Uneasy together
Why do we keep capitalism if capitalism is so bad for us?
We are finally starting to talk more about capitalism. Discussions around capitalism and what effects it has on democracy are re-emerging in social science, but also in mainstream debate, pushing us to make a collective effort and imagine a different future. As pointed out by many in the social movements field, protests on the environmental, race and gender issues arose when and where old cleavages, namely debate on class or capitalism, had faded away. The debate on capitalism has disappeared not just because we cannot find an alternative to it, but also because of the unease that derives from calling for something, believing that promise and slowly seeing that it was nothing more than a hoax. In Streeck’s (2011) definition, capitalism is “a social order built on a promise of boundless collective progress”, and nowhere more than in former communist countries this broken promise is easier to observe, as change there took place almost overnight, in a more radical way than in Eastern Europe.
We can’t because it’s us who wanted it
Now that we are increasingly becoming aware of the many flaws of the capitalist system and opening our eyes to the rampant inequality and the conflict that it engenders in our societies, why do we still keep the system as it is? Aside from out-dated structural explanations, which ignore wastefulness and posit that capitalism is the most efficient of economic systems, there is more that is preventing transformation. In the U.S. and Western Europe, our inability to imagine a different system may depend on a dearth of experience. French and American citizens have heard countless tales of life in a communist regime, but few have experienced it. Socialist and communist systems have been depicted as misguided and faulty at best, and cruel or outright evil at worst.
This is certainly not the case in former communist countries. In Albania, capitalism went from being the absolute evil (Albanian dictator Hoxha prided himself in leading the “purest communist country in the world”), to turning into a deep-seated desire to unlock wealth and democratic freedom, which could finally be accessed after the fall of the communist regime. Somewhat in a way similar to the religious sphere, where the wished-for freedom of cult has meant that a number of external interests have been able to easily set shop in Western Balkan countries, Albanians welcomed capitalism as the panacea and ended up suffering a deadly collapse of social order in 1997. The most recent protests for the preservation of the National Theatre are a remainder of that unease.
As for Russia, the work of fiction of Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country (2018), is an excellent example of the unease explanation. The novel is set in contemporary Moscow, where a young second generation American scholar has returned to look after his ailing grandmother. The woman lives in the centre of Moscow, which has completely lost its previous boundaries and which is turning into something the old lady does not want to see. The grandson and author observes that after suffering so much to communism, she is now losing everything to Russian turbo-capitalism, but is unable to voice her unease precisely because she does not have the vocabulary and the imagination to break away from the trap of binary thinking: either it is one evil or the other. Thus, it is almost paradoxical to witness the emergence of a fringe group of young socialist activists who conspire against Russian oligarchy and set up small protests in the city. They do so not within the stale ideological remnant of a previous era, but as a new, youthful reaction to the extreme capitalist system that Russia has fallen prey to.
We can’t because it won’t let us
A second explanation as to why capitalism is still the system we live in relates to society’s inability to break away, because of capitalism’s ability to stiffen and silence any alternative thinking. Beckert (2016) puts forward the idea of ‘fictional expectations’: capitalism creates a regime of secular enchantment, which does not allow actors to see what damages such system is creating. The emergence of the entrepreneur social class and the economic system in which such class operate are in constant relation with a cultural and moral milieu, which explains and further supports their emergence. In order to break away from the first two tenets of capitalism, namely a new social class and a new economic system, we must begin challenging the cultural norms that underpin capitalist society. In this respect, it is enlightening to see how protest movements focus collective efforts towards either the capitalist structure or the social class that is benefitting the most, but they rarely undertake the much challenging task of addressing the cultural norms permeating capitalism. We struggle to truly address capitalism, because we are imbued with its values and promises of progress, success and the endless reassurance of moral and material improvement. Fisher in Capitalist Realism (2008) analyses this dynamic through pop culture and philosophical anecdotes, recalling the much-quoted Zizek and Jameson phrase “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. The term Capitalist Realism itself comes from Schudson’s 1984 book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. Again, the idea that the compromise we made as a society leads to a general sense of unease is captured here (and also in the work of Ventura, Teoria della classe disagiata). Capitalist Realism refers to the ‘pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture, but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action”. Capitalist society suffers from what Fisher calls reflexive impotence: citizens do not protest and demonstrate because they are convinced that this will lead to nothing, it is a sentiment of impotence that is ultimately reflexive and self-fulfilling in that it impedes any improvement. According to this vision, anti-capitalist protest movements do not challenge capitalism as a system, because they are unable to put forward an alternative and thus only try to mitigate some of its worst manifestations.
After endless promises of wealth and abundance, we grew accustomed to the idea that capitalism is the best possible system to live in, both economically and culturally and we stopped questioning the impact capitalism has on our lives, our societies and our economic structure. We chose to focus instead on other cleavages, which pertain more to the identity domain rather than the socio-economic sphere. However, a general sense of unease has been creeping in for quite some time now, not just in Western Europe and the U.S., but in former communist countries as well. But we are unable to address such uneasiness. This depends on a number of reasons: we are going through a crisis of responsibility and cannot find the ultimate responsible actor, we struggle to find a way to challenge the structure which we ourselves have built, we are unable to lucidly see how deeply ingrained the survival of capitalism is in our collective perceptions, so much so that we lack the creativity to propose a constructive paradigm. Until we think of a viable alternative, we will be unable to break free from the capitalist spell.
