Welcome, Fisher. Let's talk to you all. Okay, well, thanks everyone for coming, and apologies for speaking in English. But you wouldn't want to hear me try and speak in Swedish. I always find it really odd coming to someone else's country and speaking my own language. It seems really odd to me. But thank you for putting up with it. Okay. So what I'm going to talk about today is really the two main lines of my work, I suppose, and the two main terms with which I've been associated over the past six or seven years.
One you've already heard, which is capitalist realism. a political notion or an ideological descriptor, one might say. And on the other hand, ontology, a term which, as I'm sure many of you know, originally came from Jacques Derrida, but which really has got repurposed over the course of the last five or six years, particularly in relation to music. and what I want to do today is bring together these two terms which I think are two sides of the same phenomenon actually that what capitalist realism blocks out is what hauntology mourns for, longs for
and seeks a return of Okay, I'm going to start with three epigraphs, as it were, one of which is a piece of music, and then two sections from recent or 30 recent books. because what I want to do today really is connect up the concepts of capitalist realism and hauntology with the issue of what I'm starting to think of
as a kind of digital malaise or pathologies of the digital. I think that just as we're at a moment when we're seeing a rising tide of global militancy against capitalism. We're also seeing a kind of growing scepticism disenchantment about the forms that digital culture is taking. I've noticed this sort of anecdotally over the last few months in particular. a number of people really sort of reaching a point of kind of weariness and despair with cyberspace. But as I suggest in the title of this presentation today,
it's not, for me, the issue is not just cyberspace. It's cyberspace time. and perhaps what I want to suggest is that there's a dimension of capitalist realism and of hauntology which has to do with these crises of cyberspace time we've been online practically for a decade now and perhaps only now are we really starting to see what it's doing to us. Part of the issue here is how do we articulate any kind of critique of digital culture without sounding like conservatives?
And I think there's a parallel with the way that neoliberalism took over the notion of modernity, modernisation, so that it became synonymous. There's a parallel with that with the way that communicative capitalism or digital culture has also taken over the notion of the future. If we are to resist communicative capitalism, the form that digital sociality now takes, it seems that we can only do so from a position of retrenchment or reaction. and this for me poses the problem of capitalist realism
in a different way or rather we can see the set of issues that I associate with capitalist realism from a different angle when we look at it in the light of the digital or communicative capitalism ok so that's the introduction to the introduction Right, okay. I'm now just going to do the three epigraphs. Okay, so first then a piece of music. Oh, crap.
a section from Franco Berardi's book, Precarious Rhapsody. Could you say again what the music was? Oh, the music. I didn't tell you at all what the music was. the music was Berion it's a track called You Hurt Me it's from his first album 2006 I think I'll talk about it in a bit in a second ok and this is from Franco Berardi's book Precarious Rhapsody which was 2009 there Berardi argues the acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing
an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind individuals are not in a position to consciously process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers their cell phones their television screens their electronic diaries and their heads However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, effective, victorious. The practice of multitasking, the opening of a window of hypertextual attention, the passage from one context to another for the complex evaluation of processes, tends to deform the sequential modality of mental processing.
according to Christian Marazzi who has concerned himself in various books with the relations between economics, language and affectivity the latest generation of economic operators is affected by a real and proper form of dyslexia incapable of reading a page from the beginning to the end according to sequential procedures incapable of maintaining concentrated attention on the same object for a long time and dyslexia spreads to cognitive and social behaviours leading to rendering the pursuit of linear strategies nearly impossible. And he continues. Today's psychopathy reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic, and more precisely, a socio-communication, communicational one.
If you want to survive, you have to be competitive, and if you want to be competitive, you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a reduction of the time available for affectivity. These two tendencies, inseparably linked, provoke an effect of devastation on the individual psyche. Depression, panic, anxiety, the sense of solitude and existential misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be indefinitely isolated, as psychopathology has done up until now, and as economic power wishes to do. It's not possible to say, you're exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make a cure, get the hell away from it all,
recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill yourself. It's no longer possible for the simple reason that it's no longer a matter of a small minority of crazies or a marginal amount of depressives. It concerns a growing mass of existential misery that is tending more to explode in the center of the social system. Okay, and a third epigraph then from this recent book by the cyber theorist, psychoanalytically trained cyber theorist, Sherry Turkle. These days, she writes, being connected depends not on our distance from each other, but from available communications technology.
