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Q: Is the bicycle dead?
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For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.
Is the proletariat crucial to capitalism? Yes, absolutely. It is actually more crucial to capitalism than the bourgeoisie. You can have capitalism without the bourgeoisie but you cannot have capitalism without the proletariat. Overcoming capitalism requires the self-abolition of the proletariat. This makes the question of left-wing politics extremely difficult. How can you talk about the self-abolition of the proletariat when working people are being pushed against the wall? I think it is very difficult to try to mediate the issue of defending the achievements of working class movements in a neo-liberal universe, and a position that avoids hypostatizing the working class as the bearer of the future. I don't claim to have any easy answers to that, but I do think the abolition of the working class is the key to the liberation of humanity. I agree
with Marx's formulation.
Moishe Postone, 'Rethinking the Critical Theory of Capitalism', Principia Dialectica
2 (2006), p.13
Obama's victory in the US may be the opening of a new period in the evolution of mankind. This event has injected new hope in the peaceful army of the general intellect all over the world. The new President was voted in by cognitive labor, and his victory is the defeat of the criminal class represented by Cheney-Bush. But this victory marks only the beginning of the fight, that will be the fight of intellectual force against the brutal force of ignorance, violence and profit.
While I can certainly agree with Berardi's comments on the privatisation of experience, the shattering of social solidarity, and the pernicious effects of privatised car culture, the fact that computers has a great deal to do with these dynamics (and permitted the possibility of the complex financial products which helped produce the current crisis) is bypassed for a political fable of libertarian cyerculture tamed by 'the man' (it's as if The Baffler never happened...).
Berardi's solution is to conduct a kind of therapy on the desire for private property. His argument is that 'semiotic goods' are not annihilated through use (just like tables?) and so permit common use and collectivisation. Now we no longer have to look forward to a wave of suicides, but communism is back, surfing on the wave of commanlity of knowledge, the ideological crisis of private ownership, and the mandatory communilisation of need.
Of course this can't be the old communism of 'Will and voluntarism' (the entirely predictable targets), but 'A totally new brand of communism'.