Market Stalinism and the Marxist Supernanny

Well, we've made it to the end of 2024 and the end of our run on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. In this episode, we unpack these last two ideas, talk about Stalinist Bureaucracy and why it's relevant to talking about work today, some updates on this podcast, and some thoughts on the recent UHC CEO shooting. So, grab a holiday-themed emotional support beverage, enjoy, and have a happy new year!

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism : Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/index.htm

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 17: Market Stalinism and the Marxist Supernanny

Hey all. Welcome to part 3 of our look at Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? And… the last episode of the year; between the holidays and trying to hustle some VO work to pay the bills (this episode’s late as I recently finished the largest voiceover project I’ve worked on to date, which was about 3 hours of finished character work, and, no, unfortunately you’re never going to hear any of it, it was just some corporate TTS system training, so, don’t expect to hear me on something animated any time soon. It was fun, but, man, editing 3 hours of finished audio and cataloging 71 WAV files is, um, tedious, I was a bit spent after knocking that out so this got put on the shelf for a week) So, plan is to  wrap this year, take a measure of what’s gone well and what needs some attention, and come back fresh in January, and then closing out this section on thinking Utopian about the problem of work. Speaking of, when we pick back up, we’ll be looking at James Livingston’s No More Work, Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea and circling back to Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries to do a deeper dive into some of the theory she’s leveraging and her nonteleological-utopian approach to dealing with the problem. Then we’ll have a bit of a section conclusion, and I’m going to try to set up another Happy Hour conversation (with better audio this time), before moving on to History, where we’ll take a look at some of the ‘Masters of Suspicion’ (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche), Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and others. If you’re interested in a really comprehensive examination of the history of work, I strongly recommend checking out Work: a Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman. I listened to the audiobook – I’m recording one right now, but I still can’t bring myself to say “I read” an audiobook (unless of course I’m the one literally reading it), I don’t know, maybe I’m old fashioned, maybe some scrap of analytic philosophy took root somewhere deep in my psyche and structures the way I use words – Suzman’s text is a fascinating (and did I say comprehensive?) look at the anthropological, biological, and socio-political history of work. The audiobook is like 14 hours and it’s narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith, who does a fantastic job. What we’re going to be looking at though is more of the philosophy side, or the intellectual history side of the problem of work that informs how we got where we are now and where we’re hoping to go; so, Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogical approach to history; Freud’s psychoanalytical method and its sociological importance; Weber’s sociological analysis of how the logic of capitalist work is indebted to Protestant Christianity; Marx’s historical materialism, following from Hegel and informing later thinkers like Benjamin, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Foucault and Deleuze, Horkheimer and Adorno, Berardi, Negri, Gramsci, and so on. that have all concerned themselves with history, ethics, social justice and labor; and, of course, the M word itself, Marxism. I’ve only got a loose outline right now, I’ll be working on that over the break, but I think that will take us pretty much into the summer, another break, and then the start of “Philosophy vs Work” Season 2. 

While on the topic of holidays, work hustles, and the future of this podcast, did you know you can Support the show? I know some of you do, and, sincerely, thank you, every little bit helps. There’s a Support link on the hosting page, Philosophyvswork.buzzsprout.com (sidenote, buzzsprout instituted a bit of a visual revamp recently, so if your curious about the social media links, they’re now on the bottom of that page, so, just scroll down) and there’s the Patreon site, patreon.com/c/philosophyvswork (you can find a link to that on both the buzzsprout site, it’s the one with the ‘external website’ icon and the YouTube channel). Patreon currently offers 3- and 6-dollar tiers, there’s no difference in what membership gets you, we don’t have swag or t-shirts or anything, yet anyway, it’s just up to what you believe the show is worth to you… and Buzzsprout offers 3, 5, 8, and 10. Man, I need to get into the actual content before I turn into NPR. Oh, and a last little update on the podcast, we’ve now got downloads on every continent but South America, so, I guess the world is telling me I need to jot Liberation Philosophy onto next year's reading list. 

