During WWII, American industry and productive capacity was immensely developed and after the war the same industrialists wanted to maintain their insane rates of profit.

To keep themselves from a crisis of overproduction, they sought out new markets. Partially this was the reconstruction of Europe but a far more sustainable and substantial market was sought: the exploitation of desire, the colonisation of the human soul.

War time propaganda utilised cutting edge social psychology to direct the will of the nation towards military strategic objectives. The same tools were merely repurposed into advertisement to fuel the post-war consumer economy.

The same did not happen in the Eastern Bloc as the state directly owned the industry and so were not concerned about maintaining a rate of profit and the need to seek out new markets. While we tend to remember the Cold War as a battle between “Democracy and Dictatorship”, what brought down the Iron Curtain was the allure of consumer goods above all else.

The point of illuminating this history is not to say that we must reject all advancements in light-industry goods or luxuries. The point is that we in the West are inundated with propaganda at all times and it’s completely normalised to the point that we see ourselves as consumers first, citizens second, workers dead last.

The order must be flipped on its head. Our collective subjective orientation in the world, if we seek liberation, must be understanding ourselves as workers first, citizens of our nation-states second, and consumers last.

Right Wingers, if they are at all aware of this history, put citizen/ethnicity first and seek to subordinate the interests of the workers to the interests of the state/race. Most pundits, regardless of position on the political spectrum, are entirely uncritical and the substance of their “politics” are fandom wars. Pepsi vs Coke, rather than Workers vs Capital.

The truth is that only the workers, organised as an international united front, have the power and capacity to establish a new world and, in so doing, liberate the human heart from its colonisation by Capital.

Until there is sufficient critical consciousness of the material structures and processes that have produced our world and the historical laws that govern their development, we will continue to have the same shallow discourse about what brands to elevate and what brands to cancel and nothing will fundamentally change.