/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17434373]

Methods of capitalist control:

>Contemporary media (TV, film, Internet) is responsible for blurring the line between products that are essential for living and products for which the need is created by commercial images.

>Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (denominated fiat currency) rather than use value. Usefulness is quantified and defined in monetary terms to assist exchange. This becomes the only value.

>Multinational capitalism separates produced goods from the factories , original materials and the processes (including the people/cultural context) used to create them.

>Urbanization, which separates humans from nature, and recenters culture around production systems so large they cause alienation.

>Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms.

[Anonymous No.17434419]

>>17434373
How long will it be until this "Late Era Capitalism" trend ends? I notice it's gotten bigger over the past year. I guess people will get tired of Chapo eventually and probably go back to being Sam Harris fans agains or something.

>"N-no!! This isn't a trend its been around -- M-Mark Fisher C-Capitalist Realis -- Philosophers I haven't rea -- I might've just gotten into it, but it's a-always been --"

Yeah yeah yeah, give me a fucking break.

[Anonymous No.17434433]

>>17434419
when or if capitalist totality ends

[Anonymous No.17434436]

>>17434373
>>17434419
>"Oh man, I can't believe when I was younger I actually use to be a New Atheist Facts And Logic Man who believed everything Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens said. How embarrassing!"

>"Even worse, after that I somehow bought into the whole neo-con Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro thing. Jesus, I must have been really lost!"

>"Don't even get me started on what happened next - I become one of those WOKE BASEDJAKS, and I started believing everything breadtube - Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, HBomberGuy, and Sean - said. I must've just been too ashamed of the Peterson thing, and I was taking myself way too seriously."

>"But now, I'm glad that I've found CHAPO TRAP HOUSE, RED SCARE, and CUM TOWN. Ha ha - yep, these guys are all DEFINITELY telling it like it really is... How did I not see it before?! I DEFINITELY WON'T feel EMBARRASSED about being into this group in a couple of years!"

[Anonymous No.17434441]

>>17434419
You do realise that OP (though he apparently didn't understand Baudrillard) is referring to theories dating back, to at least, the 60s? Not everything is about the last trend in podcasts consumption.

[Anonymous No.17434447]

>>17434436
>peterson
>shapiro
>contrapoints and co
Not me

[Anonymous No.17434452]

>>17434419
the phrase late stage capitalism does not appear in op

[Anonymous No.17434476]

>>17434373
>Noooo I hate having access to luxuries that increase my quality of life
>Noooo I hate that I can buy literally anything as long as I exchange enough time to pay for it
>Noooo I hate having access to any commodity I could ever possibly want
>Noooo I hate on demand services and the luxury of having every commodity in one place
>Can't even decipher the leftist gibberish in this last one

[Anonymous No.17434498]

>>17434476
yes, it turns us into docile slaves of the economic machine and blurs the line between real and constructed

[Anonymous No.17434560]

>>17434441
You'll notice I cleverly preempted this exact response in the green text of my original post.

[Anonymous No.17434580]

>>17434498
People in primordial societies had to work hard, risking serious injury, disease, and death. Were they "docile slaves" to nature? Were their primitive religious beliefs in the spirit world (i.e that trees and plants could think thoughts, and influence the weather) not blurred lines between reality and psychic construction?

[Anonymous No.17434614]

>>17434580
Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history between symbolic societies — i.e., societies fundamentally organized around premodern exchange — and productivist societies (i.e., societies organized around production and commodity exchange. He systematically develops distinctions between premodern societies organized around symbolic exchange, modern societies organized around production, and postmodern societies organized around “simulation” by which he means the cultural modes of representation that “simulate” reality as in television, computer cyberspace, and virtual reality

With the Industrial Revolution, distinctions between representation and reality broke down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, causing commodification. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype.

In postmodernity and digital realm, the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes meaningless. Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with or that no longer have an original.

[Anonymous No.17434668]

>>17434436
Kek

[Anonymous No.17434676]

>>17434373
Baudrillard had an awful reading of Marx

[Anonymous No.17434711]

>>17434614
There is no imitation. Reality is what we make it. The world is my representation. This is the consequence of Kantianism.

[Anonymous No.17434718]

OP seems to be a Marxist misinterpreting Baudrillard's work. Baudrillard argues that the traditional Marxist approach is inadequate to address the circumstances of the postmodern age. Marxism doesn't have all the needed concepts to fully analyze postmodern consumer society. To properly address our circumstances, we must examine psychological needs and how they are manipulated by those in control.

