AU CONTRAIRE

Soul Suicide in the Ballot Box as Palestinians Are Butchered

by Edward Curtin / October 24th, 2024

It’s been a long time but worth remembering, if you can, that when the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the whole world watched in horror.  The events of that day were repeated on television over and over and over again, to the point where they became afterimages lodged in people’s minds.

As a result, although the buildings were not brought down by the impact of planes (no plane hit Building 7) but by explosives planted in the buildings (see this and this, among extensive evidence), most people thought otherwise, just as they thought that the subsequent linked anthrax attacks were directed by Osama bin Laden when they were eventually proven to have originated from a U.S. military lab (thus an inside job), and, as a result of a massive Bush administration/corporate media propaganda campaign, most Americans supported the invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent invasion of Iraq, and decades of endless wars that continue to this day, bringing us to the edge of nuclear war with Iran and Russia.

It is impossible to understand the United States’ full-fledged support today for Israel’s genocide in the Middle East without understanding this history. Israel’s genocide is the United States’ genocide; they cannot be separated.

All these wars involve the machinations of the neo-conservative clique that in 1997 formed the Project for the New American Century that ran George W. Bush’s administration and whose protégées have come to exert great control of the foreign policies of Democratic and Republican administrations since. It is not that they lacked power before this, as a study of American foreign policy as far back as the Lyndon Johnson administration and its non-response to Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty confirms.

Contrary to the widespread claims that Israel runs U.S. Middle East foreign policy, I think it is important to emphasize that the reverse is true.

It is convenient to claim the tail wags the dog, but it is false.

Israel’s war crimes are U.S. war crimes.  If the U.S. wanted to stop Israel’s genocide and expansion of war throughout the region, it could do so immediately, for Israel is totally reliant on U.S. support for its existence – as they like to say, “It’s existential.”

All the news to the contrary is propaganda.  It is a sly game of responsibility ping-pong: shift the blame, keep the audience guessing as they hit their little hollow ball back and forth.

Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.  Such geo-political control is linked to the United States’ endless war on Russia and the control of natural resources throughout the vast region (a look at a map is requisite), stretching from the Middle East to southwest Asia up through the Black and Caspian Seas through Ukraine into Russia.

In both cases, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians whose ultimate target is Iran (America’s key enemy in the region as far back as the CIA’s 1953 coup d’état against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh), savage wars of extermination have been promoted through decades of carefully orchestrated propaganda.  In the former case, through the mainstream corporate media’s magic of repetitive cinematic images, and in the latter, through their absence.  To be shown photos of many thousands of dead and mutilated Palestinian children does not serve the U.S./Zionist’s interests. Propaganda’s methods must be flexible. Show, conceal.

The September 11 attacks and the current genocide, each in its own way, have been justified and paid for with similar but different credit cards without spending limits, the so-called wars on terror waged on the visual credit card of planes hitting buildings preceded and followed by endless pictures of Osama bin Laden, and the genocide of Palestinians on the holocaust credit card minus images of slaughtered Palestinians or any awareness of the terrorist history of the Zionist’s century-long racial nationalist settler movement of “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians from their land.

To know this, one has to read books, but they have been replaced by cell phones, functional illiteracy being the norm, even for college graduates who are treated to four years of wokeness education and anti-intellectualism that reduces their thinking to mush and graduates them with sciolistic minds at best.  I am being kind.

The eradication of historical knowledge and the devaluation of the written word are key to ignorance of both issues.  Digital media and cell phones are the new books, all few hundred words on an issue conveying information that conveys ignorance.  Guy DeBord put it succinctly: “That which the spectacle ceases to speak of for three days no longer exists.”  Amnesia is the norm.

To which I might add: that which the mass media spectacle continues to speak of or show images of for many days exists, even if it doesn’t.  It exists in the minds of virtual people for whom images and headlines create reality.  The electronic media is not only addictive but hypnotically effective, producing cyber people divorced from the material world.  News and information have become a form of terrorism used to implode all mental defenses, similar to the floors at the World Trade Center that went down boom, boom, boom.

The war crimes of US/Israel are readily available for viewing outside the coverage of the corporate mainstream media. Most of the world views them, but these are the unreal people, the ones who don’t count as human beings.  These war crimes are massive, ruthless, and committed proudly and without an ounce of shame.  To face this fact is not acceptable.

Those who pretend ignorance of them are guilty of bad faith.

Those who support either Harris or Trump are guilty of bad faith twice over, acting as if either one does not support genocide or that genocide is a minor matter in the larger scheme of things.

Choosing “the lesser of two evils” is therefore an act of radical evil hiding behind the mask of civic duty.

