CONSOLIDATED MEANS—
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
KNOWLEDGE FACTORIES IN
THE SOCIETY OF CONTROL
now that politics is totally defined by pure spectacle, and globalization has reached its peak, society is now combined of a few simple principles: never-ending technological renewal, fantastic imagery flowing through feeds like water, integration of the state and the economy, and the total consolidation of life into the hands of the corporation.
a “factory” is generally understood as an assemblage of machines and workers, where production happens and is consolidated, and then further standardized. control is exercised through power—expressed through the management and modularization of time, movement, and activity. the classic fordist concept of the factory has long since been abandoned in favor of a more networked approach—cognitive capitalism has replaced the sweaty forms of labor, which are now outsourced to the third world, or to underpaid migrant workers in american sweatshops. what we are left with is immaterial flows of finance, images, know-how, commerce, and the commodified idea of the “career”, where one sells themselves to the corporation as collateral for survival.
part of this diffused approach to labor, is the university as knowledge factory, where education is treated as a commodity, and knowledge is fabricated and manufactured by machines and workers(students); trained and stress tested in order to reproduce the conditions at hand, all while passing through the gears of administrative control—learning the techniques and protocols of the mode of production in order to assimilate into conformist society, and reproduce the material conditions which are burying us all.
the university serves as a microcosm for society as a whole, with students at the bottom, serving as an approximate for the working class, teachers, acting as the managerial class, the petty bourgeois, responsible for the students reproductive labor, and finally, the administration—the ruling class, who is subservient to a board of wealthy donors and private corporations who make decisions with their wallets to ensure that the status quo is upheld.
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the recent struggles for divestment led by the FITSJP brought a whole host of contradictions to the forefront—FIT administration shows no desire to consider the student body in their decisions beyond surface level concessions and facile gestures. the members of SJP negotiating with the administration, were effectively stonewalled by a lack of attention, and respect; rich coming from an institution that prides itself on fostering a diverse community of “unconventional minds”, and who is committed to free expression and debate, so long as said expression doesn’t threaten the shadowy entities that profit from barbarism, and line administration’s pockets with returns, in exchange for their complicity in the systematic obliteration of entire lineages in the name of settler colonialism, resource extraction, and real estate developments that would make the levantine region look more like south jersey.
power is maintained by a self-sustained, self-referential, and recursive fabrication of truth through discourse, which upholds power by defining the window of acceptable truth within the confines of the system protocols. in the past, power asserted itself through the threat of violence—in addition to violence, power is now subtractive; not only is there the threat of violence, but there is also powers ability to define futures, and modulate life, based on the decisions of those who wield power through means such as assessments, registration holds, learning modules, codes of conduct, financial aid, debt, rfid cards, passports, the list goes on—however it should be noted that power is not just the state or the institution, it’s also the structures and relationships between subjects in the social sphere that affect our direct connections with each other, and inform the bylaws of our social fabric—power is everywhere and in all of us, go read some foucault, i don’t have much time here.
the english theorist stafford beer once said “the purpose of the system is what it does”— financial capitalism, government propped up by private corporations, imperialism, and the like, are all doing what they need to be doing; everything feels like it’s on fire but it’s actually working just fine—the oil’s being pumped, the amazon packages are getting delivered, the doordash is coming, the story’s still being posted, and the hospitals are still being bombed—the powers that be have decided that this will all continue for the foreseeable future.
the term late-stage capitalism is kind of regarded as an internet leftist aphorism, but it’s said for a reason; its up to you to figure out what to do after the end—figure out what’s important to you that isn’t consumerism or the internet, vote in local elections, consider which relationships matter the most, talk to people about real life, and if you’re freaky, build new systems that will replace the old ones—the more of us the better.
the good thing about the end is that it presents an opportunity—what surrounds us is a catastrophe, however, the landscape has become something to learn from, and inhabit—don’t be led astray by passive comforts, or the threats of the managers and admins who talk of empty promises, touch base with each other, and bring ideas to the table to leverage messaging across channels.
one day this will all be in ruins—when this horrifying orgy of wealth and power reaches its complete self-annihilation, it will be at the end of a process that will have been long since completed in the periphery that surrounds the core.