means, it is far below the level of contemporary Corporation Capital in capitalist countries, because of its entire lack of any sense for modern organization and developmental policies, i.e.,an understanding of modern technology, and so its characteristics remain a petty-bourgeois sense of usury and momentary profit according to the logie »take it while you can get it!«)
The mediums of mass communication helped to form the petty-bourgeois mentality. They quickly oriented themselves towards the logie of market »money/goods relations«, and they considered them-selves progressive if they began to develop their readers taste for West-European »consumers society«. They believed that the same laws are applicable to culture and »sausage sales«.Consequently everv-thing reminiscent of Marxism soon disappeared from their pages (actually the political bureaucracy set the example of how to fight the Marxists). »New values« appeared-sensationalism, pathological forms of social behaviour, eroticism, pop musie, fashion snobbery, nudę mo-dels on new models of automobiles - everything that would appeal to the petty-bourgeois parvenue. Just try putting a photopgraph of a working girl in a red kerchief or crowd scenes in the Mao-Tse-Tung manner on one of our newsstands amid the display of bare female breasts and bodies, you will immediately notice that you are confront-ed with two different cultures that exclude each other, and which are easily defined. These are extremes, but just let anybody try to define what values exist between these extremes in our country.
If we try to compare the style that has taken over in our society with the western »consumer society« we must notę that we are below the level of that society. The bourgeois society never really madę an ideology of the money/goods relationship, but rather attempted to present »higher values« which it stressed as vital to the common in-terest (as opposed to particular interests), as »honest business me-thods« and »legal competition« (different than our Bałkan money-grubber orientation towards unearned profits), as the stress on puritan morals in public business life, and religious moderation and an »ethical sense of duty« in private and administrative life, so that the principl-es of morality and socialization always went against the logie of the capitalist market. These paradoxes in the capitalist or bourgeois per-sonality are well known from frequent analysis of the capitalist society. The strict ideological thinkers in our country tried to solve this »bourgeois controversy« on an ideological piane, stressing not what is positive in the bourgeois (their business and social morality) but what is negative (wealth accumulation and inereasing class distinction). That explains why some otherwise very temperate criticisms (by our philosophers and Marxist-sociologists) of our society and the conse-quences of competition and a consumers attitude were vigorously at-tacked by the »official« ideologists of our society.
It is evident that such social processes brought about a disolution of class consciousness in the workers, and a strengthening of class con-sciousness among the middle class. It is becoming morę and morę evident, especially in the area of social awareness and those forces that shape it (mass media, official ideology, culture creation) that our
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