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Post by Admin on Aug 30, 2020 23:17:26 GMT
Under capitalism, investment in new technologies only occurs when it's profitable for corporate interests – if we want innovation to benefit society at large, we need a socialist system. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/08/how-capitalism-stifles-innovationThe technological dynamism of capitalism has always been a powerful argument in its defence. But one of its secrets is that at the heart of this change we find neither bold entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, nor established firms. Investments pushing the frontiers of scientific knowledge are just too risky. The advances sought may not be forthcoming. Those that do occur may not ever be commercially viable. Any potentially profitable results that do arise may take decades to make any money. And when they finally do, there are no guarantees initial investors will appropriate most of the resulting windfall. There is, accordingly, a powerful tendency for private capital to systematically underinvest in long-term research and development. Despite popular perceptions that private entrepreneurs drive technological innovation, the leading regions of the global economy do not leave the most important stages of technological change to private investors. These costs are socialised. In the quarter-century after World War II, the high profits garnered by American corporations due to their exceptional place in the world market allowed corporate labs to engage in “blue-skies research” projects. But even then, public funding accounted for roughly two-thirds of all research and development expenditures in the United States, creating the foundations for the high-tech sectors of today. With the rise of competition from Japanese and European capital in the 1970s, private-sector funding of research and development increased. However, long-term projects were almost entirely abandoned in favor of product development and applied-research projects promising commercial advantages in the short-to-medium term. Basic research continued to be funded by the government, like the work in molecular biology that supported the move of agribusiness companies into biotechnology. The same was true for projects of special interest to the Pentagon — the developments associated with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for instance, which paved the way for modern global positioning systems — and other government agencies. But medium-to-long-term R&D in general was in great danger of falling into a “valley of death” between basic research and immediate development, with neither the government nor private capital providing significant funding for it. For all their rhetoric touting the “magic of the marketplace,” those in the Reagan administration recognised market failure when they saw it. They began to offer federal and publicly funded university laboratories various carrots and sticks to undertake long-term R&D for US capital. New programs were created to provide start-ups with resources to develop innovations prior to the “proof of concept” required by venture capitalists. Under Reagan, the Small Business Innovation Development Act even mandated that federal agencies set aside a percentage of their R&D budget to fund research by small firms. These and other forms of public-private partnership have granted US capital enormous competitive advantages in the world market. It’s no surprise that Apple’s tremendously successful line of products — iPads, iPhones, and iPods — incorporate twelve key innovations. All twelve (central processing units, dynamic random-access memory, hard-drive disks, liquid-crystal displays, batteries, digital single processing, the Internet, the HTTP and HTML languages, cellular networks, GPS system, and voice-user AI programs) were developed by publicly funded research and development projects. It hasn’t been the dynamics of the market so much as active state intervention that has fueled technological change. The Promised Golden Age Technology is more than just a weapon for inter-capitalist competition; it is a weapon in struggles between capital and labour. Technological changes that create unemployment, de-skill the workforce, and enable one sector of the workforce to be played against another shift the balance of power in capital’s favor. Given this asymmetry, advances in productivity that could reduce work time while expanding real wages lead instead to forced layoffs, increasing stress for those still employed and eroding real wages. Two ongoing technological developments further strengthen the power of capital. Advances in transportation and communication now enable production and distribution chains to be extended across the globe, allowing capital to implement “divide and conquer” strategies against labour to an unprecedented extent. Astounding new labour-saving machines are also becoming more and more inexpensive. An exhaustive study of over seven hundred occupations concluded that no less than 47 percent of employment in the United States is at high risk of being automated within two decades. Anything approaching this level of labour displacement will yield more misery, not progress, for ordinary workers. But the lower cost and higher capacities of machines have also led to change of a better sort. As the prices of computer hardware, software, and Internet connections have declined, many people can now create new “knowledge products” without working for big capitalists. Multitudes across the globe now freely choose to contribute to collective innovation projects of interest to them, outside the relationship of capital and wage labour. The resulting products can now be distributed as unlimited free goods to anyone who wishes to use them, rather than being scarce commodities sold for profit. It is beyond dispute that this new form of social labour has generated innovations superior in quality and scale to the output of capitalist firms. These innovations also tend to be qualitatively different. While technological developments in capitalism primarily address the wants and needs of those with disposable income, open-source projects can mobilise creative energies to address areas capital systematically neglects, such as developing seeds for poor farmers or medicines for those without the money to buy existing medications. The potential of this new form of collective social labour to address pressing social needs across the globe is historically unprecedented. In order to flourish, however, open-source innovation requires free access to existing knowledge goods. Leading capital firms, hoping to extend their ability to privately profit from publicly supported research, have used their immense political power to extend the intellectual property rights regime in scope and enforcement, severely restricting the access open-source projects require. Copyright, after all, was extended for twenty years at the turn of the century, just as internet access was starting to balloon. Despite these barriers, the success of open-source projects shows that intellectual-property rights are not required for innovation. Further evidence is provided by the fact that most scientific and technological workers engaged in innovation are forced to sign away intellectual property rights as a condition of employment. These rights actually hamper advancement by raising the cost of engaging in the production of new knowledge, and by diverting funds to unproductive legal costs. [rest in Link]
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 16:53:57 GMT
"Capitalist ideology is internalised into the super-ego, and therefore people are sort of brainwashed to vote against their own interests." Terrific discussion by psychoanalyst Don Carveth on the psychological hold of capitalism, and how we need to understand it if we are to successfully transcend this. He's exploring the work of Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and in particular the radical ideas of the Frankfurt School (Fromm, Marcuse, Adorno), who developed a compelling synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxist thinking in order to try to understand why we still live in the sort of regressive, oppressive systems that we do. Or as Carveth puts it: "Why did the European and American proletariat not recognise what was in their own self-interest and smash capitalism? Why didn't they? They [i.e., Fromm, Marcuse, Adorno, at the Frankfurt School] felt that they had to turn to psychoanalysis for the answer. And of course the answer they derived from psychoanalysis was essentially the super-ego - that capitalist ideology is internalised into the super-ego, and therefore people are sort of brainwashed to vote against their own interests. This has a much wider application than just to that question - about why the revolutions didn't occur where they were supposed to occur. It has a much wider implication. Why do all of us - despite all of our education, and therapy, and everything else - why are so many of us still cowed by authority? Why do we comply, instead of stand up for ourselves? There are certain people who know how to play the role of the Super-ego - like they know how to step into the super-ego role, they know how to come on like an authoritarian father, and they know how to induce guilt. Why is the working class still voting for Trump? These are profound psychological questions, so this is why they turned to psychoanalysis." From: Freud & Beyond 2016 #7: Fromm, Sullivan, Sartre: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-5q4-nxXWA(about 20 mins in)
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2020 17:07:53 GMT
NOVEMBER 2, 2018 Capitalism is killing the world's wildlife populations, not 'humanity' by Anna Pigott, The Conversation phys.org/news/2018-11-capitalism-world-wildlife-populations-humanity.htmlThe latest Living Planet report from the WWF makes for grim reading: a 60% decline in wild animal populations since 1970, collapsing ecosystems, and a distinct possibility that the human species will not be far behind. The report repeatedly stresses that humanity's consumption is to blame for this mass extinction, and journalists have been quick to amplify the message. The Guardian headline reads "Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations", while the BBC runs with "Mass wildlife loss caused by human consumption". No wonder: in the 148-page report, the word "humanity" appears 14 times, and "consumption" an impressive 54 times.
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Post by Admin on Sept 2, 2020 20:37:54 GMT
Is Capitalism Itself a New God That’s Devouring the Planet? BY CALEIGH FISHER ultraculture.org/blog/2014/08/21/capitalism-thing-ate-planet/Is capitalism a memetic super-organism that uses humanity as a host—a new god created by the humans who serve it—that’s now devouring the planet? My thesis is simple. That capital, in whatever form it is in—dollar, pound, yuan—is a supra-biological organism much like a bacteria. It can eat anything—trees, rocks, oil, flowers, animals, time, energy and humans. It digests and metabolizes everything that it devours and turns it into more capital. It is by taking what naturally occurs and giving it “added value” that capital is created. This is how it is born, through the conversion of nature into something else: not nature. But capital cannot accomplish this on its own. Capital in and of itself does not exist. It is an infectious idea. It is a meme gone wrong. Being an idea, it does not exist in this dimension except as an idea. It inhabits the imaginary universe. It is a concept that is trying to slowly eat this entire planet. It has already infiltrated almost every square inch of the earth, and has plans for sporulating onto the moon and Mars. It has infected almost every human to one degree or another. Those it hasn’t actually infected, or those whose immune systems have fought it off, still have to live in a world that is thoroughly controlled and created by capitalism. This culture does not serve humans. Just look around for a moment. Capitalism is not being used for the betterment of humanity. This culture does not serve humans, and certainly doesn’t serve nature. It serves capital. It is designed so that more capital will be created. Forests will be leveled, mountains ground into dust, thousands will die in these endeavors—to create more capital. It uses us to create more of itself while giving us various diversions along the way to keep us content and pliable. Any benefits to humanity from capitalism are by-products. It has found a symbiote host species, and it needs to look after them and have them multiply so that it can increase its range and influence. When I use the word capital, I mean a symbolic object that represents some amount of labor performed by humans. Whatever form it comes in, capital is in essence control incarnate… or discarnate. People are under the belief that they use capitalism to achieve their own ends, but I submit that it is capital/control that is controlling people. It infects their brains so that they want more and more control/capital in their lives, but what control/capital is doing is getting the humans to create more of itself. Humans are the tools of control/capital. Capital uses humans to create more of itself, and it has even modified the laws in the world so that capital can exert more influence over human processes. The intrusion of capitalism into the political system isn’t about humans becoming wealthy through their lack of ethics, it’s about capital gaining more control over the workings of the planet so that it can create more of itself. Since capital doesn’t exist physically, it has to use humans to achieve its ends. We are the only animal that has so far been infected by capitalism, though every other animal and plant and microbe has felt capital’s influence. Every species on earth has its nemesis which keeps it in check. Capital has no known enemy—no real predator, at least. Every animal is bound to the prey/predation cycle. Even those at the top of the food chain have to rely on sufficient prey to keep their numbers up. If the prey declines, so does the predator. And there is always disease and random accident, fights with neighbors, etc. to put some pressure on every species from plankton to pythons. But capitalism has no known enemy. There are forces and events that have slowed its growth, but every single economic activity has the goal of creating more capital, or moving capital around. When you buy something, you don’t use up capital, you move it around. If you buy a house, you shift capital to the previous owner, but the capital is not used up. You bought the house for $134K, but you’re now selling it for $210K—you just helped create $77K in capital. The interest that you pay on your mortgage is in essence a promise to create more brand new capital. That is what interest is. It is capital making you promise to make more of it for the privilege of being its courier, its vector of further infection. We aren’t using money, money is using us. When discussing this idea, a friend suggested that it wasn’t capital that was the danger, that it was technology that was driving this process. I argue that technology in some forms existed pre-capital, and that it was integrated into a pre-capital lifestyle which discouraged the wanton maximal “use” of everything around. Blowguns are used in the Amazon, but the tribes there didn’t just keep on hunting more and more animals in the hopes that they could get someone to buy their excess kills. What is this “buying” thing? You hunt what you can for what you need to survive. There’s no point in killing more than you can eat or store safely. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll go hunting again, and there will be more peccary or deer. To try and hunt down all of them today is just foolishness. There’s even archeological evidence that the bow and arrow was introduced to Australia millennia ago and was rejected by the people there as being too efficient. With a tool like that, you might be tempted to hunt more than you needed. The boomerang made sure that hunting was a proper challenge and meant that overpopulation was never an issue. Capital wants overpopulation, more people, more vectors, more flesh machines to cut down forests, dig up stones, grind up grains, all of which will create more capital. So—how do we kill capital? That is the question we need to answer for our survival. Don’t think that capital has some special love of humans. We may have created it and are at present its most effective tool, but the development of all technologies and machinery have been at the service of capital. Automation creates capital more efficiently than having humans do all the work. When automation first came into being, humans thought that we would soon have lives of leisure, that automation would free us. This has clearly not been the case. Automation was in fact a creation of capital so that it could multiply even faster and more effectively, and consume the planet even better than before. Anthropologists tell us that neolithic humans, pre-capital humans, worked an average of 3-4 hours a day to have their necessities for survival, and despite physical hardships and other “suffering,” they led lives of spiritual fulfillment. In fact, they may very well have been happier than we are now. Capital wants us to want more, because that more is, at the base, more capital. Capital does not want us to be happy and satisfied and content. Capital wants us to feel like we need more of it, always. I need a better house, therefore I need to make more $ to buy that house. I need a new television with surround sound, which means I need more $ to buy it with. Capital is controlling us, creating dissatisfaction which can only be filled by more things, and all things that aren’t nature are vectors for creation of capital. This is no accident.
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Post by Admin on Sept 6, 2020 1:13:28 GMT
Nathan Robinson on how David Graeber taught us to notice and question what was overlooked and unexamined, with the goal of making us more free to enjoy the brief, wondrous gift of getting to be alive. www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/what-david-graeber-noticedDavid Graeber noticed things. Everyone notices a few things here and there, but David Graeber noticed things other people did not. This was partly because he was an anthropologist, trained to shed presumptions about how human societies work and figure out how they actually work, to see people both through their own eyes and through the eyes of others. It was also, however, because he was an anarchist, instinctively inclined to reject the existing order of things and think for himself about what could and could not be justified. But Graeber did not simply see; he was a committed activist, participant as well as observer, who turned his intelligence to practical questions about how to make people more free to enjoy the brief, wondrous gift of getting to be alive. David Graeber died this week, and with it Planet Earth lost one of its most fertile and original minds. His loss is a tragedy not just for his family, colleagues, and friends, but for everyone who wants to understand what is going on around them, because for many more years David Graeber would have continued to notice new things, everywhere, all the time. Without Graeber to point out what isn’t obvious, fascinating and troubling elements of our world may now go completely unnoticed. Unless, of course, many of us learn from him and follow his example.
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Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2020 0:37:58 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 12:58:44 GMT
Ritualistic Consumption could not have happened if individuals were not raised in an environment worshiping monetarism, which just exploits anything for the sake of commerce and has caused illusory attachments to things that we dispose of later on. The Shocking Story About “Ritualistic” Consumption medium.com/@manasearthcustodian/the-shocking-story-about-ritualistic-consumption-16d5471ef850Exposing the destructive patterns of monetarism is essential to initiate the transition toward a money-free society. Capitalism, socialism, communism, it does not matter, they all follow the money. China is, by the way, conquering Africa where the slave wage pool is big enough to keep production costs low. Sounds familiar? Our society is a house of cards of an absolutely Gargantuan proportion, and it is literally killing humans and nature alike. Actually, if you tell these people, most will not believe you and rather use the argument that nobody is forced to consume. They will forcefully deny the influence of this programming, conditioning because the realization is too painful to deal with. Ritualistic Consumption Ritualistic Consumption could not have happened if individuals were not raised in an environment worshiping monetarism, which just exploits anything for the sake of commerce and has caused illusory attachments to things that we dispose of later on. Buying works just as any hard drug addiction. Spending to conquer the material gives a high and rewards the ego instantaneously, which later fades and requires another spending fix. Many people today are already feeling the pinch and do not spend the way they used to, but still have the access to several credit cards. Most people do not buy a house because they want to but fall for the propaganda surrounding the housing market. They own a house and feel rich(er) about it. This wealth effect is total fiction since the 2008 bubble has not gone away. What individuals need to change are their perspectives about life, distance themselves from the notion their material possessions are everything they have to cling on. Instead of investing in materialism, choosing to discover the world, real-life experience with Nature, and communicate with different points of view without judging too fast. Taking the time to live for oneself before having any kids. All this is impossible to do as long as monetarism remains a social premise. Maybe the price to pay for the majority to way up is ultimately a crash. But it is going to make the “transition” toward a money-free society trickier. A steady flow of people recognizing the value of a non-competitive society would be ideal, but it does seem like it is not going to happen that way. We should ready ourselves for a wild ride and realistically to redouble our efforts to spread the word in the most efficient fashion possible. If you have watched the YT doc, “The Century Of The Self”, and how Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, showed American corporations how they could use Freud’s theories to trick the public into wanting things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires, there is one important piece missing to the puzzle, and which is that of the Victor Lebow character. As the world economy moves toward a checkmate, the Lifting Of The Veil will cause many to rally against this current anti-humanity system. Perhaps no critical mass, but enough momentum for people to welcome the money-free alternative… and the word of mouth helping propagate the latter? Despite the so many headlines claiming that the economy did so well, and registered 3.5% growth, reality tells a different picture as corporate buybacks are skyrocketing in 2018, and of course, quarterly earnings look great. The reality is that monetarism is unraveling and the story that got us to this point is kinda terrifying. Terrifying in the sense that human conditioning was so easily achieved. A cakewalk as Annie Leonard explains here below. Who Was Victor Lebow? He was a 20th century economist and retail analyst, perhaps best known for his quotation regarding the formulation of American consumer capitalism found in his paper “Price Competition in 1955” (Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955). Modern authors disagree as to whether Lebow was encouraging and prescribing conspicuous consumption or grimly acknowledging and critiquing its prevalence among American consumers.http://www.thefullwiki.org/Victor_Lebow The 20mn Presentation That Will Change Your Life Forever (5,451,811 views) Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1).
