Jan Marijnissen van de SP 33

Alles in onze cultuur is in de verkoop. Alles moet gekocht of verkocht worden. Van onderbroeken tot hele systemen, van kranten tot ideologieen. Alles moet geconsumeerd worden, want anders heeft het geen zin om het te produceren en zonder productie geen winst, en zonder winst is het leven ondenkbaar voor de moderne mens.

In Century of Self verklaart Adam Curtis over de grondlegger van de public-relations industrie: 'In 1939 Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, created a vision of a future world in which the consumer was king. It was at the World's Fair in New York, and Bernays called it democracity. It was one of the earliest and most dramatic portrayals of a consumerist democracy, a society in which the needs and desires of individuals were read and fulfilled by business and the free market.' De Amerikaanse historicus Stuart Ewen, auteur van PR! A Social History of Spin: 'The World's Fair created a spectacle in which all of these concerns were met and they were met by Westinghouse and General Motors and the American Cash Register Company. Company after company presented itself as a sort of centerpiece of a society in which human desire and human want and human anxiety would all be responded to, and it would all be met purely through the free enterprise system. There was this sort of notion that the free market was something that was not guided by ideologies or by political power. It was something that simply was guided by people's will.'

Adam Curtis: 'This was the model of democracy that both new Labour and the American Democrats had bought into in order to regain power. They had used techniques of consumers and they had accepted Bernays' claim that this was a better form of democracy. But in reality the World's Fair had been an elaborate piece of propaganda designed by Bernays for his clients, the great American corporations. Privately Bernays did not believe that true democracy could ever work. He had been profoundly influenced in this by his uncle's theory of human nature. Freud believed that individuals were not driven by rational thought but by primitive unconcious desires and feelings. And Bernays believed that this meant it was too dangerous to let the masses ever have control over their own lives. And consumerism was a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing the responsible elite to continue managing society.'

Op dit punt aangekomen, moeten we enige licht laten schijnen op de rol van de SP, de enige partij in het Nederlandse parlement die claimt socialistisch te zijn. Daarover in een volgend stuk.