By DENNIS DE OLIVEIRA*
The ideological clash between defending capital and fighting against capital is reduced to who defends only the rich or who is concerned about poverty.
In 2009, British thinker Mark Fisher published the work Capitalist realism with the subtitle “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. For him, current times show that capitalism has formed a social ontology in which everything and everyone must be framed within a “business” perspective where the search for efficiency becomes a mantra.
All the critical fortunes of capitalism, from the Marxist, anarchist, social-democratic and other traditions, are considered a thing of the past. However, the process is more complex and pernicious. The criticisms of social inequalities produced by the capital accumulation regime, instead of being refuted, are reinterpreted.
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in the book The New Spirit of Capitalism highlight this aspect: the rapid appropriation of criticisms by capitalism in this neoliberal phase within a different parameter. Instead of thinking of the structure of capitalism as a class society, it deals with problems on the level of relationships between individuals. And this goes directly against one of the pillars of capitalism in the post-Fordist era: individual responsibility for socially generated problems.
It should be noted that never before has so much data and information been produced and disseminated about the ills of current capitalism. Reports from international institutions on the increase in inequality, destruction of the environment, growth in poverty, and concentration of wealth are topics that are now and then populated by the mainstream media, generating television reports, and the production of documentaries disseminated on social media platforms. streaming.
A situation that recalls the discussion on sexuality in Michel Foucault. According to the French philosopher, sexuality has never been discussed so much, which does not mean that it ceases to be a device of power. The devices of power in the Foucaultian sense are not defined only by prohibitions, but by production. Thus, sexuality is not prohibited, but used to exercise power. And this exercise occurs with its framing in the grid of the discourse where power is exercised.
In an analogy with the dissemination of reports on the ills of capitalism, it is observed that they fit within the discursive devices of power in such a way that this re-signified appropriation of the critique of the new spirit of capitalism spoken of by Boltanski and Chiapello is carried out.
The impacts of this process on the political field are disastrous. By losing sight of the structural critique of capitalism, the political debate is limited to management mechanisms – more or less “efficient” – in which the problems arising from the capitalist structure are reduced to mere agenda items (such as, for example, combating poverty, racial and gender inequalities, etc.). The ideological clash between defending capital and fighting against capital is reduced to who defends only the rich or who is concerned about poverty.
In countries on the periphery of capitalism, the disaster is even greater, because traditionally, what was called left was also concerned with the fight against imperialism. The concept of “globalization” appropriated from a gelatinous perspective and separated from the processes of appropriation of wealth in the capitalist world system contributed to the emptying of the anti-imperialist sense of a left-wing policy.
Specific actions in defense of human rights, combating poverty and racial and gender inequalities are subject to Realpolitik within state apparatuses increasingly subsumed to the logic of large transnational capital. Thus, a “transgenic left” is generated that combines affirmative action measures with macroeconomic policies of fiscal adjustment that guarantee the plundering of public resources by rentier capital.
In the end, all the diagnoses of the ills of capitalism that are repeated and disseminated incessantly, devoid of a structural analysis, create the impression of an action without a subject – in the same way that the blackmail in the speculative market that pressures for more restrictive macroeconomic policies seems to have no subjects to promote them (it is the so-called “market” that is suspicious). In a society of individuals (and not of classes) everything bad that occurs seems to be the product of the degradation of human beings.
While everyone is guilty, no one is responsible. And the boat is moving. Neoliberal realism is fully realized with the increasing tragedies, but they do not generate indignation – at the limit, they generate paralysis or, I would even say, cynicism among those who were not affected by them.
*Dennis De Oliveira is a full professor of Journalism at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author of, among others, books on Structural racism: a historical-critical perspective (Dandara).
References
BOLTANSKI, L.; CHIAPELLO, E. The New Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2009.
FISHER, Mark. Capitalist realism: is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? New York: Routledge, 2020.
FOUCAULT, M. microphysics of power. Rio de Janeiro, Grail, 1984.
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