Labour then — like the unemployed, like nature, like consciousness itself — is automatically disciplined by being integrated into the system, which compels workers to expend every last calorie of energy in service to it and to mutilate themselves in order to fit into whatever role the system has determined they are best able to fit. As the world-mechanism entered its terminal, late-capitalist, phase and migrated into instantaneously transmitted virtual channels, the nature of this compulsion, along with the modes of engagement it demanded from workers, changed from relatively obvious institutional constraints to extraordinarily subtle forms of Phildickian coercion. Old-school tyrants still exist of course — for it is still the case that only the subservient and insensitive are promoted to, or can endure to be in, positions of management — but as the system perfects itself, so it distributes its command across the Magical Cloud. Just as there is no-one in the call-centre that can be held to account for the various administrative nightmares of free-time, so there is no-one at work in charge of work-time. Those who endure the horror of working poverty find themselves constrained more by schedules, spreadsheets and smartphones than by kapos and commandants.
As more and more tasks are automated and outsourced, the post-modern company owns less and less land and hires fewer and fewer people. Labour, cut free, transforms into the precariat — a condition of chronic rootlessness, crippling working poverty and tractable anxiety whereby the individual is transformed into a corporation of one, working ‘in partnership’ with ‘fellow’ transnational organisations — and the voluntariat — in which the component parts of the condition we ordinarily refer to as ‘living’ (talking to each other, helping each other, making things, playing and so on) are ‘harvested’ by post-modern institutions, which either own the networks by which such activities occur or, more simply, which can simply take what is freely created.
A precariat workforce finds that it must sell not just its activity during working hours, but its entire being at all times, forever. ‘Labour is done everywhere, and discipline or control over labour is exercised everywhere’11. Success in the late-capitalist system increasingly becomes a measure of how well one sells oneself, or performs (in both senses of the word); meaning how well one can meet the targets of the system (self-management) while projecting informality, friendliness, creativity, engagement, enthusiasm and whatnot (emotional management). The stress that this induces — exacerbated by invasive surveillance and exposure to ‘peer-review’ in the virtual panopitcon of the internet — is prodigious, but because it is one’s own self that is compelling the worker to act (in both senses of the word), it is impossible for the self to perceive the cause and nature of its estrangement from reality, or recognise the solution. It’s not unlike a real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You smile, you nod, you meet your targets and answer your phone. It’s not you doing it, but there’s no you to notice that anything is missing; just a vague sense of emptiness which can never be filled.
Pseudo-you accepts the working world as not merely normal but as actually desirable. Work, like slavery, debt, democracy and war, gives man a reason not to be free; a reason to avoid having to face himself (or his wife), a reason to complain about his sad, sad story, and a reason to do nothing about it. Everyone says they want to be free of the nightmare of work, yet fall apart when they are granted such freedom, and immediately start scrabbling around for more work; or for more fun, which amounts to the same thing.
Labour must be controlled in this way if it is to be commodified; but it must also be stripped of autonomy in order to forestall the capitalist horror of over-production; when not enough people are buying what the system is producing, because they are producing it for themselves. Over-production does not just lead to falling profits; it can wipe out capital completely, which is why forcing people into the role of consumers, or subservient employees, is so important to the system.
A key component of this control is the eradication of the psychological roots of self-sufficiency; namely, inventiveness and initiative. This is the purpose of schooling (see myth 17).
Professionals are allowed some autonomy. Their work is such that it cannot be minutely directed from above, which is why they are pre-selected by the educational arm of the system for their obedience. Professionals also often work for governments which are, ostensibly at least, non-profit organisations; which simply means that the profit (from educated or non-dying citizens) accrues less directly to the captains of industry.
Fredy Perlman, The Reproduction of Everyday Life.
The classic example of ideological motivation is the ‘work ethic’; the idea, which has driven the workers of the West for the past few centuries, that we are morally obliged to work for the system for our entire lives so that, perhaps, one day, we will no longer have to work. A subtler modern example of ideological discipline might be ‘team-spirit’ — the means by which loss of purpose, dignity, joy and freedom at work is compensated with group-bonding. ‘I didn’t agree with the purpose of the war; I was just looking out for my buddies’ — applies equally to the army platoon, the office department and the school class.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs.
Although, curiously, not quite so interested in developing such methods for ‘streamlining’ management.
See Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman.
Who serve other purposes as well of course; principally boosting diversity for leftists and mowing the lovely lawns of the right.
Which goes straight into the hands of landowners.
Guy Standing, The Precariat; the New Dangerous Class.
22. The Myth of Uniqueness
Future students will be as much confused by the supposed differences between capitalist and socialist professional institutions as today’s students are by the claimed differences between late Reformation Christian sects.
Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions
The system must promote the idea that its internal factions and ideologies are radically different to each other. This is an illusion · · · The late-capitalist system must also promote the idea that all its people are radically different to each other. This is also an illusion · · · These illusions are called diversity. Actual diversity is a threat of the first order to the system and must be stamped out wherever it occurs.
‘Democratic’ capitalism, we are told, is radically different to totalitarian communism and fascism, yet all these systems had and have the same attitudes to nature and society; domination and exploitation. The alienating principles of ‘scientific management,’1 along with the hyper-rationalist ambitions of modernists to completely subjugate nature and culture to centralised, specialist, scientific control, were eagerly taken up by American capitalists, German fascists2 and Soviet communists, none of whom regarded either land or labour as anything more than resources; which is why they all end up with the same misery, poverty and ecological ruin.
For capitalists it is generally private power that decides how productive life is to be managed and where surplus is to be allocated (with a cursory nod towards ‘democracy,’ see myth 16). For so-called fascists and communists it is generally the state that makes these crucial decisions. Nowhere is the worker meaningfully consulted,3 nowhere are ordinary people free to direct their own fate and nowhere is land excluded from the market. The centrally directed market of communism gives nominal ownership of the means of production to the worker while functionally denying him any power over them; which is to say communism, like fascism, is, as Lenin conceded — indeed as Engels himself recommended — a form of bourgeois state capitalism.4 Genuine libertarian socialism, or anarchism — the practice of dismantling the market, the state and the system — such as was practiced, to some extent, by the Soviet councils of the Russian revolution, was crushed just as violently by Lenin’s ‘socialist’ Bolsheviks as it was by Mao’s ‘red’ army and Hitler’s national ‘socialists’.
Huxleyan capitalism is at pains to position itself as the opposite of Orwellian communism, fascism and totalitarianism, and to efface all commonalities5 in order to generate an ideological antagonist, a bad guy to justify military intervention abroad and suppression of criticism at home. We do not invade countries to gain control of resources but to defend against communism. We do not silence critics because they threaten power, but because to criticise capitalism must equal support for the bad guys.6 We do not build walls to keep poor Mexicans out of jobs, we let one or two climb the Diamond Ladder (see myth 5) and structurally exclude the rest.
Another component of The Myth of Uniqueness is the notion that capitalism exists in splendid isolation to the bad old autocratic systems of yore. Overt violence, constant warfare, bizarre rituals and superstition, these are all things of the past. We would never behave in such a brutal, uncivilised manner. Our wars don’t count as violence, our spectacles, rituals and beliefs don’t count as superstition, our poverty isn’t really poverty (see myth 11).7 Likewise so-called ‘neoliberals’ criticise stuffy old ‘neoclassical’ folk while relying on precisely the same state interventions (and extremely strong ones), the same money and property system, the same professional dominance of the commons and, at base, the same egoic experience of the universe8.
But by far the most pervasive and paralysing element to the system-serving idea that ‘we’ are different to ‘them,’ is the idea that a difference exists between the [Huxleyan] ‘left’ and the [Orwellian] ‘right’. The range of thought that lies between, say, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, The Guardian, Adam Curtis, Laurie Penny, Alain de Botton, Hollywood and Remainers on the so-called ‘left,’ and David Cameron, George Bush, The Mail, Sky, William Buckley, Katie Hopkins, Alan Dershowitz, Roger Scruton, the bbc and Brexiteers on the so-called ‘right’ is roughly the thickness of a cigarette paper. Despite an enormous amount of highly visible disagreement (‘lively debate’) between them, they all accept the underlying assumptions of the market-system, they all, ultimately, serve the business class (despite profitable left-wing claims to the contrary: see myth 31), they all have the same foundational attitude to reality, love, truth and other so-called ‘subjective’ illusions and they all turn, as one, to repel the threat of those who seek to strike at the root of the system; unless of course it temporarily serves their professional interests.
In the real world, the entire media spectrum — along with all governments, businesses and professional institutions (which also like to pretend they are unique, autonomous units and not integral parts of the one system) — runs from the far right (which the media calls ‘left’), to the extreme right (which it calls ‘right’). To the right of this microscopic overton window, lies pure modern fascism (see myth 12) and to the left lie the centre (the misguided but generally egalitarian political position of most of the world), the left (inhabited by socialist reformists; see myth 31) and, finally, the extreme left (inhabited by anarchist critics of the entire system); all of which, from Kropotkin to Stalin, from Wilhelm Reich to the Third Reich, from Jesus of Nazareth to the Spanish Inquisition are viewed by the capitalist ‘mainstream’ as pretty much the same thing; total, horrifying, insanity.
And so the media turn, as one, in indiscriminate condemnation of Fake News, Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Vladamir Putin, Julian Assange, George Galloway, Noam Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Media Lens, John Pilger, Morrissey, Ken Loach, Osho, Robert Faurisson, or whoever happens to be today’s Official Baddie, seeing no meaningful difference between them, for the simple reason that hating the bad guys (sjws or nazis, Sanders or Trump, Gays or sexists, Putin or Thatcher) is good for business; and the media turn, as one, away from our crimes (in Falluja, Basra, Bengal, Vietnam, North Korea, Indonesia, Laos, Nicaragua, Kenya, Malaysia and China) and towards the marvellous personal qualities of our leaders (or their tragic ‘mistakes’ and ‘excess of goodwill’); and the media turn, as one, towards tragedy, corruption, rape, murder and the crimes of official enemies, and away from the true horror of the world and its actual causes, away from the root of suffering, and the well-spring of joy it occludes, away from the liberating genius of life and towards an identical pan-pornographic dreamworld of contextless images beamed from halfway around the world into your brain; and now this and now this and now this and now this and now this and now this…
Alongside the ludicrous idea that our system is unique — The Myth of Systemic Uniqueness — runs the idea that you and you and you, who form the atomic components of this special we, are also special. You matter, apparently. You are different, so they say. This is the Myth of Personal Uniqueness.
Your freedom to ‘be who you are’ exists within predetermined limits. You can be anything which corresponds to your role in the market, as consumer or producer. You can have any identity (definable personality) you like if it helps you get a job or respond to an advert. Nerd? Trans? Buddhist? Carer? Fan? Atheist? Black? Foodie? Fussy eater? ocd? Retro-porn enthusiast? Welcome. If we have a job or product for you, step right in; and if you’re not sure who you are, then we’ll diagnose, test and measure you, and tailor your experience to what we know you like. And if you still don’t fit in, we’ll arrest you — which is to say, we’ll give you the identity of ‘prisoner’.
What cannot be tolerated by the capitalist economy is a refusal to ultimately identify with skin-colour, body-shape, gender, diagnosis, addiction, race, religion, sexual preference, ideology (left, right, green, red, black…) or market-directed interests and talents. The inability of the system to acknowledge the indefinable is enthusiastically — if implicitly — welcomed by the individual ego, which is trained, from birth, to cling to its fears and addictions and to defend itself with its constructed identity and its definable world. Ego is as terrified of genuine self-knowledge — which comes from deconstructing identity and definition — as the market is; both the systemic ego and the capitalist market will greet genuine independence, genuine uniqueness, originality and psychological freedom from addiction with incomprehension, ridicule and contempt.
In short you can be a black, half-Nepalese, transsexual, stamp-collecting communist midget with high-functioning Asperger’s and a talent for graphic design, or you can be a tall, ripped, straight-A, white-supremacist all-American upper-manager with a cruel mother, a farm-equipment fetish and a python. Fine — as long as you are both dissatisfied in your love-lives, unable to be on your own, addicted to consumption (porn, video games, food, fitness, shopping, whatever), forced to work for fifty hours a week, have no idea who your neighbours are, cannot fix or make anything you actually use and spend most of your idle time wanting or worrying; which is to say, as long as, underneath your ‘identity,’ you are just like everyone else.
And so we come to the marvellous Myth of Diversity, the idea that the institutions of the system value or produce vast collections of thoroughly unique, creative, independent and integrated individuals, while in the real world, what they actually need, demand and manufacture are classrooms, offices, cities, farms and forests comprised entirely of obedient, isolated replicants9. These can be measured and managed. Nature — countless unique people, living amongst countless unique species — cannot.
And lo, it comes to pass that ever newer and more fantastic kinds of food are produced, ever stranger and more novel ways of clothing, heating or housing ourselves appear and an ever wider variety of personality profile fills the feeds; ever narrower and finer forms of sexuality or gender, ever more refined and hyperspecific interests, ever new disorders and syndromes, ever more specific identities assiduously constructed to achieve the holy grail of psychological capitalism: specialness… while, at the same time, local languages, regional accents and the musicality of speech are everywhere levelled out, eccentricity is banished, all forms of dress begin to resemble each other, all houses are constructed from ikea, all music begins to sound the same, movies become entirely predictable rehashes, schools, hospitals and airports the world over become indistinguishable, as do factories, farms and forests; of nature we see little more than pigeons, cats, rats, foxes, dogs and flies, of the world we see little more than food, sex, sport and war, of ourselves we feel little more than what we want and what we don’t want; and that’s it. Everyone talks about the same things, has the same narrow range of opinion and reacts in predictable ways to the same kind of life lived everywhere in the same kind of way. Officially this is ‘diversity’. Actually — to those sensitive and aware enough to perceive actuality that is — it is excruciating monotony, the inevitable consequence of which is sickness.
Genuine diversity — natural systems which integrate a vast number of unique but mutually cooperative (or even uncooperative) and contextually beneficial elements — is extremely robust. Factory chickens, factory timber, factory corn, factory houses, factory children and factory workers on the other hand are vulnerable to infection, disruption and pain, and so must be continually pumped full of artificial supports, nutrients, fertilisers and antibiotics. They must be continually and aggressively defended against the slightest incursion, and they must be continually justified or normalised by a professional class paid and privileged to keep the rickety monocultural huts of civilisation from toppling in a fart.
Aka fordism and taylorism. These have, in ever subtler forms, governed industrial output for over a century; although elements of time-obsessed scientific management can be found throughout history, as far back as the inventors of modern time-measurement, the proto-capitalist ancient Mesopotamians.
Hitler kept a life-sized picture of Ford next to his desk.
Only in the most ‘progressive’ companies does the worker have any input, and then only over matters which pertain to productivity, never to the allocation of surplus.
‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’ both share common base assumptions. The communist state owning the means of production entails a slightly different system to private ownership, but in both cases ordinary people are powerless. A system based on different power arrangements in society was never even attempted in the ussr, and Lenin said as much. See Resnick and Wolff, Class Theory and History.
‘It is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one’s one country.’ Thus, Orwell; although it is important to note that Orwell is talking about the modern definition of fascism (authoritarian and right wing). In fact fascism originated in Mussolini’s socialism (see myth 31).
Likewise criticism of model capitalists such as Clinton, Blair, Obama and so on must equal support for Trump, modern fascism and the far-right. The idea that they are all rabid capitalist warmongers cannot be countenanced, ever, by the capitalist ‘left’ (the managers of people) and the capitalist ‘right’ (the producers of things) noisily battling out with each other, in the capitalist press, their procedural disputes about how the system should be managed.
‘We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger’. Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread.
