The Connections Between Capitalism, Mass Consumption and the Totalitarian Regime
The Connections Between Capitalism, Mass Consumption and the Totalitarian Regime
Author: Rafael De Conti
Georg Lukacs, a hungarian philosopher who lived in the last century, built a theory about the capitalism that is essential to understand some reasons of the totalitarian regime and the connections of this regime with the contemporary phenomenon of mass consumption. Accordingly to the part of his work, that utilized the consumption�s relations as an object of study, the humans beings have become a number and, by the same process, have lost their singularity. This process would be done by the capitalism�s nature, which transforms everything into monetary value and, consequently, transform the singularity in particularity. Kant, enlightenment�s philosopher of the eighteenth century, taught us that the particularity is the opposite of the universality and that the singularity is the synthesis of these two spheres. For example, you, who is reading this text, are a human being like all the other people and, at the same time, you are a particularly person which is a constitutive part of the whole called human species. The singularity is, precisely, the union of this opposition (particularity-universality) and it is also the sphere which is responsible for making someone different from any other person. When we become a number, we lose the identity was given to us by this singularity�s sphere. From the Hannah Arendt political point of view, a twentieth century�s philosopher, the biggest problem of identity�s loss is the fact that, in this situation, a person can be replaced by another person, considering, also, that this replacement can be done by murder, as it happened at the Nazism, during World War II, when millions of human beings became disposable such as money and things exchanged in the mass consumption�s relations. Disposability is the same that the loss of all and any quality. It is possible that the power have a close relationship with the quantification process. Ultimately, a prisoner receives a number which substitutes his or her name aiming at better State�s control. The loss of the personality implies the denial of onself, and, consequently, the decreasing of power. Weakened, the prisoner can become more obedient. By this destroying mechanism, it is possible to say that the biggest problem in this prison system is that the singularity of the human being is destroyed when the substitution of his name by a number takes place. And, in a totalitarian regime, everyone is a prisoner in this sense. But Arendt goes further and says that in a totalitarian regime, such as the Nazism of World War II, the oppressed person is in a worse situation than a prisoner. The reason for this statement is that even a prisoner has some basic rights. A person which has lost all and any quality because of the loss of civil rights, such as the Jewish at the Hitler�s government, did not have even a minimum protection. These people cannot be heard as a prisoner can be, if we take into consideration the fact that a prisoner can claim about something through the law. The fundamental point of these philosophical views is that the normal economical organization and, consequently, the normal consumption life-style, can be the origin of a possible rise of a totalitarian regime to the power. RDC. 12.03.2008.