Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, a post-industrial society in which we witness the ‘end of labor’, in which software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the older dark-suited manager.
Toni Negri himself, the guru of the postmodern left, praises digital capitalism as containing in nuce all the elements of communism – one has only to drop the capitalist form, and the revolutionary goal is achieved.
Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crime…
[...] the ‘ultra-objective’ or systemic violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism, which involve the ‘automatic’ creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the unemployed, and the ‘ultra-subjective’ violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or re…
While Lossky was without doubt a sincere and benevolent person, really caring for the poor and trying to civilise Russian life, such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the systemic violence that had to go on in order for such a comfortable life to be possible. We’re talking here …
