FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE INVISIBLE WEDGE

(including the very same people) for lower prices. The seesaw of economic policy rocked on this fulcrum.

The growth of the consumer movement in the United States, the recent uprisings in Poland against government-decreed price hikes, the endlessly raging debate in Britain about prices and incomes policy, the deadly ideological (struggles in the Soviet Union over whether heavy industry or consumer goods should receive first priority, are all aspects of the profound conflict engendered in any society, capitalist or socialist, by the split between production and consumption.

Not only politics but culture, too, was shaped by the cleavage, for it also produced the most money-minded, grasping, commercialized, and calculating civilizaiton in history. One need scarcely be a Marxist to agree with The Communist Manifesto’s famous accusation that the new society “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.'” Personal relationships, family bonds, love, friendship, neighborly and community ties all by became tinctured or corrupted by commercial self-interest.

Correct in identifying this dehumanization of interpersonal bonds, Marx was incorrect, however, in attributing it to capitalism. He wrote, of course, at a time when the only industrial society he could observe was capitalist hi form. Today, after more than half a century of experience with industrial societies based on socialism, or at least state socialism, we know that aggressive acquisitiveness, commercial corruption, and the reduction of human relationships to coldly economic terms are no monopoly of the profit system.

For the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is A reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrial-Jnm. It is a reflection of the central role of the marketplace in all societies hi which production is divorced from consumption, in which everyone is dependent upon the marketplace rather than on his or her own productive skills for the necessities of life.

In such a society, irrespective of its political structure, not only products are bought, sold, traded, and exchanged, but labor, ideas, art, and souls as well. The Western purchasing agent who pockets an illegal commission is not so different from the Soviet editor who take kickbacks from authors in return for approving their works for publication, or the plumber who demands a bottle of vodka to do what he is paid to do. The French or British or American artist