By LUIZ MARQUES*
The “self-entrepreneur” is the poor self-referential guy with a dulled sensitivity: winners know that meritocracy is nonsense.
In the words of David Harvey, in Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: A Guide to Class Struggle in the 21st Century, “compensatory consumerism” is a Faustian pact between capital and labor. A deal with the devil in which workers remain precarious and poorly paid, but enjoy the possibility of choosing between a myriad of cheap expenses. The act of consumption is a fundamental element for the legitimacy and, above all, for the stability of the capitalist order.
The production of consumer goods for the masses satisfies the desire for happiness, especially among young people. This is the lesson learned by the “elites” in the May 1968 student revolt that united demands for individual freedom and social justice. The XNUMXs popularized ideas against the “consumer society” and the “spectacle society,” which numbed individuals and social classes with the drug of commodity fetishism. But it didn’t stop there. Industrial development discovered Columbus’ egg: it is harder to sell products and services than to manufacture them.
In the following years, the market began to specialize in niches. It directed advertisements with information to artificial intelligence algorithms, which gave it a personal touch. Market segmentation, to accommodate different lifestyles, is equivalent to social fragmentation. Furthermore, it channels the feeling of satisfaction and approval to the status quo, despite the ills.
Instead of raising wages, the cost of goods is reduced to ensure the well-being of the subordinates. However, the devaluation of income due to inflation and the inferior quality of products have led to a decline in consumption – not to mention household debt. In addition, automation and high-tech of manufacturing swell the army of the helpless, excluded from the productivist grammar. The worn-out pants represent poverty, with a designer label, to glamorize iniquities.
The street vendor who sells industrialized products is an unpaid employee of an industry who is relocated to the economic circuit, without labor rights. The informal market reincorporates the well-off subproletariat into the sphere of consumption and into the orbit of consolidation of surplus value. Thus, it naturalizes the hegemony of capital. The truly excluded actor (the poor) is one step below informalization. He belongs to an analytical category that a sociologist calls “rabble.”
“Called to assist the accumulation of capital with the capacity of productive work in central countries, Latin America had to do so through accumulation based on the super-exploitation of workers”, emphasizes Ruy Mauro Marini, in dialectic of dependency. Our industrialization never targets the domestic market; it restricts it to the privileged. For the common people, there are only street markets, Shopee and commercial counterparts to enjoy in soft installments. The rest fits into a haiku.
Rules for radicals
Is society heading in the right direction? No. Consumption no longer creates that sense of integration. The “self-entrepreneur” is the poor self-referential soul with a dulled sensitivity and also enveloped in necropolitics. The winners – sincere ones – know that meritocracy is a load of crap.
For David Harvey: “We need to reclaim the concept of alienation. Without it, it is impossible to understand what is happening in politics today. Entire populations are giving in to alienated conditions. Whole ways of life are collapsing and being abandoned. The situation requires the creation of another political economy that combines an understanding of the basic causes of this malaise. Otherwise, the hegemonic social process and its dominant mental conceptions will sink us even deeper into the depths of fascist authoritarianism.” Change is urgently needed. We have reached the brink of the abyss.
The climate crisis itself contributes to the expectation of a life without waste and ostentation. Research indicates that young people no longer identify with the car advertising that was popular with their grandparents. On the contrary, they are fighting for public spaces for leisure, sports, culture and cycle paths in cities, whose urban perimeters are dedicated to private cars (parking lots, avenues, overpasses, roundabouts). On average, 40% of the space is left for housing construction and pedestrian walkways.
People's tolerance for being satisfied with the crumbs of the banquet is reaching its limit. The extreme right captures the disenchantment by inventing scapegoats: immigrants, Gay Boys, racialized people, feminists, socialists, secularists. Anything other than capital, the untouchable god of our universe. Those who feel left out of the social hierarchy by egalitarian policies expel hatred. It is necessary to examine the subterranean motivations of resentment.
The rise of religion and the impatience of organized fan groups express, on the one hand, the rejection of the soulless order and, on the other, the acceptance of violence. Faith in the supernatural and the sharpened knife in football passion symptomatize the fatigue of the spectacle, while theshopping centers wither. In the Northern Hemisphere, many have become concrete coffins with closed stores. The spell of the shop windows is being broken, not only because money is tight. The system does not ensure social cohesion and peace; it is a nightmare. The individualism of the census keeps everyone chained in the mythological cave.
We are in the gap between alienation and hope. Only direct and open criticism of capitalism allows us to formulate syntheses that overcome social, gender and racial inequalities, and the destruction that threatens humanity and plagues the planet. The challenge requires the organization of labor to confront the power of the powers that be – rentierism. There is already talk in hushed tones in bars about the opposite path to that which leads to slavery, neocolonialism or voluntary servitude. There is even a practical manual for the rebels’ insurgency, with an oxymoron in the title – Rules for radicals.
Christian socialism
Christmas, by celebrating the birth of Christ, revives early Christian socialism. The majority of the population does not have access to basic necessities, which renders ideas from the 1960s abstract. Santa Claus’s sleigh crosses leagues far from almost a billion humans, without food security. Let’s hope the renewed Christmas catharsis does not block the critical consciousness that public policies are awakening in President Lula’s most difficult term. Let’s hope that emotions wrapped in gift wrapping do not exhaust our repertoire of kindness. Instead, they encourage “engagement” – a word that found its meaning of revolt with Sartre – in the collective struggles for a fair and egalitarian society.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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