An inventory – Chapter I
Here you will find essays from various sources, written in the twenty-first century, attempting to shed light on the vestiges of society that make up our contemporary world enslaved by market logic. It will be understood that this list is not intended to please those who want to continue to run this world and their servants. Nor even those who, out of opportunism, prefer to be satisfied with it and talk about something else… Or sink into denial of reality.
Masterpieces or indisputable works will not be sought here – moreover, there are none. Attempting to honestly shed light on our world has become an uncertain and uncomfortable thing due to the very fact that everyone has to make an effort to live there with a minimum of coherence and sometimes simply to breathe…
Capitalism will end; the question is, will it drag us into its end before we find a way to get rid of it.
For those who don’t fully understand what capitalism, market liberalism, is, it can be summarized as this ideological machinery, this poor religion, which, reducing everything to political economy, is transforming everything into a commodity, absolutely everything. To make money.
Through this movement, it is gradually destroying any common ground and ultimately any possibility of social interaction. It is also completely ruining the conditions for a decent human life on this Earth through its greed and its multiple depredations.
Capitalism is global terrorism on a planetary scale.
However, it is highly advisable to look into the issue in more depth for those who want to get to grips with it.
“De la misère humaine en milieu publicitaire” (On human misery in the advertising environment) by Groupe Marcuse.
Advertising regularly lies directly about the origin and quality of the goods it promotes. Just think of all those commercials presenting industrial products as local produce. We are shown the good old craftsman, not the factory from which the products actually come. Moreover, this can be seen as a kind of homage that the inhuman industry pays permanently to what it has eliminated – this homage of course having the function of concealing the industrial reality, and of favoring its development to the detriment of production on a human scale.
“Avis aux naufragés” (Notice to Shipwrecked Men) by Robert Kurz .
When critical reason falls silent, murderous hatred takes its place. The objectively untenable nature of the dominant mode of production and way of life is thus expressed in a way that is no longer rational but irrational. Thus the retreat of critical theory was followed by the advance of religious and ethno-racist fundamentalism. Until the critique of capitalism (in its radical and emancipatory form) is reborn, bouts of social and ideological paranoia will be the one and only yardstick by which to measure the degree reached by the contradictions of global society.
“Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif ?” (What is a device?) by Giorgio Agamben.
I call a device anything that has, in one way or another, the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control and ensure the gestures, behaviors, opinions and discourses of living beings.
“Pourquoi êtes-vous pauvres ?” (Why Are You Poor?) by William T. Vollmann.
The main merit of this book is that it confronts a shameful reality that the populations of the “rich” countries largely prefer to ignore. The capitalist system has not remedied this situation and no longer even claims to be able to do so; it is content to organize its invisibility.
More than two and a half billion people in the world live in extreme poverty and in completely undignified living conditions.
And this, contrary to the assertions of liberal “do-gooders”, is not improving at all but, on the contrary, is accompanied by a kind of passive acceptance, a social autism that accommodates itself without much shame to infamy…
Ah, excuse me, I have a notification on my smartphone!
“La perversion ordinaire” (Ordinary perversion) by Jean-Pierre Lebrun.
The absence of encounters with others, their repeated avoidance, can only leave the infantile omnipotence of the subject intact.
It is here that what we will call “democratism” can emerge. It is an optical illusion that leads the citizen of the accomplished democratic modernity to believe that his autonomy is a given from the outset. But the illusion works and they constantly seek recognition of their individuality by a collective to which they feel they no longer owe anything.
The psychic life of the neo-subjects of modernity, in these current times when the organizing and repressive force of patriarchy is no longer operative, has characteristics that distinguish it profoundly from that of their elders. The main thing is that it is no longer so much repression that is at work in them, as was the case with the “normal neurotic” to whom we were accustomed, but rather denial.
