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123 pages

English

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Have you ever felt totalled?

This book provides a utopian vision which could replace the overbearing truth that capitalism encompasses the entirety of our lives, weaving deep into the fabric of all that it means to be human.

Through industrialised warfare, surveillance and commodification, deepening crises and ecological catastrophes, capitalism threatens the total destruction of human civilisation. But in amongst this wreckage there are still functioning parts which can be salvaged through the collective force of the human imagination and the mobilisation of the masses. To do so, we must realise a different future to the apocalypticism forewarned by scientists, prescribed by economists, accommodated by politicians and made spectacle by the entertainment industry.

This book asks how a utopian possibility is discernible through the power of human creation. Can it be realised when as a society we are in different ways materially, ideologically and libidinally bound to the capitalist machine of destruction?
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Year Zero

1. Materially Determined Apocalypse

2. The Three Orders of Apocalypse

3. The Double Helix of Dissatisfaction

4. Production Spiral

5. Consumption Spiral

6. Banquets of Worlds

7. Clash of Axioms

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

Economic Policy

Public Policy

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Marxist philosophy

General officer

Political economy

Theory

Labour economics

Economics

Business

General

Labor

Labour

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Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783712663
Langue	English

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Totalled
Totalled
Salvaging the Future from the Wreckage of Capitalism
Colin Cremin
First published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Colin Cremin 2015
The right of Colin Cremin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3438 7 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3437 0 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1267 0 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1268 7 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1266 3 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction: Year Zero Eros and Apocalypse Chapter Content
1.
Materially Determined Apocalypse Unstoppable Forces 57 Varieties of Apocalypse
2.
The Three Orders of Apocalypse The Real Order of Apocalypse The Symbolic Order of Apocalypse The Imaginary Order of Apocalypse
3.
The Double Helix of Dissatisfaction The Alienated Condition Circuits of Capture The Oedipalised Economy of Austerity
4.
Production Spiral The Consumer Society Does Not Exist The University Dilemma The Oedipalised Economy of Employability
5.
Consumption Spiral Libidinal Sponges Alienation as Consumer A Crisis of Consumption Biopolitical Culture Industry
6.
Banquets of Worlds No Man’s Land Relics of the Past Utopian Space and Time The World Without Capitalism
7.
Clash of Axioms State of Contestation Manifesto The Verdict
Notes Bibliography Index
Acknowledgements
First, I want to express my immense gratitude to David Castle and all the people at Pluto Press for enabling this book to happen. Thanks to the University of Auckland for grants and funds that helped me conduct research for the book. I would also like to thank Steve Matthewman, who has done so much for the department of sociology, and for me: a friend, comrade, and intellectual fellow traveller. I’d also like to offer a belated thanks to another colleague, friend – comrade – Bruce Cohen, and his partner Jessica Terruhn, for helping to make the transition to Aotearoa/New Zealand such a smooth and pleasurable one, the ever reliable Good Times Tsars. I have had the pleasure of teaching and supervising excellent students during the past couple of years. Particular mention should go to Eli Boulton, Bartek Goldman, Juliet Perano, Mediya Rangi and Dylan Taylor. A special thanks goes to Janet McAllister for her thoroughgoing and invaluable proofreading and critical commentary on the first draft of the manuscript.
Also, thanks to Tracey Sharp for the research she conducted for me. I could thank many other people here for a whole variety of reasons and can only apologise for the sake of brevity for not mentioning you by name. Finally, if anyone has more than any other borne the weight of anxieties and frustrations that go with working on a manuscript, it is Akiko, to whom in friendship and love I am indebted.
Introduction: Year Zero
At 4.7500 degrees longitude and 155.4000 degrees latitude you will find the Carteret Islands of the South Pacific. Made up of six atolls, they are inhabited by some 2,500 people. They lack access to basic infrastructure; there are no cars, shops or phones on the islands. Seline Netoi, who lives on one of the smaller atolls, survives on coconut milk and fish. Two metres of shoreline disappear each year. In 2009, the King Tide, which comes three times a year, completely covered the island. 1 Whether this is a result of sinking tectonic plates or climatic change is moot for those forced to leave the islands. Many have already evacuated; others refuse to leave. As Rufina Moi explains, ‘There is nothing better than home. Our treasure is this island. We think of our mothers and fathers and grandfathers who are buried on the island and we cannot leave them. We might as well die with them because we love our Carterets.’ 