MIND INDUSTRY
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the industry is operated: under state, public or private management,
within a capitalist or a socialist economy, on a profit or nonprofit
basis. The mind industry's main business and concern is not to sell its
product:
it
is to "sell" the existing order, to perpetuate the prevailing
pattern of man's domination by man, no matter who runs the society,
and by what means. Its main task is to expand and train our con–
sciousness -
in
order to exploit it.
Since "immaterial exploitation" is not a familiar concept, it might
be well to explain its meaning. Classical Marxism has defined very
clearly the material exploitation to which the working classes have been
subjected ever since the industrial revolution. In its crudest form, it
is a characteristic of the period of the primary accumulation of capital.
This holds true even for Socialist countries, as is evident from the
example of Stalinist Russia and the early stages of the development
of Red China. As soon as the bases of industrialization are laid, how–
ever, it becomes clear that material exploitation alone is insufficient to
guarantee the continuity of the system. When the production of goods
expands beyond the most immediate needs, the old proclamations of
human rights, however watered down by the rhetoric of the establish–
ment and however eclipsed by decades of hardship, famine, crises,
forced labor and political terror, will now unfold their potential
strength.
It
is in their very nature that, once proclaimed, they cannot
be revoked. Again and again, people will try to take them at their
face value and, eventually, to fight for their realization. Thus, ever
since the great declarations of the eighteenth century, every rule of
the few over the many, however organized, has faced the threat of
revolution. Real democracy, as opposed to the formal fac;ades of par–
liamentary democracy, does not exist anywhere in the world, but its
ghost haunts every existing regime. Consequently, all the existing power
structures must seek to obtain the consent, however passive, of their
subjects. Even regimes which depend on the force of arms for their
survival feel the need to justify themselves in the eyes of the world.
Control of capital, of the means of production and of the armed forces
is therefore no longer enough. The self-appointed elites who run modern
societies must try to control people's minds. What each of us accepts or
rejects, what we think and decide is now, here as well as in Vietnam, a
matter of prime political concern: it would be too dangerous to leave
these matters
to
ourselves. Material exploitation must camouflage itself
in order to survive: immaterial exploitation has become its necessary
corollary. The few cannot go on accumulating wealth unless they ac–
cumulate the power to manipulate the minds of the many. To expro-
