Activity

Building a postcapitalist world is as much a technical task as a political one, and in order to begin thinking about it, the left needs to overcome its general aversion to formal modelling and mathematics. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that the same people who criticise the abstraction of mathematical modelling often adhere to the most abstract dialectical readings of capitalism.

The combination of social alliances, strategic thinking, ideological work and institutions builds a capacity to alter public discourse. Crucial here is the idea of the ‘Overton window’ – this is the bandwidth of ideas and options that can be ‘realistically’ discussed by politicians, public intellectuals and news media, and thus accepted by the public. The general window of realistic options emerges out of a complex nexus of causes – who controls key nodes in the press and broadcast media, the relative impact of popular culture, the relative balance of power between organised labour and capitalists, who holds executive political power, and so on.

The obverse of hope is disappointment (an affect that is today embodied in figures like the young ‘graduate with no future’). Whereas anger has traditionally been the dominant affect of the militant left, disappointment invokes a more productive relation – not merely a willed transformation of the status quo, but also a desire for what-might-be. Disappointment indexes a yearning for a lost future.

Today, one of the most pervasive and subtle aspects of hegemony is the limitations it imposes upon our collective imagination. The mantra ‘there is no alternative’ continues to ring true, even as more and more people strive against it.

The neoliberal hegemony in the United States, for instance, came about by linking together the interests of economic liberals with those of social conservatives. This is a fractious (sometimes even contradictory) alliance, but it is one that finds common interests in the broad neoliberal framework by emphasising individual freedoms.