Yep. Buried in among the thirty pages of warbling is an apologia for his effective creationism about language. One suspects all the rest is just so much superstructure to excuse those few lines.

It's cool that you are largely in control of your own means (although I do wonder how many corporately controlled private platforms you have to rely on in order for your business to function). The point would be to scale this kind of thing up on a society - in fact world - wide level, while allowing people to flourish as they do. I don't doubt that all sorts of really cool stuff happens in the interstices of capitalism which give people all sorts of measures of control of their lives - but the point isn't to encourage more of these as a solution, because the imperatives of capital accumulation simply means that such enterprises are always swimming upstream. Your own life situation, whatever you feel about it, does not answer to the structural impoverishment of vast swathes of the Earth under capitalism. There are factory workers making your shoes who do not have the luxury of refusing to work for someone else. Even your standard of living is underwritten by others.

Unfortunately, communism doesn't give people any more control over their lives -- it just moves the power over you to a collective and shuffles around irrelevant pieces of paper called money. — Paul

Maybe, maybe not. But the capitalist realism which says that this is the best possible world has to remain blind to the suffering of hundreds of millions if not billions that can be directly attributable to capitalism.

I'll have to believe it when I see it. I don't trust Australian voters atm.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/01/18/morrison-legacy-unable-govern/

Also this one's a good one from Crikey - and something I think that's much overlooked in the focus on Morrison as a personality. Like, it strikes me that the government doesn't function as a government because it's only actual function is to help its friends (and stay in power so it can continue doing that) - that's it. It doesn't have actual procedures of information sharing and any apparatus' of decision making; or if it does, they have been left to degrade so calls are made on an ad hoc basis:

The capacity of government has diminished. Federal MPs are now drawn from a less diverse range of backgrounds than 30 years ago. Between 40% and 50% of MPs in the current federal Parliament, depending on the party, are former political staffers; the remainder consist largely of lawyers and bankers. The dominance of former staffers affects both the life and professional experience of MPs (and the ministers drawn from their ranks), and the role of political staff. The job is no longer about providing high quality political advice to ministers — it’s simply a stepping stone into Parliament for junior party workers.

The capacity of the public service (APS) has been, by common agreement, significantly diminished. Many of its function have been handed to political donors, either via outsourcing to large consulting firms, or through corporate executives directly writing government policy. And decision-making has been shifted increasingly to ministers’ offices and their staff, who operate with virtually no public accountability and thus have less incentive to ensure good process and sound reasoning. As a consequence, high-quality public servants have decamped or been sacked for being too independent. The current generation of public service executives is the weakest in living memory, with few strong performers. And the most experienced secretary — Home Affairs’ Mike Pezzullo — presides over the most disastrously incompetent department of all.

Like, the machinery itself has rotted. It's terrible.

So needs met is more important than power differentials (only a few owners own the means of production)? — schopenhauer1

These two things cannot be treated separately, except as an intellectual game. Capitalism is not just any power differential: it is an accumulative one which consistently requires growth without which it will fail. Its closest analogue is the malignant tumor: it will - and has - eroded all capacities to meet needs in search of that growth. This is why class war is one of its most symptomatic phenomena: its growth literally feeds on the lives of the working class, and the continued suppression of the latter is one of its conditions of growth. If you cannot eliminate the particular kind of power differential that capitalism is, any effort at ensuring 'needs met' will fail. At best, one will secure temporary reprieves, and even then, usually at displaced costs - as with the much celebrated 'Scandinavian model' which relies upon planet killing extractive industries, or else the inhumane exploitation of third-world labour to produce its products on the cheap in order to keep costs down and living standards high.

There's a reason why Marxism is a 'materialist' theory of the world: it looks at how the world actually functions, rather than playing abstract games about 'whether power differentials are more important the needs met'.

and a system that is not capitalist has never existed. — NOS4A2

Read a history book.

Fair enough!

Chomsky is arguing precisely that "bodies" and "the physical" does not really have a place in today's science. — Xtrix

Right, and from this he wants to draw the conclusion that there are some things in the world that will always escape us. Again, the latter stands as a perfectly reasonable position (that things will always escape us), but movement from A to C simply doesn't follow. If bodies and the physical don't have a place in today's science then they were always insignificant from the beginning other than as conceptual holding-patterns whose time is done. We owe them nothing and they speak to nothing.

