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All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.
Karl Marx, Capital -
Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming years. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicky, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss their dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way of a happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future -
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.
David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”Posted on June 10, 2012 with 3 notes
Source: thebaffler.com
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The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and Foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say for example the Maoists and the Indian Government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas, can both be admonished as Human Rights Violaters. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel, then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.
Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story”Posted on June 10, 2012 with 3 notes
Source: dawn.com
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The poor of the subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the local village usurer—the Baniya. But microfinance has corporatized that too. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18 year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, ‘Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.’
There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story” -
This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital -
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied… but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger -
Naomi Klein: Individualism vs. the planet
“…the major determinant of whether a person rejects the scientific consensus on climate change is whether they have a strongly ‘hierarchical’ or ‘individualistic’ worldview. One set of stats that didn’t make it into my piece: 78 per cent of subjects who display an ‘egalitarian’ and ‘communitarian’ worldview believe that most scientists agree climate change is happening (which is true) – compared with only 19 per cent of those with a ‘hierarchical’ and ‘individualist’ worldview.
“For me, it follows from this that part of being an effective environmentalist is trying to win more people over to a worldview in line with the laws of physics and chemistry, rather than offering shopping advice and touting ‘market-based solutions.’ Put another way: if we know that aggressive regulation and rebuilding the public sphere through collective action are integral to meeting this challenge, then we have a responsibility to say so, and to defend the worldview behind those policies.”
-Naomi Klein, quoted in Andrew C. Revkin, “Naomi Klein’s Inconvenient Climate Conclusions,” New York Times, December 7, 2011.
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Reality Sandwich: Occupy the Future
Capitalism has always been driven by naked self-interest. Under neoliberalism, selfishness just has a lot more freedom to do its damage. Walter Benjamin’s observation “perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake” has never been more apt.
This is why the occupy movement is such a game changer. -
Foucault vs. Marx
“…the reader might have the impression that I am theorizing a structure within which individual subjectivities are trapped. My argument rather is the opposite, and is more in the spirit of Marx: the individual subjectivities articulate their social cooperation in social forms that aim at entrapping them, but at no point is entrapment all that exists, since it is continuously disrupted and other spaces are continuously created.”
-Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital
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Occupy the Future: A new generation reaches for the emergency brake
“Occupy Wall Street, like the indignados of Spain who inspired its actions, has been criticized for the vagueness of its demands. But the occupiers and indignados have seen clearly what the politicians cannot: the situation is irresolvable within the frame provided, so the frame itself must be broken.”
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What is debt? An interview with economic anthropologist David Graeber
“If you want to take a relation of violent extortion and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt.”
"A man unstuck from place and time, he travels the world on foot, his only lifeline to his friends and family a litany of dreary picture-postcards sent from arbitrary locations the world over."
