is an animal machine who lives without the permission of thought. Our passions are generated not from our opinions but from the involuntary movements of human body. They are not good or bad in themselves, but a part of human nature. Hence, desire must be recognized as need in order to be under the control of the reason to promote the general welfare of the mankind.

Another tendency of modern rationalism is represented by Friedrich Hegel (Grumley 1989). According to Hegel, nature itself is a self-realizing consciousness. It is a moment in the accomplishment of the absolute reason- Spirit. In this sense, consciousness of the individual can not realize itself through the knowledge of existing natural facts which themselves are the alienated singular moments of Universal Spirit. Freedom is not only knowing the necessities but also changing them toward the self-realization of the finality of the History.

Hegel (Richard 1980) considers desire as the motivation for passion; the opposite of Spirit. Passion is the particular, multiple, it does not envisage the unity but diversity. Desire ties the man to his body by detouring him from the search of absolute knowledge which should be his real aim. Desire opposes the will to realize the universal reason because it is determined by particular needs. Passion is a “pathos”, a sufferance which turns life into destiny instead of driving the subject to the quest of freedom.

THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RATIONAL MODERNITY

The extension of these two tendencies of modernity in terms of social and economic explanations of human behavior manifests itself in utilitarian (Cartesian) and Marxist (Hegelian) theories. For the first one, human being is a rational being with unlimited needs and wants who has to act in an environment determined by scarce resources. Although needs and wants are unlimited, they are not ambivalent: they are commensurate according to the different levels of utility gained from their satisfaction.

Thus, freedom is full information of what is available; at what cost; and the ability to compare different levels of utility which would be obtained from the satisfaction of wants. Individual has a preference, he knows what he wants; he is capable of consistently ordering his wants from most prefered to less preferred; and he will choose from within this ordering in such a way to maximize his satisfaction (Bohm-Bawerk 1949, McKenzie 1976).

Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1964) extends the utilitarian theory to a social system basis. According to Parsons, the motivation for human behavior is not the pure self-interest. Economic rationality is not a psychological generalization but a value system appropriate to the social system. The goal of the economy is not simply the production of income of an aggregate of individuals. Besides, the reproduction of the social system as a complex whole of institutionalized value patterns is the essential mechanism of the social system. The first functional imperative of the social system is to maintain the integrity of that value system and its institutionalization. In this sense, households, universities, units of government, churches etc., are in the economy (Parsons 1956).

Freud introduces a new dimension to the concept of desire as a motivating force of human activities: the satisfaction of primary needs such as food, shelter, clothing, etc., is more or less immediate. Desire realizes itself and consumes its realization spontaneously. Nevertheless, this is not true for sexual instinct (libido). Desire stays latent in the unconscious because of the repression of the immediate consumption. This causes a state of frustration and the missing object of desire is replaced by symbolic objects. Desire, which is sexual in nature, transforms itself into a need for these objects. The “pleasure principle” replaces itself with the reality principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, frustrating pleasure for delayed, restrained but “assured” pleasure (Marcuse 1966, Freud 1970).

The discourse on consumption shifts its axis from the principle of “lack” to the principle of “abundance” during the post-second world war period: The organization of the society becomes so complex that the “homo economicus” can no more decide on what is “good” and what is “bad” without the help of educators. This is a dangerous affair however: who would decide about the “realness”, “essentiality” of the needs which the consumer is not aware of? There comes our old friend “science” who is accustommed to operate always together with the morality since Socrates. It seems that science and morality are not satisfied by the colonization of the nature outside the “human subject”, now they are here for the discovery of what is inside the man. Motivation research was their first galley in their conquest of the dark waters of the non-rational and they are finding more and more complex vehicles. “Conquistodares” continue to colonize the world and their missionary is the mass media.

Of course some old fashioned moralists did not wait to criticize this situation: the motivational analyst and symbol manipulator pooling their talents and millions of dollars at their disposal, were making a fascinating and at times disturbing team. They were shaping the minds by using the occult influences (Packard 1957).

