: the Western working class does have its automobiles, TV, fast food, clothing, etc., and these acquisitions---as time has shown---petition a great deal of loyalty to current power relations.:Thats because they want them. Why they do is irrelavent to the immediate truth of that.
----
No...it is not irrelevant. You, who are so preoccupied with forms of coercian and manipulation of "choice" should realize this. Our 'advanced' capitalist system has been the 'natural' result of
monopoly tendencies and the cut-throat competition for market share. What is being manipulated is Desire. Every advanced technique offered by behavioral psychology, anthropology, social and motivational research is being used in this endeavor. Even the techniques offered by Spier and the Nazis are being used - as well as techniques of persuasion employed by the CIA. Many, if not most, incorporate cues that are of unconscious origin (the way we tend to turn right when entering a store, use of particular colors, sexual suggestion, the use of particular forms of music to increase or decrease agitation...and on and on. Even the use of the "quiet sell", the "rational sell" is but one more technique in the vast arsenal of the art of persuasion.
At this point it is customary for the defenders of 'free' market economics to cry out: "But it's Free Choice! The trouble with you socialists is that you deny the freedom of the individual by restricting his/her free choice!"
Nonsense. It is the capitalist system that restricts rational 'free' choice. It is designed to do just that. The last thing a company wants is choice if it means buying from a competitor. But that's just the market place. What about some other choices. What about a sustainable environment? Should that be a choice? What about guaranteed employment? What about guaranteed health care, housing, and education? Is that a choice? Of course not. Why? Well partly for the same reason that the next presidential candidate for the Republican Party (and thus possibly of the U.S.) will be G. W. Bush. Is this the result of rational choice? Yes - if you are one of the manipulators of choice.
