> > Because Western culture demands the maintenance of identrity to fuel
>desire to fuel consumption to keep capitalism going.
>
>
>I don't like this formulation. Widespread print literacy, which happened to
>take hold in Europe first, lead to both democracy and increased
>psychological individuation. Both of these latter things are indispensable
>treasures, two of the greatest achievements in human history.
>
>Capitalism did not invent identity. It exploits and distorts identity, via
>marketing. If we want to be taken seriously by lots of people, we must stop
>being so damned imprecise and hyperbolic in this area, IMHO.
Thank you.
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396:
>6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the
>wage-earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and
>civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually
>completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both
>quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid
>holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and
>qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent
>to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content
>by capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is
>a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any
>rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond
>justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization
>of consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of
>needs and consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism
>to a critique of civilization), turns back the clock from scientific
>to utopian socialism and from historical materialism to idealism.
>Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of
>capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material
>basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from the
>Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving
>towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits
>of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements
>for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided
>in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also
>therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development
>of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form
>has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the
>place of the natural one.'
>
>For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
>therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation
>of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of
>these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
>individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist
>sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean:
>rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which
>continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and
>one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship
>between the production of goods and human labour, which is
>determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that
>henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum
>production of things and the maximum private profit for each
>individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum
>self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must
>be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms
>of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural
>environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same
>time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with
>material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich
>individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial
>self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his
>consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e.,
>democratically) subordinated to his collective interests.
>
>Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system
>of needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in
>some circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The
>exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things
>of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new
>qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the
>natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery,
>creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself;
>the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being,
>production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs,
>because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being
>as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in
>order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable
>of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a
>condition of production founded on capital....