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 13:03:25 GMT
September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day. Many NGOs, politicians, and corporations will release statements on the need to raise awareness around individual mental health. But they only pay lip service to a deeply systemic issue that is rooted in the injustices and exploitation of capitalism. Capitalism Caused the Suicide Epidemic. We Must Overthrow It www.leftvoice.org/capitalism-caused-the-suicide-epidemic-we-must-overthrow-it“Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.” — Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism, 2009) Every year on September 10, people around the world observe World Suicide Prevention Day. Organizations such as the World Health Organization and others use the day to build awareness about the causes, signs, and ways to prevent suicide. But these efforts at best attempt to put a bandaid on a deeply complicated issue and at worst obfuscate the material conditions and systemtic factors that contribute to rising rates of suicide around the world. . When confronting the underlying causes of the horrifically high rates of suicide, we have to understand that capitalism is the root cause of many deaths by suicide, as well as the lack of resources to help people who are struggling. As such, we need to fight to prevent suicide with an anti-capitalist perspective. Contrary to messaging from many non-profits and government organizations, suicide prevention should not be — cannot be — an individualized task. It is not, as many suggest, the job solely of individuals to check in on their loved ones and ensure that they have the help they need. By that same token, it cannot be the sole responsibility of the person who is struggling to find help for themselves. Rather, we must understand that we have a collective societal responsibility to look after those who are confronting a mental health crisis. Given this, any conversation about suicide prevention must center the need to construct a society that is designed to aid people rather than exploit them. Because at every turn, the capitalist state has failed us. It has left us to die, to mourn our loved ones, so long as we continue to make our bosses money. Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crisis are increasing suicide rates to an alarming degree. A study published in August reported that 25.5 percent of people aged 18 to 24 said that they had seriously considered suicide in the last 30 days. Like other public health crises, suicide disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. 41 percent of trans* adults report having attempted suicide while the suicide rate for Native youth is 2.5 times higher than the national average. As the economic crisis worsens and more people lose their jobs and homes, millions more will die as the rates of suicide continue to rise. Worsening material conditions will lead to increased suicide rates among vulnerable, exploited, and oppressed people in particular. Studies show a strong association between poverty and youth suicide rates, and about 30 percent of those who die by suicide are unemployed. This shows that suicide is not the inevitable result of a personal psychological problem but, rather, a reaction to despair caused by material conditions. It is not merely a personal decision but a symptom of a larger societal problem. That capitalists and their governments are responsible for these deaths must never be forgotten. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the government has not forgiven rent, has not cancelled student loans, has not provided free healthcare, has not extended livable unemployment, and has done nothing to protect the millions of jobs that were lost. It is true, of course, that suicide has a variety of causes including both material conditions and underlying mental health struggles, and it is overly simplistic to lay the entiriety of the blame for suicides at the feet of capitalism. However, capitalism has created oppressive and alienating conditions while at the same time systematically depriving people of necessary resources. This is especially acute in the United States where healthcare is privatized and mental health care is harder to obtain than it is elsewhere. Given this, any discussion of mental health and suicide prevention must acknowledge that we will never be able to truly care for people and prevent suicide under capitalism. As long as people are exploited, alientated from their labor, oppressed, and deprived of resources by the state, there will be a suicide epidemic. This is not to claim that, on the day after the revolution, all mental health struggles will disappear. Far from it. But the way that our society currently addresses these issues is, to paraphrase the Mark Fisher, inherently dysfunctional. For capitalists, millions of suicide deaths per year is a small price to pay to maintain their power and profits. Every year around September 10, a plethora of companies, business leaders, and officials release statements or products to support suicide prevention. Vice President Mike Pence’s wife Karen Pence, a teacher at a school that explicitly excludes LGBTQ+ students and staff tweeted out her support for suicide prevention on September 1, saying that it is an “important time to recognize suicide as a public health issue.” In 2017, even Donald Trump himself issued a statement recognizing World Suicide Prevention Day which said that, “As a Nation, we must strive to prevent heartbreaking loss of life caused by suicides.” Last year, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services likewise tweeted his support. This shows the limits of a suicide “prevention” that isn’t explicitly anti-capitalist. Of course, almost no one would say that they oppose suicide prevention efforts. But when it comes time to support even the most moderate policies to actually prevent suicide, they merely pay lip service to the issue, hiding beyind empty slogans and instead put profits over human lives. Famed labor organizer Mother Jones famously said that we must “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Too many people have already mourned losses and too many more will be mourning in the coming crisis. To honor their legacy, to demand justice for the lives lost, we must fight with every ounce of our resolve against the system of capitalism. Capitalism has damned us to a system of crippling debt, unwavering exploitation, and failing social services. We owe it to ourselves, to all those who are struggling, and to all of those who have died to be relentless in our fight. The suicide epidemic is preventable only by creating a society where people aren’t alienated from their labor, have much better material conditions, and free access to health care — including mental health care. This is the world that we fight for. This year on World Suicide Prevention Day, let us re-affirm our commitment to fighting for a better world against the capitalists and their governments.
