Monday, December 05, 2005
(9:35 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
I Love Capital
Le Colonel wrote something good recently, disputing Zizek's claim that populism is bad.The universalization of the middle class European lifestyle's material conditions will drain that lifestyle itself of desireability and interest and life.Having recently started a job -- something that, in context, I am quite glad about, even though it is finally a pretty stupid job -- and also having gone through some periods of unemployment and near fiscal insolvency, I have often had occasion to wonder why a more leisurely life isn't possible, why, for instance, I can't just have a few years off to study without having to sell my labor in order to enrich some capitalist. (I suppose in theory I could, assuming I had waited until I got into a fully-funded program, but then one is confronted with the option of either having one's labor exploited by the university or, again, finding some shit job.) The system needs people to be unemployed, so why not just take volunteers, rather than arbitrarily drafting people (or claiming that it's random, but really using racial profiling)?
Zizek, movie buff, is one of these people who have been convinced by this theme of American cinema. Be suspicious of anyone proposing to construct any system which will guarantee heat, hot water, food, shelter, attractive utile architecture involving public art. Any image of a world without teeming slums and plenty of violence and the constant risk of destitution or execution is sinister, soul-deadening, Hitlerian. The material life of the prosperous few in capitalism is really a hell; not something to spread to everyone but something to abolish.
There's always a sinister, despotic intellectual behind the scenes in such places, the dark side of the Enlightened Individual out to rationalize and systematize humanity out of all individuality. And the tragic thing the genre laments - its 'problem'- is the 'Populism' which allows such nefarious plans for the equal distribution of leisure and material comforts to succeed. People are such sheep they'll be content in such conditions; they'll make that bargain; in their leisure and security they'll become creepily serene and undesiring; ultimately they will have to be saved from their material abundance, which is the cause of their spiritual slavery and rot, by the vigorous, quirky barbarians who'll blow everything up, who will free them from the refrigerators and electricity and plumbing which are enslaving them. Expropriation, the reclaiming of the commons, is never an option.
Risk! Danger! Struggle for survival! This is the only dignified condition for human beings.
Of course these assumptions, this paradigm, has its kernal of almost-but-not-quite-truth. And it always comes packaged in an irresistably attractive humanism, usually equipped with a love story which reminds us that a little pain is part of a lot of pleasure. Very often the narrative discovers that the engineers of the utopian society started out 'meaning well' but the arrogance with which they assumed power over others, and saw individuals as mere instruments and building materials of an Ideal Of Community, twisted the initial benevolence of their project - via a process of abstraction, of the marginalization of concrete and material and the affect it inspires - into malignant tyranny. Well, just so, one says. But is the jacuzzi itself really the instrument of the tyranny, imbued with the power to control its producers?Does the commodity conceal a tyrant genie? Can nothing be expropriated, must 'freedom' be sought in the wild, in propertyless, hungry exile, as for the escaped slave on the flight to Canada? The price of freedom is to leave all the wealth one produced behind with the baddies? Or burn it? Such tales, regardless of the variation of their details (some lean 'left,' some 'right') are really just recounting the founding myth of the expulsion from the common which 'freed' labour for the capitalist market. American cinema tells this exhilirating liberation story over and over as an escape from the slavery of material security.
It's a cunning operation, this construction of the destitute fugitive as the model of individual liberty, leaving the market the only socially ordering force capable of nourishing the individual as a body without enslaving its soul...the market then as the saviour whose mechanisms guarantee the thriving individual, with mental, physical and emotional liberty and access to physical and imaginative stimulation, all that which in reality capitalism relentlessly destroys. This common propaganda is so effective because it ostensibly champions what we champion - the body, creativity, loyalty, liberty - and admires what we admire, but explains the world with adept deceits regarding the pursuit of these values and that happiness, persuading us that all this can only be had at the price of the common and its bounty.
We seem to be continually told that we are in a double bind:
- Only the capitalist mode of production is able to produce consistently rapid growth in the wealth of the world.
- The instant anyone other than the capitalists has control over that wealth, it will disappear.
This renunciation of the wealth of the earth -- are we expecting to find our reward in heaven? Or moral dividends today? That's the infuriating thing -- the moralizing discourse. The supposedly morally superior system is the one where we know for a fact that people are going to starve to death, the one where an endless succession of lives are wasted on meaningless labor that is extorted from them because there is now no longer a way to "live off the land." In one of my theology classes, we were talking about Karl Barth's socialist commitments, and one of my classmates -- who hoped to be able to parlay the skills gained in obtaining his MA in theology to become a "theological consultant" to parishes, apparently unaware that virtually all ministers in his denomination had a masters degree already, the MDiv -- claimed that if people were not satisfied with the contracts offered by their employers, they had the free choice to seek employment elsewhere. The argument seemed obscene to me then, and it still does now that I have accepted the first job that came along. Leaving out of the equation my option to either beg from my parents (who are not guaranteed to have anything to give me) or to go further into non-negotiable, non-dischargeable student loan debt, I don't feel like I had many options. Even if there is a chance I might get some higher-paying freelance job, I can't afford to wait as long as it would take them to pay me. And here I am, a white male with a masters degree -- my ability to show up on time and do basic tasks has been documented by an accredited degree-granting institution, and people are not arbitrarily suspicious of me based on the color of my skin. When people want to talk about the "choices" faced by people in the inner city, I feel like I'm talking to space aliens.
The "job" -- I've heard that in many foreign countries, they simply use the English word, because nothing in their own language quite corresponds to the experience of a "job." Our masters now don't supply us with food and shelter -- such would be totalitarian -- they supply us with jobs. Manna from heaven, jobs! A large number of jobs, to be distributed in the most morally upbuilding way! If we're really righteous, perhaps the lords of the manor will reward us with enough money to pay back the money they loaned to us at exhorbitant rates!