That physical flux was the "least popular" explanation of causality around Leibniz's time is interesting, but I don't see the relevance here. — Xtrix

The point is that these ideas are throughly historical - they had a date of birth and they will have a date of death. The idea that these senses of causality are deeply held eternal metaphysical notions is just rear-guard parochialism. Even if infants develop certain ideas along a relatively stable developmental path, this might speak to nothing other than the fact, of, I dunno, the necessity of avoiding being eaten by lions. Which is, shall we say, a regional issue at best. Or else that infants hew to an incredibly diminished sense of intellection precisely on account of the fact that they are infants.

Oh come, hop in. I'm allowed to be mean to Chomsky he's not here.

Exactly. As if, out of some misplaced sense of fealty, we owe these dead concepts and dead people an explanation of exactly why their dead concepts are just so dead - on pain of impugning our ability to understand the world. But these things have literally nothing to do with each other, and if the dead are dead then may they stay in their graves without it for one moment being a commentary on our ability to understand the world.

Materialism is just like anything we more or less understand -- it includes thinking, reasoning, etc. So we can't leave it behind until someone explains what it is. — Chomsky

I mean what is this nonsense? We can't leave it behind because it "is just like anything we more or less understand"? What is that even supposed to mean? There's no transitivity here. This reads like someone who has invested too much time in studying theology and then insisting that it is now everyone else's problem that his interests are dead.

For example, as I mentioned, an infant, presented with presentations which indicate that there's some kind of causality -- like when the ball rolls this way a light turns red or something -- they will invent a mechanical cause, and they don't care if it's not visible, because infants understand that most of what goes on is invisible but there's got to be some mechanical cause otherwise there's no way to influence anything else. So that does seem to be the way our minds work, and that tells us something about the limits of our understanding; in fact a classical, crucial case -- and it can go on to other cases — Chomsky

And what, if we can't square our most advanced concepts of understading to the intellectual standards of literal infants this is supposed to be a comment on our understanding other than the fact that infants are literally the stupidest variety of human on the planet? This is so sloppy and the fact that anyone takes it seriously is insane.

If that is how you read that exchange then so be it.

Because it is the one relevant to the OP.

A social relation to the means of production: typically understood in terms of ownership, or control, or lack thereof.

Except it does not disprove any of my points or make a dent in them. — god must be atheist

You're welcome to do your own research.

The idea of contact action, which was the common sense basis for mechanical philosophy, is a human property. — Xtrix

But this is simply not true. Via Christian Kerslake's Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy:

The notion that now strikes us as the most sensible approach to causality, that finite substances are responsible for the changes they cause in other substances (then called the theory of physical influx), was at the time [that Leibniz was writing] the least popular. This was because the only way available to conceive the idea that a substance with a set of properties caused a change in another substance was through the explanation that there was a transmission of properties from the first to the second, which was held to be inconceivable. Therefore, the notions of occasionalism and pre-established harmony became popular among philosophers as elaborate avoidances of physical influx.

Like, our intuitions are useless. Forget them. They're trash and philosophically uninteresting other than a good historical and cultural tale. If you want to read how absolutely bonkers our (by which I only mean Western) schemes of causality really have been, check out Steven Nadler's editied collection on "Causation in Early Modern Philosophy" (you can find it on Libgen). And today, the most cutting-edge way we tend to think of causality today is in terms of counterfactuals (see Judea Pearl's work). Like, maybe bodies and 'the physical' have a place, but that would have to be argued, and not taken for granted - certainly not in the way that Chomsky does.

And even 'free will' and 'consciousness' are totally modern concepts that popped into existence not all that long ago. Like - these aren't some big eternal questions. These are, for the most part, cultural memes given institutional standing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html

First search result.

In the US, the top 10% of the population own 90% of the shares. The rest confer effectively no managerial rights, other than an entitlement to dividends or selling or lending those shares. That's not control of the means of production. And the rest of your post is just you not understanding what class is, but that's your problem not mine.

I suppose we can argue that science is just a Western invention— and there’s something to that — Xtrix

Huh? You think science works or does not work because we can't conceptually retrofit things like 'bodies' and 'the physical'? Eliminate both and science will be just fine. The equations will turn out just the same; the predictions will be validated (or not) regardless. Again, the use of some particular vocabulary to characterise what is, in practice, a more or less entirely autonomous field says nothing about that field or its discoveries.

Thus, there can’t be a mind/body problem — we still have no sense of “body.” — Xtrix

So what? If this were a medieval internet, someone would complain that we still have no sense of 'substance'. But this would not be a comment on the mysteries of the world: this would be a comment on how useless substance is as a term. That Chomsky talks about bodies is nothing more than an anthropological fact. Its significance is cultural, nothing more - at least, in the absence of any argument otherwise.

We may not know everything, and perhaps one example is understanding the world in terms of bodies, material, and physical. — Xtrix

Would another set of examples be not understanding the world in terms of qi, or karma, or mana? What claim do 'bodies' or 'material' have which make them anything other than a limited European set of ideas that have been in vogue for some time? Why should the failure of those terms tell us anything at all? Because we are self-important? Because you are contingently situated in this moment of history and place? The elevation of anthropological fact to transcendental condition of intelligibility is - well it's ridiculous.

Again, why the failure to retrofit an outdated vocabulary speaks to something about the universe and not the paucity of European grammar is beyond me. It's like a village engineer with a hammer and a scythe complaining that because his tools are unsuited to fix the car (he's tried everything!), the car is therefore unfixable. What kind of self-assured arrogance is this? Chomsky's essay, is, as far as I can see, the villager's complaint.

A proper image would be even worse: there's people with entire car workshops with state of the art equipment, the the villager is complaining that yes, yes, the state-of-the-art equipment is very good and fixes the car just fine but how oh how is he to reconcile the scythe? No one seems to be able to able to do it! MyStErY. Maybe Chomsky could try just... moving on?

You keep going after the VERY large CEOs and Board of Director types and NOT the small business owner that started out let's say by himself and grew from there — schopenhauer1

This is something you always read into what people say on this topic. God knows why. Literally no one mentioned a CEO except for you, out of thin air. It's why I stopped discussing this with you last time. It is why I will stop again if you continue to make shit up.

I'm sure they would say that. They would be wrong.

'Worker' is a social relation to the means of production. It doesn't change because you get paid more. Look, there are probably some nice fine-grained distinctions to be made here and there for the sake of sociological niceties, but 'the middle class' for all intents and purposes is a propaganda category used as a cudgel to convince workers that they aren't really workers. That's the role it plays in the larger discourse, no matter the scholarly finesse on the matter. "Help/grow the middle class' is - for 99% of all cases - code for "ignore your exploitation kthx".

Material well-being or ownership of means of production? — schopenhauer1

The latter overwhelmingly determine the former. To treat them as independent variables is idealism.

There is no such thing as 'the middle class', which is a capitalist invention meant to distract from the fact that you either own capital, or are a worker. 'The middle class' are still workers. Six figure and seven figure workers, are still workers. There are edge cases like workers paid in equity or whatnot, but they are negligible and without any real power for all intents and purposes.

'Inequality' is also one of those nice liberal distractions that is an effort to address symptoms rather than causes. The increased noise level about 'inequality' - while nicely intentioned - is just another attempt to address the problems of capitalism entirely within the ambit of capitalism.

This is why 'soft left' pop economists like Piketty, Kelton, or Mazzucato are so de jour right now. They all argue within the acceptable bounds of not putting capitalism itself into question. Just little adjustments around the edges. The same goes for those who fly the flag of 'stakeholder capitalism' - like people advocating for square circles.

He's saying we have a much different understanding today, one not confined solely to mechanistic processes -- like contact action, which was what was once meant by "understanding." — Xtrix

Would it be that he were just saying that. The failure of the mechanic philosophy - among other things - is Chomsky's license to conclude that there will be many things that will "remain in obscurity, impenetrable to human intelligence". There's nothing wrong with the latter idea per se. But the parochialism lies in the idea that it follows even minimally from the failure of the mechanic philosophy, which, in a word - who cares? As if the whole of the intelligible was at stake in the mechanic philosophy, and not some intellectual trend that will be forgotten in time as a footnote in some future philosophy textbook.

