In choosing the title for our presentation ‘paid work voluntary servitude’ the first source which sprung to mind was ‘Fight Club’ by Chuck Palahniuk. The reason for this is that Fight Club explores how the middle class have been conditioned by society to work for things that aren’t important to human beings but have made these things seem important through a constant barraging of advertisement and how to make it in society, and what gets left out is yourself as an individual (how you feel what you want and why). We are conditioned in a way to make us all similar, to think the same ‘like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct’.
A demonstration of how society grips us through a conversation between Jack and Tyler which shows how we give value to things which don’t matter;
(T) ‘do you know what a duvet is?’
(J) ‘a comforter’
(T) ‘it’s a blanket…just a blanket. Why do guys like you and I know what a blanket is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. what are we then?
(J) ‘consumers’
(T) ‘right, we’re consumers, we are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guys name on my underwear’
To emphasise the slavery perception in this Tyler gives a speech;
‘an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and cloths, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need’
Society gives us a reason to work for cars and cloths, but this is just deceit so that a service will be provided so that society can function.
When considering how society manipulates the masses one has to think, how voluntary is my act to work?
From Tyler’s point of view not much at all if any because once you buy into consumerism and work for it, you decrease as a free person ‘the things you own, end up owning you’
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Yea, I finally accept Fight Club as being relevant to the issue. When it was first mentioned I didn't really think that consumerism was that essential to the question "Is paid work voluntary servitude" but since we've been researching it and discussing it so much it does fit in. The blanket example is a killer as well.
The whole issue of custom and materialism is really important when you consider the Western culture - but in relation to what Blair has contributed - in terms of inequality (something that Rousseau also discusses in his Discourse on Inequality) I think that the materialism aspect is more a custom of the C2 and above classes (lower middle through to upper middle) as working class people work more in order to afford to survive... sure they have some material nature - T.V's, cookers etc but their priority must surely be food, shelter, warmth/power (gas, electricity etc) and water.
Which lets face it aren't cheap and with such heavy taxation on basic products (petrol is a really strong recent example) I think it only accounts for half the population - probably less.
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