- Capitalism and Alternatives -

No, really...

In Reply to: For the non mass media try.... posted by Gee on August 23, 1999 at 12:28:22:

: :

Against the will of its leaders, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this kind took place at the expense of the individuality in whose name it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve to pursue one's own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both with enthusiasm and abuse; or a modern city-dweller who can now only imagine friendship as a "social contact"; that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact. The only reason why the culture industry can deal so successfully with individuality is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society.

: : -Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

: A miserable opinion of their own lives more than anyone elses.

SDF: No, actually Horkheimer and Adorno are offering us their poetic version of the fragmentation of personality described in Gyorgy Lukacs' HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS. Before the world of capitalist competition, everyone is quite alone because human relations become another form of commodities bargaining, and friends are an expense to be minimized in order to cut overhead. Thus the individual is lessened by capitalist existence.

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