And, you know, there were waves of this democratic socialism throughout the US and in Europe and elsewhere also. And that is what had to be stopped. That is what had to be stopped, eliminated as even a possibility of existing. And in place of that then, this mandatory individualism. But the individualism of neoliberalism has always to be policed. There's always the danger of consciousness being raised again. There's always the danger that when people are together that they will develop a collective consciousness,
that they will secede from this forms of miserable, you know, angst-ridden individualism, which is, you know, which is the kind of supervised condition. And I think that is where we are at the moment. Fundamentally, I think that, you know, this form of capitalist exploitation or capitalist super-exploitation is no longer a commodity exploitation. Now, if we can look back in some ways at the period of commodity exploitation with some, to some extent, dewy-eyed nostalgia. Because when capitalism was about commodity exploitation, this was a form of dialectical exploitation, which the commodity, you know, had to involve workers.
You know, workers had to produce it. You had to exploit workers in order to get it. And the commodity was separate from the workers. It was something extracted from the workers' labor. Whereas now, there's a form of more direct exploitation, which is, I think, not the commodity form, but the promotional form. You know, like, why can you be induced to work for nothing? Particularly if you're in the cultural sector or whatever. Well, because you can promote yourself. You know, promotional remuneration. And this injunction that we promote ourselves at all times, that is totally second nature now. And certainly naturalized heavily through social media, etc. Again, it's something we don't think about. And what this allows is a fantasy of capital, that it can live without workers entirely.
That it's doing you a favor, right? If, since, you know, since work is a form of, allows you to develop, allows you to accrue this kind of reputational capital, then the capitalists are doing you a favor by giving you a job. You shouldn't expect to be paid as well, right? And this is clearly the logic at the moment. But it seems to me that this is, you know, this is not, this is not, no, this is not really.