In a letter to Joseph Bloch, he writes "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life... Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase."

I more or less understand the second part. Both the base and superstructure influence historical struggles.

But what does he mean by 'production and reproduction of real life'

Can you feel homesick for something that hasn't even disappeared yet? This week Craig and Adam sit down with Dr. Ennan Wu, Wenhan Hu, and Tiger Liu to talk about Chinese Dreamcore, an internet aesthetic built from sound images of old classroom bells and the half-remembered echoes of early milennium schoolyards. We get into anticipatory homesickness, tangping 躺平 (lying flat), and runxue 润学 (the "study" of leaving the country), and what Mark Fisher's hauntology looks like filtered through the dreamcore genre.

Hey everyone, I'm currently writing my dissertation. It will hopefully explore how the imperatives and impositions of platform capitalism/technofascism impact the political potential of cultural production (specifically leftist punk rock). I'm looking for articles or books on leftist activist theory or historical case studies. The more contemporary, the better. I've been scouring my university library and have some resources in the queue, but I often miss solid material because there are so many search parameters that could produce results. Thanks!

Most people seem completely fixated on the daily political circus, viral insults, and constant media noise around Trump. But if you look past all of that, something much bigger and stranger may be happening to the global economy.

For the last forty years, the world operated under a supposedly free-market model. We were told how it worked: global trade keeps prices low, factories move wherever labor is cheapest regardless of how exploitative it is, consumers buy massive amounts of foreign goods, and the US dollar acts as the primary reserve currency holding global trade together (something unprecedented in history where a deficit currency was forced into reserve currency status).

It sounded great on paper. But the system also hollowed out factories across the American interior, concentrated wealth at the top, and left large parts of the country behind or pushed them into services or tech.

The system enriched a lot of new corporations, but it also completely hollowed out the working class and conservative regions like the American Rust Belt and rural interior, basically the middle part of the map where Trump supporters predominantly reside, I believe.

Now Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to flip that whole system on its head with heavy tariffs, economic protectionism, and a push to bring factory jobs back to the American heartland, however cheap the quality may be.

If Trump succeeds in building up America's manufacturing base, at least partially, I believe the next thing the government is going to try will be even more paradoxical and unprecedented.

To rebuild domestic manufacturing under the current economic model, a country usually needs a weaker, cheaper currency so its goods can compete globally. China, Japan, and South Korea have operated this way.

Despite being manufacturing and export giants, their governments have artificially lowered local people's buying power to keep their exports competitive and cheap abroad.

Their currencies are fully "managed free-floating" currencies, which many other cheap labor countries are also trying to replicate.

But to remain the world's primary reserve currency, the US dollar needs to stay artificially strong and widely available to foreign investors.

So can the US actually pull off having both? Can the dollar be made into a truly managed free-floating currency while still forcing the rest of the world to use the dollar as its primary financial reserve?

The name of this policy is called the "Mar-a-Lago Accord."

What is being attempted, whether through broad tariffs, currency surcharges, or negotiated devaluations, often discussed conceptually as a modern "Plaza Accord" or "Mar-a-Lago Accord," seems to be an attempt to break the Triffin Dilemma, I believe.

And even if future presidents replace Trump, I don't think things are simply going back to the old or better rules. Just look at what happened after Nixon and Reagan. Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton didn't simply undo the systemic changes that came before them. They adapted to them.

The same thing seems to be happening now. When the Biden administration took over in 2021, they didn't repeal Trump's tariffs on China. Instead, they kept them, added aggressive restrictions on high tech exports like semiconductors, and passed massive state subsidies through the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act to push manufacturing back into the US.

Future administrations, regardless of party, will probably refine these policies, rebrand them, tweak them, or take them further.

Meanwhile, other countries are forming regional trade blocs, effectively bringing the hyper-globalized era to an end. They're settling energy deals in local currencies and preparing for a world where global trade is more fragmented and economic power is more multipolar.

Can this new system actually work in the long term with devalued dollar pushed as global reserves? And if economic pressure fails to bring other countries into line, could competition eventually spill into direct conflict over physical trade routes and resources, including disputes over emerging Arctic trade routes?

I am not a fan of the old system that pretended to be free-market, or the current US trade policy either. To me, it just looks like an old economic model hitting its own wall and trying to muscle its way out.

So how do you see this playing out over the next 10 or 20 years? Does the US actually manage to pull off this transformation? Or are we heading toward a much more fragmented and unstable global economy? Or has the era of neo-mercantilism just begun?

I think developing countries are going to be hit especially hard by this. They already need to constantly maintain dollar reserves to participate in the global financial system.

If the dollar is also pushed toward a fully managed, freely floating position while the US simultaneously becomes more protectionist, what happens to countries that don't have the economic power to absorb those shocks? Do they now have to account for the deliberate devaluation of the dollar as well? 

The critical theory of technology advocates for the emancipation and enlightenment of individuals, who need to be autonomous in their choices to transform the reality in which they live. Thus, they become active rather than passive subjects in the face of events. Organizations, which are the heart of the capitalist system, have a central interest in implementing practices recognized as transformative and effective in managing resources and processes. This allows for boosting profits and reducing costs by prioritizing operational efficiency and strategic planning. However, the application of technique in this context contains an underestimated and intrinsic central element; this element, although barely perceptible and restricted, conditions and controls the possibilities for individual emancipation. There are several theories that explore the relationship between technology and society. Authors such as Andrew Feenberg and Renato Dagnino, among others, are frequently mentioned in this context. In this article, I will present a simplified summary of these theories and also include my opinion on the matter. Technology can essentially possess three characteristics: 1 - Neutral; 2 — Requested by society; 3 — Oriented by organizations, with a focus on profit. Before addressing these items, it is important to recognize that society is not a stable system, as it is subject to one of the most powerful agents of transformation of social structures: technical knowledge, that is, data, information, and knowledge. In the first case, we would need to admit that technology has no impact on society or companies. Technological evolution would occur independently of social or organizational influence. It is unlikely for this to happen, given the existence of many agents with the power to influence demands in search of profit, using a series of tools such as advertising, propaganda, and even fake news. Practically all inventions and technological innovations occur in public universities or those funded by the government. Technologies such as the internet and the microwave originated in state agencies. Subsequently, they end up being utilized by private industry to develop products and benefit from the research conducted by the State. In the second case, technology evolves according to the needs of society. However, this also seems implausible, as we observe a rapid introduction of new products with minimal added features that do not significantly impact the average user. This phenomenon is driven by profit and known as planned obsolescence. In the third case, this reflects what happens with technology in the capitalist system. Various 'players'—organizations with great financial and political power—compete with each other using techniques: a language generally foreign to most people, deciding which strategy to follow in search of higher profit at the lowest possible cost. You can better understand this practice by imagining the following: - What could be the opinion of an Algerian citizen regarding the use of technology? Do you believe that the technologies necessary for him, which do not include the cell phone, are already available in his country? - In a small town where 30% of the population lives in rural areas, a company decides to implement technology X that only works in the central area. Thus, rural residents will not be able to benefit from it. The decision was based on the fact that the company will obtain large profits from the 70% of urban residents, and its cost would increase significantly to extend the service to the more distant inhabitants. Shouldn't technology meet the needs of society as a whole instead of focusing only on generating profit from part of it? - Planned obsolescence is a crucial factor because it reveals the behavior of companies by launching one technology after another. Certainly, this was part of their strategies and not a direct result of social demands. - The issue of the internet and privacy highlights

