Bookmarker tag: inspo/anti-capitalism (51 notes)

[...] If higher wages were all that is necessary, Marx would have been no more than a wordy and over-philosophical union activist. The problems, however, are much bigger: the wage relation and capitalist social relations themselves. The point is not to redistribute capitalist value, but to overcome it, to destroy it as the relation that rules the world.

The idea that capitalism will persist as long as the rule of value holds is Marx's essential lesson. This is not a majority opinion, and is easily taken as dismissive of "reformist" efforts to improve working conditions and the distribution of income. I don't mean to suggest such efforts are useless because they are not "radical" enough. Clearly, any effort on the part of labourers (and unemployed people) to improve the material conditions of their everyday lives is worthwhile. My point is that the fundamental problem with capitalism as a mode of production is not ultimately addressed by the redistribution of capital.

[...] The whole point of paying workers well is to keep the system going--in fact, there is a theory in orthodox economics that says this is exactly what "fair" wages do. So as a social justice strategy, wage demands are key. As a social transformation strategy, they are insufficient.

Yet it must be said that this still does not suggest an obvious reason to reject the idea that if workers were paid "fairly"--presumably at least as much as capitalists--then no one would want to be a capitalist anymore, or would have no self-interested incentive to be one, and the whole mode of production would fall apart. In other words, we might use the wage relation to overcome the wage relation. [...]

On the contrary, the explanation is far more straightforward: capital won. Sometimes with armies, sometimes with persuasion, sometimes with money, and sometimes by accident, but it won. For at least the last thirty or forty years, and this is increasingly true in nominally "noncapitalist" nation-states like China also, capital has proven richer, more powerful, more expansive, more convincing, and more real than any other political economic force on the planet. It is not a myth, it is not an elaborate hoax, and its wealth and dominance are not fictitious or illusory. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has written the political economic rule book by which the world plays, and defined the terms and means by which one might "legitimately" break those rules. Socialists may have lost their ideological fire, or they may have read the writing on the wall and decided that given the options available to them, and the ultimate political and economic objectives to which socialism aims, i.e., the long-term betterment of citizens' everyday lives, their constituencies had to play by the rules, and the rules rule against being socialists.

[...] The most fundamental problem with capitalism, and the reason it must be rejected, is that it is structured, in its very operation, to make it impossible for millions and even billions to be free in any meaningful sense. The critique of capitalism has little to do with how well it provides for the people of the world relative to what came before (feudalism, slave-plantations, etc.), or with a need to defend the disastrous attempts to resist it (Stalinist "communism", faux-socialist kleptocracy, etc.). Anticapitalism has to do, rather, with the fact that capitalism is not good enough. It is unacceptable.

[...] Some, of course, hedge their bets, saying capitalism is "the best we can do," or the "least bad" way of organizing our political economic lives. That, it seems to me, is horseshit, and not a shred of evidence supports it. At my most generous, I might grant that capitalism, relative to what came before, is among the better ways developed thus far, but [...] why would we accept something because it is the best "so far"? Imagine if we had stopped at leeching or slavery because they were the best methods for medicine and agriculture we had developed "so far".

[...] These were actual living humans—I keep coming back to this—not only adopting but insisting upon the priority of a monstrous legal construct designed for the express purpose of annihilating all concerns but its own profit.

I feel like I am not doing a great job of capturing, in words, the dread that this produces in me. Across the room, one of my dogs is licking its asshole with intense fervor; it is making sounds like the stirring of a pot of macaroni and cheese. Also, large bees are thumping loudly off the glass of the window with arrhythmic regularity. Both of these are very distracting; I am having a hard time doing the thing that makes me money. If I were a corporation, the spectrum of possible responses to these distractions would include killing my dog and encasing my home in soundproofed concrete; that spectrum would be ordered by the degree to which each option maximized my blogging efficiency and by nothing else; what mediated the preferability of these extreme responses would not be concerns that they were cruel or might diminish the simple human pleasure of having nice, big windows to look through on a sunny day. Alas, I am a human—I cannot be a corporation, and a corporation cannot be me—so the dog gets to live. For now.

But the point is: You are not the corporation. You are the human. It is okay for the corporation to lose a small portion of what it has in terrifying overabundance (money, time, efficiency) in order to preserve what a human has that cannot ever be replaced (dignity, humanity, conscience, life). It is okay for you to prioritize your affinity with your fellow humans over your subservience to the corporation, and to imagine and broker outcomes based on this ordering of things. It is okay for the corporation to lose. It will return to its work of churning the living world into dead sand presently.

There is a lonely need at the heart of this book, the need for all this ephemeral shit to mean something, for the generations nurtured by the internet to have collected something more than transient commodities and opinions about them, more than posts and tweets and days of recycling things we’ve consumed and perhaps leveraged into monetized brands. But Cline has rejected the bigger ideas that usually absorb all our mortal flailing into an arc of greater redemptive significance. Religion is out. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t so much as flirt with Marxism, even in a rootless Hegelian form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis inexorably churning human society forward. Capitalism is portrayed as a disease unless it’s in the hands of the right people, which is indistinguishable from the view of capitalism espoused by the wrong people.

At times, you can almost sense a muffled scream trying to escape the page, the unthinkable recognition that memorizing movies and videogame speed-runs and every beat of a standup routine contains only the memory space required to store it—that it builds to nothing, achieves nothing, signifies nothing more than the story of somebody else. That you can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark 100 times, and on the 101st, it won’t reveal a greater truth or build a better you. That the passivity of life via filmstrip exacts no price because it confers no prize. That, maybe, the cold message of becoming a pop-culture savant is realizing that you’ve dedicated your life to the craft of memorizing how it happened to someone else—or as someone else happened to imagine it. That the Comic Book Guy was right to lament, “Oh, I’ve wasted my life.”

