castles in the sand

The symbolic importance of acting. Repression/Dependency complex.
The relational aspects of globalization, i.e. “the market”(place) where interchange occurs. As the neural pathways of the brain are complex in meaning but simple in conduct - bearing messages like Hermes - so global exchange functions the same: we bear the economy, the cyclical process of production has turned us into symbols of itself. Individuals represent functions of multinational corporate and state apparatuses, structures that map artificial geographies of virtual exchange, layering them over populations like a blanket of digital snow. When errors in the system occur, as they do periodically, the role of the state as capital’s fail-safe is clarified; in the name of the national economy the adrenaline is administered, shock-therapy, and the people are left scrambling in the reorganization - while the pulse has once again begun.
It is the most insidious trait of capitalism to connect us with invisible thread, not invisible because it does not exist but because it is removed from our presence, we have no contact with it, we are alienated from it; that thread traces the movement of material-historical production. We are connected to others by the products we use or consume. It is this basic network of production that has evolved from the industrial capitalism of the 18th century into a global system of institutionalized hegemony and political repression.
While people remain ideologically divided in many ways, imagined or not (it is the imagination that matters) there are yawning gaps in communication and dialogue, potential regions of intersubjective recognition and material cooperation which might begin to break down the mysterious Other; these spaces are both physical and psychological.
“During the process of its historical development, the industrial bourgeoisie has repeatedly had to find new solutions to the following problems: how to buy raw materials for the factory at low prices; how to enable the working class to feed itself cheaply, in order to keep wages low; how to create a supply situation in which it would be possible to absorb a growing proportion of the rural population in the factories. These problems have been resolved by the industrial bourgeoisie by the use of State power in several new forms, but always on the basis of an ever more implacable subjugation of a growing proportion of the world’s population, incorporated as direct colonies, protectorates or spheres of influence in the metropolitan States’ systems of domination.” Gramsci, p.301