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in a democratic context---you know, an actual democracy--because what people decide is meaningful (so they have power) it would not be possible for a failed economic ideology like neo-liberalism to continue to be taken seriously simply because it is possible for people to dissociate the ideology from the consequences of its having been dominant for 40 years. it would not be possible to have destructive, reactionary political worldviews continue to be circulated simply because people have the resources to buy channels that repeat and reinforce it. because decisions taken would be meaningful, because people would have power, comparisons of framework to effect would be routine. and information would have to be relatively undistorted. the persistence in the face of history and reason of dissociative supply-side nonsense is a symptom of our collective powerlessness. that people invest in it without being able to do anything but repeat it's premises is an indication of powerlessness. because nothing is at stake in what we the people think. we have no power. but we rattle on endlessly as if we did.
much of the contemporary forms of disempowerment are expressed in and are expressions of the capitalist organization of labor.
but to know that you'd have to think labor mattered, that the organization of work mattered as more than an abstraction that's factored in when the captains of imaginary industry get all hayeky and pretend think about the history of price. the material organization of work---the division of intellectual labor--is a basic expression of power relations in a capitalist context. most are part of an intellectual proletariat, subjected to fragmented, stupid information and given ridiculous interpretive frameworks fit to it. largely as a management tool.
it continues to amaze me that people who believe in fantasies like free markets and like to blab about individual freedom (freedom in the sense that involves no power) support an economic theory that not only produces class warfare that most of them are victims of, but worse advocates the removal or limitation of mechanisms that make private sector actors accountable to a public. it's an ideology of self-dispowerment, the stuff of slaves, in nietzsche's sense.
i gotta go.
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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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