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i'm not saying that everything is paranoia...i'm really not. i tried to be specific. the idea that somehow an Authentic Social Fabric is being wrecked to increase state power seems to me the problem.
to my mind alot of the same processes that you point to result from the absence of controls over the ways in which capitalism has mutated. so from the lack of regulation, the lack of policy. from conservative power, really. from neoliberalism. from the rejection of the political. from the delusional idea that capitalist markets are rational.
this sits on a deep ignorance of the history of actually existing capitalism almost from its inception. it's stunning to me that folk can point to symptom after symptom of the way in which capitalism destroys the social foundations it relies upon to function and blame that destruction on the modern state---which btw i am not a fan of in principle---but which is as it is largely as a mechanism to control for/shape the effects of capitalism and in the doing make of it a system in which people can live and that can reproduce itself.
so the problem is that alot of folk seem to operate with a notion of "the state" that seems to me totally upside down. and its in the way this upside-down idea of the state gets used that the paranoia comes, i think. because the state is set up as some Malevolent Outside Force That Wants to Eat Little People.
class stratification: not paranoid. that's it's been getting worse is obvious. but this is a function of the neoliberal abandonment of the state, not of the state. on and on.
that more clear?
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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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