Is There an Alternative to Global Consumer Capitalism?
The horizon for revolutionary ideas
has been delimited by the market,
to which we now customarily turn
to sate all our needs
The glorification of purchasing power
as a kind of political freedom
and the spread of easy credit extending it to all
helps sustain the illusion that we live
in the best of possible worlds
A problem that has haunted progressive politics is how to conjure an inspirational image of the future it’s working for without evoking a pie-in-the-sky utopia that is vulnerable to reactionary sniping.That efforts to change the status quo are inherently unrealistic and juvenile is one of the most potent weapons in the conservative arsenal.
Too much vague happy talk about genial communities and personal fulfillment and you invite a sarcastic retort along the lines of Homer Simpson’s “Oh, look at me! I’m making people happy! I’m the magical man from Happyland, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!”
(Or perhaps: “Marge, you’re my wife, and I love you very much. But you’re living in a world of make believe, with flowers and bells and leprechauns, and magic frogs with funny little hats.")
Enjoying meaningful work, living among friendly neighbors, having a safety net in case of catastrophe and a just distribution of a society’s wealth: these are childish notions one is supposed to surrender when one becomes an adult.
In the face of such derision, then, progressives must project a convincing ideal worth struggling for in order for people to bother to confront institutions or involve themselves in the messy world of politics.
The further one’s ideal drifts away from the prevailing multinational techno-capitalism, the more necessary—and difficult—this becomes.
Many strains of Marxist thought are traditionally anti-utopian, regarding idle daydreaming about ideal worlds as supplanting the work necessary to achieve them.
Fredric Jameson points out that “the projection of ‘socialism’ as a radical ethical alternative to the existing order virtually ensures the impossibility of its coming into being: and this, not despite its plausibility and its power as an ethical critique of capitalism, but virtually in proportion to it.” (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke U Press, 1991).
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek adds this coruscating critique of liberal academics:
My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market).Alternatives to global consumer capitalism become harder to imagine as its logic seems ever more universal and rational (it “defeated” socialism in the Cold War), and we grow accustomed to its rewards, the fruits of “false utopia”.If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies.
Their excessive politically correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is:
“Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!” (”Repeating Lenin”)
The glorification of purchasing power as a kind of political freedom and the spread of easy credit extending it to all helps sustain the illusion that we live in the best of possible worlds.
And because consumerism has fulfilled certain past utopian wishes—say, for easy and rapid travel, for on-demand entertainment, for all the information in the world at our fingertips—without making us any happier, we’ve lost our ability to believe in the possibility of meaningful change.
We instead embrace insatiable consumer desire and resign ourselves to endless series of shopping binges. As Adorno claims in a conversation with Ernst Bloch from 1964:
“People have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be completely different.” (Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, MIT Press, 1988).
The horizon for revolutionary ideas has been delimited by the market, to which we now customarily turn to sate all our needs.
Rather than utopia, we find ourselves restricted to imagining the “new and improved”—whether it be a detergent or a hybrid vehicle or a dual-core microchip processor.