Today what drives these struggles is not just rivalry for power but insecurity. Surplus elites are waging a war for economic survival in which hyper-liberal values are commodified in the labour market. Woke is a career as much as a cult.
The New Leviathans
I’ve been saying for years on this blog that wokeness is a tool in job wars. But job wars sound nasty, so people find a moral purpose in their wokeness.
I thought this was a Peter Turchin theory?
Yes, made-up woke jobs are totally worthless and do not contribute anything of value to society, but Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overpopulation goes beyond even that. It seems most of the jobs we do are not that much more valuable. There is a select few key people that do the most significant work, but most office jobs are not that.
Maybe that’s why there is a shortage of nurses, teachers, trades people, etc. Those jobs have incredible value to society, but are tough jobs. AI automation is going to put this in overdrive.
Yes! He quotes Turchin and Pareto, which is a big plus in my book.
My job is very valuable. Today, students were almost physically restraining me at the end of class because they wanted to keep talking. No AI can do it.
I know you didn’t ask but I’ve had a tough day and feel the need to brag a little.
Wake me up if Gray has something interesting to say about the “labour theory of value” with regard to the inherent contradictions between amortised finance capital and labour capital.
Oversaturation of elite competition winds up as just another form of Keynesian deficit spending in which these elites are desperately trying to spend their way back into relevance and not merely to survive.
“Woke rhetoric” is a form of currency, after all, but so will be what comes after it to replace it during the present bubble.
There’s a Cautionary Tale here: surplus value capitalism choked on itself back in the 1970s, and if these oversupplied elites don’t get it right this time, they might just choke themselves out of existence.
It’s not Pareto and Turchin that are interesting, that’s all too common with this kind of thing, and it’s been overdone.
So wake me up if Gray has something to say about this or perhaps even something on the Marxist, Fordist, and neoliberal connections of Christian Marazzi.
He’s the one to pay attention to when it comes to the “process of financialisation”, or in Adam Curtis’s parlance the concept of “hypernormalisation”.
You’ll hate the Deleuze, you’ll distrust the Marxism, and you’ll feel unease at the echoes of Ricardianism.
But perhaps you’ll also see where the ancaps are, with their distrust of the “labour theory of value”, seeking an exit from it not because they want to define a new and more durable value capture in its place, but instead because they’re looking for an accountability of value that survives bubbles.
Until then, it’s bubbles everyone wants, and it’s bubbles everyone gets.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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