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Conventional forms of collective protest have not disappeared regardless of what is currently being said about the rise of this dangerous brand of pan-capitalism that appears to be able to absorb everything – including revolt. And no doubt class is still the central fulcrum for resisting capitalism successfully since it is the only emancipatory category that also seeks to abolish itself when it confronts the source of economic servitude, not just perpetuate its own self-identity, which is why a number of non-class protest movements can happily subsist alongside capitalist hierarchies
kinda obvious in retrospect but worth remembering
[...] The ‘accelerationist’ perspective, for example, is a philosophy of political intervention that has recently gained popularity. Accelerationists suggest that capitalism is now so totalising that it can absorb almost any form of protest or opposition. In fact, it might even thrive on dissent. Thus, being against capitalism has become a futile exercise. Instead we ought to use its own untenable and destructive principles, speed them up, so that it too ‘snaps’ and disintegrates, leaving a clean horizon within which we can rebuild a more democratic polity. As Steven Shaviro, a leading commenter in the movement suggests in his book No Speed Limit,
the only way out is the way through. In order to overcome globalised neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences … the hope is that, by exacerbating our current conditions of existence, we will finally be able to make them explode, and thereby move beyond them.
he's fairly critical of accelerationism, noting instead that revolution can't actually occur when the oppressed are at rock bottom
"This is how critical theory can easily slip into a de facto right-wing, pseudo-capitalist position, albeit adorned with Che Guevara tattoos and a left-wing library." (p238)
[...] Life itself is simply about being endlessly concerned with solving technical problems, many of which have none (e.g., debt, etc.). For example, it’s crucial for any civilised society to have a functioning and affordable nationwide public transport system (value). But the job of delivering it has been handed over to organisations who view that value-goal as secondary to making money (means). So much so that it utterly fails in its wider mission. The problem is that society as a whole is being run pretty much in the same way.
[...] One might be tempted to conduct a deconstructive reading of neoclassical economics in the style of Jacques Derrida to try and discern what precisely is the ‘absent presence’ quietly animating this vast machinery of means in the dark margins of its own impossibility. On the other hand, perhaps there’s good reason why Derrida steered clear of economics as such. For its social centre is strictly void, a perceptive abyss that is bereft of wider political reflection. This variant of nothingness is frightening since it consists of interminable tautologies: ‘the reason you do this is because you do this … now let’s model it’. From the rise of the Chicago School onwards, we are no longer permitted to ask why, for example, we have banks, prisons, markets, the cumbersome institution of work and so forth. Challenge any official about this and their gaze slowly drifts away into nothingness with a dumb ‘huh?’ expression. In a universe ruled only by means (especially prices and money) the unassuming margins that Derrida argued were so important for grasping a discourse (i.e., it’s what is not said, continuously deferred that gives a text its deceptive positivity) are suddenly missing.
None of this would be a problem if economics was confined to the endowed chairs of the academy, esoteric journal articles and boring conferences. But the lexicon of neoclassical economics is the leading language game in (post-)neoliberal societies of control. And this economisation of life in general has only gathered strength following the global financial crisis, an event that mainly become notable because it affects rich people (the Global South has had its own global crisis for many years, it’s called poverty). [...]
just, lol
[...] jobs become a quantitative output (politicians only talk about them in terms of faceless numbers) rather than a qualitative or substantive input that might serve some wider social and existential role. In other words, a job is no longer a means to achieve other things but a (dead) end in itself.
[...] Social classes, we contend, are fundamentally associated with the stored historical baggage and the accumulation of advantages over time.
Bourdieu says this a lot but I like this phrasing
[...] As the Hills report noted, thus 'economic advantage and disadvantage reinforce themselves across the life cycle and often on to the next generation'. Because the possession of economic capital takes time to acquire, it is also inevitably associated with the ageing process, even when inheritance is at work. Ageing and accumulation reinforce each other.
[...] Thinkers who identify with the Marxian tradition maintain that the category of distribution fails to capture the full depths of capitalist injustice because it neglects the relations of production and fails to problematize exploitation, domination, and commodification. [...]
not a bad point tbh (she seems to think recognition addresses this)
[...] The working class is the body of persons who must sell their labour power under arrangements that authorize the capitalist class to appropriate surplus productivity for its private benefit. The core injustice of these arrangements is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution in which the proletariat's own energies are turned against it, usurped to sustain a system that benefits others. To be sure, proletarians also suffer serious cultural injustices the "hidden injuries of class." But far from being rooted directly in an autonomously unjust status order, these derive from the economic structure, as ideologies of class inferiority proliferate to justify exploitation. The remedy for the injustice, accordingly, is redistribution, not recognition. Overcoming class exploitation requires restructuring the political economy so as to alter the class distribution of benefits and burdens in the Marxian view, such restructuring takes the radical form of abolishing the class structure as such. The task of the proletariat, therefore, is not simply to cut itself a better deal, but "to abolish itself as a class." The last thing it needs is recognition of its difference. On the contrary, the only way to remedy the injustice is to put the proletariat out of business as a distinctive group.