Lol I literally had a strict rule where I downvoted every comment that started with “this”, no matter what else was written. Fuck that noise.
I did quite enjoy that article, although I would disagree with his conclusion. As can be guessed from my user name, I think the nature of capitalism is to blame, not personal habit. It seems tenuous to claim that a phenomena that has affected humans by the billions can be remedied by personal choice. A critic may say that is exactly buying into the illusion of capital. What is a systemic issue of production and distribution being reduced to one of personal agency, moral failing, and consumer preference.
One of the best books I’ve read in a long time is about precisely this. Immediacy, or the Cultural Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh. It is a spiritual successor the Frederic Jameson and Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as Debord and others.
Her argument is mainly that as markets have come to dominate every aspect of our existence, market logic has come to dominate culture. The current logic she names Immediacy. The idea being that in all aspects, including academia, culture is dominated by personal, immediate experience. It is nominalism, the idea that mediation of experience through abstraction, whether philosophical concepts or difficult art, is pretentious, impersonal, boring, amd tedious. We demand immediate response from that we engage with. Whether it be social media, music, novels, or movies, they are required to be immediately relatable, translatable, and consumable.
This is why shows like Rings of Power feel vapid and lacking. They are not mythical people in which we can posit ourselves, in which we can aspire and dream of greatness, of justice, of friendship and loyalty. The show feels like it is sneering and rolling its eyes at these. No one is really like Aragorn, come the fuck on. Hokie ass garbage.
Instead it offers us… ourselves in a fantasy setting. Symbolism and themes are hard and boring and pretentious, so they will pursue their own petty interests as we would and squabble and pout. Shows like this just feel like our world in a new setting. The orcs are “complicated”, under the auspices of moral complexity but really just to denude morality from the world altogether. No grand messages. That shit is lame. And so we are more invested in Aragorn the moment his face changes to tenderness,as he looks down at Sam, willing to defend his his master against this 6’ tall man with a longsword wielding a candlestick, and shows a deep moral complexity. This is using something rare in our world, a powerful man, a Numenorian, admiring the courage of a hobbit gardnerer with a candlestick. Admiring his bravery and loyalty. And as a mysterious, threatening, hardened traveller showing compassion and vulnerability.
It is striking in its contradiction, actual subversion, difficulty, and seeming otherwordly goodness. Not that shows have to portray traditional morals to be compelling. They need to portray something that is not immediatelt accessible to us. But that goes directly against the market logic. The same logic that creates fetishized commodities that seemingly appear at our door. That turns the complexities of climate disaster, exploitation, global supply chains into little entertainment boxes that exist simply because we desire it to.
The gig economy, where employment is mercurial, “nomadic”, precarious, is celebrated as freedom. The destruction of new possibility is celebrated as authenticity. Live your truth. I heard an ad for lawyers that offered to help on “your divorce journey”.
And as this world offers us constant ennui and anomie by fuflilling desires it convinces us we have, it also implores us to act now! The environment is collapsing, recycle your cans for Christ sake! Buy products in brown packaging you fucking monster! So it feels almost irresponsible to dream, foolish to hope, impossible to imagine. The actual message of Marvel movies, novels that are part confessional diary, green marketing, is that “this is the only world. Even in space. Even with superheroes. Even in Middle Earth. The only arrangment. Even your wildest fantasy cannot escape this reality. There is no world outside of capitalism. All is exchange and consumption and endless banality”, As Mark Fischer put it “It is easier to imagine the end if world than the end of capitalism”.
So I, and Kornbluh, do actually agree the solution is a moral imperative. But not to engage with the machine in a moderate way. Trying to curate an eddy in a flood. But to make difficult art. Art that is mediated. Art that requires investment and separation and abstraction. Just now, when the world is on the brink of endless catastrophe, is it most appropriate to dream of different possibilities. To read Lord of the Rings and look at Aragorn not as sentimental and trite, but as aspirational.
Lastly, if you have interacted with teenagers there is a deep, bedrock cynicism that eclsipses irony and sarcasm. Those things imply a hope thst was betrayed. They largely have never hoped, have never stayed up breathelessly reading a challenging book, or listened to an album on repeat that fundamentally changes them, that they feel beyond their bones. Which is full tragedy. Adolescence should be when dreaming through new and exciting media elavates you, opens new horizons. There is overwhelmingly apathy, amusement, boredom. Little curiosity or imagination. Their entire worlds have been robbed of them. They can sense it. They don’t tend to love or even like social media. But their horizons are closed. Nothing left even to dream of. They don’t have the faculties to even sense what it is they are missing, they just know it is.
Very sorry for the length. I just really love the book, and thanks for the article. It was a good productive read.
I think this is correct. Racism didn’t start, nor was it exclusive to, the South. The South was a largely fascist style totalitarianism for black people until the 1960’s, but this was one instantiation of a worldwixe view. Racialized capitalism has remained with cosmetic facelifts. The South was part of a much wider shift in European thought in the 15th and 16th centuries towards a racial world. Modern conceptions of race arose to justify exploitation, taken from things like “Purity of the Blood” to differentiate Christian converts post Reconquista from older Christians. So they could continue discriminating. When conquering the Americas and enslaving Africans they ran into the same issue. Justifying war and brutality along Christian lines becomes quite muddled after their children grow up having been born and raised Christian. So the idea was that they carried heathenism in their blood. Easy, now perpetual, hereditary bondage has a justification. Capitalism arose concurrently with Imperialism and the Enlightenment. So this racialized worldview, with massive economic incentive, became standardized, secularized, “rationalized”, eventually becoming eugenics and Nazi race science.
