The pretentiously named Bonarka City Centre is not merely an eysore, especially with the repellent disco chimney beaming out across the dark nightsky in Podgorze and Plaszow but it represents a "Cultural Chernobyl" for Poland.
The deracination of Krakow from a small mitteleuropean city that survived the bleak ravages of Communist statism only to be then handed over to the gales of destructive neoliberal capitalism in wrecking its charm and turning it into a re-presented tourist spectacle needs explanation.
Pathological consumerism is one reason as large number of those who reside in Krakow value spending their time perambulating meaninglessless around Galeria Krakowska, Galeria Kazimierz and the pretentiously named Bonarka City Centre.
Such "consumerbots" have the right to waste there one life in such mindnumbing surroundings, the "air conditioned nightmare" to use Henry Miller's words, but equally so the large numbers who require that Krakow retain its true and enduring character have the right to be heard too.
Market populist politicians of PiS and "liberal communists" like the owner of Bonarka City Centre, Sandor Demjan, try to evade the inherently unethical consequences of their promotion of these pathologies by soothing rhetoric, upbeat boosterism and prating of "familiy values".
Demjan, perhaps realising that narcissistic consumerism leads to the kind of behaviour exhibited by the Galerianki who sell their virginity to older men in exchange for consumer goods, uses slick PR to portray himself as a "saviour".
"Sandor Demjan wants Bonarka to be something more than a big mall. During the grand opening the mayor received a batch of 100 złoty vouchers for 2,000 underprivileged children from Krakow-based NGOs and welfare associations.
The amount was funded by Demjan himself, and his lease-holders from Bonarka. The owner of TriGranit has already supported many charitable institutions in this area.
It was his idea to include a branch of the U Siemachy association in Bonarka, which operates in the Małopolska region and maintains social therapy centres for “difficult” youth. The 400-square-metre U Siemachy seat in Bonarka will open in 2010".
Bonarka is the largest shopping mall in Europe but it is taking the concept of a warm indoor shopping centre to new levels where it becomes a subsitute for actual city centres and areas with small retailers.
It's basically the Communist dream of the collective anthill which was dreamt of by nineteenth century Utopians realised here on earth by capitalists, often those as from Hungary, who switched from being Communists to ultra-neoliberal cool capitalists when the Soviet game was up in 1989.
“We want Bonarka to be perceived as a centre that is friendly to children, which is why we decided to dedicate these funds for kids,” says Dariusz Rudziński, BCC Managing Director.
That tends to contradict evidence of child prostitution and girls regarding themselves as commodities as a direct result of the brand of all encompassing universe of pure consumption advocated by pretentious pseudo-philanthropists like Demjan.
According to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, "liberal communists" are those who "claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc)".
Zizek's worth quoting at length on liberal communists because his analysis is precise and correct, despite the fact he otherwise spouts lots of silly designer Leninist guff himself in order to convinve deracinated Westerners that the left could "mean" something again under his guidance.
"So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities.
The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy"
The kind of banal rhetoric spouted by Demjan are as predictable with those who follow the cliches of the moment with an intense devotion to the militancy of their mediocrity in rationalising the exploitation and manipulation of young people into total consumption and philanthropy thus,
As Zizek comments, "Olivier Malnuit drew up the liberal communist’s Ten Commandments in the French magazine Technikart":
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.
10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has dissected the illusions of the repuslive generation of liberal communist Utopians who love May 1968 as an flowering of youthful energy and designer creativity which shattered the bureaucratic order in both the West and in the East.
In Houellebecq's satire Platform, the jaded character Michel Renault on holiday in Thailand suggests that ex-Communist nations like Cuba offered a kind of "endangered regime appeal" and "political exoticism" which could be packaged and sold to bored consumers in the West.
Tourism and shopping malls were invested in primarily by ex-student radicals who saw that all desires could be realised through destroying the barriers separating the individual from the market and reducing himself and his worldview to totally rigified commodification.
Essentially the PR from the Bonarka City Centre projectors is dedicated to infantilising adults and to eliminating childhood and transforming all into people who regard themselves and their choices as perfect rational utility maximising commodities in a market.
The pretense at humanitarianism is nothing but part of the very feel good factor that encourages the notion that excessive materialism and consumption is essentially a Good Thing that improves an individual, can make him an "ethical consumer".
But the very fact that babes in consumerland are conditioned to feel at home and these cathedrals of consumerism means that people no longer go to a shop to buy a particular good or pay for a service but to spend time teased by the infinite promise of consumption.
Consumption becomes a way of existence that eliminates all consciousness that anything more worthwhile than being a banal commodity on a "personality market" has any importance: the individual loses his own life, his integrity and his ability to ask questions and challenge things.
This is precisely what liberal communists want, even though the infinite growth Utopia will run up against the limits imposed upon it by the environment and where the feeling of disempowerment leads to despair an only one palliative-more consumerism. This could spell disaster.
That is why Erich Fromm, when witnessing the emergence of the mass consumer society in the 50s that would dominate the world on being exported from America during it's century of hegemony, commented that,
"A healthy economy is only possible at the expense of unhealthy human beings".
Naturally, such sane and wise considerations are wholly absent from Demjan who opines "Bonarka is a very important project to me. As a Central-Eastern European, I am proud that my acquaintances from London speak enviously of our new centre”.
Where the new Westfield shopping mall in Shepherd's Bush can't even rival Bonarka perhaps Demjan is correct, but the effects of untrammelled debt fuelled consumeriosm in his own Hungary and Tony Blair's legoland Britain are a warning as to what is to come to Poland
For in the UK the "noughties" the level of collective mental health had declined sharply. More than two million Britons are on antidepressants.
Binge drinking a the addiction of a million to class A drugs and what Fromm called "acts of destruction" -self-abuse and vandalism - have reached record levels.
The Samaritans have shown that five million people are "extremely stressed". Oliver James' seminal book, Affluenza, and a Unicef report in January 2007 which listed Britain's children as the unhappiest in Europe, are powerful statements on the society the UK had become.
No matter what PR Demjan pumps out, the net effect will be the same in Poland as it has been in the UK. He might fool those who genuflect before money and corporate power whilst affecting humanitarian sentiments.
I am not convinced and the Preserve Krakow Heritage Society of which I am part is drawing up a petition to have the Bonarka Disco Chimney unplugged immediately |
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