Ernest Dichter comforts: there is nothing to be afraid of. Motivation research is only in the quest of human behavior. Human desire is the raw material it is working with. Human progress is a conquest of the animal within us. The strategy of human desire is the tool of shaping the human factor. No conquest is possible without strategy !

Human behavior can not be explained merely by the rational, conscious acts. Our daily decisions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we are often quite unaware. Modern communication makes the use of emotional appeals in addition to rational ones in order to sway people. Very few products have purely utilitarian aspects. Motivation research only helps us to achieve a number of deeper psychological goals. Why should we try to repress them? What we need is a new freedom – the freedom to think in new channels. Motivational research is the application of social science techniques to the problems of human motivation (Dichter 1960).

The Hegelian extension of modernity as a socio-economic system manifests itself in Marxism. According to Marxism, classical and neo-classical economic theories reflect an alienated reality. The concepts of utility and exchange value which are taken for granted by these economists are in fact historically determined and socio-economic processes. The scientific method can not restrict itself only to the understanding of the immediate reality but has to operate in order to change it towards the laws of motion of the history.

According to Marxists (Mandel 1969), man is estranged to nature through his act of production. In primitive societies where the division of labor is not developed, men produce use values for their immediate satisfaction. Nevertheless, with the development of division of labor, men begin to produce commodities for exchange. Exchange value becomes a mediator between man and man whereas use value is the mediator between man and nature. This process of objectification turns into a process of alienation; man becomes alienated to the product of his labor.

Total alienation occurs with the generalized commodity production, where the private property of means of production deprives the laborer from his direct labor act. Concrete labor becomes subjugated to the exchange value, the abstract quantity of social labor. This subjugation implies the commodification of labor as labor power. Alienated labor becomes the only mediator for social exchange. Society loses the control of social relations created by itself. Commodity fetishism occults the market relations as a product of human activities and makes people believe that the laws of market are natural laws. During this process of production for pure exchange, the capitalist speculates on creating a new need in another so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place new independence:

“Subjectively, the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and overcalculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites”.(Marx cited in Mandel 1973 pp: 36)

The only possibility of overcoming this distorted reality is the action of historical subject armed with critique.

Criticism has its origins in Post-Socratic philosophy as its cousin positivism. It is the art of explaining the phenomena which are “veiled” by images, appearances. Considered as one of the essential activities of reason, critique opens the way for the rational subject through all spheres of life to make them accessible. In monotheistic religions, it is a way of interpreting the “signs” in order to justify the supremacy of the “word”, “scripture”, “the holy book”.

In this context, critique is the instrument of reason to reflect on the “objectivity” of the objects of experience. On the other hand, dialectical critique distinguishes itself from the metaphysical critique in the sense that it aims to change the conditions of what is considered to be false or distorted consciousness. It claims to render transparent what had been previously hidden in order to initiate a process of self-reflection to achieve a liberation from the dominations of past constraints.

In its vulgar forms, marxist critique observes the liberation from the alienation in ex-socialist countries (alas !). In these countries working class is not alienated to its labor because the private property of the means of production is abolished. Socialist state takes care of the “essential needs” (i.e. use value) and socialist man does not have “inhuman”, “sophisticated”, “unnatural”, and “imaginary” appetites. Working individual in socialist countries is not alienated to his products; he constructs socialism through his production act: he is a “labor hero”, a new man, who realizes his “unalienated desire” in making of history. Each magnificient dam built, each sputnik sent to space, each olympic medal won by an athlete belongs to the victory of the socialism in which each individual is involved as an organic member.

