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Parable

A reader writes:

have just read Capitalist Realism and can relate directly with How Mark Fisher talks about the old/heavy, new/light inspection. I used to be a FE teacher but I now drive buses; I had to leave FE a few years ago due to depression. Recently all our buses were fitted with a device that records bus movements such as breaking, cornering etc. This information is sent via GPS to a website where individual drivers can access their data (performance?) Drivers are, of course, heavily encouraged to constantly monitor their efforts. Targets have been established are we are in no doubt that in the near future this personal data will be used as a disciplinary tool. As with Mark's example of the teacher we will spend less time concentrating on driving and more time looking at the new little box on the dashboard with three LED's; 'is my driving green, amber or red?

Some other interesting responses to Capitalist Realism here, here, and here, which I will engage with in more detail when I've got through my current thicket of marking, teaching, editing, freelance deadlines and public appearances. (I also have posts on paternalism and Richard Kelly's The Box which are very near completion - but they've been in that state for quite some time.)

"A sealed loop ..."

Dan Jenkins writes:

Just wanted to say how taken I was by your comments about education. ... I am a Head of English in a secondary school. I haven’t read your book yet but the comments you posted in reply to Graham struck a chord.

If all of this auditing really did weed out those poor teachers there may well be a purpose in it but it rarely does – poor teachers survive because they are better than no teacher and generally get given a good reference when they evince signs that they want to move on (the GTC is a whole other can of worms) – and yes I agree those that can fill in forms, find meaning and comfort in meaningless data and the set meaningless targets for others tend to rise to the top.

The thing that struck me most was your reference to the cost – the hidden cost in what appears to be a costless process – the psychic cost, the wearying cost which reduces good teachers to tired teachers.

I don’t know if you have looked at the new OFSTED grading system – to be accorded Outstanding now a teacher must engage all pupils/students at all times – a requirement which appears to many (including myself) as ridiculous. Yet rather than institutions pointing this out and thus refusing to play the game, they have working parties set up to try and achieve this impossible dream. It seems that the Olympic motto of Higher, Faster, Longer (or whatever it is) has now become the motto of Education.

Dan also draws my attention to the sinsister Fischer Family Trust:

The data generated by FFT are inviolate and target grades are generated from the pupil specific data – no reality check is allowed to take place and teacher’s ‘success’ or otherwise is measured against the figures produced ( an impossible prediction cannot be changed because these are the figures we are judged on). It’s a sealed loop of target setting and judgement of performance by results that feeds round into ever more invasive Performance Management target setting for teachers and Lesson Observations by senior teachers working with the aforementioned impossible standards set by OFSTED. Which of course then leads onto valuing schools based on league tables… which leads back into FFT targets (of course set at the impossibly high category D – 25th percentile)

This you all know I am sure – the point about audit culture – the way teachers now have to be proficient with a whole skill set which has less and less to do with Teaching and Learning and more and more about book keeping. This, I feel, is in keeping with an erroneous belief in ‘accountability’ – a quasi legal notion that being ‘responsible for your data’ will somehow improve the experience of learners ( service culture ideas of consumers and consumer rights in here too I feel). There is a pun on accounting and accountability that I am unable to make but it is in there somewhere!

Spectres of revolution

"Graham's claims about those calling for revolution seem a little off," writes Paul John Ennis , of my recent conversation with Graham. "For one there is almost a constant cloud of cautiousness that hangs over leftism today and Badiou, for one, does not push for a classic revolution but something like carving out autonomous spaces - zones within capital but resistant to it." Reid was also very troubled by the post. A measure of clarification is called for.

It isn't that anyone is calling for a revolution - on the contrary, there are very few such calls - so much as that there is a continuing appeal to revolution, an alleged revolutionary identification. This not only amounts to a weak messianic gesture, it is also completely at variance with the institutionalized nature of cultural Marxism that Paul describes: "cultural Marxism finds a safe ground in the midst of academia where ones commitment is always partial and never costly". What this produces in continentalist leftism is a kind of camp solemnity, and I fully share Graham's exasperation with it. In Paul's own excellent book of interviews, Post-Continental Voices (forthcoming on Zer0), Ian Bogost describes very well a familiar disjunction:

Continental philosophy has long prided itself on its purported coupling to the material world, mostly through a particular sense of political action. For better or worse, that typically falls in the wake of May ’68, a group of ideas that Peter Starr has given the apt name “logics of failed revolt.” Starr traces this dynamic in France until the 1976 abandonment of Leninism, but it is clear that an idealized attitude of leftist reform continues to pervade applications of continental philosophy. This is particularly ironic in the United States, where I am based, since the decades since ’68 have simultaneously hosted the massive growth of continental philosophy and the wholesale rejection of socialist politics in any form.

