Is Goldman Sachs Speeding Up the Future? Part Three

Dear Raoul,

You fool, you’ve taken up exactly the point of debate I wanted to wage.

Friedman, Harvey, and Arrighi (or what I've read of them) share a conviction that is a a common fallacy: proactive revolution, that is to say, revolution out of step with the dialectic. If you want to get drunk on Marxism, read Marx, who preaches a vast wasteland of starvation and depravity around which the revolution must coalesce. That is to say, in contemporary terms, high food prices leading to starvation, global warming making the planet uninhabitable, overaccumulation rendering all but the highest brackets of society uninhabitable.

All of which are, obviously, outcomes that we must not allow to come to pass. But the "speed up the future" argument, as I had come to understand it, is a provisionally nihilistic exercise in Realpolitik. As such, it stands to reason that the dialectical forces that will bring revolution in the context of a vacuum of proactive progressivism will come more quickly, thus dulling the potential decades of starvation and depravity. You will recall that food prices were the single most tangible material deficit to inspire Tunisia and Egypt. Ideologies of liberation were powerful enough only to provide a reactive rallying cry. There was a historical-material trigger, suggesting that perhaps the Historical Dialectic cannot subsist on ideology alone, no matter how pressingly progressive that ideology may be.

There is a third possibility here, which would be to speed up the future by raising awareness of exploitation and depravity in the ruling classes among the wretched of the earth, thus triggering the reactive progressive move through a synthesis of ideology and empirical observation. This would seem to be Harvey's angle, though I fear he preaches only to a choir for whom political action is fetishized but not properly understood--a choir who, given the opportunity to take up arms for the cause, would prefer to keep reading, assuming their comrades were safe and their meals still adequate.

If I can sum this all up in one proclamation, it is this: we need a radical leftist Realpolitik.Without it I fear we are condemned to bitching, moaning, and smoking cigarettes inside our intricately constructed ideological cocoons, drunk on the feeling of raw and utter truth and superiority we draw from a vital and devastating knowledge on which we know not how to act. We too need the dialectic.

Never doubt my leftism again, you motherfucker. I would gladly piss in Friedman's mouth and nuke the Aspen Institute.

- Francis Fukuyama

Is Goldman Sachs Speeding Up the Future? Part 2

Dear Francis,

High food prices speed up the future in that they create hardship among the wretched of the earth, leading to revolt. But that revolt is by no means necessarily going to be toward an egalitarian, rather than merely populist, end—thus potentially setting the future back. Witness: mass hunger and the election of Sweet Mickey in Haiti. Where speculation-inflated prices least speed-up the future is in America and Europe, because agricultural subsidies there insulate them from the global market.The mild rise in food prices in the West is nothing compared to the devastation unleashed elsewhere. Indeed, the more global prices rise, the better subsidies appear politically to self-interested voters ("Look at how food prices are rising around the world! What will happen to us if we don't continue to subsidize our foods?!"), thus worsening the problem and retarding change in the heart of Capital. You're being inattentive to the geographically uneven nature of capitalist development and have been seduced by a vision of smooth, one-dimensional globalization. Yes, speculation-inflated food prices do speed up the future, but so did Stalinism--to the future of extinction. QED You are a dumb bitch and you need to stop reading Thomas Friedman and start reading Michael Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi.

I know I'm going to hell--all my friends are going to be there!

Raoul Castro

Is Goldman Sachs Speeding Up the Future? Part 1

Dear Raul,

Is Goldman Sachs speeding up the future? This article seems to think so, though it's author seems to have missed the fact.

Discussion item for a future series of beers at Lowlands:
How, and under what circumstances, can market-driven speculation be an asset to the progressive cause?

Provisional Answer A (the "Neo-liberal-leftist" answer): When asset commodity prices are kept artificially low by government intervention, thus slowing down the future, market speculation can correct for the downward price manipulation.

Provisional Answer B (the "Trotskyite" answer): Fuck you and your fucking category mistake, you motherfucker.

Provisional Answer C (the "social enterprise as liberation theology" answer): Under most circumstances, and the only reason you think it can't is because your disdain for synergies between capitalism and progressivism has condemned you to a life of bitter, self-righteous irrelevance. If The Future is a 180mph Ferrari that just crossed the Swiss border, you are an Italian cop with no jurisdiction.

Provisional Answer D: Only in the case of consumables.

Yours Truly,
Francis Fukuyama

P.S. Oh yeah, here’s the link, you motherfucker.