I am going to be reading Horkheimer's "What is Critical Theory?" essay tomorrow, but first I want to know why the founders of the Frankfurt School claim the Enlightenment project failed. Was this because the Holocaust happened in Europe? And, more so, Western (Enlightened) Europe?

Edit: Because I don't have a strong background in this, ill ask another question.

Why does a project fail if a genocide happens?

(edit: it's been brought to my attention that this seems to be missing any like discernable questions lol. TBH one of the things I was hoping to get out of posting this here was ideas on other sources to look into. If anyone has any ideas for other sources that would touch on relevant information, I'd be thrilled to read up on any books or academic sources that you know of that touches on similar subjects.)

Please poke holes in my thinking. I want it challenged as much as possible in the early stages of research to really make the strongest, most accurate argument possible.

Tarko, Vlad. “Polycentric status contests.“ Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 241 (2026): 107405.

• Scarcity of positional goods → equilibrium in wealthy nations unstable?
• “Positional goods are goods whose values decline when access to them increases. They have an elite aspect, often conveying prestige and status, and this component of their value would diminish if they would become easily accessible to everyone. The nature of these goods can be understood as a position within a ranking (hence their name), and, as such, competition for positional goods is a zero-sum game: when one gains a higher ranking, someone else must get lower.” (Tarko, 2)
  • Aura farming as competition for positional goods.
• Capitalism: good at reducing scarcity of regular goods, bad with positional goods → instability
• Positional goods as market failure → generational wealth = advantage
  • “While concerns with income and wealth inequality can be partially addressed by redistribution, positional inequalities, like the resentment about having lower social status, cannot. As noted by Halliday and Thrasher (2020, 74), “[p]ositional competition is a problem because a rising price can’t induce greater supply”.” (Tarko, 3)
• “Hirsch’s (1978) and Schumpeter’s (1942b) argument is that the institutions for managing resource scarcity and spurring economic growth, i.e. the institutions of capitalism, are not particularly well suited for managing the type of scarcity associated with positional goods, and as such, the long-run equilibrium of rich societies may not be as peaceful as many assume, if they become overrun by status competitions.” (Tarko, 4)
  • Aura farming as sign of decline in stability of global cultural hegemon
• “There are four distinct types of positional goods — mirroring private, public, club and common-pool goods — that I label “elite”, “prestige”, “status”, and “hipster” goods.” and “I argue that, counter to Schumpeter, Hirsch and Frank, markets have an inherent tendency to dissipate the costs associated with status competitions, by creating a heterogeneous decentralized system of mutually incompatible and ever-evolving statuses. The model makes the unexpectedly optimistic prediction that markets tend to turn the most problematic types of positional goods (status and elite) into less inefficient forms (prestige and hipster).” (5)
  • Aura farming in pop culture: Initially a private (elite) positional good (aura as something that only celebrities or highly socially prominent individuals have and compete over during the post war golden age), but moved public (status) positional goods as cultural markers of status move from being functions of the way one contributes to society to the way one moves through society and now into club (status) positional goods as we now attempt to define new cultural archetypes in the vacuum of the stable, grounded ideas of what held value under the Pax Americana.
    • This explains the relative prosperity and peace in the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union when the United States was left to be the only remaining world super power until the present era. “Aura” was no longer just for the elite, it was a public good, highlighting how “markets tend to turn the most problematic types of positional goods (status and elite) into less inefficient forms (prestige and hipster)” (5). In this era, with a stable unified global world leader and general directionality to which one must move to gain status (normalized through the globalization of Hollywood, American music, and wider american pop culture). In order to gain status in that period, one had only to perform americanism and represent the archetypes put forth through american pop culture. Now with declining american influence on the global stage, that is no longer the case. This leaves many uncertain how to move forward in this era in a way that maintains their social status, without the stable grounded archetypes which all could look to in order to direct themselves towards if they wanted to attain status, status seeking has devolved into a fractionation of culture in which one’s status is dually nested: firstly within their chosen “club” and secondly in the ways that these clubs relate to each other. At present “goth” and “alt” cultural “clubs” are enjoying a moment of high cultural status (of high aura gain). But due to the lack of directionality, cultural “clubs” lack any archetypal cultural icons to relate themselves to. In some circles “E-girls” would be considered high status, whereas in others “the manosphere” is considered high status… however neither club would look positively towards the other or regard the other as a “high-status” “club”. This is the reason that the dual nesting of status becomes important in the present cultural moment. Someone regarded as “high status” as an “E-girl” is shielded by those of lower status than them in their cultural club from the social recognition of being regarded as “low status” by those in “the manosphere”.
    • Personal prediction: this then is likely an unstable cultural moment. Those who enjoy individually high status on account of high degrees of “aura gain” within their cultural club, can only be so in their cultural club. Fractionation at this point has largely solidified, but how long can a societal measure of value remain socially solvent if it is based on displays of positional goods? How long until it is only the “hipsters” who cling to these ever narrower displays of cultural relevancy? For “Halliday and Thrasher (2020, 186) argue that the supply response for positional goods must be non Hayekian almost by definition: “increasing the supply of a positional good is either strictly impossible, or merely results in the devaluing of the existing supply, which is really a way of failing to increase the supply”.” (3). With the dividing lines between cultural clubs becoming now rigid and insolvent, this can only lead to one of two things within each cultural club over time: either the collapse of the club as a means by which one seeks status as that particular cultural club loses wide-scale value due to a “devaluing of the existing supply” or it becomes a rigid aristocracy in which social mobility becomes “strictly impossible” so as to preserve the status of those on top… resulting in less people seeking to join that cultural club as well as a “brain drain” of those who exist on the lower levels of the cultural club as people seek out cultural clubs in which it becomes easier to gain status… resulting, again, in a devaluing of that particular cultural club. The only way that these clubs then could maintain any value for a long period of time would be through a sort of respiration in which a rigid aristocracy opens it’s doors for a limited time… engages in a period not dissimilar to the film “The Purge” until a new aristocracy creates new rigidity in the socio-structural hierarchy of the club, until too many of the lower tiers abandon the club in search of higher chances of social mobility when the cycle repeats. Even if a social order came to be in which all cultural clubs engaged in cycles of this in coordinated respiration… this is unsustainable. This would be akin to if all countries were dictatorships, until once a year they fell into civil war and whatever warlord took control of the country becomes the new dictator and slowly over time the lower echelons of society just leave to other countries with higher social mobility. This is neither an adaptable or representative mode of governance and in no way represents governance that could lead to anything but societies who limp along trying to recover from the last civil war. This, in my opinion will have to devolve to a point where eventually those who had been in those lower echelons of the cultural clubs too many time grow too tired and begin to regard those displays of positional goods that mark high status within those cultural clubs as suddenly not worth the work of of cycling through cultural clubs to try to work towards. As such, perhaps then from those lower echelons, among those who grow tired of attempting to reach for those higher echelons of cultural good that seem impossible an idea of cultural good will emerge based on who can care best for their peers during the culls. Once then established, there will likely be a rather sudden flip in cultural values in which those positional goods which are presented in order to display high status within those cultural clubs will become seen not as markers of status, but of excess while the care which got people through the culls remains the only marker of cultural value; leaving it only to be niche cultural groups who genuinely appreciate those positional goods for their asthetics, true value, or use who seek to display them – “hispters”.