Moreover, I can grant everything that Reid - and Alex Andrews in the comments - say about the practical-empirical left (no-one involved in leftist organisations really expects a total and immediate eschatological transformation of society, nor have they for at least a half a century). But this is to ignore the traces that the the concept "revolution" carries with it, and the way that the left (of whatever stripe) remains haunted by those traces. I believe that "revolution" is - and has been for a long time - a malignant ghost for the left, and one of the regrettable effects of Badiou and Zizek has been to revive it. The fact that Badiou no longer thinks that either a Jacobin or a Leninist revolution is possible, that all we can hope for is some miserable "autonomy" from Capital, only compounds this impasse. The effect of continually invoking the violent theatre of Jacobin revolt can only make small zones of autonomy appear even more paltry, producing a sense of gloomy resignation very far from the "encouragement" that Badiou seeks to engender. But the alternative to this resignation is not Zizek's relentless litany of Robespierre-Lenin-Mao; Badiou is surely right that the time for that kind of politics is long gone.

Zizek should be taken at his word; a real repetition of Lenin would entail a break from Lenin - and, I would add, from the co-ordinates of that exhausted tradition. When Badiou says that we must invent the "communist hypothesis" again, from nothing, that is also correct, provided that the word "communist" - alongside "emancipatory", "progressive", "radical" - can itself be dispensed with: such words, dulled by their ceaseless circulation in the cultural left and by their appropriation in Capital's NuLanguage, taste stale in our mouths. Badiou is nowhere more inspiring than when he writes of how "exalting" the task of inventing a new politics in the current conditions can be. And Zizek is right when he says that the very apparent hopelessness of the current situation ought to licence an experimental attitude towards politics.

So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life - it is what Zizek would call the "spontaneous unreflective ideology" of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively - the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.

(On which, there are some excellent strategic suggestions by David Harvey here. Great title too, with a wonderful hyperstitional puissance: "Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition".)

"This is not the time to score political points" ...

The response by some commenters to Peter Hallward's essential piece on Haiti shows once again why The Guardian's Comment Is Free is so often one of the most depressing sites on the net. In a swamp of middle mass complacency like CiF, you'd expect the howls of "Half-witted pseudo-marxist gibberish", but what of the staggering: "You can't bring history into this." Then there's the crushingly predictable: "Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring poltical points?" This liberal commonplace needs to be completely overturned. What is the implication here? That to confront the real, long-term causes of why so many died is somehow not "respecting" them? Needless to say, the idea that politics should be suspended in the face of suffering is the very hallmark of contemporary ideology. Now is not the time for political discussion, we'll look at the long-term causes later .... But, since Band Aid this "emergency" temporality has become a permanent state of affairs, allowing neoliberalism to further strengthen its hegemony under the cloak of "post-politics". Of course some even claim that the concept of "neoliberalism" itself is "gibberish" spouted by only by "half-witted Marxists". What this kind of claim establishes is the depressing reach and power that capitalist realism has over large areas of the British middle class. The real capitalist realists are not those working in neoliberal think tanks, who know full well that neoliberalism is a political project that has to be ruthlessly, continually enforced, but those who deny the existence of neoliberalism itself; they are the liberal dupes who, in the name of a "realism" that routinely ignores facts and evidence while pretending to appeal to them, propagate a "commonsense" which takes place inside the reality system instantiated by neoliberalism.

One irony of this squeamishness about "bringing politics" into situations of mass human suffering, of course, is that, as Naomi Klein consummately demonstrated in The Shock Doctrine, the neoliberal project has depended on its ability to rapidly helicopter into just these situations and exploit them. It is ready to do so again. Witness, for instance, the initial pronouncements of the Heritage Foundation - the text was subsequently changed, but here is what it originally said:

Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region…

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

Needless to say, I'm not of course suggesting that people shouldn't give to humanitarian relief. As one of the most perspicuous CiF commenters - thank goodness, there are some - notes, it is those who object to politics being mentioned who are imposing a stupid binary. Contributing to humanitarian aid, which we all must do - and I'm told that this is one of the best charities - in no way precludes a political explanation. Conversely, renouncing the political (or restricting it to where it "properly belongs") doesn't mean that it will go away - it just means that, with the unwitting assistance of the CiF general anti-intellect, the powerful and wealthy will continue to impose a politics that serves their interests.
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Live and let die

See also Lenin and Ashley Smith, who describes how, "[i]n close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean--tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation."