In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. - David Graeber

With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with–often spearheaded–attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” though the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principle,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.

Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.