Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa. It is definitely not in crisis – it is just the people caught in this explosive development that are in crisis. This tension between overall rapid growth and local crisis and misery is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself…
The society of experience – the direct commodification of our experience itself. What we are buying on the market are less and less products, (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more ‘life experiences’ experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle… ‘we become consumers of our own…
Since in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the…
In capitalism,you cannot throw outthe dirty water of financial speculationand keep the healthy baby of the real economy:The dirty water effectively is the blood of the healthy baby.One should not be afraid to go to the end here:the global capitalist legal system itself is,in its most fundamental dimension,corruption legalized.The question of where crime begins(which…
While on the road, when I am not driving, and we are not talking – I plan to read more from Slavoj Zizek’s book The Courage of Hopelessness A Year of Acting Dangerously. Here are ideas from a paragraph in the first chapter. Today’s globalization, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions…
Stand and fight ! or accede to the hard edges of this world: post industrial, connected, regimented — that we have made. Those are the thoughts that rise to contemplation. I found a port in the storm, somewhere that is familiar, where mind and body do not lapse into a pity party. It has…
Long Guns By Carl Sandburg Then came Oscar, the time of the guns, And there was no land for a man, no land for a country, Unless guns sprang up And spoke their language. The how of running the world was all in guns. The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,…
Friday, the last day of my work week. Beginning to mentally prepare for a road trip to the west coast, driving back with stops along the way. I believe the final stop is to be New York City and then return to Chicago. Hopeful of visiting Gettysburg along the way home. Some pictures of…
Without dispute mechanization (science/technology) has developed the means of satisfying real needs, but we reproach it with having too strongly encouraged, artificial ones, with having fostered luxury, with having favored the towns to the detriment of the countryside, lastly with having widened the gap and revolutionized the relationship between employer and employed, between capital…
Without being exactly in danger of starving to death, people consider that life is not worth living if they cannot have comforts, pleasures, luxuries; the national industry is considered insufficient if it provides for a bare existence, if it does not provide affluence; a country considers itself incomplete if it has not good ports,…