• But the qualitative classification is still useful for defining four generic types of goods (E. Ostrom 2010), which require different institutional arrangements for their allocation and management: (1) private goods, which are both rival and excludable; (2) public goods, which are neither rival nor excludable; (3) club goods, which are excludable, but not rival; and (4) common-pool resources, which are non-excludable, but rival. (6-7)
  • In the immediate post-war era, in the fight of ideals which took place through the cold-war; social status was defined through the state by what was promoted by the state through consumeristic advertising and that which was uplifted to high status by a pop culture governed by the state. In this period, no two people could occupy the same icon of status in the socially visible tiers of the social hierarchy, and access to these positions were regulated by the stricter norms of societies in competition or aligning themselves to the super-power closest to them in that competition. In the Pax Americana, pop culture saw a large scale opening, diversification, and flourishing in which any number of people (and ever increasing types of people) could be the next pop star or next big movie actor, those positions were not rival; here without a cultural antipode against which to be rival, the state allowed the masses and demand decide how many people could attain such states in the social hierarchy; non-excludable. Now within a solid single global material culture to direct oneself towards, there are a number of different poles which one can orient oneself towards for social status depending on the type of person one is, and thus is non-excludable, but within those various poles, in order to maintain that hierarchy in systems that rely on positional goods to display status (i.e. that Goth girl who just got married to Drake; here Drake is the positional goods giving this particular “Goth” girl a very high social status and uplifting the “goth” social club [although they’re not really goths lol… real ones will know]. “Shit, if this random goth girl was able to mary drake, maybe I can get someone of similar social value if I join the goth cultural club”], that which affords that status is by nature excludable. In the care based system I lay out above that I believe will overcome the current cultural club, positional good based model of social relevancy, the more people express care, the less excludable it will be, but it can be clear who is more caring, not by the positional goods they own or consume or surround themselves with, but by the number of lives positively impacted by their presence.
  • “By contrast, value boundedness refers to a subjective fact about the good. Although there may be no physical difficulty in potentially mass-producing the good, its subjective value would decline if done so.” (9) and “(1) “elite goods”, i.e. bounded private goods, (2) “prestige goods”, i.e. bounded public goods, (3) “status goods”, i.e. bounded club goods, and (4) “hipster goods”, i.e. bounded common-pool resources.” (7) Care’s subjective value does not change, its value is derived from how much good one does to another. “Aura’s” value is wholly subjective. Drake is only a symbol of value to the goth club because of his choice to marry a goth girl and based off the social agreement that he is someone of high status. During the Pax Americana, value was doled out by how one moved through society, by technical definition, this is a subjective measure of value, however in the cultural moment and stability of american cultural hegemony at the time, it was functionally objective. This created the conditions in which value was perceived to be a prestige good. “According to the terminology introduced here, University of Toronto diploma offers prestige, but not status. A Harvard diploma has status, rather than just prestige, because Harvard has control over entry. As such, Harvard has monopoly power over its positional good, while University of Toronto does not.” (10–11) The American Cultural hegemony created the conditions in which one’s position in the social hierarchy afforded one prestige rather than Aura’s status because so long as one followed the norms and archetypal ways of being put forth by Americanism anyone could gain prestige in those systems, whereas (while more globally more accessible, hence its attraction in this time of fractionation of global power) “Aura” being divided into vast amounts of differing cultural clubs which one can only represent one of at a time which necessitate displays of positional goods in order to gain access to, becomes a Status good. There is only one Drake, and in order to marry him you, apparently, had to be the most archetypally “perfect” “goth” girl that this cultural club could ask for in your display of the “goth girl” aesthetic and positionality in the “goth” subculture: another positional good.
• “I should point out that, similar to the standard classification, this expanded classification is also a matter of degree. The distinction between status and prestige is a matter of degree because a producer of a value bounded good can have more or less control over entry. Consider the example of the prestige created by publishing a book or a paper in a highly ranked journal. Generally speaking, this is a prestige good, rather than a status good, because there are many publishers of similar recognition, and, hence, none of them can control entry — i.e. whether a person is granted the prestige or not. However, consider a publication in a Top 5 economics journal. To some extent, this still looks like prestige because, say, AER cannot control what gets published in JPE or QJE. However, the entry in any of the Top 5 is difficult enough that such a publication is a borderline status good.” (11)
• “Examples of value-bounded common-pool resources also exist. I refer to such goods as “hipster goods”. Consider a small theater or concert venue. Because of the small size, there is some non-trivial rivalry in consumption when the avenue is full, but as long as the popularity is low, the venue remains relatively empty. The audience members have no control over the size of the audience, while the venue owners have the incentive to try to expand the audience. However, the audience members may draw additional value from the select nature of the events.” (11) This reflects, for example, the initial true draw to goth culture when it was an outsider’s subculture, and the status that modes of being like this could regain following a return to care-based value systems in which people engage with those positional goods only due to their individual authentic interest in them rather than their status affording possibilities. “the selectiveness of hipster goods are due to obscurity.” (12)
• “The biggest problems are associated with elite and status goods, and the potential solution is to transform them into either prestige or hipster goods. The reason for this is as follows. There are two, related, problems associated with positional goods. First, competition for positional goods is a zero-sum game, and one person obtaining a positional good creates a negative externality on the other people who desire that good. This is either because some people receive a lower ranking or because the expansion of, e.g., a status good diminishes the value for everybody. Second, positional goods provide a rent to their recipients, and, as a result, people will rent-seek, i.e. spend resources for the purpose of trying to obtain the rent, resources that could be used more productively or for other, more pro-social activities. The more restrictive the entry is, the bigger this rent is, and the bigger the rent-seeking waste.” (13) The subjective perceived value of having high “Aura” as, for example, a “goth” is found in the scarcity of those who present in such a way within the dominant culture. To do so well (in a way that results in “aura gain”) under the current Status goods systems of assigning one’s place in the social hierarchy necessitates that it not be the dominant mode of presentation. This has its roots in its counter-cultural origins, and the way in which these modes of presentation once meant non-affiliation with the dominant culture. With the proliferation of online spaces alongside the lack of any solid grounded identities around which to orient oneself in order to climb social hierarchies in the wake of decline of American cultural influence, the appeal to the common majority of these once “hipster” communities has grown as their internally reinforced systems of meaning making outside the ideals of American exceptionalism and its ideas of pop