Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress by Smail & David

Author:Smail & David [Smail & David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906254773
Publisher: PCCS Books
Published: 2005-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. George Monbiot. Captive State: The corporate takeover of Britain. Macmillan, 2000.

2. Jean Baudrillard, 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press.

3. Naomi Klein. No Logo. Flamingo, 2001.

4. Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin Books, 1967.

5. A persuasive statement of a very similar view is to be found in Paul Farmer, On suffering and structural violence. In A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock (eds), 1997. Social Suffering. Univ. California Press.

6. In an excellent article in New Internationalist, (Eat, sleep, buy, die. New Internationalist, 329, November 2000) Jonathan Rowe uses almost identical words and ideas to reinforce the case:

In economics there is no concept of enough: just a chronic yearning for more, a hunger that cannot be filled.

This requires that all life must be converted into a commodity for sale. The result is a relentless process of enclosure. It started centuries ago with land. Today it is encroaching upon every aspect of our individual and collective beings.

Think about the growth industries today. We buy looks from plastic surgeons, mental outlooks from pharmaceutical companies, the activity of our bodies from ‘health’ clubs, interaction with friends from telecommunications firms, and on and on. Security comes from police departments, insurance companies and privatised prisons. Transport comes from oil and automobile companies.

Virtually every life function and process is turning into something we have to buy. And lest anyone suspect a tired ideological shtick, let’s say right here that the government is a culprit too. It turns education into schooling and community into bureaucracy—much as the market turns childhood into a petri dish of nagging.

Either way, what the economists call growth becomes a process of cannibalisation. The formal economy, private and public sectors alike, takes us apart piece by piece and then sells us back to ourselves.

We must become less so that the economy can become more. Little wonder we feel drained and stressed. We become the biological counterparts of the oil wells and toxic dumps, both the raw material of the economy and the receptacles of its waste. Meanwhile, millions don’t have enough to begin with.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.