“Paradis infernaux, les villes hallucinées du néo-capitalisme” (Paradise Lost, the Haunted Cities of Neocapitalism) by D. B. Monk and Mike Davis
A series of striking urban studies on Cairo, Beijing, Johannesburg, Dubai, Kabul, Managua, etc., Infernal Paradises could be the anti-guide to the “dream worlds” spawned by contemporary capitalism. From the now classic Arizona gated community to the entrenched camps of Kabul, via the synthetic California imported to Hong Kong and elsewhere, or the architectural spectacularization of Beijing in the neoliberal era, the imagination that presides over these new forms of utopia is one of unlimited enrichment, constant hyperbole, lavish spending absolute physical security, the disappearance of the State and of any public space, the complete liberation from pre-existing social ties… But this debauchery reserved for the rich does not give rise to any real experience; it is entirely connected to the fetish objects of global phantasmagoria, harnessed to the same fixed ideals of the global market. The absence of a horizon that characterizes our world is compounded, in these other worlds, by violence against the poor, massed together, ever more numerous, behind the visible or invisible borders that every day transform the territory of the rich a little more into so many neoliberal citadels enclosed in the heart of our modernity.
“La Vie sur terre” (Life on Earth) by Baudouin de Bodinat
Anyone who reads the works of Baudouin de Bodinat with any attention will find that they provide very coherent explanations for a whole range of significant questions about the world in which we live, questions that the “learned” and media prefer to keep vague and unformulated. It must be said that the explanations of the state of these things that directly concern us are often not pleasant to hear. It is indeed very difficult to admit a truth that directly calls into question the idea we have of ourselves, of our freedom to think and act; difficult to admit that we are the dupes of a system of domination that has managed to disappear so well in order to rule better.
To the point of invading our awareness of the nature of our surroundings, of making us see a “natural” order in the worst artificiality.
Yes, especially since we have become very sensitive to anything that might challenge our personalities, our little identity constructs. When it is so easy to ignore an unwelcome person: a grumbler, a busybody, a depressive, a pessimist, even a conspiracy theorist (a contemporary designation that is very useful when it comes to discrediting any criticism) – in short, a pain in the neck. As if things weren’t already so difficult….
“Le Petit-bourgeois gentilhomme” (The Petit-bourgeois gentilhomm) by Alain Accardo
The capitalist system does not only function through the exploitation, despoilment and oppression of the greatest number, but also through the adherence of the majority to the system that exploits, despoils and oppresses them. In other words, it functions through psychological and moral alienation, maintained by hopes of individual success and personal fulfillment, which are most often fallacious.
Whereas in the past we might have spoken of a “liberating school”, today we would be better off speaking of a “conservative school”, so great is its concern, explicitly shared by families and the teaching profession, to “adapt” young people as closely as possible to the existing order.
“L’éclipse du savoir” (The eclipse of knowledge) by Lindsay Waters
It is no longer a question of form, never of content. This is the root of the problem of this ecological disaster that is hitting the university.
Is there any link between the current slump in the university and the rise and victory of the managerial revolution of the last thirty years? I think so. One of the questions that concerns me most is why there is such intellectual immobility in so many disciplines in the academic world. Why has the triumph of the managerial revolution led us to such a reactionary moment in terms of thought?
The university and the free use of intelligence do not go hand in hand; they are most often locked in a struggle to the death. There is something like a love of partitions in this institution.
“Sans objet” (Whithout purpose) by Frank Fischbach
What does today’s employee discover, constantly challenged as a free subject and called upon at all times to show himself to be the autonomous subject that he has to be, as the subject supposedly capable of defining his objectives by himself and conducting his projects by himself? He discovers, most often in failure, pain and suffering, that he possesses none of the means that would enable him to assert his autonomy, to see his projects through to completion and to achieve the objectives he has set himself […]. Access to the objective conditions and means that would enable him [to act as a free and autonomous subject] is systematically taken away from him and denied him.
If the social body is so docile and submissive, it is because it has been deprived of any means of exercising control and deploying its own power. Yet this dispossession of the conditions for the exercise of its own power is the very effect of the mechanisms as they produce subjectivity: insofar as they generate processes of subjectivation, the mechanisms produce beings who are subjects not only insofar as they are subjugated, but primarily insofar as they are abstract subjectivities, separated, cut off from the places, environments, means and conditions without which they can no longer deploy any power to act on their own, nor exercise any active control over their own lives.
“La Nouvelle Raison du monde” (The New Ruling Class of the World) by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval
The State is now obliged to regard itself as a business, both in its internal functioning and in its relationship with other States. Thus, the State, which is responsible for building the market, must at the same time build itself according to market standards.
It is better to say that capitalism has reorganized itself on new bases, the driving force of which is the implementation of generalized competition, including in the realm of subjectivity.