I’d also like to take a minute to address the UHC CEO shooting, given this was almost certainly an act of political violence and given the general content of this show. First, I do not support or condone violence. I, like Einstein, consider myself a pacifist, and a pacifist up to a point. For Einstein, that point was Nazis, and, personally, I think that’s a pretty good line to draw. Once you’re facing something that poses such an immediate and catastrophic danger of violence to others, pacifism may do more harm than good. Ethics isn’t ethics in a vacuum, ethics can only be ethics in regards to relationships with others. If you’re curious as to my thoughts on nonviolence, in case you missed it – and, based on downloads, it’s a safe bet if you’re listening now, and especially if you’re a recent listener (welcome, by the way) you started listening because of that episode, but check out episode 15 on Trump, Anger and Outrage. 

As for the shooting, why am I putting my two cents in on a pretty saturated topic, in both legacy and social media? Well, because, in part, the social and legacy media response to the shooting connects to what we’ve been talking about in terms of capitalist realism. On the one hand, you have the legacy or mainstream media (liberal and conservative) condemning the action, condemning the ambivalent to sympathetic public response, covering UnitedHealthcare’s security response (and, importantly, in many, but by no means all, cases, sidestepping United’s health coverage denial process and the real harm they’ve done to the public, especially children and the elderly, or focusing on the police action of the manhunt and what the police are doing to appear to keep the public safe – also sidestepping that this was a targeted act of political violence and that this wasn’t someone shooting into a theater or arena or some other public venue and posed next to no threat to the general public. If anything, the biggest risk to the public was getting caught in some police standoff or having the misfortune of looking anything like the shooter and being assaulted by some vigilante or wannabe hero cop. Now that he’s been peacefully captured – personally, I think it says a lot that he managed to get from New York City to Altoona, Pennsylvania, on public transportation no less, either unseen or, at least, unreported, only to be turned in to police in a county where over 70 percent voted for Trump – it’s just a question now of how much light of day legacy media is going to give to the trial and what the judge will allow publicized as well as into evidence and testimony. For example, how much will the public get to hear about Brian Thompson’s involvement in UHC’s industry leading 32% claim denial rate, or 90% denial rate algorithm. Will anything about UHC be admitted into evidence. How much will be made public in the media? And, of course, what impact, if any, will that have on UHC’s share price? And, ultimately, what will Congress do, if anything, as regards UHC’s Medicare and ACA coverage? Will anything be done to rein them in, or will the government keep paying them to literally get away with murder by gross negligence – granted, it’s difficult to even pretend negligence when the policy intends to let people die painfully as long as it’s better for  the bottom line. 

Since the shooting, there has been some, I won’t go so far as to call it disinformation – I have no insight into the content creator’s intent beyond presuming a desire to go viral and maybe make some money on it – but multiple posts, TikToks, etc., have claimed that Amazon, in response to the revelation of the words written on the recovered bullet casings, had blocked the sale of Jay Fineman’s “Delay, Deny, Defend: why insurance companies don’t pay claims and what you can do about it" because it could, allegedly according to Jeff Bezos, ‘further radicalize people to take similar actions.’ Now, best I can tell, this is utter BS. The book is still available on Amazon for purchase for Kindle and the paperback is sold out, which is confirmed on the author’s website. 

Had this been true though… We'd be leaving the territory Fisher was talking about as capitalist realism as postmodern societal condition and moving into Stalinist territory, with the narrative of corporate capitalism, and its protection, as the approved discourse. Beyond that though, this is the same vendor that makes Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Camus, and so many other “radical,” “leftist,” and “revolutionary” authors readily available. What this tells me – again, had this been true, it’s not, the book appears to still be available for purchase for Kindle – is that the capitalist class, people like Jeff Bezos, recognize that the political left, at least in America, had been neutered of its revolutionary or radicalizing potential. Revolutionary Marxism is perfectly banal now, material suitable to be sold for profit; but, a book on the minutiae of health insurance companies contains enough damning evidence to cause people to take up arms against CEOs, and so must be silenced. 

To be fair, Amazon also makes authors such as Ayn Rand, Thilo Sarrazin, Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, and others on the far right readily available as well. 

Alright, Fisher, part 3. Market Stalinism and the Marxist Supernanny!

