Our socio-economic neurosis is grounded in the philosophy of late 20th century capitalist fundamentalism, when industrial economic systems of social control were enhanced to boil human reality down into units of individualised pulp fiction. In the 1960 and 1970s a growing social awareness emerged that challenge industrial Fordist methods of work that dominated countries like the USA and UK, where consumer goods were manufactured on production lines of deskilled human labour, like those pioneered in the manufacture of the Model T Ford Motor vehicle in the early 1900s. The breaking down of the production process into quick, standardised steps enabled wages to rise and uplift many workers to the middle class. From this elevated position along with increased disposable income to express self through materialism, it also created the conditions for people to see beyond subservient ways of being. Given the time, space and economic security to think many people’s awareness and self-confidence began to grow.
Alternative ways of self-expression began to emerge as did discontent the increasingly shared experiences of working conditions, that in the era of mass production degraded the human experience to being cogs of repetitive actions on a conveyer belt machine. This growing awareness threatened to rupture the ideology of master and servant, which is at the foundation of capitalist way of being, as the collective assertion of workers uniting to demand better pay and working conditions, gave the individual workers confidence to speak up for themselves and a collective sense of empowered being.
Many of them demanded a better life than the old pre-war world of top-down traditionalism, and the passive aggression of social class heredity. Ladies quietly knowing their objectified places, mentally unstable, ethnocentric white supremacy, black man as threat. The centuries old British way of life, challenged by an infusion of ascendant American liberalism, and the development of idealistic British youth subcultures that challenged the hegemonic grip of centuries old power elites, Kings, Queens, off with their heads.
Following the surprise re-election of Winston Churchill for the Conservative Party in 1951, those born into power, set about rebuilding social acceptance for capitalism and the idea that humans' express self through buying things. Following six years of socially progressive Labour policies, which included the foundation of the welfare state, it was time to put profit before people once again.
Fordism was introduced to improve the profitability and productivity of British factories, applying American methods of assembly line production, to replace unionised skilled labour with unskilled workers. The idea being that mass production of cars and consumer goods could be manufactured on assembly lines using machines that were easy to use. Consequently, the price of goods decreased as big business came to dominate through economies of scale. During these post war years, workers on assembly lines were required to complete repetitive and alienating tasks which gave little job satisfaction. To ensure targets for profit were met, management closely controlled the speed of production and working conditions, which for a while saw incomes rise.
Sociologists Paul Willis argues that some elements of working-class subculture adapted quickly to the Fordist production line. Generations born out of poverty, struggle and grim working conditions, had developed cultures of resistance that find meaning in fleeting moments of joy. These emerge in young people through anti school subcultures where survival techniques are shared against the drudgery of the formal curriculum assessment tests, sitting down writing things, meaninglessness, nothing to do with real work. This is a fight to keep spirits alive despite the life crushing hidden curriculum, teachers acting like your future boss destroying fun, threatening you with dos and don’ts or live the rest of your life broke.
For Willis these youth possess a more fully developed culture than most of the school population. School uniform rule rejecting deviant styles, symbolic resistance to the tyranny of school mind, body and soul control. Subcultural style aspires to be more grown up than the school accepts, smoking and drinking, expressions of adulthood, life ahead. Violence, theft and vandalism, self-expression in a world devoid of hope. All these behaviours are cultural adaptation, allowing skint boys the dignity to choose a life of real work graft, cigarette break freedom, beers down the pub with Dad and the lads from school.
For sociologists Clarke and Jefferson, consumer culture was promoted to replace traditional working-class identity rooted in work and community, with new ways of being offered by individualism, homeownership and consumerism. This was facilitated through what sociologist Ian Taylor calls a process of bourgeoisification, were everyone was encouraged to see themselves as middle class consumers. This resocialisation shifted consciousness away from identifying oneself as belonging to a social group, towards becoming an autonomous individual.
