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Jonathan Rutherford
© Jonathan Rutherford 2007
We are in search of a left alternative for the future. But there is no alternative out there waiting to be found or recovered. We will have to make it ourselves. The purpose of the Cultures of Capitalism seminars is to think analytically about this task.
The global rise of liberal market capitalism and its ideology of neo-liberalism was a response to the crisis of profitability in the 1970s. The aim of this new hegemonic project was to restructure national economies and societies in order to reduce the influence of labour and optimise capital accumulation. New ideologies and new forms of production, partly driven by innovations in information and communication technologies, have broken apart traditional class relations and cultures. How is class being restructured on a national and global level? Which social forces will emerge as the new agents of political change? In a globalised world what forms of political, social and cultural organisation will be a vehicle for this change? We need an analysis of contemporary capitalism and culture, and the impact of these on individuals, society, the planet. There are no clear signposts to follow. But as Rebecca Solnit says, getting lost is like the beginning of finding your way.
Wealth production in the UK has for a long time been dominated by the financial services industry. But as manufacturing has continued to decline, the cutting edge of change has been in the post-fordist, service, knowledge and cultural industries, driven by the new technologies. These have expanded rapidly - though large sections of the service industry retain key traditional features, e.g. low wages. These sectors are shaping the economic future with new forms of production and consumption, and these new forms are also being incorporated into the more traditional sectors of the economy. The rhetoric of a knowledge economy has been central to New Labour's economic strategies since the 1990s. The government has argued that the new conditions need radically new policies. Its 2001 White Paper on Enterprise, Skills and Innovation addressed the creation of a labour force of autonomous entrepreneurs rather than dependent employees, and announced the emergence of a new classless meritocracy. In reality education and a 'flexible' labour market have heightened class inequality as the class and social relations of production have been re-organised. Risk has been transferred from business and the state onto individuals.
A capitalism
of intimacy
An increasingly marketised state is used to facilitate new forms of
capital accumulation, extending markets and corporate profit making
into the public sector and non-market social spheres of life. Capitalism
in the core economies is expanding 'inwardly' into the psyche and emotional
life of the individual in order to utilise human potential. It has created
forms of communicative labour that function as transmitters of care,
information, symbolic meaning and learning. Openness to emotion and
the capacity to feel are utilised as economic functions. The production
process extends beyond output to conscript culture, knowledge and individual
affect. Promotional culture mobilises thinking, imagination and sensibility
as businesses attempt to capture customer loyalty. Businesses create
relational cultures in which consumers become co-producers of cultural
meaning, so helping to develop new markets. This is a capitalism that
seeks the intimacy of the consumer in order to embed commercial transactions
in personal and daily life. The industrial modernity of class and the
producer has given way to a more individualised society of the consumer.
Paulo Virno argues that the productive force of post-fordist economic activity is 'the life of the mind'. Not just cognition, but also intuition and the symbolic world of the unconscious where communication is non-verbal. Production is about inventing symbolic meanings and new ideas by creating desiring consumers who can be mined for their habits, dreams and forms of knowing. Just as early industrial capitalism enclosed the commons of land and labour, so today's knowledge-driven capitalism is enclosing the cultural and intellectual commons, the commons of the human mind and body, and the commons of biological life.
Communications and education have a central role for these new kinds of production. Schools and universities are subjected to continuous corporate reform in order to integrate them into the economic activity of the market. Their function is to realise individual productive potential and facilitate the restructuring of the class relations of production. Because communicative labour has no tangible end product, what counts as a measure of productivity is performance. Children are relentlessly tested to force up their productivity. At school, in work, and also in social life, a culture of capitalism rewards individuals who comply with market-shaped criteria to measure, judge and discipline themselves in pursuit of a self-reliant, entrepreneurial form of life. This culture of capitalism, with its life coaching, career counselling, success pursuing, and never-be-still trajectory, is about producing the subjectivity of the individual as a form of economic potential. It invades what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls the space of creative living, which is 'sacred to the individual'. Here, in the name of profit, or utility or function, it requisitions the tools of social life - intellect, learning, relational life, communication.
The promises of success and consumerism cast a veil of wishful dreams over the nihilism and inequalities created by this economic activity. There is no classless meritocracy. A majority of the UK population are peripheral to wealth creation and its productive forces - one in six leaves school unable to read, write or add up properly. Social mobility has diminished and life chances are still largely determined by class background. The post-fordist industries do not create significant employment. The fastest growing occupations are in low paid communicative labour: data input, admin, face-to-face services in health, education and care.
Class and consumption
The traditional working class in the UK, formed out of the industrial
revolution, has lost its economic role as the engine of wealth creation.
