Analyzing the anti-capitalist sentiment within me

[Milos Uzelac]

The desire for a new future order of things, substantially different from the present, is religious conviction at its core - the awaiting for the eventual coming of the Kingdom of God - in the external outside world rather than the internal personal sphere. Anti-capitalist sentiment, void of a precise and substantiated scientific analysis backed by empirical fact, becomes a religion in itself, a religion of opposition against an imagined external Other cause of evil and suffering seeking to rationalize and explain inner suffering within and caused by the self. It serves, paradoxically, as the opium for explaining to oneself the causes of his or her one's pervasive feeling of alienation from thy self, thy labor, and other's by numbing the actual inner and experiential alienation with a hyper-abstract extrapolation that sees the cause in an imagined imposed order of capitalism, in its perceived and imagined historical, societal and current economic form, while not being aware that it's a system you wilfully participate in everyday life via participation in capitalist exchange -

as the author, Mark Fisher poignantly points out: ''accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in the planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation.''

''The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us."

Capitalist realism, as the author Mark Fisher notes, in his book of the same title, is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. As Zizek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it.

What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism.

A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called "interpassivity": the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

"The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief."

"Capitalist ideology", in general, Zizek maintains, "consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of the inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange."

According to Zizek, "capitalism, in general, relies on this structure of disavowal."

"We believe money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

Corporate anti-capitalism wouldn't matter if it could be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. The so-called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism

Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than a political organization, there's a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met.

Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism."

[Milos Uzelac]

Quote from Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism book, Chapter 7: Capitalist Realism as Dreamwork and Memory Disorder, p. 60 and p. 61:

It wouldn't be surprising that profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms, the memory disorder which is correlative of this situation is the condition of theoretically pure anterograde amnesia.

Here memories prior to the onset of the condition are left intact, but sufferers are unable to transfer new memory into long-term memory; the new therefore looms up as hostile, fleeting, un-navigable, and the sufferer is drawn back to the security of the old. The inability to make new memories: a succinct formulation of the postmodern impasse...

If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork. When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the gaps and the lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us.

What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown picked up on when she argued that it is precisely dreamwork  which provided the best model for understanding contemporary forms of power. In her essay, 'American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization', Brown unpicked the alliance between neoconservatism and neoliberalism which constituted the American version of capitalist realism up until 2008. Brown shows that neoconservatism and neoliberalism operated from premises that are not only inconsistent but directly contradictory.

'How', Brown asks, 'does rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means (neoliberalism) intersect with one that is expressly moral and regulatory (neoconservatism)? How does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire? How do support for governance modeled on the firm and a normative social fabric of self-interest marry or jostle against support for governance modeled on church authority and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty, the very fabric shredded by unbridled capitalism?

 

But incoherence at the level of what Brown calls 'political rationality' does nothing to prevent symbiosis at the level of political subjectivity, and, although they proceeded from very different guiding assumptions, Brown argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political processes. As Brown claims,

'the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites... Frankfurt school intellectuals, and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom."

Extrapolating a little from Brown's arguments, we might hypothesize that what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism together was their shared objects of abomination: the so-called Nanny State and its dependents.

Edited June 10, 2021 by Milos Uzelac