In this process, sociologist Phil Cohen explains how the redevelopment of economically disadvantaged areas destroyed communities by the mass relocation of people into new high-rise housing developments, without any attempt to keep extended families together. For Cohen, these obliterated structures of social support networks where cooperation between family and friends revolved around local public spaces, corner shops, pubs and pavements. For him, the ruling class preference for the nuclear family as the central hub of life, atomized the working class into tower blocks, where families were literally placed on top of each other as if removed from history, out of place and deleted from time.
Social theorist Dick Hebdige observes how this consumerist restructuring of society was promoted as common sense via an ideology that made it seem like fate. The cultural dominance of individualism was established by manipulating public consent, making it seem natural and normal. Drawing upon the work of philosophers Marx and Engels, he explains how the dominant ideas of any particular time in history are controlled by those who have the power to decide what is important and what a society should produce.
By the mid to late 1960 and early 1970s, working class youth had begun to express discontent with this way of life, as capital, the wealth accumulated by the powerful over time, expanded its pursuit of profit by eroding working class living conditions. Clarke and Jefferson observe how youth began to express unhappiness through deviant subcultures that resisted the contradictions of consumerism. Enslaved through repetitive and alienating work, the illusion of freedom as self-identity expressed through owning stuff, bollocks.
The spectacular youth subcultures of Teddy boys and girls, mods, rockers, punks and skinheads, gave subcultural and sociological value to new forms of dress and music. These styles rescued aspects of collective identity from the past and redeployed them through consumer culture as a collective rejection of ruling class authority. Mods expressed their distinctive subcultural style to salvage some of the attitudes and activities of the traditional working class whilst imagining themselves as socially mobile white-collar workers. In reality, they occupied positions as unskilled or semi-skilled workers, where they were dominated and controlled by middle class managers.
This world contradicted the promises of consumerist freedom and Clarke and Jefferson suggest that many young people saw through this paradox but felt trapped. To challenge passive acceptance, they consciously subverted consumer goods, turning them into objects of resistance. The scooter, a formerly a respectable means of transport, was appropriated and converted into a weapon and symbol of collective working-class identity by mods.
Likewise, skinheads became an expression of resistance to bourgeois hegemony. Through this deviant subcultural style, they expressed intergenerational resentment at embourgeoisement, passed between parents and children. Through an exaggerated form of traditional masculinity rooted in manual work, skinheads imagined that they could maintain control of their locality by scaring the bourgeois to keep out. Buzz cut hairstyle, braces, button down striped shirts and heavy boots shouted angry semiology at the grey suits of ruling class authority. Clarke and Jefferson say that this subcultural style attempted to maintain the status of traditional forms of masculinity by deploying them against the threat of consumerist culture and job losses, some of which was misdirected by xenophobic political agitators against immigrant populations.
Conversely, Hebdige explains how despite a significant degree of hateful racism, a multicultural allegiance developed between many second-generation African Caribbean youth and the white working-class population. These young people whose parents had arrived in the UK on HMS Windrush in the years immediately following the Second World War, are significant in the way that their search for identity in face of racism, contributed greatly to the development of ‘indigenous’ youth resistance to top-down authority. Responding to an open invitation to relocate and rebuild Britain, thousands came to do their bit, only to be greeted by the prejudices of ignorance, nurtured over hundreds of years by British ruling class empire exceptionalism.
Faced with a short lifetime of racist prejudice, many second-generation immigrants formed subcultures to assert their hybrid British- African-Caribbean identity and resist racism. Children of the HMS Windrush generation found themselves looking towards Africa to assert their identity as black and British in a country that didn’t accept their existence. Many found themselves living with the poorest and most fragmented communities as capitalism dismantled community solidarity into individual against individual.
Hebdige explains how reggae music provided a uniting soundtrack that empowered black people across the world to unite through the religion, Rastafarianism, and its promise of salvation from the current hell of Babylon: white colonial power. Through unity and religious practice, black people who live in exile across the world will be welcomed back to Black God’s Promised Land; Zion- which awaits in Africa. In Britain, second generation black British youth adopted a secular expression of this identity that allowed them to resist endemic racism with a Rasta style and ‘began to cultivate a more obviously African ‘natural’ image.’
