Sara’s Reviews > Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons > Status Update

"To open up memory as a site of radical struggle" - which does not mean we should spend time remembering occupations, but that we should understand the violence behind the present normal. Unfortunately Foucault seems to be a forbidden author within the autonomist orthodoxy club.

"What does debt teach? It teaches you that you are lonely, competitive individual" - debt creates cognitive lock-in, teaches you to overvalue what you're paying for, to avoid cognitive dissonance, thus impairing critical thinking.

Interesting paper by Caffentzis framing the literature on the commons referenced in the bibliography: http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/ca..., but not understood. As Marx noted, the existence of commons relies on regulation and investment by the state, It cannot stem from micropolitical initiatives. The commons are different from kibbutzim.

"The wages we earn from producing something we have no ownership or connection with" - by assuming this unrelatedness we do capitalism a big favour. We have ownership for what we contribute to put on the market, as the German citizens owned Nazism, and ignorance is not allowed.

"We rely on cooperation to reproduce social life, but that process of reproduction is poetic, sublime and profound" - what??! A 'process' poetic? Tell Proust.

"These struggles to protect, feclaim and expand the sphere of autonomous values (...) are fundamentally radical in the sense that they strike at the 'root' of capital's modus operandi" - one of my favourite quotes quoted here!

"Capitalism is not a system of production but a system of reproduction" - actually, a tool used for reproduction. Capitalism has no agency. Only society exists. Our society uses capitalism to reproduce itself at the expense of other societies - we should not shy away from this.

"Few spaces exist in the world that are free of capital's influence" - capital is one of many forces geared towards inequality, but it has by no means a monopoly over the will to create and maintain an unequal society. Fundamentalisms, mafias and religious traditions, for example, provide their non-capitalist contribution to the popular cause of inequilty.

"The ultimate horizon for humanity beyond capitalism is the commons" - capitalism is about the economy, the commons not necessary, unless we mean resources (fisheries, rivers, etc), which have economic relevance. Not everything that is shared has or should have economic relevance and be interpreted like a commons, otherwise we'll play a reverse capitalistic game.

"The rise of debt as an enclosure of the future" - THIS is genius!