Tag: Fredric Jameson

  • Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Towards A Theory of Everything?

    Marxism and Psychoanalysis: Towards A Theory of Everything?

    Our understanding of the nature of the universe has received many breakthroughs since Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity during his “miraculous year” of 1905. As the century progressed, a theory of general relativity was sketched out to provide a framework for the movement of matter through the spacetime continuum—testable knowledge employed across a variety of fields today. While relativity is the backbone of our understanding of the cosmos, quantum mechanics was developed in order to explain the behaviour and physical properties of microscopic matter, such as molecules and atoms.

    The existence of atoms was proposed during antiquity. In modern times, our knowledge has come to include atomic properties such as protons, neutrons and orbiting electrons that move in waves. Since atoms are the building blocks of matter, atomic properties dictate the physical characteristics of everything we see—and everything we don’t. Relativity has been used to generate precise mathematical predictions about gravity and the speed of objects but quantum mechanics adheres to an uncertainty principle that asserts only probabilities can be known about subatomic movements.

    Laws of History

    When asked how humans could devise an atomic weapon but fail to develop the political means to prevent it from destroying us, Einstein replied: “That is simple. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.” While humans exist within a space set by biological parameters, our behaviour is subject to endless cultural permutations, psychological dispositions, technological revolutions and political formations. Of all the world’s great thinkers, it was one Karl Marx that delivered a framework for understanding human societies. Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral: 

    Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

    Marx was able to see that humans entered into definite relations of production in order to satiate our biological needs and it is upon this basis that history unfolds. As individuals, we are born into a social structure that precedes our existence and conditions our being. Our families, neighbourhoods, cities, employment, wealth, housing—these are better thought of as social products rather than individual affectations. As Marx put it: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”1

    Nature comprises physical material but social relations are to human society what gravity is to the universe. Relations are what channel our energies, shape our matter and mould our consciousness. Marx makes this analogy explicit in Capital when discussing the relative value capitalist commodities: “The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of value by socially necessary labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”2 Social relations—of the economy, the state, culture, family, etc.—are not visible but we feel their pull like we feel the force of gravity.

    Fredric Jameson credited Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud with founding “the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought” described “as unities of theory and practice.”3 While history is replete with philosophers offering up static codes of ethics and rigid ontologies, Marx and Freud provided the theories of motion, change and flux that capture the subjective totality of the modern age. We can say that Marxism is the social science equivalent of the theory of relativity, explaining the motion and historical development of society as a whole. And if Marxism is something akin to a macrolevel theory of relativity, psychoanalysis would be the quantum mechanics, the microlevel complementary.

    The Individual Singularity

    Marx recognized the existence of tendencies directing societies depending on their mode of production. But at the level of an individual—a single CEO or suburban consumer or blue collar employee—we are left with an unpredictable singularity that does not strictly conform to laws of history.4 The economic parameters of an individual are concrete but the habits, taste preferences, customs, personalities, overall health, talents, deviancies and sociability are highly variable and unique to each of us. The society will condition our habits, customs and well-being to a large extent but there are infinite combinations of traumas, predispositions and formative experiences that yield highly unpredictable outcomes at the individual level.

    Freud himself had a few detours through medicine and conventional psychology before realizing that many of his patients—branded “neurotic” or “hysteric” in 1800s Vienna—were suffering from afflictions of the unconscious mind: “Our starting-point is the unconscious mental processes, with the peculiarities of which we become acquainted through analysis. We consider these to be the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.”5 

    There is a parallel here to Marx’s theories of human society; like an iceberg, there is an invisible mass, an underlying process that manifests what we are able to observe. For Marx, the material world is rooted in processes of social relations, class conflict and surplus value formation. For Freud, our conscious thoughts and, often, our physical health is a latent expression of unconscious memories. Marxism alerts us to the existence of a vast ideological superstructure that expends considerable energy rationalizing the economic base on which we exist. Similarly, psychoanalysis explains that repression hides our unconscious thoughts from our conscious selves: “The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away and keeping it at a distance. Repression demands a persistence expenditure of force, and if this were to cease, the success of the repression would be jeopardized.”6

    French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was able to take the field even further, perhaps owing to a comprehension of Marx that Freud lacked.7 Lacan described the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other”—a horde of other people we carry in our heads like traits. Humans are thus transindividual beings that cannot be understood in isolation from the society that produced them. This stands harmonious with Marxism. The entire scope of Lacanian theory is too complex to detail here but his three orders of the psyche warrant consideration for Marxists: the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real.

