Late Capitalism

Tue Nov 9 21:09:41 UTC 2021

Wow!  This BE group read has produced a great series of pronouncements on *The
Way Things Are?*!  and  *How Things Will Go?!*  and  *How Bad Are We All?!*
or  *What the Fuck (We’re All Fucked)*?!

Well done!  Who knew Pynchon put all that in BE???

David Morris

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 3:18 PM Mike Weaver <mike.weaver at zen.co.uk> wrote:

> More and more these days I see the system as no more than a receptacle
> for human drives, and as the system has developed over the centuries and
> millennia, the elites have maintained their position by the exploitation
> of particular drives within frameworks developed to protect their
> position. The rest is opportunism and evolution.
>
> The move from feudalism  to capitalism was a move from religion enhanced
> by raw power to law enhanced by raw power. There is no planning
> involved, just social evolution - a dialectic between opportunism and
> circumstance.
>
> The entrenchment of the current Republican mindset owes more to Trumps's
> opportunism as it does all the machinations of the Koch tribe. Had he
> not come along who's to say it wouldn't have remained  far longer as
> separate strands of relatively impotent disgruntlement. It's Johnson's
> self serving and mendacious ambition that has the UK where it is today.
>
> I'm not sure a system does imply anything tangible, its essentially a
> system of communication, of power before information,  it only demands
> pathways and connections, switchboards at the most.
>
> I really dislike the term 'late capitalism' - an expression of hope
> where none yet is visible, I feel - a product of the tidiness of triples
> and Trotskyist idealism.  Best used ironically. Did Jameson's attempt to
> change it to 'latest stage of...' fail because too many cling to the
> hope of an end? But if we use infant, adolescent, adult in place of
> early, middle, late  we might consider possible equivalent time scales,
> having 'late' last a long long time.
>
> Mike
>
> On 09/11/2021 17:18, rich wrote:
> > who actually is innocent, though. Much of the 'system' is so much
> alchemy,
> > far removed from growth in the general sense. One big gambling den,
> rigged
> > by maths PhDs. we all sponge off the system, how else to survive. But for
> > many of us, we are enjoying our lives, hardly' just surviving'. The
> system
> > provides. But a system implies a geography, a building, something
> tangible.
> > There isn't anything tangible about the system. Those who want to see it
> > die, overthrown, are deluded. Those who believe in the system are equally
> > deluded. There is nothing to control, only tweaked at a miniscule level
> of
> > what we perceive to be high intelligence.
> > In effect, no one wants to rip that creature off their face. Maybe it'll
> > all come crashing down. Maybe not. Art can only suggest. It isn't
> innocent,
> > either
> >
> > rich
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 12:14 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And
> that
> >> time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or
> >> anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death,
> >> when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World
> can
> >> supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
> Living
> >> inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a
> >> maniac bent on suicide… though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes
> >> back through the loudspeaker…” —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
> >>
> >> On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 11:30 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Good point and applicable to many semantic issues. Every generation
> has a
> >>> tendency to think they are at some kind of apex. I think the term late
> >>> capitalism as used currently  is more predictive than descriptive and
> may
> >>> of course prove completely wrong through reform or some other event.
> >>> I see it more as acknowledging that the Titanic has received a mortal
> >> blow
> >>> and is going down. That this current arrangement is physically,
> >>> biologically, and socially unsustainable.  I wonder what late
> capitalism
> >>> means to other readers.
> >>>
> >>>> On Nov 9, 2021, at 10:37 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Let’s get more specific:
> >>>>
> >>>> Inherent in the current use of the term, “late capitalism,” is a
> >> critique
> >>>> of observed problems of the modern practices of capitalism.  But the
> >> term
> >>>> isn’t new:
> >>>>
> >>>> “ The term "late capitalism" was first used by Werner Sombart
> >>>> <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Sombart> in his magnum opus
> >> Der
> >>>> Moderne Kapitalismus, which was published from 1902 through 1927, and
> >>>> subsequent writings; Sombart divided capitalism into different stages:
> >>>> (1) proto-capitalist society from the early middle ages up to 1500 AD
> >>>> (2) early capitalism in 1500–1800
> >>>> (3) the heyday of capitalism from 1800-1914(WW1)
> >>>> (4) late capitalism: 1914 until today.”
> >>>>
> >>>> “The term late capitalism began to be used by socialists in
> continental
> >>>> Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many
> >>> economists
> >>>> believed capitalism was doomed.”
> >>>>
> >>>> At the heart of the term is the question of whether current problems
> >> are
> >>>> due to abuses and corruptions of the system, or whether the problems
> >> are
> >>>> inherent to the system.  Another question is about the nature of
> >> reforms
> >>> or
> >>>> regulations that make capitalism a hybrid system.  Is a
> Reformed/Hybrid
> >>>> Capitalism still “Late Capitalism?”
> >>>>
> >>>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
> >>>> Modern usage of the phrase and further evolutionEdit
> >>>> <
> >>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Late_capitalism&action=edit&section=4
> >>>>
> >>>> According to a 2017 article in The Atlantic
> >>>> <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic>, the term "late
> >>> capitalism"
> >>>> is again in vogue to describe modern business culture, although with a
> >>>> semantic change or an ironic twist. "Late capitalism" has become a
> >>>> catch-all term for various phenomena that express capitalism's
> >>> distortions
> >>>> of human life, and it is often used in critique and satire. This usage
> >>> also
> >>>> conveys a sense that contemporary capitalism cannot go on like it does
> >>>> forever, because the problems created by business are getting too
> large
> >>> and
> >>>> unmanageable.
> >>>>
> >>>> The phrase “late stage capitalism” is used commonly as a critique of
> >> the
> >>>> fascistic qualities that emerge in the later stages of capitalism.
> >>>> Capitalism to many may seem to be free of this exploitation if not
> >> taken
> >>> to
> >>>> the extremes of “late capitalism”. A competing viewpoint is that
> >>>> “Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on
> >> authoritative,
> >>>> controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that
> >> of
> >>>> capitalists and workers”, and that this is not something that emerges
> >> out
> >>>> of a devolving system but rather is present in the framework of the
> >>> system
> >>>> itself.
> >>>> --
> >>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>
> > --
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>
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