Okay, I think I know what you’re thinking. Market Stalinism?? How on earth do these two words go together? Markets imply trade and capitalism and Stalinism is totalitarian, soviet communism. Well, yes, and no. On the one hand, markets really precede capitalism so it’s really that capitalism implies markets rather than the other way around, capitalism needs markets, but markets don’t need capitalism; and neither Stalinism nor Sovietism fulfil the aims of communism. Quick and dirty version, soviet, is simply the Russian word for a council or assembly. The Bolshevik soviet was, nominally, a worker’s council, an attempt at a governing council made up from the working class. Now, long story short, in the early 1900s – another sidenote, when asked about when the American economy was “great,” as in, what economic model should we be looking at to ‘make America great again’, Trump nominee Howard Lutnik immediately jumped to the early 1900s, a period of extreme worker exploitation and violent suppression – in Russia you had people like Lenin, following from Hegel and Marx, trying to teach Hegel to a largely illiterate working class on economics and philosophy, trying to get them to go to reading circles after a long day in the factories to read incredibly dense texts, on economics and philosophy, in order to awaken ‘class consciousness.’ This was, unsurprisingly, a failed endeavor. Lenin opts instead that a vanguard is needed to awaken class consciousness; it’s just not going to happen naturally, or if it does it will take too long to do anything about the abuses taking place now. And so, in the wake of the 1905 Revolution – a particularly fascinating period where Russia, briefly, had a constitution – and one that, in writing anyway, guaranteed greater rights and civic duties to the people than in the United States at the time, especially as regards women, and introduces the soviet system – and, yeah, I know I’m leaving a ton out, but we need to get back to Fisher – of these local governmental councils. The councils were comprised of workers, socialist revolutionaries, anarchists, fighting directly against the Tzarist government, and following the 1917 Revolutions (the first, the February, or Bourgeois, or Democratic Revolution and then the famed October, or Bolshevik, or Socialist Revolution, after the Germans smuggle Lenin back to Russia in order to get Russia out of World War One. Now, without getting into Leninism and the revolutions, though it may be worth revisiting somewhere down the line, the takeaway here is that the soviet system under Lenin, and then especially under Stalin, transforms the government from the Tzarist Absolute Monarchy to an Absolutist Bureaucracy. The Soviet History Archive (made available through the Marxists Internet Archive, or Marxists.org, a volunteer, non-profit, public internet library that makes works of political, philosophical, and scientific thought by Marxist and non-Marxist authors freely available – I use it often to help cite sources, for example, if I made a margin note about something Walter Benjamin wrote, it’s a lot easier find the essay and passage… yada yada yada… the only discrepancies I’ve found appear to be differences in translation), now, per the entry “Soviet Government” they note, quote

After the promulgation of the 1936 Constitution, under Stalin, the Council of People's Commissars was defined as the Soviet government and the "highest executive and administrative organ of state power". However, at the same time, the Constitution also stripped the Council of People's Commissars [the Soviet Government, 1923-46] of its ability to enact laws, and instead confined it to issuing "decrees and regulations on the basis and in execution of the laws currently in force". Legislative power was shifted to the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium, who alone could alter laws, having replaced the Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive Committee respectively.

Lenin had sought to create a governmental structure that was independent of the party apparatus. Grigory Zinoviev, however, maintained that the Politburo was the principal body of the state, and from Stalin’s tenure [as General Secretary of the Party, he didn’t serve as Chairman of the Presidium] until Mikhail Gorbachev’s [who served also as General Secretary, and concurrently as Chairman of the Presidium, then Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and President of the Soviet Union], there existed an informal system of government by which appointment of People's Commissars came to be made by the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and ratified later by the Council of People's Commissars.

End quote. 

Under Stalin, any interests that the socialist revolutionaries, the workers, the anarchists, the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, or even Lenin, were incidental to Stalin’s totalitarian grip on power, fueled, among the people, by fear mongering of the abuses of capitalism and the evils of the imperialist American military (which was of course rhetorically refuted but never actually mitigated by the US or American businesses in their actions) and, of course, overseen across the Soviet Union by the ever-present police state. 