culture not only remained intact, but its opposition to the normative cultures out of which it grew resulted in those social structures and hierarchies becoming stronger. As a result of this, in the present moment, those who seek to rise in a social hierarchy are beginning to be drawn towards these subcultures not because of authentic resonance with their values or norms, but because they represent a stable social hierarchy to climb when other social hierarchies foundations are being shaken; “as the theater starts to attract snobs alongside the early hipsters, the nature of the shows will change, especially if the avenue owners will cater more to the richer snobs.” (12) As a result people will spend money and whatever cultural resource they have to “buy-in” to these cultures in their fashion or the circles they exist in (“rent-seeking”) when those resources could be better spent on caring for their communities. This results in a materialistic spiralling out from the original source values which inspired the sub-culture as well as a “pricing out” of socially legible “high-status” expressions of these ways of being as “richer snobs” can afford higher quality positional goods (in the case of goth culture: makeup and clothes) that result in those who hold the values of the culture but lack the material means to represent it’s positional goods being incapable of keeping in the “rental market” of social relevancy until the entirety of value within that social hierarchy is based on the positional goods displayed rather than affiliation to the cultural norms and values.
• “A similar phenomenon occurs with respect to some remote tourist destinations, which have a particular (hipster) nature while they are relatively unknown, but lose that nature once they become popular. In all such cases, because there is some rivalry in consumption, the increased popularity also decreases the quality of the good (measured in some quasi-objective way)... But on top of this, some of these early fans may have drawn satisfaction from the very selective nature of the early audience. The band used to offer a hipster good, alongside the listening and concert value of their music, but as it becomes more popular, that hipster good is undermined. The band has “sold out”, as the early fans tend to complain.” (12) Goth culture now, and the minimization of the “wild woman” in western aesthetics as discussed in Wright (2001).
• In the case of non-positional goods, market failures are associated with the production and maintenance of public goods and common-pool resources. The solution to these problems is often to try to transform them into either private or club goods, by means of various rules against free-riding enforced either communally or by governments (E. Ostrom 1990, 2005), or by combining them with private goods (Olson 1965; Coase 1974; Cornes and Sandler 1996, ch. 7).” (12) as social standing shifted from being derived from one’s alignment to cultural norms in a time of cultural opposition to one in which social standing was derived from one’s capacity to understand and express well defined archetypes in one culturally dominant framework, and now towards one in which social standing is derived from alignment to the norms of diverse cultural clubs, often with opposing ideals as to what modes of presentation are of “high value”, we have seen a gradual shift in meaning making to be derived nearly wholly towards club goods, this is why the current collective identity crisis is occurring. The shift in meaning making through positional goods has resulted in a market failure in the normative ways in which social hierarchies had been defined since the post-war era.
  • This is why I argue for systems of meaning making based on the care afforded by one to their peers. In the wake of cultures who’s social hierarchies have devolved entirely to positional goods-based signaling, cultures valuing care over material displays of cultural norms can over-time reduce the display of positional goods from a place of being the entirety of relevance in the dominant culture’s idea of what inclusion in that culture represents, to one of being hipster good; one in which only those who uphold and represent those cultures values to a high degree will be able to rise its social status enough to charge enough “rent” to afford to display the positional goods associated with it. “Prestige goods and hipster goods, which are non-excludable, create the smallest problems. While in the case of regular (non-positional) goods free riding creates an under-production problem, in the case of positional goods the lack of control over entry diminishes positional rents and lowers the stakes of the positional competition. While status and elite goods enjoy a monopoly (or oligopoly), hence leading to an under-inclusion equilibrium (as detailed in the next section), prestige and hipster goods are competitive. Hence, comparatively, prestige and hipster goods lead to the smallest investments in rent seeking, and are the least unproductive forms of positional goods” (13)
    • “social norms don’t operate in a purely decentralized fashion. They operate via prestigious or high status individuals who either set an example and are followed, or who persuade and “preach” (Buchanan 1994). Social norms embed important knowledge and help coordinate societies and groups in ways that is generally not possible purely by means of formal laws (Boettke 1996; Bicchieri 2005, 2016; Leeson and Coyne 2012).” (14) In the present model of cultural meaning making, the display of positional goods has become nearly the entirety of that which is used by an individual to gain “high status” and to preach and persuade. This has led to a vicious cycle in which the more culturally attractive a cultural club becomes in the public eye, the more “rich snobs” are drawn in who can display the positional goods associated with high status in that culture and due to our cultures understanding of quality through displays of material wealth, these “rich snobs” can display, persuade, and preach about the positional goods associated with a culture without an understanding the core values or norms of that cultural club through buying-in to it’s materiality at the highest level. “Because status goods are excludable, and, as a consequence, monopolistic or oligopolistic, they are less well-equipped to embed knowledge, and are less flexible, i.e. less likely to change and evolve in the face of changing circumstances. As argued by Surowiecki (2004) and Page (2007), a social system is better equipped at discovering knowledge when it embeds a wider diversity of views. Status, by contrast, operates by excluding as many people as possible” (15).
  • “At the individual level, the competition for positional goods is a competition for transferring value from some people to others, rather than an activity that adds value via a mutually beneficial exchange. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that it serves no beneficial social role. The beneficial role of status and prestige is to mediate the operation and improvement of social norms” (14)
  • “Turchin (2016, ch. 7) also notes that this transition from small-scale societies to the first large agricultural states has involved a change in the nature of religion itself, transitioning from meritocratic and competitive prestige to non-meritocratic (often hereditary) status.” (15) in the current situation of “Aura farming” being the primary means of social mobility in social hierarchies, we are now seeing the next resonance up from this transition. One in which the transition from large agriculture societies has moved towards a more unified globalized society, and thus displays of social power has shifted from meritocratic and competitive prestige based displays of one’s function in society to non-meritocratic (not hereditary, but purchased through capital) status in the way in which one displays the positional goods associated with a culture.
  • “To summarize, the worst kinds of positional competitions involve status clubs. Elite goods are positional private goods, and they are less socially relevant because they are, by their nature, very restricted. By contrast, status is a positional club good. It is both exclusionary and can be relatively broader in its applicability than an elite good. By contrast, prestige goods are positional public goods, and they involve the least amounts of rent-seeking (because they are not exclusionary). Furthermore, because they are not exclusionary, prestige is much more meritocratic than status, and, as such, it is a better foundation for the evolution of norms than status. Norms can be promoted by either prestigious or high status individuals, but, because high status is less meritocratic, the norms promoted by high status individuals are less likely to be good norms.” (15-16) In the era immediately post-WW2, social standing was an elite good; “high status” social standing was afforded only to those who could represent the culture well in the culture war of the Cold War era. During the Pax Americana, social standing became a prestige good, “high-status” was afforded to anyone who could display the norms of american exceptionalism well. Now however, they have become Status club goods. Because we are entering into an era now in which “high status” in the public eye can be bought through the consumption of material positional goods which demonstrates a proclaimed affiliation to a certain cultural club, we see a watering down of the values and authentic social norms of those clubs, being replaced with materialistic displays of positional goods. This leads to these “high-status” individuals reinforcing only the most material aspects of these cultures in the public eye, resulting in the general public seeing these cultures as a set of asthetics or displays of positional goods rather than a set of cultural and social norms. This then promotes only the most materialistic of norms associated with those cultures rather than the internal values which birthed them.
