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.This vision of the communist future provides the unacknowledged basis for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s anticapitalist thought in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.Their diatribe against fixed identity and encomium to deterritorialization is an elaboration of the future proclaimed here by Marx and Engels.7.THE ENDS OF CAPITALISM1.Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 2010), 119.2.John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Utilitarianism and On Liberty (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 182.3.Just as utilitarian ethics is isomorphic with the capitalist structure, Kantian ethics is implicitly anticapitalist.In the second formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant rejects treating others as a “mere means” rather than as ends in themselves.For the capitalist, everything and everyone are means to the end of more productivity and more accumulation.4.The introduction of a newer and better model is not the only way that dissatisfaction subtends consumption.It also manifests itself in the declining price of the product.One waits to buy the product at the best price, but then the price inevitably drops after one has purchased the commodity.Though simply a structural effect of the capitalist system, the dynamic of the dropping price has the effect of bonding the subject to the process of consumption through the dissatisfaction that it creates.5.It is not difficult to imagine pushing workers to the extreme as an ethical duty.The capitalist does this on behalf of social productivity, which counts more than the discomfort of a few workers and may ultimately redeem this discomfort.One might even imagine a capitalist version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, which functioned as an apology for Stalinism on the basis of the future it would make possible.6.Modern Times echoes the critique of industry’s indifference to the worker formulated in René Clair’s À Nous la liberté (1931).It echoes the earlier film to such an extent that the producers responsible for À Nous la liberté sued Chaplin for plagiarism.It was only the intervention of Clair, out of affection for Chaplin and appreciation for his art, that brought the lawsuit to an end.7.Capitalists have historically resorted to extreme methods—Pinkerton detectives, legal machinations, and even open displays of violence—to put an end to strikes because they recognize implicitly that the strike represents a challenge to the ideal of productivity that guides the capitalist system.The strike is an existential threat to capitalism.8.Aristotle, Physics, trans.R.P.Hardi and R.K.Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed.Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:333.9.The connection between the idea of the good and the valuation of the final cause is decisive in Aristotle’s thought.If one begins with the belief that subjects pursue some good and that this is the motivating factor in all their actions, one necessarily arrives at a conception of the final cause.In every case, some specific good is the final cause on behalf of which subjects act.It is only by abandoning the idea of the good, which capitalism doesn’t do, that we can free ourselves definitively from thinking in terms of final causes.10.Modern science’s complete dismissal of the final cause reveals the incompatibility of science and traditional religious belief.The only way to sustain belief and remain a follower of modern science is to adopt Kierkegaard’s approach and accept that God manifests itself in the world only in counterintuitive ways and disruptions rather than in the form of final causes.That is, science leaves us with the choice of nonbelief or fideism.11.When Thomas Nagel tries to revive teleology in modern philosophy, he does so with the express intent of counteracting scientific materialism, even though his teleology attempts to dispense with the divine.For this creative but ultimately failed effort to revive the final cause, see Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).12.Insofar as we are capitalist subjects invested in productivity, Bruno Latour is correct to claim, as the title of his famous book says, We Have Never Been Modern.Of course, this is not Latour’s point at all.He wants instead to confound modernity’s clean divisions, such as that between subject and object, culture and nature.See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans.Catherine Porter (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1993).13.Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 489.14.The great filmic manifestation of this logic of the final cause in capitalism occurs in Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992).This film recounts the travails of four salespeople tasked with peddling worthless real estate as if it were an attractive investment [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]