Under New Management: Capitalism from Utopia to Dystopia

Inspired by this image, I am going with a giant donut theme for this post.

While I do not use the phrase much myself I have always been intrigued by the phrase "take as read" to refer to something that is assumed or taken as axiomatic rather than established. In academic contexts it can sometimes be useful to assume a particular interpretation rather than establish it, to lay out a baseline of understanding in order to move onto other things. In this particular case I am tempted to say, because I do not want to go into it here, that we can take as read that contemporary democratic society gets its image of the good life and its justification from capitalism. Capitalism provides us our image of "freedom, equality, and Bentham," to use Marx's phrase. Freedom is understood primarily as the freedom to purchase what we want; equality, understood as equality in the face of the same commodities, the McDonalds I eat is the same McDonalds that Donald Trump eats, and Bentham because we are all motivated by self interest. 

Moving beyond the Marx passage I would like to sketch out three different versions of the image of capitalism, or more exactly, of the market legitimates both capitalism and the existing social order. The first is from Fredric Jameson, where it shows up in that Jamesonian way, in which the asides and digressions are as important as the points themselves, in a book on Hegel. In that book Jameson briefly makes the point that if we want to think in terms of the Hegelian problem of recognition then it is the world of consumer society where we feel recognized and are recognized in return. As Jameson writes, 

"It is thus scarcely a distortion to posit the humanized world of consumer society as that externalization in which the subject can find itself most completely objectified and yet most completely itself. The contradiction begins to appear when we set this cultural dimension alongside the legal and political levels of late capitalism: for it is with these that the Kantian ethical citizen ought to identify himself, according to the theory, and in these that he ought to be able to recognize his own subjectivity and the traces of his own production. But this is precisely what does not obtain today; where so many people feel powerless in the face of the objective institutions which constitute their world, and in which they are so far from identifying that legal and political world as their own doing and their own production.”

We get our sense of identity from brands and logos because we can recognize these brands and logos as having their own identity, of possessing qualities. Sometimes we might find the brands we idolize to be at odds with our values, when a company makes a statement about BLM or hires a trans spokesperson, but we can always find another brand that expresses who we are. There is even a pro-gun coffee company. Woke capital and MAGA capital vie for our attention and money.  

The Simpsons 

Of course identifying with consumption, with our consumer choices necessarily effaces other aspects of our existence, namely work. Frédéric Lordon has argued that in contemporary politics the interpellation as consumer negates and marginalizes the worker. As Lordon writes, “The justifications offered for contemporary transformations in employment practices—from longer work hours (‘it allows stores to open on Sundays’) to competition-enhancing deregulation (‘it lowers prices’)—always contrive to catch agents by the joyful affects of consumption, appealing only to the consumer in them.” Every discussion of work, and working conditions, is framed in terms of how it affects consumers, higher wages become higher prices, a strike threatens Christmas and so on.

Of course no one with the exception of the very rich can just be a consumer. This brings me to my final point, and a bit of a dedication, Joshua Clover in his great little book on Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' song "Roadrunner" argues that the worker/consumer division is in some sense the defining division of modern culture. The pleasures of consumption, rock and roll and driving around in particular, exist to negate the pains of work. As Clover writes,

"The joy part is important, drinking and cruising, the separation of the car from the unsayable fact of the factory that produced it, the separation of the joyrider from the brutalized assembly line worker even if they must in truth be the exact same person, consumer and producer, the separation between the two figures existing only as a preferred fiction for bourgeois economics and perhaps a necessary fiction for the life of the worker if pleasure is to be experienced as something other than the B-side of misery, even if that means accepting the devastating division of your capacities into work and leisure with the corollary that you can never be a whole person. This division is a necessity for rock & rolls existence. I am trying to say, and so is the dream that you can stand outside of it. In some sense this is what the teenager means, not an age but a position. Sure school is a kind of factory...but this is what must in general be concealed for the romance of the teenage to blossom. You have a driver's license but no time card, not yet, and that is everything, physical speed but not the dreary commute."

Clover's remark has interesting resonances with Macherey's assertion that the split subject of modern, which is to say capitalist, society, is not split by language or the symbolic, but by the divide between being an owner of labor power and a work whose labor power has been sold. 

Iron Man 2 

That is a lot of reading material for a point that I wanted to take as read, as already established. What justifies the extended and somewhat elliptical reflection on the idea that capitalism, the consumer side of capitalism, provides our image of recognition, joy, and freedom is the fact that this image is at once political, economic, and cultural. As democracy is being eroded all around us, it is worth noting how many people were not really attached to democracy, at least as a political form, in the first place. (There is a great segment in Astra Taylor's documentary What is Democracy? where she interviews some Americans in their twenties, asking what does democracy mean to them. Their response is that they are more attached to the American Dream, to mobility and being able to buy more, than they are to any political system). For many people their image of freedom was not the freedom to protest but the freedom to purchase, their ideal of choice was not the choice of representatives but the choice of products. In the past few years we have seen this play out as the possibility of not being able to shop or eat at restaurants during the brief and partial lockdown phase of COVID stirred up more popular anger than the loss of an ability to criticize even a foreign government. 

What I really wanted to reflect on, however, is what happens when this image runs out, when pleasures of consumption are few and far between and work is multiplied and extended through life. To put this back in terms of Joshua Clover's image, the automobile is no longer caught between cruising and the commute. It now has a third function, driving for Uber or delivering food for Doordash. If consumption was our image of freedom then what happens when consumption, when our transactions on the market, feel less free, less like choices, and more like the daily frustrations of dealing with indifferent corporations. 

As important as the division between consumer and producer is for understanding capitalist economics, politics, culture, and even psychology, it is not the only division. Or, more to the point it is possible to argue that "one divides into two." The producer side of the relation is caught between alienation and interpellation. Work is both a frustrating experience of powerlessness and an experience of power and agency. Consumption too is an experience of freedom and choice on one side, and powerlessness on the other. We tend not to think about the latter, and often relegate our images of inefficient bureaucracies to the public sector, and government workers, to work in another Modern Lovers reference. Hence all the stale jokes about DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles(to stick with the automobile example) and the long line to get a driver's license. However, I would argue that as much as these images reinforce the ideology that the market is efficient and government inefficient, they fail to capture the reality of our actual experience. Anyone who has ever dealt with an airline after their flight has been cancelled knows that the real masters of inefficiency and alienation are private corporations. As much as we tell ourselves that corporations are responsive to our needs and desires, reflecting them back to us in commodities that seem to reflect our wishes before we could even imagine them like so many different Oreo flavors, corporations are often "too big to care," especially those that occupy a monopoly or virtual monopoly in their area, like airlines and cable companies.

Despite their claims of efficiency, the DOGE cuts to various departments from education to social security and Medicare will undoubtedly produce more frustration and alienation, not to mention actual deaths. People will find themselves on hold for long hours, unable to get answers to important questions, and so on. Organizations that protected us from disease, extreme weather, and contaminated products will be gutted to the point of being useless, making life nastier, more brutish, and shorter. Many will be angry, and some will connect this frustration with the cuts and Trump's policies, but many will just accept them, the same way that they accept that a cancelled flight means sleeping on the floor of an airport. Or the way that we all just accept the fact that the price of things around us go up, as the qualities get worse. All of this just becomes the way of the world in capitalism, which produces constant frustration but only rarely does that bubble up to actual indignation. 

Which is to say that perhaps capitalism provides both our image of utopia, of freedom and equality, and dystopia, of powerlessness and frustration. What connects these two images despite their apparent opposition is their common denominator, the isolated individual. Consumers and workers, both sides of the divide, are individuals first and foremost, bearers of individual labor power or shopping power. Which is to suggest that perhaps the way out of the bind of capital's utopia and its dystopia, the freedom of choice and the reality of subjection, is to create another utopia, less individual and more collective. 

Posted in memory of Joshua Clover.