Dear Adbusters, are we not from this world?

For the longest time I was always excited when a new issue of Adbusters hit the news stand at our local co-op grocery store, 20 some issues can attest to that, until one day it hit me, several years back...No, it was not the obvious problem that I am buying a magazine which is the self-proclaimed bible for the anti-consumer(ism), for I love to consume its our "natural" way of life.  As ironic as that fact my be, its not that I have to pay to read about not paying for things that bothers me, rather, it is the constant message that my world, our world, is not ours and that we have somehow lost our world or that we are alien to this world brought on by hyper-consumer capitalism.

Adbusters is constantly reminding me that we are something else, we are not the materialists that capitalism desires us to be and Adbusters is completely right in saying that we are not this type of materialist. Though we are not hyper-capitalist materialists we do live in a material world and desire the material.  Up until this point I agree with Adbusters but the magazine's repeating conclusion that we are somehow "naturally" not materialists troubles me.  The troubles continue, Adbusters seems to pride itself on guilt-ing its readership into agreeing that it is "our" fault, the consumer's fault, as in the Big Ideas of 2011 issue, "Our five-planet lifestyles are the primary cause of the floods in Pakistan."

I feel the lack of class perspective regarding Adbuster's mantra of anti-consumerism puts the burden and blame on "our" shoulders as if we are the free-market engineers.  When the majority of Americans live in both material and intellectual poverty brought on by capitalism, a brutal war against our (working) class there is no need to insult us and blame us in the very same magazine we buy for enlightenment.  I am not sensitive to critique or to debate regarding the excesses brought on by capitalist consumption but I will not take the blame for something I do not do, nor do I expect my class to.

There is another underlining argument which flows throughout the pages of Adbusters that is intertwined within the blame and guilt written about ourselves in the magazine, the notion that we are not of this world somehow alien.  Again, in one sense I agree, we are not of this world because we are living in perverse capitalist interpretations of the world but regardless of our hatred of capitalism we are still of this world.   

I hope I get this right, in a Hegelian-Marxist-Debordian way, we are part of this consumerist world, it is our world, we brought this about, but what matters is not how guilty we feel about it or how much blame we place on ourselves, what we do as proactive dialectians is what matters.  Here, should not forfeit our own agency, autonomy, or political power by blaming ourselves and trying to consume less but instead look to the soviets(workers-councils).  I am not totally sure how positive i feel towards Lenin(ism) as historical necessity in the sense that we once needed a literal vanguard, but I do feel positive that we do not need that form of a workers vanguard today.  We are no more in need of advertisements telling us what we need than we are in need of the Party telling us what we need.     

This world is ours, the cell phone conversation you just had via texting is just as natural as our face to face conversations.  The cell-phone is merely a tool not some apocalyptic doomsday machine and the day our soviets rule over the material world is the day that we decide if mining the African and South American earth is worth the effort.  Not until then.



I hope to move beyond the discussion of whether or not this or that is ecologically sustainable and discuss the issue I have with ideologies or philosophies that attempt to place human beings and human activity outside the "natural" world.  I totally agree that we, even as a capitalist society, should not produce in a manner that is ecologically unsustainable but I will never agree to, or caste off our responsibility to this Earth, in saying that what we as human beings and producers do is not "natural".  I rather take my chances in this (hyper-consumerist) capitalist filth as a dialectical materialist than reduce my existence to vessel full of guilt and blame.  Our methods of producing, are indeed destroying the planet, but our methods are "natural" nonetheless. Our behavior on this planet is as "natural" as the behavior of frogs or any other animal.  It just seems for some scientific and philosophical reasons we are more conscious of our methods and behaviors but these "facts" do not make us any less "natural".

                      

 I hate the assumption that class society is "natural".