The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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- But we are not living in an
- In order to control the world, one must first name it
- In the real world
- Paid content and “advertorials” are now ubiquitous, making it difficult to know whether we are reading honest reporting or an ad with a byline
| Horowitz 22 [Eli Horowitz, 6-26-2022, "Capitalism Is the Real Information War," MR Online, https://mronline.org/2022/06/26/capitalism-is-the-real-information-war/, DOA: 7-6-2022, SMarx, JTong]
False Names: “Procrustics” and the Capitalist Attack on Free Communication In an ideal world, all of these nefarious tactics would be met by a robust response from governments, researchers, nonprofits, and the press. But we are not living in an ideal world. If anything, the opposite is closer to the truth: under capitalism, we are fast approaching dystopia. Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science-fiction master, foresaw our situation in a way that no other writer did. In his 1958 novel Eden, he proposed a method by which a tyrant could achieve total, permanent control over a populace—but without the use of jails, guards, or even constant surveillance. He called this method procrustics, and he described it like this: “It’s not that they do not have names for things, and for the relations between things, but that the names they have are in fact false, are masks.… In order to control the world, one must first name it.” Without the ability to speak the truth to one another, we cannot unite in action; and without the ability to unite in action, we cannot overthrow the tyrant that drives us toward poverty, strife, sickness, and misery. In Eden, the name of this tyrant is never revealed. In the real world, however, we know its name: capital. Thanks to the constant presence of corporate deception in our lives, we barely even have the words to describe what is happening to us. Regulatory agencies are dwarfed by the corporations they are supposed to oversee, watchdog nonprofits are overwhelmed, and the higher education system is buckling under the weight of private profiteering. But it is media organizations that have been hardest-hit in recent years, as private equity firms and other hostile investors have stripped newsrooms and shuttered entire reporting divisions. In other words, even when capitalism isn’t profiting by lying to us, it finds a way to profit by silencing the voices that want to offer us the truth. As news outlets get picked off like so many deer in hunting season, the ones that remain are being increasingly corrupted by hard-right ideologies and corporate money. Paid content and “advertorials” are now ubiquitous, making it difficult to know whether we are reading honest reporting or an ad with a byline. Profit-maximizing news organizations also shy away from stories that might damage their bottom lines, even when the stories are indisputably true. In 2018, for example, ESPN altered a fluff piece about a linebacker’s diet in order to avoid offending Wendy’s, one of its advertising partners. All of these practices are blatant violations of journalistic ethics, but capitalism will never choose transparency—let alone morality—over money. Not even our day-to-day conversations are safe. As many observers have noted in recent years, capitalist culture has begun leaking out into the broader world, interfering with our ability to simply talk to one another. Corporate “garbage language” has spilled over into casual speech, filling our conversations with meaningless jargon and inspiring many of us to think in toxic, empty-headed “grindset” memes. Naturally, the situation inside the workplace is even worse. Hundreds of posts on the popular r/antiwork subreddit feature bosses who falsely tell their employees that they are not allowed to discuss their wages. Other workers strain against job requirements that require them to lie to customers and colleagues. And by threatening, censoring, and retaliating against any workers who dare to speak their minds, corporations chop away at our ability to communicate with one another, thereby attacking dissent at the root. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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