Maybe that’s the seductive—and to those who embrace it—profound appeal of a story like Ready Player One, built on the bones of hundreds of others: that somehow we can construct a scavenger hunt of narrative human significance from everything we’ve already consumed, something every bit as spiritual and whole as a more rigorous study and embrace of the world as it is. Maybe there is a mechanism by which we can collect enough skill and armament and enchantment to ineffably cohere as flesh and spirit, something more sublime than meat networked and spasming with electricity.

Cline just hasn’t watched the movie that explains that part yet, and it’s not his fault. Nobody has.

If community programs have consistently floundered, both in the past and today, what’s left? A return to the rule of experts? Bigger dams and better seeds? If faced with two approaches — that of the development expert, asking “What can we do for the poor?” and that of the community developer, asking “What can we do with them?” — then the grassroots approach seems at least less condescending.

Yet there is a third question that inhabitants of the Global North might ask, one that would be far more productive. “What have we been doing to them?”

That question implies a different framework, one that proponents of participatory development rarely consider. It raises the possibility that there might be some causal relationship between government policies in the Global North and the continued poverty of the Global South. Rather than focusing merely on poor people in poor places, it zooms out, capturing the North and South together through a wide-angle lens.

The exploration of viable alternatives brackets the question of their practical achievability under existing social conditions. Some have questioned the value of discussing theoretically viable alternatives if they are not strategically achievable. The response to such sceptics would be that there are so many uncertainties and contingencies about what lies ahead that we cannot possibly know now what the limits of achievable alternatives will be in future. Given this uncertainty, there are two reasons why it is important to have clear-headed understandings of the range of viable alternatives. First, developing such understandings now makes it more likely that, if future conditions expand the boundaries of what is possible, social forces committed to emancipatory change will be in a position to formulate practical strategies for implementing an alternative. Second, the actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on beliefs about what sorts of alternatives are viable. This is a crucial sociological point: social limits of possibility are not independent of beliefs about limits. [...] In the social case, however, beliefs about limits systematically affect what is possible. Developing compelling accounts of viable alternatives, therefore, is one component of the process through which these limits can themselves be changed.

It is no easy matter to make a credible argument that ‘another world is possible’. People are born into societies that are always already made, whose rules they learn and internalize as they grow up. People are preoccupied with the daily tasks of making a living, and coping with life’s pains and pleasures. The idea that the social world could be deliberately changed for the better in some fundamental way strikes them as far-fetched—both because it is hard to envisage some dramatically better yet workable alternative, and because it is hard to imagine successfully challenging the structures of power and privilege in order to create it. Thus even if one accepts the diagnosis and critique of existing institutions, the most natural response is probably a fatalistic sense that not much could be done to really change things.

No existing social theory is sufficiently powerful to even begin to construct such a comprehensive chart of possible social destinations beyond capitalism. It may well be that such a theory is impossible even in principle—social change is too complex and too deeply affected by contingent concatenations of causal processes to be represented in plan form. In any case, no map is available. And yet we want to leave the place where we are because of its harms and injustices. What is to be done?

Instead of the metaphor of a road map guiding us to a known destination, we could think of the project of emancipatory social change as more like a voyage of exploration. We leave the familiar world equipped with navigational devices that tell us the direction in which we are moving and how far from our point of departure we have travelled, but without a map laying out the entire route from origin to endpoint. This has perils, of course: we may encounter unforeseen obstacles which force us to move in a direction we had not planned; we may have to backtrack and try a new route. Perhaps with technologies we invent along the way we can create some artificial high ground and see somewhat into the distance. In the end, we may discover that there are absolute limits to how far we can go; but we can at least know if we are moving in the right direction.

This approach to thinking about emancipatory alternatives retains a strong normative vision of life beyond capitalism, while acknowledging the limits of our knowledge about the real possibilities of transcending the capitalist system. This is not to embrace the false certainty that there are untransgressable limits for constructing a democratic egalitarian alternative: the absence of solid scientific knowledge about the limits of possibility applies not only to the prospects for radical alternatives but also to the durability of capitalism. The key to embarking on such a journey of exploration is the usefulness of our navigational device. We need, then, to construct what might be called a socialist compass: the principles which tell us whether we are moving in the right direction.

[...] The abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms. lest capitalism cease being capitalism. Similarly, markets may or may not be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Braudel and Manuel DeLanda, but what is certain is that capitalism, dominated by quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart, is an anti-market. Bill Gates promises business at the speed of thought, but what capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. A simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis.

For precisely these reasons. accelerationism can function as an anti-capitalist strategy-not the only anti-capitalist strategy, but a strategy that must be part of any political program that calls itself Marxist. The fact that capitalism tends towards stagflation. that growth is in many respects illusory, is all the more reason that accelerationism can function in a way that Alex Williams characterises as 'terroristic'. What we are not talking about here is the kind of intensification of exploitation that a kneejerk socialist humanism might imagine when the spectre of accelerationism is invoked. As Lyotard suggests, the left subsiding into a moral critique of capitalism is a hopeless betrayal of the anti-identitarian futurism that Marxism must stand for if it is to mean anything at all. What we need, as Fredric Jameson-the author of 'Wal-Mart as Utopia'-argues, is now a new move beyond good and evil. and this. Jameson says, is to be found in none other than the Communist Manifesto. 'The Manifesto,' Jameson writes. 'proposes to see capitalism as the most productive moment of history and the most destructive at the same time, and issues the imperative to think Good and Evil simultaneously, and as inseparable and inextricable dimensions of the same present of time. This is then a more productive way of transcending Good and Evil than the cynicism and lawlessness which so many readers attribute to the Nietzschean program.' Capitalism has abandoned the future because it can't deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary Left's tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital's anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing. Time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts, and to think ahead again.

