Originally Posted by roachboy

the facts of this matter are in a sense evident.
enabling this has been a centerpiece of conservative politics since the reagan period.

the ideology that enabled it, and that enables it still functions: you see it all the time, implicitly in the way in which the dominant media apparatus--which mediates folk's relation to the world but only by providing infotainment, but also (more so) by framing reality as an accumulation of objects and politcs as the extension of the fact of their arrangement with the effect that whatever the existing order is is necessarily legitimate--and explicitly in the variants of neoliberalism--the ideology of "rational" markets (for example) that continues to be so dominant in the united states that it functions without a name.


people do not react to states of affairs at the empirical level.
in a sense, there are no states of affairs at the purely empirical level.
another way around: any state of affairs can be explained away because no state of affairs is understood independently of an ideological framework.
the perverse beauty of the existing order is that it has controlled the system of social reproduction long enough that it no longer needs to explicitly dominate people because people dominate themselves.

its easy peasy: if people understand capitalism to be a force of nature, then the states of affairs generated within it are simple effects of inevitable, natural processes. to revolt would then be to like king lear, trying to stop the ocean.

this is obviously insane, but it is also obviously how most americans live.

the effects of hegemony are ugly: if you control the frames of reference, you can generate consent for almost anything.


and at this time, there is no basis for political oppostion.


libertarian politics of course has nothing to say. it is a self-paralysing variant of the dominant ideology, one that takes (for example) the neoliberal opposition of the state to a logical conclusion. it provides nothing that would enable a sustained critique of the existing order because it duplicates its ideological underpinnings. libertarian politics presupposes that there is a natural order within capitalism that is determined by the playing out of "free markets"--this playing out is distorted by the state. that is idiotic.

personally, i think that this would be a good time for people to begin thinking about what a truly radical oppositional politics might look like, to work out its conceptual premises, to generate positions and float them in the netaether (for example), opening them up to critique, etc. seen from a certain distance, the conditions for a radical change are beginning to emerge from within the exercize in sustained incoherence that is the present american system, but there are very few frameworks that enable people to see what is happening, and almost none that enable folk to imagine other alternatives toward which they might move, so there is no real political action and seemingly little possibility of such political action. there are and will no doubt once again be oppositional movements directed at specific issues like the bushwar in iraq, but these are not necessarily movements that go beyond being single-issue matters--and single-issue matters are interest group politics. they are not revolutionary politics. there are no revolutionary politics.


so bend over, folks, and accept the gifts of capitalism.
if you can't work out a coherent critique, then you have little choice but to learn to enjoy whatever comes your way.
who knows, maybe you can even convince yourself that getting fucked in this way is fun--not only that you like it, but that you deserve it because it has to be this way and only a deviant would think otherwise. if you need reinforcement, watch more tv.

good luck with that.