Five Glimpses of the Abstract Parasite: On the Libidinal Dynamics of Really Existing Capitalism (Fisher's Ghosts, part 3)

John Maynard Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week. Now we have to answer work emails at 11PM on our day off. The border has vaporized.

This piece has taken several attempts, and I’m on the verge of giving up – I want to write about the libidinal dynamics that drive Capitalist Realism. The social, psychological, and other forces that make people invested in a system that has absolutely failed to provide for them. Why are people on the side of Really Existing Capitalism when it so gloriously fails to work?

There have been a number of pieces attempting to explain this: Back in 2011, David Graeber wrote a wonderful piece explaining – I would say proving – that Capitalism doesn’t drive technological development (outside of communication and surveillance technology), called “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, and his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory took aim at the assertion that it makes people feel fulfilled. The introduction of Mark Fisher’s own Ghosts of My Life – and the video lecture “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” – examines how it empties culture of the new, swallowed by nostalgia (we have a whole series on that topic.) Meanwhile, Capitalist Realism itself discussed the proliferation of bureaucracy (talked about in our series here) and depressive hedonia (talked about in our series here, by Edgar) and touched upon the environmental crisis (which I wrote about more extensively here.) By the time you finish reading this piece, there will be another two and a half thousand tweets explaining how impossible it is to earn your way up to the status of billionaire within the course of a human lifetime.

I feel like each individual step in this intellectual journey is uncontroversial, but as soon as you lay it all out for people and take it to the logical conclusion, the spittle begins to fly. The question, when you get down to it, is why are people invested in a system that does very little but generate joy for an ever-shrinking slice of the population and misery for the vast majority?

This is a classic example of a hyperobject: a system or phenomenon too extensive to be observed or held in the mind. With the caveat that these are sketches of the same thing from different angles, I’m going to look at a number of angles of this system of Really Existing Capitalism. I think all of these are true and there are rhizomatic cross-connections between them — each sketch is a slice, because there is no complete picture.

The Shittiest Religion

Honestly, the creepy symbolism is already there.

I was in school for eighteen and a half years, and for sixteen of those years, I went to a Catholic school, and for twelve of those years, I had to regularly attend mass. For those not in the know, the centerpiece of a Catholic mass is communion, marked by the transubstantiation of the host – little disks of unleavened bread – and wine into the flesh and blood of god.

As a caveat, I’m not Catholic anymore. I’m not really anything.

This is given an idolatrous echo in the actions of the market, where we transubstantiate the actions of our flesh and blood into tokens of abstract value, which are then exchangeable for everything else. It is a sacramental action of capital.

Consider, also, the moralism: work hard and you can achieve samsara from the generational cycle of poverty. Work hard and ascend the ranks and, you, too, can become a billionaire, a modern-day god-king. People who don’t achieve? They’re sinners. People who do achieve? They’re god’s favorites. Those are the only two options.

How could it fail to be a religion? It is articulated in the language of debt and forgiveness. Our moral and our financial vocabulary come from the same source. It has its own sacred calendar, with its own holidays: Thanksgiving is declining and becoming Black-Friday-Eve; the high holy days of interactive media are E3 in late summer; on tax day we account for our sins.

Economics began as the philosophical study of the political economy. Political economics grew out of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy was a secularized branch of theology. Economics has its root in theology, and now we discuss the market like it is some kind of vengeful, capricious god that inflicts feast and famine however the whim strikes it.

In this version of things, Marxism functions similarly to the Protestant Reformation, challenging the hegemony of a particular line of thinking – and Social Democracy and Keynesianism function as a sort of counter-reformation, an attempt to allow the orthodoxy to steal some of the rebellion’s momentum. The difference between these schools is the same as the difference between these religions, when it should be a scientific matter.

But economics – especially neoclassical economics – is about as scientific as intelligent design. If intelligent design were the only thing that you were allowed to discuss in your class on evolutionary biology and mentioning other theories – be they Lamarckian, Darwinian, or otherwise – would get you laughed out of the classroom.

Every Man a Pharaoh

For the record, the tendency of chimpanzees or lobsters to develop hierarchies isn’t necessarily a reason to embrace hierarchies as naturally good. That’s called the naturalistic fallacy.

In episode 77 of Behind the Bastards, “The Bastard Manifesto”, journalist and comedian Robert Evans proposed that strict hierarchy is the most natural arrangement for human societies. That is, that we are hard-wired for social hierarchies. He also points out that being a high status individual seems to lead to something like brain damage: being in power tends to lead to the atrophy of the faculties that allow us to gain that power.

Evans proposes that egalitarian social arrangement is a technology that our ancestors developed, both to control the damage that power does to those holding it and the exploitation that comes from these hierarchies. This led to an inversion of the default situation, with egalitarian societies becoming the most common arrangement and a tiny sliver of the population living in hierarchic societies. A reversal happened at some point, and it began to spread like a plague.

