97 UDC 1 Spengler O.+141.319.8(4) Carlos Javier Blanco Martín 1 University of Oviedo,Asturias, Spain SPENGLERIAN CAPITALISM AND THE IMPERIUM OF CITIES Abstract Tis essay is both a Spenglerian and Marxist approach to the crisis of Western societies, especially European ones. Te crisis began with the appearance of the mass man, inhabitant of the big cities, and the consequent “commodifcation” of his being. Te human being becomes more and more a commodity and is degraded. Te evolution of the forces of the lef and of Marxist thought, unfor- tunately, has led to a reinforcement of this objectifed vision of the person as well as to a reinforcement of the capitalist system of exploitation that they are supposed to denounce. Keywords: capitalism, commodifcation, mass man, big cities, decay, alienation 1. Big Cities and Decay Te ofcial understanding of social phenomena is usually done under the optic of a fatalism that should be, at least, suspicious to us. Tings just happen, perhaps under the remote impulse of certain economic determinations or qua- si-natural laws. In the same way that a cataclysm occurs, such as glaciations, earthquakes and droughts, a “catastrophe”, a scourge, comes upon the mass soci- ety. Tis mass society will be, already naturalized in the way described, the very protagonist and cause of the evils that come to it. We are already highlighting the contradiction: the masses “do” and the masses “sufer”. I believe that we have to dig into the hypocrisy of our social science in order to get out of this apparent contradiction and use a fne scalpel to fnd, in another way, the real contradic- tion in which our society lives (Ortega 2012). Our European society is living in a process of unstoppable urbanisation. Te great masses of peasants began to emigrate from their villages and homelands, ancestral depositories of all Celtic and Christian culture. Te city, until the 16th century balanced with the countryside, began its defnitive power, its imperial- ism on the agriculture, its absolute colonization of the countryside. Te city be- came a sink and melting pot for all the human forces scattered in the surround- 1 carlosxblanco@yahoo.es