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Capitalism is an effervescent elixir. People clamor to catch a lift upward on the latest bubble even though deep down, most know there is only air beneath them. Stocks, tech valuations, real-estate speculation — it’s not the stuff of the economy that really matters, but rather, the timely exit from each overvalued market. A few people win, most lose, and the victors tend to be those already advantaged by their class position. Nevertheless, we suppress that knowledge, because facing the truth is too painful. It’s nice to have something to hope, and to work, for.
[...] there might be an alternate ending to this story. Recently, twenty thousand Google workers around the world walked off the job for a few hours. Spurred by anger at the multimillion-dollar payouts given to high-level executives accused of sexual harassment, the global organizing effort came together in under a week. Some of the San Francisco contingent expressed solidarity with the city’s striking Marriott workers, a marked disavowal of the industry’s typical hyper-individualism. If tech workers keep traveling down this road, and manage to elicit class consciousness in America’s white-collar professionals — a cause long thought to be hopeless — now that would be a true innovation.
The star rating is a particularly ingenious means of sowing this anxiety. As we all learned in primary school, amounts are nonsense without units. Six, one half, eighty-seven thousand—these numbers do not mean anything unless we know what mutually agreed-upon unit they attach to: fortnights, teaspoons, furlongs, etc. But what is a star? Nobody knows. The star rating average is only meaningful in relative terms: it’s higher or lower than the star ratings other striving workers earn. In other words, user reviews situate our performance not according to some stable benchmark—such as increased production per hour worked—but within an ever-fluctuating hierarchy comprised of our peers.
This all-too-public, shifting performance grid represents but one of many tools that keep the flow of anxiety humming along under neoliberalism. Others abound, and are now such a familiar feature of our working and emotional lives that we scarcely notice how routinely they derange our basic sense of self: there’s the rollback of ongoing employment through the gig economy, the explosion of applications (LinkedIn, for instance, turns its users—even the employed ones—into constant job applicants), zero-sum performance assessments such as Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, just-in-time shift scheduling, entrepreneurial kindergartens, and many more. All of these systems encourage us to view others’ achievements as our own setbacks, to individualize completely all successes and disappointments.
[...] We all know that those at the top play by different rules, and that for most people, consequences can be wildly out of proportion to their blunders. At least under feudalism, this discrepancy was out in the open. Yes, it was unjust, but it also couldn’t be denied. What’s special about capitalism, and its neoliberal version in particular, is how most of us must accept that each and any of our individual missteps justifies all calamity that befalls us, no matter how ruinous. The location of all social problems onto individuals has now reached preposterous proportions. It used to be that people’s hardships owed to their not studying hard enough or having a rap sheet for smoking weed in the 7-Eleven parking lot. Now, ordering avocado toast at brunch is the vice that justifiably closes someone out of the housing market forever. Meanwhile, today’s glorified feudal lords continue committing fraud and torture—or just go on lying and bumbling their way into greater wealth and political glory.
Anxiety, and especially depression, as the late social critic Mark Fisher noted, often have social causes, but we are led to believe that we suffer individually and must struggle alone. Fisher’s point is that we are prevented from even considering such conditions as social. The treatments on offer, the most common ways to discuss recovery—therapy and pharmaceuticals—are essentially solo journeys that patients undertake. Against this hyper-individualist vision of psychic healing, we do well to highlight Fisher’s core insight that the tools we are given skew how we understand the world and our place in it. Language, typically the most essential method by which we articulate our affective life, can be a most insidious means of our own oppression if co-opted by those who would exploit us.
There is a reason why re-emergent words and phrases like “solidarity,” “class consciousness,” “mass movement,” “organize,” and “collective struggle,” sound old-fashioned and in need of a good dusting-off. They didn’t simply fall out of vogue; they were aggressively obsolesced in our everyday lives by a variety of interests—employers, corporations hungrily eyeing public assets—determined to alienate us from each other in the interest in marketizing our souls for their own benefit. In return, they bestowed to us a self-oriented language of supposed care, that was never really meant to liberate us from the sources of our anxiety and depression. It’s only there to blunt the pain temporarily—long enough to enable us to move on to the next TaskRabbit assignment, Uber client, or briskly managed election cycle.