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Subjective liberation projects were, from their inception, examples
of productive maximization; at the heart of the liberationist project,
machines of manufacture were set in motion and markets
established to consume the commodities flowing out. Out of
anecdotal grievances, short hand concepts of oppression and the
response to real prejudice, opportunities were exploited for the
furtherance of the capitalist social relation. Through a transference
of the 'revolutionary project' to the apparatus of political
appearance, the causes of personally experienced misery could be
mis-attributed to simple mechanisms of caricatured oppositions of
interest: the situation of women could be attributed to men, blacks
to whites, gays to straights. And all the time, profit wast to be made
through the enforcement of prejudice, and in the case of Apartheid
profit was to be made through its reduction and overthrow (and all
instances of political rejection of prejudice refers back to apartheid
as an essence made concrete). Anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-
prejudice captialism is an explicit project of the United Nations. It
is apparent therefore that prejudice is not the true problem and its
overcoming is no kind of solution to the exploitation of humanity.
This literal overcoming of prejudice is fantasy anyway, it
disappears and like a vanishing point on a trompe l'oiel horizon -
prejudice is effect not cause, it is present in all our partial
experience and in the very structure of language. The liberation
effected by oppressed subjectivities that we have experienced
since the Sixties can in no way be considered to constitute social
progress, unless, that is, we acknowledge progress to be
something malign. Progress implies development within set
conditions and the set of our society are those that
constitute capitalism. Progress, in present society, is a concept
applicable only to the increasing effectiveness of exploitative
procedures.

Has it all been in vain? Was the struggle of the Seventies
worthless? If we consider our world and ask ourselves whether
our lives have in general then the answer must be that, in general,
they have not. The end of the liberation struggles was the
achievement of a status of normality, that and a commodity
definition for what had been previously excluded, like any other
poor dummy, is some kind of something, we suppose. Life for
some has got better, that which chafed has been filed down. But