Contemporary Capitalism: The structural abolition of community, stability, and belonging

Before the diagnosis starts, I want to make sure all readers understand some terms I will use throughout the piece. 

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Fordism vs. Post-Fordism

    Throughout this piece I will mention the terms “Fordist” and “post-Fordist” as pre-labels to capitalism. Before the paper continues, I want to explain what these terms necessarily mean, and the difference between the two ways of capitalist production.

Fordist capitalism is characterized by classic industrial work. Filled with assembly lines, the production of material goods, and clear work-boss factory hierarchy, Fordist-capitalism is what the average young teenager still thinks of when they hear “work.” A spot on the production line, doing your specific boring job, and being at the will of your factory boss. 

According to Marxist economist Christian Marazzi, the switch from Fordism to post-Fordism happened on a very specific date: October 6,1979. “It was on that date that the Federal Reserve increased interest rates by 20 points, preparing the way for the 'supply-side economics' that would constitute the 'economic reality' in which we are now enmeshed.” (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism) This rise in interest rates did two things. One, it contained inflation. But two, it gave rise to the possibility of a new organization of the means of production and work distribution, an organization we will dive into throughout this paper. The boring assembly line work of  production gave way to a work known for “flexibility”, “creativity”, “communicative”, and a general production based around cognitive, intellectual, and emotional labor. More so, in Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points out that, “This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced.”

Under the  factory, the work was divided into clear blue and white collar production labels, with the different types of labor being acknowledged by the very structure of the factory itself. It was known for the noisy environment, constant watching over of managers and supervisors, with workers having access to communication only during their breaks, in the bathroom, and of course, at the end of the working day itself. But in the post- world the assembly line has been destroyed in place with what Fisher, Berardi, and Adams (three authors we will reference and attempt to synthesize throughout) call a flux of information based around communicative and cognitive work. 

It was the working class who rightfully fought for an escape from the repressive and alienating  factory work. This gave rise to neoliberalism and its advocates, which was able to be the advocate “as the opponents of the status quo, bravely resisting an inertial organized labor 'pointlessly' invested in fruitless ideological antagonism which served the ends of union leaders and politicians, but did little to advance the hopes of the class they purportedly represented.” (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism)

Deterritorialization

        For critical theory, the term "deterritorialization" is the process by which an ensemble of relationships, called a territory, loses the base organization and context which it founded itself upon.

Semiotics and Capital

Berardi describes semiocapitalism as “a capitalism founded on immaterial labor and the explosion of the info-sphere […] the kind of overproduction manifest in semiocapitalism is specifically semiotic; an infinite excess of signs circulates in the info-sphere” Semiocapitalism is “characterized by an excess of speed of the signifiers and stimulates”. 

The info-sphere is the area between the signs and the psychophysiological organism is the info-sphere. The info-sphere is between the infinite expanse of cyberspace and the subject that acts as receiver of the technological stimulation.

“Semiocapitalism needs the psyche — it needs our emotional engagement, our empathetic and cognitive energies. The dizzying explosion of the info-sphere is the field that illustrates this need.” (Tristam Adams, The Psychopath Factory)

Semiocapitalism, “first and foremost mobilized the psychic energy of society to bend it to the drive of competition and cognitive productivity.” (Berardi, 2009)

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As neoliberalism and markets expand to a global level, the universal rule this has come with is an unrelenting deterritorialization of all communal identity and natural formation of collective solidarity. As post-fordist capitalism moves into the exacerbation of cognitive labor and semiocapital, where all the ills of post-fordist work life are exacerbated (violent labor market, structurally reinforced competition, the buying and selling of fragments of labor time by the capitalist class), an overall sense of extreme anxiety is combined with the abolition of all forms of group solidarity that we used to know. 

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Post-Fordist Psycho-Violence 

Before we entered this digital post-fordist world, your class identity was easily identifiable. You either bought labor power, or you sold labor power for a wage. It was the capitalist class and the working class. However, as the world moved into a post-fordist marketplace, these class distinctions started to erode. No longer is there a capitalist commanding the worker to use their physical body to produce their specific part of the commodity on the assembly line for 8 hours of a day no.. we now see the digitized, virtual, post-fordist market expanding to a global level, where pockets of time are bought and sold. "The essential transformation induced by the digitalization of the labour process is the fragmentation of the personal continuity of work, the fractalization and cellularization of time. The worker disappears as a person, and is replaced by abstract fragments of time. The cyberspace of global production can be viewed as an immense expanse of depersonalized human time....Attention implies a constant investment of nervous energy, and this is much more difficult to manage and is much more unpredictable than the muscular efforts required of workers on the assembly line." (Bifo Berardi, Heroes). This buying and selling of fragmented labour time is the best way to show the utter anxiety and paranoia that the post-fordist labor market creates. You are no longer a worker for a company, with a secure job, and clear goals, no, you are now a pocket of time, bought and sold around the market, with your mental attention and energy used for different forms of production and creation of information and other immaterial commodities.. Moreso, companies use the instabilities of this new post-fordist labor market against the workers on a discursive level. “Reliability”, “flexibility,” “business ready”, etc to make sure that you are a good reliable worker, who is obedient and a fair representation of the corporation. To reinforce this past the discursive level, worker evaluations are used as even deeper forms of control, to make sure that capitalist surveillance is reinforced. Weekly, monthly, yearly, there consists of worker evaluations where the management class decides if you met enough quotas, reached enough quantification standards, and were a productive enough employee. 

Cognitive Subservience of Symbols and Representations

This business model that post- working conditions revolve around has created what Mark Fisher calls a “market stalinist'' worker model. “The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols.” In this contemporary capitalist world, workers compete to serve representations of success. On an even deeper level, this new form of production that is structured around the production of symbols and representations is done largely on the cognitive level. Symbols and digital images are now the basis of value produced in cognitive labor industries. This specific cognitive work--the specific content that is produced can’t be quantified through time--largely produces simulated digital sequences and symbols that enters some computerized system..This completely mental form of labor causes the notion of productivity to become undefined. Specifically, the relationship between time and quantity of produced value becomes something we can’t quantify and determine, since for any cognitive worker, every hour is not the same from the standard of produced value. When production revolves around creativity, imagination, and the production of representations, time no longer is a stable reference point for value. For example, the new creation of value rests on the creation of digital shapes, digital figures, and other immaterial and vaporized forms of value. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher uses an example of a Hospital as being a victim to these quantification metrics and subservience of symbols, “....hospitals perform many routine procedures instead of a few serious, urgent operations, because this allows them to hit the targets they are assessed on (operating rates, success rates and reduction in waiting time) more effectively.” He continues, “It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company 'really does', and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.” These images are no longer mere representations, but the actual things strived for in production itself! Another clear example is on the stock market, care for marginalized groups is quantified and then impacts the figure of value that is shown on the digital stock market. This creates a system where this forced quantification of unquantifiability that Fisher talks about in the social sectors actually invades the industries that were made based on competition and alienation. It is an exacerbation of the Market Stalinism that Fisher noticed, and it’s something that is voluntarily enforced! The capitalist class markets cognitive labor as labor that is free, creative, and other adjectives that recognize the inherent unquantifiability of this type of work, and then implement severe quantification programs to structurally reinforce workplace competition and to remain in power over the mental desires of the workers! This constant competition, and constant serving of symbols and spreadsheets destroys any chance at mental security, solidarity, and freedom from anxiety. Business plans now revolve around structurally enforced competition and rugged, unrelenting individualism.

Everyone Needs That Stock! 

Another way class-solidarity has been structurally destroyed has arisen with the ever-growing importance and worker reliability on the financial market. With the financial market creating a kind of work that produces immaterial commodities, it has formed what Berardi calls an “elsewhere class”, a class made up of completely virtual production of symbols and representations of information. It is a post-bourgeois class, and it's a class we all rely on. The financial reterritorialization that modern capitalism depends upon has created a class with no relation to any physical territory or community. Contra to fordist capitalism, where the property owners had a relationship to the territory their business resided in, and necessarily worked towards a common social goal, this class is not concerned with the future of any territorial community because the next day this class will move its investments to a different part of the world. Moreso, this class is a class that gains its profits from a completely virtual space. The activities this class profits off of indlude net trading and high-tech immaterial production. However, identifying the members of this class is impossible, because everybody is structurally obliged to depend on it. The teacher whos pension fund will only be paid if the profits of the financial market grow is just as much apart of this class and its growth as the CEO who invest five grand in an upstart business half way around the world. Identifying those who are investing in the financial market is difficult, impossible, as everybody is obliged to depend on it. In a sense, everybody is part of the class that is investing in the financial market. However, in this modern finance capitalism, the stock market rises and the financial market grows when wages and benefits of the working class go down... yet like stated before, workers have their pensions, retirement funds, corporate hedge-fund investments, and other financial ties to the finance market. To be a successful post-fordist worker, you must care about the fordist style of classical class conflict - your own working conditions, wages, benefits, etc, - while also caring about your return from stock market because of and your retirement fund. Your solidarity can’t be foolproof, and a distinct class identity doesn't exist. Any community based around class, and external class contradictions is necessarily abolished, as the ‘elsewhere virtual class’ becomes the true class of reliance, that everyone is in, one way or the other.

Techno-capital and the Breeding of Psychopaths

Deterritorialization

When the territory itself, the place the individual knows as “home” is turned into a body of competition, one can no longer maintain their sense of social solidarity. When everything material about their territorial identity, the food, the decorations, agricultural style, has been deterritorialized in the name of capital, the localized individual faces a social death. One can only respond to this by responding in an indetearian, reactionary manner. This massive deterritorialization and structural move towards the abolition of community, interpersonal body-body relationship, and neglecting of empathy, results in a violent and aggressive reterritorialization done in complete reaction. The cultural structures of loneliness, angst, depression, anxiety, etc, that are caused by the combination of post-fordist labor market violence and the deterritorialization of localized and communal identity are prerequisites for the exacerbation of the psycho-cognitive mutation that the digitized world has on the minds of young people. It is the combined effect of pre-existing mental conditions that these neoliberal structures have implemented on the minds, combined with the digitized world that produces this intensification of resocialization, destabilization of empathy, and further deterritorialization of territorial communication. When people can’t deal with the violence of the labour market, when their communal identity has been destroyed, when their sense of belonging is no more, and when the finance world and digitized world alienates them from any chance at empathy and real solidarity, they respond with a move towards any identity they know. They respond to receive that sense of belonging back, the only way they know how, towards the past. They respond to the psychological violence of contemporary capitalism towards an appeal to the time where they belonged, towards traditionalist values, and violent aggression against whatever is “other”, because that is the only communal identity they have left, opposition towards all deemed “others.” Clearly, there exists a new antagonism now. We have information technology provoking an acceleration and intensification of symbolic exchanges of information and stimuli, along with the massive waves of economic and political migration that the global, post- market has necessitated. This has provoked a massive change in all things we deem “territory” furthering the instability of real identity. This process, combined with neoliberal culture of competition, exacerbate the need for identitarian belonging, a violent contradiction specific to neoliberalism. “Here lies the identitarian trap,” says Berardi, “...the return of concepts such as homeland, religion, and family as aggressive forms of reassurance and self-confirmation.”

