was he right?
Mark fisher
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About what ?
capitalist realism, lack of novelty in aesthetics, on why modern life causes depression, etc
yes but idpol is the opium white leftists can't get enough of
Yes
leftists don't care about idpol, that's a liberal thing
>muh purity
Lmao keep telling yourself that
mark fisher's infamous essay was predominantly about telling leftists to back away from intersectionality and identity politics which got him excommunicated by many american communists
About hauntology in America? Yea. One of the very few interesting topics to come out of whatever the hell philosophy has become today.
I guess so, but was he really the one right about stuff.
Wasn't he recycling ideas of other philosophers ?
gone too soon. i'm sure he will be remembered though. we haven't gone far along enough in post-modern capitalism for a lot of people to take him seriously though
You don’t get it. IDpollers (found in the left and right liberals) distract everyone from the class war, which keeps us tearing at each other and letting the oligarchy and security state run the world.
Don’t be such a tool
not really
yes chapofag....everything is a spook except class, I learned about Marx freshman year too
>don't be such a tool
you literally just regurgitated ideas you didn't deduce yourself
Class war is why things suck like this. People believe in the spooks with all their hearts, like they used to believe in god and divine right of kings.
>you repeated generally accepted truisms
Eat it up, baby’s bird. Write it down. Someday you’ll get it.
There have been plenty of identarian communist and anarchist groups, shits not going anywhere. The history is to poisonous with clear factions beyond class that it just wont work. Resentment doesnt just go to those who rule you
Irrelevant
>class war is why things suck like this
>used to believe in God
replacing God with the man-made "utopian" state isn't going to create heaven user. Your greatest fault is your unbridled faith in humanity to elevate themselves beyond their passions and create justice. Religion has known this about man for thousands of years.
>a literal ad-hominem
lol Yea Forums truly is dead
Exit the Vampire Castle should be compulsory reading in universities
It's a fake and gay replacement for having a family. In place of family the malfunctioning wh*toid embraces the retarded child races as family.
Ridiculous idpol takes and usernames with rose emojis go hand in hand on Twitter.
Why did he kill himself ?
this but unironically. it's a combination of no family and no religion. they fill their spiritual void with """tolerance""" and dogs
he knew how bad things really are
>Hate religion
>Have to import religious people because you just wont fucking make kids
Liberals are something else
According to himself, the woes of contemporary society can be neither identified nor healed if looked at from the point of view of isolated problems of individuals with personal trauma or mental affliction. So he probably took a black pill so hard he decided to fade away.
That is what led to this capitalist system. A dream that freeing commerce from the crown would make a utopia.
But I have no such “unbridled faith” I merely want a more free world where we can steer the beats of society towards more calm and thoughtful pastures. It isn’t a fault. People giving up without even tryin is a fault.
Haha pardon? The truism?
*Beast
*trying
Poor lad, did he have a family ?
Knowing/thinking too much sure is dreadful
You sound like a fascist right now
He should have taken the clown pill he might still be alive.
Anyone read his Flatline Constructs book?
Don’t like the word steer?
I didn’t say a dictator would steer. People would, could, steer society to actual civilization if we took control of our lives, drew the borders at our chests, took responsibility for our yet unborn, etc.
Ok the "people" through some collective conscious media will take control of our lives and unanimously move in the same exact direction to create utopia. Now you sound like a fascist mystic.
Doing stuff is fascist
You know why Europe from not so long ago was so nice and idyllic? It had peace and prosperity.
Everyone want that. Generally. Only injured heads will disturb such peace, and we can cure them too.
There’ll still be much to do after capitalism.
If we survive it.
not him but the idea that the economy should work in favour of the people is an idea any fascist would get behind
Which is why they’re capitalists.
Fascists are to to liberal capitalism what jihadists are to Islam
when was the period of time Europe was nice and idyllic?
He called Nick Land the Nietzsche of our time
the quote was actually something like "Land was our Neitzsche" referring to radical leftist theory going on in Warwick at the time
His talk about culture slowing down is interesting. I don't think he is completely right about music since there have been some developments but if you look at contemporary music a lot of it is just fetishizing the late 20th century
yes, he got the Land/Deleuze/Lyotard treatment. He was spot on in his writing and was trying to warn us but just like all the people mentioned he was left hardly noticed and highly berated. I think he killed himself because he always had depression combined with constant berating and his theory of capitalism stagnation... its not a suprise
>dude we should just ignore misogyny and racism
Nah, we don't have to halt the process of social justice just because it isn't the "main issue".
what are the list of principles I have to confess before I can be a true comrade?
t. neoliberal
Yes I am. And I think its working.:3
>maybe we should set that broken leg
>are you stupid! the man's in pain! don't set his leg, give him morphine
>okay, but if we don't set the leg it won't heal
>how could you think of setting his leg in a time like this! he needs morphine!
>okay but that won't fix anything, we need to set the leg or he will need morphine for the rest of his li-
>REEEEEEEE MYSOGYNY AND RACISM
>You know why Europe from not so long ago was so nice and idyllic?
If there's anything with a better history of war and chaos is europe. This place as never and will never gain peace. Your "not so long ago" is probably from your young point of view where you werent so aware and into politics.
Capitalism has never dreamt of a utopia, unless you count ancaps, objectivists, Randians and Nozick. It's a system for commerce and unlike marxism it's not a messianic religion.
>butterfly
>young
She's in her 30s.
It's pretty young, in the grand scheme of things :3
It was supposed to mean the time when she was younger.
I honestly dont know wtf her age is.
shes in her 40's according to her
Why do leftists love him so much ?
Why is what theyre saying inherently bad? Are we not supposed to question any womens legitimacy?
>according to her
user, according to her, she has three girlfriends. :3
I think we are working with what we KNOW here, as opposed to what she says.
I'm pretty sure that's about average for lesbians...
Not ones who aren't doing anything because of me :3
She's simply trying to get a rise out of me. Nothing more, nothing less.
The left isn't one person or one belief, he was very controversial in the left for saying we should forget about identity politics and go back to focusing on class
Could you imagine being the person that made this comic and you think men actually talk like this?
user, I'm no psychiatrist, but it really can't be good for you to get obsessed with a middle aged gay woman you've never met
Don't fall to judging people based on identity politics
I was just skimming an article he wrote.
>Then there was Russell Brand. I’ve long been an admirer of Brand
>she has three girlfriends
wtf is that for real?
It all makes sense now why she is such a big whiney cunt agaisnt marriage and monogamy and wants le big family, orgy-progy, partner-swapping lifestyle.
Idpol is the grave leftists will die on thanks to millenials. No amount of MUH TRUE leftists will change it you are an even bigger minority than altright tards at this point. Give up
Does anyone have that screencap of her saying I wasn't letting her do anything? She'll admit she's being abstinent because of me if you press her on it...
user, believe it or not...
Wait till you hear this...
People.... lie on the internet...:3
>it's really not as bad as you say it is
I can post like 20 examples from this board right now of misogyny and what knot. Probably from self described leftists as well
When most of its people were happy.
Soc-dem holding pattern of capitalism that fed off of other communities, but they were generally happy.
As nice and prosperous as capitalism can make a place. Plenty of leftists saw through it of course.
Now imagine a world without capitalism and debt token exchange.
No, i want you to shrivel up. The pics are of me in my 30s. I aged since then. Stop calling me a liar.
Three friends. Not really significant others, sad to say
Stop making it sound like it isn't butterfly. :3 You wanted drama, you got it.
First off, you DID call them your girlfriends in a rather salacious way if I recall. Secondly, you are lying. You are lying because there is no way you are in your late 30s in those pictures and they weren't even posted half a decade ago.
I posit this: you are lying by around a decade. I think you're in your late 30s. Yes, it matters.
>Three friends. Not really significant others, sad to say
Three friends in the mean that you do casual hookups like with "benefits"? Or just three friends really?
If the latter, its really sad to hear from you that you only have 3 real friends tho. Didnt you make any friends in university or school?
Stop being a 22 year old pervert please, user.
:3 If she doesn't respond it's because I hit the nose on the head. God, it'd be nice if you're, say, 35. Perfect even
Capitalism just aims to make profit at the expense of people. It's not a good system if you put humanity first
if you think a woman would even lie about being older than she actually is you don't socialize with women. also, I hear straight women call their friends girlfriends literally all the time. are you one of those incels I hear so much about?
The former, I have plenty of friends.
Back to topic though, please.
Not since I hit the nail on the head, you haven't. You don't do things with people anymore do you? :3
What's even going on here?
We are in the process of exposing why the anonymous problem is an issue: there are many who simply just randomly stop by the board or something.
I'm helping illustrate this concept: that although something has been going on between me and butterfly for ages, there are still people constantly asking what is going on. It's because of the effectiveness of my 'strategy' for this 'game'.
Anyway, she's a 30 something lesbian who is suddenly abstaining from all sexual intercourse due to my demands :3. Not even joking.
So..autism?
Yes user, that's it.
Some snarky one-liner which shows an unbelievably low level of understanding yet still tries to deprecate others for putting any thought into this medium whatsoever.
Exactly. :3
Please note, all she had to do was respond to this post. She knows better. She knows that she is lying and she knows that she wants to at least be a little honest. She was created this way. It's why she spends all day under the avatar of a butterfly she changes to fit her mood. She is born to be cute...