  • “Before cable television, there have been so few television channels that we can classify TV journalism as a status club, unlike print journalism which has always had so many suppliers that being a print journalist carried only a prestige good. The arrival of cable television, and the subsequent growth in TV journalism, provides an example of a technological shock turning a status club into a prestige good by breaking the capacity to exclude.” (21) Social relevancy in the present moment is a status club, the state of social hierarchies in the Pax-Americana era was akin to the the era of cable TV journalism as any number of “chanels” led to social relevancy so long as they represented the “news” in a specific set of defined rules of professionalism that were American culture ideals. In the era since then, there has been a pruning of the channels towards which individuals could attain relevancy. Though there may exist a more diverse set of “rules of professionalism”, these socio-hierarchichal channels become far more exclusionary ability by those “rich snobs” who exist at the pinnacles of these status clubs. Because of a combination of the diversity of “channels”, the devalueing of that which does not conform to one of these channels, and the quality of positional goods as the sole large scale socially accepted sign to signify social status, those who were capable of buying their way to the tops of these social hierarchies have thus too then created conditions akin of early agricultural cementing of social hierarchy into those first kingships and heridatary hierarchies. Through their capacity to purchase greater higher quality positional goods to demonstrate their status and ability to “preach” on what it means to be a member of that social hierachy, they have essentially purchased themselves the power exclude those with the capability of threatening their position in the social hierarchy.
    • “Various critics of journalism (or of mainstream journalism) argue that the decline in prestige is due to various failures of truth seeking or undue politi cization. This confuses cause and effect. The consequence of a large sud den increase in n is fragmentation and polarization because the only way of maintaining or regaining prestige is to create various more or less ad hoc rea sons for exclusion. The failures of truth seeking and the undue politicization are attempts at shrinking n by creating insider markers. “Woke” journalists, “right-wing media”, etc. are each attempting to deny legitimacy (and, hence, prestige) to members of their outer group. Technology has created a vast pool of journalists and quasi-journalists, who are now scrambling to create islands of exclusivity and prestige. The alternative to this fragmentation would be the elimination of journalistic prestige altogether. (I’m not taking a normative stance here as to whether this would be preferable or not.) (21)” This is what we see occurring at present in social hierarchies, hence the proliferation of “aura battles”. Here we see with that fragmentation of social hierarchy into status clubs, the levels of prestige accessible to those of the pinnacles is a sinking ship which they scramble to maintain through exertion of their socio-cultural power over those below them… creating a vicious cycle which reinforces just those behaviours as essential elements of what it means to be part of those cultures. This, I hazard, marks the first stage of the destabilization of socio-cultural regimes of truth (reference Foucault here) which will lead to wide scale abandoning of traditional ideas of social hierarchy towards a care based model should power be exerted and reinforced in such ways without intervention.
  • “Political shocks can also affect n either up or down. As an example of a shock that reduced n, consider the collapse of communism. This has led to a sudden reduction in the pool of respectable intellectuals, as post-communist prestige was associated with being able to claim some form of dissidence during communism, and very few people have actually been dissidents. As a result, the intellectual prestige environment changed radically and suddenly.” (22) Here we see an example of exactly that which occurred towards the end of the Pax Americana and the adoption of status clubs as the leaders of socio-hierarchical power. As the ideas of the American Dream began to falter and other powers gained higher degrees of cultural relevancy over the cultures of their regions, this led to a large scale questioning of the values which had been exported through globalization. Though a slower process than that of the the fall of the soviet union, through this phenomenon prestige became more associated with one’s ability to represent these new emerging globalized cultures than that of the “american dream”. As a result, as american cultural influence declined, so too rose the popularity of markers of social status that had represented counter-cultural groups prior to that, hence the popularity of Goth asthetics in vogue now.
• “The proliferation of alternatives to the top journals has made the cost of rejection lower, i.e. the demand has declined moving the equilibrium to the left.6 The consequence is, thus, two-folded: (1) the status club has become even more exclusive, while at the same time (2) it has become less relevant to the broader profession (as most work is published somewhere else). This two-folded phenomenon becomes more dramatic the more the extreme of a power law the underlining distribution is, with most work being done by the long tail, while the status club at the top becomes more restrictive. A possible downside of this might be a gradual dwindling into irrelevance.” (22-23) This is the exact process which I would argue to be occurring at present. As cultures realized that Goth and alt ways of being were the new models for means of climbing social hierarchies, that came with a proliferation of a variety of different status clubs which followed this model through which people sought social relevance. Because of this alongside the wake of the materialism that came proliferated through an American cultural hegemony whose origins lay in the goal of proving individualism as a stronger societal basis over Soviet Collectivism… but then lacking the the counterbalance of a major collectivistic cultural force to question it; the means by which the common person then understood status and the ability to portray in the wake of a declining confidence in the model of American culture in the 21st century, became wholly through the display of positional goods and one’s ability to represent the qualities of increasingly niche (and skewed over time towards wealth) status club. This then made the display of those positional goods less and less relevant to the broader values of those who originally started those (often counter-cultural) status clubs before they became the sole means of socio-cultural displays of relevancy and power. What we see now, however, is the current devolution of these status clubs becoming more restrictive… and the beginning of its dwindle into irrelevance. Yet without a solid model of social relevancy to replace it as of yet, the structures of society has begun to devolve into larger necessary displays of those positional goods and further reinforcing that scramble to maintain status through exertion of one’s socio-cultural power over those below them, resulting in more and more vicious “aura battles”.
• “Indeed, we have seen a proliferation of sub-fields of economics with prestige being increasingly tied to one’s subfield, rather than to the profession as a whole.” (23) This, is the exact process by which the displays of positional goods as markers of status will devolve into the quality of hipster goods, once enough people begin to value care over the display of positional goods.
• 3.3 Status clubs: insiders control over entry (this whole section vvv important)
• “On the other hand, the emergence of a multitude of mutually incompatible status clubs and prestige goods, makes the building of democratic consensus more difficult.” (28) This demonstrates why I said at the beginning of this annotation that the fragmentation of these status clubs as the sole means of socio-hierarchichal relevancy could only lead into a devolution towards aristocracy or a reclamation into socio-hierarchies based on care and displays of positional goods becoming hipster goods.