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2020 21:23:23 GMT
"Semio-capital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic but also psychopathic. Semio-capital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 Bending the Stick: The Returns of Political Economy and Philosophical Anthropology Into Philosophy Paolo Virno writes the following:
“What is involved here is the conceptualization of the field of immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure, between the revolution of labor process and the revolution of sentiments, between technology and emotional tonality, between material development and culture. By confining ourselves narrowly to this dichotomy, however, we fatally renew the metaphysical split between “lower” and higher, animal and rational, body and soul—and it makes little difference if we boast of our pretensions to historical materialism. If we fail to perceive the points of identity between labor practices and modes of life, we will comprehend nothing of the changes taking place in present-day production and misunderstand a great deal about the forms of contemporary culture.”
Virno’s idea of the immediate coincidence between affects and economics not only characterizes his own work, or much of it (some of the recent work is focused more on the problem of philosophical anthropology, which is perhaps already alluded to in the quote above), but several other works in philosophy. These works stem from two central conditions: First, a breakdown of a certain version of Marxism for which the relationship between production and ethics always passed through the necessary mediations of the base and superstructure, law and politics, hence the immediacy. Second, as the quote above suggests, this change is also brought about by the transformation of capitalism itself, a transformation that Virno will later qualify according to the centrality of the very question of the human in the production process: the increasing importance of not just language and thought, but of human flexibility and neoteny in post-Fordist capitalism. As Virno argues the current regime of labor with its combined demands of professionalization and precariousness results in a model of labor which is not so much about particular skills, talents, and knowledge, but the capacity to acquire skills, knowledge, etc. We sell species being, not the alienation from species being. “Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process.”
I am interested in both this return to philosophical anthropology, to a speculation of the fundamentals of human existence, and political economy, to an unmediated examination of the economy in terms of its effects. In the last decades of the last millennium, both of these things were forbidden: economism and humanism were epithets to avoid at all costs. What interests me about this recent turn, not just in the work of Virno, but others, is not so much the return of the repressed, but this idea of an immediate coincidence. of a combination (or is it a dialectic) in which the human is displaced by its immediate entry into the economic and the economic is understand as constitutive of the human. Immanence is perhaps the key to not overcoming the old taboos, but understanding the present.
Moreover, to cite Stiegler, who I will be discussing in a minute, the retreat from political economy by philosophy has been coupled with a retreat in engagement at the level of politics. I would add to this that similar perils confront any philosophy that leaves the anthropological terrain, which is distinct from anthropology or humanism. This terrain covers that highly ambivalent intersection of culture and nature that constitutes human life, what Virno calls historico-natural and Balibar calls anthropological difference. I am thinking here of the long night of “social construction” in which the only thing that one could say about anything, desire, labor, identity, language, etc., was that it was socially constructed, contingent not necessary. This important emphasis on construction crashed upon the shores of its unexamined ontology (everything is socially constructed) and its non-existent politics (we should construct things differently…or better)
All of this is a preamble of sorts for a review of two of Franco Berardi’s recently translated works (The Soul at Work and Precarious Rhapsody) and Bernard Stiegler’s Pour une nouvelle critique de l’economie. They are connected by this theme, and the much more contingent fact that I just happened to read them at the same time.
To begin with Stiegler, an intersection of interests (primarily Simondon) has drawn me to read some of Stiegler’s works, the translated books and a few of the shorter books in French. I remain ambivalent, however, and not ready to dive in. When it comes to Stiegler, diving in really is diving in: he seems to come up with multi book series the way the rest of us come up with shows to watch on DVD. There is a little of a bad infinity to these writings as they gravitate around the same these and ideas. Anyway I was curious enough of his attempt to take on the economy that I read his new book (at least it was his new book, he probably finished something else by the time I wrote this blog post).
