Similarly, as we enter a new phase of militarized austerity, corporate and state power have spared no time or expense in developing new technologies of repression and surveillance that make any substantial revolutionary effort much more difficult. In this situation resistance is far from a threat to the system. In fact, resistance may quickly become the keyword of a new, even more dystopian form of what Herbert Marcuse (1969, 36–48) called “repressive desublimation,” where we are all encouraged to resist precisely because it poses no real threat to the system as a whole. While capitalism is based on the cooptation of people's individual and collective subjectivities, bodies and agencies, the forms of resistance through acts of desire, communities of difference and unmappable identities are not sufficient, in and of themselves, to save us. Nor, we might add, are forms of resistance based purely in attempting to secure for workers (or some fraction of workers) a slightly better deal.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 535