That it is commonplace only confirms these words from the English playwright Harold Pinter’s extraordinary Nobel Address in 2005:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El

Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Little has changed since 2005, except that these crimes have increased along with the propaganda denying them, together with vastly increased censorship – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all targets of U.S. bombs, just like Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, etc.  Now the U.S. has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and the voting public is all worked up over choosing between candidates supporting genocide and the massively expanded Israel attack on neighboring countries.  It is a frightening spectacle of moral indifference and stupidity as we await the Israel/U.S. bombing of Iran and Iran’s response.

Yet I ask myself and I ask you: Is there a connection between the voting public’s support for these war criminals and attention deficit disorder, amnesia, and dementia?

Or is this embrace of the demonic twins’ – US/Israel – foreign policy a sign of something far worse? A death wish?

Soul death?FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

Five Situationist Books


Ken Knabb <knabb@bopsecrets.org>
Tue, Oct 1, 4:31 PM 

PM Press has just republished two of my books:

Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited and translated by Ken Knabb
This is the most comprehensive collection of texts in English by the notorious group that helped inspire the May 1968 revolt in France and the international Occupy movement of 2011. For this new edition I fine-tuned all the translations and updated the bibliography to include comments on dozens of newer books by and about the situationists.




Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Translated and annotated by Ken Knabb
This pithy analysis of the fundamental structure of our society is arguably the most important radical book of the past hundred years, but it is also very challenging. This is the first edition in any language that includes extensive annotations, making it much more accessible.





PM Press now also distributes my other book:

Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb
Along with a variety of shorter articles and leaflets, this book includes “The Joy of Revolution,” in which I examine the pros and cons of a wide range of radical tactics and then offer some speculations on what life might be like after a situationist-type revolution.





PM Press has published many other books of related interest. I particularly recommend Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life and Anselm Jappe's Guy Debord, both translated by my friend Donald Nicholson-Smith.

These five books bring our real options into the open, helping us to better understand and undermine the absurd social system in which we find ourselves. If you aren't already familiar with them, I encourage you to check them out!

P.S. During October you can order any of these books from PM Press for 20% off (coupon code: OCTOBER).

____________________

Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis, and the Situationists

Vasilis Grollios

Routledge, New York and London, 2024. 206 pp., £130 hb
ISBN 9781032556772

Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty


The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?

Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.

Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.

One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.

Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).

In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.

The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).

Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).

The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).

In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).

The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation ­of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

1 March 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/

Welcome to the Mass Psychology of Violence American Style

BY HENRY GIROUX

 JULY 22, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“There are days—this is one of them—when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. …I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they … have become in themselves moral monsters.”

–  James Baldwin

The United States has slid into a form of political, economic, cultural, and social psychosis, evident in its cruel, neoliberal, democracy-hating policies unleashed since the 1970s. At the heart of its authoritarian and rogue state practices is a systemic war on workers, youth, Blacks, and immigrants, increasingly defined by the rise of mass violence and a punishing state both at home and abroad. The U.S. has morphed into an empire run by a callous, greedy, billionaire class that has destroyed all remnants of democracy, while embracing the fascistic ideology of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Fascism now wraps itself not only in the flag but the sordid embrace of the Christian cross. America has transitioned from the old-style celebration of unchecked individualism depicted by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged to the glorified greed advocated by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, and the inhumane, psychotic avarice of Patrick Bateman, dressed up in high fashion in American Psycho. This evolution of barbarity is further exemplified in the criminogenic images of right-wing Texas Christian preachers calling for gay people to “be shot in the back of the head.”[2] Welcome to Trump’s America.

With the death of the social contract emerged what Guy Debord called “a society of the spectacle,” characterized by death-dealing rituals, mass spectacles, and a psychotic infatuation with weapons of death. What is new here is a cultural sphere where irrationality functions as cultural glamour, and politics is dressed up in the ether of violence–a much-embraced ethical tranquilizer. The spectacle of the outrageous celebrates violence with a smirk. Remember those MAGA politicians wearing AR-15 pins after reports emerged of children’s bodies being blown apart in Uvalde, Texas.  This spectacularizing of weapons of death adorned in family and distorted religious values was evident when right-wing politicians recently posed with AR-style rifles for Christmas card portraits, and churches in conservative states gave them away in raffles.

An ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action. Crimes against humanity now become fodder for video games and the Hollywood disimagination machine.  All of which creates an ecology of cruelty and sadism that promotes a “symbiosis of suffering and spectacle.”[3]

Reuters reports that conservatives are pushing a bill in Congress to designate the AR-15 style rifle as “the National Gun of the United States.” Recently, an image surfaced of four elderly women in a church holding AR-15 rifles as part of a blessing ceremony. The staunch of death and moral vacuity oozes from these narratives. Some of the deadliest mass shootings in American history took place with these assault rifles. Against this mass psychology of fascism and ethicide is a history of children’s bodies blown apart by these weapons: 20 children killed in Newtown, Connecticut; 19 children killed in Uvalde, Texas; 17 students and educators killed in Parkland, Florida; 58 people killed and over 500 wounded in Las Vegas with assault weapons. Rather than mourn the deaths of children and others, the right-wing celebrates the weapons that killed them.

