Reply To: Another Bank in Crisis?
Managed to access that article by another route and what it says about Marx is not bad:
“Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”
Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.” (my emphasis).
This echoes any discussions about feminism, gay liberation, etc with some arguing that these are challenges to capitalism and so have a revolutionary potential. But it is clear that they are quite compatible with capitalism and even accord with its logic of only being interested in labour-power as such and not with the particular characteristics of its bearer, ie its drive “to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass.”
”Woke capitalism” is what you would expect. The likes of DeSantis are just backwoodsmen tilting at windmills.