What place does your culture have for you, as an individual? What use can it make of your particular talents? Do you belong somewhere, and FEEL like you belong?
These are important questions.
And, again, laying blame at “Capitalism” is merely a cognitive displacement. Marx said “Capitalism” to indicate all he thought was bad with the world, which was mostly that it refused to feed him when he refused to do useful work, and refused to worship his unshaven and unwashed narcissistic genius.
You don’t create anything when you assign blame. Put forward a plan, or ideas. Separate out what is good–wealth and the leisure and security longer lives it brings–from what is bad–unchecked greed.
And I will continue to insist that our system would look vastly different if we had stable money. The rat race would slow down. Much less work would be required to survive, and far more people could dedicate themselves to becoming convivial and erudite thought workers, with interesting things to say, and the time and space to say them. More people could become artists, or spend their days digging the Earth.
This insane greed comes from competitiveness, and the competition is driven by the wealth lost through theft committed by banks and governments. That competition would be much less brutal if we had not lost 90% or more of our created wealth over the past century.
Most people should own their houses. They should be able to pay cash for cars. They should be able to get by on thirty hours of work a week.
For myself, I can’t decide if the bankers are simply themselves insanely greedy, or if a small elite within their community is dedicated to genuinely evil and lunatic notions of global control, driven by their own traumas and sociopathic urges. Certainly, the means are the same, and no doubt both motives are present–and like most motives, none purely.
Anyway, if the Left can speak of Society, we can do the same of Culture, while at the same clearly demarcating the limits of the usefulness of this reification.
But it is there. We dream of our social worlds, do we not? We have dreams of showing up unprepared to class, or naked, or in our underwear. We are all affected by the expectations of others, and those expectations are the railway which runs through our individual consciousness, and takes us other places.