newspeak

Yanis Varoufakis.

I’ve been following YV’s comments for some time, but usually via interviews and other accounts. I’d not subscribed to his blog. Now I have, and recommend it. I suppose that from my perspective, the disintegration and possibly savage destruction of the Eurozone is both affecting (in the human sense: to see the breadlines, for instance) and fascinating: how will the structures of power maintain themselves in the face of dissolution? Or, to put it otherwise: What will happen to capital in this erosive zone?

And, though the Eurozone crisis is particular to the zone, which is a Frankenstein monster stitched out of the cadaver’d parts of others to resemble something beautiful in the abstract, ugly in the flesh, nevertheless, it does suggest a future for other deep capital markets, especially those rooted in the foundry technologies arcing back to the 19th century.

But we are entering a new capitalization, with different models of making, distribution, selling. The question is: are they different enough? I’d say: not yet. Remember when the crisis first hit, the comforting notion was that the world was different now, for it was no longer the case that when the US sneezed–had a recession–the rest of the world caught cold. In fact, what really happened was that the novelty of this new recession simply proved that the driver for the global economy continues to be the potlach American consumer and the object of consumption the commodity, whatever it is, she desires.

I suspect that will change, and is changing. But slowly.

(Mind, I’m not opposed to consumer capitalism nor to commodities: I like those I have. But in the face of a world beyond the brink and in the face of the knowledge that my commodities equal somebody else’s certain misery and exploitation, and that situation has not gotten better over time…. well.)