Is Late-Stage Capitalism a Thing? (Part Two)

https://jacksonhamiltonivs.org/2022/09/18/is-late-stage-capitalism-a-thing-part-one/

The great shift between Regionalist-Institutional Liberalism and Rawlsian-Consumerist Liberalism was largely a revolution without revolutionaries. It was organic, more than anything else. To be fair, social movements played a major role but those movements were not trying to establish the system that ended up happening. Rawls did not invent Rawlsianism as much as he described the philosophy that was emerging. As much as the social movements played a role, things like suburbia and the car-centric landscape were as, if not more, important. I equate Robert Moses with John Rawls in who ascribe blame to in part one of this piece.

The collapse of the community institutions owing to the car was much more the cause of the shift than the rights movements after the Second World War. In part one, I describe the pervasive code of Omertá communities had to cover asses of deviancies. That most gay people could be gay as an open secret in the tight-knit communities of yore. People will cover the asses of their neighbors and kin only if they have a community bond. Sodomy laws are more likely to be enforced by communities where people don’t know each other than ones where they do know each other thus creating the need for a gay rights movement.

It is the same reason, in part, there must be a mental health movement. Because, as Foucault said, eccentrics were beloved and tolerated in the old world. Communities, generally, would tend to cover the asses and take care of their abnormal members. Once everything got more formal and institutional, then the people who were informal weirdos were formal mental cases and, like the gay people who went from living as open secrets to being persecuted by law enforcement, those with mental health conditions had to spend decades fighting for things they largely had informally earlier in their communities now within the context of the impersonal and bureaucratic statist system.

In the ultimate, I am an anarchist. In proximate, I am a democratic socialist. For the most part, the Rule of Moré worked better than the Rule of Law does. Communities are better at using social pressure to regulate behavior than the state is with its steel and concrete. Marx believed in the abolition of the state after a final revolution much like myself but I believe that revolution is, largely, one of urban design and creating soft and scientific institutions to replace the state. Unlike other anarchists from the left, I am not a communist for a gift economy but am a micro-capitalist, if you will. Believing in the perpetual existence of farmers’ markets and the shops of master craftsman, the micro-commerce of bughers and guilds. As a macro economic system, I beleving in the abolition of capitalism, however. And, I still believe in a ceremonial state in the ultimate. I am a monarchist and believe in a full aristocracy from dukes on down. I may be as anarchist as Emma Goldman, I still believe in having a fake state just for fun. I don’t believing in bringing the old world back but a Hegelian synthesis of late 20th century liberalism and Jane Jacobs-style communitarianism.

As far as the consumerist part of the system. That is, as mentioned in the part one, defined as a world where people are constantly being marketed to and where percived difference between goods more than geographical proximity the dominant factor in why one buys something. The cliché “If it bleeds it leads”is the theme of this. Not just in the explcit meaning of violence but to describe the long tradition of clickbait. The media society and the bulk of people’s exposures were to get them to buy things. The meritocracy become a democracy and that democracy favored things ever more base, tasty, and coarse as the Overton Window was pushed in the direction of metaphorical (and literal) horniness to elicit hastier consumerism for greater profit.

In an earlier article I said “The average politician not knowing any Plato probably happened around 1970”. I also said in that article “in order to vote for Marjorie Taylor-Greene one must be at a level of stupidity our evolutionary lineage graduted from around the time of Lucy. And, I would gander that 95% of people who know who Lucy is would never vote for Marjorie Taylor-Greene.” Consumerism pushing the Overton Window in the direction of hornier and therefore hastier purchasing of things made people stupider and eventually so stupid they became fascists. Pedophiles sell and capitalism sold the people the pedophiles they wanted and eventually the people wanted their reality to be as interesting as their fiction so they invented a reality as interesting as their fiction and attempted to stage a coup on that basis. And as much as the average consumer wants knife-weilding rapists to be their greatest danger because it is exciting and suspenseful, their greatest danger is global warming and while it is hot, it is not sexy and the consumers are not afraid nor do they care, in the least.