Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (41 page)

The progress of alien or compensatory consumerism has its own internally destructive dynamics. It requires what Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ to be let loose upon the land. Daily life in the city, settled ways of living, relating and socialising, are again and again disrupted to make way for the latest fad or fancy. Demolitions and displacements to make way for gentrification or Disneyfication break open already achieved fabrics of urban living to make way for the gaudy and the gargantuan, the ephemeral and fleeting. Dispossession and destruction, displacement and construction become vehicles for vigorous and speculative capital accumulation as the figures of the financier and the rentier, the developer, the landed proprietor and the entrepreneurial mayor step from the shadows into the forefront of capital’s logic of accumulation. The economic engine that is capital circulation and accumulation gobbles up whole cities only to spit out new urban forms in spite of the resistance of people who feel alienated entirely from the processes that not only reshape the environments in which they live but also redefine the kind of person they must become in order to survive. Processes of social reproduction get re-engineered by capital from without. Everyday life is perverted to the circulation of capital. The coalition of the unwilling in relation
to this forced redefinition of human nature constitutes a pool of alienated individuals that periodically erupts in riots and potentially revolutionary movements from Cairo to Istanbul, from Buenos Aires to São Paulo, and from Stockholm to El Alto.

All this rests, however, upon the possession of sufficient money, the crushing need for which persuades ‘previously unpaid strata of society to seek waged work’, which further increases ‘the need for compensatory consumption’. As a result ‘getting paid becomes the primary objective of the activity to the extent that any activity which does not have a financial compensation ceases to be acceptable. Money supplants other values and becomes their only measure.’ Along with this goes ‘an incentive to withdraw into the private sphere and give it priority, to the pursuit of “personal” advantages’. This then ‘contributes to the disintegration of networks of solidarity and mutual assistance, social and family cohesion and our sense of belonging. Individuals socialised by (alien) consumerism are no longer socially integrated individuals but individuals who are encouraged to “be themselves” by distinguishing themselves from others and who only resemble these others in their refusal (socially channelled into consumption) to assume responsibility for the common condition by taking common action.’
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Affections and loyalties to particular places and cultural forms are viewed as anachronisms. Is this not what the spread of the neoliberal ethic proposed and eventually accomplished?

But the more time has been released from production, the more imperative it has become to absorb that time in consumption and consumerism, given that, as was earlier argued, capitalist ‘economic rationality has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth’. The ever-present danger is that freely associating and self-creating individuals, liberated from the chores of production and blessed with a whole range of labour-saving and time-saving technologies to aid their consumption (microwaves, washing and drying machines, vacuum cleaners, to say nothing of electronic banking, credit cards and cars), might start to build an alternative non-capitalistic world. They might become
inclined to reject the dominant capitalist economic rationality, for example, and start evading its overwhelming but often cruel rules of time discipline. To avoid such eventualities, capital must not only find ways to absorb more and more goods and services through realisation but also somehow occupy the free time that the new technologies release. In this, it has been more than a little successful. Many people find themselves with less and less time for free creative activity in the midst of widespread time-saving technologies in both production and consumption.

How does this paradox come about? It takes a lot of time, of course, to manage, run and service all the time-saving household paraphernalia with which we are surrounded and the more paraphernalia we have the more time it takes. The sheer complexity of the support apparatus embroils us in endless telephone calls or emails to service centres, credit card and telephone companies, insurance companies and the like. There is also no question that the cultural habits with which we have surrounded the fetish worship of technological gizmos capture the playful side of our imaginations and has us uselessly watching sitcoms, trawling the internet or playing computer games for hours on end. We are surrounded with ‘weapons of mass distraction’ at very turn.

But none of this explains why time flies away from us in the way it does. The deeper reason lies, I think, in the structured manner in which capital has approached the issue of consumption time as a potential barrier to accumulation. Producing and marketing goods that do not last or easily become outdated or unfashionable, along with the production of events and spectacles that are instantaneously consumed, culminates, as was earlier argued, in an astonishing categorical inversion as consumers produce their own spectacle on Facebook. While the rents that accrue to capital from these forms of social media are vital, these forms of consumption also absorb an incredible amount of time. Communicative technologies are a double-edged sword. They can be wielded by an educated and alienated youth for political and even revolutionary purposes. Or they can so absorb time (while steadily producing value for others
like Google and Facebook shareholders) through idle chatter, gossip and distractive interpersonal banter.

Capitalist economic rationality is difficult if not impossible to refute when people’s lives, mental processes and political orientations are taken up and totally absorbed either in the pseudo busy-work of much of contemporary production or in the pursuit of alien consumerism. Getting lost in our emails and on Facebook is not political activism. Gorz has it right: ‘If savings in worktime do not serve to liberate time, and if this liberated time is not used for “the free self-realisation of individuals”, then these savings in working time are totally devoid of meaning.’
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Society may be moving towards ‘the programmed, staged reduction of working hours, without loss of real income, in conjunction with a set of accompanying policies which will allow this liberated time to become time for free self-realisation for everyone’. But such an emancipatory development is threatening in the extreme for capitalist class power and the resistances and barriers created are strong. ‘The development of the productive forces may of itself reduce the amount of labour that is necessary; it cannot of itself create the conditions which will make this liberation of time a liberation for all. History may place the opportunity for greater freedom within our grasp, but it cannot release us from the need to seize this opportunity for ourselves and derive benefit from it. Our liberation will not come about as the result of material determinism, behind our backs, as it were. The potential for liberation which a process contains can only be realised if human beings seize it and use it to make themselves free.’ Confronting collectively the multiple alienations that capital produces is a compelling way to mobilise against the stuttering economic engine that so recklessly powers capitalism from one kind of crisis to another with potentially disastrous consequences for our relation to nature and for our relations to each other. Universal alienation calls for a full-blooded political response. So what might that response be?

