Skip to main content

"... Capitalism for the 150 or so years [sic] of it's existence was based on production of material goods from which surplus value derives that in turn was divided between industry profits, interest payments and rent...The  heyday of this economy in terms of its employment of labor forces in manufacturing (production centered) activities was between 1940 and 1980. Today production centered economies have been dissembled with manufacturing in the US employing at best 10 percent of the workforce...Japan and Germany around 20 percent...top Asian tigers like South Korea about the same...even China overall has never seen manufacturing employment rise above 25 percent of employment. And the rest of the world is experiencing what has been dubbed "premature deindustrialization". 



The current economy, if you want to call it that, is based on money games, Himalayan sized debt, leverage, and extraction of "pounds of flesh" from the bones of humanity. It operates more like a "Merchant of Venice" than capitalism. That is why authoritarianism is so prevalent.  Capitalists without capitalism can summarily dispense with bourgeois polities because the bourgeois economy is largely gone except for ideologies of both Right and Left that support it. The Right because neoclassical economic voodoo states capitalism is forever because natural. The Left because gurus like Zizek need it to survive (even figuratively) so their heroic working class revolution can dismount it...
DKLNG, fr.com, a comment on Zizek's article.

Comments