Most of the time we carry that technology with us. In fact, being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it's easier to communicate if you can focus without interruption on your screen. In this new regime, a train station, like an airport, a cafe or a park, there's no longer a communal space, but a place of social collection. People come together but do not speak to each other. each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places which that device serves as a portal a place used to comprise a physical space and the people within it what is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent
at a cafe a block from my home almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee these people are not my friends yet somehow I miss their presence okay I'm sure that we can all recognize that phenomenon that Terkel describes there in fact something that we increasingly take for granted but I think I want to suggest that those three things that we just heard are profoundly connected burial when I first heard the burial record in 2006 and I thought it was one of the most important records of the decade and I retain that belief
I think it was one of the most important cultural statements really to come out of the UK in the first decade of the 21st century really really that first album the self-titled album Bury On and the second one Untitled form a kind of single piece in lots of ways. And a kind of affective portrait of what it was like to live in the UK in the early part of the 21st century. And you probably noticed there that in Burial Sound the relation to dance music. The relation to the UK dance music of the 90s.
And one way into this notion of hauntology is to the hearing double that one is required to do when you're confronted with tracts by burial. What I mean by hearing double is it's a bit like walking into a building, a dilapidated or derelict building, and remembering what that building once looked like. and that's not an idle metaphor in connection with burial whose music is sort of full of music concrete type samples which suggest spaces and derelicted or dilapidated spaces of course in burial's case
what's significant about these spaces is that they were the sites of collective delirium that what we're hearing double the spectral traces of the other music that we're hearing alongside its kind of dilapidated form, you know, is the music inspired by the UK rave scene, really. Excuse me, that's where dilapidated. Oh, fallen into disrepair or ruin. Yeah. Yeah, please, anybody, any point, you can ask me anything. It's the only way we're going to get through this. So yeah, if I say something, you just don't understand,
or if you just want to ask me anything, any point, that's what I'm used to. I started off teaching 16 to 19-year-olds in the UK. They wouldn't listen for more than 90 seconds. and that's part of this attentional deficit regime that I was just referred to really so I kind of get a bit of a nosebleed and vertigo if I can talk for very long without people asking me questions so please go ahead so yes so the power of the burial record for me was that it was quite clearly about expressing a certain sense of space and And expressing a sense of that space as now being denuded, emptied out.
And there's a kind of mourning, a mourning for what had once taken place in these spaces. and that morning was formally signified by the echoes of UK dance music of the 90s particularly jungle drum, bass and garage because what's significant really about the decade we've just lived through, in terms of UK music and UK dance music in particular,
is the massive slowing down in the rate of change or innovation that has occurred. And this is perhaps one of the first sort of antimonies or paradoxes I'd want to point to. It's one that actually Frederick Jameson had noted really quite a long time ago in the 80s and early 90s. The longer the time goes on, the more prophetic I feel that Frederick Jameson's work is, actually, for noting these trends long before they were clear to the rest of us. That particular paradox is that, okay, particularly in the last 10 years,
we've lived through massive changes in culture at a formal level, or certainly the level of the distribution and consumption of culture. Really, changes that are unimaginable, actually, almost, from the perspective of the late 90s. Bear in mind that the iPod only really took off in 2005. You know, that seems like a massive threshold, doesn't it? That seems like that's such that we can barely believe it's only five or six years ago that that happened. So, you know, with the emergence of MP3s, peer-to-peer, etc.,
the end of CDs or the virtual end of CDs of course old people still buy them but it's impossible to imagine isn't it really in 10 years time young people buying recorded music, paying for recorded music that's already totally anachronistic to lots of young teenagers or people younger than that, you know, who don't even have MP3s now. They're more likely, if they listen to music, to get it via YouTube or such like. But OK, so when we take a step back,
we can all think, OK, that's a massive change in consumption and distribution of music that's happened over the last 10 years. Yet, at a cultural level, at the level of content of culture, rather, rather than the sort of form in which we consume it, there's a massive deceleration. That's, you know, the example I mentioned of UK dance music, where, you know, forms of music would emerge in the 90s that were sonically unimaginable only a short time before. something like Jungle Drum and Bass. You couldn't have conceived of anything, even a year or two before it actually emerged,
you couldn't have conceived of anything like that. When it actually emerged, it was a sudden eruption and a rush of the future coming in. There was a whole succession of these developments in the 90s. You struggled to find anything of that sort in the 21st century. now we can because the mainstream one could say mainstream popular music or whatever had been slowing down for some time perhaps it's possible to ignore that well for instance in the UK we had a miserable spectacle of things like Britpop in the 90s
you know the pathetic kind of attempt to pretend it was the 60s again and all of that and the return of rock and lads and stuff and and all of that horror okay so but that so that was going on in mainstream culture but there's an alternative to it which which you could which you could cling on to uh in the 90s um is the problem in the the last decade is that uh those places where you would go for an alternative to mainstream kind of retrospection and kitsch, have themselves become subject to entropy. And it's not that nothing is happening in these zones, but it's happening in a much smaller way and in a much less dramatic way. And for me, this is part
of why Burial was important, because Burial kind of acknowledged that at the same time as his music kind of wouldn't accept it. Burial himself, I should say, is young. I mean, he's a bit of a mysterious figure, but I think he's in sort of mid-20s, I'd guess. And part of what's interesting about the phenomenon of burial is a nostalgia for something which he himself didn't experience. And this is an increasing phenomenon. In fact, Sherry Terkel talks about this quite poignant anecdote in this book, which is called
Alone Together, which just came out a few months ago, where she interviews a number of people about their experiences with digital communications media. an awful lot of people. And one of the young people she speaks to says, yeah, wouldn't it have been great if you could just write letters and stuff? I mean, I don't remember it, but I'm nostalgic for it. I never lived through this, but I'm nostalgic for it. And Burial is similar. Burial didn't experience a wraith himself. As he told me when I interviewed him, his contact with Rave came by a brother who was significantly older than him. So when
his brother would come back into the house, he would come with these tales of going to Rave, he'd come with these mixtapes, etc. So Burial had that contact with this lost world of delirious collectivity via a close relative. So in Burial's music, there's that sense of loss, loss of something which he himself didn't have, but nevertheless loss which he can feel the loss, and he can articulate the loss. But I think what also comes out in Burial's music
is the sense of existential misery that Berardi talked about. It's a music that's saturated with sadness. And of course, part of the reason for that sadness is the disappearance of popular collectivity itself, I could say. the popular collectivity associated with dance music. And that's one of the characteristics or properties I'd want to stress in relation to hauntology, really, is there's a mourning for modes of collectivity that have disappeared. but there's also
I think what also comes out in Burial's music because of its strong and vivid sense of spatiality is a mourning for the disappearance of the public spaces that Sherry Turkle talks about that sense that we are alone together that what this new digital connected world has brought in lots of ways new forms of solitude I think that's that sense of solitude is part of why Burial's music became so important why it connected with so many different people in what has connected with so many people
in the last few years. Okay, then, just to take a sort of further step back then, and just to fill people in on what I mean by capitalist realism, and to draw out the comparison with hauntology. Okay, well, capitalist realism is, in some sense, hard to define, but easy to spot once you know what it is. capitalist realism can be described succinctly as the belief although it's not quite a psychological belief in any ordinary sense
that to use a phrase attributed both to Shlavoj Zizek and to Frederick Jameson that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism that in other words Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim made in the 80s that there is no alternative to capitalism, to neoliberal capitalism has ceased to be changed its meaning you could say that when Thatcher made that claim in the 80s she was speaking preferentially There's no alternative to capitalism
because all of the alternatives are worse than this. Now it has an ontological sense. There's no alternative because we cannot imagine there being any alternative scenario, any alternative form of social or economic organization. and and capitalist realism isn't just there being pushed by neoliberal ideologues it's in us as well and I think nothing illustrates this more clearly than the real widespread failure of so-called left if there was any such thing anymore
in parliamentary terms in Europe to have taken advantage of the most spectacular failure of a political project ever, probably, which was the financial crisis and the bank bailouts of 2008. If ever a system, if ever a political credo has failed, has one ever failed so dramatically as neoliberalism did that? Remember the key idea of neoliberalism, that all of the ideas fell, all of them. One that markets, so-called markets,
run things more efficiently than states. And alongside that one, it presupposes a distinction between markets and the states at all. you know this both of those went down big style because you know big time you know big that you know throughout I mean one form of capitalist realism which you know we're endlessly subject to in the UK working public services was this idea that you know business runs things better business you know things should be run like businesses you know well now we can see it, you know, if even businesses can't be run like businesses, why should public services, quite honestly? But, no, but, I mean, so that, that idea, I mean, that, that, that idea that,
you know, business or markets runs things better, well, you know, no matter what the scale of a kind of state fuck up, you know, it would really have to struggle to compete with the scale of the bank bailouts, wouldn't it, really? You'd really struggle to think of anything that could compete with that. But also, as I said, this whole operating opposition here, the idea that so-called markets were ever separate from the state, is retrospectively revealed to be nonsense. Because if the state was going to bail out markets, they're already a part of the state anyway. They're always already a part of it, you might say.