The failure to retrofit our 16th century concepts to what we (can?) know of the world is not a failure of the world. It is a failure of those 16th century concepts.

Or to put it differently again: Chomsky is probably right about two things: (1) the mechanical philosophy has exhausted itself; (2) We probably won't end up knowing everything. But that these things have anything whatsoever to do with each other is incredibly silly.

I'm just saying, if one has square holes, it's silly to say that because one has tried to fit the round pegs every which way and failed, that the square holes are unassailable.

Chomsky's argument though is even more parochial than that: if the world cannot be explained in the terms of these 16th century dead European guys, then it's likely no terms will ever do, forever.

Doubt.

This is more argument than Chomsky presented. And if it's really as simple as: "surely you can't believe you will know everything", then I didn't need a 30 page lit review to tell me that. But Chomsky, who knows this, is trying to link a particular and historically and culturally specific vocabulary and arrogate it to the conditions of understanding of the universe itself. But that is no better.

What I said quite specifically was that the arrogance resides in procedures that Chomsky uses to get at the conclusions you nicely hightlight in bold. By doing a literature review of centuries old dead people with a historically specific vocabulary - some of which we just so happen to still use - and, finding that the world does not fit into these rather specific, historically situated concepts - which may or may not even exist as concepts sooner rather than later - then have the gall to suggest that the world is incomprehensible because of that. It's incrediblely unbelievable.

Aside from not understanding (intuitive understanding) how gravity works, we can point to other obvious mysteries: free will, how the world produces qualia, creativity in ordinary language use, imagination, how matter can think and so on. — Manuel

Like I said, imagine a post-scholastic Chomsky saying: "we don't know how essence, or attribute, or mode, or [insert outdated vocabulary which no one uses anymore here] works, and it's unlikely that we will ever know. We'll just likely 'move on'!". One would laugh. Of course we will move on. One does laugh.

People deny today that concepts such as 'qualia' are coherent. I think they are right. So too with 'free will'. To think that, because we 'don't know how they work', this tells us something about the universe? No, this tells us about a set of historically and geographically specific humans, and the idea of generalizing about the nature of the universe from their failures is silly - and arrogant.

If some Chinese Chomsky did a review of Chinese concepts that one had never heard of and concluded that those concepts have not fared so well in capturing the world, one would take that for a cute little bit of anthropology. Not some comment on the universe and its mysteries. In fact taking Chomsky's essay as anthropology is probably the best way to take it, and the best way to see its arrogance - intellectual historical anthropology mistaken for philosophy.

I honestly can't help but find a note of arrogance in the essay - as if, if the world does not conform to the categories that we would like to impose upon it - especially the categories as dreamt up by dead 16th Century white men - then well, it really just must be unintelligible. We can't figure it out? Well, so much the worse for the world!

I know it's supposed to be the opposite - a certain sense of humility in the face of the world, but the essay's procedure belies this. It says: look at all these brilliant figures - not even they could figure it out, and if they couldn't do it, who are you to speak? I guess its this weird dialectic right - examine the knowers to figure out the limits of the known. But how human, all too human...

A more interesting - Spinozist - mysterianism would be one for which we don't yet know what we are capable of. A more self-reflexive mysterianism, all the better to defuse the all-too-certain mysterianism of the essay. This is why I think the lack of conceptual attention to intelligiblity or understanding per se - as @180 Proof rightly points out - really vitiates the entire essay.

idk I feel the same about everything you say ever so

A complement from you.

---

Guess this is what Biden meant by flattening the curve.

Imagine if the general Covid response under Trump would have been "go to work if you have Covid and if you would be so kind, kindly just fucking die for the economy kthx".

Liberals would have lost their shit and screamed "Trump bad" till they were blue in the face. But because their opposition to Trump is purely aesthetic and premised on the fact that Trump does not have the right class markers to be as incompetent and murderous a pig as Biden actually is being, the latter simply gets a free pass.

"In the early days of the pandemic, Democrats excoriated then-President Donald Trump for not doing enough to allow people to stay home from work. “Flatten the curve” was the phrase of the month, and even centrist Democrats found their inner democratic socialist, at least temporarily. ...Now, that rhetoric is nowhere to be found, even though most public health indicators are worse now than at any other time during the pandemic... Now, the entire political establishment has arrived at the consensus that little, if any additional help will be forthcoming. Renters in New York State face an expiring eviction moratorium. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki spoke out against the Chicago Teachers Union’s calls for a safer workplace. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky downplayed the risk Omicron poses, saying it was “encouraging news” that people who have died from the variant had at least four comorbidities."

https://truthout.org/articles/how-did-we-go-from-stimulus-checks-to-go-to-work-with-covid/

A worse Covid response than Trump. Utter crickets by liberals. May all of them be swamped in misery when Trump returns to power.

This is all well and good but it would also be nice if the US stopped supporting Nazis, which, of course, they are.

By all means ignore what I cited and blather on about irrelevancies.

And the US is of course well known for only ever working with offical representatives and not genocidal militias the world over, ever.

I think the Ukrainians that the Americans are supporting are Nazis, even if not exclusively.

It helps of course that Americans also support Nazis domestically, ever more often.

Or at the UN. Just like, wherever they tend to be, it turns out.

Because why would US help Nazis! — ssu

Because the US likes helping Nazis when it suits them.

Because the US has never had any issue supporting genocide, when not conducting it itself.

Looked into the Ukrainian Nazi thing. It's good stuff. Because of course the US is materially supporting literal Nazis.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato/

According to a recent Yahoo! News report, since 2015, the CIA has been secretly training forces in Ukraine to serve as “insurgent leaders,” in the words of one former intelligence official, in case Russia ends up invading the country. Current officials are claiming the training is purely for intelligence collection, but the former officials Yahoo! spoke to said the program involved training in firearms, “cover and move,” and camouflage, among other things. Given the facts, there’s a good chance that the CIA is training actual, literal Nazis as part of this effort.

...Adding to the absurdity here is that the reason Washington has been giving Ukrainian Nazis its assistance is so they can serve as a bulwark against Russia, which war hawks liken, as they always do, to Adolph Hitler’s regime and its expansion through Europe in the 1930s. While Vladimir Putin’s Russia may be a malevolent actor on a number of fronts, Putin’s recent incursions into neighboring states like Ukraine are driven largely by the expansion of the NATO military alliance up to his borders and the security implications that come with it.

In other words, to stop what US hawks classify as the next Hitler and Nazi Germany, Washington has been backing literal neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, who are in turn communicating with and training homegrown white supremacists, which Washington in turn is ramping up a menacing repressive bureaucracy at home to counter.

Meanwhile Americans scream themselves blue over the world-wide threat of Putin. Any wonder it was the US and Ukraine that were literally the only two countries to vote against an anti-Nazi measure at the UN. Because they're fans of fucking Nazis, when they're not being some themselves. Fuck the US.

Worth treating the whole Ukraine thing with a giant tub of salt.

The US government has substantiated these incendiary claims [about Russian intentions in the Ukraine] with the usual amount of evidence, by which I of course mean jack dick nothingballs. The mass media have not been dissuaded from reporting on this issue by the complete absence of any evidence that this Kremlin false flag plot is in fact a real thing that actually happened, their journalistic standards completely satisfied by the fact that their government instructed them to report it. Countless articles and news segments containing the phrase "false flag" have been blaring throughout all the most influential news outlets in the western world without the slightest hint of skepticism.

...None of this is to say that every theory about any false flag operation is true; many are not. But the way the mass media will instantly embrace an idea to which they've heretofore been consistently hostile just because their government told them to to do it says so much about the state of the so-called free press today, and the fact that the rank-and-file public simply accepts this and marches along with it as though talking about false flags has always been normal says so much about the level of Orwellian doublethink that people have been trained to perform in today's information ecosystem.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/false-flags-suddenly-no-longer-a

And from the Michael Hudson interview linked above:

But the Americans already have troops in Ukraine. Their special operation forces, they’re in Ukraine. The U.S. has already hired I guess what used to be Blackwater troops, mercenaries; they put them in Ukraine. So the U.S. is fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. Russia said two weeks ago that the U.S. special forces were planning a false flag chemical attack, and it said the city and the time. And it said, if you do that, we’re just going to come in and bomb.

So Russia found out about it and it stopped the false flag attack. But the U.S. has forces there. They thought that somehow they could provoke Russia into actually invading. I can guarantee you. I’m willing to lose my reputation if Russia actually invades Ukraine. It would be crazy. It doesn’t have the money to do it. It doesn’t have the troops.

And who needs Ukraine? Russia has no need for Ukraine. And it’s a basket case. It has the lowest living standards in Europe. And on every U.S. international report, it’s the most corrupt country in Europe. Nothing can be done to help at all.Russia doesn’t have to attack it. All it has to do is let it – if somebody is committing suicide, you don’t stop it.Russia did say that if there is a military attack on the Donbass, we are going to respond with missiles, and the missiles will not necessarily be linked to Ukraine. We may bomb, for instance, Romania, where NATO has missile launchers.

And Russia has made it clear you’re not going to go anymore with these salami tactics of moving NATO bit by bit. As far as Russia is concerned when America put special forces and troops there, when America gives Ukraine offensive weapons, as the Biden administration does, that is literally backing Ukraine, absorbing it into NATO informally.Whether it has signed the contract or not, it is working for; it is a satellite basically of the State Department.

I don't see any reason to adopt the vocabulary of what those in the 17th century thought was the criterion of scientific knowledge, that physical explanations equated to "common sense" and what counts as common sense were people's experience with engineered machines. Of course the world isn't a machine, the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" now that we're familiar with video games. There's no reason the world has to comport with our everyday experience, but that doesn't mean increased knowledge of counterintuitive things isn't actual knowledge of how the world works. — Saphsin

This seems exactly right. The whole essay is incredibly underwhelming. It reminds of that parable about the man who can't find his lost keys because they are not under the streetlamps which he is looking for them below. Except Chomsky adduces a few examples of such historical streetlamps from which we are supposed, I guess, to generalize? Or to change the image: one can imagine a post-Scholastic philosopher lamenting how centuries of writing about essence and existence, modes and attributes, have not yet yielded definitive knowledge about the world. But just as that hypothetical writer would be lamenting about nothing more than the uselessness of a mostly outdated vocabulary, is Chomsky doing any different?

One would think that an essay dealing with the limits of intelligibility would have something more to say about the very concept of intelligibility other than what is effectively an outdated literature review! - In this sense @180 Proof is right too. There is little by way of conceptual analysis here, and I don't think Chomsky's historical erudition, no matter how impressive, really gets us any further in thinking about the limits of intelligibility.

That said, what little conceptual analysis there is seems to bear on our notions of 'matter', 'the physical', and 'mechanism'. I did like the suggestion - not pursued with any of the depth it deserved - that 'intelligibility' stands or falls with mechanism. But rather than following the path to see what this might say about intelligibility, Chomsky pursues the path of mechanism, and its failure. But why should we have any stake in that beyond antiquarian interest? Surely it is intelligibility which is of interest here? It just seems like Chomsky had avoided the subject of his own paper to follow what he found more convenient.

This probably comes off as a bit harsh. But I did enjoy the discussion. It is good to have a check, every now and then, on our metaphysical ambitions. But this paper is more gestural than substantive, imo.

Edit: to put the question in the sharpest possible way: even every doubt raised by Chomsky over matter, the physical, or mechanism is correct - why would this tell us anything at all about intelligibility apart from the fact that we have approached it with inadequate terms?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-12/covid-supply-chain-crisis-economy/100750814

Marxist theory of value in the ABC. Things are looking up.

Australians are getting a stark reminder about how value is actually created in an economy, and how supply chains truly work. ... Labour — human beings getting out of bed and going to work, using their brains and brawn to produce actual goods and services — is the only thing that adds value to the "free gifts" we harvest from nature. It's the only thing that puts food on supermarket shelves, cares for sick people and teaches our children.

