>Of course, the analogy was invoked mostly as a corrective to Doug's
>open-ended skepticism. If capitalism is a historical system, like
>feudalism, with a beginning and an end, it should follow at at some
>point, the system "passes its zenith", so to speak. What that point
>is, though, is certainly open to debate. The (highly abstract)
>criterion deployed here is that in which capital attains a scale and
>scope of development to the point where capital itself becomes its
>own "greatest barrier" to its further development, whereupon there
>ensues the process of its own "self-abolition". This is not an
>automatic process - capital surely does not abolish itself
>willingly! - but on the contrary must strive to disguise this
>process from itself (meaning us, subsumed with capital as we are) to
>the point that it opposes this as a process of ultimate triumph (in
>this sense Fukuyama was right - we are at the 'endtime' of _a_
>history). So the current 'neoliberalism' is but a religious
>reflection of the 19th century classic projected upon our own time,
>not an accurate representation of our real condition at present.
>Yesterday it was the spontaneous ideology of a class; today it is
>the mechanical prefabrication of a hybrid social order of capital
>and state so closely interleaved that even some of it "opponents" -
>as some are in the "antiglobalization" as well as some in the
>"worker" camp - can be positively engaged in its reproduction.
Hmm. Why do I get the feeling that because some guy said that capital would become its own final barrier, you're hot to find it in the real present? That may be true someday somehow, but why are you so sure that that's not decades, maybe centuries, away? The current "neoliberalism" is the dispersion of what was once the spontaneous ideology of a new ruling class into the ideologies of proletarians; capital shapes our leisure, our fantasies, the way we see the world. "Mechanical prefabrication" sounds like something brittle and lifeless made by dolts, when in fact the whole ideology reproduction system is very clever, and market disciplines impossible to evade. You make the inmixing of state and capital sound novel and impossible; seems to me to be quite long-lasting, dynamic, and effective. Some of its worst enemies can be found largely on the internet, which I'm sure capital and state would find amusing, if they knew about it.
Doug