inspo/anti-capitalism

[...] 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.

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.

This charge against the poor, frequent as it always is in democratic movements, is not valid. The first attempt of a democracy which includes the previously disfranchised poor is to redistribute wealth and income, and this is exactly what the black South attempted. The theory is that the wealth and the current income of the wealthy ruling class does not belong to them entirely, but is the product of the work and striving of the great millions; and that, therefore, these millions ought to have a voice in its more equitable distribution; and if this is true in modern countries, like France and England and Germany, how much more true was it in the South after the war where the poorest class represented the most extreme case of theft of labor that the world can conceive; namely, chattel slavery?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.