Status Updates From Postcapitalist Desire: The ...

That's what I'm suggesting, I guess, in terms of what we saw with black performers in the US. Their success preceded the actual shifts in racial dynamics in US society. Again, not that they were resolved, by any means, but culture allows this kind of performative anticipation of a radically transformed world.

You can have this machine that is the most wondrous thing imaginable but, if you don't have the time to use it, it might as well not be there.
And that's where we are at. That's where we are in terms of what human capacities are at the moment, and what the capacities of the things produced by humans are — or let's put it that way, for the moment — and what the capacity of human agency to use those things is!

[Capitalism] has to continually inhibit the capacity for consciousness, and it's done a very good job. You could say that time is fundamental to the means of production— of everything! It also seems to be, in the world today, like some sort of fairy-tale where there's some magical golden machine in a room over there that can make anything you want. It's just there, but you don't have the time to go there.

As Marcuse said, we could all be working much less now, but that's the insanity of it — the full insanity of the capitalist system! They produce an artificial scarcity of time in order to produce a real scarcity of natural resources. That's effectively what's happening. It's the production of spurious commodities that nobody wants, like slippers with the faces of alligators…

The bourgeoisie cannot have consciousness. They can't see how things really are. This is part of what I think is important about what is being said here. The proletarian does not, by virtue of their being proletarian alone, see the true nature of things. Only by virtue of what we can call consciousness raising…only by a process of consciousness raising, by a practice of consciousness raising, can they achieve that.

Capitalism, then, would be this system whereby this alienation - to use that term
— of human capacities is taken to its absolute limit. It's a monstrously, prodigiously productive system, yet it's also one which seems to — and does — exploit and oppress the majority of the population, and which even the minority have limited capacity to alter.

This is the same for the bourgeoisie.[The problem of immediacy]is why they don't know!They are the puppets of this process, you could say. From their point of view, they're putting more money in, they're making more money.From capital's point of view, they're just the means by which it grows. And this process is, in principle, infinite.And has to be — there always has to be more.This is in the nature of capitalism.

Because living in a family is living collectively. It's just a very restricted form of it.
Isn't part of the function of the family for capitalism that it can contain the desires for collectivity that we have?
It's a desire that can only be met by collective groups that is expressed in a form that is often chauvinistic, that is competitive, that is defined by its exclusions as much by its inclusions.