Capitalism – Page 2 – Nonsite.org

Back to Work: Review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs is one long exercise in evasion—an attempt to go “beyond” capitalism without actually going through it. Graeber prefers the muteness and aphasia of the animal over the interdependence of the speaking subject. Yet as Marx, Engels and contemporaries already recognized, Kant’s ape has to begin to speak and assume his role as a member of coercive communities if history is to ever start.

Alone In A World of Objects: Videogames, Interaction, and Late Capitalist Alienation

BY Trevor A. Strunk

Is feeling good an aesthetic? We might say that feeling a kind of subjective pride is a commodified politics—an affiliation of progressive sentiment with market forces that we have seen in such ad campaigns as Oreo’s LGBTQ-positive viral advertising, a way to align politics with preferences. This preferential politics is mobilized, at least in part, by Gone Home as form and content marry to create a limited political efficacy, a reaffirmation of the player’s good politics regarding sexuality (or, conversely, a negative pleasure for the player in experiencing politics that they do not find agreeable). But while preference can produce a politics, it is difficult to imagine that “feeling good” can count as an aesthetic.

The Climate Movement Needs to Get Radical, but What Does that Mean?: A Delayed Review of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein

BY Peter Dorman

The view that capitalism is a style of thinking, progress is a myth, and political contestation is irrelevant to “true” social change belongs not just to this one book but to all the commentators who found nothing to criticize. That’s the real problem.