Critical Western Theory

According to Marx the central driving force of capitalism is in the exploitation and alienation of labour. From this statement alone I can say that the western focuses more on its self and ability to be independent on their own but a significant feature of western theory is the ability to critique their own philosophy and that they do not depend entirely on their own. The problem with capitalism is that they depended on manipulating the class consciousness and it became more of an ideology than a fact. What Western Marxism of Lukacs, Gramsci and Frankfurt try to do is to critique the failure of Marxist capitalism. Gramsci gives the term hegemony referring to capitalism and how it came to be accepted. The problem with capitalism is that it continued to manipulate the class consciousness making it seem more of a dream that cannot be attained until they wake up and face reality. Since the development of science and technology made a new era for mankind, with the failure of capitalism science and technology finally emerged proving in fact that capitalism is holding back human development. The free market does not in fact drive different corporation to produce new kinds of tech, medicines to better their profit but it actually delays or stop them. Why? Well because there is a need to make money and while the most plausible idea is the one that we should endorse logically it hinders the development of new radical ideas because who would depend on an idea that could fail? It stops us from thinking out of the box because with this kind of thinking it is not profitable and risky, when you are talking about money risk is a negative factor that is taken seriously. With the development of technology positivism was also promoted. The creation of the media then paved a new way for different ideologies to manipulate culture and the people especially with the emergence of media as a form of entertainment where people can be easily manipulated by controlling the stream of information that the media shows. It also paved the way for the emergence of popular culture where borders of other countries is slowly being torn away and the different cultures especially western culture is spreading to other countries. Take us for example, the number of products that we have from the US compared to our local brands has a wide gap. Just thinking about international brands we would already want them because it shows how rich you are if you have these. Here arises a problem then as Habermas points out how can we the people create cultural meaning from the ground of everyday life if the production and distribution of culture take place through the massive institutions of mass media? Because of our dependence and the continued admiration towards western culture over our own is really the problem. With the continued growth of media and different cultures borders are thinning down giving way for globality and maybe in the future a global world. We can see globality in Europe today with the formation of the Council of Europe they are ultimately trying to do what the United States have been successful about, the formation of these countries into one nation maybe in the future that would happen but until then we can only see the continuing growth of this relationship. The western critical theory originally from Europe helps us to understand the different ways by which a country can develop, since each country is unique and different in many ways not one theory can clearly give us the means of achieving peace and stability but we must adapt to the needs that we need to achieve today and for the future. Only by understanding the roles that must play can we grasp the different idea that is presented to us with these theories, although the western critical theory greatly helps us in understanding the challenges that they met and the challenges in Europe that gave rise to the continued criticism to these approaches.