The Destruction of Empathy

 “It is not the content of the game, but the simulation itself, that produces the effect of desensitization to the bodily experience of suffering and pleasure.” (Bifo Berardi). In the early ages of life, children are now gaining their primal human impressions from machines and tech, instead of their parents and human community. The sheer fact that humans are now learning more of their vocabulary and speech patterns from machines instead of their mothers is undoubtedly leading to the development of a new kind of mass sensibility. To Luisa Muraro, an Italian feminist philosopher, access to language for the newborn and youth is fundamentally linked to the affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. “The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something that is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother.” In this new deterritorialized, and digitized world though, this exact process is reduced to an exchange between machine and the brain of the learner. The process of language learning is now “detached from the emotional effect of bodily contact, and the relation between signifier and signified becomes merely operational. Words are not effectively grasping meaning, meaning is not rooted in the depth of the body, and communication is not perceived as an effective relation between bodies, but as a working exchange of operating instructions,” says Berardi, and naturally, “We can expect that psychic suffering will soon follow.” According to the The Common Sense Census, 53% of 11 year olds have a smartphone and that number jumps to 69% when the age becomes 12. Something we know, but often don’t talk about, is that verbal communication is not the only form of communication that allows humans to gain a sense of emotion, feeling, and even empathy. Sensibility is the faculty that allows humans to understand signs, feelings, emotions, and communications that cannot be reduced down to just words. Non-verbal communication is one of the greatest faculties of the human mind, and it's at stake here. Moreso, empathy is not just some natural emotion. It is a very specific psychological condition that is refined, and in the absence of cultivation, can whither away and disappear. When newborns, kids, and young people develop most of their communication and emotive skills based on machine-mind, this sensibility, this learning of empathy, this mental reinforcement of non-verbal communication and the ability to recognize distress in others without speaking, is destroyed. What we see now is that this very mutation in the communication experience is producing an empathetic pathology and a sensibility pathology. The electronic flows of digital information that enters our minds at an accelerated rate destroys our ability to recognize a real, human world, and natural forms of community. For Tristam Adams, "Technology is conditioning a poverty of affective reactions as well as a self-centred subjectivity. This can be understood as both a ‘lack of empathy (and) inflated self-appraisal’ (DSM, 2013). The potent energies of the environment we inhabit desensitize our psychic skin. A lack of empathy, low affective reactions and a lack of sensitivity towards others are some of the symptoms caused by a technological burning as result of exposure. The living substance, exposed to the ubiquitous and technologically amplified energies of late capitalism, forms a thick skin — a numb callous is hardened under the lights. Callousness is conditioned."

 

The Breeding of Psychopaths

Most anti-capitalist rhetoric revolves around capitalism destroying empathy and sympathy, but the modern workplace shows us a different story. In the contemporary workplace, empathy itself is now the specific mental process that is bought and sold, controlled and let free, and utilized for productive ends. The modern worker must employ empathy in certain productive institutions, like worker-worker management, personal network, and social entrepreneurship. On the flip side, the modern worker must also be increasingly psychopathic and void of empathy in others productive institutions, in the creation of business models built around worker-worker completion, the subservience of these models, and the competition that fragmented labor necessitates. The worker’s flow of empathy is blocked, cut off, and then freed again when it is able to serve capital. “On the one hand, the consumer or worker must have an empathizing capacity. This type of empathy is a flow and it can be exploited. It is an energy that can be siphoned. But the manager, sales assistant, law enforcement officer or doctor must not work with an utterly unregulated flow of empathy. If they do so they will either behave unproductively….The flow of empathy, the unstoppable in-feeling of the pain of others, must be regulated, cauterized and formatted so that it can be tapped into when the job requires it, or when the consumer needs the illusion of it.” (Adams)

The best example of this is that in the modern workplace, bosses are no longer considered “boss”. The reasoning behind this is that the management class has now utilized Jungian theraputic methods on a discursive level, and believe that that terminology would destroy any chance at empathetic communication. Illouz wrote in 2007, “Mayo, who had been trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst, introduced the psychoanalytical imagination inside the workplace. Mayo’s intervention had a thoroughly therapeutic character. For example the method of interview Mayo had set up had all the characteristics (except the name) of a therapeutic interview. […] Mayo seemed to stumble accidentally on the importance of emotions, family, and close bonds, but he was in fact only importing therapeutic categories into the workplace.” These exact management methods are akin to one of a psychopath. The manager fills his role as a reflexive and conscious comrade, projecting the appearance of empathy, care, and the ability to listen. Yet these appearances aren't done to actually empathize or form an emotional connection, but it is done to increase their managerial performance and economic productive end. It is superficial, a pseudo-empathy on a discursive level. As Bifo shows how work is becoming ever more commutative and social, we can see that  from a business structure standpoint, the modern manager is trained to be a psychopath. One who puts on the outfit of caring and empathetic, but in reality is cunning and manipulating your emotions to increase productivity. Empathetic flows are forged, designed, digitized, and utilized only for the productive end. This is one of the main shifts from fordist capitalism to the post-fordist capitalism we all live in: the shift from uncaring authority in the workplace to disingenuous psychopathic performances of empathy that exploit our desire for human connection to profit. Capital has no care for emotions, and will abolish your chance to communicate them outside of work through a culture of competition and communal deterritorialization, and then exploit your need to communicate them to further its own reproduction.

