“From its beginning to its current senile form, capitalism has presided over a massive graveyard.”
“Therefore, a particular capitalist imaginary results from this end of history narrative and this imaginary leads to a closure of thought. Such an imaginary is an ideological constellation: everything wagered to declare that capitalism is the only expression possible.”
“As noted in the prologue, one purpose of this project is to map the coordinates of a possible radical future beyond the present crisis and submit existing commentary to rigorous critique. Therefore, it is necessary to demonstrate the paucity of Žižek’s vague idea of communism.”
“Specifically, theory goes wrong whenever it fetishizes the surface froth of capital, misreading it as in some way profound and strategically important.”
“Necrocapitalism challenges us to do more than select philosophical reflections and use them like sticky notes on the world. […] One way to spell this out for the space of philosophy is to insist on philosophical reflections that help us think through meanings not given by the same limited, and fatal imagination that has made crisis and death an ordinary feature of the world for most people.”
“The task at hand is not to point to mutual vulnerability that transcends difference, but rather to point to the differences that have exacerbated this crisis: class differences.”
“…while misogynist violence and patriarchal inequalities might be amplified by the pandemic, it is important to illuminate the ways that they are inextricably wrapped up in necrocapitalism and have been from the time of capitalism’s bloody birth.”
“The necrotic characteristics of capitalism that were always with us don’t go away in these times, as much as some want to pretend it is only now that we approach dystopia; they are in fact accentuated.”
“Indeed, the dichotomy between good and bad protester is shorthand for a number of conceptual and practical distinctions that have profound consequences for direct action and for legitimation of the antipolice uprising…”
“The question of which slogans to deploy is therefore the question of whether or not we will overshoot, or be left behind in our attempts to swim with the masses and crystallize their demands in a way that has requisite force, and the capacity to catch and spread widely.”
“As an instrument of ideological repression, academia is porous and academics on the side of the oppressed must choose their battles with this fact in mind. Liberal principles of academic freedom cut both ways, and in a setting prejudiced against the oppressed it means they mostly cut the wrong way.”
“What matters is that we recognize that the risk of the virus is not an apolitical reality separate from the racist policing of the capitalist state, but is a result of the same rotten conditions at the base of our society. The virus is as political as it gets, and it has been used as a political weapon against those willing to take to the street.”
“We know, that one of the functions of liberal ideology is to obfuscate the violence and exploitation inherent in the capitalist mode of production, coating it in the gloss of ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, and yes that word again, ‘justice’.”
“Despite the fact that actually existing capitalism (and its colonial/plantation roots) is the most violent reality the world has known, any apprehension of this fact will face pacification, especially if such an apprehension translates into practice.”
“…if it is correct that white hegemony has been stabilized and reconfigured under neoliberal, carceral policy, then what we are witnessing is the destabilization of this hegemony, a destabilization of the present arrangement between bourgeois democracy and white supremacy.”
“The Uprising was first of all a righteous explosion of anger, but now envisions and fights for a future, and to speak of futurity is to speak of children. Some of us militating on behalf of the Uprising are actually parents, or caregivers of children in some capacity. But each and every one of us makes a claim on the future of our community’s children when we enter the three-way fight.”
“These basic historical operations of settler capitalism… are vectors in the continuing, and necessary movement of necrotic capitalism toward the ruin and immiseration of people whose lives and deaths are required to maintain bourgeois society at various stages.”
“It is, after all, the conditions of capitalism which would transform children from loved members of a family into economic instruments who will also sell their own labor. It is capitalism that forced parents to choose between time with their children and time laboring for a meager wage.”
“…the imperialist bourgeois family has become dependent upon migrant labour regimes. White bourgeois women are able to work outside of the home in professional and management positions while migrant women raise their children and clean up around the house and migrant men take care of the landscaping and gardening.”
“Liberal ideology thus approaches the pandemic as a problem that can be solved with individual responsibility, liberty and formal equality, and the rational agency of the bourgeois subject.”
“…we must reject the thesis, maintained by the parliamentarian left, that there is a continuity between leftist social movements and electoral politics.”
“Bailing out a boat that is sinking so that it can stay afloat a little while longer, or so that a small number of privileged passengers can scramble for lifeboats, is hardly “harm reduction” in any meaningful sense of the term.“
“The reason women like Hillary Clinton and Ruth Ginsburg are criticized by the oppressed is that liberal feminists attempt to pass them off as liberators when, in reality, they are our oppressors and relate to us in the same way that any male imperialist does.”
“The chorus of social media voices unable to contain their excitement at the current situation speaks ultimately to the weakness of the organized left. A movement so weak that it has to cheer on the role a virus plays in the political struggle is a movement that must seriously self-reflect on the meaning of power and the means of attaining it.“
“Although proponents of the bourgeois electoral circus argue that refusing to participate in the spectacle of elections is callous indifference, and thus evidence of a nihilist attitude, might it in fact be the opposite?”
“The use of Trumpism, though it might not demarcate the last four years as an aberration in American politics, severs these far-right tendencies from their roots in American history, indeed recent history.”
“Crisis indexes the normal functioning of capitalism rather than being an aberration. Historically, fascism steps in as a contender when the crisis becomes acute.”
“Far from drawing a sharp line between the supposed oddity of far-right “Trumpism” and neoliberal administrations of empire, the Biden cabinet picks go to the core of what America is today, oddities and all, and that is a decaying settler-colonial empire overstuffed with contradictions displayed in high necrocapitalist relief.”
“We are now being exhorted to return to a neoliberal normalcy, and act as if the recent delirium of the most powerful imperialist nation was an aberration, when in fact we should be rejecting this violent and necrotic system altogether.”
“The return to “normalcy” will constitute a regression toward the capitalist system that enabled the pandemic to reach the scope that it has—and which continues to enable successive environmental crises.”
“What we are witnessing is capital seizing the moment not simply to keep its grip on us, but also to tighten it.”
“Capitalism is not only incapable of producing justice for Black people and the oppressed; it is not only incapable of stopping the death of Black people and the oppressed at the hands of the police it is also a state of affairs where even the possibility of stopping the mass death of the oppressed due to COVID-19 is controversial.”
On Necrocapitalism 