Gek-Opel said:
Hmm yeah true but only through capitalism itself is this ever actually possible (ie to prevent the amelioration effects of a two sided battle)-- not through any form of socialist project or revolutionary revolt. The problem comes in imagining the impossible, which is what a genuinely new political system appears to be, under the conditions of capitalism itself. Hence the need to concentrate only on accelerating capitalism to a point where its side-effect of creating a sense of its own inevitability subsides. Communist revolutions were trapped in the conditions of capitalism, as well as being confused with nationalistic struggles against imperialist occupiers or industrial expansion...
The lack of anyone being in control, its diffuse nature, the way it is successful as a system because of how it mirrors basic human drives makes it impossible to attack as you would any normal physical enemy or political body.
The key problem with capitalism is its ability, as a by-product of the aggregate of billions of tiny interactions, without anyone in control, to warp time itself and place fundamental, tho invisible, blocks on the ability of people to think otherwise, to think the unthinkable, to be genuinely innovative. But because of this problem you cannot think after-capital inside it... its totally paradoxical to imagine that you can! But in many other ways there are a lot of quite interesting and useful aspects to capitalism- its ability to potentially disrupt and dismantle the state of course being the primary example. It is as much the nation state which is at fault as capitalism itself....
It is paradoxical because capitalism in its current phase is more than just a system by which we allow economic interaction to be regulated. It is a life-world, a time-line of its very own, bending and warping perception (of narrative, of the possible) in infinitely subtle ways (ie- rampant post-modernism)... it is true that you can sit there and pipe-dream yourself some alternative systems. But these will just consist of some shuffling of the cards already dealt.
No this is all perfectly accurate. There are no guarantees, and history tells us that such projects frequently lead rapidly into terror. However, the alternative is the ossification of humanity itself.
Some excellent points, Gek-opel (with apologies for the concatenation-editing in the quotes above].
What both the neo-liberal capitalist theologians and the
'third way' neo-socialist
'capitalism with a human rights friendly face' tolerant multi-culturalists have in common is their inability to perceive capitalism as an inherently
abstract force, a replicant hyper-virus that resists all attempts at both representation and sanitisation. Indeed, reactions to it (from both political stripes) are constitutive of it: as capital is ruthlessly structural, the numerous and diverse retreats from it (from nationalism to racism, from traditional religion to new-ageism, from reactionary nostalgia to rural organicism) become its very conditions of possibility, the very ground (re-territorialisation) on which it perpetuates itself.
Capitalism persists (much like the Death Drive) and intensifies precisely because neither capitalists nor ostensible anti-capitalists are
capable of taking it at its purist, at its very word: the radical universalising (or globalising) tendencies of its rampant de-territorialising, which are everywhere met with (following Deleuze-Guattari's incisive account of capitalism) a compensatory re-territorialising, a retreat into nationalism, racism, ethnicism, cultural obscuranticism and nostalgia, theistic fetishism, a retreat into a naturalised 'class' (instead of a progressive universalist proletariat there is a regressively ossified working class), solipistic narcissism and sociopathic withdrawal, etc, all of which appear to be simultaneously intensifying as capitalism spreads.
Ironically, then, it is capitalism's radical/progressive elements (anti-organicist, anti-egotistical, anti-identitarian, anti-patriarchal, fragmenting of Oedipus) which need to be emphasised (the "accelerating capitalism" you refer to above), insisted upon - via
overidentification strategies, for instance - to the exclusion of the reactionary tendencies that facilitate its continuation, in order for it to be obliterated. Capitalism is
unreformable, and all attempts to reform it (eg. via welfare state simultaneous with fascism in the economically depressed 1930s) only strengthen it. Equally, the personalisation of its faults - blaming it all on particular elites and/or individuals (world 'leaders' like Bush, Sarcozy, Brown; fat capitalist bastards like Gates, Soros, Murdoch, Bono, etc) is futile: they are bland puppets of viral capital, not its cause or source. Believing that if we could just get rid of all the greedy and nasty bastards in power that constitute the ruling elite, then everything would be so much nicer and fairer and
friendly, is not only deluded, it is the predominant ideological mode of liberal capitalism (and, of course, it ultimately runs the risk of leading to all kinds of twisted and delirial conspiracy theories, like for instance those now widely accepted about 9/11, and very persuasive they undoubtedly are, all too persuasive, as
this architect's polemic demonstrates).
I mentioned theistic fetish above as an example of a reaction against capitalism that has the paradoxical effect of further enabling it: this is one of the most powerful 'theological' features of capitalism in Western societies. Two examples:
(1) Money. Everyone knows - appealing to the ideology of 'commonsense' - that money, currency, is just bits of paper, just digits in cyberspace, of no intrinsic or essentialist value, etc, really all just a meaningless, worthless, useless nothingness. Yet none of us actually believe this, we disavow this knowledge, we act as if it somehow has magical qualities, consequently giving it the same structural function as a religious fetish.
(2) Inner Self/Ideal Ego/Self Actualisation. The basis of contemporary new-ageism, the extra-ideological retreat from the ravages of unrestrained neo-liberal capitalism, the notion that no matter how crazy and insane and unjust the modern world may be under capitalism, the daily oppressiveness of work, commute, schedule, politeness, transaction, poverty, war, global warming and pollution, etc, none of it really matters ultimately, because we have our own (imaginary now identified with the real) very special, very unique, very transcendent, very magically other-dimensional, little precious 'selves' into which we can reassuringly retire at the end of a hard capitalist day. So convalescing and preparing us all over again for the next, same, day ...
