“Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspectives of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.”Scanning the future is impossible. That's why Capital has a sophisticated praxis of 'Regret minimising' portfolio choice which features quite savage penalties for inelasticity- i.e. failure to change quickly as economic signals change. Risk is continually shunted off on to inelastic Demand or Supply but re-emerges as the prospect of windfall profit before being shunted off once again on the less responsive factor of production.
Contemporary Marxism, like Mayan Astrology or Anti-Masturbation theory, can't scan the future. It can only say it will be a massive shit show coz everybody ignored me when I said it would be forty years ago so, obviously, it's gonna happen when you bastards least expect it and then you'll be sorry you were mean to me and didn't buy my books and get me on Oprah and I'd have been so great on Oprah she'd have gone mad with joy and given everybody an SUV.
The proletariat is that factor of production which reproduces itself- the word means 'child bearing'- and will always be fucked if it does so in the hope of profiting by so doing. The joy of not hoping to make a bit of money of the fruit of your loins prompts that pursuit of true freedom which takes one out of the Labour pool and into Prison or the Crack Den or such Service Sector jobs as represent some blend of the two.
What is the 'simultaneous perspective of Shenzhen, Los Angeles and Lagos?' It is that one must become elastic in one's behaviour or else get increasingly fucked over. Talking shite or listening to other people talking shite won't help. What matters is finding alternatives as good, or better, than the ones you are currently facing.
Capital helped itself by becoming elastic. It either perished or became too slippery for bureaucrats or Trade Unions or gangsters to hold down and fuck over. Some workers showed themselves equally nimble. They prospered. Others didn't. Their rents depended on fucking over their kids.
That's the whole story. Liberation is elasticity- nothing else. If you have perfect elasticity you can't be exploited. Fortuna can't fuck you over. Sadly, this also means you can't fuck over your kids- which kinda destroys the incentive for keeping them around save as consumer durables of a particular, positional, type. However, unless we all agree to fuck up the Environment big time, those little shits will escape our ownership and we, as a species, will die out. Thus Marxism, and Libertarianism, and Mayan Astrology, and Anti-Masturbation Ideology, can still have a market- albeit one for crap.
No comments:
Post a Comment