    The imaginary is our concept of self which is locked in by the symbolic order, representing a shared collective consciousness of language, law, culture and ideology. The Real is that which resists symbolization and conscious integration. The most common encounter with the Real is the experience of trauma. To be reductive, we can think of our minds as three orders forming a Borromean knot representing the self, society and nature.8

    Lacan believed that psychoanalysis could not be placed onto a scientific footing like linguistics or structural anthropology because of flaws with the causal model. The cause under investigation in psychoanalysis is the very subject resulting from that cause: “Science is therefore not yet capable of encompassing psychoanalysis.”9 Marxism, too, is afflicted by similar problems, the narrow horizon of a bourgeois paradigm that seeks to isolate mechanisms of cause-and-effect rather than examine the complete totality of a system. This should be expected within a capitalist mode of production that is fixated on capital accumulation irrespective of the hazards it produces. After all, the existing mode of production “is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.”10

    Toward a Theory of Everything?

    Psychoanalysis demonstrates that uncovering unconscious memories, rolling back repression, is the path to rehabilitation and restoration of the individual. In a similar fashion, Marx laboured diligently over three volumes of Capital in order to reveal the underlying mechanics of capital accumulation and ruling class power. Like a revelation of the unconscious, if we understand the motion of capitalism it is then possible to transcend it. By restoring the productive powers of labour under our own conscious control, alienation from our labour can be eliminated and society is made congruent with our human nature. Within this context of an unalienated, post-capitalist mode of production, psychoanalysis will find its proper recognition as a holistic science. 

    Indeed, Jameson himself once proposed a dedicated institution of psychoanalysis for his hypothetical post-revolutionary society: 

    We may provisionally call this new institution the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, and it will, in conjunction with unimaginably complex computer systems, handle and organize all forms of employment as well as all manner of personal and collective therapies. Mediating between the individual and the collective, the new institution will combine the functions of a union and a hospital, an employment office and a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau, and a social welfare centre. Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state thereby withering away into some enormous group therapy.11

    Jameson’s version of the proverbial dictatorship of the proletariat is admittedly strange and unorthodox but it underlines the potential that a positive union between Marxism and psychoanalysis represent. Physics looks to merge quantum mechanics with relativity for a “theory of everything.” When socialism comes to the West, this can be accomplished by the praxis of Marxism and analysis.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 265. ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2019), 49. ↩︎

    3. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 59. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey elaborates on this concept of an individual forming a singularity within Marxist theory in A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume 2 (Verso, 2013): 33-4. ↩︎

    5. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader (W.W. Norton, 1995): 301. ↩︎

    6. Ibid, 569–70, 572. ↩︎

    7. For example, Lacan famously based his concept of jouissance on Marx’s theory of surplus value. ↩︎

    8. The Real, of course, is not entirely synonymous with reality in Lacan’s thinking. This conceptualization has some utility within a Marxist framework however. ↩︎

    9. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1995): 139. ↩︎

    10. Marx, Grundrisse, 106-7. ↩︎

    11. Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (Verso, 2016): 81-2. ↩︎
  • The Dialectics of Dune

    The Dialectics of Dune

    “Is the dialectic wicked, or just incomprehensible?”1 Fredric Jameson’s punchy interrogation of the dialectic could also be turned onto Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the classic space opera, Dune: is it wicked, or just incomprehensible? The answer is “both” and in the best possible way. It is “wicked” in the full double entendre, presenting a cruel universe lavished with gladiatorial death matches, atomic weapons, titanic sandworms—and it looks really fucking cool under Villeneuve’s masterful direction. Its incomprehensibility derives from a power structure that portends a stark future for humanity, even with flags planted across thousands of planets. But anything is possible in a sci-fi future and book author Frank Herbert took pains with his imaginary universe to have it all make narrative sense. What we should pay attention to is how he does this. The best science fiction is great because of what it says about our world in the present and Dune is no exception.

