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On 12/2/14 7:14 AM, Red arnie via Marxism wrote: > Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on the psychology of human > decision-making, which may be why he’s so gloomy. ‘This is not what > you might want to hear,’ he says, but ‘no amount of psychological > awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard > of living. So that’s my bottom line: there is not much hope. I’m > thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.’ The average American watches television 5 hours a day. The average hour-long TV show is 36 percent commercials. Each commercial is produced by a "creative" team made up of graduates from Ivy League schools who are well versed in psychology (just watch Mad Men) and designed to create an unquenchable desire to buy, buy, buy. We are in a Catch-22 situation. The ruling class creates the conditions for commodity fetishism that is undermining capitalism's ability to create commodities in the long run. The Communist Manifesto alluded to such contradictions: "The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. "The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself." _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