We lost this technology, and it led to the formation of raiding tribes, imperial and feudal states, and periodically there have been attempts to reinstitute the technology of egalitarian arrangements. Our modern capitalist state is a decentralized adaptation of the hierarchic arrangements that came beforehand. Anyone who acquires enough capital (status markers) wins the right to dominate and abuse others through the exchange of these markers of status, and it is only by imagining that they will one day accrue enough status markers to, in turn, abuse and dominate that placates people: they think they’re waiting their turn, but it’s an evolutionary remnant.

There is a technique I’ve heard about indigenous people in the amazon using to trap monkeys: they place a piece of fruit inside a hollow gourd, with a hole large enough for a monkey’s hand to be stuck through, but not for the hand and the fruit to be removed through simultaneously. Thinking that it will get the fruit, the monkey refuses to let go, even when the hunter approaches with the knife drawn.

In short, everyone thinks that they’ll become boss one day, but simple mathematics proves that’s impossible. Only a small number of people get to be the boot; everyone else stays an ass.

God forbid you say there should be no boots.

Shock Treatment

Image associated with an article from the Economic Times about the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.

Now, an often-quoted figure is that communism (the most popular alternative) has killed about ninety-four million people. This figure comes from the Black Book of Communism, a document with many problems – the principle author, Stéphane Courtois, is reported by a number of contributors to have been obsessed with reaching a figure of one hundred million deaths, and a number of contributors have distanced themselves from it as a result.

Moreover, M. Courtois includes Nazis in that figure, and we all know that Nazis don’t count.

But still, one might ask, is sixty-five million better than ninety-four million? Only academically.

That being said, consider the horrors of the colonization of the Americas, New Zealand, and Australia; the Atlantic Slave trade; The Congo Free State; the mismanagement of India by the British, including the completely engineered famine of 1943; the death toll of Operations Condor and Ajax, among others; the deaths caused by western industrialism; the contemporary crises of health care and addiction. The Bloody Ledger of Capitalism is four centuries thicker, and I would argue that it contains some of the worst atrocities ever committed. The number of deaths is staggering, even without counting Nazis, like Courtois does.

A perfect microcosm of this is found in the contrasting stories of Chernobyl and Bhopal. In Chernobyl, some forty people died, and it was made off-limits to the public. In Bhopal, Union Carbide messed up and killed at least thirty-eight hundred people, and possibly as many as sixteen thousand. People still live in Bhopal.

But because one was managed by “the Soviet Union” and the other was managed by “Union Carbide”, the former is the fault of “communism” and the latter is the fault of…?

No one ever said Capitalism. We have bureaucracy to defray responsibility.

Fear of Flight

Sure, maybe one day we’ll move beyond money, but not now, right? Consider: Jean-Luc Picard is closer to being the 24th century equivalent of a superstar in hobbyist circles than he is the captain of an air craft carrier. His dream is commanding a starship, and so the incredibly resource-rich civilization he’s part of (they can make anything they want instantaneously!) gave him a chance to fulfill that dream.

Of course, I know people who are going to call me a communist for suggesting that Capitalism is as bad as Communism, and use that as grounds to dismiss my opinion (I’m related to a few of them). I’m just going to say now, to get the first jab in, that saying that is idiocy and they should be embarrassed to let the words slip past the gate of their teeth.

But these are supposedly the only two options: Marxism-Leninism and Free Market Capitalism. We’re so afraid to try anything but these two systems that obviously don’t work, and the former obviously works worse than the latter. There is, after all, no alternative. Right?

There is no alternative because whenever someone steps out of line and tries to do something other than capitalism these days, we murder them. We’ve gotten pretty good at it, too.

We forced the Iroquois to sell their land. We watched as MacMahon burned the Paris Commune. We stood by as Franco rolled tanks through Catalonia. We allowed Pinochet to smash Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn. We let Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invade Rojava.

Every time we encounter a different arrangement, we are gripped by a murderous frenzy. Who let these people be free? How dare they. How dare they. How dare they.

This is why I’m so on about science fiction, and other media that explore imaginative solutions to very real problems. We’ve gotten to the point where there’s no one left to treat this fever: everyone is infected. And so we have to cure ourselves, and that means that we have to think our way out of it.

The Traumatic Loop of Capital

The Cuyahoga River caught on fire a dozen times. This photo is from 1948. We polluted the world so much that a river caught fire, and it’s not even the most polluted part.

Even those of us who despise capital and wish to escape the capitalist construction of reality buy into it on the level of our actions, and this forced complicity is traumatizing. In the second chapter of Capitalist Realism, Fisher writes that “to reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital . . . What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.” Which is then followed by the most famous passage out of the book:

“The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” (all from page 15)

The problem is that none of us can unplug from the system. We’re locked into the circuit, and it’s impossible for us to pull back – because why would the decision we have to make today effect whether or not we are anti-capitalist? We still have to work.

And that’s the thing that really messes you up if you’re against Capital: to survive, you have to buy into a thing that you hate and feel like a phony, or you have to go hungry and homeless and cold.

Just remember: failing to unplug completely from this system isn’t a sign of failure or a lack of commitment. It is just a sign that we need to search for new weapons.

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