    Throughout the novels and film adaptations, much of Dune’s plot revolves around the desert planet of Arrakis. Arrakis was long ago a water world covered by oceans and its transformation into a vast desert of sand dunes expresses the tendency of things to change into their opposites. This tendency is a staple of Heraclitus’ ancient Greek philosophy, it is an ancient Chinese principle of the I Ching, of yin and yang and was popularized by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung who had a tremendous influence on Herbert. The transformation of things into their opposites is also articulated by concepts like “only the living may be dead” or “the Sun at its zenith must turn toward its setting.”2 These simple articulations are true but omit the key ingredient of dialectical conception which is the countervailing force, the contradiction. 

    Dialectics

    The unity of opposites is foundational to modern dialectical thinking but it is the strength of contradictory energies that determine the transformation. The living being will struggle against its environment and degenerating cellular metabolism before death comes, just as the force of a rotating Earth is what brings the Sun into view each day. On Arrakis, it was the introduction of sandworm larvae to the planet which made it a desert, as the spawning larvae enclosed the existing water in their bodies until it was all gone. With the larvae, this simple contradiction turned a water world into sand but, without it, the oceans would have remained forever. It is the contradiction which provides friction—the energy necessary to break up stasis, create change and propel matter. 

    Dialectical reversals leave their fingerprints all over the story of Dune. For example, when the Baron of the powerful House Harkonnen orders the annihilation of House Atreides and the genocide of Arrakis’ Fremen people, he sets in motion the forces which would destroy his own house and the imperial order writ large: the Fremen give shelter to the surviving Atreides’ son who then guides them on a violent quest to destroy the oppressive imperial order, beginning with the assassination of the Baron and his heir. In sequels, the Fremen army overruns the galactic Imperium and realize their long-standing ambition of terraforming Arrakis into a greener, more habitable planet. But their success is what renders them extinct; when they disperse and lose their customs attached to the desert planet, they cease to exist as a distinct people. The dialectical reversal occurs here at the moment of victory, when their success amounts to their demise.

    In Dune, as on Earth, “history puts its worst foot forward.”3 From an attempted genocide of the Fremen by House Harkonnen, both are ultimately destroyed—the Fremen being victims of success, the Harkonnens victims of failure. But Jameson reminds us that “these conditions of possibility are what you work back to, after the fact.” We cannot know in advance the consequences of an action taken, whether the existing conditions will lead to success or what contradictions remain to run us over in reverse.4 This is true whether we are talking about a fictional jihad in Dune, the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles or the genocide in Gaza. Temporality is an important aspect of dialectical thinking as the present represents yet another unity of opposites: that moment when knowledge of the past meets everything unknown about the future. 

    The Bene Gesserit are a matriarchal order whose ultimate goal is to obliterate this opposition of known past and unknown future by producing a superhuman who can presently know both at once. At the point where Villeneuve’s films pick up, their plan was to have the Harkonnen heir reproduce with Paul Atreides’ unborn sister after reaching an appropriate age, giving birth to an all-seeing messiah. This plan did not materialize because, despite their superior access to ancient memories, the future is shrouded to them as it is for anyone. 

    There is a caution to dialecticians here, that even the best-laid plans will always find complications and contradiction beyond the simple cause-and-effect equation. When evaluating the future state of things, such as the consequences of the Trump presidency or the social implications of environmental ruination, it is important to guard against the myopic scope that searches for the path to a preferred outcome. Rather, we must consider the prior contradictions brought us to the present momentum before considering the future oppositions which are inevitably aroused within a spiralling capitalist juggernaut. Every future is preceded by a past and the task of the dialectician is to try and locate these “future anteriors” before submitting a range of possible outcomes. 

