Carry on consuming

Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the title of Deleuze and Guattari's epic social deconstruction theory published in 1972. It is a monster of a book, written in bombastic style, critiquing capitalism's moral climate. It is not a sensible book in many ways. But its recklessness heightens one's awareness of how sensible, and therefore immune to argument, contemporary capitalism has become. The problem with this, is that it leads to a perversion of ethics in a system that is fundamentally inhumane. It promotes a society that only celebrates and rewards the materially greedy. As Deleuze and Guattari show, with capitalism, not only does existence become a fight against human atrocity, it becomes a fight against a State that does not even acknowledge the existence of its oppressed people. We realise that we are in the grips of a newer form of fascist totalitarianism. By being in favour of productivity and graft, somehow society evades the argument that it must provide a level of care for its citizens in a way that the dollopping out of capital cannot supply.