Culutre as Resistance

What is totalisation?

Reshaping the world (time, space, subjectivity, knowledge, and language) in the interest of capital accumulation

How does totalisation promote social hierarchy?

Creates docile bodies, one person speaks, everyone else listens

Who is capable of recognizing and challenging normal western processes as the effects of totalisation?

People from the bush mode of production - egalitarian lifestyle

Time, space, knowledge, subjectivity, and language

Foundation of culture, perceived differently across modes of production

Subversion

Using something to create meaning, but the true meaning is clearly the opposite of the surface meaning

Subversion from the 1951 Indian Act

Status created to make Indigenous people lesser, reclaimed as something to be proud of

Individual / un self aware

Least effective challenging of social norms, e.g. crime

Individual / self aware

Individuals take action in hopes of making change, less care for wellbeing of self

Collective / un self-aware

A group unknowingly challenged social norms, like practicing indigenosu culture, or embracing Status

Collective / self aware

Most effective to bring fundamental social transformation (revolution), can be international or local, e.g. Idle No More

What is a commodity?

Something that has a use and exchange value, exchange value makes everything quantitatively relative

How does capital control society

No one can escape the rule of capital, economy is based in it

The commodity as a tool for appropriation

Things being commodified lose spiritual meaning, integrates more into capitalist logic, insidious and effective because people want money and promote equality