Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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February 06, 2017
refugees [1/7]
are from the future:
It is also the case that,
given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general
corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is
perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only
category in which one may see today -- at least until the process of
dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full
completion -- the forms and limits of a coming political community.
Agamben's "Beyond Human Rights" (1996)
Automation replaces men. This
of course is nothing new. What is new is that now, unlike most earlier periods,
the displaced men have nowhere to go. . . .
There is only a limited number
of these old workers whom capitalism can continue to employ in production at a
pace killing enough to be profitable. The rest are like the refugees or
displaced persons so familiar in recent world history. There is no way for
capitalism to employ them profitably, yet it can't just kill them off. It must
feed them rather than be fed by them. Growing in numbers all the time, these
displaced persons have to be maintained, becoming a tremendous drain on the
whole working population, and creating a growing antagonism between those who
have jobs and those who do not. . . . And it is this
antagonism, brought to a climax by automation, which will create one of the
deepest crises for capitalism in our age.
James Boggs, from chapter 2, "The Challenge of
Automation"
in The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro
Worker's Notebook
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