Subsume on the periphery capitalism marcuse

The very concept of вЂњcountercultureвЂќ as an ideal and a practice has been challenged and contested repeatedly over the past fifty or so years, both inside and outside of the academy. Far from being unambiguously aligned with a mode of resistance then (as seemingly inferred by the quote above), the imperative for change would appear to be a basic constituent of that which the latter seeks to undermine. (ix)Д«ut it is not just radical activists and ancient philosophers who celebrate the constancy of change on the contrary, it is a basic principle of post-industrial capitalism, a system which relies upon the constant extraction of surplus value-this being the very basis of the accumulation of capital-through an ever-accelerating creation of new markets and new desires fostered via a perpetual cycle of technical obsolescence and social destabilisation. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear.

Ounterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. Their opposition was revolutionary even if their consciousness was not.In one of his final pieces of writing, Timothy Leary-one of the most singularly iconic and influential figures of the 1960s counterculture, known especially for his advocacy of a вЂњmolecular revolutionвЂќ premised upon hallucinogenic self-medication-proposes that These were the people whose standards of living demanded the ending of intolerable conditions and institutions and whose resistance to one-dimensional society would not be diverted by the system. As a result, rather than looking to the workers as the revolutionary vanguard, Marcuse put his faith in an alliance between radical intellectuals and those groups not yet integrated into one- dimensional society, the socially marginalized, the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other race and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable. The working class was no longer a potentially subversive force capable of bringing about revolutionary change. Its political parties and trade unions had become thoroughly bureaucratized and the power of negative thinking or critical reflection had rapidly declined. Most important of all, the pressure of consumerism had led to the total integration of the working class into the capitalism system. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society as changed and social control is anchored in the new needs which it as produced.

Modern Capitalism had created false needs and false consciousness geared to consumption of commodities: it locked one-dimensional man into the one-dimensional society which produced the need for people to recognize themselves in their commodities and find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. In societies based upon mass production and mass distribution, the individual worker had become merely a consumer of its commodities and entire commodity way of life. Affluent mass technological societies, it argued, were totally controlled and manipulated. At the beginning of One-Dimensional Man Marcuse writes, вЂњThe people recognize themselves in their commodities they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,вЂќ meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they buy, thus making commodities extensions of people's minds and bodies. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans that the objects produced by laborers became alienated and thus ultimately dehumanized them to functional objects. MarcuseвЂ™s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl MarxвЂ™s main concepts: Objectification, which under capitalism becomes Alienation.

Subsume on the periphery capitalism marcuse