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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.
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