In the months after the election, the media focused on tech leadership. Who did or did not trek to Trump Tower? How much diversity of opinion was there in this room of white people? How far would they Lean In to fascism? Who cares?

We focus on the rank and file, because the reality is that meaningful change to the system that brought us Trump is not going to come from the people whom that system made billionaires. Meaningful change must come from below--from the workers who write the code that generates those billions to the workers whose service makes their coding possible.

The current arrangement might seem natural and immutable. But, as one of our favorite futurologists once said: so did the Divine Right of Kings.

Anthropologists tell us that when the structure of a core myth begins to change, everything else about society changes around it, and fresh new possibilities open up that weren't even thinkable before. When myths fall apart, revolutions happen.

The Indian famines of the late 19th century were not a natural disaster, as the British insisted at the time. They were the predictable consequence of imposing a foreign market logic that saw fit to eliminate basic human food security and sacrifice tens of millions of people in the service of profit. The famines had nothing to do with endogenous economic problems; rather, they were caused by India's incorporation into the emerging capitalist world system. As the historian Mike Davis puts it:

We are not dealing, in other words, with 'lands of famine' becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870-1914) when its labour and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy. Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism.

We are told that free trade would create an international division of labour, and thereby give to each country the production which is in harmony with its natural advantage. You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there.

[...] Smythe does not celebrate audiences as always rebelling and does not argue for social-democratic reformism that tolerates exploitation and misery. His analysis rather implies the need for the overthrow of capitalism in order to humanize society and the overthrow of the capitalist media system in order to humanize the media.

The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and farmers--with all of the producers of the world--to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. The time is past due for new form of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation. The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be organizing free collective expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serving the ruling class.

Third, we need a legal framework for a new regime of accumulation. This takes vision; it's today's equivalent of what a social democratic or socialist economic policy used to be. It means bringing state back in, not only as neutral gatekeepers of economic fair play but as a volonté générale that gives the economy a social purpose and a base in democratic values. There is nothing neutral about the actual economy. It is a complicated, systematized effort to reconcile productivity with the privilege of powerful elites, dominant social groups, and global coalitions. [...] This might mean public investment, public co-ownership and strong incentives for social enterprises.

Some of this might sound slightly awkward to us, since we haven't discussed it for a long time. But we have to have this conversation if we want to implement cooperativism. [...]

[...] Does anyone believe that a Clinton presidency would have gone after Wall Street and the 1 per cent? That it would have diminished rather than stoked populist rage? In fact, the rage felt by many Trump supporters is quite legitimate, even if much of it is currently mal-directed towards immigration and other scapegoats. The proper response is not moral condemnation but political validation, while redirecting the rage to the systemic predations of finance capital.

[...] Trump's victory marked a defeat for the holy alliance of emancipation with financialization. But his presidency offers no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new 'new left'.

[...] the left was not established so as to have things easy but in order to bring about the impossible. It was created to improve the world and the condition of human beings in the teeth of adversity and apparent hopelessness, to fight for human rights and democracy and to flood the societies of the world with democracy.

This is not, however, a book of prescriptions. No glorious blueprint for the left resides within its pages. Rather it brings together crucial perspectives for understanding capitalism and the world we inhabit. While the assessment of capitalism and its opponents may seem bleak, the conclusion of the book is not. The way forward is to be found by arming ourselves with unsparing analysis of the predicament we find ourselves in, while having the fortitude to once again think ambitiously about broad emancipatory change.

[...] the recognition of capitalism's bankruptcy does not ineluctably translate into anticapitalist politics [...]

The obstacles to conceiving a new emancipatory politics are formidable [...] Neoliberalism has meant a gloves-off form of class war, borne out by the assault on militant unions, relentless restructuring of employment, speed up, wage slashing, and intentional unemployment as a means of disciplining workers and breaking organinzed labor. [...] the increasing precariousness of employment has put a damper on workplace militancy, as workers are hesitant to take actions when they may easily be put out on their ears.

Yet neoliberalism has operated in other ways, which are subtler, but no less destructive. The enormous growth of finance over the past three decades and the integration of the working class into financial circuits, through pensions, mortgage, and credit card debt, have bound people into the system [...] This has been significant for the recent trajectory of capitalism, as more and more people kept the system afloat by borrowing money [...] it has caught workers up in the system, giving them a stake in its survival. The hope of individual advancement within the system, or simply hanging on, has become in many cases a substitute for collective social change. [...]

[...] It appears increasingly obvious that the ecological systems on which life depends cannot endure the ravages of capitalism indefinitely. To be sure, we need to guard against seeing the crises we are living through as automatically auspicious moments for radicals - after the deluge, us. Crises unleash many things, a great deal of them not the least bit amenable to the left, much less to an overarching radical vision of social transformation. Capital is in the process of resolving the crisis by imposing ever more neoliberal austerity, which ensures that the type of capitalism ahead will be a particularly unstable one. The triumphalism of capitalism, however, has crumbled away and pessimism may be lifting. The future is unwritten. One can only hope that a route out of the darkness will be navigated, where the discontents are finally able to seize control of their collective destinies.

There is no quick fix for the Left’s impasse. The attempt to revive ideas of self-management are admirable in that they highlight the fundamental importance of challenging private property.

But the project’s dominant populism underestimates the limits of doing so within capitalism and overlooks the fundamental necessity of comprehensively challenging and overturning existing property relations — which cannot happen without developing the class cohesion and institutional capacity to confront the capitalist state.

