It is easy to understand why people give up on the world and just retreat into a private life. If you look at life around you, it can seem very bleak. Social life sometimes feels like it is completely fucked.
When I heard Senator Kay Patterson defending her rotten governments Medicare policies, I felt I had had enough.. too much listening to the radio, too much news. I long ago promised to try and stop listening to the news. I only have so much listening time in my life, so why the fuck am I wasting my time on the news when I could be listening to a wonderful Jewish Palestinian Jazz fusion music ‘Exile’, the marvellous Gilad Atzmon and the Orient House Ensemble.
There are times when the daily vomit that is the NEWS becomes counterproductive. The act of understanding the social reality of late capitalism sometimes requires a person to step back from the flood tide of contradictory moments. Too much of a preoccupation with these moments can lead to a psychopathology.
What is most fascinating about our late capitalist reality is the generalisation of chaos. Not only does the system become rocked by periods of economic and social instability, the very core of the social reality we experience comes apart (Is this what links Marx to John Coltrane’s most expressive and chaotic music e.g. Ascension?). Consider the sociology of modern life. Our understanding has evolved out of the traditions that include Marx. All attempt to describe structures by which social interests are shaped and interact.
I would suggest that those evolved understandings we have inherited and which we now teach in our centres of education are becoming increasingly strained. Why? Not because of the evolving understanding, but from the chaos and disorganising power of modern productive forces. Capitalism has become a solvent, dissolving all social relations before it. Historically capitalism evolved ‘regulatory systems’, that locked various social interests in a social compromise that allowed various forms of ‘governability’. In late capitalism the very idea of regulatory system starts to come apart.
Revolutionary socialists may draw comfort from such a thought, until we take it further. What if the solvent removes not just the system of regulation, but the very notion of ‘social interest’. Without the idea of social interests, there is no such thing as class. The idea of ‘capacity for social organisation’ becomes problematic. I don’t only mean the capacity for social organisation of the ‘working class’. I would argue that the capacity for the organisation of all social interests becomes problematic. That includes the social and organising interests of capitalism. This is a scenario for barbarism.
7:24:57 AM 
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