The Revolution of the Center
Be very careful who tells you this is a world where things change. From time to time there will be a revolution in social relations that are actually an adjustment - but not revolution - of material relations. Consider segregation. Laws that formally delimited race-based zoning over time became barriers to capital expansion.* Desegregating allowed capital poles to continue expanding with black neighborhoods being new zones for capital inflow/outflow.
The symbol crafted from this turn in history has a couple of faces, one of those being a clear demarcation between a blemished past and a present resplendent with justice. More attractive, certainly, than the reality of racialized inequity remaining a fixture of American life even amidst general falling fortunes of all citizenry.
The symbol loses its luster (authority as spectacular co-narrator) with this latter development. How can desegregation stand for a more just union, if there is less justice all around - widespread immiseration, mounting evidence of failed state and empire? If there is in fact, less evidence of the future than ever before?
You would need corroborating symbols also attesting to the future’s health under American stewardship. And (as mentioned above) these symbols would also run cover for capital’s drive to expand and reproduce, ie the re-shuffling of material relations.
This musing began when I considered the trend of modern fashion over the decades encompassing my life. In decades past clothing and accessories represented participations in public life that precluded other ways of participating. They were declarations of cultural identity informing others how and with whom this person oriented themselves toward society. In the 80s and 90s for example, you didn’t find many teachers with full tattoo sleeves or facial piercings. Not a lot of finance guys donning streetwear or embracing futurism.
Spectacular ad-barkers tell us this is how we remain individuals in the work place - you can be a cottage core mortgage broker, a gothic administrative assistant, an aggressively normie YouTuber, a body conscious PA - just express yourself! But to me this is a tacit recognition that all barriers that would preclude anyone’s full energies being plied in service as labor must be eroded. How could we keep someone from working in finance just because they have tattoos and piercings? Why stop a willing participant from becoming an adjust professor even if they dress like a 30 year old theatre kid? Before the imperatives of capital these can no longer serve as meaningful impediments and thusly, they do not.
Instead of asserting individuality they actually lay bare how all are reduced to mere workers irrespective of any superficial differences. A tacit acknowledgment that no mere cultural affect run through commodification can threaten political economy. The freedom of choice, and the ostensible extremes of those choices, are sold as revolutions but are - yet again - just the center revolutionizing itself, for itself.
*remember, Marx - helpfully explained by prof Harvey - describes capitalism as a system constantly in motion. Capital gains must be re-circulated into the market either from which it came or diversify into new markets that prove more lucrative (or less stagnant.)