The result is the worst of all worlds: while self-management is confined to the fringes, the dominant corporations continue on their merry way; the hated state is ignored and left to continue hammering us; there are occasional outbursts that absorb energy but leave little of substance behind; the working class, for all its potentials as an actor, stumbles aimlessly on.

Until the discussion is politicized such that it can go beyond a (legitimate) critique of statism, and begin to see the democratic transformation of the state as part and parcel of economic democratization — and the development of the class capacities to address this is made a priority — this “next big idea” will only be the Left’s latest failure.

So we went back in and showed them our proposal, and they said no. Doris stood up and pounded on the table and said, “Are we not worth it? We’re doing this for you. We’re cleaning and working for you. Are we not enough?” And then she just looked at everybody and said, “Come on, guys,” and we all stood up and walked out.

I felt prideful in that moment. I felt very empowered. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m getting kind of emotional. But I was very prideful about it because for the first time, I felt part of something that I know I should be a part of.

I know this is what I’m meant to be doing. Not this job, this job means nothing. It’s about what I’m doing at this table, for myself and the other people that will come after me. For the guy who has something wrong with his lungs. For the lady who can’t walk, but she still has to work. That’s what this is for.

When we went back in, I told them my story. I told them, “I’m homeless and working for you. I started working for this company to better myself. It’s only me. I don’t have any children. I’m not married. I want to support me, and I can’t do that. At the moment, I can’t even pay a deposit and first month’s rent at the same time. These wages are still too low to do that. I can’t. And there’s many other people that can’t either. I take showers in your facilities. I’m sneaking around where I can’t be seen. I’m coming into work three, four hours early because it’s cold out. How would you feel in that situation?”

It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed and cynical about the state of the digital economy right now. In return for what mainly amounts to small measures of consumer convenience, massive economic control has been ceded to platforms. But this consolidation has also changed the configuration of capital and the terrain of class struggle, as I discussed in a previous essay for Real Life.

It’s important not to turn this reconfiguration into a desire for what Gavin Mueller has describes as “digital Proudhonian” solutions, which overemphasize a critique of monopolies from the perspective of “creatives” and artists at the expense of class struggle in solidarity with the “noncreative” workers (think Uber drivers and warehouse workers) whose socialized, collective labor makes platform-based monopolies possible. If such solidarity is to challenge capital’s endless bloody appetite, we will have to understand how these platforms work and where they are most vulnerable. As platforms centralize commerce and labor, this makes them nodal points that, with the right organization, can be disrupted by militant labor action. The strike called by Spanish workers for a consumer and worker boycott of Amazon on Prime Day is just one example of the early rumblings of this.

Consumerism promises to fill a void created by the profound lack of democracy and political participation many feel in their day-to-day lives. Platforms are the means by which tech companies have sold us the empty calories of consumption cloaked in the rhetoric of freedom. So-called multisided markets promise an endless buffet of culture and commerce with no strings attached because they are designed to hide their real costs. But in prior periods of struggle, new forms of organization and resistance arose to meet it. Any realistic political project that could move us beyond this new age of monopoly consumerism that has taken hold will necessarily take platforms as its object and its opportunity.

You are part of the leadership of a popular movement that has just seized power in your country. Your commitment is not to bourgeois nationalism, but to socialism. You are from a country that had been under colonial rule and then neo-colonial subordination or else from a country that was not formally colonised but nonetheless experienced the full weight of imperialism. Your economy is in tatters, its raw materials drawn out of the country, its people reduced to labour on the global commodity chain gang. Your country has not been able to forge an independent foreign policy, nor a capacious social policy. A popular upsurge that began with an anti-IMF riot brings you to power. The window of possibility for your government has begun to close just as its opens.

What will you do?

The US ambassador – accompanied by a delegation of local representatives of monopoly capital firms and the local oligarchy – comes to see you and your comrades. This gaggle of important people flutter about, coming to ensure that your government will set aside its grand promises to the people and – after some mild transfer payment schemes to tackle the terrible poverty – will resume the status quo. After all, says the US ambassador, the status quo has been good for the country. The FDI flowed in, the IMF report of its staff visit has been productive, the GDP is high, the currency is relatively stable and the oligarchy – well, the oligarchy has been the pride of the nation. The ambassador wags a finger in your face – arms deals have to be signed, military agreements have to ratified. The boat is on an even keel, says the ambassador. No sense in rocking it.

You knew that this delegation would come to see you. Nothing they say or do surprises you. Countries like yours – countries of backwardness (takhalluf) – do not control their destiny. Colonial rule altered the structure of politics and economics as well as of society. Old notables had been side-lined or absorbed into the new world where they become merely representatives of forces that lived elsewhere. The new elites that emerged represented the interests of themselves certainly, but also of external forces – not their own populations who had been reduced to rubble by the plunder of colonial rule. Poverty came alongside illiteracy and disease. Backwardness was not the fault of your culture, but of this imperialist history. Your movement came out of the slums, where the bulk of your people live. They have spoken to you. They have given you their programme of action. They want you to act.

When your people won independence or overthrew your monarchy fifty years ago, the new elites seized power. They offered up your raw materials and your workers for rock bottom prices, as long as they got a cut of the profits. That is what they had won independence for – to increase their share of the theft. This large-scale bribe was then replicated down the class ladder as your country became a country of bribe-taking rather than social initiative. No development could come to your country, whose social advancement was blocked by structural obstacles such as the terms of trade for your primary products and your reliance upon finance from the old colonial powers. Your rich minerals and rich agricultural products find their prices fluctuate and remain low, while the prices of manufactured goods that you import from the imperialist powers increase. The gap between these two leaves your public exchequer in permanent debt. You borrow money from the banks of the imperialist countries and you use their currency for your international trade – both drawing you in to what you know is the imperialism of high finance. Underdevelopment is the only development that your country experiences.