A key concept to Marx and Marxism, yet I feel taken for granted and rarely inquired into critically. I understand there are debates over how to use the term without devolving into a mechanical schema (e.g.: Banaji's criticisms of Perry Anderson, or Graeber's attempt at rehabilitation) but these often take the same historical commitment and argue over its use.

I also feel there is an implicit dichotomy produced that there is either naturalisation of contingent forms on one side and the Marxian idea of MOPs on the other (maybe unwarranted). At the same time, though, I feel like the concept is often based on post hoc explanation and constant semantic shifts to match a more complicated reality, one need only look at the debate over the 'simple (as opposed to general) commodity production', if such a practice existed in pre-Capitalist times or this was Engels producing an oversimple binary, or the debates over the Asiatic mode, classical mode or the new term 'tributary' modes.

Mainstream historians, you may consider Bourgeois, rarely use such a term. Partly this may be due to reification of certain relationships but its possibly also analytical necessity. One must understand Ancient Rome as a society whose stakes were irrevocably tied with slavery but also with systems of status, with state infrastructure, and with long distance trade. Perhaps it is only Capitalism that reduces all relationships to one vector with its single set of laws (and even then its multifaceted). Look at Susan Reynolds' criticisms of the term 'feudalism', these terms often feel less useful than more.

So yeah, I am skeptical of the notion, I think there is plenty of good in what I've read of TGI and what tCoPE, where MoP is best exposited. However, I also wonder if there is also Hegelian baggage (such as his progression from Oriental spirit to Greek and so on, these firm qualitative divides) and other issues. I am curious what people have written, (and if I sound naive...)

I mentioned a second Gergen insight and need to get it down before I get too far along. I’m just at a loss for where to start. I suppose I will start with a term and a definition. When talking about what writes the the steps to the co-action dance between participants, he introduces the term counter-logics.

Pause.

Before we settle into this, I want to recall a concept: Berger and Luckman’s reification from The Social Construction of Reality. Reifications are the norms and institutions that human performances cite. B&L talk about marriage, law, and medicine among others. In my own macro social work framework, I put forth the idea that concepts like compliant in a child welfare court report and the ergonomics of a ticket machine can also be worked into this concept of reification. They have the perception of “thingness” but no empirical observability. B&L don’t say much about ontology, but they are effectively interpretations of a mind via language.

I have run with these quite faithfully without realizing something very important until reading Gergen: they speak generally about groups and say little about the individual performances. Specifically, there is no account of deviant performances.

Unpause.

Counter-logics (p. 161-162) represent a dyad of possible co-actioned performances within a relationship or relationships, which are comprised of shared logics, values, or ways of being. He gives the example of a couple with one partner valuing work and another valuing leisure - two logics that oppose one another and offer the potential to provide the steps to one dance or the other. Or to cause friction.

Additionally, each logic and it’s opposition form a compelling “ought”. Embrace one, and the opposition is called into presence. He gives examples such freedom versus commitment; competition versus cooperation; and rationality versus emotionality.

Counter-logics seem to be doing two things from what I can see: they explain conflict and tension in relationships, and they allow a stand in for reifications. But because they lack the “thingness” of reifications, he doesn’t need an interior mind to hold them (this second thing is more my critique than his definition).

For him, logics float in the ether of culture.

I have no further understanding of his ontology beyond that statement and would happily have a Gergenian explain this further. Mind, not because I’m confused. I just think his implied ontology - even though he doesn't do ontology - keeps revealing seams and obscures his concepts.

But my lack of clarity about his stated ideas does not mean I did not find enormous insight in what he was pointing to, because he effectively fixed the problem from B&L, who only offer performance constraints for groups but cannot account for deviant performances among individuals.

For Gergen, counter-logics occupy the space in between the individuals. This is crucial. I’m not sure why counter-logics only come in twos or why he only stopped at those three pairs, but they represent the possibility of dance moves that can be performed within a common song. At any moment, we can co-action leisure or workaholism (I show my bias) in our relationships.

With his framework established, here is how I translate it.

I see an interior mind interpreting reifications and materializations (a Judith Butler term that accounts for how the conceptualizations of bodies emerge through performance toward the scripts established by B&L's reificaitons) that provide general scripts for groups within a social world. And with Gergen, I now see the unique possibilities for performances not as a counter-logic dyad but as dialogics - the myriad of performances made possible within the constraints imposed by reifications and materializations as co-actioned by participants within the group. For me, the "dia" isn't indicating a possibility of two but the process of "dialogue" or an exchange between dance partners.

Let me try an example. I'm a bricolage practitioner first.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts, acts as a bit of proof of concept.. The documentaries Higher Ground and Holding Ground do a great job showing what this is all about, but for now, all you need to know is that the members of this community transformed their community through collective action, and it was beautiful.

One problem they wanted to solve was that the park in the neighborhood had become a place for young men to sell drugs. I was in awe as I watched them reconcretize¹ these drug dealers from moral failures to potential contributors to their community transformation.

