Status Updates From Hellworld: The Human Specie...

Jumping back in after a long hiatus, and I’m fully convinced this is a masterpiece

"In fact, the problem [of financial sector's relation to sclerotic fixed capital and declining rate of profit in mfg.] is exactly the opposite: the excess capacity and narrowed profits of industry make it an increasingly unproductive strain on the total social capital deployed by the well-oiled machinery of finance."

"But finance is simply a technology used to coordinate production and deploy class power, no more or less speculative than any other sector. When these interventions [to manage crisis, downturn] produce diminishing returns, this generates the illusion of an unproductive sector weighing down the 'real economy' beneath."

finished pt 1

“ In the pages of Capital Marx whispers that there is a second world sunk in this one… . Rather than
the ‘economy’ presented in the form of plain facts that can be aggregated and processed through simple empiricism, we find self-reflexive social dynamics difficult to grasp precisely because our attempt to understand them is both constituted by and helps to constitute them as social forces.”

“Capital is horror that is nearly indescribable not because it is too complex to grasp or too occluded by ideology, but precisely because it is so overbearingly sensible that we feel it everywhere, as the expanding hellworld in which we are encased. Again, Marx himself described
capital as an ‘alien mediator’ that operates as an ‘entity outside man and above man’ and thereby becomes a sort of real God”

Someone educate me, but I really don’t see any way to rebuild working class politics by increasing union density when even in China, the “workshop of the world”, workers are constantly being replaced via automation or factory relocation to even lower wage regions within the country or externally to Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Cambodia.

This is bleak as hell