The economy doesn't work if people can't work. So the first economic priority during a pandemic must be to keep people healthy enough to keep working, producing, delivering and buying. That some political and business leaders have, from the outset of COVID-19, consistently downplayed the economic costs of mass illness, reflects a narrow, distorted economic lens. We're now seeing the result — one of the worst public policy failures in Australia's history.

The result is an unprecedented, and preventable, economic catastrophe. This catastrophe was visited upon us by leaders — NSW Premier Dominic Perrotet and Prime Minister Scott Morrison in particular — on the grounds they were protecting the economy. Like a mafia kingpin extorting money, this is the kind of "protection" that can kill you.

Because the financial crisis of 2008 wasn't a financial crisis but an general crisis of capitalism that just so happened to begin in financial markets. The only reason there is so much money sloshing around in finance is because the real economy is at its least profitable in decades and capitalists have to seek refuge in finance.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf

"The fundamental source of today’s crisis is the steadily declining vitality of the advanced capitalist economies over three decades, business-cycle by business-cycle, right into the present. The long term weakening of capital accumulation and of aggregate demand has been rooted in a profound system-wide decline and failure to recover of the rate of return on capital, resulting largely—though not only--from a persistent tendency to over-capacity, i.e. oversupply, in global manufacturing industries. From the start of the long downturn in 1973, economic authorities staved off the kind of crises that had historically plagued the capitalist system by resort to ever greater borrowing, public and private, subsidizing demand. But they secured a modicum of stability only at the cost of deepening stagnation, as the ever greater buildup of debt and the failure to disperse overcapacity left the economy ever less responsive to stimulus".

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-11/how-the-omicron-covid-19-outbreak-is-affecting-nsw/100749102

Spending data analysed by ANZ last week indicated economic activity plummeting to levels lower than any other time during the pandemic. "We're now facing economic situations that are worse than if we'd had an actual lockdown," said economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work. ... With cases expected to peak in mid-January, analysts from Mr Stanford's team have predicted up to a third of workers in NSW could be in isolation in the weeks ahead.

So here's the question. If there is, in fact, an shadow/effective lockdown which is devastating the economy anyway, what real benefit is there of not declaring an actual lockdown, or instituting/heightening public health measures?

There's only one answer: such health measures can no longer be used to benefit the friends of the government - the Harvey Normans and so on. We've already had an enormous transfer of public wealth into private hands, and because they can't get away with it again, they don't see the point in instituting any further such measures. What the liberals call 'the economy' is really 'their friends'. And their friends can't benefit this time around, so the actual economy, which they are always crowing about, can go to hell.

https://acmeanjin.org/articles/why-everything-has-gone-wrong-with-covid-19/

The capitalist class in Australia wants to get back into the world economy. Certainly, mineral exports have been going gangbusters all along, but tourism and education, two huge export industries, have been closed down for over a year and the businesses in that sector are desperate to get going again. Capital also wants access to temporary migrant workers to be restored. Because their temporary status puts them at the mercy of employers, they are often employed at illegally low wage rates. Farmers and other bosses who make major use of this scam have been complaining bitterly about labour shortages.

The success of public health authorities in suppressing COVID-19 and then eliminating it from internal circulation (apart from periodic breaches in hotel quarantine) has produced a major problem for capitalism. Keeping COVID-19 out of the community has been greatly welcomed, but has led to the population being reluctant to rejoin the global economy while the virus is rampant overseas. Business has therefore had to pressure its political representatives to come up with a solution.

The solution that the political representatives developed? Letting COVID rip. ... Criticisms of what is occurring haven’t been rare, but they have been misplaced in their direction. We are not witnessing the result of incompetence from politicians or governments, rather we are seeing the results of a thought out strategy designed and implemented by the state to benefit capital at the expense of working class lives.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-commits-to-3-5-billion-tank-purchase-from-the-us-20220109-p59mub.html

"Australia has not deployed a tank in combat since the Vietnam War."

$3.5 billion on tanks.

But we "can't afford" a decent public health response.

I guess the Americanization of Australia continues apace.

The warmongering fear over China is no doubt in the background of this bullshit.

Also apologies but I couldn't care less about Djokovic and if him and the government continue slinging poo at each other forever that would be totally fine. Every word spilled on entitled man who hit ball good is a word wasted.