"For most people under twenty in
Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer
even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.
Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into
the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming
life of the population is so taken for granted that it is It would be
dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian
state rife with political potentials, so it's as well to remember the role that
commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth
century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and
recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played
out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that
previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the
pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist
culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or
'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of
rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and
'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather,
they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within
the mainstream." -- Mark Fisher, Capitalism Realism
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51
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