By GUSTAVO GABRIEL GARCIA*

The culture industry uses dystopian narratives to promote fear and critical paralysis, suggesting that it is better to maintain the status quo than to risk change. Thus, despite global oppression, a movement to challenge the capital-based model of life management has not yet emerged.

1.

It is now well known how much the cultural industry has produced dystopian material: films, music, series, TV shows – and even messages spread by some sects and religions – often evoke the end of the world. This discourse has clear intentions: to promote fear and critical paralysis, to foster consent and, above all, to suggest that, between the world we have and the one that may come, it is better to keep things as they are.

This process of containment aims to prevent criticism of capitalist technological society. Faced with the uncertainties of the future and the risks of experimenting with other models of life, a conservative rationality is established. This logic was presented by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in a precise way in his work the one dimensional man, published in 1964 and still extremely relevant today for understanding the control mechanisms of contemporary capitalism.

Herbert Marcuse argues that the process of containment, which aims to keep everything the same, is as central as the concept of revolution in Marxist analysis. Capitalist society, with its technological paraphernalia, directs development towards a state of stagnation that prevents contestation and presents itself as the only possible form of economic, political, cultural and subjective organization.

According to Herbert Marcuse: “The more rational, productive, technical and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable become the means and ways by which the administered individuals could break their servitude and take their liberation into their own hands” (MARCUSE, 2015, p. 45).

Despite this technocratic repressive force, which oppresses billions of people around the world, a global movement to challenge the capital-based model of life management has not yet emerged. This model objectifies and destroys lives through exhausting work hours, the production and sale of weapons, hunger and poverty.

2.

It is in this context that containment acts. Even in the face of a reality marked by misery and dehumanization, revolution seems increasingly distant. One explanation for this is the efficient production of false needs that the capitalist system imposes. It is a fabrication of desires that acts collectively, but which is expressed individually in each subject.

This process, according to Herbert Marcuse, produces an ideological leveling between social classes. He observes: “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same places of leisure and relaxation, if the typist is as attractively made up as the boss’s daughter, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve to preserve the Establishment are shared by the entire underlying population” (MARCUSE, 2015, p. 47).

Herbert Marcuse thus anticipates the standardization of both needs and desires. The worker, like the boss, begins to seek profit, wealth and comfort, and no longer to challenge the model to which he is subjected. This subjectivity is appropriated by the discourse of the “entrepreneur of the self”, by platform work and by a 24/7 capitalism, in which the worker voluntarily submits himself to a logic of constant production – the same one that perpetuates misery, poverty, war and genocide.

In this way, Herbert Marcuse denounces one of the most irritating aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the irrational nature of its rationality. It is a system that expands comfort while generating discomfort, that transforms waste into necessity and destruction into progress. All of this is managed in a subtle way – and it is in this context that dystopian narratives come into play.

Dystopias, appropriated by the cultural industry, operate as an empty, domesticated critique. While they generate billions in profits through audiovisual productions, they also function as a mechanism of symbolic containment, preventing real change. By presenting catastrophic futures as possible alternatives, these narratives reinforce the idea that the present, despite its flaws, is still the “least worst.”

This reflection seeks to explain precisely why so many dystopias are produced. The more technologically advanced society becomes, the deeper its contradictions become: poverty and war increase, while millionaires become billionaires. It is about managing contradiction.

Here is the central paradox of this civilization: “the irrationality of its own rationality” (MARCUSE, 2015).

The elimination of profit as an accumulation of unproductive capital is essential for this transformation. Only then will it be possible to build an alternative model – one that is neither a repetition of the present nor the dystopian catastrophe projected by cultural narratives. In its place, a reality based on solidarity, collectivity and social justice is proposed.

Recognizing the ideological potential of dystopias, therefore, is the first step toward deactivating their paralyzing effects. Instead of fearing collapse or resigning oneself to the alienating comfort of stability, we need to imagine the new. Not the new as yet another technological commodity or simulacrum of freedom, but as another form of life—possible, sensible, and common.

Criticism, in this context, is not just denunciation: it is a creative gesture. It is in this gesture that the contradictions of capitalist rationality are overcome.

*Gustavo Gabriel Garcia holds a PhD in geography from the State University of Maringá.

Reference

MARCUSE, Herbert. One-dimensional man: studies on the ideology of advanced industrial society. Translated by Robespierre de Oliveira, Deborah Christina Antunes and Rafael Cordeiro Silva. New York: EDIPRO, 2015. [https://amzn.to/44dRUeC]

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE