mind reader

As I grow increasingly concerned about the level of influence Zucc has with his near monopoly on social media, I concomitantly grow concerned about the atomisation of workers and mystification of the labour process. Today, I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about social bonds, and the “cohesion” of society. In particular, I think we need to spend some time truly attending to how the common sense has shifted to a worship of individual billionaires, giving way to a rise of front-seat oligarchs directly in control of abstracting worker connection to production, and to direct control of the machinery of government [1]. Naturally, I’m also concerned with how this will play out in Australia given the commencement of Albanese’s campaigning, but let’s take it one step at a time [2]. The atomisation of workers in contemporary times is extreme. Capitalism benefits when solidarity is eroded, and it has played the long game to...

Let’s take a voyage together through three understandings of class. This concept is becoming increasingly interesting to me, particularly in relationship to transformative movements. Across history a great many Marxists, and others who on occasion appropriated from Marx and Marxists (looking at you Bourdieu), have debated class as a (social/political/economic/determining) construct. The brackets, here, are worth some discussion but let’s first think about defining some key terms that will be useful for us as we progress through this discussion. At the source class can be understood in terms of a person’s relative relationship to the means of production. The means of production ranges from: (1) the physical spaces where work happens (factories, farms, offices), (2) the tools and machinery used in production (from hammers to industrial equipment), (3) the raw materials that are used to make things (iron ore, cotton, oil —...