There is, I repeat, no such thing as a non-contradictory response to a contradiction. An examination of the range of contemporary political responses to universal alienation on the ground produces
a profoundly disturbing picture. The rise of fascist parties in Europe (particularly virulent and prominent in Greece, Hungary and France) and the organisation of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party with its singular aim to defund and shut down government in the United States are manifestations of deeply alienated factions of the population seeking political solutions. They do not shrink from violence and are convinced that the only way to preserve their threatened freedoms is to pursue a politics of total domination. This political current is supported and to some degree meshes with increasingly violent militarised responses to any and all movements that threaten to break through the walls of that repressive tolerance so crucial to the perpetuation of liberal governmentality. Consider as examples the unduly violent police repression of the Occupy movement in the United States; the even more violent response to ongoing peaceful protests in Turkey that began in Taksim Square; police actions in Syntagma Square in Athens that smack of the fascist tactics of Golden Dawn; the continuous police brutality visited on student protesters in Chile; the government-organised attack upon protesters against the unsafe labour conditions in Bangladesh; the militarisation of the response to the Arab Spring movement in Egypt; the murder of union leaders in Colombia and many more. All of this is occurring in the midst of a rapidly widening net of surveillance, monitoring and punitive legislative activism on the part of state apparatuses intent on waging a war on terror and liable to view any active and organised anti-capitalist dissent as akin to an act of terror.

There is widespread agreement on both the far left and the far right of the political spectrum in the United States that the state system as currently constituted is overreaching in its power and that this has to be fought against. This signals a widespread alienation from a state system that has historically taken on the task of trying to manufacture consent and social cohesion (usually out of an appeal to a constructed fiction about national identity and unity) across factional, even class lines. Foucault’s analysis of governmentality is helpful here. The autocratic, absolutist and centralised state bequeathed to the world in Europe after a phase of fiscal militarism
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to be adapted to bourgeois principles and practices, which meant adhesion to the utopian politics of an impossible laissez-faire. This transition was successfully accomplished in the English case by using freedom as a means to create governmentality (much as Amartya Sen later advocated for the developing world). This meant that the capitalist state had to internalise limitations upon its autocratic powers and devolve the production of consensus to freely functioning individuals who internalised notions of social cohesion around the nation state. Above all, they had to consent to the regulation of activity through the procedures of the market. Clear limits were placed upon centralised power. The politics of the Tea Party as well as those of the autonomistas and the anarchists in the United States converge in seeking to limit or even to destroy the state, though in the name of pure individualism on the right and some sort of individualistically anchored associationism on the left. What is particularly interesting is how the existing mode of production and its current political articulations define both the spaces and the forms of it own primary forms of opposition. The hegemonic practices of neoliberalism in both the economic and the political arenas have given rise to decentralised and networked oppositional forms.

The specifically right-wing response to universal alienation is both understandable and terrifying in its implications. It is not as if, after all, right-wing responses to these kinds of problem have not had massive historical consequences in the past. Can we not learn from that history and shape anti-capitalist responses more appropriate to a progressive answer to the contradictions of our times?

From time immemorial there have been human beings who have believed that they could construct, individually or collectively, a better world for themselves than that which they had inherited. Quite a lot of them also came to believe that in the course of so doing it might be possible to remake themselves as different if not better people. I count myself among those who believe in both these propositions. In
Rebel Cities
, for example, I argued that ‘the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold’. The right to the city, I wrote, is ‘far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and re-invent the city more after our heart’s desire … The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’
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Perhaps for this intuitive reason, the city has been the focus throughout its history of an immense outpouring of utopian desires for happier futures and less alienating times.

The belief that we can through conscious thought and action change both the world we live in and ourselves for the better defines a humanist tradition. The secular version of this tradition overlaps
with and has often been inspired by religious teachings on dignity, tolerance, compassion, love and respect for others. Humanism, both religious and secular, is a world view that measures its achievements in terms of the liberation of human potentialities, capacities and powers. It subscribes to the Aristotelian vision of the uninhibited flourishing of individuals and the construction of ‘the good life’. Or, as one contemporary Renaissance man, Peter Buffett defines it, a world which guarantees to individuals ‘the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life’.
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This tradition of thought and action has waxed and waned from time to time and from place to place but never seems to die. It has had to compete, of course, with more orthodox doctrines that variously assign our fates and fortunes to the gods, to a specific creator and deity, to the blind forces of nature, to social evolutionary laws enforced through genetic legacies and mutations, by iron laws of economics that dictate the course of technological evolution, or to some hidden teleology dictated by the world spirit. Humanism also has its excesses and its dark side. The somewhat libertine character of Renaissance humanism led one of its leading exponents, Erasmus, to worry that the Judaeo-Christian tradition was being traded in for those of Epicurus. Humanism has sometimes lapsed into a Promethean and anthropocentric view of human capacities and powers in relationship to everything that exists – including nature – even to the point where some deluded beings believe that we, being next to God, are
Übermenschen
having dominion over the universe. This form of humanism becomes even more pernicious when identifiable groups in a population are not considered worthy of being considered human. This was the fate of many indigenous populations in the Americas as they faced colonial settlers. Designated as ‘savages’, they were considered a part of nature and not a part of humanity. Such tendencies are alive and well in certain circles, leading the radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon to write a book on the question,
Are Women Human?
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That such exclusions have in many people’s eyes a systematic and generic character in modern society is indicated by the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of ‘the state of
exception’ in which so many people now exist in the world (with the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay being a prime example).
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