For Hebdige the ideological resistance of white working-class skin heads drew inspiration from black resistance and struggle against, white corporate brutality, enslavement and violence. The idea of black resistance was celebrated in early 1960s mod subculture, who looked to artists like James Brown because he personified the art of subversion, inverting social norms and values, being successful on his own terms. Even the skin head subculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was inspired by the aesthetic and bass line of the Jamaican yardie, subcultural resistance through black power.
The beats of ska and two- tone, the boots, braces and cropped hair, all symbols of defiance against social restructuring. White youth solidarity, inspired by West Indian community, a culture armoured against the external threats of white man’s ruling class ideology.
These subcultures led to the development of a wide rage hugely significant styles of music including, jungle, garage, drum and bass and drill. Back in the 1970s punk and skinhead subcultures drew inspiration from this struggle and incorporated it to articulate their alienation from bourgeois consumer society. In this sense, the punk style was a white reinterpretation of black ethnicity and its resistance through style, music and spirit. In the concrete tower block landscape of 1970s urban Britain, the colour and vitality of West Indian culture gave white youth hope that another world was possible, even if this world was characterised by alienation, decline and top-down social restructuring.
The contradictory nature of the relationship between the white working-class communities and the black settlers, was of course apparent and both confrontational and symbiotic. It is here by the power of cultural alchemy, a form of hybridization occurred between hopeless urban white youth trapped in a capitalist crisis and oppressed black you. This transformational contradiction remains at the heart of contemporary British society.
For Hebdige, the function of youth subcultures in the post-World War 2 years was to continually reconfigure themselves out of the previous manifestations of subculture. This was necessary because subcultures were brought into mainstream culture overtime by the ruling class who either incorporated them into mainstream culture, by being ‘brought back into line’, perhaps via a media campaign designed to shame ‘the animals’ into line as passive conformity; or commodified into merely an item of fashion, where subversive adaptations of style become expressions of consumer identity.
In dismembering the style of subculture through the sale of items of its constituent parts the bricolage of meaning is made obsolete. Hebdige argues that the symbolic meaning of particular styles or types of clothing are passed between youth subcultures as a way of expressing a deeper meaning. Once these are extracted from the group, their value as a signifier is lost.
The philosopher and political theorist Marcuse anticipated the transformational power of 1960s counterculture to liberate the world from one characterised by mind numbing, alienating work into another way of life as celebration and work as co-creation. Following the counterculture of the 1960s/70s, where capital was fearful of the development of new forms of democratic ways of social organisation. Capital sought to replace the confidence that the counterculture had inspired in wider society, to question the nature of socio and economic relationships within capitalism.
Posed with this threat social and political theorist Mark Fisher identifies how neoliberalism was developed by the ruling class to protect their grip of power by removing conscious challenges to its dominance and replacing them with anxious consumers. Fisher argues that neoliberalism was directed towards the destruction of three types of consciousness which were beginning to unravel capital’s grip on power. These where; social class, psychedelic popular modernism, and socialist feminist. Each of these areas of thought exploration were allowing individuals to join in a shared understanding of their collective (class/ female) exploitation in a mind-expanding reality that was cleared of social structures through the vistas opened by the psychedelic and drug induced nature of popular culture and youth culture.
Fisher expands this analysis, by explaining how ruling class authority became increasingly fearful of these subcultural movements and their rejection of passive consumerism. Ideological dominance was asserted through a sense of capitalist realism, which sought to deflate our ability to imagine collective expressions of individual freedom. Freedoms which according to Fisher came out of 1960s music and arts, projecting an alternative view of freedom, accessed psychedelically and experienced as interpersonal connectivity. In the song Psychedelic Shack, by the Temptations, the listener sees their own mind as a ‘psychedelic shack’ where freedom can be rediscovered as a communal space where all external barriers are gone.
