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The reason that it’s so easy to whip up loathing for “benefit scroungers” is that – in the reactionary fantasy – they have escaped the suffering to which those in work have to submit. This fantasy tells its own story: the hatred for benefits claimants is really about how much people hate their own work. Others should suffer as we do: the slogan of a negative solidarity that cannot imagine any escape from the immiseration of work.
the next paragraph is a really weird one about bukkake but i can forgive him cus this one is so damn good
Capitalist realism is an expression of class decomposition, and a consequence of the disintegration of class consciousness. Fundamentally, neoliberalism must be seen as a project which aimed to achieve this end. It was not primarily – at least not in practice – dedicated to freeing up the market from state control. Rather, it was about subordinating the state to the power of capital. As David Harvey has tirelessly argued, neoliberalism was a project which aimed to reassert class power.
As the traditional sources of working class power were defeated or subdued, neoliberal doctrines functioned as weapons in a class war increasingly fought by one side only. Concepts like the 'market' and 'competition' have functioned not as the real ends of neoliberal policy, but as its guiding myths and ideological alibi. Capital has no interest in either the health of markets, or in competition. As Manuel DeLanda, following Fernand Braudel, has argued, capitalism, with its tendency towards monopoly and oligopoly, can more accurately be defined as anti-market rather than as a system which promotes thriving markets.
In addition to the plasticity of organizational form, we need also to pay attention to the plasticity of desire. Freud said that the libidinal drives are “extraordinarily plastic”. If desire is not a fixed biological essence, then there is no natural desire for capitalism. Desire is always composed. Advertisers, branders and PR consultants have always known this, and the struggle against neoliberalism will require that we construct an alternative model of desire that can compete with the one pushed by capital’s libidinal technicians.
What’s certain is that we are now in an ideological wasteland in which neoliberalism is dominant only by default. The terrain is up for grabs, and Friedman’s remark should be our inspiration: it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Bifo is right. It wants us to be dejected: not so catatonically depressed that we can’t work, but not so confident and secure that we will refuse to do bullshit jobs. (What is this it that wants us to miserable? Why, the real management of the Overlook Hotel of course. Our misery is like nectar to it …) Capital needs people desperate, scrambling on the edge (watch Tory MPs laugh at starving families!), it needs people scrimping and saving and crossing off lists, it needs people to be grateful for any work, no matter how poorly paid, no matter how insecure, struggle after struggle, year after year …
Red belonging offers something different to traditional forms of belonging (faith, flag, family – so many corrupted forms of the commons, as Hardt and Negri have it). Jodi Dean has movingly described how the Communist Party in the US
gave some Americans the feeling that the world was of one piece, their work meaningful as the work of a class, their struggles significant as part of a global struggle to liberate collective work from those claiming it for their own private profit. For desperately poor and barely literate immigrants, communism is a source of knowledge and power – the knowledge of how the world works and the power to change it.
The sense of belonging here could not be reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever; it was a special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance. “Even those engaged in the boring, repetitive work of distributing leaflets or trying to recruit new members as the official line changed, or chafing against the smugness of higher ups, experience their life in the party as intensely meaningful.”
As opposed to the essentially spatial imaginary of Blue belonging – which posits a bounded area, with those inside hostile and suspicious towards those who are excluded – Red belonging is temporal and dynamic. It is about belonging to a movement: a movement that abolishes the present state of things, a movement that offers unconditional care without community (it doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are, we will care for you any way).
Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects, which arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions, hope is something we call upon when we have nothing else. This is why Obama’s “politics of hope” ended up so deflating – not only because, inevitably, the Obama administration quickly became mired in capitalist realism, but also because the condition of hope is passivity. The Obama administration didn’t want to activate the population (except at election time).
We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act. “Confidence,” Spinoza argues, “is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.” Yet it is very difficult, even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them/ us there are few if any “future objects from which cause for doubting is removed.”
Jason Read’s essay “The Order and Connection of Ideology Is the Same as the Order and Connection of Exploitation: Or, Towards a Bestiary of the Capitalist Imagination” explains why narrativisation is so important. In his account of two neo-Spinozist thinkers, Frédéric Lordon and Yves Citton, Read reminds us that
our desire, our loves and hates, are already shaped by narratives, by scripts inherited through television and books. We enter into a world already scripted, and, as Spinoza argues in his definition of the first kind of knowledge, our life is defined as much by signs and images as things experienced.
This means
that the scenarios that we imagine, the stories and narratives that we consume, inform our understanding of reality, not in the sense that we confuse fiction with reality, but that the basic relations that underlie our fictions shape our understanding of reality. It is not that we confuse fiction with reality, believing everything that we see, but that the fundamental elements of every narrative, events, actions, and transformations, become the very way that we make sense of reality. Fiction exists in a permanent relation of metalepsis with reality, as figures and relations from one constantly inform the other.
The ultimate fantasy here – the ultimate fantasy of Capital ‘itself’ – is of cutting workers away altogether. Capital’s libidinal metaphysics is a kind of cosmic libertarianism: Capital identifies itself as a force of unbounded energy, whose capacity for infinite accumulation is obstructed only by political contingencies. Soon, always soon, Capital dreams, I will be free of the need for politics … and free of the need for humans too … (“… liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… “) Capital’s realised utopia would be a burned-out planet full of fully-automated factories turning out shit that no-one wants to buy, with no-one left to buy it any way, because the conditions for the continued existence of these factories is the destruction of an environment humans can live in.
Capital is nothing if it is not parsimonious, and for the last thirty years it is has sustained itself by relying on readymade forms of existential affiliation. This reliance on already already-existing forms of identification—all those nationalisms and religions, with any number of archaisms ready to crawl out of the crypt—is what postmodernism has been. There are no ‘pure’ archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web). It faces not a confident capitalist modernity, but a capitalism that has retreated from the present, never mind the future. Left to its own resources—or rather, left to the resources it retains from previous forms of exploitation—capital can never come up with anything new. Postmodernism was its ideal form, and the naturalised postmodernism of capitalist realism was its optimal solution to political and cultural antagonism. The UK has specialised in developing the steampunk model: Victorian social relations, but now with iPhones.
The problem with late capitalism is not the greed of capitalists. That's the difference between a Marxist analysis and an ethical one - the Marxist one will focus on systems, forms of organisation are central. Capitalism is not bad because CEOs are uniquely evil. It's the other way around. Anyone who's in the position of CEO would act as CEOs do. It's just a systemic pressure that produces that kind of behaviour. Part of the problem is that we are looking at systemic tendencies here. [...]