why the ends of capitalism is absurd?

This I cribbed from amazon's summary of Meghnan Desai's book, Marx's Revenge , which I cribbed from Kortbein.

I imagine the philosophy of network idea might have something to do with the reduction of transaction costs theoretically wrought by cheaper information technology, which would hasten progress towards complete globalization of worldwide marke

i'm still on the first paragraph tbh but so far this piece is monumental

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-extractive-circuit-singh-chaudhary

😲

"The machinery—the actual form and function—of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by fossil fuels; telecommunications; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South with regimes of hyperwork in the Global North; rare earth “sacrifice zones” with refugees; migrant labor with social reproduction; ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon with profitable opportunity. It has required the transformation of states; it has ripped through biomes and through flesh. Capital often appears and is treated as a historical abstraction; this is doubly true of globalized, financialized capital. The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain. Its realities underscore the generalization of a colonial social relation in socioecological terms, even as older modes of imperialism and neocolonialism are hardly swept aside. Its speed, frenzy, coercion, and brutality reach into the very heart of the imperial metropole, far beyond where such relations were already present. Feelings of exhaustion—depression, desperation, fatigue, exasperation—course through its wirings, neurons, biochemicals, and sinews."

omg was just talking about this, time to get schooled.

i'm just gonna quote some more, this thing is a hum-dinger

"Now imagine a Global North worker, across the globe, likely “middle class.” Probably white but not necessarily so. Place her in California—an increasingly unsuitable geography for mass human habitation. Say she’s white collar—perhaps an office assistant, accountant, or coder. In the 1970s her labor would likely have been lower in waged-hours than it is today, and it would have included, in the famous phrase of Arlie Hochschild, a “second shift” of unwaged “free” domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, care work: the often “invisible” aspects of social reproduction found in the home. Today, our imaginary Californian works longer hours, in a “productively optimized” labor process, still for a lower wage than a male counterpart, even as part of her “second shift” is now itself displaced onto migrant labor, including everything from general health care work to at-home care and domestic work to independent contract labor for household maintenance, which can range from food preparation and delivery to, in concentrated urban centers, laundry and far beyond. The extractive circuit produces prodigious amounts of such “disposable” people.

This move toward “outsourcing” domestic labor was already occurring in much earlier periods (the 1960s, 1950s, and earlier), but in the United States that was, at the time, shifted instead to differently racialized gendered labor; a largely black, racialized caste system underwrote white middle class “normalcy” in the United States. Such a caste system unquestionably continues to this day, even if its racialization has taken on “multicultural” hues. But the augmentation that is key to understanding the extractive circuit is the ever-increasing number of inputs designed—to use somewhat crude economic language—to maximize productivity and profitability. This augmentation has spread comparative advantage from geographies to the body itself. This is the case even if it leads to, at best, an increasingly socioeconically and ecologically tenuous maintenance of current overall economic productivity. Put more simply, our imaginary white-collar Californian now works harder and longer helping to maintain an artificially futile level of production and requiring mass consumption of everything from energy to electronics. And she does so for less. Her real wage has stagnated for several decades; even though the professions imagined above could place her income above the 48 percent of Americans who earn less than about $31,000 a year, they don’t come close to the levels where twenty-first-century capitalism truly pays off (not even taking into account the grimmer picture in wealth.)[1] Her lifestyle is thus supported by financialized debt, which in turn requires her to ever further “innovate” and “diversify” her “human capital.” This includes but is not limited to the intensive self-maintenance through biochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and other technological interventions to her body and its internal composition and processes. She does consume more, but this is not a particularly pleasurable form of desire fulfillment. It is rather her very desire to continue to exist that is rechanneled into the logic of capital accumulation."

this is my favorite kind of thing in the world, thx

Read about 1/3 and it's putting lots of things I've read here and there in one place

Love this thread title

really enjoyed this, thanks. my work is tangential to the concept of ‘human capital’ and that truly is a creepy phrase/concept if you stop and think about it

it puts a lot of things i've been thinking about mental health 'awareness' into a compelling framework. also i should read some frantz fannon.