Nurturing the Consumptive Society

Dear George,

As expected, our current presidential campaign is shaping up to be another circus in which much noise is made about nothing. In foreign policy the focus is on who has the biggest dick, while discussions of domestic issues are reduced to vacuous promises of “change.”

There is, however, one noticeable improvement: there isn’t much talk about family values. Our Corporatists were uncomfortable with its emphasis in the 2004 campaign. The simple fact is that strong families are bad for business.

Okay, George, this is where I have to get a little thick, so you might want to have Condi or the Big Dick walk you through this.

America is now in the vanguard of a movement best called Corporate Marxism. The big difference between it and traditional Marxism is that the new proletariat is our corporate elite. The goal is liberation through the withering away of the state.

Our new proletariat achieves this liberation through the accumulation of obscene amounts of capital. To do this, they have to sell stuff, lots and lots of stuff, and an atomized market of isolate individuals make the best consumers because they are great impulse buyers. Isolation fuels this trend while groups, such as the family, can discourage it because at least one asshole is going to ask, “Do we really need this?”

Istvan Meszaros explains it in Beyond Capital when he says:

For this reason, the human agency of consumption must be fragmented to the
smallest possible unit—in that such units are the most easily manipulated and
dominated, as well as the likeliest to supply the maximum demand for capital’s
wares. ‘Nuclear’ family relations must be adjusted in the same sense,
narrowed down ultimately to the one-generation basic unit and the transformation
of offspring into ‘sovereign consumers’ at the earliest possible opportunity,
coupled with ever higher divorce rates acting in the same direction, especially
in advanced capitalist countries.

This is where the Religious Right becomes problematic. When they start prattling on about the sanctity of the family, they are endangering our economic growth. Corporate Marxism eschews both family and community. Rather than a family sitting down to break bread together, it need a disparate group of individuals gathered under one roof with each individual so focused on their individual screens, be they computer or television, that they are barely aware of other members of the group.

According to Meszaros, one symptom of our fragmented consumptive society is the demise of the “family car.” He says, “For in order to maintain the senseless multiplication of motor cars—and the corresponding neglect or even willful destruction of public transport services—the system had to devise the absurd marketing strategy of the two or even ‘three car family’…despite the devastating impact of this grotesquely inefficient form of transport.”

The bottom line here, George, is that you’d better pull James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, into the Oval Office and give him a little talking to. In our new age, families are counterproductive. Every time a family falls apart it adds to our GDP.

So tell him to focus on the abortion issue, since every baby born is a new consumer. The sin of abortion is not murder: it is depriving a fetus of its God-given right to consume.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones