ABSTRACT
This is a pivotal moment for humanity, when the meanings, values and norms of everyday life are arching towards oblivion; when human beings are being distributed unevenly across the planet as little more than property relations; when a culture of slave labour is increasingly defining the workaday world; when capital’s structurally instantiated ability to supervise our labour, control our investments and purchase our labour power has reached new levels of opprobrium; when those who are habitually relegated to subordinate positions within capital’s structured hierarchies live in constant fear of joblessness and hunger; and when the masses of humanity are in peril of being crushed by the jackboots of the capitalist beast. The winds of critical consciousness, enervated by outrage at the profligate use of lies and deceptions by the capitalist class – a class that gorgonizes the public through a winner-take-all market fundamentalism and corporate-driven media spectacles – are stirring up the toxic debris from our austerity-gripped and broken humanity. Capitalism subordinates human beings to things, splitting human beings off from themselves. Correlative to a capitalist economy is an unconscious schema of rational calculation governing an erotically exuberant pursuit of knowledge which involves a possessive mastery over commodities, a squandering of human nature, abstracting from the wholeness of human beings and thus turning them into fragments of each other, creating the impersonal, quantifying, and utilitarian rationality and alienated consciousness of homo economicus.
