A New Working Class / Oligarch Coalition of Collapse

MAGA has achieved the liberal dream of frictionless capitalism. It turns out the best way to discipline labor is to incorporate it, or, as the Situationists described it, recuperate it. The technique starts with atomizing, alienating and individualizing the worker, stressing the competition between Her and Her Fellow Workers. Dog eat dog, as Joni Mitchel sang it. Then you add some stimulus/ reward - just enough treats so the worker won't take any risks -like a long line of credit,( personal debt is at a record high) a house in the suburbs, a nice vehicle or two. For their part, the oligarchs need to do some serious grooming. They polish up the image, projecting htemnselves as humanist disrupters, radicals, revolutionaries. In Gramsci’s words, this trade-off comes from “collusion in the success of a strategy of passive revolution, which responds to pressures from below by incorporating popular demands. Such a strategy can succeed in improving the lives of enough of the population to legitimate hegemonic claims as long as economic conditions permit”. In other words, as I have long argued, elites/"ruling classes/ the "capitalist class" will grudgingly incorporate social democratic reforms into their agenda when it serves their purpose of legitimization. It can be as simple as the price of gas, or eggs. This supports the "metanarrative" that markets and the profit system are the only way to organize society. They give a little then take a lot. Which is all well and good until the oligarchs start believing their own hype and they too are subsumed in the Spectacle. As Joao Camargo puts it: "The elites themselves, instead of just using these vast set of ideas to dominate the other classes, actually came to be dominated by them. They came to believe the mystical hype about their role in the world and in society, about capitalism as the only way to organize human societies, about historical miracles and about the end of history. They are still doing so despite their tiny historical existence and despite the fact that some of their own institutions recognize that they are jeopardizing the subsistence of global civilization." The rulers themselves are mired in "a compulsory need derived from their very own metanarrative in which they are stuck. They can’t help themselves, it is their core social and cultural programming. They will never be able to solve the crisis, but only to deepen it. We need to overthrow them or their death pulse will lead us all into collapse."