Marks of weakness, marks of woe: "Chav" as Allegory

Daumier, The Third Class Railway Carriage (1862-64)

 

This post follows on from our review of Chavs «The Author as Sympathiser» and will make more sense if that has been read first.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

“Every social class has its own pathology”, Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.10.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Van Gogh, A weaver’s cottage, July 1884

 

 

George Monbiot

The Gurdian  

 

Fri 15 Apr ‘16  Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17

 

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race

Creative Commons image via NASA

It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them.

The end of capitalism has begun

stuartshils:  orpheus’s mood after the departure of eurydice

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian

Interactions of the technical and the social

benheine.deviantart.com

 

Saskia Sassen

Digital formations of the powerful and the powerless

Saskia Sassen compares the impact of two kinds of socio-technical formations on the public sphere: electronic capitalist elites concentrated in global cities and globally networked, local social activist movements. Both have the power to transform existing political and economic systems.

The aim is to contrast two kinds of socio-technical formations that have crystallized in recent years: global ICT-mediated financial markets and, a very different case, local social actors geographically dispersed yet increasingly part of a globally articulated space even though they mostly are not in direct communication with each other. Each of these two types of formations has variable and often complex relationships with territory, law, state authority, and diverse kinds of power. The emphasis here is on interactive domains, which include formations as diverse as electronic trading networks and elementary electronic community lists and boards.