In the world of simulation, production, work, wages, strikes, etc. lose their primary significance and become appearances or simulacra. Whatever Marx dreams of for the working class, neoliberalism achieves, not in the way they were imagined, but ability to simply transform itself into an eternal system of domination. Capitalism is no longer a system based on production, but a system to which one submits in the sense of symbolic exchange.

[Anonymous No.17434729]

>>17434614

Is the human tendency to confuse representative symbols of reality unique to capitalism? Take, for example, the following three people:

1) A peasant in the Dark Ages who genuinely believes the King has a God given right to reign above him, and that he himself was made poor because it’s part of God’s vision.

2) A soldier in Ancient Roman who believes an upcoming war is going to be noble and heroic, after being fed stories and poems describing war as such.

3) A person in an uncontacted tribe whose crops fail, and so they intuitively assume their neighbour set a dark curse on them, and so they kill their neighbours.

All three have allowed symbolic representations - religious stories, art, and superstitions - to “cover” actual reality.

[Anonymous No.17434741]

>>17434729
*representative symbols of reality with reality itself

[Anonymous No.17434747]

Stop reading French bullshit theory and read Marx.

[Anonymous No.17434768]

>2021
>capitalism

[Anonymous No.17434785]

It's like this have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to buy something something that you know would be useful to you and so you had certain specific criteria for this thing but then you had trouble finding one of these things that met those criteria even among the seemingly endless bombardment of choices and perhaps you never found it at all and you think how could this be the case in a system that seems designed to cater to the consumer i.e. you towards it's own gain and in this process what you realize is that this isn't really the case that the system does not serve your interest as an individual at all and was never intended to do so but instead sets out to diminish and hijack your autonomy and demoralize you through this constant series of small sacrifices and compromises and frustrations which to you by design seem logical and eventually expected so as to become imperceptible and you realize in the end this is what true control is altering the perception of the natures of change and permanence and this is precisely what the system sets out to do

[Anonymous No.17434803]

>>17434785
Ugh shut up

[Anonymous No.17435316]

>>17434436
Based

[Anonymous No.17435327]

>>17434476
None of these things matter past having heating for your house

[Anonymous No.17435331]

>>17434436
>cumtown
why do people lump them in with chapo and red scare its just a comedy podcast with gay jokes

[Anonymous No.17435502]

>>17434476
Yeah, all of that hedonist capitalist garbage is pointless without autonomy. Most state “socialists” also advocate sacrificing autonomy for hedonism’s sake (removing economic autonomy via taxation is still coercion even if the taxation is used to pay for some social service, it explicitly does not give power to the people because safety/happiness does not constitute power. If everybody who’s taxed consents to the tax without being coerced then it can be a product of autonomy, but then a tax would essentially be unnecessary since people could just choose to collectively pay for the service without any coercive entity pigeonholing them into it through potential legal penalties. Autonomy is power), so they’re no better. There’s more to life than the pursuit of happiness and when people are happy to exploit others and to be exploited you just end up with a society of cattle.

[Anonymous No.17435801]

>>17435331
the same people listen to it, i suppose. i'd be much more embarrassed by watching people like philosophytube and contrapoints, than some lazy podcasts.

[Anonymous No.17435811]

>>17434476
>>Noooo I hate that I can buy literally anything as long as I exchange enough time to pay for it
not really. quality is quite hard to find and doesn't exist for some things. this is because even with expensive products everything is made with the same factories using the same templates.

but as others have said, it's meaningless. you only try to deflect from the important things like social and spiritual health, and personal freedom.

[Anonymous No.17435822]

>>17434373
ok, and?

i don't understand these commies or postmodernists or in general philosophers who are like
>gotcha! i figured out society and all its ills!
and?

you'll go home, have dinner, jerk off, and go to sleep. and then you'll wake up, go in to work, work, leave, go home, have dinner, jerk off and go to sleep again.

what changes?

[Anonymous No.17435965]

>>17434373
>Urbanization, which separates humans from nature, and recenters culture around production systems so large they cause alienation.
This one and to a degree the rest of your points apply to industral society in general. You'll still be a faceless economic unit in a materialist universe for the communist utopia.
Capitalism, communism, fascism, all are all just slightly different types of human farming systems.

[Anonymous No.17435988]

>>17435822
to solve the problem you must analyze it and understand the mechanisms behind it

[Anonymous No.17435991]

>>17434373
>muh control
>muh society is a prison
>muh consumerism

Go isolate yourself in the woods.

[Anonymous No.17436000]

>>17434373
Absolutely true. Instruments of power currently used by the capitalist regime to maintain dominance, but these tools would be used by other regimes as well. Marx doesnt have the answer. The answer is deeaclerationism. Return to monkey.