has its Eastern counterpart. There, freedom is the way of life instituted by a communist regime, and all other transcending modes of freedom are either capitalistic, or revisionist, or leftist sectarianism. In both camps, non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
Just as in 1984 the society is moving in the direction of limiting thought, limiting the ability to express the full range of our humanity. In the America of 1964 however we dont need the thought police we dont need the apparatus of a totalitarian state to keep us in check, keep us to conform to the norms and values of a consumer society, the corporations, the politicians and the media have all devised interlocking ways to reinforce conformist thinking that supports at root an unequal and unfair political and economic system. The great strength of the work is an essential refashioning of Marxism to argue that we all in some shape or form are suffering from false consciousness.
“Today political power asserts itself through its power over the machine process and over the technical organization of the apparatus. The government of advanced and advancing industrial societies can maintain and secure itself only when it succeeds in mobilizing, organizing, and exploiting the technical, scientific, and mechanical productivity available to industrial civilization. And this productivity mobilizes society as a whole, above and beyond any particular individual or group interests. The brute fact that the machine's physical (only physical?) power surpasses that of the individual, and of any particular group of individuals, makes the machine the most effective political instrument in any society whose basic organization is that of the machine process.”
The power of the society is the power to change the self so that we start to believe that our very identity and ability to express ourselves is tied up with the consumer items we have purchased or have been taught to pine for
“The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced. “
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