The fragmentation of activist collectives aided capitalism’s current dominance

Evidence

Of course, the disarray of movements of resistance to capitalism in recent decades arises from the play of planetary forces, where economic interest, the protection of privilege, political rivalries and the appropriation of media dynamics by the logic of financial profitability are much more decisive factors than the clan divisions of statistically insignificant small groups. A little more ‘conviviality’ among activists will not, therefore, be enough to provoke an assault on the new Winter Palaces. And yet, how can we ignore that the fragmentation and/or hyper-localization of collectives putting forward (concrete or theoretical) alternatives to capitalism are at least in part responsible for its disastrous victory at the present time? — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 348

Categorization

• QUESTION: The causal weight claimed for attention-fragmentation vs. structural economic forces is left deliberately unsettled — worth interrogating how much explanatory weight attention theory can honestly carry here.
• XREF: connects to: Oppositional workers’ organizations mirror capitalist structure and thereby absorb class struggle; De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 672; Workers can overcome fragmentation, but sector structure determines mobilization paths and identity frames. (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics #expands (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 672
• Oppositional workers’ organizations mirror capitalist structure and thereby absorb class struggle #corroborates (0.75)