This consumer-oriented society has already dealt a lethal blow to the literature of the past. Literature such as Madam Bovary, A Streetcar Named Desire, even something close to Farewell to Arms has not been created. These masterpieces of their time created a sense of subversion, a revolt against the system or at least they indicated some serious malady afflicting society. However, consumer culture has invalidated this element of resistance. Some of us still read these masterpieces for the beauty of their language, the intricate nuance they have or the artistic texture they possess. The majority barely knows Dickens, Oscar Wilde, H G Wells or even Ryder-Haggard beyond their names. Everything related to literature has been mutilated. Instead of society, a US war criminal or its chocolate opposite, James Bond, performs wonders. He can win a war on his own, face a battalion of enemies and comprehensively annihilate them. The individual dominates but society recedes into oblivion. Thomos Adorno rightly pointed out, “The spectre of man without memory is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois society.” Economists and sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber correlated the principle of tradition to feudal, and that of rationality to bourgeois forms of society. This means no less than that advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past. Consumerist literature has given birth to an Orwellian language. Instead of complete words, abbreviations are used. We hear rarely about the USSR. The younger generation barely knows what this word once stood for — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a symbol of hope for the working class. These words carried definite meanings. Pronouncing them as they were is likely to send a different or perhaps an alternative message to the younger generation. It means once an alternative existed, which for its own dialectical reasons fizzled out, and that the possibility of such an alternative still exists. Why inform the new generation about this alternative? It will be akin to axing one’s own feet. NATO is a commonly used word but how many people actually know that it stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation? If it is brought to their knowledge, one may ask, in this treaty, what a non-European country like Turkey is doing since it is not a part of the western hemisphere. NATO was created to defend the monopoly of capitalism. Goldman Sachs is its financial arm while NATO is the hegemonic one. The people of Pakistan are familiar with another amazing term: father of the nuclear bomb. Anyone with average prudence can ask what the loving figure of a father has to do with something so inimical, so disastrous? The mother of all evils is another example of this Orwellian language rife among youngsters. In the recent past, words such as rationalisation and austerity have been frequently used. Can depriving people of their jobs be stated as rationalisation? Can providing trillions of dollars to bankrupt institutions while revoking public benefits of social welfare, health facilities and free education, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered as austerity? This is what Herbert Marcuse suggests as “the union of opposites” and “the cunning of reason”. He says, “Prior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation, literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction — the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature, which was repressed and repelled in reality.” Max Horkheimer states, “With the union of opposites this culture is lost. The more ideas have become automatic and instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.” Roland Barthes adds, “In the present state of history, all political writing can only confirm a police-universe, just as all intellectual writing can only produce para-literature, which does not dare any longer to tell its name.” The media permeates between superstructure and an unhappy base. It becomes a tool for the hegemonic relationship between the masters and the slaves. That is why Max Horkheimer suggests, “The denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render. The greater the extent to which scientific propaganda makes of public opinion a mere tool for obscure forces, the more does public opinion appear a substitute for reason. This illusory triumph of democratic progress consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived.” Free thought is acceptable as long as it does not threaten the established reality. All literature, however superficial it may be, if it has the potential of becoming a commodity, gets absorbed. Even revolutionary thoughts are not prohibited as long as they pay lip service to this great cause. However, any serious attempt to consolidate the opposite camp is thwarted with an iron fist: “The truth of art and literature is granted, which should not disturb the order of business.” Francois Perroux states: “The slaves of the developed industrial civilisation are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined neither by obedience nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being a mere instrument, and reduction of man to the state of an instrument.” Now is the time to revisit the discussion that was the beginning of our article — the debate between Lao Tzu and Confucius. Art, to paraphrase Confucius, in other words consists in promoting charity and duty to one’s neighbour, “a capacity for rejoicing in all things; in universal love, without the element of self”. Literature, therefore, being an art, would function as an instrument of social change or its control, the writer in the first case would produce work ‘selflessly’. This places the consumer in the role of the recipient of propaganda, and artistic ‘success’ would be a factor of commodity of production. In a nutshell, it highlights two points: one is that ‘selfless’ production is an illusion: “Does not universal love contradict itself? Is not your elimination of self a positive manifestation of self?” His second point is made elsewhere, where he advocates that we should replicate what occurs in nature: live our lives to the best of our conscious ability, not fixed by idealism but not unresponsive (though not reactive) to the plight of our neighbours. And ‘responsive’ means taking things deeply in but still acting spontaneously. Capitalism hampers this ‘responsiveness’. However, if we mention the evils of capitalism, we must not hesitate to state that under any circumstances, the arts/literature or any expression however bitterly opposite it may be must not be made subservient to the state ideology as we experienced it under Stalin, Mao and, till recently, the Kim dynasty of North Korea. In affairs of the state, participation of the masses is as imperative as the liberation of an artist. The great leader of the proletariat Rosa Luxemburg states: “Real freedom is freedom for those who think differently.” That is only how one can liberate mankind from the smothering and commoditisation of literature. To sum up this article, to me the first condition to liberate humanity from this conundrum is freedom from want, which is the real freedom, freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. “The unrealistic sound of these propositions,” Herbert says, “is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces, which prevent their realisation.” This freedom will also liberate literature from defending a totalitarian structure, which deforms the defender and what it defends. (Concluded) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com