‘Psychedelic shack, that's where it's at
People, let me tell you 'bout a place I know, to get in it don't take much dough
Where you can really do your thing, oh yeah
It's got a neon sign outside that says
Come in and take a look at your mind
You'll be surprised what you might find
Strobe lights flashing from sun up to sun down
People gather there from all parts of town’
‘There ain't no such a thing as time
Incense in the air, peace signs painted everywhere
I guarantee you this place will blow your mind
They got music so high you can't get over it
So low you can't get under it’
As transnational capital ditched Fordist methods of production and adopted neoliberal systems of post-Fordist control, socially progressive thinking was subordinated by neoliberal capitalism, absorbing the emancipatory power of the counterculture to become marketised expressions of individualised consumption. Psychologist Oliver James hypothesises that the capture of human potential by neoliberalism has led to the contemporary development of a social pathogen he calls ‘affluenza’; where increased material wealth causes suffering, depression and anxiety. For Fisher, this atomistic individualization now causes mental illness that can only be treated with pharmaceuticals produced by the corporation. Post World War subcultures who once rejected the insistence of education to self-better themselves, are now required to self-medicate.
When faced with such a threat to their dominant position, the ruling class organised themselves to reassert top-down authority and their ability to define their mastery of social reality. Radical individualism was formulated to reassert the top-down authority of economic capital, this being the power of human energy extracted as profit by ruling class owners of the means of production. To avoid subsuming power to the worker and paying them more equitable terms of employment, the powerful developed the technological capacity to relocate industry from the UK to other countries where labour costs were cheap, and workers were post colonially subservient. Trapped in their culturally replicated feudal-mindsets and a naïve self-aggrandising reading of Darwinian theories of societal evolution, the rulers of British politics and industry pulled the rug from under their less evolved and less fit, population.
Instead of treating their work force with the increasing comfort and dignity through higher wages and better working conditions, the powerful exported their factory machinery overseas. Via the myth of deindustrialisation here at home, transnational trade moved to containerised distribution systems that shipped consumer goods around the world from cheap labour factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China. Here in the UK ways of life that had emerged in working class communities since 18th century economics pulled families from rural seasons into factory rota ways of being, were decommissioned just like that. Where hardship had found meaning and hope in the shared experiences of intergenerational life on the factory floor, brass bands, clubs and associations were all dissolved by the new world order of individualised consumer lifestyle choice.
Under the regime of post-industrial capitalists, human reality was redefined through the fictionalisation of life through symbolic brand logos and expression of self as individual self, split apart from communities of being. Self-worth was extracted from community spirit through TV adverts and via catalogue shopping the cult of consumer identity was given birth. In this neoliberal fantasy world individuals express their hidden inner self through the things they own. Instead of making things in factories, the producer was turned into a service sector worker, where they add value to imported goods by creating myths through advertising, shopping experiences and by repackaging cheap imported goods to make them look worth more than they should. For this system to work, communities of people needed to be encouraged to view themselves as being of greater value than the world than the degrading world around them. As the urban landscape of industry that had defined reality for many millions of people for a couple of hundred years was dismantled.
This form of capitalism rose to power in the USA and its political allies, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Devised at the Rand Corporation USA, this new liberal method of social control was based on the Cold War policy of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, whereby the USA and the Soviet Union military industrialists, created immense wealth and power by agreeing not launch a nuclear attack because each side had a comparable array of ballistic missiles capable of annihilating one another. This system of economic development was nuke proof capital accumulation, suited and booted dog men were kept from killing one another thanks to their lack of faith in humanity and fear of their newly liberated animal nature.
Nobel Prize winning mathematician and paranoid schizophrenic John Nash's work was chosen by ruling class culture to show how a socially engineering economic system driven by suspicion and selfishness people looked after their own interests was more desirable than the threat posed by a cooperative one. In concurrence with ruling class perception, his mathematical formula seemed to confirm that humans are only motivated by self-interest and greed, to think otherwise was deadly dangerous. This is the founding principle that neoliberalism capitalism is built upon. Trust no one as they will screw you over to better themselves or blame you for the shit they are in. Economist James M Buchanan supported this view, adding, there’s no such thing as altruism. Public servants who believe in public service are a dangerous threat to be stopped, politicians who say that they are in politics for anything else, other than their own self-interest are dangerous.