    Implausibilities 

    Although the Bene Gesserit were unable to foresee the dramatic reversal of fortunes experienced by the Fremen people and great houses of Dune, their general goal of maintaining stability in the galaxy can be judged positively. In the universe of Dune, imperial dynasties last millennia, the Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit and Mentats mirror medieval-style guilds and monastic orders, aristocratic bloodlines trace to prehistory and antique weaponry like swords experience revivals. While the political dramas and fight scenes make for a rapturous story, the “feudalism in space” that Dune showcases feels impossible for a few reasons. 

    Every social organization carries with it processes that both uphold and undermine the system simultaneously. These supporting and undermining processes are things like class division, use of resources, technology, environmental conditions, religious movements, political organization and so on. In Dance of the Dialectic, Bertell Ollman points out that “over time, it is the undermining aspects that prevail.”5

    For most of human existence, human beings organized along tribal lines, in hunter-gatherer societies that were primitive communist. The reason why this system endured for well over 100,000 years is because it embedded almost no undermining processes for much of its existence; low population density, strong communal cooperation, plenty of land to roam and natural resources to harvest. What undermined the communal system was a warming climate and the mass extinction of megafauna at the end of the ice age. The nomadic tribe then found itself at a material disadvantage to the permanent settlement and it was here when class society emerged, as both land and people became property. 

    The feudal system in the West appeared much later, a synthesis between monotheistic Christian religion, successive Germanic assaults on the Western Roman Empire and a collapse of the urban economy. It was a system sustained by the suppression of usury, the ideological monopoly of the Catholic Church, control of land by warlords and aristocrats and the extraction of rents from the peasantry. Since feudalism crumbled upon the discovery of the Americas and the exploitation of its vast landmass, it is difficult to imagine how such a system could assert itself in the context of a spacefaring, multi-planetary civilization. Socialists generally believe that unlocking the technological capability for cheap and efficient space travel would duplicate the conditions of primitive communism, in a higher form: low population density relative to the stars, abundant natural resources, strong communal cooperation amongst starship crews and the ability to relocate in the galaxy should undesirable circumstances arise. 

    Reconciliation

    Herbert understood the relationship between class-power and scarcity, with his character Liet-Kynes of the Fremen remarking, “beyond a critical point within finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.” This is a matter of history on Earth, as the advent of nutrient-dense agriculture increased humanity’s numbers, shrank the quantity of available land and ripened the conditions needed for slavery, feudalism and then capitalism. The Fremen are oriented toward a more nomadic, communal society because the harsh conditions of Arrakis requires mutual cooperation and low population density in order for them to survive. 

    With the historical experience of Earth in mind, we must assume Arrakis is an outlier in the Imperium. Herbert gave his fictional universe a feudal structure which implies a few characteristics: that the planets of the Imperium became crowded over the centuries; there is little upward social mobility; the economic strength of the ruling houses derives from rents; technology is restricted; religion is uniform. This is explicitly evidenced in a few areas of the story. First, there is the Spacing Guild that holds a monopoly on interstellar space travel, effectively making it impossible for the average person in the Imperium to escape the tyrant ruling their planet. Second, there is the Bene Gesserit and a standardized “Orange Catholic Bible” which confers a degree of religious conformity to the galactic feudal empire. Third, there is a prohibition on certain technologies, including “thinking machines,” which may otherwise provide the basis for revolution.

    Because Dune focuses so closely on those at the top of the social pyramid, the processes that either support or undermine the centralized authority of the galactic empire are obscured. It isn’t the political intrigue or battles on the ramparts that make any human society tick; it is the people at the economic base with boring and ordinary lives. The ones who feel anxious during a commute and go to work for a living and play with their kids at home—they are the ones that make their rulers possible.

