> I don't believe decadence is a useful concept in understanding
> capitalism.
Actually, it can be an incredibly useful tool, but only when properly historicized, and never as part of a moralistic critique which blames a bad system on a few bad individuals. The US Empire, a.k.a. mid-20th century state-monopoly capitalism, really is in a decadent phase, in the sense that it is losing its hegemony to other social formations. None of which is reason to crow about the glories of, say, the Chinese developmental state, which is a construct created out of dire necessity, full of internal contradictions and class struggles. The flip side of US decadence is transnational possibility: we workers of the world have long had a planet to win, but now we have digital media to organize ourselves with.
-- DRR