Icon of aspiration … Susan Boyle. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters
In a culture that constantly celebrates a new breed of savvy, sophisticated, empowered consumer-citizens, the notion that we are hoodwinked and manipulated by political and corporate elites was always going to be controversial. And sure enough, when my book
Get Real was published earlier this month, some reviewers objected to my claim that the old problem of false consciousness was still very much with us. "The fundamental trouble with this book," for
Esther Walker in the Evening Standard, "is that the author ... thinks that people don't know what's best for them, whereas I've always thought that people know exactly what is best for them and choose to do things that are self-destructive anyway." And
according to Sam Leith in these pages, "Glaser is caught in a classic High-Table liberal bind: she believes in power to the people but has a pretty low opinion of the average person's ability to tell the difference between Hollywood films and real life." But there's something about this accusation of elite condescension that merits, as my English teachers used to say, unpacking.
To begin with, false consciousness – as Leith knows – isn't a liberal concept; it's a Marxist one. Marx and Engels argued that capitalism operates not only through the forced oppression of the workers, but also through persuading them to conspire in their own oppression by subscribing to the myth of upward mobility. In other words, the capitalist system relies on the carrot as well as the stick
Read the full essay at The Guardian.