More subtle approaches of critical theory are represented by the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer claim the replacement of practical reason by instrumental reason as a result of the developments in culture industry. The alienation caused by the commodity fetishism infiltrates into the consciousness of the working class through the commodification of culture by the leisure market. Since then the self realization of working class through its “praxis”, its practice of labor to transform the world becomes a part of instrumental reason. Although the classes exist, there is no more possibility for class consciousness for working class. Public invades private, private invades public. It becomes difficult to make a distinction between the external suggestion and internal desire. The main principle of domination becomes manipulation of desire instead of repression. Hence, instrumental reason forms an impersonal system which becomes independent from all the members of the society, including those in the ruling positions. Either bourgeoisie or working class lose their position as subjects but turn into objects dominated by the technical rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer try to recover rational subject by means of a “negative dialectics”, a criticism of commodified objects according to a sublimated art (Bottomore 1984).

Even in this subtle approach of Adorno and Horkheimer, reason as the realization of the universal ideals continues to colonize everyday life. Furthermore, they seem to share the same ideals with the “consumer researchers”, in the sense of “educating” and “informing” people about their “true needs”. They form a harmonious couple after all, where human boredom needs exigently self-cannibalizing novelties: critique and interpretation revolutionizes, consumer research rationalizes.

TOWARD A PROGRAMMED SOCIETY?

One of the first resistances to the reason oriented universalist modernity comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche accuses Socrates of reducing philosophy to a discourse which tries to regulate passion for will to live into a unique, universal reality. Philosophy becomes serious , logical, clear and demonstrative with Socrates. Reason analyzes, dissects, systematizes, makes rigid what is hidden in deep. Nevertheless, interior life of man is an act of ambivalent passion rather than being an act of cold objective rationality. Desire is rooted in the life which gives us the will to live. It is the passion to exist. In this sense, it is not possible to rigidize it into the tracks of rationality. To live in harmony with cosmos does not mean to follow the tracks of an assumed universe but to feel the rythmes and pulses of the life. Thus, desire opposes knowledge when it does not accord with life. Desire is pathetique; in the sense of both suffering and sharing. It is the aspiration to deepen the life in our singularity and to be in accord with the flow of the cosmos (Deleuze 1983, Richard 1980).

Georges Bataille (Bataille 1985) pushes further Nietzsche’s arguments. Bataille claims that rationalistic realism invades all domains of life with the development of modernity. Endless quest of reson to appropriate external forms into an organized system of words causes the impoverishment of human imagination: words order,but images evoke symbols. What strikes human eyes determines not only the knowledge of relations between various objects, but also a given and decisive state of mind. Therefore, it is not the rational signification of the symbols which make them important for human existence, but their irrational ambivalence.

Following this reasoning, Bataille points out that the rationalization of the human desire as necessities and regulating it in terms of a rational utility frame would be repressing it in order to maintain a certain order which is hypocritical and unjust. How can material utility be the main task of life, Bataille asks, since it is limited to the reproduction and conservation of whatever exists? Man is not only a calculating machine whose goal is to realize benefits, but also an emotional being which realizes itself in the symbolic sacrifice. Sacrifice is a mythical delirium from all selfish calculation and reserve. It signifies an ecstatic exit from the self, a desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion. Sacrificial consumption is the elementary form of orgy, which has no other goal than the incorporation of irreducibly heterogenous elements (Bataille 1985).

Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1970; 1983; 1990) develops similar arguments concerning symbolic exchange. In today’s consumption societies symbolic exchange becomes a parody under system of signs of social standing. What we consume in consumption societies is the meaning of the signs. The signs transmitted by the mass media do not signify a meaning in themselves, but mobilize the collective imaginary to give them a signification. When everybody agrees on the meaning of the sign then it is consumed (consumated). Mass media is an infinite generator of signs without signification. Thus, the main principle of consumer society becomes non- difference through difference, normality through competition.

Mass psychology provokes the people to have what others do not have, but since everybody is doing the same thing, there begins a competition for the “ultimate model”. When everybody has it then it is no more “ultimate” but “obsolete”. Contrary to the puritan rationalism where the “model” is more or less stable, today’s hyperrationalism has to consume its “model” in order to maintain its operation. Planned motivation takes the place of moral responsibility and extends the puritan morality to a hedonistic morality of self-fulfilment. The feeling of guilt after transgression replaces itself with the rationalization: in order to be normal, you have to change- you have to cope with others.

