A Light Through the Cracks (Fisher's Ghosts, Part 7)
18th and Vine in Kansas City at 9:05 PM. Image posted by Reddit user KCattattam. Used without permission.
I’ll be honest with you: I’m sick of talking about the disease and its social and political effects. I’m an English teacher, and my thoughts are, honestly, probably not all that deep. That being said, I’m also a gadfly and can’t bring myself to be quiet.
A while ago, I said that I was done with the Fisher’s Ghosts series.
Mark Fisher, wearing the face of someone who can see the future. Photo by Georg Gatsas / Verso Books.
Sadly, I feel it necessary to return to the series. Some people on social media have questioned whether this current situation signals an end to Capitalist Realism – the widespread blockage that prevents us from imagining a future beyond capitalism.
I’ve heard the comment that what we’re basically seeing now is a dry run for a general strike – what would happen if people just refused to show up for work. The hand-wringing among the rich and powerful in the United States is certainly telling: it prompted my last piece by showing that there’s the assumption that society exists to serve the economy. Some commentators on the right have voiced the opinion that it should be considered acceptable that up to 3% of the population of the USA dies so that the economy could get back up and running.
For the record, this is essentially the statement that roughly 9,816,000 Americans should die to keep the engines of capitalism running. This is an exterminist position – a genocide in the name of the markets.
Fisher commented that under Societies of Discipline, people are transformed from whole people into the figure of the worker-prisoner (the factory worker who labors in an oddly carceral setting, enclosed and immiserated.) He followed this up by stating that the analogous figure in Societies of Control are the “debtor-addicts.” But as with everything in the Society of Control, the boundaries have come down and the mechanisms of control have become evaporated and all-encompassing.
Reposted on Reddit from @mikeapedia101
We live paycheck-to-paycheck to pay landlords living rent-day-to-rent-day to pay banks living mortgage-payment-to-mortgage payment. It’s an oddly feudal arrangement, now that I think about it.
But it’s a feudalism built on this figure of the debtor-addict.
We have now entered the “Trainspotting” phase of Capitalism.
(As a caveat: our stance here at Broken Hands Media is that addicts are not inherently bad people. Addiction is not a moral issue. It has medical, social, environmental, and psychological dimensions, but addicts are suffering from a condition. That being said, addiction is bad, and I say this as someone who struggles – sometimes not as hard as I should – with compulsive behaviors.)
To be alive is to need things. Air. Water. Food. Shelter. Social interaction. By necessity, there must be a differentiation between hunger and addiction. When these natural needs become psychologically displaced to something else, we have one of the key characteristics of addiction.
People work to secure money – the de-and-reterritorialized symbol that allows us to fill these needs: I wish there was a commonly acknowledged alternative to this system, but that’s Capitalist Realism for you – and eventually we substitute money, in our minds, for these basic needs. It’s at this point that the condition of the debtor-addict becomes, if not inevitable, then at least likely.
Because we have advertising: our desires are captured by the machinery of the market, and are redirected. We enter into debt to serve the addictions that are instilled in us. So we pursue tchotchkes, widgets, and trinkets with the fervor once reserved for pursuing an antelope across the savanna.
But this is only part of the problem: in truth, Fight Club said all of this back when Fight Club was relevant. The real problem is that the logic of the behavior of the individual has been reproduced upward on out postmodern chain of being: groups of people now engage in the same endless addictive cycle of chasing their high.
It’s not just that we are debtor-addicts. It’s that we are debtor-addicts employed by debtor-addicts who are contractually obligated to still other debtor-addicts.
Gilles Delueze once pointed out that nothing ever died from contradictions. Americans don’t seem to see the problem with voting for the current power structure and still demanding robust safety nets to be put up to support people through the Covid-19 pandemic. They think that they can demand support and get it while still voting people into power that don’t think they should be supported.
The people currently in power see this as an opportunity to give a blank check to people who think you deserve nothing. For them, a crisis is nothing but a way to make the system function worse for the average person. It’s the disordered thinking of an addict.
The worst thing you can do in the depths of an addiction is feed that addiction. Feeding that addiction is also the easiest decision to make when in that state. So what happens if we go cold turkey on capitalism? Chain ourselves to a metaphorical radiator and try to sweat it out?
Well, first of all, you’d have to get enough people go along with it. A very limited number of people are engaged in the essential businesses, and they have a good reason to seek better conditions. This might seem, outwardly, like the time is ripe for them to go on strike.
Of course, there’s also a legion of potential scabs. There are many food service and retail workers who are out of work now, and it makes sense for them to seek some kind of way to support themselves. We can’t fault people for not wanting to starve.
The text in question.
I think our real answer lies in the subtitle of Capitalist Realism: “Is there no alternative?”
We need to answer this question with defiance. If we want to make this situation better, we need to prove that there is an alternative. Whether this takes the form of a militant union or a fluid swarm of mutual-aid organizations doesn’t matter to me – I’m not really equipped to answer it.
Nothing ever died from contradiction, but a contradiction – we can’t work because we can’t go out in public :: we have to work to pay our bills to live – is a gap. It is a chink in the enemy’s armor. We need some tool to lever open that gap.
Despite my martial metaphor, I’m not whole-hog on revolution as the answer. Before this crisis came about, I was actually thinking about writing a piece criticizing the tendency among American leftists toward dismissing everything other than immediate armed revolution as invalid. I still feel skeptical about the milennarian revolutionary messianic tendencies I see there.
What we need isn’t revolution. I’m not certain it’s wholly reform. I think there is a third option between and beyond revolt and reform that leads out of the current situation. My current thinking is aimed at a rehabilitation of the body politic through the construction of dual-power and mutual aid, hidden within the margins.
My reasoning is simple: I live in Missouri (pronounced homophonically with “misery” – sorry to everyone who says it wrong,) and our governor, essentially, on this issue refuses to govern. There is only so much that our municipal government in Kansas City can do. Those of us who live here need to practice mutual aid – while also practicing social distancing – and try to help provide for one another because nothing above the city level is working properly. The State and Federal government is dysfunctional and depraved. They’re not the enemy, though: they’re cowards, fools, and addicts existing in a state of abjection who can’t do what’s necessary, and were they not a danger would be deserving of compassion.
Yes, even them.
So it’s not a chink in the armor.
It’s a gap, and it’s narrow, but maybe we can make it wider. Maybe we can open up this contradiction a little and try to crawl through into a world that we didn’t think we would ever reach. But I know for a fact that it’s not worth going if not everyone has a chance to come along.
Because I think that we shouldn’t replicate the vices of the other side: Not three percent. Not a third of a percent. Nothing but no one left behind is acceptable. If they decide to stay in this state of capitalist abjection, there’s nothing we can do to make them come along, but they have to be removed from power. And, to tell you the truth, if a member of the bourgeois wants to cast aside their privilege and unlearn what they’ve been taught, I think it’s necessary to let them come.
Capitalist Realism effects all of us, and it’s not dead, but it is cracked. It’s up to us to widen the gap.
It’s up to us to fashion a tool that will help us escape.
※
If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference.