"The concept of"americanism" includes both a positive side-"Thing-ness"-and a negative one-alienation from nature. The contemporary industrial city,with its everyday isolating of nature from the place of production, and the place of production from the place of organizing activity-this city that is completely, to the last inch, fettered by matter that has been transformed by humanity until the last faint resemblance to its spontaneous source has disappeared - creates a relation to the Thing as if to a self-sufficient form that is retired within itself. Its dynamic-laboring structure and its living force are never simultaneously present; thus both become "soulless." This leads to capitalism's characteristic thirst for nature as if for something that, in contrast to the thing, seems to be alive, or, conversely, to its aversion to nature and to the fetishizing of things that are putatively, outside of any relation to nature, valuable in themselves (the so-called technicism from which many excessively zealous worshippers of americanism suffer)." — Boris Arvatov