Eat Fast And Leave...

I'm indebted to this weekend's FT for the text snippet from 'Lunch With The FT' [interview in a Tokyo McDonalds with Chinese dissident commentator Li Ying] that gave me the title for tonight's post; which should absolutely be taken as in the imperative sense: as edict rather than desire. To my mind this directive sums up where we are in the advanced [?] capitalist ethos in which twenty-first century man-and-woman-kind finds itself; either at the hands of laissez faire arms-distance neo-liberals, as in "The West" or under the grip of the over-weaning controls of state capitalism such as obtains in modern day China; with all points in between pretty much just shades of the same. Pay, consume and move on with alacrity: you're taking up retail space.  Needs and desires shortened into data-compressible chunks as small as possible to serve the needs of The Great Stone-Eater itself [blog posts passim, and courtesy of the late Alex Harvey] in its quest for ever-increasing profit.

The historical failures of either form of the capitalist myth of freedom of choice and the ability of markets to be self-stable [they manifestly aren't] are as plainly written in the history of the human race as the equally abysmal performance of state capitalism - itself just a cosmetic rewriting of the communist playbook, which in itself was based on chronic and specious re-readings of Marx dragged out of context and misapplied in pretty much the same ways as most of subsequent economic theory throughout the modern era has been. The problem is actually pretty fundamental:

Aside from the obvious imperatives of greed and the accumulation of power and money for their own sakes, the human race has always been hell-bent on up-scaling and institutionalising the petty, internecine squabbles of the village and its inequalities, to the macro level of nations, continents and the globe itself. The fact remains that we have lost, mislaid or deliberately dumped our ability to compartmentalise the necessary from the desirable, and the fact that there is a genuinely inviolable stratum of necessity and its compensation for, that underpins both our humanity and our ability to co-exist in human society, and therefore participate in the capitalist dream itself. The global village realised in human terms for once might actually be a nice idea? After all, basic survival and community support systems preface the ability to consume in the capitalist sense. It's instructive that McDonald's, conceptually, in the context of the FT piece somehow straddled the divide between the empowered and the oppressed: curious iconography, but there you go: that's a PhD thesis for someone much younger than me to propose...