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This is all a consequence of an excess of power. If the old autonomist argument is correct and capital’s innovations were forced by workers’ acts of refusal – and what could illustrate this thesis more effectively than Murdoch’s struggle with the unions in the 1980s – then it’s now clear how sloppy and shoddy capital’s operatives became in the lack of any effective opposition. This is decadence – not merely in the moral sense, but also in the sense of decay and deterioration. During the early 21st century high pomp of neoliberalism, hacks, cops and politicans were so confident that they would never be exposed that they behaved in an ever more brazenly depraved manner, and appeared to take little care in covering their traces. What’s also emerging into clearer view now is the tabloid media’s crucial role in the biopolitical control which was central to the constitution of neoliberal hegemony. [...]
[...] But what has to differentiate the left from the right is a commitment to the idea that liberation lies in the future, not the past. We have to believe that the currently collapsing neoliberal reality system is not the only possible modernity; that, on the contrary, it is a cybergothic form of barbarism, which uses the latest technology to reinforce the power of the oldest elites. It is possible for technology and work to be arranged in completely different ways to how they configured now. This belief in the future is our advantage over the right.
[...] Capitalist realism refers to a set of political beliefs and positions, but also a set of aesthetic impasses. “Realism” here does not connote a realist style so much as the inability to see, think or imagine beyond capitalist categories. It’s no accident that “reality” entertainment came to the fore in the unprecedented period of neoliberal domination before the bank crises of 2008. Hirst’s work belongs to a corresponding development that we might call reality art. The dead animals in the formaldehyde really are dead animals. The skull really is a skull. This inertial tautology may the real “point” of Hirst’s work, and also the reason it emptily but emphatically resonated in a neoliberal era characterised by political fatalism and the corrosion of social imagination. Things are as they are; they cannot be re-imagined, transfigured, or changed. Is there any art object which better captures this than the diamond-encrusted skull of Hirst’s For The Love Of God, the object which, more than any other, may come to stand for the decadence and vanity of the pre-2008 neoliberal world? For The Love Of God makes explicit the guiding logic of much of Hirst’s work: the only certainties are death and capital. But it can tell us nothing about this. It is a mute symptom which exemplifies a condition it can neither describe nor transcend.
weirdly, eerily, beautiful
The point of capital's sponsorship of cultural and sporting events is not only the banal one of accruing brand awareness. Its more important function is to make it seem that capital's involvement is a precondition for culture as such. The presence of capitalist sigils on advertising for events forces a quasi-behaviouristic association, registered at the level of the nervous system more than of cognition, between capital and cultural. It is a pervasive reinforcement of capitalist realism.
[...] Most of the innovations in British popular music which happened between the 60s and the 90s would have been unthinkable without the indirect funding provided by social housing, unemployment benefit and student grants.
These developments precisely opened up a kind of time that is now increasingly difficult to access: a time temporarily freed from the pressure to pay rent or the mortgage; an experimental time, in which the outcomes of activities could neither be predicted nor guaranteed; a time which might turn out to be wasted, but which might equally yield new concepts, perceptions, ways of being. It is this kind of time, not the harassed time of the business entrepreneur, which gives rise to the new. This kind of time, where the collective mind can unfurl, also allows the social imagination to flourish. The neoliberal era – the time when, we were repeatedly told, there was no alternative – has been characterised by a massive deterioration of social imagination, an incapacity to even conceive of different ways to work, produce and consume. It’s now clear that, from the start (and with good reason) neoliberalism declared war on this alternative mode of time. It remains tireless in its propagation of resentment against those few fugitives who can still escape the treadmill of debt and endless work, promising to ensure that soon, they too will be condemned to performing interminable, meaningless labour – as if the solution to the current stagnation lay in more work, rather than an escape from the cult of work. If there is to be any kind of future, it will depend on our winning back the uses of time that neoliberalism has sought to close off and make us forget.
There is a problem, however, in seeing capitalist realism just as a belief and an attitude, in that both are based on individual psychology. The discussion needed is one that interrogates where those beliefs and attitudes come from, for what we are actually dealing with is the social decomposition that gives rise to them. For that, we really need a narrative about the decline of solidarity and the decline of security - the neoliberal project achieved its aim of undermining them. Capitalist realism then is also a reflection of the recomposition of various forces in society. It is not just that people are persuaded of certain beliefs, but rather that the beliefs people have reflect the way that forces in society are composed in contemporary capitalism.
[...] Neoliberalism was supposed to cut away the red tape. So why is it that teachers are required to perform more bureaucratic tasks than they ever were in the heyday of social democracy?
Simply because neoliberalism has got nothing to do with the freeing of markets, and everything to do with class power. That is reflected in the introduction of certain methods and strategies, ways of assessing teachers and schools, justified because they allegedly increase efficiency. Well, anyone who has engaged in this kind of, to coin another phrase, market Stalinism knows that nowadays what matters is what appears on the forms, irrespective of whether it actually corresponds to reality.
It was New Labour which accelerated this development in education by introducing targets - isn’t it interesting that New Labour presented itself as the extreme antithesis of Stalinism, but it ended up reconstituting at a formal level Stalinism’s really bad aspects (not that there were many good ones!). The language of planned targets has come back, like the return of the repressed.
Given that this clearly does not increase efficiency, we need to see it as a disciplinary mechanism, an ideological, ritualising system. If you are a teacher sitting at home filling in lots of forms full of quasi-business rhetoric, you are not going to teach a better lesson the next day. In fact, if you just watched TV and relaxed, you would probably be better equipped in that regard. But the authorities are not idiots: they know this; they know they are not really increasing your performance.
So what is the function of these practices? Well, one is obviously discipline and control: control via anxiety, control via the destabilisation of professional confidence. These things are framed as ‘continuous professional development’, and that sounds good, doesn’t it? You always want to learn more, don’t you? And now you always have access to training. But what it really means is that your status is never really validated - you are constantly subject to review. And it is a review of a bizarre and Kafkaesque type, because all the assessment criteria are characterised by a strategic vagueness, whereby it might appear possible to fulfil them, but in reality that fulfilment can be constantly deferred. The result is that teachers are in a constant state of anxiety - and anxiety is highly functional from the perspective of those who want to control us.
[...] Capital has no idea of any solution to the crises which led up to 2008. There is no guarantee that the current crisis can be ended, because capital’s means of keeping wages low and demand up was debt itself. If you make debt harder to come by, then what is going to take its place? There is no answer to that, and plainly capital’s apologists are just flailing about.
Their only answer has been the strategy of austerity, which in large part has been based on a historical forgetting of why the welfare state was introduced. It was introduced not out of the kindness and largesse of the capitalists, but as ‘revolution insurance’, so that widespread discontent did not spill over into revolution. They have forgotten that and as a consequence they think they can keep pulling away those social safety nets without any problem. Last year’s riots give us a glimpse of some of the possible repercussions.
Obviously all the anti-capitalist movements, right up to Occupy, have managed to mobilise disaffection, but they have not been able to coordinate it in a way that causes capital any long-term problems at all. What could coordinate discontent? And what could convert ambient disaffection into sustainable antagonism? It is a lack of the sustainability of these antagonisms which is part of the problem with them. Another problem with them, which my comrade, Jeremy Gilbert, has raised, is their lack of institutional memory. If you do not have something like a party structure then you do not have institutional memory, and you just end up repeating the same mistakes over and over.
There is far too much toleration of failure on our side. If I ever have to hear that Samuel Becket quote, “Try again, fail again, fail better”, I will go mad. Why do we even think in these terms? There is no honour in failure, although there is no shame in it if you have tried to succeed. Instead of that stupid slogan we should aim to learn from our mistakes in order to succeed next time. The odds might be stacked in such a way that we do keep losing, but the point is to increase our collective intelligence. That requires, if not a party structure of the old type, then at least some kind of system of coordination and some system of memory. Capital has this, and we need it too to be able to fight back.
These descriptions of a CEO’s day also prove Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in Anti-Oedipus that, in capitalism,
there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves ... The bourgeois sets the example … : more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital . . . ‘I too am a slave’ – these are the new words spoken by the master.
At the top of the tower, there is no liberation from work. There is just more work – the only difference is that you might now enjoy it (life is too exciting for sleep). For these CEOs, work is closer to an addiction than something they are forced to do. In a provisional formulation, we might want to posit a new way of construing class antagonism. There are now two classes: those addicted to work, and those forced to work. But this isn’t quite accurate. Whether we are working for our employers (who pay us) or for Mark Zuckerberg (who doesn’t), most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return.