Stiegler approaches the economy through some of the central themes of his work: individuation, borrowed in part from Simondon, and his general idea of grammatization (the word he uses in this book), which is to say the exteriorization of memory, in tools, writing, and devices, which is constitutive of history and humanity as such. As Stiegler argues, such grammatization is a condition of proletarianization: workers can only be reduced to simple abstract labor power if the machine can take on their specific memory.(The term grammatization, my awkward and literal translation, obviously has its origins in Derrida’a trace, but like all of Stiegler’s concepts it is fundamentally eclectic: drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the inscribing socius.) This is also where the new dimension of the critique comes into play, Stiegler criticizes Marx for not taking into account consumption. Consumption is another kind of proletarianization, a loss of subjectivity and individuation. Just as the machine at work takes on the subjectivity of the worker, the memory and knowledge, the machines at home, in consumption, does the same. Proletarianization becomes a general condition, distinct from pauperization.
As I have noted previously, Stiegler’s critique seems to overlook the activity in modern consumption. However, his critique, which focuses on the economy as a phenomenon of subjectivity and belief has some merit. Drawing on the concept of externality, he argues that we lack the positive externalities, education and sociality, that make it possible to combat the negative externalities of capital. The subjectivity that capital produces is incapable of combating its effects, and ultimately even of sustaining it.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi belongs to the same generation as such thinkers as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, but with the exception of his piece on the semiotext(e) collection on Autonomia, much of his work has not been translated into English. This has all changed rather abruptly with the recent publication of The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy and Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. The first book is a necessary update to the concept of alienation: a word that is as unavoidable as it is discredited, as well as an attempt to situate the Italian Marxist tradition within the larger context of the Frankfurt School and French Thought. With respect to the first aspect the book points out a positive dimension of alienation, alienation as the basis of refusal, in the thought of Tronti, juxtaposing his work with Marcuse as two very different reflections on the same period. As Bifo writes about this positive dimension: “Alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as an estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship.” Thus, inserting a necessary political dimension into the debate on alienation.
The real difference with respect to alienation, the real reason that it has fallen out of favor, is not political, but historical, concerning the change of the economy. Alienation corresponded to the Fordist economy, to a production process in which information and communication flowed only in one direction, in which work imposed a mute necessity on laboring bodies. This has fundamentally changed, and with it the situation of the soul in work. This new situation cannot be accurately captured by alienation. Bifo’s work has the benefit of underscore the political and economic transformations underlying the theoretical shifts from alienation to the production of subjectivity. It is not a matter of a change of trends, but a change of the real conditions. The new work process does not so much alienate subjectivity, but produces it. The worker is not excluded from the production process, but brought into it, compelled to communicate and compete with all of their being. Alienation and the old pathologies will not describe this situation.
Precarious Rhapsody is the most concerned with this shift and the new pathologies. New pathologies brought about by the shift to semio-capitalism, capitalism of signs. As Bifo writes:
“Semio-capital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic but also psychopathic. Semio-capital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”
Much of Bifo’s analysis comes close to Stiegler, his “post-alpha generation” refers to a generation that learns more words from machines than their others, which justifies my review of the two together. Bifo even shares some of Stiegler’s faults, tending toward an apocalyptic understanding of this shift. Bifo like Stiegler sees a loss of sensitivity and attentiveness to others in the digital world, connect it to a particular pathological incident (the Virginia Tech Shooting). Stiegler and Bifo overlap in an apocalyptic tone of sorts. However, such limitations of their pronouncements shouldn’t overshadow their strength. This strength is most clearly pronounced in Bifo who uses the term compositionism to define Italian workerism: the reference is not just to class composition, but to all of the technical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions that make up the conjuncture.
We must think together the new pathologies of the present, ADD and depression; the new technologies, social networks; the new regimes of regulation, neoliberal deregulation; and the new productive classes; the cogitariat, if we are to make any sense of the present. The old categories, and taboos, cannot restrict this, humanism, economism, etc. all must be reexamined.
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Post by Admin on Sept 18, 2020 17:36:06 GMT
The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself by Richard D. Wolff Published September 2020, by Democracy at Work Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7356013-0-4 The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over 50 essays, The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself, Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that "returning to normal" no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us. The Sickness is the System is published by Democracy at Work. Professor Wolff generously donated his time and work so that all sales revenue could go to support d@w. www.democracyatwork.info/books
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Post by Admin on Sept 24, 2020 19:42:04 GMT
Neoliberalism and Me Culture Undermine Mental Wellness and Human Dignity Prilleltensky argues that individualism and neoliberalism undermine the key components of a healthy society and worsen mental health www.madinamerica.com/2020/09/neoliberalism-culture-undermine-mental-wellness-human-dignity/A new article, published in the American Journal of Community Psychology, discusses how elements of neoliberalism and hyper-individualism erode the core tenets of a healthy society, damaging our personal and societal well-being. Isaac Prilleltensky, a community psychologist at the University of Miami, employs a philosophical exploration of what it means to ‘matter’ and claims that we must change the structures and environments that currently prioritize “me” over “we.” If we do not, the United States will continue to see a decline in mental health and wellness. Prilleltensky writes: “If we want everyone to matter, we must foster a We Culture and reject politics that use and abuse mattering…we should embrace movements that seek to balance feeling valued with adding value to self and the community.” Mattering at the Intersection of Psychology, Philosophy, and Politics Isaac Prilleltensky First published: 13 August 2019 doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12368Citations: 7 This article was originally presented as the Seymour B. Sarason Award address at the Biennial Conference of the Society for Community Research and Action in Chicago in June 2019. I wish to thank Ora Prilleltensky for many insightful comments and helpful feedback. I also wish to thank Rebecca Lamperski and David Yaden for sharing valuable resources and data on the scholarship of mattering. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajcp.12368Abstract Mattering is an ideal state of affairs consisting of two complementary psychological experiences: feeling valued and adding value. Human beings can feel valued by, and add value to, self, others, work, and community. To make sure that the need for mattering is fulfilled, we must balance feeling valued with adding value. Moreover, we must balance adding value to self with adding value to others. Unfortunately, the dominant neoliberal philosophy does not support the values required to ensure the experience of mattering. Whereas a healthy and fair society would require equilibrium among values for personal, relational, and collective well‐being, the dominant philosophy in many parts of the world favors personal at the expense of relational and collective values. Neoliberal economic and social policies have resulted in diminished sense of mattering for millions of people. Some people respond to cultural pressures to achieve higher status by becoming depressive or aggressive. Some marginalized groups, in turn, support xenophobic, nationalistic, and populist policies in an effort to regain a sense of mattering. To make sure that everyone matters, we must align the psychology, philosophy, and politics of mattering. The political struggle for a just and equitable distribution of mattering takes place in social movements and the policy arena. The perils and promises of these efforts are considered.
