‘More and more, we are grasping that the perfect crime of capitalism is built right into the system itself and scarcely needs to be hidden or disguised within false rhetoric. But then why are so few interested in any type of systemic critique? Part of the problem is that an older form of capitalist ideology is getting in the way. Even if we try, many of us cannot help but take the system’s pharmaceuticals, wear its sweatshop-made clothes, and use its products and services (of course, this primarily refers to the minority of the world’s population who actually have access to these goods and services). We can cognitively map the system and learn where our coffee comes from, how are shirts are made. In the end, however, we cannot avoid transgression. In an earlier Fordist moment of capitalist production, workers were bought off on the level of desire (tempted more by what type of upholstery to outfit their new cars with than by organizing revolution on the factory floor). Today, it is more about being bought off on the level of conscience, since it is impossible within commodity culture to be clean. Perhaps we no longer experience the old Fordist desire, with its accompanying moment of forgetting (“I would really like to have that commodity, no matter how it’s made and how the workers are treated, and therefore I will let myself forget how the system works so that I can enjoy my new purchase”). Instead, we increasingly experience its opposite: we don’t want to have that commodity, because we know (and don’t want to forget) how it’s made and how the workers are treated. Nevertheless, we cannot conceive of how to get by without purchasing it (because we see no alternative option) and we cannot prevent feelings of guilt over our participation in a loathsome system. Therefore, we let ourselves forget the vulnerability of the system precisely so that we can enjoy our purchase knowing that we could not have done otherwise. While the Fordist statement was, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is actually rotten,” today’s statement is, “I will not organize against the system because I have forgotten the system is capable of being terminated.” In both cases, something like amnesia or “memory washing” has occurred. But the causes and effects are qualitatively different. And again, in the new chronic moment, what we cannot make ourselves bring to consciousness is cognizance of, let alone desire for, the system’s final end. However, the radical action available to us today is not a “waking up” to our duplicity and hypocrisy, in which we let ourselves experience all the attending guilt we are currently managing by various amnesic strategies. Rather, the challenge is to mobilize our hypocrisy in a way that relies less on moral categories and more on an objective critique of the total system that has left us––via false choices––with “hypocritical” lifestyles.' -Eric Cazdyn; The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness







