AWOL - Supplement Sessions on Marx's Critique of Capitalism [EXTRA CREDIT]

The Spectacle: A Skeleton Key
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2228885/Spectacular-Times-Spectacle-A-Skeleton-Key

“Life itself has become a show contemplated by an audience. That audience is the proletariat. Reality is now something we look at and think about, not something we experience.” In society, Capitalism controls reality. The citizen of society is the audience in which they are eager to sell their labor power to the capitalist. By doing so, the audience is first influenced by the capitalist, similar to how the audience is influenced by the media. In both given situations, the audience soon alienates itself by working for the capital. Reality is soon an illusion to those who are ‘working for a living’; the proletarians.

Based on what I wrote on my last entry on Marx’s Critique on Capitalism, ‘Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, another philosopher at the time [during Marx’s theory of Capitalism], believed that the change in quantity, in any given situation, leads to a different kind of reality. He thought that history was a process that the world was most likely going to turn into in a point in time; a physical reality.

In relation to Capitalism, the process of people becoming proletarian is due to “The Spectacle”. According to The Spectacle: A Skeleton Key, the Spectacle is “a social relation among people mediated by images… The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living… the liar has lied to himself” (A Skeleton Key). The Spectacle is a fake world; a constructed reality. In capitalism, the Spectacle is made by convincing people with the false reality of capitalism, and to work for the capitalists. However, according to Howard J. Ehrlich, there has been there is a kind of division made between capitalism and the state, in this case, the state would be the people working for the capitalist. He says that “It exists in our minds, and we produce it in our day-to-day existence. The banalities of everyday life, the meaninglessness of most work, our profound isolation from others, and our being treated—these are not byproducts of capitalism: they are key mechanisms of social control” (Ehrlich). It seems to Howard J. Ehrlich that Alienation is not caused by the capital, but instead is caused by oneself for deciding to dedicate his/her labor-power to the system. This falls back into the a cycle where people are used to following daily routines in which they work for the large businesses to earn money. Because people chose to work for the capital, “life is divided between ‘work’ time and ‘free’ time. But we sleep on, buying back in our ‘free’ time what we produced in our ‘work’ time. Real life is elsewhere” (A Skeleton Key). It is to those who consider working for the capital the reality of how people survive in society in order to gain money and ‘make a living’, when IN REALITY, it is the way people are actually hurting their selves in society by creating this illusion of making progress in one’s life.

Because of the binary opposition of Reality vs. the Essence in Capitalism, people are unaware of the spectacle that is causing one to alienate his/her self from their original life. Even though alienation is considerably “good for business” by “[multiplying] needs” (A Skeleton Key), Marx would agree that it is a manipulating way to abuse laborers who are trying to survive in society. And because laborers have no choice but to work, depending on the class of the laborer, the capitalist has an advantage to create a spectacle where it causes the laborer to alienate him/her to become proletarian, and thus forever a part of the system until that person dies. Unfortunate, but that is the American way of life, to a certain extent.