Category: Reich

Alienation, Anarchism, History, Human Rights, Identity, Karl Marx, neoliberalism, Philosophy, Piketty, political philosophy, Reich, social media, social networks, Wittgenstein

Alien Technology
Things are pretty strange, it’s got to be said. But are they actually alien? (image credit Kim Hunter)

The question of technology and our relationship to it is one that has preoccupied me for some time now. It is separate from us as a concept – technology is not, so to speak, human – and yet it is deeply intimate in so many ways, so much as to make us think that our existence is dependent on it, as is our identity; Winner’s formulation of technology as a Wittgensteinian form of life (as I wrote about in my recent thesis) appears to me to be an appropriate joining of the human being and our technology, like Kevin Kelly’s ‘technium’, a kind of skin. But just as it becomes more deeply insinuated into our lives, there is something discomfiting about it, something unnatural, something foreign. Something alien, perhaps.

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Capital, Democracy, law, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, Piketty, Reich

Capitalism, Meritoctatic Democracy, and Legitimacy

 

Piketty (top) and Reich have both taken on the subject of Inequality
Piketty (top) and Reich have both taken on the subject of Inequality

Piketty on Capital and Reich on Inequality are both essentially saying the same thing, that inequality is structurally bad, and growing. (We can revisit posts on social mobility and the inevitability of capitalist collapse to understand some of the ways in which this manifests itself.)  In essence, Piketty – and Reich – argue that capital will continue to accrue to fewer and fewer people.  There is a possible alternative, extended, dystopian view that suggests that capital – through the corporation – actually transcends human ownership entirely and become a virtualized entity in and of itself, a creature of law, that exists to perpetuate itself and grow.  Therefore, in essence, capital exists to extract wealth from people, and rather than realising an objective of ‘raising all boats’, it actually pushes all boats into the water to the point of sinking, though not quite. For to sink those boats would be to undermine the source of wealth itself, and the essence of capital growth, which capital needs to survive.

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