During this same time, there was mass exploitation and genocide on a global scale. It was not the Confederacy that eradicated entire tribes, forced assimilation, occupied Haiti, opportunistically betrayed the Phillipines by annexing it and brutally putting down the same freedom movement they had fought alongside the year prior- and promised independence. Nor was it the Confederacy nor Jim Crow that annexed Hawaii by force, in the name of fruit companies. The list goes on.
It is very easy to imagine the north as this mercantile utopia of small businessmen, fishing and trading and fiercely defending liberty. There was certainly a real strand of Enlightenment thought througb the Am. Rev. that was actually emancipatory, anti slavery, property, and capital. The Constitution was very much a reactionary document, meant to centralize and consolidate power in the hands of the new elite, North and South. Bourgeois rights to trade and property became instilled as the preeminent rights, any thought of social tranformation died in Shay’s Rebellion.
Telling is the fact that Whigs opposed the Bill of Rights out of fear they would be read as exhaustive, and used to delimit the barebones conception of liberty by excluding everything not written. Hell, they even threw in an amendment explicitly stating “dipshits, these aren’t the only rights, they are examples”. And now those who claim to be defending the original text and intent betray the explicit intent by deferring to state power whenever they possibly can. The only amendment that gets completely written off is the inconvenient one that says the BOR should be a starting point. They call it too vague, funny because that was the entire point. To say “hey, use your judgement to protect liberty, think expansively, we are literally just some guys, we don’t even have The Simpsons”.
Anyways, the Northern business interests did not particularly care one fuck about slavery, and they brutalized every wave of immigrant labor they could to turn Southern cotton into fabric(so did England, without the massive financial returns of Southern cotton the Industrial Revolution would’ve been dead in the water).
But the abolitionist movement began to turn the population against the evils of slavery. The progressive middle class and freedmen eventually turned the North to abolition. Now there is an idea that Republicans and Democrats magically “switched positions” after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well yes and no. The Republicans were always the party of the wealthy. They gained the support of Northern industrialists that saw slavery as inefficient when compared to treating labor like a market- also catastrophically exploitative. The North has been profoundly racist as well, if not so overtly.
Very telling is how immigrants were categorized racially. When they were an oppressed working class, they were segregated and painted as racially inferior. The Irish largely treated like the Jim Crow South. Papist, non Germanic, Celtic, swine. As the Irish gained voting power and moved into the middle class, and the Nativists needed their support to exploit the New Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe… congrats Paddys! You’re white now! Now lets oppress the Mongoloid Italians and Russians and of course Jews.
What this demonstrates is racism was not an independent force of spite. It was, and still is, an economic weapon.
When thinking about race in the North, keep in mind they had a muuuch smaller black population than Louisiana. If they so had majority black populations in mist areas I imagine it would’ve looked largely similar to Jim Crow. During the Great Migration blacks were forced into shitty neighborhoods, could only work specific jobs, and were still subjected to mass violence. The Black Panthers started in Oakland and soread largely to Northern cities. Huey Newton was assassinated by the FBI and Chicago PD. This is the heart of your question, and I think the answer. Imagining capitalism as a non racial system would mean it would be radically different everywhere. As long as wealth is consolidated, exploitation need occur. Where exploitation occurs, the best way to get people to support their own exploitation is through manufactured markers if difference. “What about Nordic countries and Belgium”. Well, European countries were largely able to posture Liberty Equality Fraternity because the exploitation was exported, and even then there was still brutal class conflict and if course persecuted minorities(Norway has an indigenous population thst was nearly wiped out).
As the threat of class conflict rise, Russia fell to communism, and the fear of Bolshevism spread reactionary forces of capital allied themselves with their own mutant offspring and used all the technologies of domination, ideological, financial and material, to turn their racialized, imperial domination inward. The violence of fascism would not look a freak occurance to someone from the Belgian Congo, or Jim Crow South, or Vietnam or South Africa.
Fascism is an offspring of the global economic system of domination. No place or people is immune. As the parent comment said, they’d find a new outgroup. Capital needs ideological justification for its theft and domination. Describe the American privatized prisons to someone and ask them what nation is being described.
A final note, as Adorno(see username) points out, this is not opposite the forces of Enlightenment and Progressivism. It is embedded in the logic of Enlightenment. Categorization, quantification, implies grester and lesser values. All morality is reduced to market exchange. Tell people in the “backward” Middle Ages that starvation was needed as an explicit threat to keep people working(something argued in 17th cent England with the Poor’s Act and literally echoed today by Neoliberals), and they wouldsay that is the height of barbarity. But human worth is production and consumption, we are in a dog eat dog social world built to consolidate wealth and power. One that was wholly alien to all societies prior to the 15th century. God sorry this got so long. All to say, race is an invented means of differentiation, something else wouldve arisen to replace it had everyone been white.