Your group of revolutionaries had spent the decades under the clouds of IMF warfare studying the ‘unilateral adjustment’ thrust upon your country. You discover Samir Amin, who gives you that concept of unilateral adjustment. It means that the policy framework for any government of your country will be channelled by rules devised elsewhere, rules that benefit the old colonial powers and impoverish your own country. Even socialists are trapped by this unilateral adjustment. Structures such as unequal exchange and old-fashioned plunder vampirically diminish the wealth of your country. Your country was forced to adapt to the needs and interests of the old colonial powers. You can never be free.

This is the moment for you to test the theory of delinking – the concept you absorb from Samir Amin. To delink is not to break from the world and isolate oneself. Isolation is not possible. If you do break with the unilateral adjustment, you will either be overthrown in a coup or a military intervention in the name of saving civilians or you will be under sanctions and embargos for decades. You do not want to isolate yourself. You are an internationalist. To delink means to fight to set an alternative framework for your relations with the world, to force others to adjust to the needs and interests of the working-class and peasantry in your country and in other countries. Delinking, you read in Samir Amin, means to ‘modify the conditions of globalization’.

The politics of Wages for Housework was shaped by women who had an understanding of capitalism, imperialism, and the anti-colonial struggle. Thus we could not accept that women’s liberation could be a struggle for “equality with men” or that it could be limited to equal pay for equal work. We saw that in the same way as the racialization of black men and women had served to justify slavery, so had gender-based discrimination served to exploit women as unpaid workers in the home. This is why we supported the struggle of welfare mothers, which was led by black women—not because black women were the majority of women on welfare, which was not the case, but because black women were the most ready to struggle for their rights. They were the ones who were out in the streets saying: Welfare is not charity. Every woman is a working woman. They were saying, like us, that raising a child is socially necessary work. They were saying, Don’t tell us that we are parasites. Don’t tell us that we are dependent on the state. When the state needs soldiers, it turns to our children. When it needs people for its factories, it turns to our children.

Rather, what would a (cultural) politics look like that approached the desires that feed financialization? What sorts of new constituencies and collaborations would need to form to fulfill those desires otherwise? And how could writing and research about financialization not merely point to the “big lie” of the system, but show that such a system cannot fulfil those values it promises? How could we reveal that, behind the necromancy of financialization, there resides an incredible, creative constituent power, a species being, one that is, today, rudely conscripted to the reproduction of its own exploitation? How could such work not merely bemoan the absence of a revolutionary financialized subject, but call that subject into being? If financialization represents a new set of relationships between what we once imagined to be the distinct fields of culture and economics, and if financialization and the politics germane to it are, to some extent, the product of the imagination, then scholars thereof can no longer imagine themselves as detached outsiders.

[...] Colds are a referendum on how kind we can be to ourselves, how much we can let ourselves get away with, how small we can allow ourselves to be. They are also reminders of the large and overwhelming power of the systems that want us to be none of these things.

Every day there is some news story about someone who kept going to work through some horrible sickness, with a broken limb, through labor pains. We are supposed to find these stories inspiring. This particular tendency - to find the human willingness to break ourselves, the desperation that refuses kindness to one’s own body - to be somehow heroic, equated with both physical and moral strength, is not particular to our era. It is older and more insidious than that, deeper and harder to get at than the easy classification of millenial burnout. That burnout, or whatever name you want to give it, is real, but it is part of a vast and ancient idea that by destroying ourselves, by using ourselves up, we become holy and virtuous, guaranteed moral clarity, free from possible accusations of selfishness, clean as a bone and bathed in light. It is silly to think that there is nothing that does not reach back to an old and creaking and claw-fingered religion in our belief in the redemptive beauty of bearing up under suffering, of working through the pain.

[...\ The places in which your life takes place, the places you love so radically, belong to wealthy corporations, to a tiny handful of families with unthinkably old money, to the Sacklers and their industry of death, to the Catholic Church, to NYU, to Google, to Donald Trump. We are borrowing our lives from people who disdain those lives, to whom we are at absolute best an inconvenience. Each inch of sidewalk, each welcoming shadow of a grand building, the air itself as it softens around you and turns siren-like and loving in spring, all of these are possessions; someone owns them, but it isn’t you.

To live in a city is to carve a very small story out of someone else’s much larger one, burrowing our skinless and unimportant daily events, our losses, our triumphs, our jokes and heartbreaks and errands and arguments, cancelled plans and chance reunions, forgivenesses and grudges, bargains and failures, into someone else’s massive narrative of wealth. One comfort is that this is the way it has always been, the skyscrapers versus the ground. This paradox of an essentially rented life may actually be the thing that gives a city meaning, but it is also the thing against which the city struggles. How possible is it to live in the quiet story, and how long until those lives become largely untenable, until the loud story is all that is left?

I do think that millions of other teens (who, like me, never even what Sassy was, let alone that they should ask for a subscription for it) suffered without access to feminism. But there’s also the unique and poignant and enduring suffering of the women who become fodder for its formation and sustenance: postfeminism made them villains, and in so doing, made itself stronger.

I talk about this like postfeminism is a living entity, or a side in a war, with generals captaining it. Ideologies are never that coherent, that distinguishable, even if they do have people who benefit and profit from them. But there is no “outside” of ideology: We are all participants in a given ideology’s formation. Those who push against it can inadvertantly codify and reinforce its tenets. Those who ignore it nonetheless internalize it messages. The most effective and insidious of ideologies are those that make themselves invisible: it’s not a stance, it’s not political, it’s just the way things are.

