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© Jonathan Rutherford 2007
We are making a left alternative. A story, cultures, ways of living and
looking at the world that can move people into political activity. The purpose
of the Cultures of Capitalism seminars is to think analytically about this
task.
What are we up against?
We need an analysis of contemporary capitalism. Without this analysis a
left politics will fail to recognise what and who are our adversaries.
The global rise of liberal market capitalism and its ideology of neo-liberalism dating back to the 1970s was a response to a crisis of profitability. It was a hegemonic project that aimed to:
It eradicated socialism from public discourse and defeated the left politically
and culturally.
A quick analysis
In the past imperialism was a principle instrument of accumulation. Today
capitalism no longer has the same scope for external expansion. It must
also expand 'inwardly' into non-market social spheres. For example:
Paulo Virno argues that the productive force of post-fordist, knowledge
driven economic activity is ‘the life of the mind’. Not just
cognition, but also intuition and the unconscious. Openness to emotion and
the capacity to feel are utilised as economic functions. Production is about
creating desiring consumers who can be mined for their habits, dreams and
forms of knowing as part of the process of inventing symbolic meanings and
new ideas.
Education plays a central role in producing these new means of commodity
production. Universities and schools function to realise individual productive
potential. Children are relentlessly tested to push up their productivity.
Teaching and lecturing are forms of communicative labour whose productivity
must be measured in a proxy market. Research funding is increasingly geared
to market value.
This culture of capitalism is about producing the subjectivity of the individual
as a form of economic potential or performativity. At school, in work, and
also in social life, it rewards individuals who comply with market-shaped
criteria to measure, judge and discipline themselves in pursuit of a self-reliant,
entrepreneurial form of life. It invades what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
calls the space of creative living. Here it requisitions the tools of social
life - intellect, learning, relational life, communication. It creates alienation
and carries with it a loss of meaningfulness.
Consumerism offers an antidote in the pleasurable pursuit of desire, but
boundless choices have the effect of disassembling human wanting and need.
What is claimed to be freedom to choose veers toward a nihilism of 'objectless
desire' and all kinds of compulsive and addictive behaviours.
This knowledge and cultural economy is only part of the story. Substantial
swathes 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.
The expansion in university places has largely remained within the middle
class. The fastest growing occupations are in low paid communicative labour:
data input, admin, face-to-face services in health, education and care.
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 poor, low-wage economies where primitive forms of
capital accumulation are creating a global proletariat in conditions of
violence and exploitation. The working class is forced to compete with this
global proletariat and the downward pressure on wage levels.
Capitalism has depoliticised class while heightening the inequalities between
classes. Individualised status-seeking consumption plays out class conflict
in a mass symbolic struggle for individual social recognition. Shame and
humiliation is distributed to those lower down the hierarchy. The pain of
failure, of being invisible or seen as inferior to those above, cuts a deep
wound in the psyche. The fear of redundancy is not just about the loss of
paid employment but the loss of a purposeful life and recognition as a social
being.
The uncertainty, the constant change and the decline of a sense of belonging
heralds the spectre of cultural destruction. Cultural difference becomes
the prism through which large sections of the white population experience
and react to their insecurity. Migrants exploited by unscrupulous employers
are seen as a threat to wage levels and as competition for housing and under-resourced
public services. They become the portents of future displacement and cultural
loss. 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.
A left hegemony
These conflicts around cultural difference and nation, class inequality,
and the flexible labour market articulate what Gramsci describes as the
sites where the incurable contradictions of the system reveal themselves.
New Labour will not confront them and so has opened the door to xenophobia,
racism and the fascist right. The left will only regain support amongst
the disenfranchised working class when it finds the courage to grapple with
the injustices and inequalities of class and the economic forces that produce
them.
But this alone will not be sufficient to forge a new hegemony. The predicaments
of affluence as well as the injustices of class have to be addressed. New
kinds of post-imperial national identities need to take root. Outside the
formal structures of representative politics there is an extraordinary array
of single issue campaigns and community actions, and also individual and
group pre-occupations with racism, the environment, well-being, sexuality,
the body, relationships, and ways of living. The left must be able to orchestrate
these micro- cultures and politics into an ensemble. To begin it must fashion
a symbolic language that resonates with the hopes and imagination of its
key constituents .
How can the left create new meanings out of old discredited definitions?
Aesthetic and cultural work is a central task of hegemonic politics. The
importance of media, intellectual knowledge, art, music, poetry, image making,
the spectacle, is that they give form to new sensibilities and forms of
consciousness. They can give recognition to the invisible, voice to the
silenced. They create meaning where none has existed before. They draw on
traditions of thought and practice in order to imagine a different kind
of future.
There is no pure or authentic realm of the imagination that will deliver
symbolic meaning. We are all entangled in the system of commodity exchange.
Isobel Armstrong describes four components of aesthetic life: playing, dreaming,
thinking, feeling. These are the resources that will give a left hegemony
its social fabric, its cultural identifications, and its forms of belonging.
They are also the resources claimed by knowledge and cultural capitalism
as it expands inwardly into the social sphere and human psyche. From its
imaginative conception to its realisation in culture, meaning will be contested.
The struggle for new cultural meanings of socialism will be most intense
in our dealing with cultural difference and searching for forms of interdependence
- a just balance between togetherness and individual autonomy.
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