JR'S Free Thought Pages
                                                                       No Gods  ~ No Masters    ~ No Bullshit

Unrelenting Shocks of “Capitalist Realism” and the Neo-liberal State Dictatorship of Capital

By JR, November/December, 2020

Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, defines capitalist realism as an ideological framework we call neo-liberalism that obscures or denies any possibility that lies beyond the horizon of capitalism. It gives the impression that “there is no alternative” – the infamous TINA principle of Margaret “there is no society” Thatcher who pronounced that we’ve achieved the apotheosis of culture and politics, the “end of history” as conservative political philosopher Francis Fukuyama put it in a 1992 book.

Capitalist realism, then, is a shut down grand narrative of the horizon of life’s other possibilities, of our ability to create or imagine anything beyond the deeply cynical immoral neo-fascist corporatist canon of what currently exists.

Capitalist realism is the official hideous ideology of the neoliberal state, a demented form of market dominated dogma endlessly supported by insidious and often subtle corporate media propaganda that seeks to eliminate all resistance. “Capitalist Realism,” the seminal text by the late Mark Fisher, forensically dissects and dismantles the dynamics by which late capitalism ensures global domination and hegemony, enforcing its quasi-religious doctrinaire mantra of market theology which discourages and blocks any and all radical public critique, rendering real democracy a delusional fiction. [1]

Capitalist realism maintains a monopoly on interpretation of culture and politics, raising questions about the dictatorship of the market, which spreads its ideology like an aggressive deified plague to all parts of society in addition to being the final arbitrator of every decision public and private. Like a monotheistic god, the supernatural “invisible hand of the market” decides everything- the final source of appeal to all human endeavors.

Neo-liberalism revels in the desecration of the public realm, destroying the possibility of democracy and community root and branch. But capitalist realism isn’t simply an objective anti-democratic mechanism but rather is an exercise in public relations, inculcation, indoctrination coupled with non-stop advertising and branding for the global capitalist forces of primarily the banks, huge financial predators and multi-national corporations that overpower state sovereignty and the sycophantic political pimps who we are told represent the common people’s interests. Like the dubious enterprise of economics (rightly deemed the “dismal science”) that underwrites and supports it, capitalist realism is a convenient cynical fiction, nonetheless elevated to the status of a science by complicit neoliberal economists in business, the state and, sadly, in academia where at one time there was free dissent and critique.

Mark Fisher‘s analysis is a necessary commentary on the way the dictatorship of the market corrupts public institutions like our corporatized schools and universities, touting the banalities of marketing and business administration while shamelessly defending the complicit managerial bureaucracies and the deeply immoral system of financial parasitism by mafia banks and corporations that have more power than many countries.

For anyone who has any delusions about the decency and morality of the neo-liberal world order, I highly recommend the award winning 2010 documentary Inside Job that in every sordid sickening detail records the 2008 global financial collapse, systemic cesspool of corruption and shameful successive public bailouts.

You may be able to watch this must see revealing film in its entirety on the Vimeo web site here:

https://vimeo.com/20536543

In its devious ways, the monstrous capitalist gorgon reforms the institutions and actors of the social democratic state to become fundamentalist evangelists for the total omnipotence of the global market, leading to the normalization of post-democratic governance as it transfers power and wealth upwards to Wall Street vultures and the transnational wealthy elite “masters of mankind”. Society becomes atomized, sterile and inert, immunized from the emergence of ideals that compete with vile neo- liberal hegemony of the markets protected from any and all public scrutiny.

Notes:

[1] Realism is a school of philosophical thought, a metaphysical position underpinning all science that claims reality exists independent of our subjectivities, opinions, biases and beliefs. Unfortunately the notion of scientific inquiry, objective reality and truth have been hijacked by not only anti-enlightenment philosophical trends such as postmodernism, but by politics, the proto-fascist capitalist state and its corporate propagandists to promote their agendas of exploitation and pillage of what remains of the planet and its dazed and confused inhabitants. Truth is reduced to utility and reality reduced to whatever makes a profit. Science, to a large extent, is no longer the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, reality and truth, but rather like the Enlightenment project of inquiry, logic and reason, has been reduced to the instrumental and pragmatic. Like a fictitious deity, the market has become the final arbitrator of all that exists.