Even the widely condemned assassination attempt on former President Trump was turned into a promotional gimmick by the MAGA crowd, who sold sneakers featuring an image from the incident. Additionally, mindless conservative pundits and the MAGA propaganda machine leveraged the assassination attempt to portray Trump, once again,  as a messianic figure, blending cultism, thoughtless loyalty and fanatical religious devotion into a toxic mix of fascist politics.

A culture that celebrates not just violence but the weapons that support it has lost its hold on humanity and celebrates itself through the rituals of barbarism. Violence is all that seems left for a large segment of society to feel anything, whether it be a sense of community or the weak pulse in the collective corpse-like body.  In a society that turns AR-15 weapons into icons of violent masculinity and the adoration of death, all that is left are the screams of children and others who have embraced symbols of the bloodlust of a dark fascist present and future.

Violence is once again in the news with the assassination attempt on Trump. But rather than provoke a national conversation about violence as the most important mode of communication, commodification, and national identity, it is removed from the pathology of state-sponsored violence, a cultural mode of entertainment, a valued commodity, and any sense of responsibility or social and ethical consequences.

In light of the assassination attempt on Trump, the term “assassination” blazes across the front pages of the mainstream press and social media, serving more as a political ad and tool of propaganda than as a warning about a society mired in violence. What seems to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream media is a certain irony surrounding the attempt on Trump’s life, given his repeated false claims that the Feds and Biden were trying to assassinate him. In this case, politically motivated, hollow talk about falsely alleged assassination attempts on Trump moved from the spectacularized realm of fear-mongering and fictional victimhood to a potentially deadly reality. Make no mistake the visceral and dangerous reality of such violence—unadorned by lies and political opportunism–has taught Trump nothing. Trump has a long history of mocking violence against others, such as the near-fatal attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a deranged right-winger. As a target of such violence, Trump reworks the language of violence into a “narcissistic public performance” of victimhood and the enduring strongman.

The horror here is unbelievable, wrapped in an arrogant blend of economic, political, and religious fundamentalism that does not merely cover up violence but is complicit in it. Violence and the AR-15 assault rifle have become the new symbols of this true assassination, emblematic of a culture of predatory carnage and cruelty reminiscent of the horrors of a fascist past. This is a violence that has more cultural currency than justice, compassion, care, and the radical values of a true democracy. It is a violence wedded to the celebration of the death of historical consciousness, the assassination of truth, an indifference if not emotional investment in the suffering and death of millions of children from poverty, war, and disease.

The clickbait image of the day shouldn’t be Trump raising his hand defiantly after an assassination attempt. Instead, it should be a powerful visual of the American flag and the Constitution, both riddled with bullet holes.

Notes.

[1] The title highlights  Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). The U.S. government prohibited their sale and the sale of all of Reich’s books including The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He was imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where he died in 1957.

[2] Minyvonne Burke, “Texas pastor says gay people should be ‘shot in the back of the head’ in shocking sermon,” NBC News (June 9, 2022). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/texas-pastor-says-gay-people-shot-back-head-shocking-sermon-rcna32748

[3] Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, “Traffic in Pain,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 9.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

 

Stanley Cup hype: Have we normalized commodity fetishism?

Courtesy of Stanley 1913 | The Chronicle

By Tina Qian

February 18, 2024 | DUKE CHRONICLE

 
 
 

On TikTok, the hashtag “#StanleyCup” has 7.3 billion views. Simultaneously, on the news, people poured into Target for a limited version of the Stanley Cup, even though they’ve likely hoarded four or five Stanley Cups already. What is so unique about the Stanley Cup? While some claim it is a source of emotional support, others see it as a millennial aesthetic. By routinely releasing limited versions with different colors, Stanley Cups possess a quality that is desirable among Gen Z girls. 

At Duke, we see people carrying Stanley Cups around – it is almost pervaded among certain groups of people. Before coming to Duke, I was exposed to a completely different type of fashion and popular culture. In my home country, people do not use 40-ounce water bottles, nor do they find the appearance of a Stanley tumbler attractive. When I was in high school, I used a 17-ounce thermos bottle, which is light, portable and commonly seen among my peers. It is interesting to see how people from different cultures perceive one thing differently based on either aesthetics or empiricism. 

Admittedly, Stanley Cups can be a source of emotional support for those who have a higher need to keep hydrated throughout the day, considering their insulation and 40-ounce capacity. However, it has evolved into a cultural symbol under the waves of hyperconsumerism. 

Is the hype over Stanley Cups about aesthetics and/or empiricism? Part of it might be. However, my own encounters with culture and accommodations spun a different narrative. After noticing that  I carried a Camelbak tumbler, a friend from my home country asked me whether I was Americanized. Another friend who’s currently enrolled in a less diverse university told me that they might get a Stanley Cup to fit into  “bourgeois American culture.” Stanley Cups signify an archetype of a desirable trendy culture, yet it denotes an exclusivity to the alternative. 

A Stanley Cup is not the only code to an exclusive popular culture and hyperconsumerism. On a Chinese lifestyle platform “Xiaohongshu” (the so-called Chinese Instagram), “U.S. private school elitist girl culture” themed posts went viral. The posts displayed the commonly perceived trending outfits and accessories among certain groups of American young people, including Stanley Cups, UGG boots, Lululemon, Golden Goose sneakers, Goyard tote bags, etc. 

The amount of fashion items displayed in the posts are overwhelming, and the title of this trending series is captivating. With an almost aggressively direct categorization of style, a collage of fashion choices are now available in front of the viewer, wondering whether you should join the cohort of stylish girls. Such might be a projection of the star image, and as the public reception shifts to a general admiration of those coded brands, you justify your doubts and thoughts, riding the wave. 

We normalize commodity fetishism. We normalize not only hyperconsumerism and commodity fetishism, but an organized passivity facing whatever’s overwhelmingly trendy. What about your Spotify Wrapped? What about the concept of an icon? What about those career paths that seem so tempting but you’re so uninterested? 

Nowadays, commodities are endowed with something more than themselves; no longer do they follow their simple, specialized functions. People start to believe that their personalities are reflected by what they consume: clothes, accessories, tech items, music, food and types of entertainment. 

Commodities like Stanley Cups are so mystified with artificial auras that it becomes difficult to realize that they are deceptive in themselves. People tend to believe that a higher price reflects some essential characteristic, presumably higher quality, of the commodities, while the truth does not always align. It takes labor to produce a decent, desirable commodity which further becomes a cultural symbol among certain groups of consumers. The relation between commodities’ stylish appearance and an exclusive culture derived from their aura is easily perceived if you lived in a capitalist society for a while, yet the underlying economic relation and how they dictate a social structure is often overlooked. 

Marx’s theory of alienated labor stated that individuals are separated into units and are not only alienated from their work, product and creativity but also from each other. Such alienated experience is hidden under the aura of commodities that distract consumers from what matters beneath that image. 

French theorist Guy Debord defined the “Image”  as a result of capitalist accumulation. “Image” is every (and all) capitalist cultural symbol that dominates and distorts everyday life, and it gradually becomes the present, the reality we live. We are lost in the tides of consumerism and unaware. 

For some of us, the question is: Are we really lost? When commodity fetishism encounters other factors such as cultural background, socioeconomic condition and immigration status, it’s urgent to ask that question again. Are we completely unconscious of hyperconsumerism, or do we intentionally wield it as a symbolic shelter? 

On Xiaohongshu, I was shocked by an entirely self-aware comment under a post discussing a Chinese girl’s dilemma in a prestigious boarding school in New England. Being a first-generation American and international student is difficult. Such student knows that they will belong to this land someday but not now, so they crave belonging and acceptance from the majority. Under the post, people shared their and their children’s experiences of being excluded in racially homogenous U.S. high schools. 

Comments under the post translated by Tina Qian

The Blogger offers her upfront suggestions: “You can buy her some equipment that white girls would be jealous of – LoveShackFancy clothes, Lululemon’s sportswear, Dior’s cosmetics, Goyard tote bags, Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, Golden Goose’s sneakers, LV’s wallet, and Chanel’s accessories – at least by doing so white girls won’t dare to bully her.” 

This comment hurts. This echoes the Xiaohongshu post mentioned above, which discoursed on U.S. private school girl culture. Everything seemingly points to an observable truth that sometimes one has to learn others’ physical and cultural language to defend oneself. 

But brands do not matter. What matters is the act of hyperconsumerism and how this act, when enacted by the marginalized, reverses the power dynamics against those who hold power in certain environments. Such an act reveals those social relations that are not widely perceived among individuals. 

One’s exhibition of hyperconsumerism doesn’t constitute a symbolic shelter but rather a sheer accumulation of capital — thus one becomes the image itself, almost treacherously, intriguing and trapping the mass in material consumption. 

Stanley Cups are now under the spotlight of hyperconsumerism, and what’s next? All fashion is old fashion; all fashion is new fashion. All fashion is the climax of an ongoing plot, and we look back, blinded by the matrix of repetitions. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.