We made fun of the world because of our ironclad belief that the world could not go on as it had before. With governments, schools, factories, police forces, brothels, militaries, armies, wars, judges, colonies, executives, madness, the misery of productive work, the seriousness of upper management (they were serious spirits, devoted, well-educated, powerful, full of experience and goodwill, sometimes criminals but always from the elite), and those speeches that incessantly repeated the obvious — reality as it was, reality as it couldn’t have been otherwise. (But with some “idealism” despite it all, you know, so we “wouldn’t lose hope.”) As well as hope — the claim that the worst had passed — they also still offered us some threats, so as to maintain a certain nervousness. The worst could return, we were told, if each of us didn’t do what he was made for; if, for example, the students stopped studying, the workers stopped working, women stopped having children, judges no longer passed judgment, and criminals ceased to commit the wrongdoing that makes us truly admire the police.

We didn’t believe them anymore. We no longer believed that the “biggest moments of our lives” were any different from ordeals — the competitions, the entrance exams, the medical exams to receive certificates, military service, decorations (or no decorations), citizenship (or no citizenship), careers (or no careers), the granting of credit (or no credit), et cetera. We no longer saw the need. All of a sudden, we no longer understood why the world had to be selective, that is to say, “meritocratic” — why selections were always prejudicial toward some and favorable toward others, why this should be a sign of good taste, talent, morals, progress. We understood nothing of “reality”; we felt it lied about our world.

And that was why we practiced sociology.

As Solow remarked when he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987, “One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions.” In other words, private investment and distribution goals could be made objects of indirect planning if capital markets sent meaningful signals about social priorities. But “the hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions.” High securities prices might signal that a corporation or municipality was satisfying public wants through its provision of sales or services — or that it had been thrown on the betting table or the chopping block. Profits and profitability in the capital market, it turned out, no longer told us anything about what kind of products and services the public wanted to consume and how. Maybe they never had.

The logic of the corporate enclosure of the public sphere is truly a neoliberal wonder to behold. As our power elite steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any broader responsibilities or demands than the mandate to continue amassing ever greater quarterly returns, the rest of us meekly pantomime an odd parody of consent of the governed by focusing inordinate attention on the ever-mythic specter of enlightened corporate political agency. At least, we’ll cry, Twitter and Facebook will de-platform that rabid lunatic Alex Jones—that’s accountability! Or, at a minimum, we’ll plead, Nike will cast Colin Kaepernick in their sneaker campaign—that’s solidarity! Or again, at the very least, we’ll point out, Amazon is bringing jobs to Long Island City—that’s leadership!

In our actually existing consensual reality, it of course matters not a whit that the culture-war sport of celebrating corporate censorship betrays any supposed democratic commitment to protecting the rights of all citizens on an equal basis, subtly charging both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey with the power to decide what is and is not free speech. (“If Trump supporters don’t care about my speech, I don’t care about theirs,” a typical liberal disputant will snort on any given social-media platform, in full Frank Rich dudgeon.) And no matter that Nike, a Hydra of exploitative global supply chains with dubious labor practices, degrades Kaepernick’s protest of racialized police brutality to the inert and content-free mantra “Believe in something”—a funny-except-it’s-not late capitalist parody of empty advertising slogans. (“Say what you will, but Nike is taking a risk and making a powerful statement,” the contented liberal online commentariat will predictably tweet.) Amazon might hold entire cities hostage, dangling jobs in front of desperate mayors in exchange for public cash, private development contracts, and access to municipal security apparatuses, but “only New Yorkers could complain about getting 25,000 jobs,” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost scoffs.

The ruling class is always small, the lower orders large, even in a caste society. The poor always vastly outnumber the rich. The powerful are fewer than those they hold power over. Adult men hold superior status in almost all societies, though they are always outnumbered by women and children. Governments and religions sanction and uphold inequality, social rank, gender rank, and privilege, wholly or selecteively.

Most people, in most places, in most times, are of inferior status.

And most people, even now, even in "the free world," even in "the home of the free," consider this state of affairs, or certain elements of it, as natural, necessary, and unchangeable. They hold it to be the way it has always been and therefore the way it must be. This may be conviction or it may be ignorance; often it is both. Over the centuries, most people of inferior status have had no way of knowing that any other way of ordering society has existed or could exist - that change is possible. Only those of superior status have ever known enough to know that; and it is their power and privilege that would be at stake if the order of things were changed.

We cannot trust history as a moral guide in these matters, because history is written by the superior class, the educated, the empowered. But we have only history to go on, and observation of current events. On that evidence, revolt and rebellion are rare things, revolution extremely rare. In most times, in most places [...] They resist, yes; but their resistance is likely to be passive, or so devious, so much a part of daily behavior, as to be all but invisible.

When voices from the oppressed and hte underclass aer recorded, some are cries for justice, but most are expressions of patriotism, cheers for the king, vows to defend the fatherland, all loyally supporting the system that disenfranchises them and the people who profit from it.

[...]

Working men watch their company's CEO get paid three hundred times what they are paid, and grumble, but do nothing.

And just as the benefits of status presume the irrelevance of material inequality, so do its injustices. When you think your real problem is not that people have more money than you but that the people who have more money condescend to you, your problem is status. And when the solution to your problem is (as Sennett recommends) “mutual respect across the boundaries of inequality” (i.e., no more condescending), you have the imaginative world of neoliberalism, the world in which it’s OK for a few people to be rich and a lot of people to be poor but where it’s definitely not OK to make anyone feel bad about being poor, where it’s important above all to remember that there’s nothing wrong with being poor, and where, as Lee’s mom says, “being rich doesn’t make you a better person.” Indeed, the very thing wrong with the liberal elite—the thing, at least, that right-wing neoliberals like Wolfe and David Brooks are always taking them to task for—is that they think being rich does make them better people, or that being better people is what made them rich. But the reality, as Brooks puts it, is that in America, “nobody is better, nobody is worse.” Thus his famous comparison of the differences in American life to those in a high school cafeteria, divided into nerds, freaks, jocks, et cetera—they’re not classes, they’re “cliques.” Sure, the jocks have a higher status, but they’re not really better than the freaks, and just as the jocks shouldn’t be boastful, the freaks shouldn’t be resentful. The jocks shouldn’t be bullies; the freaks shouldn’t bring their Kalashnikovs to school.