We can now begin to understand on a structural level why the cultural phenomena of workers loving their work, finding it the most important of their day, and it being quickest thing one regurgitates when asked about their identity. Outside of the workplace, social safety nets have been destroyed, along with this structural impoverishment of existence in a collective, and the ability to communicate within it and feel a sense of worth and belonging. Workers have this huge love for work because as economic competition becomes accllerated, daily life became lonely and tedious, and a complete restructuring of the workplace was capital's response for this. Work becomes an understandably desirable environment for the working class because forms of genuine emotional communication outside of work are now impoverished, and the enforced discourse and theraputic methods of manager-worker replaces what the social life has lost, empathetic communication. Even though the workers know it's a performance, an act, a means to the end of profit, it's all they have for this emotional field. Capital exploits our desire to empathize and communicate now to reproduce itself as the entity we always serve in the end.

The workplace itself, and its exacerbation of the utilization of technology and technological stimuli is combining with capital to have the same desensitizing and psycho-mutated effects we've discussed before. As the info-sphere explodes into the workplace, digital signs, cues, data, codes, and technological energy bombard the worker's psyche with accelerating technological frequencies and intensities in the production process. Accelerated frequencies of exposure to an array of stimuli and the increased intensities of the stimuli erode the time required for a deep in-feeling, for empathy: In recent decades, the human organism has been exposed to an increasing mass of neuro-mobilizing stimuli. The acceleration and intensification of nervous stimulants on the human brain seems to have clogged up and thinned out the cognitive "institution" that we call sensibility. As this occurs, the time available for responding to nervous stimuli has been dramatically reduced in the accelerated marketplace that the expansion of finance capital and all of its symptoms have brought about. This can be one of the reasons for why we seem to be seeing a massive reduction in the human mind's actual capacity for empathy: Technological symbolic exchange among human minds makes it increasingly difficult to perceive the existence of the body of the other in time, similar to the theories of Luisa Muraro... The time for empathy is necessarily lacking because stimulation has become too intense. Accelerated exposure to technological stimuli both in and out of the workplace is leading to a digital formatting of the psyche that has zero capability to form an affective reaction. The constant communicatory signs and light and auditory stimuli that the organism is exposed to is able to desensitize the human psyche through an overload of technological data and information leading to an acceleration of simulative intensity which leads to the reduction of socio-emotive communication.

However, desensitization isn't the guaranteed impact of what we've analyzed here. Panic, and a psychic anxiety is the other. Economic competition and digital stimuli intensification through the info-sphere, combined together, can induce a state of permanent mental state of panic syndrome. Panic is the other natural reaction of the sensitive human mind when it is submitted to intense and constant stimulation that is too rapid for the human brain to take in. To the contra of desensitization, we are also seeing a mass working class stimulus overload.   

Contemporary capitalism (techno-semio-capital and its combination with post-fordist working conditions) is not about the production of material goods like past capitalist systems were about, but about the production of psychic stimulation and specific mental states.

Don’t worry though, capital always has a solution! The contradictions of semio capital play out in the type of drugs consumed. The individual is exposed to accelerated forms of media arousing stimuli. These energies and effects elicit an arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, or on the other end, desentize it. This would be an example of psychopathic conditioning in the Tristam Adams sense. But the former traits, the traits of depression, panic, and a psyche that can’t handle it all are unproductive, so capital necessitates another psychotropic recording to a more productive state through the use of stimulative medication. “In short,” says Adams, “one is either conditioned into a psychopathic poverty of affective reaction through exposure to external stimuli or one is administered psychotropic medication.” Late capitalism’s solution to the panicked worker is another form of desensitization. The worker consumes SSRIS like Zoloft and Prozac to treat depression and panic, then stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall to maintain production standards, and finally Viagra to allow the already damaged psychophysiological mind-body to its basic working function. reproductive and sexual physicality. All solutions to the psycho violence of post-fordist capital follow the same guidelines: return the human subject into an efficient and productive worker.

Business Models 

Competition now doesn’t just occur between businesses, it occurs between the workers inside of those businesses as well. Workers are now told by the management class to compete for the best evaluation, that will give you more working time, that will give you a sense of security and stability (things the labor market can’t give you), and are pitted against each other for that. Post-fordist business models are a new form of top-down management where the “top” is a digital network necessitating constant communication that relies on the psychological violence that the post-fordist labour market necessitated in the first place, it’s a system that reinforces itself as all actors do their part. France’s Telecom, one of the most important tele-communication companies in the world is a great example of this business model being played out, and the effect it had. The company was privatized in 1998. Because of that privatization, the finance class that took over needed to abolish all the debt that they now consumed. “During the telecoms boom of the late nineties, France Telecom bought Orange, and the debt of the company escalated to 70 billion euros… From 2004 a recovery plan named ‘NeXT scheme’ was implemented: it was essentially aimed at reducing costs, especially wage costs, continuing a convergence policy for its products and services, and grouping together all the brands under the single brand of Orange.” (Bifo Berardi, Heroes) 40,000 workers were fired, and the rest were put into individual call centers where they were told to compete for the best economic and productivity results that would guarantee them more secure hours, and more bonuses. The culture of neoliberalism is one of structurally reinforced competition between the working class that relies on the violently unstable fragmentation of work that the post-fordist market necessitates. 35 workers committed suicide. “This is the problem,” Berardi says, “the direct relation between the privatization of the enterprise, the restructuring of the work space, the precarization of the worker’s life-and suicide. The suicides of France Telecom workers cannot be ascribed to psychological vulnerability but essentially to the distressing and humiliating organization of work.” France’s telecom isn’t the only example of this, far from it. Over the last 20 years, many industrial companies in the world have implemented this exact business model based on increased productivity, setting workers against each other, and displacing workers from their workplace to break up any chance at community and solidarity. 

In The Psychopath Factory, Tristam Adams extrapolates the analysis of enforced competition into its relationship with the organization of empathy, “All forms of work are subject to an insidious nature of competition that emerges from quantifying feedback and targets. A nurse, a lecturer, a used car salesman or a website designer are all operating under the pressures of competition and the frenzy of quantification. To be clear, the suggestion here is not that psychopaths rise to the top or succeed in particular vocations. Rather it is that work environments require the worker to become increasingly psychopathic just to get through the demands, requirements, stimuli and exposure of every day.” We have to ask, why do workers accept this? Because solidarity has been destroyed. “...every worker is alone, facing the blackmail of merit, the humiliation of failure, the threat of being made redundant. What follows is a sense of guilt, anxiety and reciprocal resentment for the perceived mutual inability to help each other, to build solidarity. This is how the heavy architecture of shared depression is built.” (Berardi) This is then used by business plans to create a pseudo-empathetic work culture with the only goal of serving productivity. They are semi-automatic strategies that give an impression of care and empathy in order to maximize productivity. Emotional states and relationships like empathy and care are reduced to signs and cues - scripted into codes for not only customer transactions but also worker-worker and worker-management reactions as well. It is because of a hyper-competitive work environment full of constant technological stimulations like emails, alarms, loud phones, etct that workers have to behave more psychopathically than before, and don’t really mind it, because they are now desensitized. A subject’s path towards psychopathy is accelerated when structural competition is enforced. “….at work the least psychopathic worker will always be compared and pressured into becoming more psychopathic by the forces of competition that work along the line of what is most productive and quantifiable.” (Adams, The Psychopath Factory) The difference here between the business model of breeding psychopaths and all other illnesses is that psychopathy isn’t an illness, it isn’t something society strives to cure. It is completely based on circumstance. “Grossly antisocial circumstances, and those foul of the law, lead us to the traditional psychopathy generally conflated with criminality. But in the circumstance of the conditioning — anempathetic of requirements, empathising facades, techno affective exposure, emotive and electronic stimuli, all exacerbated by competitive frenzy and put to productive work — we call this being a good worker, not psychopathy. Once cleaved from antisocial behaviour or criminality, psychopathy seems normal: good for business and unnervingly similar to our polite, professional and passionate working selves.” (Adams, 2016. Italics added, changed “anempathic” to “anempathetic”) 

“....the use of empathy for business, or care; empathy is organised, and allowed to exist only when the job requires it. The desensitisation that comes from overstimulation and overexposure is a way in which the organism is written into. The numbness that results from the worker being subject to a bombardment of infoblitz, emotive content and visual and sonic stimuli is a result of capitalist writing/formatting. In the same way, psychopharmaceuticals that directly dull the senses, anesthetising the overactive amygdala, are all part of the mechanics of capitalism’s inscription. The therapeutic manager who reduces empathy and emotions to cues, signs and signals in the service of production and exploitation is symptomatic of capitalism’s inscription.” (Adams, The Psychopath Factory) Everybody is coded into the perfect psychopathic worker under the current relationship between post-fordist business models, the precarious and fragmented labour market, and the social darwinist, hyper-digitized culture that exists once you leave work. The psychopath is not like the schizophrenic or the psychotic subject, no, he psychopath fits within the code of capital itself! As explained before, capital and its infiltration into all walks of life manufacture a psychopath of a subject. The fordist market controlled the physical bodies and capabilities of the worker. The post-fordist market controls the psyche and the minds of the work. It controls, organizes, cuts off, and redistributes the cognitive ability to hold emotion. And one cannot escape this. One must fall into line, become one with capital’s code, if they want to adhere to the codes that allow survival and the ability to navigate the post-fordist work environment.

In the past, under fordist capitalism, home life was the place to escape the precariousness of fordist assembly line work. But now, under post-fordist capitalism, where work time is unstable, fragments of labour time are bought and sold, and worker evaluations control the lives of the workers, even the home life is destroyed as well. Workers have to be constantly ready to take a call, because if they don’t, they are deemed not “reliable” enough, not “flexible” enough, not “business ready” enough, using the terms that the post-fordist labour market fetishsizes against the workers themselves (flexibility, readiness, etc). When you have to take that call to be a more reliable worker than your office neighbor, when you have to complete that spreadsheet faster than Stacy two rows down, when you have to be a better “representation of the corporate model” than your office best friend Jim, it creates the neoliberal, finance capitalism culture of radical social darwinisms and alienation from community, that doesn’t just stay at the workplace, but invades the home life as well, the one place in fordist-capitalism where workers could expect leisure time and time with the most reliable community, the family. But even that time is now destroyed. Workers are now forced into internalizing these standards of what it means to be a good, post-fordist worker. It has created a Foucauldian-like dystopia where structures of control aren’t just enforced by an outside class of people, but self-enforced here, by the workers themselves. So, when work invades the homelife, it isn’t just the material work itself, it is this culture of enforced competition and rugged individualism that doesn’t escape the mind when the worker travels home, because it can’t. We now see workers reinforcing this management bureaucracy voluntarily, through the system of worker evaluations, exacerbating the sense of alienation and any sense of mind-autonomy in, and now out of, the workplace. One cannot escape this culture of rugged competition and self-peer surveillance, unless they wish to be replaced by a more “reliable” and “flexible”  worker. It is a labor market based on instability, reinforced by a work style of forced deterritorialization of community and co-operation between workers. It is a system structurally designed to reinforce itself at the discursive level, business level, and home life level, to destroy the mind of any worker, making sure they get no feeling of belonging or security. 