Let’s bring this home a little, I mean, we’re more than a little distant from Stalinism now. Seriously, we’re pushing the tail end of 2 generations since the official collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The oldest of Gen Alpha are like 12 already, and the generation is demarcated to only run through 2025, and then the next generation, whatever that will be, will start.  If you’re an American, imagine a system of government like ours, but without Federalism and where everyone is from the same party. The city council reports up to the county, which reports up to the state, which reports up to a region, which reports up to the ‘supreme’ house of representatives, which ultimately reports to a political apparatus like the RNC, which appoints someone like Donald Trump to lead the entire thing, and where Trump can fill the most senior governmental positions, especially in intelligence and law enforcement, with his own loyalists, following his orders first and then the party line, and wherein if you can’t report up what the leader wants to hear, you’re either going to be replaced or jailed, or both. And of course, as no one wants to be replaced or jailed, everyone reports up precisely what the leader wants to hear, whether it’s true or not. 

And to be clear, the Stalinist Communist Party and the communism of Marx and Engle’s Communist Manifesto, are two wildly different societies. As deeply politically divided as America is today, Republicans and Democrats, even MAGA die-hards and SJW progressives, have far more in common than Stalinism and Marxism. 

Alright, so, what does all of this mean for us? And what in the hells is Market Stalinism? 

Now, the beating heart of the Stalinist, Soviet government was not Communism, or Leninist-Marxist revolutionary ideology, or Socialist Realism, or ‘the workers,’ but the bureaucracy. And I mean capital B Bureaucracy, as in, and to quote the Online Etymology Dictionary, “"government by bureaus [from the French word for desk]," especially "tyrannical officialdom," excessive multiplication of administrative bureaus and concentration of power in them, in reference to their tendency to interfere in private matters and be inefficient and inflexible, 1818, from French bureaucratie, coined by French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay...”

And to those of you out there that actually speak French, I apologize. 

Fisher points to 1999’s Office Space as a brilliant case study for both the corporate and service/hospitality workplace, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, as, in the corporate office, a “mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet authoritarianism” and in the chain restaurant, the employee’s required and regulated self-expression, “individuality and creativity” expressed in terms that “have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies,” which “now make affective, as well as productive demands, on workers.” 

Fisher points to the scene where Jennifer Aniston’s Joanna is informed that her seven pieces of flair while being “officially enough... is actually inadequate.” I’d like to point to one of my favorite examples that I’ve experienced in both the corporate office and chain restaurant worlds; what I call, the false rubric employee review. 

So, back in grad school, as a TA, if I were grading papers, I’d have a rubric – now, most professors, in my experience, would also provide the rubric to students so they know what they’re going to be graded on – a rubric by which to determine what grade the paper received, as much of an essay, especially a position paper, could  be taken as subjective. Here’s an objective outline on what’s worth an A, B, C, etc. grade. If they meet the criteria for an A, then, they get an A. The corporate world, I’ve found, has no such conception of analysis or criticism. The rubric provided as to what qualifies as Outstanding, Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, Needs Improvement, are goalposts that, at the top end, can never be met. The corporate manager lines are as such; 1. As there is always room for improvement, there’s no such thing as perfect, or outstanding, or 5/5, etc. The best performing, most passionate, most loyal employee will only ever be able to achieve like a 4.7-ish score. 2. Your job is to exceed expectations, so if all you do is exceed expectations, then all you are actually doing is the minimum required of you. The goal of the review isn’t actually to provide constructive criticism, encourage better performance, or reward the hardest working and most dedicated employees ; it’s to render subjective what ought to be an objective process and formalize the company’s defense in mitigating any and all increases in payroll costs, keeping payroll as low as possible, cutting the weakest employees – to be replaced by cheaper new hires or eliminating the position from payroll (only to be replaced by a third party temp, ‘cause, they still need someone to get the work done, but want it done more cheaply, especially as regards SEC and tax filings) and giving the best employees as little as necessary to prevent them from seeking other, more gainful employment. 