Neoliberal governmentality as a specific way of directing the conduct of others must therefore be opposed by a twofold refusal that is no less specific: the refusal to conduct oneself towards oneself as a self-enterprise and the refusal to conduct oneself towards others according to the norm of competition. (…) The invention of new forms of life can only be a collective invention, due to the multiplication and intensification of cooperative counter-conduct.
“Accélération – Une critique sociale du temps” (Acceleration – A social critique of time) by Hartmut Rosa
The constraint of adaptation, on the other hand, is a consequence of the structural dynamics of late modern societies and, more specifically, of the acceleration of social transformation. The accelerated transformation, not only of the material structures of the environment, but also of relational models and forms of social connection, of the orientations of action, inevitably leads to the existential feeling among subjects of being on a slippery slope.“
But let’s be reassured, it’s not just an existential feeling: it is slipping away.
”Suburbia ” by Bruce Bégout
The culture of the second half of the 20th century is above all a child of suburbia: it grew up in its cheap and motley space, made up of shopping centers, gas stations, motels, discount stores, giant business parks, residential neighborhoods, highway interchanges and vacant lots.
What dominates “modern sensibility” is hyperexcitability (…). Underneath the spasms, asthenia reigns.
“Théorie du drone” (The Theory of the Drone) by Grégoire Chamayou
With the armed drone, between the trigger on which one has one’s finger and the barrel from which the projectile will emerge, there are thousands of kilometers in between. This distancing shatters the very notion of war: what is a combatant without combat? Where is the battlefield? And can we really talk about war when the risk is not reciprocal, when entire human groups are reduced to the status of potential targets – waiting to become legitimate?
“La Santé mentale – Vers un bonheur sous contrôle” (Mental Health – Towards Controlled Happiness) by Mathieu Bellahsen
Understanding that mental health is part of a legitimization of the discourse of adaptation is important for understanding what is at stake: “Mental health is the ability to adapt to a situation that one cannot change.” What should we think of people who do not adapt to a situation that they cannot change, who refuse to adapt, or even who help to change the situation? In this normative definition, revolutionaries can easily be considered as having a mental health problem, thereby disqualifying social struggles in favor of a reactionary and sanitized worldview.
In psychiatry, the importation of industrial and entrepreneurial discourse is intended to resolve the contradictions that grip all actors in the field of mental health and allow everyone to face an imposed framework. This framework is one of generalized competition between states, institutions, services and people, with all that this entails in terms of painful constraints on the individual (patient or caregiver) and solutions applicable to all.
“Les Mots sans les choses” (Words without things) by Éric Chauvier
Calibrated words are now emerging from research laboratories to be sold off to the highest bidder of the rulers: “eco-responsibility, diversity, sustainability, world city, planetary, global city, diffuse city, ethno-marketing, feminicide, care, gender order, environmental justice”, the list is non-exhaustive.
Capitalism (in actions and words) has not only penetrated the university environment on an economic level. (…) Continuing to sell the unsellable and the iniquitous on an ecological, social, economic or research level is only possible by mobilizing a cultural logic capable of making this state of affairs, which everyone would consider disastrous with a newfound acuity, acceptable to citizens.
This is the belated version of capitalism, to which the humanities and social sciences contribute very largely. It was enough that new skills be validated: that students submit to a science model without negativity in order to obtain funding; that teachers teach them to patent and deify accordingly.
Whether knowledge is produced by imposing it from above or by harvesting knowledge from below is no longer a question of interest to researchers.
We must observe how, in just a few decades, class conflict has become inaudible, then unspeakable. The language of governance now pushes us to confuse a social world without tension with a social world without words that evoke tension.
“La machine est ton seigneur et ton maître” (The machine is your lord and master) by Jenny Chan, Xu Lizhi, Yang and Celia Izoard
China, which in the space of a few decades has become the world’s factory, transforming itself into one of the most brutal capitalist societies on the planet, and even though we “consume” its products every day, remains largely invisible to the neo-citizens of the Western world, as if they were not at all concerned. However:
Every detail of the daily life of these electronics workers is a reminder of the extreme meanness on which big business is based: in the manufacturing sector in particular, small savings make big fortunes. The compulsory meetings at the beginning and end of the day are unpaid. It is forbidden to talk to the person on the next production line and to look up. The food is tasteless and insufficient. At the Jabil factory in Wuxi, recruitment fees are charged at every stage, including the medical examination, and drinking water is not provided in the dormitories. At all these sites, cancers, respiratory and neurological diseases are rife, as a result of exposure to aluminum dust, cutting fluids and solvents.