She's embarrassed a little about being a 30-something attractive woman posting on Yea Forums, but don't worry. You have nothing to be worried about, this medium is optimal. The reputation and the mentality of the users is not. :3
uwu
:3
XD
Why don't we just call "left-wing idpol" "Communism with American Characteristics" instead?
>Communism with American Characteristics
fuckin kek
It literally was. Classical liberalism wasn’t like neoclassical/ancap but they had/have the same faith in capitalism
Liberalism was supposed to bring a sort of utopian world, but it just unleashed rule by the greedy.
Essentially
I still think he’s trolling for kicks, it what is the difference really?
>Its a 40s anarchist lesbo woman posting on Yea Forums that has 3 lesbo partners and shitposts about politics and thinks she knows whats best for the plague of lonely and bitter incels that wander around.
Lmao, i think i will never take your shit serious again knowing where this is comming from.
Hows the menopause coming up?
You always accuse other people of trolling though because YOU are the one trolling.
You mistook your birthdate by 3 years? fucking shut up.
Butterfly listen. I think you're cute. I think you're adorable. I think you're within a decade of my age. I think you know my age because you pay attention to what I say also.
Stop this madness. Just admit I might be on to something. :3
She mistook her birthdate by THREE years?
Stop being a depressing retard, not ALL of what she is saying is true
It's not her birthdate, that's why.
Im not menopausal.
Anytime I troll people get so butt blasted
>oh boy it's a Mark Fisher thread
>it's devolved into the weird butterfly stalker having another episode
See this is what I'm talking about.
You just admitted IN THIS POST, that you're trolling.
But next time you come by they'll all insist you're in your 40s lmfao. Here it is everyone! Pay attention to what she types! FFS STOP BEING DEPRESSING.
You see it in their mentalities too, they are always like looking for something else to be depressed about. They are a bunch of depressing losers who need to cheer up already :3
fuck you butterfly faggots
please user, get some help
Can someone tell me/us about his thoughts on capitalist realism, lack of novelty in aesthetics, and why modern life causes depression
SEE WHAT I MEAN BUTTERFLY?
And she's probably laughing her ass off at how true this is too. Fuck you all :3
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT A WOMAN IN HER 30s IS POSTING ON THIS SITE WHEN SHE BASICALLY JUST ADMITTED THAT SHES IN HER 30S ON THE FUCKING BOARD AND YOU STILL WONT BELIEVE.
WOW I GUESS PEOPLE MIGHT LIE ON THE INTERNET WHAT A SURPRISE AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
>Stop being a depressing retard
Im not even a depressing incel or a /pol/tard, but i think its kinda funny how a person of such diferent background is telling those incels whats best for them and advocating for her ideology.
>Anytime I troll people get so butt blasted
People already think your ideas are most of time kind of retarded and purely ideological, specially your lack of knowing history. You just have to take it up a notch and no one notices that you are trolling since its so close to those ideas aswell.
But that's the problem right? You just assume everyone on the site is a fucking incel? Don't you see how this behavior is recursive? :3
I'm not an incel, I'm a volcel, and so is Butterfly now, starting a few weeks ago.
>You just assume everyone on the site is a fucking incel? Don't you see how this behavior is recursive?
No since those people had claimed to be lonely n stuff in the first place.
Then they should stop that too man, what kind of good does that behavior do you anyway!?
wawaweewa!
>this is too much
He couldn't move beyond transcendental miserablism and his fellow leftoids went all retarded and shit in 2015. I think he was a good soul with valuable intuitions, but his radical spinozism 'everything is already dead' is a suicidal's ultimate cope.
I'll hazard a guess and say he was afraid Shanghai Kurtz might be right, but that's just baseless speculation.
this thread is already over. the best thing you could do for the board is drop your trip (why the fuck does anyone need a trip anyways?)
>everything I don't like is chapo
waste of digits
Because being anonymous is a waste of fucking time. It doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't stand for anything. It is void of all meaning and of any depth
:3
What? People claiming to be lonely or bitter?
Hows stopping that supposed to be good for them?
If anything her "advice" is the last thing they should be looking at desu senpai.
Pointlessly complaining about things does not resolve any problems in life :3
As a white male leftist I can confirm the movement has plenty of sperg douchebags who do talk like that
Class should come first, though, seriously.
>conversation turns
>thread is dead
Threads should all just timeout at twelve posts before people divert the topic I guess.
I would rather go without a trip. Guess what that would bring
a morsel of peace. people only pretended to be you when you were namefagging, I don't mean take the trip off and leave the name, I mean post anonymously
>Threads should all just timeout at twelve posts before people divert the topic I guess.
