by
Max Haiven
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What would it mean to take this debt to future generations seriously? It would likely mean the relentless struggle to abolish a system that condemns so many of them (of all of us) to a fate of unpayable debt, financial debt but also the toxic legacies we leave behind: climate debt, ecological debt, the sociological debts of a world riven by inequality, and the violence it products.
[...] what does it mean for the Troika to insist on the repayment of a debt that even they realize can never be repaid, a debt that, in fact, fatally undermined the debtor's ability to ever repay? At this point, the debt appears less and less like a financial obligation and more and more like a kind of vengeance.
[...] All three key dimensions of the so-called FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) were essentially born in the crucible of European imperialism and (settler-)colonialism: Both stock markets and the joint-stock, limited liability corporation had their origins in AMsterdam and London in the financing of colonial ventures, settler colonies and the slave trade. [...]
this is really bringing home the (now kinda cliched but still crucial) frankfurt school point about the enlightenment/modernity being not an escape from brutality/horror but instead fundamentally entwined with it
[...] austerity-wracked municipalities increasingly turn to predatory fines and fees to make up for chronic budget shortfalls, which leads to often deadly altercations with police and prison systems for those who cannot pay. All of these examples, for Wang, are mechanisms by which the overarching crisis of capitalism in an age of financialization is displaced through the channels cut by centuries of white supremacy. [...]
on Carceral Capitalism. i just like the phrasing
Capital expands endlessly and inevitably seeks to bring more and more aspects of the world into its orbit, but it also necessarily produces crises, first nad foremost for its exploited creators, proletarians, whose own reproduction is reduced to the barest minimum, and sometimes less than that. As capital drives competing capitalists to cut costs, workers' wages are cut or fall behind inflation, mechanization introduces less autonomy and greater dangers, the body is abused, social relations are mined, and [...] whole populations are abandoned when their exploitation proves unprofitable.
nice summary
[...] In the neoliberal capitalist idiom, in the shadow of a system that is endlessly taking revenge on us in a myriad of ways we are invited to imagine our personal revenge in precisely the terms offered to us by that system. The bullied or fired worker dreams of becoming the boss. Indeed, the latest wave of digital hyper-exploitation germane to the "gig economy" is sold to workers as a kind of revenge against what is presented as an older, formal, hierarchical employment economy: be your own boss, work hard, and eventually you will be richer, happier, and more successful than the boss who once bullied and harassed you. Apocryphal tales of the culture of Wall Street and investment banks speak to the way new recruits are hazed, harassed, hyper-exploited, and abused to make them hungry for a form of revenge that will impel them up the corporate ladder to one day lord it over their inferiors in turn.
OxyCOntin and other prescription painkillers were widely prescribed by army doctors for the same reason that they were prescribed to athletes, financiers, surgeons, and traveling musicians on the home front: they allowed for the continued extraction of skilled and specialized labor time beyond the body's conventional limits, working through the pain. [...]
see also amazon workers today
[...] the rise of industrial capitalism was defined not only by new aesthetics in the field of mechanically reproduced culture, but also by the proliferation of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical anesthetics: methods by which proletarians could dull their torqued sensing bodies to survive the accelerating mediatic and haptic violences of capitalism. These include the use of narcotics, but also the narcotizing qualities of mass culture: cheap sentimentality, Manichean narrative closure, bombastic aesthetics, reckless melodrama, and the like. [...] the complicity of the middle classes in Germany, ENgland and France was purchased with the hallucinogenic temptations of consumerism in the arcades and later department stores of the growing metropolis: secured spaces of capitalist pleasure walled in from the grime, smoke, poverty, and strife that produced them.
Benjamin via Susan Buck-Morss
pano: eve reads WB?
[...] In Graeber's interpretation [...] structural violence refers to the "forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm" that "invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely," he continues, "it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence."
[...] dead zones of the imagination are both the means and the effects of revenge capitalism, a form of structural and systemic violence that appears to be retribution for unknown infraction [sic], expressed against whole populations out not out of personal malice (though that can play a role) but through the banality of the whole system. Revenge here is the character, not the intention, of capitalism in its neoliberal, financialized valence which relentlessly seeks to recode social life and institutions to better accommodate its imperatives of accumulation.