Firstly and foremostly, it should be borne in mind, howbeit that's up
to you, that many of the folks around here, ie, this list, do not like
capitalism very much. Some, indeed, hate it with that sort of passion called
*cognitive*. Others, because they, personally, don't have any money. Marx,
for example, spent his life deadbroke, sponged off his mother as I do, and
also from his hereditary-noblewoman wife (something made possible by his
perspicacious if unappreciated daddy, who converted the lot of the *mishpokhe*
to Lutheranism, instantly, in those pre-Emancipation days, giving the family
higher Marx). Yet that's tangential, in that it was Marx' *cognitive* passion
which, first, drove him to the analysis of the significance of the measurement
and (consequent) social-control function of time in capitalism; and second,
insofar as this was True, was reluctant to let Them do it to him. As we'd put
it, Karl Marx never held an honest job in his entire life. Only once, as his
family starved, did he even apply. The position was railroad clerk. No exp
ncsry. Gd hndwrtng a must. Marx' illegibility of scrawl, for the occasion so
much worse than usual, got him a don't-call-us-we'll-call-you, which should've
suggested to Marx the invention of the telephone to get called on; alas didn't.
For many whose memories go back to 1989, the year the apparent exit-door
from capitalism, unsafe as it was, got bricked over, the word System meant
and still means, in effect, a conspiracy run by Them. The trouble with this,
as with most others, conspiracy theory is not its total falsity, but its
partaking of the simplistic. For instance, there are few plots; there are
however regularly and Elsewise scheduled Meetings which, in archaic language,
are "functionally interchangeable," with plots: in Modern English, a
distinction without a difference.
World-System theory is more sophisticated. The Capitalist World System is
the only interrealted institutionalized market-exchange organization in the
world, and its ramifications extend through all known and a couple of unknown
sovereign states, core, semiperiphery, periphery. Unknown sovereign states are
those which became sovereign after I ceased counting at #175. Arrighi's elegant
analysis of the dialectical relation between "territorialism" and "entrepreneu-
rialism" - though I like my own, cruder, analysis better - expresses quite
plainly the fact that neither the states nor the businesses *alone* gives you
the capitalist system tout court. What's more, you overthrow capitalism in
one state, the world market seeps under your door like noxious toxic gaseous
fumes, sucking you into dependence on it, and infesting you till it bursts
out like something killed by Signourey Weaver in the last reel.
It follows from this that, in World-System theory, socialism, which all
of us who can't stand capitalism desire, can only be installed, that's right,
we have the software, you run INSTALL, by simultaneous takeovers by the World
Party, or "mondialization," in the coinage of W. Warren Wagar, of all
sovereign states at once. The anticipated date for this is 2044, howbeit two
hotheads, the noble Terrence McKenna, who likes Dec 2011, and the egregious
Robert Anton Wilson, the vestiges of whose tattered reputation I am at this
very moment shredding myself, who plumps for a few months later, well into
2012, dissent (but who cares).
There is no instance of an "anti-systemic" movement which has, on a contin-
uing basis, from its inception to the present day, taught, advocated, and
practiced the struggle against capitalism on a global scale; has resisted
resolutely and without equivocation the blandishments of capitalism in both
its globalist-territorialist and globalist-entrepreneurialist aspects, and
that categorically.
No. That's wrong. The exception is, The Red Balloon Collective, founded
1967, State University of New York at Stony Brook. World headquarters is
the residence of Mitchel (actually, his mother, Rose) Cohen, 2637 Cropsey Av,
Apt #7H, Brooklyn NY, forgot zipcode, tel (718) 449-0037. The "psychedelic
Bolshevism" stuff has been recycled with advancing, uh, maturity. Oh, I'm
not at all sure of the third digit of that building address, either. Exact
precision by tomorrow.
Daniel A. Foss