Idiotism

Neal Curtis

Description

Idiotism examines society in late capitalism where the market logic of neoliberalism has become the new ‘common sense’.



Using the Greek word idios, meaning 'private', Neal Curtis calls this privatisation of the world ‘idiotism’. Through constructing a new vocabulary with which to understand our society, Curtis examines 'idiotism' across the spheres of economics, politics and culture, drawing on the philosophy and political theories of Martin Heidegger, Louis Althusser, Franco Berardi, Jacques Rancière and Cornelius Castoriadis.



This book recasts our conception of the new privatised world's 'common sense', presenting it as not simply a case of false consciousness, but an problem related to our own existence.



1. Enclosing the World, or Idiotism

2. The Ideology of Idiotism

3. Idiotism and Economics

4. Idiotism and Politics

5. Idiotism and Culture

6. Opening the World, or Democracy

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Political

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849647885
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Idiotism

IDIOTISM Capitalism and the Privatisation of Life

Neal Curtis

First published 2013 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Neal Curtis 2013

The right of Neal Curtis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3156 0 978 0 7453 3155 3 978 1 8496 4788 5 978 1 8496 4790 8 978 1 8496 4789 2

Hardback Paperback PDF eBook Kindle eBook EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

Contents

1. Enclosing the World, or Idiotism 2. The Ideology of Idiotism 3. Idiotism and Economics 4. Idiotism and Politics 5. Idiotism and Culture 6. Opening the World, or Democracy

Bibliography Index

1 29 55 85 112 139

166 170

1 Enclosing the World, or Idiotism

This book was conceived in the aftermath of the ‘Great Financial Crisis’ (Bellamy and Magdoff 2009) that first came to public attention in 2008, but continued to devastate lives as I began to write in February 2011. No doubt it will continue to do so for many years to come, even as those most responsible quickly return to their multimillion dollar bonuses euphemistically referred to as ‘compensation’. The state of the economy at the time of the crisis can be highlighted in a couple of quite startling facts that John Lanchester sets out in the opening chapter of his bookWhoops!. First of all, throughout the years known as the war on terror, or economically speaking the security bubble, global GDP rose from $36 trillion dollars in 2000 to $70 trillion in 2006, largely driven by profits in the financial sector (2010:xii). Secondly, at the time of the crisis in 2008, the largest company in the world with assets of £1.9 trillion was a bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland. This is significant because the UK’s GDP in 2008 was only £1.7 trillion (22). By any standard these figures are extraordinary. However, considering that regulation of the financial sector was negligible there was little if any oversight of this anabolic growth. This was because, according to Robert Lucas, Chicago University professor and 1995 Nobel prize winner, ‘the “central problem of depressionprevention […] has been solved”’ (in Krugman 2008:9). This supposedly overcame the need for state regulation or intervention in line with the old Keynesian model. The market alone – run by and for an oligarchy of plutocrats also known as the ‘Super Rich’ – was sufficient. Even more disturbing is that despite the crisis, and not withstanding some minor technical adjustments, nothing has really changed. Even if we exit this crisis that is still to be played out in the sovereign debt crises of the Eurozone and the US, many economists believe that a second crash will not be far off. The roots of the crisis stem from an ideology of privatisation and free markets that goes back a long way. The idea that the pursuit of private interests in a free market of goods and services is the best way to achieve the common good can be traced back to

1

2  IDIOTISM

the eighteenthcentury liberalism of Adam Smith, but the idea that common land is more productive under private ownership dates back to the seventeenth century and the work of William Petty and John Locke. Locke in particular gave the philosophical justification for the enclosure of common land and resources that, aside from war (or increasingly in conjunction with war), remains capitalism’s primary means of accumulation. However, while this longstanding privileging of the private is integral to our current socioeconomic condition the most proximate causes of the crisis are quite recent, stemming from the financialisation of the economy that began in the 1970s with the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan administration in the US. At that time conditions emerged for the ideology of free market economics to gain a much greater and more radical purchase on our political imagination. The media constantly relayed bulletins promoting competition, consumer choice, council house sales, upward mobility, credit, privatisation, deregulation, designer labels, branding, gentrification, and the democracy of share options. Everyone was encouraged to join in the fiction of this new wealth and the seemingly endless supply of money created by the great sell off. Even the UK’s pop stars were dressing up like bankers. We all lived in the brave new world of the Square Mile. Likewise in the US, the counterculture that a decade earlier had preached resistance and the importance of finding onseself were now seamlessly folded into the nichemarketing of lifestyle choices and the new individualism. By 1997 the emergence of New Labour in the UK under the leadership of Tony Blair came to signal the completion of a consensus around financialisation and privatisation that had shifted from the terrain of ideology to increasingly become part of a new common sense. By this I mean to say something akin to the popular folklore that Antonio Gramsci (1971:419) attributes to this term: something that is shaped by a coherent ideology, in turn supported by ‘the great systems of traditional philosophy’ (420), in this case utilitarianism and positivism, but remains ‘ambiguous, contradictory and multiform’ (423), retaining elements of nationalism, and racism, for example, mixed in with the new language of supposedly neutral, free market universalism. Nevertheless, despite elements of incoherence this new common sense projected a dominant conception of the world, one in which socialism, certainly, but even the postwar Welfare State and the politics of the New Deal were seen to be out of date. In this respect the use of the financial crisis to make a renewed case against public spending was the key to getting rid

ENCLOSING THE WORLD, OR IDIOTISM 3

of the anachronistic, yet stubborn element of welfarism that had continued to survive in a much reduced capacity within it. Although the New Labour government claimed to be pursuing a social democratic agenda and believed in a public sector of sorts, Blair had been converted to the ‘truth’ of market fundamentalism, and like the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton in the United States did much to further entrench the power of private forces both nationally and globally. Tony Blair’s zeal for all things private and the Labour Party’s conversion to the truth of market forces can also be explained in part by Gramsci’s understanding of common sense because, as he points out, with common sense being ‘crudely neophobe and conservative’, the ability to bring about ‘the introduction of a new truth is a proof that the truth in question has exceptional evidence and capacity for expansion’ (423). During the 1980s and 1990s, then, there was a great deal of debate amongst academics and activists about the nature of this new truth that was rapidly dismantling socialised economies around the globe and the cultures not predicated on consumption that stubbornly stood in its way. At a time when diversity and plurality were seen as democratic ideals to be promoted, and social and cultural theory was dominated by the discourses of hybridity and flow, it became increasingly apparent that powerful Western nations such as the USA and the UK, together with transnational capitalist institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF were becoming increasingly less tolerant of any form of social life that resisted the dogma of the global free market. Despite the ascendancy of multiculturalism free market capitalism increasingly became the only model for social organisation. In effect you can have free market capitalism with any kind of topping, but the stipulation is that you must have free market capitalism. For some, like many of the evangelical Christian communities in the US, an antistate commitment to privatisation is an integral component of their cultural expression, for many others, however, it was an aside, and as long as the system permitted differentiated cultural expression the shape of the economy was of only a minor concern. For theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) the acceptance and encouragement of a variety of cultures went hand in hand with the postFordist model of capitalist growth via niche production and marketing where each cultural difference comes with its own glossy magazine. Rather than standing for something that countered a centralised dogma the ‘multi’ of multiculturalism underpinned the global extension of the free market and was used to legitimate it.