Political subjects of late capitalism: from economic classes to rent-seeking minorities

Capitalism has evolved from a liberal utopia to consumer technology, in which commodification reaches its limits penetrating into all spheres of social life. Historical intensification and expansion of autonomous markets helped to resolve structural contradictions of modern society at the expense of economic growth, technological progress and modern cultural technologies of disciplinary control. Under late capitalism, all these sources are close to exhaustion. The cultural and political order of late capitalism leads to a situation when the schizophrenic subject begins to predominate as a mass agent of political action. This agent loses its ability to effectively organise its collective (class) interests in the space of history, which becomes completely overshadowed by the space of culture that simulates history. The activity of schizophrenic subjects within the consumption culture codes, which they do not control, belongs to the symbolical order that does not lead to a change in the real political order. The weakening of the political subjectness of the new social groups is expressed in the fact that the local and private logic of the just redistribution, repair or treatment of the sociocultural trauma of a late capitalist society starts to dominate in the public political field, while none of these subjects can offer any essential utopian alternative to this type of society. The fatalistic political tolerance for the project of the Late Modernity as the eternal present is directly determined by the absence of a) the horizon of utopias, b) the collective sense of historical perspective, and c) class identity of preсariat minorities as successors of disintegrated market economic classes. Strengthening non-market social groups in the situation of a downward social trajectory are increasingly falling back on local rent-seeking strategies that do not resolve, but only temporarily compensate the growing structural political conflicts in late modern society. It is argued that the return of the real political subjectness of the majority can be connected with the resurrection of history, utopias and the transformation of separate precarious groups into a new political class. These goals imply the legitimisation of a new political order in which the market ceases to be a key factor of stratification.

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