Creative Destruction

This is the process of discarding that which has lost it's potential use-value in a capitalist economy. Infrastructure, knowledge or a person, it's all the same, once the maximum potential for profit extraction has been wrung from it the logic requires it be abandoned. Rust is its mascot , its dominant motif. Think Detroit. The "creative" part is that prying open of new spaces ripe for exploitation which has made the old obsolete. Think China. Interestingly, ideas and concepts are also mechanisms of this process, implanted and discarded as needed. In fairly recent times, coercion was replaced (though by no means abandoned) by hegemony as an effective facilitator-lubricator of the market but lately coercion and it's adjunct "primitive accumulation", have made big comebacks. It has been entertaining listening to Rush Limbaugh deal with the issue of Nancy Pelosi ,who he hates,and her embrace of torture, which he loves. Nancy has not lost her use-value but that strange smile , the death head, shows her awareness of how close to the knife edge she is.

The general strike in Greece has brought the country to a standstill. The workers there won't accept a race to the bottom without a fight at least. The workers in Argentina have cut the locks on at least some of the factory gates and re-oiled the machinery with their own idealism nd sweat. A "Going Global" conference is taking place with delegates from 200 trade unions from 64 countries. The International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 168 million workersin 153 different countries, has joined in to form the Council of Global Unions. Trade unionism may have issues but this trend towards internationalism is positive. French workers have made demands, the South Koreans don't take it lying down, c'mon American workers. "We have fed the world for a thousand years". Rusting factories are a crime. The NLRB is one of the criminals.