Sublime

Or, in the absence of effective counterpower, will we witness more reactionary changes that legitimate the daily violence of capital, or at least remove the most offensive aspects from plain sight?

Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

the increase in leisure due to the spread of automation makes the participation of the masses in cultural creativeness an element of social health and stability. Such a participation seems more feasible when we think of turning the masses into creative craftsmen rather than into artists and literati.

Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

socialism

In most of the world, the last thirty years has come to be known as the age of neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned nineteenth- century creed that held that free markets and human freedom in general were ultimately the same thing.

Habermas also adopts the Frankfurt School’s rather pessimistic analysis that monopoly capitalism and welfare-state liberalism in the United States led ultimately to a diminution of human freedom, and to the hollowing out of democratic politics, and did not provide a fruitful alternative to the fragile social order of Weimar Germany that capitulated

Capitalism approaches its exhaustion when human productivity is not just augmented by technology but replaced by it.