Dear Nettimers
Here's a recent essay which owes much to my contemplation of the various
conversations on this list. I apologies: I'm not spontaneous enough to
participate in those conversations: I discover only much later what I
think, and through writing pieces like this.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/
The assault on American democracy, I say here, is not a matter of
personalities or political parties, but a deep-structural concomitant of
the return of capital. In order to understand the forces at work, we
would do better ignoring the more obvious, but analytically
inappropriate, parallels of Hitler, fascism, etc, and focussing instead
on Britain in the eighteenth century.
In this light, today's Silicon Valley giants appear as a significant
historical force of both technology and capital. Both as technological
platforms and as new formations of finance and (non-) labour, they are
well-adapted to the task of expelling the Western masses from the centre
of the world economy, and relegating them to the periphery - where they
had been until the C19 or even C20. Democracy, inevitably, then becomes
the big problem - even in the wary, discriminatory form it has assumed
in America.
Very best to all
R
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