Democracy vs Capitalism

This is from Wang Hui's essay Depoliticized Politics in the New Left Review 41. "A multi-party system pre-supposes that each party has a specific representative character and political values, for which it will fight against it's rivals within the parlimentary-institutional framework. However ,as the character and values of the parties become increasingly indeterminate within a broad macro-economic consensus, real democratic politics dissapears." That" macro-economic consensus" of which he speaks is the hegemony we need to dismantle but I am all in favor of more, and more diverse , parties as a way to get the ball rolling. Ill be campaign manager!

This is how Theodore Adorno put it: "Freedom to choose an ideology- since freedom always reflects economic coercion- everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same." With all this "freedom" ,everyone buys the exact same shit, wears the same clothes and thinks the same thoughts. The social is commodified.

I have a soft spot for old Debord because he made the polemic poetic : "the Spectacle is the submission of human sociability to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless, bright, sameness) of the market."

There is a great new team member from Argentina over at renegade eye talking about worker occupied factories and other cool stuff. A good antidote to that "broad macro-economic consensus".