To be a socialist with any real clarity and honesty is to realize we are a defeated people. If commodification doesn’t get us, then climate disruption will. But one can’t linger in a melancholy embrace of defeat. One can’t hold on to what’s lost. Nor can one study past defeats simply to win the next time. There is no next time.
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Rather, I think we have to look to the past for those who took defeat to mean not just a lack of forces but a change of situation…One has to begin again to find the counter-hegemonic forces – if that is what they still are – who point the way within this rather strange new mode of production to its transformation. The affects and images that might work are imminent to it.
The Spectacle of Disintegration