A key aim of the neoliberal project was to deflate the political imagination of an increasingly self-confident and connected workforce and it’s appetited for improved living conditions for all and a curtailment of wealth inequality. Friedrich von Hayek believed that society should not be allowed to be moderated and planned by the threat posed by democratic politics. Instead, individuals should be encouraged to follow their own self-interest, in a ‘self-directing automatic system’ where social and economic reality is created by people only looking out for themselves.
Einthoven believed that government should be detached from subjective reality and the socially rooted emotions of nationalism, patriotism, compassion, and collectivism. Government intervention also needs to be decoupled from public opinion and replaced with performance targets and privatised corporate self-regulation. In this system, capital wealth flows and accumulates globally, without the interference of moral human adjudication.
In the UK this form of capitalism was applied by prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who in the 1980s sought to take control the of country. In a show of ideological force, she tackled the power of the public sector by taking on the authority of the medical profession and challenging their altruistic culture. To ideologically subvert this anti individualist way of organising health care, she introduced the ‘internal market’, a mathematical simulation of free market economics, where individual outcomes are measured by personal targets, rather than the collective responsibility of shared actions.
Under the cover of increasing service user choice and personal freedom, neoliberalism attempted to tame the public service culture. By applying game theory developed to fend off nuclear war, individuals could now be monitored and controlled as individual health care workers. Hospitals, medical centres and doctors, experiences were hereby taken out of the real world and into the domain of an extraction that could be quantified on paper, in the economics of suspicion the subjective world of human emotions is distrusted.
This theory of atomised individualism was applied at every level, wherever communities of collective organisation threatened top-down control, game theory was applied to multiply division. In the private sector this already existed as bonuses and redundancy. In the public sector, staff were increasingly managed as individual units where altruism and cooperation were marginalised by audit culture, via Ofsted in education, the Quality Care Commission in health care.
Through game theory, individuals could now be monitored and controlled as atomised health workers. In Hospitals, medical centres and schools, professional staff experiences were taken out of the real world and extracted to data sets. Instead of engaging with the complexities of reality, individual staff are held personally accountable, the social origins of morbidity and sociological patterns of inequality are dismissed as just excuses now.
This politics of suspicion rings true with the learnt experiences of the ruling classes, whose self-interest and social indifference, had been carefully nurtured over centuries spent enduring posh school power games. The bully boy tac- ticks of boarding school, bullshit their way into corporate boardrooms and government. The patterns, beliefs and behaviours of toff privilege teach them to give a shit is weakness. Life beyond the city greenbelt is but a blurry hangover away, beyond the late summer grouse shoot, the powerless needlessly endure a poverty of hope.
Structural inequalities were rebranded as individual choice, the poverty of hope, famine, food banks and forever wars, accepted by the living dead, an inevitable part of capitalist reality. Any idea that these could be overcome by collective will, dismissed as idealistic nonsense, shut up or get out, the system now takes care of things.
For Writer and cultural critic Fisher, we are trapped in a time warp where the promise of the 20th century once offered a future of scientifically organised social progress and increased leisure time, has stopped in a place we are forced to tolerate. Now in the 21st century corporate modes of coercion shape our cultural malaise, using a panopticon of performance measuring metrics, forcing us to accept that there is always room for personal improvement. In this state of being our freedom to imagine a better world seems impossible, a deliberate political project devised by powerful elites who dominate the economy to shape a trapped sense of reality, whilst they party with booming profits.
This is capitalist realism, designed to confound the development of critical thinking, crippling us from acting collectively. The individual accountability of every teacher for each student, extracted from the social inequalities of poverty and place. One to one interaction is dehumanised by audit culture, notes taken for future self-justification, systems analysis, inspection ready database. In this digital world of quantitative data, big other surveillance keeps a close eye on everything, nobody can be trusted, feeble humans, selfish, lazy, greedy. Now the purpose of education is for teachers to justify student exam targets not met, check the records, why did things not go as the value-added algorithms expected?
Fear of the big other is at the heart of capitalist realism control culture, a power structure put in place to make sure fields of data are full ready for your next computer screen performance review. Workers are required to constantly look at ways of self-improvement, so management structures can take credit or blame low productivity on you. From the lower level of call centre operative to higher managerial positions, the big other cannot be encountered in itself. There are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big other wants.
