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the royal family and the poor - vaneigem mix lyrics

in the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king
a democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption

consumer goods are tending to lose all use+value
their nature is to be consumable at all costs and as general eisenhower so candidly explained, the present economic system can only be rescued by turning man into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest possible number of consumable values, which is to say, non+values, or empty, fictitious, abstract values

after being “the most precious kind of capital”, in stalin’s happy phrase, man must now become the most valued of consumer goods
the stereotyped images of the star, the poor man, the communist, the murderer+for+love, the law+abiding+citizen, the rebel, the bourgeois, will replace man, putting in his place a system of multicopy categories arranged according to the irrefutable logic of robotisation

already the idea of ‘teenager’ tends to define the buyer in conformity with the product he buys, to reduce his variety to a varied but limited range of objects in the shops, (records, guitars, levis…)
you are no longer as old as you feel or as old as you look, but as old as what you buy
the time of production+society where ‘time is money’ will give way to the time of consumption, measured in terms of products bought, worn out and thrown away: a time of premature old age, which is the eternal youth of trees and stones

with regard to everyday life, the bourgeois revolution looks more like a counter+revolution
the market in human values has rarely known such a collapse
the aristocratic life with its wealth of passions and adventures suffered the fate of a palace partitioned off into furnished rooms, gloomy bedsitters whose drabness is made even more unbearable by the sign outside which proclaims, like a challenge hurled at the universe, that this is the age of freedom and well+being
from now on hatred gives way to contempt, love to cohabitation, the ridiculous to the stupid, passion to sentimentality, desire to envy, reason to calculation, the taste for life to the fear of death

while we are little known we will be ignored as harmless (the spectacle is to a large extent a victim of its own image of its opposition); to the extent that some of us become better known + which will simply be an incidental effect of the advance of the revolution + our suppression would also be known and would merely draw more attention to our works without at all stopping their work
if some of our activities remain to an extent “occult” it is because of their intrinsic nature + rendered temporarily inaccessible to many by socially enforced ignorance + not because they are held secret by us in preparation for a coup d’etat
in contrast to the leaders of a terrorist or neo+bolshevik group, we are not at all indispensable to “our” movement
the state can’t control the revolution through anything it would do to us or get us to do, because the revolution is right where we want it: out of our control

- the royal family and the poor lyrics

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