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Originally Posted by ni'k
tell again how the real world is one where capitalism isn't in its final days and not be a self defeating asshole who enjoys the smuggery of the knowledge nothing new will ever happen because i'm not prepared to even entertain the idea that it could. or don't actually, because as i said i could find better ways to spend my time than the aforementioned getting sucked down into energy sapping arguments with you two.
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Capitalism has gone through many changes. As has democracy. It isn't a single-use social operation, or a homogeneous, unitary edifice. I'd have no problem with 'the end of capitalism' - I just can't see
anywhere where the simple exchange of capital doesn't take place; neither can I see anywhere where the efforts to resist capitalism didn't fall under capitalism's auspices.
Das Kapital, or the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, were both reactions to material conditions under capitalism; many of the issues outlined in both have been consolidated into capitalistic 'dialogue' (though using the word dialogue is a bit presumptuous). Trade Unionism isn't the issue it was, and it's largely been elided in the UK, but as a movement it's a reaction to failures within capitalism that now take the position of being considered by capitalism. There wasn't a break from capitalism, but there was revolutions within trades, and capitalism takes on a new form. Further back, was there really no basic, grounding antagonism of material and exchange in all but the most isolated agrarian societies? Atavism much?
I'm not talking about that tired 'Russia failed' thing, but just that I can't see, I don't have the optimism for, a break with the existing, fundamental (but contingent, a posteriori) human edifice of exchange. Capitalism isn't falling apart, it's re-grouping. There's a massive amount of arrogance about that, but there was arrogance in 1929. There was arrogance in Cote D'Ivoire, the Opium wars, the Dutch East India Trading Company. Zimbabwe, of all places, has yet failed to dissolve into civil war. Capitalism is a cunt, but it's a pugnacious, resilient cunt, not an instable, transitional model.
Have you read Atalli's noise? You might like that.