RepulsiveNumber

The modes of behaviour appropriate to the most advanced state of technical development are not confined to the sectors in which they are actually required. So thinking submits to the social checks on its performance not merely where they are professionally imposed, but adapts to them its whole complexion. Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. Thought, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake. This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable. It behaves, even in its own eyes, as if it had constantl

I saw this post on r/redscarepod a bit earlier, and, after seeing something related to it in the comment section (you'll know what I'm talking about if you find it), it made me think back to Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Mirowski is an economic historian. He isn't a Marxist, just to note; he's closer to Veblen and Georgescu-Roegen (he dedicates one of his early books to both), although, like them, he's somewhat sympathetic to Marx.

This excerpt is from the section "Five Vignettes from the Life of John Galt" in the chapter "Everyday Neoliberalism." It's the first of his "vi

This is from Adam Tooze's Crashed, about the 2007-2008 financial crisis and its many after-effects. As for the topic, I'm sure many remember Ukraine's Euromaidan protests, the overthrow of Yanukovych, and Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland at least, but, of course, there's more to this story:

Securely embedded in both the EU and NATO, Hungary could afford to take the risk of balancing between East and West. A tiny candidate country for an EU Association Agreement, like Armenia, menaced by sanctions from Russia, was not in the same position. Faced with a clear threat from Moscow, in September 2013 Yerevan pulled back. It declared its intention of joining Putin’s Eurasian Customs Union, pro

The ambivalence of the retarded listeners has its most extreme expression in the fact that individuals, not yet fully reified, want to extricate themselves from the mechanism of music reification to which they have been handed over, but that their revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it. Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and ‘activate’ themselves, they succumb to pseudo-activity. Types rise up from the masses of the retarded who differentiate themselves by pseudo-activity and nevertheless make the regression more strikingly visible. There are, first, the enthusiasts who write fan letters to radio stations and orchestras