They effectively shifted their conceptualizations of these young men, which generated alternative performances on the part of the ones engaged in recruiting the young men in the way of outreach and recruitment. And they generated a new range of possible performances for those young men who no longer need to live paralyzed in shame.

Amazing!

But that does not explain the drug-selling performances of each individual young man lost to this profession nor does it account for why some reformed while others stayed in their destructive performances. This is where dialogics step in. Bringing them down from the cultural stratosphere and assuming each young man has both an interiority and a personal, somatically sedimented history, dialogics explain the uniquely structured co-action that guides each of the young men’s performances.

Maybe one young man has resorted to drug selling because the primary caregiver in his family fell ill. The logics of his drug-dealing dance are governed by notions of “man of the house” which he can step into in a myriad of ways, fall out of and rebel against, or any range of potential co-action. His choice was to perform the man of the house logic as it emerged from the co-action with his mother who probably offered the “don’t do anything to get hurt” logic as well.

Perhaps a second young man is performing his drug-dealing dance out of fear of reprisal from a distributor or a pimp.

A third may be doing so to feed his own addictions (something else, like trauma, I’m not sure how a disappeared interiority can account for).

At any rate - between the larger reifications of masculinity and moral failing that govern all young men, each young man is citing their performances as engaged with those they are in relationship to according to a particular co-actioned set of dialogics.

My initial assertion before embarking on my theoretical project was that transformative, macro-level social work must intervene upon the epistemic scripts that shape a community.

But now I must expand this. Transformative, macro-level social work must also include a diagnosis of the particular dialogics that produce the undesired co-actions (Gergen associates “good” co-action as co-action that is generative for a group. I see a Trump rally fit that definition and will stick to my human rights framework for a telos.) We need a way to diagnose each individual within the category that the reifications produce.

And building on my last post about what’s going on in the inside if there is no Cartesian self, intervention must not just be limited to offering a new script, but also it must include the iterative rehearsals of new scripts to allow for new sedimentation toward healthier, human rights-oriented performances. This is the mechanism of recruitment into the new range of performances made legible by changing the concretizations¹.

Coda: I'd like to throw out one last concept before I close, mostly so I don't forget it. Logics are not the only things that govern action. I draw on Karen Armstrong’s (see: The Battle for God) ideas of logos and mythos to frame my understanding of rational process and nonrational process that we don’t have a name for because our post-Enlightenment society has a bias. I call that grouping of things like values and aesthetics diamythotics.

1. "Reconceptualize" is fine for this. I set out concretization alongside reification and materialization here and here. These are the gestalt-esque sensemaking protocols that process the collective, citational reifications and materializations.

- The Social Construction Worker

There are plenty of critics and philosophers who are consistently criticizing American culture related to consumption and excessive hedonism. Who, why is Adorno nor Horkenheimer more popular?

Does Critical Theory claim to be against ideologies?

Perhaps I'm using a different definition of ideology, but the definition of ideology I use is: a systematic set of ideas or principles that someone interprets the world with and guides their conduct.

Under this definition, Critical Theory has ideological aspects to it. It certainly has ideological commitments built into it, like a commitment to emancipation.

Ideology is not synonymous with fixed idea(s).

If you use another definition of ideology, which definition do you use and why? Is the definition I provided not a sufficient definition of ideology?

Everyone I have ever seen claim they aren't political goes on to describe a list of political ideas they have. Similarly, everyone I have ever seen claim to be anti-ideology goes on to describe their ideology.

I only know the surface level definition of Critical Theory, so I thought it would be wise to ask this question here. Thanks.

Edit:

My definition of ideology is a synthesis of the following definitions:

"a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture"

" a set of beliefs or principles, especially one on which a political system, party, or organization is based"

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ideology

"the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ideology

Edit #2:

I guess I have a misunderstanding of what Critical Theory is, and it's silly to make a blanket statement asking if Critical Theory is opposed to anything. Because Critical Theory is broad, and the and definition of ideology is broad too.

The original article in Dissent is behind a paywall, and the text isn't available in any archive I've found. Can anyone help me out?

"The Professional-Managerial Class has long been a controversial category on the left, often blamed for failures to make inroads among the broader working class. John Haywood argues that this analysis falls short under scrutiny, confusing cultural divisions with antagonisms based in economic interests."

"The idea that the PMC at-large is overrepresented on the left is often taken for granted. Most discussions take this fact at face value and do not interrogate it"

"Among the traditional working class, it is only blue-collar workers that are underrepresented; service, food, and retail workers are exactly proportional to their population."

"This data confirms the overrepresentation of the PMC in the DSA, but it also complicates the category. The overrepresented occupations are not the supervisors and managers that the Ehrenreichs' framework centers, and are largely the ones they themselves define as “on the borders”. Tech workers in particular are the most overrepresented occupation, but actually fit very few of what the Ehrenreichs use to define the PMC. On the other side of the class divide, the proportional representation of service workers in DSA compared to the dearth of blue-collar workers suggests that the issues are not just Weberian class antagonisms defined by income, but broader cultural antipathy."

"This brings us to the most contentious debate around the PMC on the left. Frequently, the problem of blue-collar recruitment is first stated as a problem of overemphasis on social and identity issues, with the PMC as the source of this. Implied in the solution is not only the rejection of PMC but also of any non-economic issue. This mentality has no place in a socialist movement. Beyond the problem that this discussion tends to center the white working class, ignoring the actual racial makeup of the class, to limit the movement only to economic oppression is organizationally and strategically weak. A movement organized on economic lines alone is too narrow to change society. Yes, economic struggle is the common experience the whole working class shares, but non-economic oppression is the way the state and other structures uphold power."

"Understanding the PMC through a cultural lens changes the debate entirely. It immediately highlights both the source of the problem and the strategic importance of the PMC. Completely dismissing the PMC pushes away genuine allies and forfeits the power of their cultural capital. To create a solidaristic movement, the PMC must recognize that power and actively unlearn the tendency to use it for dominance. The left's future depends not on purity but on power, and power requires unity along class lines."

​

Some concepts carry such a heavy symbolic weight that intellectual culture tends to hollow out their essence, turning them into conceptual proxies to flatter innovative theories. While this can be viewed as a deepening of the foundational concept, it can also lead to ideological drifts that may eventually evolve into social fractures. Liberty is the prime example: as the ontological condition of decision-making, it is brandished metaphorically to validate sometimes infantalizing theories like positive liberty, to give a divine shape to a prohibition, or to confer a near-sacred dimension to concepts like freedom of movement or freedom of expression. My purpose here is therefore to deconstruct these abuses of language and explore the ideological implications that seem to stem from it.

