Oct 22, 2014 TW wrote:
I was thinking as we went to pay another passel of surtaxes and insanely high bills, leaving us -like most people here- with nothing for rent or food, about why the national governments are so determined to destroy their citizens these days. What is different now that has them seemingly set on flaying the natives down to their very bones?
Traditional thinking would say that the working and middle classes are still necessary to capitalism as consumers, yet what has been happening in the southern European states is a clearly planned, brutal scrubbing out of the middle classes. The profits from consumer goods are negligible now. The only real profits are in the financial markets themselves, and that has occasioned a reassessment of extraneous material like national citizens. Goods that used to be amenities of joy, convenience and a gradual but implied improved life are now merely toys. The consumer goods marketed now are chiefly distractions to ward off any serious or social thought. People have become almost entirely inattentive to what’s going on around them, and when one is so unaware of ones surroundings, one is blithely led to where others lead them –which appears to be the purpose behind the mindlessness intrinsic in the crap that is still produced.
Of course, national governments serve no purpose any more except to facilitate the mechanisms of supranational capital, in exchange for which the political class gets a rake-off and the taxes. Antonio Negri (in Empire) suggests that Marxists must update their taxonomy to include information and service workers in their definition of the working classes, but I think that might be missing the point it raises; In most empires, scribes were slaves. A modicum of a working class is still needed, but in no more than a slave-class capacity; the middle classes as consumers no longer required in the capitalism of financial markets, are hence being eliminated and repositioned into that same remnant working class. The remnants of this remnant working class are suited only to dying off, and removing their work, money and survival-level services has been calculated to see that through.
October 23, 2014 PN wrote:
They must first wreck the schools and fill the prisons.
Wait…
October 23, 2014 TW wrote:
Those are both slave academies by nature anyway. Nothing accidental here.