Thanksgiving Is Ruined

The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

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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




 [Thus begins TiR's week-long trawl through its random links saved during the past several years.]