My last review at  my last corporate job went really well, I exceeded expectations in almost every category, falling short in a few others that my supervisor explicitly noted they didn’t care about – like rigid punctuality – I didn’t have a customer facing or internal support position, if I shifted my day from 8-4 to 11-7 for a doctor’s appointment, it didn’t adversely affect anyone, so I was generally free to come and go as I pleased, within reason, as long as I worked 8 hours a day or took sick or vacation time, if I had it, for time I needed to miss; this, however, was not acceptable to the company standards, so I lost points on punctuality, despite being explicitly informed this wasn’t an issue in our department or for my position. At the end of the score, I was entitled to a team leading, almost  90% of the approved raised percentage for the company, which wound up being… not quite 3%. I went home and did the math, this same multi-billion dollar, international company, in which I was the only full-time employee in my department and working on multiple large scale, company impacting projects, where they were so grateful for all of my hard work, had a compensation and raise system that would have taken me another 20 years to get up to an hourly rate where I could start saving to put a downpayment on a house. At my age, and with my student loans, it was a waste of time. 

Now, this of course wasn’t all my supervisor’s doing. For the most part, their hands were tied as to what they could score on the review, even if it contradicted their expressed rules for the department, tied as to what they could offer, both at maximum and as a proportion of that maximum, in terms of a raise, and what they could propose in terms of career advancement – like I said, I was the only full time person on my team, my position was actually created for me to hire me on from being a permalancer/contractor. There was no career path for me. If I wanted to advance in the company, I’d either have to take a “lateral promotion” to a different department (as my previous supervisor had), or simply wait for my supervisor to get promoted and apply for their position, transitioning out of my administrative/audit position and to a supervisory one – which, I’ll note, was the primary mode of advancement in the company. The branch manager turnover that I witnessed seemed crazy to me; but branch manager, as I learned, was often held out as a carrot to keep top performing sales people both in the company and feeling like they were advancing in their career; though they often, and fairly quickly, took demotions back to sales or left the company altogether after they realized management meant more work, more responsibility, and, in many cases, much less money. For my end, there were only three positions between my role and the company CIO and two of them were, principally, supervisory. The odds of advancement, without jumping to another department, were extraordinarily slim. 

Okay, so, why bring this up? Well, because it points to something – and Graeber brings this up in Bullshit Jobs as well – that was, allegedly, never supposed to happen in a capitalist system: the entrenched, sclerotic bureaucracy of the corporation. Capitalism, allegedly, drives innovation. Entrenchment and sclerosis is supposed to mean business death, this level of bureaucracy is only supposed to exist in “communist,” “socialist,” (and I’m using air quotes here) or state-managed economies. 

Fisher notes, quote

Initially, it might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures should have intensified under neoliberal governments that have presented themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist. Yet new kinds of bureaucracy – ‘aims and objectives’, ‘outcomes’, ‘mission statements’ – have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence. It might seem that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it.

End-quote.

Little bit of unpacking; as a reminder, neoliberal does not mean liberal in the sense of ‘liberal democrats’ or ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ rhetorical labeling. Neoliberalism, and we'll  get into this in detail next year, is a right-of-center update to classical liberalism that holds that the economy, and specifically, a capitalist economy trumps governance. Now, unlike libertarianism, which holds the government’s primary functions are to provide police, fire, and military defense, and otherwise follow the lead of the market, intervening only in the case of free contract violation, neoliberalism does believe in a strong, but limited, constitutional, democratic government and a bare-bones ‘welfare state’ that essentially sets a basement people can climb out of if/when they hit rock-bottom. To that end, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama are all neoliberals, while George W. Bush falls under the neoliberal off-shoot of neo-conservative, comfortable with the basic tenets of neoliberalism, but willing to leverage the military offensively to open potential free/capitalist markets, and by doing so, thus spreading liberal democratic government, in a kind of benevolent imperialism. 

As to ‘return of the repressed,’ this is Fisher connecting Freud, and we’ll also get to this next year as far as both Freud and Nietzsche. 

Another thing to consider, and this even more so the case today post-Covid, as Fisher points to Richard Sennett’s analysis of labor, administration, and regulation in Control societies, is the flattening of pyramidal hierarchies. In a disciplinary system, like the Fordist and pre-Fordist factory, the floor supervisor was tasked with physically observing worker behavior and productivity, and, in some cases, using physical force or threats of impoverishment to discipline workers into compliance (remember, at this time, the employer could not only fire at will, but then collude with other businesses to make sure you never worked again – but of course, poverty and unemployment were also crimes, so you could be sentenced to work just for not having work), but in the control society that observation and enforcement becomes targets and metrics, competition between workers to achieve metrics, the worker self-disciplines and the company surveils. If the factory is akin to the prison, then the corporation is akin to the police state. 