Mark Fisher’s text is indispensable as the first attempt to describe capitalism as a totalitarian system. When the market is the final basis and foundation for all decision making, the autonomy of the individual and public realm become mere consumers and commodities like all other objects in the capitalist world by the authoritarian command of a monolithic transnational behemoth bank or corporation, all legalized and enabled by the neoliberal state.

Neo-liberalism is a parasite on the rigged economic order and debased body politic, draining any minimalist “democracy” or   sense of community/solidarity that once existed of its struggling life force by replacing the central role of conscientious citizenship and input by the masses with financial manipulation and corporate management of the entire public sphere. The marginalization and elimination of competing political ideals and ideologies curtail the possibility of change to a dangerous illusion and the cultural unconscious becomes the hijacked territory of domination by corporations and its endless marketing banalities and mind numbing propaganda. Even the radical counterculture and art of the 1960s and 70s, including its music, has been co-opted, hijacked, desecrated and distorted and shamelessly used in its pathetic television advertisements. Anyone want to buy a Che Guevara or Mao T-shirt?

Capitalist realism is the short circuiting of reason by betraying the Enlightenment notion of science as pure inquiry and the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge as profit based ideologies, mechanisms and computer algorithms displace all other considerations. It is reductive because in its rigid agenda which hypocritically defines humans as rational beings who maximize utility while it continues to market superfluous products, conflating wants and needs as human cognition is reduced to nothing more than the expression of instant gratification and cynical self-interest.

Sorry Aristotle, but you were wrong about human beings as “rational animals”. What our corporate masters desire are irrational beings that make irrational decisions without appealing to evidence or logic. Marketing of mostly useless or unnecessary products relies on a narrow calculus of what drives social behavior, which testifies not to its scientific objectivity and rationality but rather the desire to model citizens as void of free will, reduced to captive unthinking automatons and crazed consumers who behave like zombie sheep that must have that latest $2000 Apple “smart” phone.

Addendum: Two Recent articles on our unredeemable FUBAR world that simply cannot be fixed - and why is about to become a dystopian nightmare that when compared with Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World makes their futuristic novels benign and facile in comparison:

The “Great Reset” or Pretext for Dystopia

By Diana Johnstone, December 10, 2020

In their World Economic Forum Treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.

By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).

In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest corona virus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.

The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.”  We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”

Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.

“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?

“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”

“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”

This is the voice of would-be Global Governance.  From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.

Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations.  It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19. 

Herr Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum and the new self-appointed Master of Humankind on our systemically corrupt authoritarian neo-fascist Dystopian Dying Planet.

A Powerful Lobby

What is it, exactly?  I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby.  The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax reductions, procurements, regulations and legislation.  In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism. 

It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector.  Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.

In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests.  The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy. 

It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.

The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets.  The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.

The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC.  It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself. 

The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext.  Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.

So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism.  But its prospects are looking good.  Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its Wall Street moguls to his transition team.

But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.

Can “Democracy” Be Restored?

The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way.  No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing.  Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.

The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total de-politicization of the American people.  That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed.  But it was all much ado about nothing. 

There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy.  Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.

A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.  

Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces.  What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development. 

Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.

Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.  

Redefining Issues

The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts.  New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.

We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.

No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms.  The WEF welcomes this as a trend.  Is it bad for that reason?  To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel.  It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.

No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.

No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.”  For the Davos planners, the three merge.

Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”

Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism?  Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset?  We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.

No. 4 – Food.  In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly? 

The Central Issue: Homo Faber

No. 5 – What about human work?

“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.” 

This replacement has already been underway for decades.  Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor.  But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work. 

The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”

Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:

 “As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”

“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click.  Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes. 

There is a potential movement out there.  But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.

In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living.  The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.

Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to  large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.”  What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage! 

And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy.  But all those robots and drones?  Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how?  By more robots?  Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?  

At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:

“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”

No. 5 – And the military.  Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens.  But not to worry!