To survive, the worker becomes a passive stressed out shell of their true human potential, subjectively removing themselves from the ‘pointless and demoralizing’ tasks they are required to perform, cutting, and pasting texts and numbers into boxes that the big other wants to see. Mental illness incubates inside this toxic culture, as the parasitic system consumes the mental resilience of its host. Where teachers where once trusted to do a good job, now they are constantly under suspicion and required to document their every thought. Under ruling class hegemony, faux independent auditors within the public sector monitor the civic minded worker with mathematically defined suspicion. In schools and colleges, Ofsted prescribes neoliberal education policy, in the contemporary workhouse do as you are told and make them pass exams. Those teachers most capable of inspiring the next generation to think big, jump ship to save their own drowning imagination. Somewhere there is another world, free from this dire situation.
This system is by design a top-down assault on the ever-present potential of humanity to think critically and beyond individual self-interest and a deliberate attempt to dumb human potential and stop us imagining a better world. For Fisher, neoliberalism deliberately destroyed the social spaces where baby boomers had once resisted the death of humanity on the anti-social assembly lines of consciousness consuming industry. This form of soul-destroying capitalism sought to turn us into mindless consumer zombies, a fevered fantasy where vast inequalities and climate catastrophe are magically solved by individual choices. Vegan meat substitutes, soya protein, palm oil shampoo, slash ‘n burn plantations, rainforests gone. Imagine you’ve made the world a better place, wishful thinking, sips of organic tea, nothing really changes, powerlessness prevails.
Stuck in the forever present, capitalist realist ideological autocracy has all but extinguishing the possibility of imagining a future beyond the next audit, self-flagellation, you’re not good enough. This mode of capitalism has consumed the potential of a human lifetime, and the poltergeist of possibility haunts our everyday. If only we could learn from the past. Patterns of behaviour are repeated without hope and progress is the latest model of the things we already have. Decoupled form time, the spectre of our future quite simply does not exist, in a world where place has been eroded and replaced by what the anthropologist Marc Auge calls “non-place airports, retail parks and chain stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located”.
Extracted as economic value from self, the unsustainable illusions of consumer culture leave us vulnerable to the virus of magical thinking, where our immunity to the bullshit of adverts is left compromised by years of advertising propaganda. Manipulated like Pavlovian dogs, we live as infantilised puppy dogs, extracted from civilization by tech giants who train us how to live in digitally rendered Virtualities from which economic value can be tapped, where post God relativity turns morality into clickbait, and barefaced lies into alternative facts.
The remnants of our pre-digital age skin, flesh, and bones, have become ‘dysmorphic,’ online battles between culture war traditionalists, trolls, and existentialists, fight over the significance of genetic code in the identity politics of individual choice. Fisher argues social dysfunction has been privatized as problems of chemical imbalance, overlooking our extraction from social connections and historical agency as the root cause of much sickness.
For Fisher, capital is a parasite that lives inside all of us and is manifest in our acceptance and complicity with the contradictions we live because of our unwillingness to face up to the ‘nothingness’ of existence, without the fragile compassion of each other. We all know in our hearts that consumerism is meaningless if only we were not living so fast. In contemporary society neoliberalism has been successful in removing class-based analysis of structural inequalities by rebranding them as individual choice. Capitalist realism gains power by moral critiques that point out the suffering caused by capitalism: poverty, famine and war are an inevitable part of reality. Ideas that might offer the hope that these can be overcome are dismissed as naïve and utopian, instead we are returning to the past in what economist Yanis Varoufakis is mutating into techno feudalism.
As the neoliberal project continues, we are conditioned to expect nothing. Living standards crumble and fall for all except the wealthy, lest we forget the Dunkirk Spirit, capitalist realist society is entropy. Thatcher’s vision has left many to view society as the pathology of human nature’s tenancy towards greed and over consumption. In capitalist realist reality, nothing makes sense except the thought bubbles offered by a diaspora of online communities.