The worker is no longer confined to their cell, but free to move about, though their activity is always monitored, they must always be available for work, and available to work (in emails, phones, text messages, etc.) and the greatest threat to their economic stability isn’t the supervisor, but their coworkers. 

Recall, the ‘utopia’ of capitalism is the end of work; using money (rather than labor) to make more money, by purchasing the materials, the machinery (the tech) and the labor (physical, mechanical, automated, robotic, AI, etc.) to produce a product to be sold on the market for profit in order to generate more wealth to be used to produce more things to produce more wealth and so on and so on. Yet, the reality of ‘late’ capitalism (the modern, post-industrial economy – and this is putting aside the possibility we’re no longer even in a capitalist economy anymore, check out mackenzie wark’s capital is dead; is this something worse? If you’re interested in reading more about that), the reality of late capitalism is a feudal-like fusion of economy and governmentality where corporations have both co-opted and duplicated the mechanisms of government, whether it’s the government serving the needs of business (in place of and over the needs of the people) or in duplicating the methods of bureaucratic, authoritarian, and police-state regimes. Not market capitalism, but Market Stalinism. 

Now, Fisher goes into psychoanalysis and Žižek and the idea of the failures of government to reign in the economy so that it serves the people as akin to the psychological trauma of a failure of the Father function, an economic ‘Lord of the Flies’, to be a bit reductive, but we’re going to skip ahead to Fisher’s idea of something that may be able to steer society back on track, and for that, we need hop on the British reality TV time machine to 2004’s “Supernanny.” 

 The premise of “Supernanny” was simple, here’s a family that’s pretty much gone off the deep end, kids run wild, there’s no discipline, the parents are detached and/or ineffective, and often on the edge of a nervous breakdown, though also enabling or complicit in the chaos, and it’s just rank chaos. They beseech TV’s Supernanny for help, and she swoops in to save the day, bringing discipline to the household (parents included). 

As Fisher describes it, “[t]he program offers what amounts to a relentless, although of course implicit, attack on postmodernity’s permissive hedonism… But the problems that Supernanny confronts do not arise from the actions or character of the children – who can only be expected to be idiotic hedonists – but with the parents. It is the parents following of the pleasure principle, the path of least resistance, that causes most of the misery in the families.” The parents cave to the children, sometimes defending their actions as trying to adhere to ‘modern’ child education and discipline research, and lacking any restraint the children, unsurprisingly, become tyrants. 

Now, as opposed to what you might find in some conservative rhetoric regarding workers or the poor, or work ethic rhetoric, or something like what Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, it’s not that the worker that is running wild and desperately in need of governance now, but the capitalist class, the corporation, the workplace, and it has done so because the government, the de facto parent, has enabled capital to become tyrannical. 

Fisher notes that what the economy needs then, is a Marxist Supernanny. Notes Fisher, “[the] problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to be based on rejecting.” 

Sidenote, this centrality of the conversion of desire to need in commercial markets can largely be laid at the feet of one Edward Bernays; Freud’s son-in-law, who bastardized Freud’s research on psychoanalysis and converted its basic premises from therapeutic to exploitative, leveraging the techniques of talk therapy in order to persuade and manipulate. Today he’s considered the godfather of marketing and PR. 

Now, there is a major flaw in Fisher’s suggestion for moving forward, and that’s the moment of crisis in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crash and the Great Recession has passed. As former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel under President Obama had noted, ‘never let a good crisis go to waste.’ Well, ironically, that’s precisely what happened. The financial crisis was met with a massive transfer of public wealth to private, for-profit banks and other industries, many of which were directly at the heart, and whose actions directly led to the crisis. Fisher’s argument was that this should have been the ideal time for a Marxist Supernanny of sorts to swoop in and bring discipline, by impressing austerity on the capital market, accepting that that would entail a “new ascesis” on the part of consumers that couldn’t then have every desire, that the market had convinced them were actually needs, immediately fulfilled. Granted, Fisher also often notes another impending crisis, though I suspect his hope was that in tackling the immediate crisis of the financial crash, we could begin to institute policy that would mitigate the coming environmental crisis. 

