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Dear Scott,
Yes, perhaps you’re right. It looks easier to investigate capital-to-customer sabotage. The other possibility (capital-to-employees) is also worth exploring but, of course, I have to chose the angle from which to explore these issues one thing at a time.
Thank you for those references. They are incredibly helpful for me at this stage!
Dear Pieter,
First of all, thank you so much for the material you shared. The papers are indeed quite helpful, and they touch upon some key aspects that I would like to explore.
Also, the aspect you pinpoint about the liberal equation of utility as an index of happiness goes straight to one of the main arguments that need to be developed.
Gramsci already noted in his notebook reflections on Fordism that capitalists were implementing sociological research on the field in order to better control the level of output of the workforce. They literally payed empirical sociologists to investigate how laborers would spend their leisure time. They would be very attentive to things such as alcohol consuming and sexual habits. One key argument was that night-time sexual entertainment (i.e. prostitution) would impair the laborer’s energy the morning after.
But when it comes to dominant capital, and given the technologic-logistical means they can implement nowadays, we can definitely imagine big corporations actively trying to shape those very habits.
I’ll keep you and everyone posted on my progress. In any case, I would like to tackle both aspects of the problem: affective technologies used to exercise power and the role of technology in the overall rise in mental illnesses and disorders. One curious thing would be to explore how this apparently contradicting forces are actually interacting with each other.
Well, second place for my country! So proud!
Jokes aside, is there a specific event that we should consider as the key trigger? Doesn’t this all coincide with the end of Bretton Woods?
Wow, what an eloquent graph.
Is the small “dead cat bounce” of 2021 (if I’m not mistaken) due to the general Covid-related recovery plans issued in OECD countries?
Dear Rowan,
Thank you for your fruitful insights on this topic. I personally have come up with similar questions about the relation between Covid-19 and capitalism and I keep asking my self: did covid-19 just forced a jump-start-like passage from a breadth phase to a depth one?
I’m asking this from my local perspective, that is, from the perspective of an Italian citizen. Here in my country, and in less than a few months a lot of firms are relocating, cutting costs anywhere (even when production is proceeding apace!), menacing massive firings, and so on.
Perhaps my claim is empirically too farfetched, since we have no knowledge of the future and I’m speaking from a viewpoint which is tantamount to a “day-to-day” observation of the events unfolding; nonetheless it looks to me like the whole pandemic is just serving as a temporal “accelerator” of the breadth-depth oscillation.
What do you think about this possibility?