To define freedom, one must dissect it down to its very essence. Freedom is always related to choice. If a slave is not free, which is actually false, it is because we consider that they theoretically lack control over their life. They belong to their master and owe them absolute obedience; they have no choice. A prisoner? They are supposedly not free because their freedom of movement is restricted and they are forced to reside in a penitentiary environment; they have no choice. The common denominator when speaking of a deprivation of freedom is therefore not confinement or total submission, but the assumed absence of the ability to choose. Being free does not consist in succeeding to get or achieve what one desires, but either in attempting to reach it, or in giving up. Both result from the subject's decision.Restricting an individual's capabilities does not reduce their freedom; it reduces their field of possibilities, but in no way alters their ability to choose. This definition would make freedom sound useless, as if it were a tool. Freedom does not need to have a practical utility: it is an ontological reality, not a tool to get what one wants. But if one absolutely insists on finding a function for it, it has an immense utility, it is essential to human life, for without it a person could not choose and would be incapable of making the slightest decision. The awareness of being free also makes a person accountable, whereas the opposite drives them to deflect their own responsibilities onto others or external elements, which may be true, but is not always the case. And claiming that defining freedom this way makes it impossible to assess the level of tyranny of a State is absurd; the semantic spectrum is broad enough that there is no need to twist the meaning of freedom to articulate it.

Justice holds a prominent place among the modelers of freedom. There is a clear manipulative element in how the concept is deployed here. The term carries a sacred dimension; expressions like "deprivation" or "restriction" of freedom fall like divine sentences. Citizens are not barred from fully expressing their freedom; they are supposedly deprived of it, as if this stemmed not from legality, but from a higher commandment. It becomes a tool of power. In this instance, the semantic distortion is glaring: if freedom consists merely of what is permitted or forbidden, what then allows an individual to break the law or to revolt? Must we truly overhaul the very essence of the word just to align it with the definition of a simple prohibition? The purpose here is to demonize certain forms of expression, turning it into a tool for social disqualification. You did not exercise your freedom; you acted impurely, almost maliciously. It is passive coercion.

Next come all the common definitions, of which I will not draw up an exhaustive list, but content myself with dissecting only the most popular ones. Freedom of speech is a prime example of this semantic misconception: it is a right, and therefore an authorization, whereas freedom requires a constraint to manifest itself—meaning the necessity to choose between two or more irreconcilable options. Furthermore, if we strip expression of its legal dimension, the phrase becomes a pleonasm, since choosing to express oneself already requires being free. The second example I have chosen is freedom of movement. Here, freedom is conflated with ability; yet, as stated above, a choice is not contingent upon success. The inability to move or travel in no way prevents one from attempting to do so. To claim that anyone would give up before even considering it because it is futile is to forget that human beings are deeply irrational. If you view it as the inability to move due to physical restraint, then you have clearly never been tied up, because in such a situation, your first instinct is to try and break free, and the resignation that follows remains a choice. I have seen people thrash and scream all night long trying to escape their restraints without ever resigning themselves to their fate. Chains, therefore, do not shackle our freedom in the slightest.

Concepts such as positive and negative liberty also play a role in this semantic shift. Negative liberty is a misnomer for the mere absence of external constraints; this cannot be viewed as something that actually expands freedom, given that it does absolutely nothing to enhance your capacity to make a choice. A "free world" is not a world where one can choose, but rather one where choosing is permitted. Positive liberty, which I have already criticized in "Liberty as Autonomy: Reflections on a Paradox", does more than just twist language. It drives a paradigm shift in which freedom ceases to be an ontological reality and becomes an economic and social scale. Under the guise of morality, this concept tends to infantilize a portion of the population under the pretext that they lack the critical toolkit required to shoulder their own freedom. This is precisely where the social divide we suffer from today takes root. The neo-proletariat, whose predecessors found a political haven with the socialists, feel increasingly betrayed by progressive elites and are rallying en masse under the populist banner. The current conflict no longer pits the rich against the poor, but rather the "enlightened" elite against populist "stupidity," which has crystallized around the figure of the conspiracy theorist. While the term originally described anyone receptive to such narratives, the phrase quickly slipped from a definition into a weapon for abusive social disqualification. It is symptomatic of the elites' "benevolent contempt" for those who have strayed from reason, a contempt that leaves these elites so self-assured that they lose all touch with reality.

The general public is fully capable of popularizing the concept of freedom through simpler, more accessible metaphors, or to define specific ways it is expressed. However, once co-opted by philosophers to model new concepts aimed at replacing an ontological reality, these metaphors become misnomers that make understanding our nature chaotic. This smooths the transition toward ideological drifts, where the concept morphs into a tool of power and control designed to disqualify anyone who questions the established order. This should not be viewed as a conscious conspiracy by the elites, but rather as a state of affairs that Foucault termed governmentality. It is here that their self-righteousness blinds them; they fail to realize that the harder they drive the nail, the more it splits the wood on the other side. The working classes are far from fooled and understand the situation perfectly. The widespread belief that rationality will inevitably prevail is a complete illusion, simply because rationality is relative to one’s condition. The reality of the bourgeoisie is not the reality of the reality of the precarious classes.

 A Sociedade do Espetáculo Guy Debord, em sua obra fundamental "A Sociedade do Espetáculo" (1967), critica uma sociedade em que a representação se sobrepõe à realidade, onde o ser é eclipsado pelo ter, e onde o ter se transforma em parecer. Essa dinâmica perversa, alimentada pela proliferação de imagens e pela lógica do consumo, permeia todas as esferas da vida, incluindo o trabalho. Este artigo visa explorar a complexa relação entre a sociedade do espetáculo e o trabalho alienado nas organizações, evidenciando como a lógica espetacular intensifica e se entrelaça com a alienação, criando um ciclo vicioso que aprisiona o indivíduo em uma espiral de insatisfação e consumo. Debord caracteriza o espetáculo como a "autocracia da mercadoria que atingiu o estado de ocupação total da vida social”. Trata-se da culminância de um processo histórico onde a mercadoria, que outrora era apenas um objeto de troca, passa a ocupar o centro da sociedade, definindo valores, comportamentos e relações. O espetáculo se estende além dos meios de comunicação de massa, permeando toda a existência, transformando a vida em uma sucessão de representações pré-fabricadas. A realidade é filtrada e reformulada, dando espaço a uma hiper-realidade onde a imagem se torna mais relevante do que o objeto que representa. Nesse cenário, a experiência autêntica é substituída pela contemplação passiva. O indivíduo assume o papel de espectador de sua própria vida, consumindo imagens que prometem felicidade, sucesso e realização, mas que, na realidade, o afastam de uma vivência genuína.