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(I say ‘official’ hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)
High neoliberalism leads to AUTHORITARIANISM. As the exploitation of labour and increased inequality leads to a disgruntled, apathetic public, which demand change via picket & protest. Not good for the bourgeoise thus business employs state to quell public (soft & hard powers,) gradually create authoritarianism.
The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new.
Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.
Tradition demands antithesis to survive.
No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it.
In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.
Capitalism materialises (you on praise aesthetic) tradition (artifacts were not praised by aesthetic, instead had a deeper intrinsic worth, ie a spiritual/supernatural, fitting in, integrally to a culture.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.
Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.
This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought
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The Last Man by Neitzche, is one who has eroded his beliefs so much, reduced his expectations so much, and reduces his need to react by so much, that he is weakened by his self-awareness. He no longer reacts, which erodes his culture. Is cut down by a society which reduces everything to a price tag. Why should he act when it does not bring him any material gain?
Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.
Manufactured belief via subversion and incorporation.
Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that ‘the role of L.A. noir’ may have been ‘to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus’.
Fiction as a TOOL ushering in new ideologies.
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.
So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.
Yet it is not capitalism but protest itself which depends upon this figuration of the Father;
A protest needs a subject or individual of malevonance in order to be truly effective. Good PR allows the 'father' to fade into obscurity. We dont blame elites for our problems, we blame the figure heads of the system. This system relies on 'elected scapegoats' to survive, i.e, presidents and prime minsters. If there was no govt, elites would need someone else to blame - therefore minorities.
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
An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact.
Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.
Business ontology of capitalism. Privatisation is presented as natural. A race to the bottom is presented as a natural course. But in reality, this doesnt need to be.
It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic.
These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’.
MO of neoliberalism: make money though things which previously were unprofitable. In doing so, you paint the change as an advancement in practicality, whereas in reality the privatisation makes it worse for the majority. I.e, tge current state of tge NHS. It is currently public, but clearly devolving to private affairs contra public efficiency.
The reality principle itself is ideologically mediated; one could even claim that it constitutes the highest form of ideology, the ideology that presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological).
Ideas which present themselves as natural and non-ideological, are often the most ideological (the highest form,) this is because ideology rely on adoption into Common practise. When people can easily, naturally adopt it - they'll no longer see ideas but action.
So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.
The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.
Any belief that the free market can solve the Real of climate catastrophe, is entirely naive. Markets rely on the constant accumulation and processing of resources, regardless of whether its a green market-based initiative or not- there is zero compatability between markets and the environment.
The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.
Insecurity via productivity and financial stress is a Real of capitalism.
While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate.
reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.
Anger expressed passively. People dont understand the source of their issues. Instead tgecreal source is neoliberalism.
I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.
Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Capitalism thrives off making people stupid. Hedonic depression.
Complex things require time to tackle. There is simply no time or energy to tackle nietzche, there is a market competition for attention - eventually the probability of receptability to nietzche will diminish.
If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.
The physical feeling of a lack of attention, bugs wriggling under your skin, the need for something to fill the void, is a way in which capitalism controls us. We feel bad for not being productive- we consume to escape this guilt.
Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’,
This is one way in which education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field.
Education is one of the only fields which directly confronts the Reality of capitalism. Academic rigour and discipline does not mix with hedonic depression. It is arguably the source for neoliberalism's rise & and its fall (due to a stupid population.)
Echoing McCauley’s mockery of Hanna in Heat (‘How do you expect to keep a marriage?’), Sennett emphasizes the intolerable stresses that these conditions of permanent instability put on family life. The values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism.
How capitalism has eroded the family.
To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or ‘precarity’, as the ugly neologism has it.
Capitalism expounds labour fkexibilith and preaches the chase for uncertainty.
The consequence is, Marazzi argues, that post-Fordist workers are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the ‘house of slavery’: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.
Post fordism is life after slavery. Confusion.
The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.
In summario. Selfish capitalism / neoliberalism preaches material gain as the key to salvation.
Many have simply buckled under the terrifyingly unstable conditions of post-Fordism.
Financial InStAbility = mental instability
This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
When achievments become more important than quAlity of product.
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
Really Existing Capitalism is marked by the same division which characterized Really Existing Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless,
Customers might previously have known that the jewelry Ratners sold was poor quality, but the big Other didn’t know; as soon as it did, Ratners collapsed.
Yiu can never tell the truth about a product.
‘I know very well that things are the way I see them, that this person is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him’.
Such cheerfulness can only be maintained if one has a near-total absence of any critical reflexivity and a capacity, as he had, to cynically comply with every directive from bureaucratic authority.
Capitalism requires pure reflexability in order to be cheerful or happy. The only way you can do this is via an almkst impossible, super anti-cynasism. You cannot, at all costs, question what has been assigned to you, else you'll understand that everything is a farce. Reality must be easily fungible in order for capital to thrive, as reality catches up fast and deems certain action unsustainable. Constant adaption is constantgly required for capital.
What then dawns is the realization that no society has ever been as standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogenously. ... What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.
Post capitalism is characterised with perpetual change. There is so much micro change, that there is no macro/fundamental change ever again. Novelty relies on what was modern in the past. Nothing is truly new, its just a plastic reproduction of what once was. Nothing has really changed since the 90s. Styles change every 5 years. Minds don't/won't. Post modernism is just the reproduction of the modern. Nothing is new. Its a repeatable cycle. It caN effectively be forecast. What is happening now will happlen again, a self perpetuating cycle.
In her essay ‘American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization’, Brown
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.
Choice =\ freedom. Politics relies on a multiplitude of options to retsin power. Which is why you have two sides of the same coin.
Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se – as the bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated – but rather to particular uses of state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatism’s strong state was confined to military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare state held to undermine individual moral responsibility.
Neoliberalism employs neoconservatism for policing the labour force. Order is kept through the idea of a natural hierarchy insociety. Police become stronger as a means to bully people into a farce 'saftey'… the real reason is due to the need to delegitimise the general population so they can submit themselves to the super rich/ the capitalist system. Police are too strong and their purpose is to undermine liberties; not protect them.
It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power, the anger directed at it much like the fury Thomas Hardy supposedly spat at God for not existing.
Govt is there to take the blame for what recklessness business gets into.
voters blame the government for giving the powers away, rather than the companies for misusing them’.
In a pattern that quickly becomes familiar, the parents’ pursuit of the easy life leads them to accede to their children’s every demand, which become increasingly tyrannical.
There is no restraint on hedonism on post-modernism. What was once seen as immoral (to be excessively hedonised) is now normalised. Parents give into children which strive for hedonism, perpetuating consumerism, individuality and infantalism.
Partly this is an effect of the increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to refuse to occupy the ‘oppressive’ function of telling the child what to do.
Real consequences of longer work days. Lack of parents must be filled by hedonistic behaviour.