On this model, then, class is turned into clique, and once the advantages of class are redescribed as the advantages of status, we get the recipe for what we might call right-wing egalitarianism: Respect the Poor. Which is also, as it turns out, the recipe for left-wing egalitarianism. Where the neoliberal right likes status instead of class, the neoliberal left likes culture, and the diversity version of Respect the Poor is Respect the Other. The Other is different from you and me but, just like Brooks says, neither better nor worse. That’s why multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management technology in about ten minutes and without having to make the slightest adjustment in its most radical claims—Americans belong to many cultures, not one; all cultures are equal and should be equally respected. What CEO doesn’t prefer respecting his employees’ culture to paying them a living wage?

[...] demanding a return to the liberal world order—as leading scholars in international relations and international law have recently done—is an inadequate response. It obscures the ways that the illiberal backlash of our moment emerged out of the inequalities and hypocrisies of that very same system.

From our vantage point, the welfare world of the NIEO might appear utopian and unrealistic. But to dismiss the world that decolonization aspired to make is to refuse to reckon with the dilemmas we inherited from the end of empire. It is to evade our responsibility to build a world after empire. Our world, like Manley’s, is characterized by a battleground of widening inequality and ongoing domination. We cannot simply recreate the 1970s vision of a welfare world, but we can take from its architects the insight that building an egalitarian and postimperial world is the only route to true democratic self-governance.

I took my son to see it. I wanted him to know something of the origins and motivations of a structure of feeling that was something that I once felt deeply and to which I will remain in solidarity for the rest of my life. Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.

[...] To abridge thinking in the name of the emergencies that today are permanent reduces it to slogans, perpetual cheerleading or nay-saying. The notion that liberals cannot criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a bankrupt tradition. My object in any event is not to criticize the cult of diversity for something worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological is to understand what devitalizes it—an endeavor that seeks to realize, not junk it.

In America, we are raised to believe that there is something intrinsically sick about criminal behavior. It is always wrong to steal, because what we own makes us who we are, because—the logic goes—we have earned it. To steal what belongs to someone else is to steal their virtue, to defraud them of their very identity. But the logic of this belief system begins to fall apart in a world where money makes more money, where how much wealth you amass has very little to do with how hard you work, and where there are few things more expensive than being poor.

And when so much money is all around you—just outside Idlewild, where Henry Hill came of age; just beyond the frayed strip malls and cracked highways that make up the entrance wound surrounding Disney World—you can also see it as passive to the point of insanity to not reach out and take some of the wealth that passes you by. And if just a little of the money that is flowing and surging and leaping its banks all around you is money that could save you and your child from hunger, from homelessness, from danger you cannot imagine and danger you know all too well—it is difficult to see the immorality in reaching out and taking what you need. Respecting ownership and property the way you were taught to, as a good American, may mean allowing your child to suffer. There are millions of Americans who seem to see no contradiction in this. There are millions more who are wondering, now, how we got to be this way, and beginning also to wonder if we were ever anything else.

You’ve changed these past few years. You’ve become a different person. We’ve talked, a lot. We’ve explained ourselves. I’ve told you how I resented the person you were when I was a child—how I resented your hardness, your silence, the scenes that I’ve just described—and you’ve listened. And I have listened to you. You used to say the problem with France was the foreigners and the homosexuals, and now you criticize French racism. You ask me to tell you about the man I love. You buy the books I publish. You give them to people you know. You changed from one day to the next. A friend of mine says it’s the children who mold their parents and not the other way around.

But because of what they’ve done to your body, you will never have a chance to uncover the person you’ve become.

Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me just before I left, Are you still involved in politics? The word still was a reference to my first year in high school, when I belonged to a radical leftist party and we argued because you thought I’d get myself into trouble if I took part in illegal demonstrations. Yes, I told you, more and more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you said, You’re right. You’re right—what we need is a revolution.

Businesses used to accept Wanda’s inefficiencies as a necessary part of their workforce—humans sometimes need to socialize, go to the bathroom, take sick days, drive Mom to a doctor’s appointment, attend funerals, stay up until four with the baby.

But at this moment, techno-Taylorism, the decline of organized labor, automation, and the ongoing destruction of shark-cage worker protections have tipped the balance of power in the workplace way, way in favor of employers. It’s gotten so out of balance that even many workers seem to truly believe that the things that make them less efficient than sharks or robots are weaknesses—moral failings, like original sin.

So millions of people battle millennia of evolution every day, desperately trying to be something fundamentally different from what we are. And when we inevitably fail, we torture ourselves with guilt over not being born a shark, or at least able to plausibly imitate one.

Fuck that. You’re not a shark. You’re a human being. It doesn’t make you a bad person if your family and friends and dignity are more important to you than some job. That makes you normal. The true outliers are the Taylors, the Fords, the Bezoses, the Ayns—people whose work is their life and life is their work. People who thrive alone in the cold ocean. People who can’t or won’t understand that almost all other humans have very different values, needs, and priorities. People with massive control over how stressful our day-to-day existence is.

So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse.

And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.

“People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.”

Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.

Maidenhair inspects Adam, as through a lab’s two-way mirror. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Anything you want.”

“It’s a simple question. How long do you think we have?”

He doesn’t understand. He looks to Watchman, but the man, too, is waiting for his answer. “I don’t know.”

