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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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