Class consciousness is one of the most effective intellectual tools to dig thoroughly the many layers of deceptive manipulation that allow the capitalist class to keep us, the poor competing with each other for scraps.
The market economy is a paradise for creative entrepreneurs and innovators willing to work hard transforming great ideas into amazing products, devices, gadgets and services that makes us all happier in a ever more commodified world.
Question: is it sustainable, desirable or necessary? In my opinion, it is not. It is perfectly attainable to have fulfilled and meaningful lives with much less, life is not about owing more but about knowing deeper to a more comprehensive understanding of the world around us.
Most relationships are becoming increasingly commodified transforming us into uni-dimensional beings. We see everything through the profit lens, when we have nothing to gain we should look somewhere else. Profit driven social relations is the default mode expandable to all kinds of relationships (animals, plants, nature) everything must be regarded as an opportunity for investment and the financialization of nature (ecosystems services) is the last frontier to control not only nature but its biochemical processes.
The market economy which means the financialized economy is the way to go, all existential threats faced by humanity and the rest of the living community of Planet Earth can and should according to the people on the top of the social pyramid (the ones that control the world financial system and pull the political strings) can be solved by the free-market neoliberal capitalist rules (green capitalism).
They will tell us that now is different but I tell you that the basic premises are still the guiding lines, "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." - Albert Einstein, because they don’t want any systemic structural change that could undermine their interests.
The human imagination subjected to the market economy mentality, puts our creativity serving the commodification of everything. The market economy praises creativity but within the profit driven boundaries.
Natural resources are limited and most habitats and ecosystems when destroyed become a major factor to drive species extinct, does it matter? No! What we need is to green the economy and keep the current system in place and everything will be fine.
Where does the raw materials come from? The PR machine are in charge to sell the wider public the fictional reality of circular economy, energy transition, imagine a world powered by blue hydrogen, biomass power-plants, millions of windmills changing the mountain and coastal landscape forever, the capitalist techno-fix mentality prevails because the profit mode is the default mode and what we need is a deep change in mentality.
Could we ask for a seven generations assessment, would it be wise?, before we, as a society decide what´s best in the long run? The techno-fix mentality, Technoscientism is the religion that we should trust to provide solutions to the problems created by previous techno-scientific solutions in an ever growing spiral of complexity. That should be the definition of irrationality but instead is becoming a generalized blind faith in technoscientism.
Wouldn't it be better to draw some limits and try to live with less in a more egalitarian society? Can we live more, work less and truly enjoy meaningful lives?
Class consciousness is the antidote to most myths and pitfalls of the so-called free-market capitalist economy based on the accumulation of wealth, power and control on the top of the social pyramid which is neither good for people nor for the environment.
High-tech innovation and computer sciences fast development applied to almost all areas of the economy is changing the way we live, work and interact socially. The fascination with information technologies is practically universal and transversal to most professional, academic, entertainment activities.
Should we slow the pace or is it asking too much! The prevalent mentality of unrestrained techno-scientific advances is widely accepted as a given, that must be not questioned, why should we slow the pace of techno-scientific development?
Humanity is undergoing fast changing times. In the global north countries the working class living standards is steadily being eroded, somehow we are transitioning from a mass consumption society to the rise of the useless class, austerity policies in financialized economies generates poverty, social exclusion and a lot of unnecessary human suffering and misery.
Whenever a society has the material resources to satisfy the needs of its citizenry and deprive them of the means to live based on ideological prejudices and fake moral principles of meritocratic values, we need a strong sense class consciousness to debunk it and put human dignity as political priority.
Our minds run on a lot of BS ideological prejudices on what is the economy for and whom it should serve, I mean what is the real purpose of any economic activity? Most of us probably believe that the main purpose of an economy is to produce wealth, because we confuse wealth with tangible goods and services, but wealth is a useful fiction to manipulate useful idioms.
Apparently most people keep believing in the myths of capitalism. Decades of anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda transformed radically the cultural-ideological environment through class denialism.
In a leveled free-market open economy, the best ideas and the most persevering people have the best chances of being successful, the losers are the ones that are not able to make sacrifices and stay focused, therefore they can only blame themselves for their failures.
Under the capitalist rule, life is a game, only the few have the opportunity to become winners, and ruthless competition to defeat the adversary is the basic rule of the game, unless cartelization works better.
While most of us compete for recognition and reward; simultaneously we are used as pawns, it doesn’t really matter which side of the barricade we find ourselves in, third parties are profiting from our labor and sacrifice.
We dedicate our lives to promote someone else agendas (which frequently are against our best class interests) that’s called exploitation.
We are free to choose whom or which organization, institution, corporation, etc, serve in order to make ends meet. Even the citizens with the highest level of education have to follow these rules, successful careers depend on the ability to pick the projects which are more likely to be funded, who funds the projects controls which ones are the good ones.
Either you serve powerful entrenched interests or you end up as a pariah. Academic freedom, free-speech, free-choice, social mobility cannot coexist with class domination. Denialism, cognitive dissonance, intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, arrogance can be summed up as voluntary servitude, at the highest levels servitude is rewarded with lots of privileges and entitlements but there is still servitude, in a trickle down servitude system.