No, its you and your horde of faggots that derail every thread. Stop making excuses. Im replying to you now since the thread is literally fucked at this point.
>Tripcodes are good and 4channel should stop having anons
>Ops threads are getting shittier now, but they should have a 12 reply limit.
I am anonymous.
A nameless board gets you shitposting more often than not. All these years of experimenting and you people are blind to this fact.
Thanks. I guess this is better than conversing with a few dozen people that don’t know or care about the OP topic
no you are psuedo-anonymous, you operate under a false name. if you don't like nameless boards go to fucking reddit
Still so blind.
If you don’t like Yea Forums go to your pure anonymous board
Ah, the daily thread with some potential where I wanted to do a write-up, but decided to the contrary after seeing it devolve into a butterfly circlejerk.
Did you Read the Bible ?
I've read the Bible. You don't want to be like some kind of legion-type demon entity, correct?
:3
Do a write up
The irony is that she implies that its anonymous posting that makes shitposts while she and her infamy derail everything.
Yep, Last Jedi was total shit that didn't even understand the originals.
capitalist realiam is when people think this is just the way things are capitalism is the natural condition and we cant do anything about it so stop ttying to change it and hussle like everyone else. basically it is easier for people to think of a scenario to the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.
>someone is recognizable ITT therefore I shall not share my thoughts. See? It IS their fault
>plainly. We are powerless to be at ease with ourselves and share information when things are in the namefield
Oh yeah. I see that everyday
“Normies” indeed
He was pretty much right with the main thrust of capitalist realism - the slowdown or continued re-retrofication of our popular conceptions of the future, as well as the idea that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people today to even consider a system/future outside of capitalism as remotely viable. Additionally, the insights in that book regarding the continued expansion of neoliberal bureaucracy, what he calls market Stalinization, is really spot on (if you work in healthcare/gov't you come to know this all too well).
Exiting the Vampires' Castle was so accurate that it basically got him killed as a result of the excommunication and vitriol he received from idpollers on the 'left'. He was 100% correct when he said-
>But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.
So much of what is called the left, at least in the US/UK, is just this - petite-bourgeois liberals basically shitposting about womens/trans/race politics, not about creating an actual shift in the structure of western civilization which creates these issues in the first place (because changing the fundamental structure of our societies is very difficult and painful, but calling people racist on twitter is easy and earns you social cred. with your echochamber peer group). Pointing out this fact ultimately proved fatal for Mark, albeit in a roundabout way.
It is unfortunate that we'll never see a completed Acid Communism. Fisher was great at diagnosing issues with capitalism/modernity, but one of the main criticisms of him that I've seen is that he suggested very little in how to actually achieve the changes he wanted so desperately. From what I understand, Acid Communism was intended to serve that vision.
What is Acid Communism?
It's an abstract interpretation of marx
It was the book he was working on before he died.
The intro for it is in the K-Punk book, but there's only like 10 pages.
Idpol types are fucking eerie to argue with or hear talk, it literally all sounds like its from a script
The Left is always a liberal pressure group in the West, this is simply How Things Are.
karl marxism might have been dead for 200 years but on the 16th of april 2019 he has officially been BURIED
Why?
this is basically pasta at this point
your retardation never ceases to amaze me butters.
In the cases of gangster rap and Ellroy, capitalist realism takes the form of a kind of super-identification with capital at its most pitilessly predatory, but this need not be the case. In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti capitalism.
After all, and as Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it. Žižek’s counsel here remains invaluable. ‘If the concept of ideology is the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge’, he argues, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.
Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
Corporate anti-capitalism wouldn’t matter if it could be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism.
Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative politicaleconomic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met.
Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events like 2005’s Live 8, with their exorbitant demands that politicians legislate away poverty.
You’re saying because he posted that Stirner meme?
I was wondering if it had something to do with the news.
Live 8 was a strange kind of protest; a protest that everyone could agree with: who is it who actually wants poverty? And it is not that Live 8 was a ‘degraded’ form of protest. On the contrary, it was in Live 8 that the logic of the protest was revealed in its purest form. The protest impulse of the 60s posited a malevolent Father, the harbinger of a reality principle that (supposedly) cruelly and arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to total enjoyment. This Father has unlimited access to resources, but he selfishly – and senselessly - hoards them. Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father; and one of the successes of the current global elite has been their avoidance of identification with the figure of the hoarding Father, even though the ‘reality’ they impose on the young is substantially harsher than the conditions they protested against in the 60s. Indeed, it was of course the global elite itself – in the form of entertainers such as Richard Curtis and Bono – which organized the Live 8 event.
To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.
The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate.Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombiemaker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.
The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary.
‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism – on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.