    Frank Herbert once described himself as a “techno-peasant” and since it is a peasantry that supports monastic orders and aristocratic titles, this label must apply to the average resident of the Imperium as well. It is incredibly pessimistic to think that humanity could achieve technological mastery over the stars only to replicate the oppression of the Dark Ages. But class systems are inherently unstable—as the existential problems which press us today attest. But if the Dark Ages lasted one thousand years on Earth there is no reason to think it could last tens of thousands of years across space. A fictional universe can send us to the stars and wave away class struggle with a pen stroke. But in the real universe we would have to abolish this primary contradiction long before taking such a grand evolutionary leap. 

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010), 102. ↩︎

    2. The first quotation is from Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003), 49 and the second quotation from The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton University Press, 1967), 63. ↩︎

    3. Henri Lefebvre cited in Jameson, Valences, 287. ↩︎

    4. Ibid, 280. ↩︎

    5. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003), 163-4. ↩︎
  • Free Markets, Unfree People

    Free Markets, Unfree People

    Most of us dread the deadening of the body and will do anything to avoid it. About the deadening of the soul, however, we don’t care one iota.1
    —Epictetus

    As the earliest human societies emerged conscious from nature egalitarianism was a common characteristic. Economic surpluses were minimal and production of material needs relied on a nakedly social effort. The psychologists David Erdal and Andrew Whiten suggest:  “Egalitarian behaviour patterns evolved because…individuals became so clever at not losing out to dominant individuals that vigilant sharing became possible, and this was the most effective economic strategy in the circumstances in which Homo sapiens evolved.”

    In the prehistoric era of hunter-gathering, or primitive communism, there was no incentive to hoard resources, ideas or technology. In fact, doing so would have carried detrimental consequences to the individual, the group and the wider species. Resources and technology were freely shared between groups and individuals, and this type of cooperation facilitated the dominion of humanity over the globe. The free exchange of ideas and resources during this era fall into the categories of gifts between tribes, reciprocal exchange between kin and petty barter between individuals. 

    After ecological pressures provoked the Neolithic Revolution, humanity had to grapple with sedentary living and the production of an economic surplus above what was needed to reproduce the population. In the presence of surplus, our tendency toward cooperation and egalitarianism became inverted and economic classes formed which laid claim to different points along the production and distribution ladder. In a dialectical reversal of epic proportions, the prehistoric aversion to domination gave way to the slave economy, the most oppressive economic system known to history.

    Ancient Rome was so saturated with unfree labour that little distinction was made between working citizens earning a wage and slave labour owned by a master. Slaves commonly held managerial roles, conducted business and apprenticed in skilled trades. Selling oneself into slavery was an attractive means to escape poverty. In such an economy, it was the narrow band of elite slave owners who absorbed the surpluses of antiquity.

    Dawn of the Market

    Both enslaved and wage labour transitioned into tenant farming during the late decline of the western Roman empire. Feudalism was a sort of synthesis between the enslaved labour of Rome and the social organization of the Germanic tribes. Meanwhile, Christian idealism began to permeate the superstructure of medieval Europe. Since most of the population was tied down to agricultural production on plots of land, merchants took on an important role in the circulation of goods. Markets were held at regular times and places throughout Europe, giving prospective buyers and sellers of wares notice to prepare. Merchant guilds coordinated the movement of imports and commercial profits became a pathway for non-landholding Europeans to capture a piece of the economic surplus of the feudal era.

    Medieval commerce was sublated by the capitalist system as it began to develop after 1492. After peasants were shook loose from ancestral farmland and piled into cities, permanent shops replaced the market squares and merchant banks funded New World pillaging expeditions. We see a point in history where labour, surplus production and capital break free of physical boundaries. This economic transformation created the foundations of science, Enlightenment philosophy, the modern state, monetary system and, of course, the idea of the free market.

    “Free market” is defined by Britannica as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal.” It’s interesting that free market fundamentalism—or laissez-faire economics—arrive on the political scene around the same time as socialism does, during western industrialization.