Okay, this is a total disaster and catastrophe for neoliberalism. So what? The point is that I think we can see that capitalist realism is by the fact that even a disaster, a catastrophe of that magnitude, utterly changing. What could be said? What could be said in mainstream discourse? A week before those bank bailouts, no one would dare question the idea that markets had sovereign wisdom. Suddenly afterwards, you could get people like Gordon Brown going, well, maybe markets can make mistakes. But even a concession of that sort was really massive. Yet, so what?
in lots of ways. The fact that neoliberalism has lost credibility and has been in every sense discredited doesn't stop it rolling on. Why not? Well, because there's no alternative story that is credible. there's no institutions or organisations which could institute that story even if it were there so neoliberalism has been allowed to continue
in its undead form and it can continue in the undead form forever that's the nature of the undead and it's you know, and this is what I often say it is easier to kill the living than to kill the undead I'm afraid, in lots of ways so where was any sort of left in Europe that could take advantage of this? Nowhere this is not a problem of, I'm not suggesting a sort of moral failing or even a strategic one. It's just that clearly the conditions weren't there for the left to, as I say, if we can even talk about the
left anymore as an agent, if that term makes any sense anymore, clearly the conditions weren't there for the left to mount any sort of assault, even though there was the most massive open goal in political history in lots of ways. OK, so that's partly what I mean by capitalist realism. Because it has this, I mean, how does capitalist realism emerge in the first place? Well, not so much by directly persuading people of its truth, but by removing institutions or organisations which could challenge it.
In the UK, the most obvious example of that was trade unions. In this period when Mrs Thatcher was making the claim, there was an alternative. she's fighting a famous war against the NUM the National Union of Mine Workers and the defeat of the miners who had themselves defeated the Tory government the Conservative government ten years previously the defeat of the miners is massive symbolic as well as strategic significance. It means that, to come back to what I was saying a few minutes ago,
that the neoliberal right now has control of modernity. Part of the struggle in that strike in the UK was about really where is history going? and that the neoliberals were successfully able to paint the left as belonging to the past, hidebound. And certainly in the UK, and I think also elsewhere in Europe, the left has never really recovered from that. It's gone into a crisis that it has never come out of. so
so what that meant is with the removal of trade unions on the one hand and also it's a carrot and stick kind of procedure evidently so you you attack forms of collective representation and but you also induce people into kind of consumer individuation. And how that worked in the UK was, well, look, those lefty bureaucrats, they want to stop you owning your own council house. Why would you want to support them? We want to let you own your own house. You want to choose to be able to do that, don't you? And who wouldn't, as it were?
