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Bad hair day?
Marx spends a lot of pages illustrating in empirical terms how the abstract dynamic of capital works. I am finishing up chapter 15 which is full of muckraking details. Harvey does a good job of explaining what is going on in this chapter, and how if you change some part of the system to reform it, the problem moves to another part. For example, if you lighten the physical demands of labor say with machinery then it turned out to introduce women and children into the labor force. If you shorten the working day, then the processes of labor are intensified. Chapter 15 is full of these kinds of examples. These are the means through which the more abstract system you are pushing, emerges. (As a literary side note, this chapter also illuminates a lot of Gilles Deleuze's wilder passages in the first of Anti-Opedipus, with its visions of the factory system as an organic machine of organs without bodies. Much of the time and grind and work discipline passages remined me of Foucault, who was always a little difficult to see as a Marxist.)
I had to look up Inside Job and watched an interview with the film maker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffHFjlqIzKE
Of course there was collusion between captial, government, and education systems, with capital in the position to dictate terms. How could there not be? There certainly is a conspiracy, in the sense of hiding these relationships and paying the media or not paying the media, if their producers don't go along... There is a reason (money) that there are few mainstream media sources to expose the open corruption of the political systems.
I may or may not to go see the movie. It's playing this week down the street. The naming of names in the here and now is politically important to do because it strips the liberal pretense of those in power. It has been important that vast corporate power appears nameless and faceless, with appointed PR personalities from the neoliberal think-tanks. With no names or faces, it makes neoliberalism appear to simply be an unchangable system, a force of nature. Abstractions are very difficult to fight. They need to be embodied.
The real deals, the actual human beings who run this system don't like their names, addresses, and faces in public view. They especially don't like published audits, police investigations, health and safety inspectors, enviornmental impact reports and a long list of other means to make their activities public records.
``Nor can it be changed by changing the laws or by the nominal ownership of the enterprises which have names and addresses.'' CC
Don't forget the election examples from Latin America like Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez. They were simply elected from the wrong class and it has made some difference to many.
And then there is the counter example of how talk or pretense of reform and a slowly growing public awareness of having been screwed was sufficient to shift money and power to the more looney tune figures of the GOP. This seemed like a pretty obvious attempt to channel public discontent into a self-destructive rightwing populism as a perferred outcome to any kind of reform movement.
I'll end with a quote from Chris Hedges from today's column:
``The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in "Brave New World," they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, "block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression."
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism.''
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/
The basic thrust of the essay is that Huxley's Brave New World of a happy drug world of brain dead optimism created by the faceless corporate state paves the way for the more brutal repression of Orwell's 1984 of endless war, fear, treachery, and torment.
CG