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Post by Admin on Sept 25, 2020 19:09:48 GMT
"Hedges takes a close look at the array of pathologies that have arisen out of a profound malaise of hopelessness as the society disintegrates due to the “slow moving [corporate] Coup d’état” instituted by the ruling classes in the ’70s in reaction to the activist movements and reforms of the ’60s. And how this disintegration has resulted in an epidemic of diseases, despair, and a civil society that has ceased to function." SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 BY DANDELIONSALAD Chris Hedges: American Empire Collapse: It’s About To Get Much Worse dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2020/09/25/chris-hedges-american-empire-collapse-its-about-to-get-much-worse/
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Post by Admin on Oct 9, 2020 9:37:37 GMT
Compartmentalization is what makes society sick... we can no longer afford to handle topics separately.“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”, wrote Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_HerbertFranklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science-fiction author best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer. The Dune saga, set in the distant future, and taking place over millennia, explores complex themes, such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled many thousands of worlds. Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time,[2] and the whole series is widely considered to be among the classics of the genre.
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Post by Admin on Oct 15, 2020 22:00:21 GMT
Published on Thursday, October 15, 2020 byCommon Dreams Resurgence of Child Labor Amid Global Pandemic Offered as Proof That 'Capitalism Is Monstrous' "Good time to remember that a number of free market economists defend child labor as being a good thing." byKenny Stancil, staff writer www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/15/resurgence-child-labor-amid-global-pandemic-offered-proof-capitalism-monstrousAs the Covid-19 pandemic and corresponding economic upheaval threaten to push up to 150 million people into extreme poverty by 2021, in-depth reporting Thursday from the Associated Press showed that the coronavirus crisis is also undermining two decades of gains against child labor in the developing world, where an entire generation of impoverished children lacking access to safe education opportunities are being driven by economic necessity to work alongside their parents or in place of unemployed caretakers. Progressive author and commentator Nathan Robinson said Thursday on social media that the dire situation demonstrates the depravity of the global economic system and its inability to guarantee the well-being of all the world's inhabitants despite there being more than enough resources to do so. "Capitalism is monstrous," he said. Robinson also noted that it's a "good time to remember that a number of free market economists defend child labor as being a good thing because it's 'freely chosen' and work is good, so prohibiting it would be 'coercive.'"
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Post by Admin on Nov 5, 2020 22:12:15 GMT
However inequitable its bias, capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. consortiumnews.com/2020/11/05/chris-hedges-american-requiem/Well, it’s over. Not the election. The capitalist democracy. However biased it was towards the interests of the rich and however hostile it was to the poor and minorities, the capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. Now it is a corpse. The iconography and rhetoric remain the same. But it is an elaborate and empty reality show funded by the ruling oligarchs — $1.51 billion for the Biden campaign and $1.57 billion for the Trump campaign — to make us think there are choices. There are not. The empty jousting between a bloviating President Donald Trump and a verbally impaired Joe Biden is designed to mask the truth. The oligarchs always win. The people always lose. It does not matter who sits in the White House. America is a failed state. “The American Dream has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now.” There were many actors that killed America’s open society. The corporate oligarchs who bought the electoral process, the courts and the media, and whose lobbyists write the legislation to impoverish us and allow them to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and unchecked power. The militarists and war industry that drained the national treasury to mount futile and endless wars that have squandered some $7 trillion and turned us into an international pariah. The CEOs, raking in bonuses and compensation packages in the tens of millions of dollars, that shipped jobs overseas and left our cities in ruins and our workers in misery and despair without a sustainable income or hope for the future. The fossil fuel industry that made war on science and chose profits over the looming extinction of the human species. The press that turned news into mindless entertainment and partisan cheerleading. The intellectuals who retreated into the universities to preach the moral absolutism of identity politics and multiculturalism while turning their backs on the economic warfare being waged on the working class and the unrelenting assault on civil liberties. And, of course, the feckless and hypocritical liberal class that does nothing but talk, talk, talk. Contemptible Class If there is one group that deserves our deepest contempt it is the liberal elites, those who posture as the moral arbiters of society while abandoning every value they purportedly hold the moment they become inconvenient. The liberal class, once again, served as pathetic cheerleaders and censors for a candidate and a political party that in Europe would be considered on the far-right. Even while liberals were being ridiculed and dismissed by Biden and by the Democratic Party hierarchy, which bizarrely invested its political energy in appealing to Republican neocons, liberals were busy marginalizing journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who called out Biden and the Democrats. The liberals, whether at The Intercept or The New York Times, ignored or discredited information that could hurt the Democratic Party, including the revelations on Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was a stunning display of craven careerism and self-loathing. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. The Democrats and their liberal apologists are, the election has illustrated, oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. Restoring the rule of law, universal health care, banning fracking, a Green New Deal, the protection of civil liberties, the building of unions, the preservation and expansion of social welfare programs, a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the forgiveness of student debt, stiff environmental controls, a government jobs program and guaranteed income, financial regulation, opposition to endless war and military adventurism were once again forgotten. Championing these issues would have resulted in a Democratic Party landslide. But since the Democratic Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate donors, promoting any policy that might foster the common good, diminish corporate profits and restore democracy, including imposing campaign finance laws, was impossible. Biden’s campaign was utterly bereft of ideas and policy issues, as if he and the Democrats could sweep the elections by promising to save the soul of America. At least the neofascists have the courage of their demented convictions. The liberal class functions in a traditional democracy as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It ameliorates the worst excesses of capitalism. It proposes gradual steps towards greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with supposed virtues. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements. The liberal class is a vital component within the power elite. In short, it offers hope and the possibility, or at least the illusion, of change. The surrender of the liberal elite to despotism creates a power vacuum that speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues, fill. It opens the door to fascist movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the absurdities of the liberal class and the values they purport to defend. The promises of the fascists are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth. Once the liberal class ceases to function, it opens a Pandora’s box of evils that are impossible to contain. Disease of Trumpism The disease of Trumpism, with or without Trump, is, as the election illustrated, deeply embedded in the body politic. It is an expression among huge segments of the population, taunted by liberal elites as “deplorables,” of a legitimate alienation and rage that the Republicans and the Democrats orchestrated and now refuse to address. This Trumpism is also, as the election showed, not limited to white men, whose support for Trump actually declined. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the behavior of Russia’s useless liberal class, which he satirized and excoriated at the end of the 19th century, as presaging a period of blood and terror. The failure of liberals to defend the ideals they espoused inevitably led, he wrote, to an age of moral nihilism. In Notes From Underground, he portrayed the sterile, defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who hold up high ideals but do nothing to defend them. The main character in Notes From Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms Russia as it now dooms the United States. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action. “I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.” The refusal of the liberal class to acknowledge that power has been wrested from the hands of citizens by corporations, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have been revoked by judicial fiat, that elections are nothing more than empty spectacles staged by the ruling elites, that we are on the losing end of the class war, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization — has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human progress, Howe wrote, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.” “The truly powerless people are those intellectuals — the new realists — who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” Populations can endure the repression of tyrants, as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. The historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair, his book on the rise of fascism in Germany, wrote of the consequences of the collapse of liberalism. Stern argued that the spiritually and politically alienated, those cast aside by the society, are prime recruits for a politics centered around violence, cultural hatreds and personal resentments. Much of this rage, justifiably, is directed at a liberal elite that, while speaking the “I-feel-your-pain” language of traditional liberalism, sells us out. “They attacked liberalism,” Stern writes of the fascists emerging at the time in Germany, “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sense in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.” We are in for it. The for-profit health care system, designed to make money — not take care of the sick — is unequipped to handle a national health crisis. The health care corporations have spent the last few decades merging and closing hospitals, and cutting access to health care in communities across the nation to increase revenue — this, as nearly half of all front-line workers remain ineligible for sick pay and some 43 million Americans have lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. The pandemic, without universal health care, which Biden and the Democrats have no intention of establishing, will continue to rage out of control. Three hundred thousand Americans dead by December. Four hundred thousand by January. And by the time the pandemic burns out or a vaccine becomes safely available, hundreds of thousands, maybe a few million, will have died. Inevitable Unrest The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. The economic fallout from the pandemic, the chronic underemployment and unemployment — close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line are included in the official statistics — will mean a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. Hunger in US households has already tripled since last year. The proportion of US children who are not getting enough to eat is 14 times higher than last year. Food banks are overrun. The moratorium on foreclosures and evictions has been lifted while over 30 million destitute Americans face the prospect of being thrown into the street. There is no check left on corporate power. The inevitable social unrest will see the state, no matter who is in the White House, use its three principle instruments of social control — wholesale surveillance, the prisons and militarized police — buttressed by a legal system that routinely revokes habeas corpus and due process, to ruthlessly crush dissent. People of color, immigrants and Muslims will be blamed and targeted by our native fascists for the nation’s decline. The few who continue in defiance of the Democratic Party to call out the crimes of the corporate state and the empire will be silenced. The sterility of the liberal class, serving the interests of a Democratic Party that disdains and ignores them, fuels the widespread feelings of betrayal that saw nearly half the voters support one of the most vulgar, racist, inept and corrupt presidents in American history. An American tyranny, dressed up with the ideological veneer of a Christianized fascism, will, it appears, define the empire’s epochal descent into irrelevance. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show “On Contact.”
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