Language of the consumption society is the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. This empty space is filled by the consumer researchers who always find and operationalize new motivations to replace the obsolete ones. There is no more fixed “human nature” or a referent for marketing. Unlike the modern establishment, there is no more a discourse of reality which serves as a fixed referent in the post- modernity; it is replaced by its simulacra. Social sciences invent new realities when the old ones are obsolete and diffuse them through mass- media: the invented reality becomes real through simulation; a reality more real than real; a hyperreality. In the simulative church where the researchers are the priests and the “deep motives” diffused by the media are the preachings, the masses depend on the mood of the consumer: they do not repress, they do not manipulate, but simply seduce the desire in order to turn it into new tracks of sign.

Thus, the system of consumption society does not reproduce itself according to total order and to the principle of production. Programmed chaos and “catastrophe” becomes the main principle of the system: the system must destroy its order in order to maintain the order. The main principle of this system cannot be power, because power produces the real, it perceives itself as real, immortal, eternal (with the aid of the theories which analyze it, even to criticize it.) Seduction is stronger than power: because it does not need a fixed reference; it is a reversible and mortal process.

Every body is not as pessimist as Baudrillard. According to Michel de Certeau (de Certeau 1984), most of the analyses of the consumer culture are concerned with the representations produced by an ordered system on the one hand, and the modes of consumer behavior adapting to these representations on the other hand. However, these analyses do not take into account what cultural consumer “makes” or “does” during this process of consumption and with the images represented to him/her.

Although de Certeau agrees with the theories of colonization of every aspect of life by systems of production, he goes further and observes a silent, non-violent resistance which survives in the domain of consumption. As the indigenous indians of South America under Spanish colonizers, who did not resist Christian missionaries but simply adopted the signs of Christianity and subverted them according to their own culture, today’s consumers use and transform the meanings of the “products” which are imposed to them. The preachers, educators, popularizers of production may present and diffuse the “technologies” of “how to use” the signs- that is all they can do. They can not control the users since they do not resist and seem to accept these rules. They can act as engineers of the social mind, but this does not necessarily mean that they can fragment and construct it. The masses follow a different way of thinking which is too fugitive and ambivalent to be shaped by the strategies of the managers of the mind (de Certeau 1984).

Michel Maffesoli observes the renaissance of the mythological ecology in the post-modern object. Post-modern ethos does not constitute itself according to a historical project, but in a reappropriated nature, within a shared space, collective participation to the world of objects. We are witnessing a naturalization of culture and culturization of nature through post-modernity. Objects invade spirituality and spirituality invades the world of objects. Our megalopoles become jungles where different objects flow imprevisibly. Post-modern object becomes the “fetish”, the “totem” where social body remembers itself. The invasion of the natural and social by the “reified” objects makes any attempt of a planned control by a manipulating subject very difficult. We begin to live in an aura weaved by mystical objects. The world of objects is no more mastered by anybody; post-modern object revenges by returning to ambivalent symbolism. It reenchants the world disenchanted by modernity.

Hence, Maffesoli does not observe a programmed system of objects in commodity fetishism. The order of post-modern object is rather like a kaleidescope which is a programmed uncertainty. It is a diffraction to the infinity. The nature of the post-modern object is not evolutionary, objects revolt against their programmed finality (either in the form of invisible hand or history); they re-evolutionize (in the sense of revolving) their order in order to subvert it. In each order, the “system of objects” has a different logic. It is a nature in a state of permanent creation through its degeneration, instead of an evolutionary nature where the strongest survives.

The masses do not converge toward a “standard package” through consumption but they diverge toward multiplicity. This gives rise to a more complex society which is fragmented and disseminated with a multiplicity of contradictory values instead of homogeneous and linear order of modernity. Post-modernity, like the Baroque, degenerates and regenerates different styles harmoniously through small details (Maffesoli 1990, 1988).

Gilles Lipovetsky (Lipovetsky 1987) criticizes the critiques of consumption society and mass culture and concludes that fashion is not a form of “soft neo-totalitarianism”, “repressive tolerance” but on the contrary, the expansion of the public questioning, autonomization of public thought and the agent of individualist dynamic in its divers manifestations. In this sense, fashion is the ultimate phase in today’s democratical societies. Lipovetsky also observes a “ruse of reason”, a popular wisdom in the crazy orgy of mass culture: collective reason advances by the help of its opposite, the irrational heteronomy of the seduction. As in the rational city of the antiquity whose rationality was formed by a network of egoist passions, autonomous subjectivities develop themselves through seduction and ephemere, critical, realist consciousness develops itself through frivolousness in today’s consumption societies.

Hence, with its ambivalent structure, today’s individual constitutes and reconstitutes itself in the unordered order of generalized fashion. On the other hand, this unordered does not represent an ideal system, a best of the worlds but a possibility toward a more free, better informed society. Generalized fashion lives in paradoxes: its consciousness favors unconsciousness, its craziness the spirit of tolerance, its mimetism individuality, and its frivolity the respect of human rights.

CONCLUSION

We are living an explosion of the universalist reason and post-modern consumer does not behave totally reasonably. He/she lives in an emotional aura where the borders between the real and imaginary are blurred; maybe in a hyperreality where the ordered reality is replaced by its simulacra. The closed systems of thought which refer to economics, sexuality, politics etc., as the content of reality deconstruct themselves. The referentials come and go like comets in the sky making a general theory of consumer behavior ridiculous. Not only does the consumer behave according to the caprices of fashion; but also its “science”. They interactively transform each other towards new fashions in a reversible, baroque cycle of seduction. In the 1950s consumer was “homo economicus; in the 60s he was “homo sexualis”; in the 70s he was “homo politicus”; in the 80s he was “Rambo”- “homo survivalis” with a manager’s suit at the top and naked as a savage at the bottom- with an American Indian mother and a German father. In the 90s there is no reason for not to presuppose that he is becoming a “homo ecologicus”. However, these cycles are not “trends”. They do not assume a linear development which exclude one another. Rather, each cycle collapses onto and into the other squeezing the other layers to form colorful pieces of quartz.

Last but not least I would like to comment on our position as a social scientist, citizen and consumer in this changing world.Post-modernity gives an end to the the dichotomy of order and chaos. We are living in a jungle where order of chaos generates its colorfulness and its peril. It may turn into a joyful spectacle where different species enjoy to share the same ecosystem or a carnage where the stronger cannibalizes the other. Although we have renounced all “grand responsibilities” implied by a rational puritan morality; we need to develop “little respons-abilities”, (ability to respond), responsibilities of cohabitation in everyday life depending on ethics of existence, a manner of being which would turn post-modern life into communion rather than cannibalism. Since we are con-damned to live in this jungle; since “we may have come with different boats or canoes, but today we are in the same boat” (Martin Luther King), we have to learn live together.. (After all ?) Hence, what are you doing after the orgy?

REFERENCES

Adorno Theodore (1973), The Jargon of Authenticity, Evanson: Northwestern University Press.

Bataille Georges (1985), Visions of Excess, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Baudrillard Jean (1970), La Societe de Consommation, Paris: S.G.P.P.

Baudrillard Jean (1990), Seduction, Montreal: New World Perspectives.

Baudrillard Jean (1983), Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e).

Beckman James (1979), The Religious Dimension of Socrates’ Thought, Ontario: Wilfred Carrier University Press.

Bottomore Tom (1984), The Frankfurt School, London: Tavistock.

Cristaudo Wayne (1991), The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom, Aveburry: Aldershot.

Dawson Miles Menaender (1924), The Ethics of Socrates, New York: Putnam.

De Certeau Michel (1984), Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze Gilles (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Athlone Press.