    As noted in the first paragraph, human beings evolved with an aversion to domination and preference for some modicum of economic and political egalitarianism. The adoption of sedentary living and the creation of economic surpluses within a class hierarchy threw back much of the formal cooperation of hunter-gatherers but it did not eliminate the collective want of freedom. Cooperation and freedom from domination is hardwired into our evolutionary history. This is visible in slave rebellions and peasant uprisings, as well as religions preaching liberation of the spirit. What capitalist modernity offers is a chance to concretely understand society and create the necessary political and economic conditions for liberation.

    Socialism v. Markets?

    For socialists, liberation involves a positive action: the organization of workers to overthrow the state and create a new government that lays hold of the economic levers of power. This would allow society to democratically create the material conditions needed for individual flourishing. Free marketeers are the inverse of this, socialism’s negative correlate: cut the government to a minimum and remove political authority from economic levers. The great promise of the free market is to provide “social order without institutions, claiming not to be one itself.”2 The premise here is that a market of self-interested individuals is the best allocator of goods and services for the whole of society. The market represents true capitalism, and true capitalism only exists where state authority ends.

    Voluntary exchange between individuals would certainly be a feature of any pro-social economy. For this reason free market fundamentalism can sound attractive. But it brings forward serious problems owing to the rock-ribbed power imbalances embedded within the capitalist economy. Every class society has featured an elite class which posits a state to protect property and safeguard economic interests and capitalism is no different. In his history of capitalism, Jürgen Kocka writes:

    State formation and the origins of financial capitalism were closely connected, and the nexus provided a way for prosperous urban citizens in high finance, a small elite, to establish their influence on politics while simultaneously making their entrepreneurial success dependent on powerful rulers and their shifting political fortunes.3

    This is a situation that continues to the present day, with the powerful corporate lobby and central banks that fuse financial capital to the state apparatus.4

    Assuming that the Siamese twins of state and corporate power could be surgically separated, the benefits are not clear. The capitalist market is not like the reciprocal exchange and gift economies of our prehistoric ancestors. It descended to us from authoritarian ramparts, by way of colonial subjugation, race-based slavery and violent ethnic cleansing. No wonder that the capitalist market is a bare-knuckled fight in which each participant must attempt to end the day with more money than they began it with.

    Even for a bourgeois economist like John Maynard Keynes it was apparent that the accumulation of money had bound society to “pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”5 Under such conditions, scams are incentivized, price gouging is profitable, environmental stewardship is burdensome, stock swindles are rife and labour appears only as a costly appendage to production.

    Stamping the capitalist market with the title of “free” does not dress the window much either. Engels pointed out the logical fallacy of the “free” aphorism when critiquing a proposal to repackage Germany as a free state: “Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government.”

    Once the great mass of people is subordinated to market forces by way of survival, the market is free to act on them in despotic ways. The workplace is a totalitarian encampment where using the bathroom and eating lunch are objects of scrutiny, the threat of termination hanging like the sword of Damocles over the necks of employees.6 Meanwhile, bills accrue. Small businesses collapse under the weight of competition. Houses are seized by debt obligations and families go hungry by price shocks. In the absence of income, the free market pushes desperate participants into drug peddling and sex trafficking. Art and corporate advertising become salacious performances demanding attention from a tired population on the go. Sterile escapism is rampant. Information deteriorates to the standards of minds made lazy and politics is a bloodsport. Every stripper pole, inside trade and contract killing can be rationalized so long as it pries away a profit. When Adam Smith likened the market to an “invisible hand” he failed to mention how often it would punch us in the face.

    Past the Paradigm

    The multitude of social ills kicked up by a despotic market which commands labour and demands consumption is the reason why the free market utopia is a mirage, at best. Even a conservative thinker like John Gray adroitly pointed out that cultural conservatism is not compatible with free market, laissez-faire policies.7 The conservative rebellion against corporate diversity policies and global trade are examples of misalignment between the capitalist market and traditional values.

