lifeisbrutallyunfair.com - Casino Capitalism

Casino Capitalism

_POSTED_BY desik

Friday, 27 March 2009

high rollers by autotelic

This weeks featured short at the Theatre Pathetique
Is 'The Hidden Dangers of Class Consciousness'
A Public Information Film

Starring the late Ronald Reagan
In his only Post Mortem role
As Reb the lumpenproletariat drifter , fixer and snitch

Who just avoids falling under the evil spell of Dorothy Day

An uptown spiritual hooker with an agenda of her own

The film documents the emergence of class consciousness
And its hinderance of Capital
The action is historically specific
And based In Las Vegas
Right now
The storyline is similar to Zola's Germinal
Only the bosses are starved and victimised by their class conscious workers

And there is no Nihilist to blow up the Golden Nugget at the end

Just the cavalry riding in under Old Glory

To restore the means of production to its rightful owners

Smash the cancerous unions

And shoot up the last chance saloon

The 'Dangers of Class Consciousness' is playing in schools, workplaces and stripjoints
Post screening there will be a competition to decide who remembers the most reasons to ignore class as a deterministic fact of life
The competition is compulsory
The first prize will be a one way ticket to heaven
The second prize will be to watch the feature again

Everyone else just has to go back to work

To pay for the upkeep of the Theatre Pathetique

The only show in town that never closes

Ever

Comments

sarah

|2008-05-14 02:41:44

everyone thinks they're middle class, whether you make 40 thousand dollars a
year, or a half million dollar a year....people always say that they're middle
class.

anna - Marx's take on class

|2008-05-14 13:47:53

Marx did not concern himself with 'social class ', class to him were the
objective material relations behind the appearances of society and the
all important workplace and one's relation to the means of production
, people are what they do not what they say..

The bourgeoisie owned
and controlled the means of production , the proletariat owned nothing
but their labour which they voluntarily entered into a contract to
sell to the bosses becoming 'wage labour' - as opposed to 'serfs' or
'slaves' of earlier historically specific modes of production .

Marx
argued wage labour is unique to capitalism and that exploitation of
labour took place because workers were never paid the true value of their
labour , determined by their human input as to Marx only people could
generate value , as the bosses ripped them off by taking profits.

To
Marx then, what social class people think they belong to is irrelevant , their factual relationship to the
means of production is all, and what was important to him and the
whole point of the communist manifesto was that the proletariat, or
working class , raised its political consciousness and became a class
aware of and for itself and one able to sieze the future from the
bosses and organise society around a fairer and more social form of
production and distribution of income..

There are also a couple of
subsets of the two main classes , the petite bourgeosie, and the lumpen
proletariat, but Marx used these labels almost as a form of contempt
and pretty much viewed them as pathetic disruptive elements almost
redundant to his overall analysis..

Marx obviously got a few things
wrong, many people argue he presented life as being more economically
determined than it actually is - although I'm not so sure about
that as money does seem to be all out there in the culture - but ,
from the economic point of view, the greatest flaw is the labour theory of
value and idea that the value of anything produced can be worked out
by dividing it by the value of the man hours invested into its
production.

This 'transformation ' problem as its called poses
real difficulties, particular when you think of goods produced by
machines and - more recently - digitally reproduced goods or services at
massive scales. There are workarounds but they dont really work .

The issue of class then is really what is going on behind the
superficial appearances of social relations within society , the extent
to which our lives tend to be defined by what we occupationally do
within the culture and how production and distribution are not geared
towards social ends but towards making huge profits for the few.

In the age of corporate capitalism and monoculture new technologies
have become yet another tool for the ruling class to use to exploit
labour and the fast dwindling resources of the planet. The problems with
global warming alone point to the need for production to be
geared towards more social and sustainable ends ( think of the damage
we've inflicted on our planet since Marx's time ) and its the workers who
create profits and wealth in society who need to really think about
what kind of world they are working to create because by and large the
corporates dont really care..

This is the class consciousness Marx
hoped to raise, an acute awareness of the economic fact of one's
relationship to the means of production, economic power and the need
to collectively challenge the prevailing status quo as a class aware
of its own self interest.In a sense the focus on social (status-like )
class distracts from this .

anna - Do you feel lucky punk?

|2008-05-14 13:54:09

I like the Casino description here as people certainly are being constantly
enouraged through the culture to 'meditate' on the prospect of winning millions
in lotteries or the like to escape the drudgery of wage labour and the
monoculture.

Its a form of escapism thats taken on religious like qualities
as the lottery and competition ' casino culture' is massively and constantly
broadcast and amplified through the media everywhere you look and it obviously
has a tranquilising effect on people who arent getting ahead. .

The lottery
ticket has become the workers stake in society, Pop Idol the material equivalent
of Rapture for most kids as they come of age and enter the workplace as drones.

Its proundly fucking tragic that so many people should meditate each week ,
perhaps even each day on how their lives would be if only the dice rolled, the
cards turned or the winning balls revealed themselves in their favour.

Now
wouldnt that be a sign of Divine Love and confirmation of that specialness we
all tend to feel?

Instant Financial Redemption.

It's profoundly fucking
tragic that we meditate on this form of redemption so much because it also
distracts the poorest people in society from taking any kind of collective
action to improve their material conditions and well being. People arent winning
more they are simply becoming more stressed and obese.

Vinny

|2008-05-14 14:11:51

so why do so many people say they're middle class when they're not even close?
Is it a form of misplaced hope, apathy, or denial?
Do you think credit cards
have helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can be middle class?

anna	\|2008-05-14 14:20:45

People have false consciousness , they aspire to be middle class as a set of
consumption choices and yes credit cards help people to engage in social status
linked transactions they cant really afford , they run up debts buying Pavorotti
albums, books they wish to be seen reading but never actually get to read and
Pilates videos that end up underneath the pizza boxes.

Its about how we deal
with our powerlessness in an age where collective action seems to be so passe.
buying the same shit seems to be the only form of collective action people
engage in nowadays.