 Notes Fisher, “Nothing contradicts capitalism’s constitutive imperative towards growth more than the concept of rationing goods and resources. Yet it is becoming uncomfortably clear that consumer self-regulation and the market will not by themselves avert environmental catastrophe.” 

Alright, now, I did say I was going to try to end this on a more hopeful, forward thinking note, since when we return we’ll be looking at the utopian side of the problem with work, rather than the problem with utopian thinking, but, keep in mind, as we’re working through Fisher, the real problem isn’t utopian thinking as such, but rather the lack of utopian thinking in that there is, under capitalist realism, a lack of political imagination for something that could truly compete with capitalism; as opposed to mere modifications to capitalism that we typically see today from even the furthest left American Democrat or British Labor leaders. 

Fisher had hoped the financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession had brought us to a “year zero,” citing British political theorist Alex Williams in calling the political condition of the time, in the middle of the crisis, as a “political landscape littered with… ideological rubble.” He felt the crisis was such that the space had been cleared for a “new anti-capitalism to emerge.” One which wasn’t necessarily bound to the old forms of anti-capitalism or the doomed proletarian romanticism of class consciousness and revolution. 

Notes Fisher, quote

It is crucial that a genuinely revitalized left confidently occupy the new political terrain [a renewal that is not a return… an effective anti-capitalism must be a rival to Capital, not a reaction to it… Anti-capitalism must oppose Capital’s globalism with its own, authentic, universality]… Nothing is inherently political; politicization requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs. If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy. … What is needed is a new struggle over work and who controls it; an assertion of worker autonomy (as opposed to control by management) together with a rejection of certain kinds of labor (such as the excessive auditing [i.e. scopophilic surveillance] which has become [the] central feature of work in post-Fordism). This is a struggle that can be won – but only if a new political subject coalesces… 

End quote.

Fisher calls for the “withdrawal” of all forms of labor only noticed by management, those subject to the mechanisms of surveillance; so, not the production of goods and services that necessarily impact the general public, but the forms of work tied up in Market Stalinism (which I’m updating a bit for a post-Covid world); self-reporting, surveillance, mouse and keyboard tracking, laptop cameras, in-office requirements for positions that don’t perform any required work that would need to be done in the office, unceasing meetings, and much of the forms of tedious, Orwellian make-work David Graeber identifies in Bullshit Jobs. 

Ultimately, the takeaway though, is that the struggle against capitalist realism is a struggle that can be won. It may, and most likely will take a crisis, and probably a pretty bad one, and there will likely be pain and suffering, and struggle and austerity, but if we have the political imagination and the bravery to take more than baby steps, to make more than minor modifications, then capitalism can be overcome. And the crisis itself, whatever it may be, is what provides the hole in the wall through which a new left, anti-capitalist political imagination can escape. From a position in which there is no way out, it will be because of the crisis that something new is possible. Entrepreneurial self-help are all really keen on the idea that there’s no such thing as luck as far as success in business, that luck is the convergence of opportunity and preparedness. Well, if we want a way out, that political imagination, that utopian thinking, needs to begin now, and be prepared for the moment of crisis, so that it can lead the way. 

And on that note, I’m going to wrap this episode, and this year! Thank you for joining me. This podcast has been something that’s been bouncing around in my head for years, and I’ve been continually surprised by the reach it’s had already. From here in Charlotte to New York, LA, Chicago, Philly,  Lawrenceville, Georgia, Salt Lake City, Frankfurt, Germany, Stockholm, Sweden, Egypt, Singapore, the UK, Vietnam, Spain, I mean, I was not prepared for the global potential for this content. So, thank you, happy holidays, be kind to each other, think big, don’t forget to like and subscribe, and have a happy new year!

‘til next time. 

Alight, now I know this is where I normally insert the usual post-roll, but we’re gonna’ do this a little bit different and, uh, lean on some of those, uh, characters we were talking about earlier!

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