Post-capitalism?
It isn’t.
But, in the context of the material world and human relations, there’s no one ‘post-capitalist’ future.
Given what we are and the fact that the world, human and non-human, has just surrendered itself to hypercapitalism, there’s a kind of path-dependence at work.
So, probabilities figured, we’re likely in for niche collapse, localization and fascist reaction.
Strictly speaking of the US.
While you’re here, are we in a postmodernist phase and do the two have anything to do with each other?
I don’t understand.
It isn’t what?
They would have done it in a heartbeat.
I don’t know who right now. I never thought I would see a President overtly try to overturn a lawful election and have this much support either. It has scared the bejeesus out of me. The door is open a crack and it’s only a matter of time before somebody more competent about it shows up. It’s already been proven that almost half the country will go for it.
I’m saying fascism because of the ultranationalism and corporations will still exist but not a free market, call it what you will, it will certainly be post free market capitalism.
The Democrats are capable of coming up with somebody just as dangerous now that we know all it takes is somebody with enough charisma to simply declare our elections are fraudulent and their cult will follow them.
World’s relations are commodified and capitalized. Not everywhere, not evenly, but enough to be the rule.
Those are material conditions. There’s no arguing with it or pretending we can produce a future from different conditions.
Capitalism is growth. Metastatically so. It respects no traditions, cultures, faiths, boundaries, distinctions, isolations or presumptions.
People live where they live, even ‘connected’ people with cosmopolitan tastes and accents.
Commodofication doesn’t ‘care’. It is an algorithm: expand, commodify - or die.
Reactions to capitalist growth and penetration, to its all-encompassing commodification of all relations, will happen in the very localized traditions, creeds, identities and cultures that capitalism threatens because actual capitalism threatens everything but itself, which is commodification. So, people will react where they are threatened, which is where they are weakest. Right now, that is all the kinds of identity, because we are in the hypercapitalist phase where identity has become an exchange-commodity, which is to say, no longer personal, subjective, solitary.
People will react where they are weakest, and the capitalist reaction to resistance is always - strong. It has to be, or by virtue of resisting the universalist compulsion of commodity growth, the local can actually defeat capitalist relations. Since industrialization, the strong reaction of the overclass, which is capitalist, has been to take a routinely uniform set of militarizations best recognized as fascist.
There is no post-capitalism. We are too far into the trajectory.
There is only boom/bust, consumption, and niche collapse.
‘Post-modernism’ as a term has as much value as ‘self-esteem’ or ‘erotica’, which is none at all, because it’s a signifier of opposition, not a semantic position.
If we’re being parsimonious, and referring to the actual and very limited Continental school of critique, associated with Lacan, Baudrillard and Foucault, it would be safe to say that they are not relevant to the American experience.
American ‘post-truth’ is utterly home grown, and owes its persistence and spread to the Revival-Carnival dynamic of American evangelical rejection of capitalist modernity.
Does “world” care what form of government a specific country has as long as the country is participating?
What do you mean by “niche collapse”?
Are they not? Why do you say that?
The world is an aggregate.
But, if you’re asking if the overclass prefers any one type if government, the answer is probably ‘no’.
England, the US, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Brazil, Germany, Japan and China all produce commodities and commodify labor, despite being, respectively, a constitutional monarchy, a miltarized corporate-republic, an administrative republic with a monarchy, a despotic monarchy, a unitary republic, a junta-state, a federal republic, a zaibatsu republic with Emperor and a state-capitalist ethnostate.
Because anyone who has read the English of their works will either ‘get it’ and immediately self-defenestrate, or give up after the third three-page, nine-hundred clause sentence, and do something reasonable, like drink whisky or go bowling.
If you read the French, you’ll probably get pretty quickly that what they’re all kind of saying is ‘words are shifty these days’, go ‘duh’, then be grateful that the arbiter of all value is no longer a pederast in a man-dress on a throne in Rome.
Post-modernism is French. It has no penetration here.
It’s not Camus, who fought actual Nazis, struggled with TB so bad that he couldn’t do what he really loved, which was kick a ball around, and wrote clear, simple sentences about the absurdity of moral absolutes, but from the relative moral authority of working to kill German invaders. Camus, Americans get. Existentialism, in general, dovetails nicely with American pragmatism.
But, surely not the pedantic ‘the text-is-not-the-text-but-everything-is-text’ stuff of French post-modernism.
Really, American ‘relativism’ is utterly homegrown, and arose as a reaction to the impenetrability of the very practical, results-driven force of American scientific success.
You read French?
This is late stage capitalism.
Interesting. Where does that come from? What’s next?
■■■■ if I know but it’s probably gonna be more like a failed state than Norway.
I mean the term. Capitalism has stages?
‘Niche collapse’ is a non-political way of saying ‘turning everything into a farmable plantation’ collapses all the ecological niches. This has consequences outside those niches, but within them, it’s pretty devastating.
But, it’s not just my term.
IIRC, it was originally used to describe how bio-niches collapsed following the loss of the wolf as an apex predator, and then again in the new niches which stabilized in the interval, after wolves were introduced