Manufactured goods are imported from a periphery of poor, low-wage economies
where primitive forms of capital accumulation, backed up by WTO rules
and bilateral trade agreements, are creating a global proletariat in
conditions of violence and exploitation. The working class, forced to
compete with this global proletariat in a flexible labour market, is
being caught in a vortex of Victorian-era casualised labour. Migrant
labour is used by employers to further deregulate the labour market
and drive down wages. The institution of work, once a source of collective
cultural identity, has become fragmented, making forms of class solidarity
difficult to organise. The spectre of cultural destruction intensifies
the economic insecurity. Class consciousness is displaced by the fear
of redundancy, not simply from employment but from life's purpose. This
threat to the integrity of the self generates anxieties over individual
status and the loss of recognition as a social being. The culture of
capitalism has depoliticised class while heightening the inequalities
and social gulf between classes.
In the society of consumers, class is developing a new lexicon of cultural domination and symbolic violence. Individualised status-seeking consumption enacts the old class conflicts and inequalities. Consumption offers the pleasurable pursuit of desire, but it is also a mass symbolic struggle for individual social recognition, which distributes shame and humiliation to those lower down the hierarchy. The pain of failure, of being a loser, of being invisible to those above, cuts a deep wound in the psyche. This is the culture of consumption that sustains the UK economy. It has been primed by readily available and cheap credit, which makes accessible a never-ending value chain of positional goods. The resulting personal debt has created a type of indentured consumption that requires never-ending work in a precarious labour market. With unprecedented levels of debt being bundled up and sold on as ever more arcane financial products, capitalism lays claim to future earnings as a means of capital accumulation. The profit is not only in the selling of products, but also in the lending to buy them.
The extension of the commodity form into non-market areas of life has privatised the public realm and made more public the private realm of personal life. It has eroded the boundary between what is social and what is governed by utility, and so threatens the relationships of care, association and community. Increasing levels of isolation and alienation are contributing to a near epidemic of stress and mental illness. The culture of capitalism disassembles human wanting and need, with its boundless choices and omniscient dreams of celebrity. What is claimed to be freedom veers toward a tyranny of objectless desire, an opaque and unbounded world that leads to all kinds of compulsive and addictive behaviours. Personal boundaries are more easily pierced by nameless fears and anxiety. What is inside and what is outside is no longer clear. It has become commonplace to feel one lives, so to speak, as a stranger outside the community.
Cultural difference is the prism through which large sections of the white population experience and react to their insecurity. Refugees and migrants are seen as the portents of still further displacement and cultural loss, competing for housing and under-resourced public services. Political antagonisms and culture wars around race, sexuality and religion attempt to construct boundaries of identity which will define a sense of belonging and entitlement. At stake in the transition from an investment in an imagined mono-culture to a capacity to live with multi-culture is the struggle for individual and cultural recognition. As Sue Gerhardt argues, 'we are dependent on what others see, and how much of our "being" they recognise'. Class inequality creates a paucity of recognition, and cultural difference becomes a focus for people's fear, paranoia and hatred.
A left politics
The counter culture of the 1960s - individual self-expression, anti-establishment
sentiment, emotional attunement to the world, the personal pursuit of
pleasure - was a reaction to the old industrial modernity and its confining
sensibilities. It has provided the cultural building material for post-fordist
forms of production and consumption. The change from a society of producers
to a society of consumers requires a new kind of political language.
The invasion of exchange value into society, and individual resistance
to it, is not, at present, agglomerating into set-piece battles of counterposing
classes. But entwined in and growing up through the attenuated conflict
around class and inequality is a multitude of skirmishes that defy the
old political categories. This can be seen not only in the extraordinary
array of single issue campaigns and community actions, but also in individual
and group preoccupations with race, identity and belonging; sexuality,
the body and emotions; and relationships and ways of living. A growing
level of political activity is global in its dimension, with the lead
often being taken from new forces emerging in the global south.
These political forces, both traditional and new, articulate the contradictions and conflicts of the social and class relations of contemporary capitalism. As Gramsci has described it, these are the sites where the incurable contradictions of the system reveal themselves. They give rise to micro-politics, which each in their way counter the culture of capitalism and new forms of commodification of labour power and social life. Their knowledge-making, their sensibilities, aesthetics, ethics and modes of critical consciousness, offer viable alternative cultures and politics to the economic values and priorities of liberal market capitalism. What is lacking is a collective cultural and political expression of these alternatives.
A left can be created in this conjunctural realm of political action and the forging of new languages and cultures. It will be a left of equality and social justice, but also of ethics and ideas, one which will capture people's imagination and offer viable alternative ways of living. It is in the searching for new kinds of interdependence - a liveable balance between togetherness and individual autonomy - that the struggle for new meaning is most intense. It is in these places, both local and global, new and traditional, that a left will emerge as a collective force. This is not about big tents and electoral fixes, but the deep and long business of creating a hegemonic politics.
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