    If the political theatre is the stage of class conflict, the current tug-of-war between interventionist modern liberals and the protectionist populist right wing demonstrates that there is no room in the troupe for free market fundamentalists. The market has already blazed a trail for mass migration, menacing technologies, medical bankruptcy, sky-high utility prices, the outsourcing of decent jobs and hollowing out of public infrastructure. All that’s left to do is fight amongst the wreckage left in its wake.

    The capitalist paradigm has only cemented over a scant 300 years of human history. Capitalism has visited humanity with a progression out of feudalism but its market is neither efficient or rational, as the swelling expanse of global slum dwellers, overflowing landfills and microplastics in our bloodstream attest.

    What is needed is not the expansion of the capitalist marketplace but its sublation: a pulling forward of our latent cooperative instincts into a universal exchange that rewards economic actors according to the satisfaction of human need rather than profit. In such a post-capitalist market, the gift economy and reciprocal exchange reappear. Rewards accrue to the doctors curing cancer; the innovators shortening the workday; the oceanographers detoxifying our waterways; the engineers constructing comfortable housing and transport for all. For humanity to have a future we must not oppose the current paradigm but go beyond it.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin, 2008): 15. ↩︎

    2. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010): 293. ↩︎

    3. Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2016): 43. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Verso, 2018): 321. ↩︎

    5. Keynes as quoted in David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023): 83. ↩︎

    6. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010): 176. ↩︎

    7. John Gray discussed in Jameson, Valences, 463-4. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “What is Postmodernism?”

    Ask the Editor: “What is Postmodernism?”

    Dear editor,


    Here’s something I’ve heard applied to Donald Trump, woke liberal activists and everyone Jordan Peterson doesn’t like: postmodern. It’s also a label placed onto some of my favourite films, buildings and artwork, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Andy Warhol prints.


    What is postmodernism? Is it good or bad?

    Cheers,

    Sora.

    Dear Sora,


    In his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson argued presciently that the radical structural changes to the economy underway in the 1980s created a western culture disillusioned by progress, marking a break with modernity in the process.1 33 years later, the disillusionment has deepened and postmodernism rules the public sphere


    After the medieval period was destroyed by the riches of exploited labour and resources from the Americas, modernity followed in its wake. Modernity is characterized by Enlightenment philosophy, secularization and science, liberal democracy, romantic and realist artwork and International Style architecture. It is debatable whether we have truly exited modernity but postmodernism can at least describe its latest evolution. 


    The most consequential casualty of the postmodern turn is the belief in progress. This has given space for right wing populists around the world to lash out at the previous order and ruling institutions. Lacking any philosophical grounding, there has been a tidal wave of contradictory political expressions coming in from the right: nostalgia for past glory while undermining the institutions that facilitated it; trickle down tax policies and trade protectionism; conspiracy theories and “alternative facts;” religious affirmations and hedonistic menageries of drugs and sex. Anything goes, and this is the hallmark of postmodernism. Because there is no grand narrative of history or final destination for humanity, nothing has to make sense beyond the present moment. Postmodernism did not produce identity politics; on the contrary, identity politics relied on the modernist narrative of a society gradually abolishing social prejudices. The triumphalism of postmodern politics has destroyed the “woke” idea, and liberals abandon it as rats flee a sinking ship.


    Many of the postmodern elements seen lately in politics have existed for years in the realm of culture. The parade of cinematic reboots and remakes, nonlinear story structures, imitation of past styles without context and a fusion of high and low art are a few postmodern characteristics that Jameson identified. Postmodernist culture like film, music, artwork or architecture, relies on extensive reference to the past because of an inability to apprehend the future.


    Postmodernism isn’t good or bad. It is simply the cultural analog to our current economic structure and material life. Finding resonance with postmodern culture is expected as we, too, are products of late capitalism.  Just as we see postmodernism dominate the society of a nihilistic West, futurism dominates the society of an optimistic China. Only when the West has consciously apprehended its economic levers will it be able to determine its future and set foot to a new era yet again.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991). ↩︎