My new boss invited me to go to lunch. Lunch turned out to be an awards luncheon for the downtown partnership where our group had a table. Comrades I have never seen so many faces of capital in my life. 1,000 suits and pantsuits that see the entire landscape around them as a vast frontier that they can exploit. 1,000 suits and pantsuits chowing down on salmon and applauding each other for finding the most creative and profitable ways for real estate capital to devour every untouched pocket of urban land in my city and be securitized and revitalized and gentrified to oblivion.
I don’t know how we are going to resist this absolute monolith going forward but my feeling after today is pretty bleak.
⚠️:yikes::thurston::nuke:⚠️ WARNING ⚠️:yikes::thurston::nuke:⚠️ SEMI-EFFORTPOST AHEAD ⚠️:yikes::thurston::nuke:⚠️
No group of capitalists have ever fucked around when it comes to extracting maximum value, but real estate capital seems more rabid than most especially in recent times. I guess this is one continued symptom of the falling rate of profit on actual production and the corresponding rise of finance capital. Making and selling products and services to us that we can have full personal ownership of is simply no longer profitable enough; instead, absolutely everything must be financialized, rented and leased rather than owned outright, for the sake of drawing continuous profit. The obvious big initial target of this transformation is housing (as parasitic rent seeking has of course always been a core tenant of capitalist accumulation) but it’s clearly expanding into other areas of life too. Oddly enough this can be thought of in a way as a process of “de-commodification” (in the sense that commodities can no longer be directly purchased, but must be acquired indirectly via various convoluted financial instruments) while also at the same time as expanded commodification (in that the process is seeking innovative ways to capitalize on and commidify our lives directly, to make human beings and their lives the product itself).
Strap in folks, the end of history is only going to get more wild from here on out. I believe a wise man once said “History 1 is dying and History 2 struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters”
Unrelated but I first read that quote years ago and for the longest time I didn’t know Gramsci said it. I thought it was from Dark Souls or something 💀
