#1

#1

Representation recedes directly; the intermediary draws away from actuality. The spectacle of mediation accumulates an immensity of production under the condition of domination.

Socialism coexists with the production of the commodity; {C}. Kapital {K}, abstractly, is the commodity.

Kapitalismo-sozjietie is a “social formation in which the presence of commodity production reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.”¹

Victor Riesel writes from 1970 concerning wage labour, portraying the immiseration of the Kansas City labourers union of unskilled workers. Citizen Riesel uses the term proletarian explicitly, a term not anachronistic to 1970. Citizen Riesel writes from a time when strikes in The United States of America spanned across 22 states. Rather than the mobilization of the sickle and the hammer, Citizen Riesel's comrades lay down their arms. America's “endemic rebels,” according to Citizen Riesel, redistribute the capital of their expropriation by means of the strike.

George Shultz and then-president Richard Nixon author the apology of capital's representation. The proletarian, the immiseration, the expropriation. Citizen Riesel assigns power to the radicalism of rebellion with a juxtaposed view of an establishment that considers the strike to be “militant.”²

In a 1970's America, those who built the structures owned the houses whilst those who did the talk wore the trousers, the labourers were the lower classes remaining expropriated and immiserated in their masses.

A rise in wages means a rise in commodity exchange value which has lead to a rise in the number of bureaucrats serving the bureaucracy that upholds capitalist domination. If each and every one who considered themselves a bureaucrat, thereby recognizing themselves as the proletariat – Citizen Smith addresses ye, o people of the telephone call centre, the mill worker, the night-shift shelf filler – and walked out «en masse» on bank holiday Monday in the month of May then each and every one of us would get their own way, put it to a vote, let each and every one have their say.

That is what Kapitalismo-sozjietie does.

The collectivity, extending to all members of the commonality, share a belief-system brought about by cohesion. Between individuals consensus is established. “At the same time, their voluntary consensus links up with a coercion imposed upon them 'from within' – that is, by the collectivity greater than their sum.”³ Conscience collective describes the process of coercion by consensus. “Or, to reformulate, conscience collective is the norms, constraints, moral or religious sentiments, and all manner of symbolic representation that express a society and legitimate both its institutions and the actual behaviour of the people in it.”

°There must be something wrong with society if I'm behaving badly° thinks Citizen Smith.

The freedom to make choices falls under the illusion of external forces that nullify any determination of individual behaviour. Depressions mark the oscillations of liberal culture, the very thing that determines our behaviour, liberal culture. Material circumstances delimit the determinations that give us real choices.⁴

“Consciousness of the material origins of culture and its relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivileged. This favours an appeal to 'man's history' in which the unified subject 'man' has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this progress is said to be challenged.”⁵

1Gillette, C./Raiklin, E. (1988) “The Nature of Contemporary Soviet Commodity Production.” International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 15, No. 516; p. 65.

2Riesel, V. (1970) "Nation Disdains Much Authority." Rome News-Tribune, Jun. 23.

3Shevtsova, M. (1989) “The Sociology of the Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 18; p.182.

4Wallis, M. (1994) “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties'.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 38; p.140.

5Ibid., 141.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.