Market identity anti-capitalists

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By TALES AB'SÁBER*

We do not identify with the 25 million unemployed and discouraged people in our world of industrial and consumer comfort.

We are so weak and contradictory, not wholesome and available for so many things. We speak ill of Enlightenment capitalism, of instrumental, western reason. We know – somehow we don't want to know how – that it destroys the world, subjugates lives, regulates exclusion and poverty, projects peripheral blows of primitive global accumulation and with immense ease converts itself into fascism, summoning masses that become like that. , to better assault the life of work and justify the State crime against the excluded that it produces.

But we don't want to consider the general hyper-productivity that we rely on every day. We no longer recognize in terror capitalism and global extinction the unrealized projections of equality, justice and universal peaceful rationality, which capitalism itself has deformed into a particular and industrial perversion, and which it exchanges for acceptance of things and fetishism wherever it is. . And yet, it was the same modern world, split between collective peace and private war, the only one to invent such horizons of political affections, which it did not surrender, due to class struggle won and fixed by one, which destroyed and deformed the idea of justice as the full and simple equality of men's civil and economic conditions.

There is no idea of ​​the world that overcomes social violence and mythical fear simultaneously, in other perspectives of culture, not modern ones. But we want the fair salvation of market identity groups, or the dream of a neo-Indian Gaia, of ecological balance and mythical multiplicities – always forgetting that there is a lot of fear in life, and there has always been war and a lot of death, in worlds that did not put the fantasy of the egalitarian universality of reason in its focus. Non-Western worlds had a social function of war, as is known, and therefore of terror.

Hence we are market identity anti-capitalists – racial, gender or sex – partial in the inscription of our own desire, our body, in the order of the other. Or, at best, liberals period, but always without knowing it. And we are anti-neoliberal and anti-Western anti-capitalists at the same time. But we are not socialists, obviously, because we like the life of the market and consumption, managed by global capital itself, the same that destroys the world, in a good way, and we prefer any rubbish luxury object to the logic of identifying with the ruined of work : those condemned by unemployment, discouraged by hyper-exploitation and Uber – white, black, straight, cis or gay –, whom we hand over to the administration, oriented to live their misery for the Young pan, by the television soap opera, by the Instagram, on Sundays at the mall's food court and at the evangelical church on the corner. Our same world system of consumption, which is the reproduction of global capital.

Hence, we are market and consumer identity anti-capitalists – our difference from the neo-fascists is that they are pro-consumer identity capitalists, any other identity group, in the midst of the same life – and we criticize the world of universal terror of life management, while we happily enjoy it and struggle to be gay with the right to marry in church, or trans with the right to enter the chosen sex bathroom in the restaurant, while we have no politics, no solidarity, for the abused world of work, ourselves. Hence we are anti-western identity neo-gays.

However, when a fundamentalist, identity, mythical-religious, non-democratic group that disregards universal values ​​of equality and justice, of gender and sex (and of access and right to criticize violence, exploitation and destruction of the other and nature), not Enlightenment metaphysician, comes to power, we all feel sorry for ourselves and are terrified because the values ​​of civil equality and women's rights, built only on the logic of universalist reason in the West, and nowhere else that we know of, have not been realized by the prevalence of the capital form in life, but which guides us in our desires for recognition and power, they do not exist there at all.

We identify with the women violently persecuted by the Taleban, not with the 25 million unemployed and despondent in our world of industrial comfort and consumption. Hence we attack the metaphysical foundation of emancipatory reason, among us, but not the capital that denied it, and that we use well as docile subjects of world consumption, we are not interested in the degraded destiny of workers in class society, we complain about the “false” West in its universality, and when in a complex country the USA is expelled by a criminal and authoritarian sexist religious fundamentalist group, we complain about the lack of perspective of democratic civil rights and equality between men and women, the same ones that American imperialist capitalism sustains, and that legitimize it as an ideological force, the same universal rights that only the history of ethics proper to Western reason has posed as a problem – on the unrealized level of philosophy – and that the power, not universal but effective, of capital, its practical reason for violence , has not let it happen, while we are happy lovers of the everyday commodity form, our world of life and its pleasures without a doubt, and we want the end of capitalism. Who am I?

*Tales Ab´Sáber is a psychoanalyst, member of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Instituto Sedes Sapientiae and professor of Philosophy at Unifesp. Author, among other books by Dreaming restored, forms of dreaming in Bion, Winnicott and Freud (Publisher 34).

 

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