It All Serves Capital in the End…. The Industry of Commodified Attention

This exacerbation of a digitized world and constant communication on social media is not something unknown to the capitalist class. In fact, even though I may be stating the obvious, it is exacerbated and intentionally reinforced on social media to profit. To understand what I mean, we must understand the way modern social media works, and then we can look at the disgusting manipulation of our minds and the evil hindering of free will for every single human being on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, all the big tech companies residing in Silicon Valley have all had former employees recently open up about the practices that the engineers and designers at these corporations take part in. When going onto your phone and opening up a social media app, you are building an unknowing dependency and addiction to the designed dopamine splurges the apps give you. To the most purest sense of the statement, attention has been privatized and turned into a commodity that is bought and sold on the market. Advertisers pay companies billions of dollars for attention that the users of these companies give them and their ads. Let’s think. If I am an advertiser, how will I know which company to invest my capital into to promote my product? The answer is clear, whichever company gives me the most engagement. Heads of companies must provide these advertisers with hoards of data to convince advertisers to invest into their users’ attention. We, the users of these sites and apps, are not the customers, we are the products. The advertisers and investors are the customers, buying and then selling our attention for a profit. So the question then becomes, how can these corporations guarantee users’ attention? Developers of Facebook have designed algorithms that target areas of the mind the average person has zero knowledge of, with the goal of manipulating these sectors of the mind to make you psychologically dependent on these social media corporations. Specifically, they create algorithms that target your pleasure receptors, the same way a drug does. Consider for a second the refresh feature of Instagram. This action was designed, according to former employees, on slot machines at casinos. The subconscious feeling of every time you pull the lever, you don’t know what’s coming next. Psychologists call this “intermittent reinforcements’’, sometimes when we check social media, there is a reward for us, other times there is not. Imagine for a second your feed was designed like a Google search page, where you can make the conscious decision to press onto the next page. This allows you to look up, check the time again, and get out of the social media bubble. The infinite feed is one of purpose and one to keep you hooked into the app. It is a feature to maximize and exploit your attention. There are more too. Catherine Price, writing this in Science Focus explains further, “Our phones and apps also take advantage of our inherent social impulses and anxieties, including our fear of missing out (FOMO) and the impression that we need to reciprocate when we feel someone has done something for us. Take, for example, those ticks on Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms that indicate when your friend has read your message. Your friend knows you’ve seen those ticks, so there’s now a social pressure for them to respond. You might even get emails telling you that you have unread messages and notifications, piling on the pressure to log in, lest you miss out on some news or leave someone hanging. And then there are those little dots that indicate when someone is in the process of replying to your message.” It’s clear, the moment you open the app, AI deploys these psychological tools to keep you hooked. And this isn’t some conspiracy theory either. In The Social Dilemma engineers and designers of Facebook open up about all of this. They open up about how a plethora of engineers employed within Silicon Valley for these different social media companies took classes to learn more about how they can exploit the mind. Every little thing involved in the creation of the platforms is designed to increase your attention and dependency. It’s the same reason that the digital picture you got tagged in, isn’t shown to you in the notification or email the company sends you as a notification for when you are tagged in something; they need you to open up the app, so they can deploy these psychological tools on you and manipulate the decisions you make, to be able to maximize your attention, and turn a profit. The algorithms have reached the point where they know our minds better than we do, and make us make decisions based off of dopamine surges and addiction, among a plethora of other psychological hacks Every time you open up a social media or search engine app, it is a game of you versus the AI that is manipulating your mind. The AI enforces algorithms that will hit parts of your mind that you have zero control over, forcing you to stay on the app for hours longer, causing your brain to become mentally dependent on the dopamine the app gives you, and to repeat this process at an exponential rate over and over again, to maximize advertiser profit. The feelings of being in “constant communication”, “unable to step away”, and “unable to calm down” that Fisher talks about are purposely reinforced for profit. The constant technological stimulation Berrardi speaks of that destroys the ability to experience true life, hold your attention to things that matter, and remain mentally stable is purposely used as a form of profit on social media. The digitized world that destroys the ability to hold a real life inter-personal relationship is exacerbated so data and information can be sold to people within the finance market. Once again, and I hope I sound like a broken record here because that’s the point, neoliberalism reinforces itself. The aggressive culture of alienating individualism combined with the inability to form human connection through any meaningful real life interaction is now exacerbated by the financial market infiltrating the commodification of attention online. This has necessitated  the reinforcement of fragmented and pseudo-fulfilling technological stimulation with the only goal in mind being the buying and selling of vaporized information on the market place in the name of capital. This intentional enforcement of alienation and reinforcement of individualism through psychological manipulation on social media is a new and hyper-modern form of exploitation. It is a new form of profit vs. need, and profit is winning. (It is important to take an Adorno-like analysis of this process. To streamline on a VERY basic level, Adorno wrote about how the producers within the culture industry, which is basically the industry of commodified culture and media, who produce music, art, and cultural products designed to create contentment among the alienated and exploited, aren't inherently evil people. They are simply meeting a market demand based on what people want, which is a distraction from alienation, capitalist culture, and at the time, post-fordist boredom. Capital as a structure simply reinforced itself when pop culture became commodified, and social media is no different. The psychologists, investors, and capitalists enforcing these types of things aren’t evil people intentionally trying to just kill the mind. They are just doing what they need to do to get by and make money. And how do they do that? By meeting market demand. There is a huge market demand for consistent mental stimulation as the digitalized world invades the minds and lives of young people. Capital as a structure simply reinforces itself once again. Remember, the tendency of capital is the enemy here, not the people who don’t know any different and are blinded by capitalist realism.)

Consumption is Revolutionary!

As Mark Fisher points out in Post Capitalist Desire, ever since the technological revolution of the 70s, individual commodities have been marketed as means of individual revolution. One must only look to the first Apple commercials, or to the Levi’s jeans commercials in that time to see what he means. “This wasn’t just something made up for the commercial. Levi’s did have that super-fetishised quality in the Soviet Union. So, again, what is this pointing to? The fact that it’s not only that the Soviet bloc was repressive — politically repressive — it also inhibits desire and blocks desire.” All worlds past neoliberalism have been implied through ideological state apparatuses as worlds that block desire. In a post capitalist world we are told, we are chained down, used, and somebody who isn’t free. This has transgressed into a culture of unrelenting consumerism, where human flows of desire, and the desire to represent oneself and one's self-actualization, has been broken down and then re-territorialized into places of consumption and spontaneously activated on an imprinted cultural level. Capital has broken down the desire to be a unique individual in the Fordist mode _ era, just to reshape it into its own tendency in this consumerist form of capitalism. As Baudrillard theorized, one collects and then places their subjectivity onto a grouping of objects as a means of fulfilling a lack. This commodification of self identity was necessarily structured by marketing teams in the technological revolution, and then reinforced as something that is subconsciously presupposed on a societal level.

The Suburbs Serve to Alienate

This culture has even invaded things deemed “communal” and “outside of capital” like urban planning. In consumer capitalism, urban planning, with the appearance of “efficiency” and “rational community planning” is used as a means to create the mental pathways to consumer culture through destroying any actual communal independence and working class communal aesthetics and identity. Urban planning under a capitalist mode of production has the goal of abolishing communication, abolishing communal identity, and forcing the working class into actors that reinforce the spectacle. Moreso, urban planning is a way the ruling class can alienate the working class from all things meant to give them a sense of human identity or a sense of freedom. As a general rule it seems, capital infiltrates all parts of life, even communal planning. The goal of such urban planning is to make sure that the working class remains subservient to their own alienation, through cutting off physical forms of community, association, and the ability to form any natural communal identity, through its designing of cities in such a way to give workers the physical means of escaping these very symptoms of community abolition and alienation through becoming a mindless consumer and filling their lives with pseudo-needs that will never allow them to truly liberate themselves from this structural alienation and repression.

In all previous periods of production, whether it be the slave mode, the feaudal mode, or the fordist mode, architectural innovations were designed exclusively for the ruling classes that controlled whatever mode was employed in society. Now for the first time, a new architecture has been specifically designed for the poor and for the working class. At the obvious core of these new planning conditions is the authoritarian decision making which abstractly converts the environment into an environment of commodity representation and consumption abstraction. The same architecture that is innate to late capitalism - roads cutting through neigborhoods to lead to fast food shops, highways cutting through nature to lead to malls - appears everywhere as soon as industrialization has begun, even in the countries that are furthest behind in this regard, as an essential foundation for implanting the new type of social existence. In Society of the Spectacle Debord sees a socio-contradiction here, "The contradiction between the growth of society's material powers and the continued lack of progress toward any conscious control of those powers is revealed as glaringly by the developments of urbanism as by the issues of thermonuclear weapons or of birth control (where the possibility of manipulating heredity is already on the horizon).” Through this, Debord finds another inner-antagonism in contemporary capitalism, the relation between economic material progress, versus the lack of progress towards conscious group control of that progress, and further alienation.

The commodity form has taken on an authroitarian control over the very structure of society and how human behavior plays out. This is the spectacle, where all subjects serve this commodity form, and commodities reproduce themselves to serve other commodities. A great example of this is the car. The car commodity has changed the entire material structure of communities, through its authoritarian control over planning. It necessitates domination of land through freeways, it controls the worker's desire to be free from alienation, while only reinforcing it, showing us that the specific commodities subjects consume to escape the destruction of community only reinforces the exact system that causes the need to fulfill your lack of identity with consumption in the first place! 

In the end, true communal identity and free physical association are structurally destroyed in the name of capital's necessity to reinforce the repression of all subjects while manufacturing contemporary ways to further alienation, whether that be through the physical obstruction of free association, or designed routes to mass consumption centers, just to make sure nobody can physically escape the structure, and never actually care enough to want to. In consumer capitalism, all commodities are linked to a depth that reinforces the structures the commodity form itself relies on.

The Fairytale of Atomized Individualism

Before I begin, I think it is necessary to critique the theory of atomized individualism. The philosophy of atomized individualism believes that “...society is made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms." That last part, the underlying belief that all individuals are acting as completely separate atoms, and just form a collective of individuals called “society” is a belief that doesn’t hold up if we truly dive in and critique it. Before I bring forward a thought experiment, let's first break down “individuality.” At its core, individuality supposes some human difference, a uniqueness. Alright, now let’s dive in with a thought experiment. Think about a human being inside of a vacuum for me. Inside of this hypothetical vacuum, would a human be able to conceptualize their individuality? Would they be able to conceptualize a concept of uniqueness? How about the very concepts that make up our understanding of individuality… could this human conceptualize personality? No. A human would have no ability to conceptualize what it means to be an "individual" because the conceptualization of individuality and uniqueness only a rises after interpersonal relationships and the perceiving of some group. In a vacuum, there is no group to perceive as a reference point of what you are being different from, thus making it impossible to conceptualize our “individuality” or “uniqueness”. This leads us to understand that we can only be "individuals" after analyzing ourselves vs. some group. A collective, or a group, really any reference point is necessary to conceptualize these things that the political and social philosophy of individualism holds to be important! It is an underlying contradiction inside of the radical individualist philosophy, and one that breaks down any theory of atomized individualism. With this, we can understand that any notion or dichotomy that separates the individual from the collective and vice versa, believing that all individuals are a “blank slate” and are atomized is silly.

On Social Structures and the Reproduction of Capitalism

    Only once we are able to fully understand that 1, our own sense of self is dependent upon our interpersonal social relations with others, and that 2, these interdependent relations constitute specific structures that can be organized either according to mutual benefit or for a particular repressive end goal is when we will be able to seek a truly liberating social movement, and a truly liberating self and society. Erich Fromm evinces a distinctive way of thinking about the nature of social relations and the ways that these relations possess causal powers over the development of the self as well as the social world more generally. Moreso, Fromm’s conception of critical theory is rooted in a theory of freedom and judgement that takes into account the ontological shape of social relations that have constitutive power over the self and the society as a whole which goes in line with the Hegelian-Marxist model. With this, we can understand that Marx’s conception of human beings contains a crucial dimension lacking in Freudian theory. Where Freud saw the individual as self-contained, Marx understood that the nature of human psychology is dynamic, and specifically functional related to the relations in which the individual is embedded and born into. Marx’s theory of needs and drives is dependent on this sociality: we need our relations to others, to the world, and to nature to constitute a sense of self and individuality. This in turn provides the basis for our drives, which are an expression of a fundamental and specifically human need, the need to be related to man and nature, and of confirming himself in this relatedness and difference to surrounding. The essence of any social structure and the relations that uphold it are constituted by practices, by conscious activity, but are also organized by the patterns of relations shaped by forms of social power (norms, values, and functional roles that these patterns of social power exhibit). For example, the relations of parent and child, teacher and student, husband and wife, owner and worker, and so on are not simply social scripts that are actualized by some abstract structure we can view fully consciously and then fulfill, but rather actualized by human practices. With this we can see that total social relations possess an ontological character, showing that they are objective in nature yet not material, but have the capacity to shape the subject via socialization, giving social-structures a causal power. Social relations are therefore real in a distinctively social sense, that are not the property of the subject’s subjectivity alone, but rather of the shared structures that we inhabit, reproduce, reinforce, and which also shape us. 

    Understanding so far that the subject fundamentally cannot realize themselves as an individual on an island/in a vacuum, and that social structures and set social relations that subjects fulfil, reproduce, and reinforce are 1, necessary to conceive of “self” and our own individuality, and shape our conceptualization of self we can now evaluate these social structures based on the kinds of ends they promote. In the modern capitalist society, social structures and interpersonal relations have been manufactured based on the economic mode of production. The constant aggression that arises from joining a competitive labor market, the forms of abnormal worker-worker competition that necessitates a motive to dominate your peer to get a raise, get a promotion, etc, infiltrate the very cultural institutions and interpersonal social-relations that are necessary to conceptualize our sense of self. Think about common discursive patterns that shape our social position: “My house is bigger than x”, “I am better than you at x”, “I have more x than you”, etc. We can further analyze the very types of sports we like: Football, where the goal is to take over the opposition’s territory, boxing, where you win by knocking out your opponent and completely controlling them, etc. We can even dive into the very motives for consumption in the modern consumerist society. Where consuming x type of brand gives you a higher social position, or consuming x to look better to your peers, and further move up a social food chain. Domination, aggression, and control of others that the capitalist mode of production is founded upon have infiltrated our very subjective actions outside of work further reinforcing this mode of production and disastrous status quo. This is a status quo that results in “The psychological results of alienation…. man regresses to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that he loses his sense of self becomes dependent on approval tends to conform and yet to feel insecure he is dissatisfied, bored, and anxious spends most of his energy in the attempt to compensate for or just to cover up this anxiety. His intelligence is excellent, his reason deteriorates and in view of his technical powers he is seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race. […] Reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest material power without the wisdom to use it. This alienation and automatization leads to an ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality.” (Fromm) 

    The members of the New Left of the 60s, the hippies, student revolutionaries, teenage activists, etc recognized these very social functions and behaviors and refused to reinforce them. They strived to abolish these manufactured subjectivities that they have been molded into to reinforce this inhumane capitalist status quo. The student protests of the 1960s were a form of Marcuse’s prescriptive Great Refusal (a way of saying “NO” to the forms of repression and domination) demanding a new and liberated society. They recognized that this new society would require a new sensibility in the Marcuseian sense, which asserts the life instincts over the manufactured aggressive instincts. This idea of a new sensibility would move beyond the classic Marxism in the way that it requires much more than simply new power relations. It would require “The cultivation of a new sensibility (that) would transform the relationship between human beings and nature as well as the relationships between human beings. The new sensibility is the medium of social change that mediates between the political practice of changing the world and one’s own drive for personal liberation.” says Marcuse. The agents who seek to refuse what capital has placed onto them would seek to rid society of its systems of domination causing a ridding of the forms of subjectivities formed by those systems, and allowing those agents to replace them with new forms of subjectivity. The feminist movement is a contemporary example of this abolition of manufactured structures with the goal of liberated individuals and communities. Feminists, even in Marcuse’s time, went through the process of rethinking femininity and masculinity, which could be the beginning of redefining what it means to be ‘man” and male subjectivity so that it develops in a way that males become less aggressive.     Comprehending these social relations is central for any leftist who strives for true liberation of the self in the sense that 1, they predate the self and thereby are active in the shaping and construction of the psychological structures and drives of the self and 2, that it is only through the overcoming of pathological social structures that a more exact, total reality of freedom be achieved.

Just to Reiterate 

Through discourse, behavior, identity, and community, neoliberalism structurally reinforces itself on every single level. Post-Fordism, finance capitalism, cognitive capitalism, semiocapitalism, neoliberalism…. Whatever you wanna call the hellhole we are currently controlled by, is built on the psychological violence of subjects and the structural abolition of community, stability, and belonging.