The Corporate Virus
by
Heather Skether
"One of the major issues of the twentieth century history, surely in the U.S. is corporate
propaganda." Noam Chomsky.
We need to sabotage the U.S. corporate and economic system through literature, film,
music, situationism, subtle terrorism and any medium available to us.
Literary texts are by no way independent from the historical movement from which they
emerge, and Marxists acknowledge the importance of history. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
the monster is a representation of the proletariat which rose up during the French
revolution and stormed the prisons, "technological and industrial progress has produced
a monster, artificial, destructive and dangerous," Karl Marx. Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1944. The working class has been dangerously oppressed like Mary
Shelley's monster and we possess the potential to cause immense destruction.
Terry Eagleton is a down to earth and unpretentious contemporary Marxist literary
critic. When he expresses literary theory as possessing "elitism, sexism, or traditionalism."
He derails the superiorityof the literary critics. When you have nothing better to do at a party, make a literary critical analysis of anything there you please
and you are the greatest of intellectual critics. Terry Eagleton draws on the work
of Althussier to provide a general framework between literary text and the social
world.
Corporations like Pepsi or GE contain what Althussier calls ideological state apparatuses,
a form of brainwashing that we accept without question. Propaganda is the medium
of the ideological state apparatus that allows society to accept blindly the conditions they live in as normal. Consume the product and your life will improve. Pepsi
is "the Real Thing." MacDonalds: "ya gotta have it."
The Ark activists who, inspired by the philosophy of Karl Marx and anarchist writers
like Hakim Bey, protest corporations and not the government, for corporations now
rule the planet; these activists try to change the way people think by subverting
and sabotaging the corporations and their products, for example, they attacked Mattel by
taking the talking Barbie and G.I. Joe doll and secretly switching their voice boxes
so Barbie says "Dead men tell no lies." And G.I. Joe says "I like to go shopping
with you." Now they intend to put the faces of dictators on Dixie cups. They are always
looking for people who work for big corporations to help them with their work so
you of lonely business world contact the Ark activists and expand the horizons of
your corporate drone existence.
I read that at the first screening of "Roger and Me," Michael Moore reserved a seat
for Roger; but a GE public relations administrator showed up instead and he felt
so humiliated by the movie that he had a hard time challenging Michael Moore's credibility the way he was supposed to.
We are all capable of having the same impact that Michael Moore had on GE with his
documentary film of the horrors of laid off workers. We need to throw a crowbar
in the wheels of big corporations, we need another storming of the Bastille, another
economic revolution. But instead of just screaming "let's smash stuff up," we will become
the contagious virus that invades the ideological state apparatus by using any and
every medium we can to subvert injustices of authority.