[lbo-talk] The Nietzsche Economy - Diedrich Diederichsen

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Fri Sep 23 22:27:20 PDT 2011


----- Original Message ----- From: "Ferenc Molnar" <ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com>

A friend sent me this essay. I have no idea where the writer is placed on the political spectrum but I found it both entertaining and frustrating. It meanders around quite a bit but it's basically a critique of the reign of the creative class... from the lowly freelance worker to the creative entrepreneurs who have achieved great power or money through a kind of work practice that appears more ecstatic than Fordist, more Saturday night at the rock concert than Monday morning at the desk. In some ways it reminds me a bit of David Brook's contemptuous though accurate study of the "Bourgeois Bohemians" but Diederichsen seems to be a bit more apprehensive of this class than Brooks. ---------------

Color me stupid, but I couldn't follow it. Especially toward the end.

What makes an economy "Nitzchean"?


>From my perch in hi tech, I can say that the entrepreneurial world is the choice site of super-exploitation: needed to rejuvenate sclerotic large companies and to extract a maximum amount of labor against the promise of creative work. The vaunted creativity, a glimmer on the horizon soon turns into twelve hour days and an excuse to pay very little (on an hourly basis) for what is usually highly skilled and extremely difficult work. The worker almost never wins. It's a game played by venture capitalists for the profit of venture capitalists and the large companies that eventually swallow the successful startups.

I can't tell whether the author of this piece understand any of this. There is a certain amount of poetic play in the essay that simply loses itself in its meanderings.

Joanna



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