“Commun” (Commun) by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval
This standard of competition does not arise spontaneously in each of us like a natural product of the brain; it is not biological, it is the effect of a deliberate policy. It is with the very active help of the State that the unlimited accumulation of capital commands in an increasingly imperative and rapid way the transformation of societies, social relations and subjectivities.
The future seems forbidden. We are living through this strange, despairing and worrying moment when nothing seems possible. The cause is not mysterious, and it is not due to some eternity of capitalism, but to the fact that it does not yet face sufficient counterforces. Capitalism continues to deploy its implacable logic even as it demonstrates every day its formidable inability to provide the slightest solution to the crises and disasters it generates.
This tragedy is not due to the fact that humanity is unaware of what awaits it, but rather to the fact that it is dominated by economic groups, social classes and political castes which, without giving up any of their power and privilege, would like to prolong the exercise of their domination by maintaining economic warfare, blackmailing with unemployment and fear of foreigners.
“L’Or du temps” (The Gold of Time) by Michel Bounan
The current individualistic predator, by elevating his personal pre-eminence above the universal subject that is its living source, has destroyed the planet and soon his own chances of survival.
“Les Enfants du chaos” (Chaos children) by Alain Bertho
Young people are in the line of fire of all those who want to make us forget that they have trashed the future.
The “line of fire” is not just an abstract expression. On every continent, young people are dying for not having respected the authority of the police with enough distance.
“La Fabrique du musulman” (The making of Muslims) by Nedjib Sidi Moussa
The permanent fixation on alleged Muslims, sometimes portrayed as threats to public order or victims of the system – sometimes both at the same time – is fully in line with the ongoing reorganization of French society. Because the real “great replacement” concerns the replacement of the figure of the Arab with that of the “Muslim”, of the immigrant worker with the radicalized offender, of the “beur” (French slang for North African) with the disgraced binational. » By looking back at the processes at work over the past fifteen years or so, this essay highlights the role of politicians of all stripes in the spread of an identity fever that blurs economic and social divides.
“Pour en finir avec l’économie” (To do away with the economy) by Serge Latouche and Anselm Jappe
Did economic life, which appears to us to be the natural basis of all human life and the foundation of all social life, exist in pre-capitalist societies? Is the very subject of economists’ reflection not rather a “brainchild”, an invention, an imaginary world that has now colonized our minds and our lives? If the economy is a fairly recent historical creation, how did pre-economic societies function? How did this economy come to be, over time, in practice as well as in thought? Thinking about a different future for our society involves thinking the unthinkable, realizing the improbable, and finally, in the words of Serge Latouche, “getting out of the economy”. A major challenge for our future…
“Tueries – Forcenés et suicidaires à l’ère du capitalisme absolu” (Killings – Maniacs and Suicidals in the Age of Unbridled Capitalism) by Franco Berardi
Suicide terrorism today strikes as much in Columbine or Utoya as in the streets of Paris. Its multiform violence arises from everywhere and pushes back the boundaries of horror each time. To maintain that the assassins are madmen or even the crazy soldiers of an enemy army is no longer enough to understand such a frightening phenomenon. Franco Beradi focuses here on psychopathology, but also on the economic and political origins of these increasingly frequent mass murders. He meticulously unravels the tangle of despair, resentment, nihilism, identity affirmation and the quest for celebrity that drives these men to take the lives of others before ending their own. What emerges is an examination of a social body torn apart by the absolute power of capitalism, a power that confines us to a dead end, between depression and violence.
“Frères migrants” (Migrant brothers) by Patrick Chamoiseau
Migrants, migration in general, are the unavoidable critical reality of this world, our world, as it has been constructed with the seizure of power of market domination over almost all of its organization. The legitimacy of migration, whether as a result of war or oppression of all kinds (economic and social), or climate damage, is absolute. To want to reject migrants is to reject the world, to reject life. It is also to reject the consequences of our actions, our choices or our passivity; it is to reject history. Migrants are the most visible expression of the need to overturn a society governed by market logic, where money is king and selfishness is promoted as the dominant value. Migrants are our fellow human beings. Fear cannot make us forget that it is just a coincidence that we are not in their place. On the one hand, there is a difficult future ahead for humanity, but on the other, there is only inhumanity, barbarism and shame.
Rebound:
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.