Dichter Ernest (1960), Strategy of Desire, New York: Doubleday and CompanyInc.

Freud Sigmund (1961), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: Norton.

Grumley John E. (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, London: Routledge.

Lipovetsky Gilles (1987), L’Empire de L’Ephemere, Paris: Gallimard.

Maffesoli Michel (1988), Le Temps des Tribus, Paris: Meridien.

Maffesoli Michel (1990), Aux Creux des Appairances, Paris: Plon.

Mandel Ernest (1969), Marxist Economic Theory, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mandel Ernest (1973), The Marxist Theory of Alienation, New York: Pathfinder.

Marcuse Herbert (1966), Eros and Civilization, Boston: Beacon.

Ostenfeld Erik (1987), Ancient Greek Psychology and Modern Mind-Body Debate, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Packard Vance (1957), The Hidden Persuaders, New york: D. McKay Co.

Parsons Talcott; Smelser Neil (1956), Economy and Society, Glencoe: Free Press.

Parsons Talcott (1964), Social Structure and Evolution of Action Theory, Glencoe: Free Press.

Richard Michel (1980), Besoin et Desir en Societe de Consommation, Lyon: Chronique Social.

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source: http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7298

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Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite  (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

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daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of `occupation’: all belong to another historical world (p15).

invisibility. In the global North at least, capitalism proposes itself as the only possible reality, and therefore it seldom `appears’ as such at all. Atilio Boron argues that capitalism has been shifted to a `discreet position behind the political scene, rendered invisible as the structural foundation of contemporary society’, and cites Bertolt Brecht’s observation that `capitalism is a gentleman who doesn’t like to be called by his name’.³

 The depressing realism of New Labour

For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we [have] postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our economy … We’ve been living on borrowed time … The cosy world we were told would go on forever, where full employment could be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor’s pen – that cosy world is gone …

We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected … The very blood in our veins had been replaced.⁶

The stresses of post-Fordism

One of the more pervasive phenomena in the current cod-neoliberal academic dispensation is CV inflation: as available jobs dwindle down to Kafkian levels of postponement and implausibility, the miserable Träger of academic capital are obliged not just to overfulfil the plan, but to record … every single one of their productive acts. The only sins are sins of omission … In this sense, the passage from … periodic and measured measurement … to permanent and ubiquitous measurement cannot but result in a kind of Stakhanovism of immaterial labour, which like its Stalinist forebear exceeds all rationales of instrumentality, and cannot but generate a permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety (since there is no standard, no amount of work will ever make you safe).⁷

The acceleration of information exchange … is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to consciously process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious (p40).

They cannot take a vacation without bringing the office with them; their office is on their cellphone. They complain that their employers rely on them to be continually online but then admit that their devotion to their communications devices exceeds all professional expectations.¹¹

Public renewal or private cure?

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Human resources: Social engineering in the 20th century

Documentary film exploring the rise of mechanistic philosphy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarhical systems. Topics covered include behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation.

Genres

Documentary

Crew

Director

Scott Noble

Actors

• Howard Zinn

• Noam Chomsky
• Christopher Simpson 
• George Ritzer 
• Morris Berman 
• Rebecca Lemov 
• John Taylor Gatto 
• Alfie Kohn 

Blogger Evan Long wrote about the film : Metanoia’s “Human Resources,” a follow-up to “Psywar,” concerns those social systems currently in effect which tend to induce a transformation in the free-born, natural human beings who enter them into spiritually broken worker-consumer drones and the behaviorist psychological theories which contributed directly to their development. (Contrary to widespread misconception, the corporate jargon term in question, “human resources,” does not refer to “resources for humans” but rather, “those resources which are human.”) As the gears of this terrible machine turn, a certain type of “progress” is made, one which leads directly toward the total enslavement of mankind. “Human Resources” is a fairly direct confrontation of the non-recognition of the intrinsic value of life which lies at the heart of psychopathy. 

 For more info about Metanoia creative film collective: http://metanoia-films.org/index.php

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