About Capitalism
Just started a new book, a slim volume by a Brit philosopher/intellectual entitled Capitalist Realism-Is There No Alternative? One thesis of the author, Mark Fisher, is that the premises of Capitalism are so embedded in our consciousness that it is almost impossible to imagine alternative ways of organizing a society. This constitutes an informal censorship which results in a banal conformity. Nothing new, no break with the status quo, metamorphosis essential for renewal, relaunch for future generations seems possible. Capitalism subsumes and consumes all previous history, and we are consumers/spectators trudging through the ruins and relics.
So far, it is a good read. Here is a sample.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world
than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
–Slavoj Zizek
Ultra-authoritarianism and Capital
are by no means incompatible:
internment camps and franchise coffee bars
co-exist.
Neoliberalism, capitalist realism par excellence
anticipate a stripping back of the state
to its core military and police functions.
The world doesn’t end with a bang,
it winks out, unravels,
gradually falls apart.
Who knows what caused
the catastrophe to occur….
like a negative miracle,
a malediction which no penitence
can ameliorate.
Action is pointless,
only senseless hope makes sense.
Superstition and religion,
the last resorts of the hopeless,
proliferate.
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,
in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
the worth of persons into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless inalienable chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word,
for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it
has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
— Excerpt, The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels
2 thoughts on “About Capitalism”
“The world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.”
This statement is relative within the context of our understanding of time. We tend to place time in juxtaposition of our daily lives, when this is far from reality. From our limited perspective a year is a long time. From the perspective of life on earth, that year is a nanosecond.
As is abundantly clear, our species is currently heaping existential destruction onto this planet, whether it is CO2 emissions or greed from Capitalism or power hungry politicians or just entitled masses, the results are actually instantaneous. We are not gradually falling apart, we are shooting ourselves in the head. In the great scheme of things, it’s as if time were watching the rise of human evolution and when time blinks, we are gone. Like we had evaporated, leaving behind only the decaying remnants of a civilization that could ponder the mysteries of the universe, yet could not move beyond the dysfunction of our own infantile limitations.
Perhaps some day other species may rise from the ashes to again embrace a sense of curiosity. In their process of discovery they might find the fossils of mankind embedded in a strata of sedimentary rock. What will they think? Will they scratch their furry heads in disbelief that we had come so far only to end in self-annihilation?
My only hope is that there may be is a lesson we can teach that future creature with our fossilized relics. Embrace nature for it cannot be conquered.
Consciousness bends time, presenting, conjuring time in a form relative to the organism’s life-arc. Is there absolute time? Space, time and matter are in dynamic relationship according to physics. Perhaps avarice is nothing but a mono-maniacal bid for more time, never mind the consequences? Everything fungible, interchangeable into monetary values. To buy time.