Doug Henwood wrote:
> . ..(calling
> it late capitalism is too optimistic for me)...
i like the phrase 'late capitalism', meself.... but i don't think this has much of an optimistic tone about it at all. bill lear mentioned a similar distaste for teh phrase 'late capitalism' recently as well.
it's the only way i know to talk about a revolution within capitalism, to distinguish real subsumption from formal, and to allow me to talk about this in ways that unsettle many of the presumptions about marx's analysis of capitalism, both by marxists and non-marxists, that i find plainly odd. like for instance, that productive labour is manual labour, that commodities are necessarily tangible objects, that the labour process which capitalism 'took up' in its earliest moments has not been in many ways radically transformed by capitalism.....
nothing optimistic about this at all. maybe it's even a little too pessimistic at times.
i don't know any other way of signalling these things without the designation 'late capitalism'. if anyone has any better suggestions, i'd be happy to consider them.
angela