Marx felt that the petit bourgeois - the small shopkeepers, that is to say - were the only empowered class that would help the workers come the revolution. "When it is time to take to the streets," he said, "they will be the ones to provide the guns."
Guns are no tool for social change. But new ideas about new modes of autonomous production could collapse the entire class pyramid. can best be achieved not through violence, but by creating a model of production and social organization that doesn't destroy individuals but rather builds them up. Such an upgrade of current modes of production and social organization would give individuals the choice to deprive their labor and their dollars from the old system.
It is ONLY when people are able to deprive their labor from the System that they're free to deploy it in the service of their OWN ends. It's sometimes amazing to me the consistency with which brilliant stuff comes out of the underground, but that's why the underground EXISTS - to provide the "guns" of radical culture and ideas to those who must reshape our society.
I understand that the whole concept of "the System" might sound trite to jaded ears, but it’s still the most potent metaphor to explain the increasingly coordinated attack on the power of the individual in our country. And the best way to explain the power of the individual, in my opinion, is to BE an individual.
The system makes the ASSUMPTION that you were born in order to serve it in some capacity. Lulled to sleep by the superficial freedoms to consume and be entertained, we forget that we are free by token of our ACTIONS, not merely our thoughts. The brand names of the world eat our communities alive. Our market increasingly resembles a finely tuned machine, operated in the interests of a dangerously small group of people. And those who refuse to serve that machine are often taken out of service like defective robots.
So many media images are hitting us left and right that it’s a wonder we bother to have original thoughts at all. It’s so easy to create; why do we inevitably let other people do our creating FOR us? Is creativity something that you should outsource?
There is something awesome in these huge, culturally transmitted systems of belief. One day we realize that we are completely possessed and dominated by a set of beliefs that we, as individuals, never chose.
Many of our "goals", the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our REAL desires hide, mere symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose - something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical - a house, a car, a better job, or a human being - but it doesn't work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the SACRED. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.
That's why the System was invented. The System exists to REDUCE the complexity of reality so that it becomes PREDICTABLE; it creates the EASY ANSWERS that are adopted by those who want to guarantee their survival, and it creates the CHAOS that awaits anyone who would spurn these answers for a more original path.
The "separate self" created to be a good productive employee is a sin against the whole human. To our bosses, we're just tools to be used for the pursuit of more profits. We're no more than automatons there to keep their factories and offices pumping out products and services. We are tools to be used up and thrown out when we're out of date. The same goes for the way we're sold our products. To the makers of hamburgers and cigarettes and soft drinks, we are just a bunch of mouths and wallets, easily manipulated with advertising and "meal deals" that tempt us to placate our hunger with fat, salt and starch.
The institutions of society are designed to pacify people, to make them feel like their needs are taken care of, to create the illusion of a society that's "under control". Think of the way a real machine is assembled. Combinations of gears and other assorted mechanisms combine forces to produce a desired effect. Those who dictate what effect the societal machine produces are considered to hold power in that society. In the capitalist soceity, naturally the effects of the machine are dictated by capitalists. In a communist society, those needs are dictated by the intellectual elite. Regardless of who holds the reigns of power in any given society, one fact remains common with nearly every society in the world. A small portion of the population uses the machine to weild power over the masses.
Cultural choices are replacing political choices. People spend so much time differentiating themselves culturally that political apathy is inevitable. Political consciousness is a matter of studying, evaluating, planning and acting; it is difficult, often tedious work, especially when compared to the glittering world of cultural differentiation. Political consciousness is a function of time spent being political; as cultural differentiation has become America’s preoccupation, small wonder that our kids find politics (which has no "marketing department") dull, irrelevant and dispensable.
Variety as a value has doomed our planet and confused us individually. Capitalism’s great claim towards progress is based on the diversity of goods and services of which we consumers can avail ourselves. But all these choices reinforce homogeneity rather than diversity; the point is that you can’t really play without MONEY, and therefore it all acts as a reaffirmation of money as the only "good" that’s recognized by the majority of society (as opposed to, say, generosity or free time).
Economic existentialism is the inevitable result. The messages of marketing are a cacophony of representation for different goods and services, but the MESSAGE of marketing is nothing more than economic existentialism. All marketing messages have at their root persuasion (some would say "manipulation")~ and this persuasion, no matter WHAT the ad, is why people have relinquished their own decisioninaking ability. Endless suggestions are beamed at us, over TV and the subway, and while these suggestions may not succeed in making us buy the product advertised, we do buy the overall message - that we can BUY our way out of any situation that doesn’t please us.
Misdirection is endemic to the American condition. Our churches preach about rebuking Satan rather than "judging not"; our law-makers bore us to tears in order to distract us from the real mechanics of political power. It should come as no surprise that our economy should also be based on smoke and mirrors.