The things the worker buys with his wages are first of all consumer goods which enable him to survive, to reproduce his labor-power so as to be able to continue selling it; and they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration. He consumes and admires the products of human activity passively.
He does not exist in the world as an active agent who transforms it, but as a helpless, impotent spectator; he may call this state of powerless admiration "happiness," and since labor is painful, he may desire to be "happy," namely inactive, all his life (a condition similar to being born dead).
The commodities, the spectacles, consume him; he uses up living energy in passive admiration; he is consumed by things.
In this sense, the more he has, the less he is.
- Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Daily Life
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i can dig it!
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