“In your heart of hearts. How long, before we pull the place down around us?”

Her words embarrass Adam. It’s a question for undergrad dorms. For barrooms late on a Saturday night. He has let the situation get away from him, and none of this—the trespass through private land, the ascent, this fuzzy conversation—can be worth the two extra data points. He looks away, out on the ravaged redwoods. “Really. I don’t know.”

“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”

The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”

“Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flare. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?”

He has seen the graphs. Everyone has. Ignition has only just started.

“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking. “Is the house on fire?”

A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”

“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”

A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . .”

“. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?”

“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”

“—lots of people would already have—”

“—with six billion other—”

“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”

Salih had become a Marxist as a teenager because she could not accept that the world was “a place of boundless suffering.” “The militant,” she wrote, “is someone who responds to a form of collective awareness. He steps into the movement for the sake of correcting the ever-crooked balance between truth and history.” Salih was never able to accept the crookedness of that balance—and it ended up unsettling her own life. She had trouble finding a place for herself, socially and professionally, in Egypt, and wrote part of The Stillborn while traveling alone in Europe. Decades later, she remarked, “I keep colliding with that ever-widening abyss between what is and what should be.”

[...]

Yet Salih continued to value Marxism as a way to see the world: “Marx was the last of the great thinkers, and part of my brain will always tick with a mechanism acquired from the world of his ideas.” Her own bitter experience, however, taught her to be deeply suspicious of ideology and how it could turn into a deadening, stultifying force rather than a means to engage with the world. She invoked Milan Kundera’s notion of totalitarian kitsch: a sort of “violent sentimentalism embodied in a collective dream of salvation.” When you embrace this kitsch and its ready-made certainties, you insist that you have all the answers, and “you refuse the human being as a world unto herself, alive with contradiction.”

It was Marx’s genius to argue that capitalists were not fundamentally different from the feudal landlords who preceded them, since each took percentages based on an arbitrarily declared “ownership” of factories or land. Profit has no more divine justification than rent, and if you can fight a landlord who calls himself a king, you can fight one who calls himself a capitalist.

Yet there was a contradiction lurking here. If no one worker could claim sole credit for a product, the owner of the factory could still claim sole ownership of everything the workers made together. Wealth was being created socially, on a new model — but still owned privately, on the old model.

The contradiction became even sharper when zooming out to consider the wider economy. As many workers as it took to run a Manchester mill, it took even more workers to make that work possible, from the machinists who manufactured and maintained the power looms and the other machines to the slaves in the American South who picked the cotton that kept those machines fed. The collective labor inside the mill was sustained by many concentric circles of collective labor outside of it.

The pre-capitalist economy looked like a cluster of islands — an archipelago. It involved a collection of small producers relatively isolated from one another and producing mostly for personal use. (Marx memorably compared the French peasantry to a sack of potatoes.) By contrast, the capitalist economy looked like a network. The network of capital concentrated masses of people into larger nodes of production and linked them through countless threads of interdependence. Yet the wealth that this network generated didn’t flow to the many workers who collectively created that wealth. It flowed to the few who owned the network: the capitalists.

Before capitalism, when production happened on a more personal basis, such an arrangement might’ve made sense. If the economy was a cluster of islands, it followed that each island would own what it made. But capitalism, by revolutionizing production, introduced a contradiction: wealth was now made as a network, but still owned as an archipelago. Capitalists like Engels’ father became rich. The workers of Manchester earned starvation wages, and lived in cholera-infested slums.

1. First of all, there is no housing crisis.

2. Housing is not in crisis.

3. Housing needs no trauma counselors.

4. Housing needs no lawyers. Housing needs no comrades or friends. Housing needs no representatives. Housing needs no organizers.

5. When we call this crisis a housing crisis, it benefits the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it.

6. It encourages us to think in abstractions, in numbers, in interchangeable “units,” and not about people, or about power.

7. We don’t have a housing crisis. We have a tenants’ rights crisis.

The most powerful and cogent critique that can currently be leveled against our mode of capitalism is that markets fail to account for ecological costs. In a crowded world of finite size, our political economy values only acceleration and expansion. Scarce natural resources like clean air and water, not to mention more complex systems like rainforests or coral reefs, are either held at nothing or seriously undervalued. Corporations could clear-cut all our forests, reduce croplands to swirling dust, turn rivers to conveyors of toxic sludge, deplete supplies of minerals and metals, double and redouble carbon emissions—and all our economic indicators would show nothing but robust growth until the very moment the pyramid scheme collapsed. Indeed, most of these things are happening, with only scattered opposition. When our math improves, when the costs of our products fully reflect the resources used and the wastes produced—especially CO2: then and only then can capitalism begin to become a viable and humane economic system.

But don’t mistake me for adding to the chorus who feign surprise at the rise of what they dismiss as “anger” or “resentment” or “populism.” By revenge I mean not only a passing sentiment but a logic of retribution, what Francis Bacon called a “wild justice,” a ruptural claiming of unpayable debts. My goal is deeper than describing the political mood of our moment. I want to explore the notion that capitalism itself is a revenge economy: a system that appears to be taking needless, warrantless, and ultimately self-defeating (but, none the less, profitable for some) vengeance on the world. Revenge capitalism breeds revenge politics among the populations that reel from its impacts and lash back, though usually, tragically, at the wrong targets. I think it is long overdue for us to imagine what it would mean to avenge what it has done to us and to the planet. The line between revenge and avenging is subtle, both linguistically and conceptually. But whereas revenge fantasies fixate on retribution in the coin in which the original injury was dealt, and thereby risk perpetuating that economy, an avenging imaginary dreams of the abolition of the systemic source of that injury and the creation of new economies of peace and justice.