Utopians against capitalism

[Celerity]

In these crisis times there is a premium on utopian thinking—but also practical proposals and the power resources to make change real.

https://socialeurope.eu/utopians-against-capitalism





If this is not a time ripe for writing about utopias, when would be? After the financial crash of 2008, the greatest growth in the democratic world of xenophobic extremism since Nazism and fascism, and the still current pandemic, many certainties of preceding decades have been blown away, leaving a vacuum utopian writing properly fills. Now comes the time to imagine futures which are not just better but altogether different. Utopia may never fully exist in reality—it derives its meaning ambiguously from the ancient Greek words for ‘no place’ and ‘good place’—but parts of its dream can be so attractive that we strive to make reality bend to them. And, provided some power can be wielded, a few will actually be achieved. Of the three books under review, Oli Mould’s is the most unrealistic. The plea for a four-day week by Anna Coote, Aidan Harper and Alfie Stirling on behalf of the New Economics Foundation is at the other extreme, comprising practical policy proposals rendered ‘utopian’ only because of the severe pressures on working conditions under neoliberalism. Tim Jackson’s Aristotelian plea for a via media comes, appropriately, in between.

Minoritarianism



While the energy of some new forces on today’s left is devoted to both LGBT+ rights and inadequate social benefits, the former appears to touch their deepest sensibilities. To anyone who has found this puzzling, Mould’s book helps enlighten. In his chapter on minoritarianism, he upbraids (though a man) heterosexual feminists for failing to understand that a flexible, changing sexuality is morally superior to a fixed one. This is because fixity of all kinds is a fundamental characteristic of white, male, nationalistic, imperialistic, racist, neoliberal capitalism—and you really do not want to be part of that package. Minority and in particular changing sexual orientations are therefore fundamental to the rejection of capitalism. Yet if this be so, Mould never stops to ponder why the rights of members of minority communities, whether defined by gender or sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability, have probably never stood higher than in the advanced world of today. This is not because of something essentially benign about neoliberals—it is just that they do not care about such things. Contrary to Mould’s core assumptions, capitalism is a highly flexible form of economic and social order. That is why it has survived and adapted. State socialism behaved like a solid, rigid lump, such that once the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, made clear that Russian tanks were no longer available to shore it up, the entire edifice collapsed within a couple of years. Capitalism more closely resembles a liquid, as Zygmunt Bauman perceived in his last series of books on the subject, especially Liquid Modernity.

Under apartheid, businesses enjoyed the low wages and terrible working conditions this implied for blacks. But when apartheid ended, they were eager to find new sources of managerial talent within the black population and new middle-class black consumers. Many excellent studies have shown how the traditional ‘breadwinner’ family suited capitalism’s purposes, with women at home sustaining the social reproduction it needed but could not or would not provide. As women gradually rejected that role, capitalism was however keen to take advantage of their work skills and new consumption opportunities. When the capitalist chameleon needed support to defend itself against socialism, its political representatives happily formed alliances with Christian democrats and espoused various forms of mainly Catholic morality. When, at a much earlier point, they were struggling against the hierarchical and anti-individualistic social order of traditional European monarchy and papacy, they were eager to ride on the back of secular liberalism and its opposition to that church and its values. Today capitalists exploit the amoral possibilities of post-Christianity. This enables them simultaneously to be ruthless towards, even heedless of, the fate of planet Earth, while shrugging their shoulders at sexual diversity. Most recently, facing the new ethics of environmentalism which threatens to overwhelm their cynicism, the chameleon is busy exploring the advantages of some new (greener) colour changes. These qualities make capitalism a slippery beast to define and pin down but also a reformable one—provided power relations in society can enforce this.

Seven ethics

Mould sets down seven ethics which, together, can be used to attack the beast: mutualism, transmaterialism, minoritarianism, decodification, slowness, failure and love. If his weakest claim is that minoritarianism strikes at neoliberalism’s roots, other chapters are stronger. Those on the relevance of slowness, acceptance of failure and love contain beautiful passages. Others are more mixed. For example, ‘decodification’ enables a moral attack on the disfiguring use of targets that has been such a feature of the neoliberal period, yet to suggest, as Mould agrees with Marcus Doel, that the use of numbers ‘is a violent act on the world’ is unsustainable. On ‘transmaterialism’, one can fully support the ‘right to repair’ movement’s challenge to the wastefulness of phased obsolescence while not endorsing Mould’s approval of the claim by Gary Francione that veganism needs to go ‘beyond a form of consumption to be a rejection of racism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of discrimination’. Back in the minoritarianism chapter, Mould cites approvingly the insistence by Judith Butler that ‘to categorize the agency of all women together in the feminist movement is to discontinue the act of becoming, which, as we now know, can lead to appropriation by the majority’. For Mould, majorities are always bad.

There are so many instances of this kind that I became suspicious that the book was a far-right send up, a reductio ad absurdum of various alternative writers. But the author is real enough and clearly believes in his positions. Mutualism is probably the ethic most important to him, meaning the rejection of capitalist exchange and the pursuit of self-interest in favour of the development of the commons. The commons has been an important theme of much recent literature but Mould wants to assert a planetary version. This is not globalisation, which he sees as capitalism’s homogenising project, but a planet-wide celebration of ethical and cultural diversity (although that does not extend to believers in individualism). Yet most successful commons have been rooted in communities that share sufficient characteristics to exercise mutual trust or, beyond that, develop institutions to formalise trust. Ironically, Mould makes the same mistake as those neoliberals who cite the medieval lex mercatoria as evidence that markets do not need the support of a state or law—they miss the fact that medieval merchants operated through trust networks of familial, local and religious connections, not markets alone. Mould relies on a spontaneous, planet-wide sense of a shared commons because he does not want to see formal institutions, these for him being the essence of capitalism. This really is utopia as ‘no place’.

Twisted aspirations............

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