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it's self-evident and has been self-evident that for capitalism "growth" or expansion is not and cannot be a steady state.
the meme that says (without arguing) the contrary is mostly about conflating capitalist relations with biological entities--so capitalism becomes a Giant Plant. it's hard to be critical about a plant: what are you going to argue against? as for the phases of "growth" attributed to this imaginary Giant Plant, why they're inevitable one after the other. and you can tell it's an imaginary plant because it only grows and never dies.
apparently folk have found something nice in seeing themselves as an element within a Giant Plant: it simplifies one's life because all questions of direction and organization take care of themselves. if pursuit of self-interest is inserted into a general plant schema, then buying shit becomes not only a civic act, but a system necessity because what else do part of plants do but move around, performing their characteristics as aspects of the performance of higher-order systems. and so all existing hierarchies are natural and they kind of have to be. thing that go wrong are always problems of wobble in certain sectors that are attributed to some problem of Essence--the Bad Apple Theory.
there is a long and glorious history of organic division of labor ideas--the last populuxe version was the corporatism of the early 20th century so enthusiastically adopted by nice folk like mussolini.
but hey, we sure knew the difference between the Giant Imaginary Plant of american-style capitalism and older forms of domination--Bad Things Originate With the State and so it follows that being dominated by "private sector" entities is not domination at all, because we all know that the Salient Feature of domination is the state. with this bit of Important Passive Insight in place, folk were able to sail through the past 30 years quite convinced that they were politically free while the reality was that the ideology they consumed and so repeated and so lived through resulted in a wholesale evacuation of the political.
but it was a soft domination.
what i expect to happen that will continue that same heroic american tradition of resisting being-dominated is that we will soon be treated to new narratives about system self-correction, free of any actual agency. Giant Plants: that's how they roll.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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