After my post last week about radicalising capitalist mediocrity, I was thinking about how another feature of capitalism might be transformed in communism: capitalism’s alienated but compulsory sociality. Capitalist production requires “sociality” in as much as capitalism forces workers to cooperate in collective work; but, capital also attempts to limit that cooperation so that it only includes the cooperation necessary for production and no more. So the assembly line, at least as idealised in capitalist imagination, would involve no direct human-to-human cooperation, but would instead embody all cooperation in machines.
One common Marxist response to this alienated compulsory sociality is to focus on the alienation part: in communism, the argument goes, alienated cooperation would be replaced with genuine human cooperation. This sounds horrible. Read more↴
When the first episode of iZombie opens Liv Moore is a perky, successful junior doctor planning her wedding. It only takes until the title sequence, though, and she’s single and spending all her time alone, doing nothing, except for when she’s at her dead-end job in the morgue. Liv Moore is a graduate without a future (she’s also been bitten by a zombie). This closed-down, anhedonic, listlessness seems like a characteristically millennial experience – as opposed to the stereotypical rebelliousness of baby bombers, or the ironic, detached disaffection of generation X (the enforced “flexibility” which comes from Liv taking on aspects of the personalities of the murder victims whose brains she eats is another dramatization of a quintessentially millennial experience). I like the show for its portrayal of this millennial position, and more for its sympathy to it, in particular its concern to defend millennial anhedonia against the passion of edgy, soi-dissant countercultural, “cool.”
I read this stupid blog post about how millennials are apparently “uncool,” and obviously it’s hella dumb, but it did make me think that if millennials are indeed rejecting the norm of “cool,” good for them. “Coolness” has long since become a means of normalisation, commodification, and oppression, and iZombie nicely illustrates that. Read more↴
I haven’t paid much attention to Left Unity, because TBH a group organised around the electoral road to social democracy seems more like an Old Labour re-enactment society than a viable political trajectory. Apparently, at their recent conference they decided not to adopt a basic income as a policy, which some have taken as a confirmation of Left Unity’s backward-looking position.
Certainly, there are plenty of reactionary old left arguments against the basic income, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that basic income was initially a right wing proposal (it was popularised by libertarians in the 70s, but, as I discovered from Angela Mitropoulos’s very persuasive criticism of basic income, it was earlier proposed by a Tory peer in the 40s). These capitalist advocates of the basic income do have a point; a basic income is a pro-market measure, at least in so far as people need to transform this cash income into the necessities of life by purchasing these necessities on the market.
There are two good things about the basic income as a demand, I think. Read more↴
Britney’s new song has been widely condemned as pure ideology; this piece in the Guardian is typical, arguing that the song reflects a contemporary, “religious” commitment to the value of work. That’s not what the song sounds like to me; it’s not so much capitalist ideology as capitalist id. While the official capitalist ethic proposes the necessity of hard work as the ground of equality, the capitalist id glories in the reality that you have to work while (indeed, because), capital doesn’t. Hence Britney’s imperious “work, bitch!” with the subtext that, work as hard as we like, we’ll never be as good as her; and doubtless we’ve all come to terms in our own way with the fact that we’re not Britney and never will be. But, if we follow the insight of the Neue Marx Lektüre that capital is the historical subject of capitalism, we might find in the id of this historical subject some useful indications of the mutations happening to the role of work in contemporary capitalism, and thereby come up with a more dialectical anti-work politics. Read more↴
The New York Times describes Spring Breakers as “at once blunt and oblique,” although you might say the film spends half its time making a very obvious point and half its time not sure what point it’s making. Which doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, but the film is actually pretty interesting. The obvious point it seems to be making at first is an analogy between the religious enthusiasm of Faith’s (Selena Gomez) evangelical church and the hedonism of spring break, emphasised by the similarity in the energized performances with which the minister encourages teenagers to get “crazy for Jesus” and the rapper Alien (James Franco) eulogises “bikinis and big booties.” If this were all the film were doing, it would be a fairly straightforward and indeed rather puritanical criticism of Schwärmerei. It would also justify interpretations of the films as entirely contemptuous of the characters and also the audience (who would be posited as a mindless Hollywood audience caught up in the hedonistic enthusiasm the film represents).
What makes the film interesting, though, is that it doesn’t just make this analogy the basis of a simple criticism: it takes this analogy seriously, or at least plays with it at length. Read more↴
The Dark Knight has nothing to do with Occupy, and no one who sees it will make that connection, unless they gleaned everything they know about Occupy from newscopter footage.
Isn’t “newscopter footage” precisely where most people will have got most of their knowledge of Occupy from? Likewise Gavin’s quibbling about how the villain, Bane’s, authoritarian command of his loyal mercenary band is unlike the leaderless process-fetishism of Occupy: yes, the bad guys inThe Dark Knight Rises aren’t a very accurate representation of what the Occupy movement is actually like, but they do accurately represent a right-wing media narrative about Occupy. Read more↴
