The second half of the twentieth century saw the all-powerful sector of industrial production gradually give ground to consumption. The very survival of capitalism depended on this new emphasis.
The fact was that the uprising of colonized peoples threatened to deprive the industrialized nations of their source of raw materials. How could this danger be avoided? The solution found by a so-called democratic Europe was to replace the exploitation of rebellious colonies by the colonization of their own toiling masses, an option that had the distinct advantage of requiring no recourse to force.
The proletarians of the colonialist nations were thus invited to a feast of false pretenses: the worldwide banquet of generalized consumption. (The United States had already successfully tried out this new form of servitude.) The exploited soon got used to adopting the dress of consumers as soon as they doffed their work overalls or white collars.
It would take some time, however, for it to dawn on them that by leaving one factory where they were subjected to the constraints of production and entering another where the seduction of consumable goods relieved them of their wages, they were being doubly exploited.
The capitalists won on two fronts: on the one hand, their profits suffered less from the workers’ incessant strikes and demands, while, on the other, the access of the majority to consumer goods hitherto reserved for the bourgeoisie disarmed the proletariat by surreptitiously inciting it to work in order to consume more. That class’s new standing—easily mistaken for a promotion to the bourgeoisie—eventually succeeded in devastating class consciousness and causing the workers to forget the very term “proletarian.”
A class, however, is defined by being, not having. The bourgeoisie is in this sense a mongrel class, the only class that tends to reduce its being to having. For the aristocracy being is simply the privilege of birth, the risible basis of an odious tyranny. The being of the proletariat is an “obligation to become,” a being that strives to abolish classes, beginning with its own, by identifying itself with that movement of “being” which overturns the hegemony of “having.”