roachboy

it's self-evident in the empirical world that not everyone who holds capital sees short-term gain as the ultimate horizon for thinking about their activities. it's self-evident in the empirical world that it is reasonable to see acting to preserve the system that enables them to extract profit is in their interest. among the many ludicrous aspects of neo-liberal thinking is the presumption that neo-liberalism and it alone controls the frame within which utilitarian thinking can operate. that presumption is based on nothing more than simple assertion. this because the frame operates at the level of axiom within the deductive chain that constitute neo-liberal metaphysics. and anyone who knows about logic at all knows that you cannot demonstrate axioms from within the proofs that presuppose them. but if you think about it at all--which is yet another optional move for neo-liberals---capitalism is not a bunch of atomized individuals doing heroic individual Work against a background comprise of other atomized individuals---rather it is a social system. a mode of production in marxist-speak. a form of life in wittgenstein-speak. it is incoherent---fundamentally so---to bracket the social-historical context in which capitalism---or any other economic order---operates. that move disables your ability to explain any of the ground rules that shape how the realities operate that are shaped by that economic order, most of which are political in nature---you know, the results of social conflict and/or negociation. what neo-liberalism relies on is the magic of number--because the relationships that it is able to describe are amenable to being reduced to equations, believes imagine them to have some extra-social validity. but that's ridiculous. stalinist central planning relied on the magic of number to generate the illusion that it was coherent---neo-liberalism in that regard is no different. the magic of number conceals problems at the level of axiom if you don't think about it. and if you live entirely within the realm defined by the magic of number neo-liberal style, you can't think about axioms because they aren't axioms. they're facts of nature. the reality is that they aren't facts of nature: the axioms that enable neo-liberalism to get off the ground as a system of statements about the world. and they are arbitrary. in this regard, they're no different from any other set of axiomatic statements. and this is a problem that no abject believe in the mysticism of number gets you around. the problem, then, that separates neo-liberalism from other ways of thinking about the social-historical world is fundamental. and for believers there's no way to get to that problem because to get to it requires a suspension of belief---just as an relativising move does. that the current american conservative version of the same old shit has the faithful reduced to clinging entirely to metaphysics is a symptomatic matter, an aspect of the problems that conservatism in the states faces in reality as a result of policies driven by its logic having been implemented and having failed. it's pretty straight forward. the sad thing is that neo-liberal horseshit has become the lingua franca of american politics---the single party state with two right wings problem--and that means there's no easy way to deal with the implosion of that language for a lot of folk. so they bug out. witness ace, for example.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite