|
it's interesting that folk seem to have such trouble not thinking that capitalism is somehow inevitable and that it represents a culmination of human history for reasons that go beyond the fact that any present anywhere seems a culmination of something because you make that present for yourself...you make and configure the present as you move through the world---but anyway, a direct-democratic revolution coming from what was the left once upon a time would not at all have lead to some flight from capitalism because capitalism is what would have shaped it--revolutionary movements in the marxist tradition were understood as taking shape on the most advanced edge of capitalist development, to mobilize social classes that were products of capitalism etc. for marx the working class was a revolutionary class because of it's double consciousness--it operated within capitalist ideology, but also had a direct experience of the realities concealed by that ideology in the course of working every day, at what they used to call "the point of production." the revolutionary movement was basically in a similar position, but it had a theory of history that it could use to piece together an image of the present, isolate the myriad problems of oppression and routinized violence that are fundamental to what capitalism is and does every day, and outline possibilities for an alternate order that was organized in such a ways as to eliminate those problems to the greatest possible extent. so it had nothing to do with running away into the woods, dispensing with technologies or anything like that.
it is amazing to me the extent to which folk, particularly in the states, have been convinced that the horseshit all around you is necessary and inevitable because it exists--the squashing of imagination that's implicit in that is a sad sad thing---maybe of a piece with the lack of imagination you see at almost every level of society right now----faced with a crisis, folk seem to having a difficult time getting their heads around the fact that it's even real, maybe because you can't see crisis on television.
i don't buy much of anything pai mei is arguing personally--i work from an entirely different political position, an entirely different perspective---but i find the threads interesting because each time they demonstrate the collapse of imagination or a sense of alternate possibilities for the present--for ourselves--that the soft authoritarian system in the united states has created. it doesn't matter that folk can wander around congratulating themselves on how free they are as they do as they're told and want what they're told they want in the ways they're told they want them. the tragedy--and i think that's the word--is that folk imagine this is all there is, all that's possible.
and if you think that way, then this is all there is and this is all that's possible.
i don't know why anyone would accept that.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|