2 If the intensive exploitation of natural resources and their despoliation by industrial production, waste and warfare elsewhere in the world has a role to play, then what has happened here is a dispossession of land by abstract processes far removed in culture and geography from life on the islands. There is no accumulative moment after the fact of dispossession, just ocean. Neither a year zero for a twenty-first-century Marshall plan, nor a blank slate for private contractors to build on. Rising sea levels, desertification and radioactive soils make dead zones from which people have migrated and metaphors for the total loss we are threatened with by processes most of us are only dimly aware of. Totalled is about those processes or, more precisely, the relationships that bind the force of human subjectivity to a more abstract and destructive force threatening life not only in the South Pacific but throughout the world generally. It is a diagnosis of our material dependencies on, ideological affinities with, and libidinal investments in the forces and relations of capitalist production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The book examines how our drives and desires, crucial to the circulation and expansion of capital, is expended in work and consumption; it traces this expenditure in order to consider how desire is made to work for capital and what this means for the whole of human society.
Capitalism encompasses the totality of societal relations, weaving ever more intricately into the fabric of all that it means to be human. It is a system that totalises and which has upended the modernity project through industrialised warfare, surveillance, commodification and control. With ever deepening crises and ecological catastrophes it threatens the total destruction of human civilisation. But in amongst this wreckage there are still functioning parts, machines to be salvaged through the collective force of the human imagination and the total mobilisation of the peoples of this earth to realise a different future to the apocalyptic endings forewarned of by scientists, prescribed by economists, accommodated by politicians and turned into spectacle by the entertainment industry. The plight of the Carteret Islanders signal one kind of year zero, one in which, as with the clocks that ticked before the Hiroshima bomb, time comes to an abrupt halt. But there is another year zero, the end of one epoch and the beginning of another – the end of class history: Germinal, the beginning of the post-revolutionary calendar.
While focused on the subject of hitherto more affluent times, the book has wider implications for how we think about capitalism, ideology and desire. It identifies in this moment utopian ideas, impulses and practices that are of central importance to a salvaging project. This is reserved for the final two chapters of the book. The preceding chapters present a grim picture of the current conjunction of forces: a diagnosis of what will here be referred to as an apocalyptic age, though one in which there remains the possibility, albeit faint, of changing the course of history.
Eros and Apocalypse
There was a time when the future seemed brighter than it does today. There were traces of optimism even in early 2007 when the banking system appeared to be, as the saying goes, ‘as safe as houses’. But in truth, the times have always been apocalyptic. Lives are permanently at breaking point, subject to the contingencies of greater economic and ecological forces, subject to plagues and famines, speculative bubbles, redundancies and repossessions. The commodity is today’s great destroyer, a divider and accumulator speeding through global communication networks, creating a chain reaction of fear, chauvinism, depression and a recurring apocalyptic fantasy present, as Jean Baudrillard put it, ‘in homoeopathic doses, in each of us’ (2010: 89). But such fantasies are opiates, a comforting drug that dulls us into thinking capital will collapse by itself under its own contradictions or that nature will have her revenge and wipe the slate clean. Business is at world’s end.
Such fantasies and the fears that accompany them do not happen in a vacuum. Media obsessions with the end-of-the-world theme and the more scholarly concerns about the future – ‘end times’ (Žižek, 2010), ‘inflection points’ (Harvey, 2012) and human/nature ‘metabolic rifts’ (Foster, 2000) – are not merely ideological. They are echoes of economic crisis, rising carbon emissions and events from 9/11 through to Occupy, the Arab Spring and Fukushima. These events and unfolding processes characterise the first decades of what Franco Berardi (2011) pronounces the century with no future. Walter Benjamin was perhaps a little more sanguine when, between the great wars of the last century, he wrote ‘all that one might have been in this world, one is in another’ (2003 [1927–40]: 114). Recognising both the loss incurred to humanity by the conditions forced upon it and the impossibility of transcending those conditions, including alienation in a time of mass destruction, Benjamin felt there remained the faint possibility of renewal, if not for himself then for future generations.
Current renderings of the kind of horror and barbarism that Benjamin bore witness to are relayed to more affluent classes in the myriad of pixelated lights on flattened electronic screens; two-dimensional planes paralleling the one-dimensionality of the pseudo-politics they invite us to engage in. Br