All that is solid melts into Nike Air.

Consumer culture sucks. What do we do about it? There we confront a problem, as it often seems as though “late capitalism” is ingeniously constructed to transform any action we may want to take into a consumer choice, thus reinforcing the system we may have set out to undermine.

Since we have been raised within consumerism, we are susceptible to interpreting our gestures from the perspective that suits its continued vitality, that assures its reproduction. We are indoctrinated by it, down to the level of how we ascribe the motives behind our actions to ourselves, and how we define values like “freedom.”

In fact, the dynamism of capitalism is assured by the way it generates discontent (social, personal, industrial, technological) that it can recapture as innovation. When we grow to dislike the vulgarized lives afforded to us by consumerism, we can contrive solutions based only on consumerist premises — better choices, more convenience, more “diversity,” better and more comprehensive markets, stronger personal brands, more-thorough demographic data.

Is this a doom unique to those living in consumer societies, or does it derive from the philosophical underpinnings of the analysis sketched out above? A dour fatalism seems inescapable when you begin with the materialist view of consciousness — the idea that, as Karl Marx famously put it in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

This view is haunted by hermeticism. Its logic suggests a sealed system, perfectly reproducing its own necessary conditions, requiring an outside shock (a “rupture,” an “event”) to disrupt it, just as it requires an implausible series of meteor strikes to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. (One of Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent ideas is that in Western pop culture, it is easier for audiences to accept a world-destroying disaster than to begin to conceptualize a way of life that could replace consumer capitalism.) If you accept that consciousness is shaped, and to some extent determined and circumscribed, by the socioeconomic gestalt, then who can come up with the strategies for breaking that totality? Who can stand outside of their own determined consciousness to assure the purity of their own motives and the rectitude of their analysis? We may be conditioned to view our problems in ways that preclude them from being remedied — much as we remain perpetually dissatisfied once we believe in advertising’s promises of complete fulfillment.

Another way of putting it is that our sense of what is possible is strongly shaped by cultural  traditions. In her defense of “cultural libertarianism” in this Reason essay, Kerry Howley discusses the obstacles to the changes capitalism is wreaking in China:

Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min’s village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.

Capitalism has always proved very effective at revealing doors where walls were thought to be in hierarchical agricultural societies, as China’s current transformation suggests. But what ideology can reveal the doors in the fortress of consumer capitalism. Or if you prefer, the prison-house of language with which it has become synonymous, as consumerism has become a matter of branded identity mongering.

Powerless to resist: capitalism finds doors in any wall.

The fantasy, popular among the Soviet Communists and the Stalinist left of yore, of establishing Marxism as a science with “iron laws” was in part a hopeful effort  to resolve this epistemological conundrum and make the scurrilous subjectivity of any particular Marxist irrelevant. Their ambitions, their frailties, whether their dialectics can break bricks — these things do not affect the immutable social laws of class struggle. But it’s sufficient to consider Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy more closely to see the problems inherent in that.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

This base–superstructure model has been subjected to a fair amount of criticism: it’s an unstable dichotomy; it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins; base and superstructure have a mutual influence on each other, so the base can’t be regarded as the “real” final determinant. The concept of identity laid out here is also slippery.We have a particular “form” of “social consciousness” that arises out of the relations we “inevitably” find ourselves enmeshed in, even before we we discover our will. But these forms derive from the superstructure as opposed to the base, and the superstructure may be buffeted by various ideological crosswinds, which Marx enumerates a few sentences later. The forms of social consciousness, then, seem far less “definite” than the base from which they ultimately derive. They are relational, in process, even as the base is static, since the base allows for a complex interplay of social relations within its fixed system.

Marx continues:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

Here we see the call for a disruptive technological force from outside the system which “sooner or later” — who can tell when? — will change the means of production and “the whole immense superstructure.” Thereby it will change fundamentally the subjects fashioned within it, breeding a special kind of implacable discontent. Those blessed with this new subjectivity will then commence the “social revolution.” But Marx himself recognized how difficult identifying the change would be; his gesture toward the clarifying power of “natural science” in the following passage is nullified by his catalog of the various sources of ideological obfuscation.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

We don’t see the transformation change directly, nor do we experience it emotionally — what we register are ideological tremors, easily subject to being rationalized away or even turned to the status quo’s account. Reactionary behavior and retrenchment are born alongside revolutionary consciousness, and we can’t tell from within the conflict which it is that animates us. We don’t know which flag we are fighting under.

Marx, taking a transcendental view here, didn’t worry about the psychology of the actors in the revolutionary drama. It didn’t matter what they thought was happening; destiny in the end would unfold, and their behavior would be interpreted after the fact. Whatever they happened to think they were doing at the time won’t signify.

Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

So we simply wait for the productive forces correlated to the old order to exhaust themselves as material conditions go on maturing. But this sort of fatalism has always been deeply unsatisfying to those who are able to see the injustices in the existing system and are inflamed with the desire to change things. If we “increase the contradictions” between the old ways and the new, can we accelerate the old social order’s destruction? More important, though, how are we to know whether the “injustices” we are seeing belong to the new order or the old one? Marx tended to assume history was synonymous with moral progress, but that was always a Hegelian leap of faith. “Heroic capitalism” was succeeded first by fascism and then by our current neoliberal order.

Capitalism has always proved very effective at revealing doors where walls were thought to be in hierarchical agricultural societies.

Gramsci attempted to solve the false-flag problem by positing a class of organic intellectuals who would be animated not by the hegemonic ideology of the status quo but by an oppositional, emergent ideology of the new righteous order to come. The Soviets attempted to fashion this “pioneer cult” through straightforward indoctrination in the primary-education system, a cultural revolution from above. Hence, the Octoberists, a mandatory youth group for all nine-year-old Soviet children. Their song is still pretty inspiring:

We are active kids — we are Octo­brists! You, Octo­ber, don’t for­get -  com­mu­nism is there yet.
We are coura­geous  kids — we are Octo­brists! We are liv­ing our life like our heroes — full of light!
We are dili­gent  kids — we are Octo­brists! Only those who like to work get suc­cess­ful in this world.
We are truth­ful  kids — we are Octo­brists! Never shall betray a friend — that’s the point we defend.
We are happy  kids — we are Octo­brists! Our songs, our laughs and dances are to share in equal stances.

But the spontaneous emergence of theoretically orchestrated organic intellectuals is no less problematic. How organic are they, really? Any self-awareness of their importance would seem to nullify them — prompt their coöptation — yet without self-knowledge, they can’t possibly coordinate social action. They remain the passive minions of historical forces, calibrating the foreordained passing of the old ways for the new.

O pioneers!: Soviet youths schooled in revolution.

And what of their fellow travelers? Could their attempts to recognize their own culpability for the status quo itself be ideological, a misrecognition useful in marginalizing and neutralizing them, so that they are still perversely protecting the existing order? Preventing the formation of organic working-class intellectuals tends to be the unwitting job of other would-be intellectuals attached to protecting their status. The public conception of the intellectual that they generate (and this seems to be the main function of their intellectual work, such as it is — generating an identity as intellectual) serves to discourage others from the path — that is, from the notion that engaging society on the level of ideas isn’t a sham. Intellectualism appears in society as sterile and cliquish, inherently impractical.

Put in contemporary terms, intellectuals become dilettantish “hipsters” or single-subject “geeks,” neither of which offer a constructive engagement with the social order, a position from which to resist, let alone revolt. Old forms of intellectual endeavor — the ones deemed complicit with bourgeois complacency and social stratification into “brow” levels — have been successfully demonized as elitist, but they have only given way to the wholesale trivialization of the social sphere into competing domains of pop-culture affiliation, corporate branding, public self-actualization as an end in itself. The shift has not produced any sort of political vanguard; at best there is an avant-garde, proud of its irrelevance to the mainstream, and contingent upon it. Pseudo-resistance is institutionalized; we get “revolutions” in fashion, in video-gaming, in rock and roll, etc.

“Heroic consumers” are merely claiming zones of potential resistance and incorporating them into the consumerist superstructure.

In consumer society, the superstructure has become so minutely articulated that it offers endless possibilities for trivial revolutions in taste. And we are in no position to tell if the change for we which we wish to agitate falls under that rubric or if it constitutes something “real,” something related to shifts in the base of productive forces and relations. Further muddying the issue is the consumerist idea that consumption constitutes a peculiarly modern form of production — so that it may in fact be a epoch-shaking intervention when we laugh at an episode of Two and a Half Men instead of with it, or script movies to be acted out within the universe of Halo 3, or perform home remixes on pirated copies of hit songs. Though this accelerates the transformation of the superstructure and even grants individuals agency in guiding its transformation, the base remains untouched. Instead, the acceleration merely intensifies consumerism’s entrenchment, its elaboration, while exhausting our desire for social change (now known as novelty) in the process. This is the consequence of our being unable to directly access the “real.” (Perhaps we can ask for nothing more from a society than to provide for the extinguishing of our surplus energy.)

Many heroic consumers would like to nominate themselves to the new pioneer cult of the left, whether they are green consumers, or creative consumers, or freecyclers, or voluntary-simplicity devotees, or fair-trade consumers, or localvores, or culture jammers, or adherents of any of the other progressive lifestyles available to Westerners. They are merely claiming zones of potential resistance and incorporating them into the consumerist superstructure. Though they believe they are opening doors, they may only be about to walk into a wall they can’t see.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.

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