“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is.  Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars.  It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:

“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen.  Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.” 

So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity.  When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!

“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail.  Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”

Americans have a choice.  Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it. 

The future is shaped by investment choices.  Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices.  For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested. 

And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.

Diana Johnstone lives in Paris.  Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions and Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .

Net Worth of US Billionaires Has Soared by $1 Trillion to Total of $4 Trillion Since Pandemic Began

Wealth Increase in 9 Months Exceeds Likely $908 Billion Cost of Covid-19 Relief Package GOP Has Stalled as Too Costly

By Americans for Tax Fairness and The Institute for Policy Studies

December 11, 2020

he collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has jumped by over $1 trillion since roughly the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to a total of $4 trillion at market close on Monday, December 7, 2020. Their wealth growth since March is more than the $908 billion in pandemic relief proposed by a bipartisan group of members of Congress, which is likely to be the package that moves forward for a vote in the next week, but has been stalled over Republican concerns that it is too costly.  

The total net worth of the nation’s 651 billionaires rose from $2.95 trillion on March 18—the rough start of the pandemic shutdowns—to $4.01 trillion on Dec. 7, a leap of 36%, based on Forbes billionaires, according to a new report  by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). By around March 18 most federal and state economic restrictions in response to the virus were in place. Combined, just the top 10 billionaires are now worth more than $1 trillion.

Forbes’ annual billionaires report was published March 18, and ATF and IPS collected the real-time data on Dec. 7 from the Forbes website. The methodology of this analysis has been favorably reviewed by PolitiFact. The ATF-IPS analysis also looks at wealth growth since February 2019—the date of Forbes’ immediately previous annual billionaires report published well before the start of the pandemic and resulting market gyrations.

The $1 trillion wealth gain by 651 U.S. billionaires since mid-March is:

At $4 trillion the total wealth of all U.S. billionaires today is nearly double the $2.1 trillion in total wealth held by the bottom half of the population, or 165 million Americans.

Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers

“Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. “As tens of millions of Americans suffer from the health and economic ravages of this pandemic, a few hundred billionaires add to their  massive fortunes. Their pandemic profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major COVID relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches. Their wealth growth is so great that they alone could provide a $3,000 stimulus payment to every man, woman and child in the country, and still be richer than they were 9 months ago. Joe Biden won a tax-fairness mandate in November. We look forward to working with him and Congress to deliver on that mandate by taxing the massive wealth of these billionaires.”

“The updraft of wealth to the billionaire class is disturbing at a time when millions face eviction, destitution, and loss,” said Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of Billionaire Bonanza 2020, a report looking at pandemic profiteering and billionaire wealth. “Billionaires are extracting wealth at a time when essential workers are pushed into the viral line of fire.”

All data from Forbes is available here:

10-13-20 Billionaires Data - Google Sheets

March 18, 2020 data: Forbes, “Forbes Publishes 34th Annual List Of Global Billionaires,” March 18, 2020

Dec. 7, 2020 data: Forbes, “The World’s Real-Time Billionaires, Today’s Winners and Losers,” accessed Dec. 8, 2020

Feb. 8, 2019 data: Forbes 2019 World Billionaires Report, March 5, 2019

Ordinary Americans have not fared as well as billionaires during the pandemic:

Without a federal fiscal relief package, workers will face even greater loss of jobs and services than they have already suffered. The Economic Policy Institute predicts that without more federal aid 5.3 million public-sector jobs—including those of teachers, public safety employees and health care workers—will be lost by the end of 2021.

Because of long-standing racial and gender disparities, low-wage workers, people of color and women have suffered disproportionately in the combined medical and economic crises of 2020. Blacks and Latinos are far more likely to become infected with Covid-19 and to die from the disease. Billionaires are overwhelmingly white men.

The stock market surge and lock-down economy have been a boon to tech monopolies and helped create four U.S. “centi-billionaires.” Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are now each worth more than $100 billion. Prior to this year, Bezos had been the only U.S. centi-billionaire, reaching that peak in 2018. Bezos and other billionaires have seen particularly astonishing increases in wealth between March 18 and Dec. 7:

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