Crack Capitalism [Paperback]

The walls all came tumbling down in 1989. The end of history was proclaimed, a clarion call for a New World Order. We were all to bask in the glow of the new dawn rising, the edict finally announcing a captialist end of history, a paradise on earth. Living Marxism, with the Soviet collapse, along with its dominoes, was pronounced expired. It lay supine. Dormant, lifeless on the mortary slab, it finally withered as a pale decaying corpse.

In the past twenty years there has been a minimal dividend, except a Polish plumber surplus and more physically attractive people serving behind bars. Young people uprooted by the lack of job prospects in their respective Iron Curtain countries were provided with freedom to migrate across Europe to seek work. The money sent back as remittances or drunk away to stem the tide of trauma.

Twenty plus years the West has found a new 1984 bogeyman in the hooded shape of the Moslem, another pariah state; North Korea/Iran/Venezuela and the wheels turn round and round, as we wait expectantly for the peace dividend. The weapons pointed at the East have since had their co-ordinates changed.

Capitalism swept onward throughout the world infecting China, Vietnam and the former European colonies. It was the onward rush of consumerism,

This books views the effects of this victory through the keyhole of Marx's alienated labour. It returns to the work of the Situationists (Vanegeim and De Bord) Henri Lefebvre and Hakim Bey.

The worker sells their labour for a wage for 8 hours plus, in a rite, all taken for granted measured by the ticking clock. During this time period they are induced into a psychologically coercive system where they display a work "front." Forced to compete with other workers to retain their post, this competition fractures community ties, producing the alienated wo/man. They undertake jobs at odds with the notion of personal creation, and life fulfillment. Particularly acute in factories and call centres, where minimal space for experimental creation is afforded, it also infects all "middle class" labour. The worker is reduced to being a machine cypher. When they return back to the place they inhabit, the home, the worker is bombarded with adverts promising a better existence, if they purchase a certain product.

This aims to relieve the worker of their surplus income, with the belief the product will induce a form of instant euphoria. Relief from the tedium of a life of drudgery is paradise. This critique extends the notion, alienation sucks on the lifeblood of leisure time, specifically constructed by those social forces wanting to produce an ersatz recompensary experience. Replicating the notion of fun, by channelling the frustration of work into a surrogate exhileration. Bring on the gameshow, the holiday experience in the Maldives, Tenerife and other holidays in other peoples misery,

This explains the package holiday, Disneyland, the rise of bestsellers, chart records, must have gadgets, new cars, throwaway sofas, magazines. It also extends to how relationships are formed, forged and disipate based upon the constant imagery bombardment of what is desirable. See this weeks Heat magazine to see Jordan, Kerry Katona, Posh Spice, Cheryl Cole, Charlotte Church, Liz Hurley and live within their shadow. See Vogue/Telegraph/Mail with its lifestyle choices, become someone the opposite of the "chav" culture.

Capitalism uses time to measure all worth, and then money to define its sense of quality. It constructs artiicial constructs people buy into and immerse themselves.

Anything revolutionary would have to extend its critique to this invasion of measurement into all things; partners, housing, work, culture, leisure, the notion of what constitutes fun/entertainment. This book begins to analyse the impact of politics and these cultural forms of freedom as detailed above.

It puts forward ideas for a personal revolution. Changing everyday life is the key, highlighting how historically life was marked by festivals and bachanals rather than rush and guzzle. A quick walk around the outside towns, lying out of Central London see vast numbers of young people inebriated with total oblivion in glitz dance hall mecca's, all pumping out alienated machine music to get people into some ersatz fun. Or the younger ones hang out in train stations and just ooze boredom and aggression. These experiences aim to replicate the illicit zeitgeist of acid raves, the carnality of the punk period and the liberation of 50's Teddy Boys/Girls jive halls.

Freedom from work need not be obliteration.

Signposting a slow movement based on recapturing time away from the man doing normal things bringing self fulfillment rather than showing off some chintz, glitz and bling.

It brings back Marx to make sense of the world, instead of making it opaque and inaccessible to all but a few initiates, by drawing on the instinctual world. The critique however is that reading a book, or going for a walk, is not going to stop bullying in the workplace, the machine gun attacks in refugee camps, the spread of the paranoid spying state, the growth of weaponry, the migration of people from developing countries to the UK, the pressure on housing stock, the boredom of work. This tends to veer to the phenomelogical world. Lighting up a joint was perhaps a revolutionary act in 1968, now it just signals; escapism from this world. It is similar to having an avatar on a computer. With no future, and obliteration the way forward, someone has to discover the real instinctual world. Then finally you can build belief with an army of young gods dwelling upon the present rather than a melee of escapists stomping in the fields.