You know, nationalised industries, completely inefficient. Look how bad the railways are. You know, British Rail, rubbish. Right, it would be much better if it's run by private companies. Well, if you've spent any time in the UK on a rail service in the last 20 years, you know what nonsense that is. But, you know, and also, you know, not only will we send this off, you'll be able to buy shares in it. okay so this double process of consigning the agents of kind of working class solidarity to the past and the same time as these inducements into kind of consumer culture and of course the emergence of credit
credit wasn't given to workers by the large S of capital evidently It was given to them because, in order to keep wages low in real terms. And this is one thing we should bear in mind at the moment. I think what we've got is a decadent capitalist ruling class which has forgotten why it needed to give inducements to workers in the first place, actually. Which was that, you know, if you don't do that, they do get a bit discontented, etc. and that, I mean, I think that has been forgotten and the austerity measures that have been brought in across Europe are, to say the least, not likely to damp down
discontent. But we can come back to that. But, okay, so that's the kind of political economic background to capitalist realism. But I also saw that there was a cultural problem and it really that was expressed in terms of precisely this inertia, retrospection, sterility, this sense of endless kind of repetition, recirculation of the already familiar. In other words, it's a form of sort of aggravated postmodernism, you could say. and here in particular I'm thinking of the theorisation of post-modernism
that came from Frederick Jameson Jameson's idea which is interesting he never really explains as far as I can see why this happens the idea that the tendency would be for culture to move away from the new and move towards a kind of mode of pastiche what's interesting about what's interesting about that move towards pastiche though is that it's largely disavowed you know if you put this to people people say well it's always been retro and revival there's nothing new about it well that's true but what we've got is an increasingly disavowed form
of retrospection in culture now and again this is something that Jameson understood very early on and his example of this was a largely forgotten film called Body Heat starred in William Hurt and Kathleen Turner and what James noted was something that was very peculiar about that film but which again I think we largely take for granted now that although that film was set in the modern day what was then the modern day, which was the mid-80s. It didn't feel like it was set in the 80s at all. The way it was shot, that dialogue, the music, the film stock,
all of that conjured a feeling of the film noirs of the kind of 40s. Yet, these formal retrospective tendencies were never explicitly acknowledged in the film. so you've got this double kind of again you've got this double kind of quality to what you're seeing it feels old but we're told that it's new and I think we can see this kind of this kind of bizarre anachronism or rather naturalised bizarre anachronism more and more across culture in the UK
at the moment we've got all kinds of miserable examples of this in music you know Duffy Adele well Arctic Monkeys this is true my anecdote about the Arctic Monkeys when I first heard the Arctic Monkeys and this isn't true no word of a lie I thought well actually I didn't hear them I saw them, I saw the video for I Bet She Looks Good on the Dance Floor. And I thought, oh, wow. Well, I didn't think, wow. It's more like, oh, here's some post-punk group from 1978-9 that I'd not actually heard before. Why do I think that? Well, because everything about the sound, at least on a superficial listening,
I'm sure experts can come out and say, there's a compression on that, you couldn't have had it back in those days. But on a superficial, the most visceral kind of lumpen level of actually hearing the sound. It sounded like something that you could have put on the radio in 1980 and no one would have looked up from their cornflakes. The line about a robot from 1984 or whatever, I thought it was about the future at the time. And it wasn't only the sound of it. It was all sort of formal properties of the way that the video had been shot. His hair, his T-shirt, the lighting, the studio, So everything about it very closely recalled the BBC sort of serious rock show,
which was the old Grey Whistle Test. It looked like, that's what I thought it was. I thought, this is some group from the old Grey Whistle Test from 1998. And, okay, there's always been retrospection. You know, we had Shawadiwadi and Shanana in the 70s. People drew attention to that. It was marketed, that was its genre, pigeonhole. You know, retro. This wasn't an issue for the Arctic Monkeys. It was no longer an issue anymore. It was even an issue for Oasis, I think, to some degree, in the 90s. But by the time of the 21st century, it's ceasing to be an issue anymore. Why? Because we've got no sense of forward movement of culture now. We've got no sense of what it is to be in 2011 in lots of ways. And why is music particularly important for that?
Well, because music used to be precisely that thing which you would, which would most reliably provide that kind of dating of a particular period. I mean, this is exploited to the level of cliche, isn't it? By filmmakers and television program makers, you know. You know, if they're really bad at it, if it's 1973, it must be sweet. you know, it must be glam rock you know, and it's you want to bring back a period but I mean, I really would struggle if someone said, right give me the sound of 2003 sound of 2004, what's that? I don't know, sound of 75, 76, I've got a fair clue
about that and that isn't because I'm paying less attention, I'm paying more attention in the last decade in the sense that I was a music critic, you know, I was just sort of around in the 70s well not even particularly aware of what's going on other examples another one, a true one Amy Winehouse when I first heard her version of the Zootons, oh god even the name makes you feel slightly sick the Zootons Valerie, I heard that in a shop and you know it's the Mark Ronson 60s kind of pastiche of course if you listen to it closely you realise that couldn't have come out in the 60s but again on a casual listen, you're walking through a shop
and thought, oh I didn't realise this was an old song and that the Zootons was a cover of this old song from the 60s again, no real issue about it it's totally retrospective in almost all its dimensions, that song and that version of the song no issue is made of it it's no longer a special category of retro or nostalgia, it's just ordinary pop music as it were and so I think this brings out this dimension of cultural expression of capitalist realism I think which as I say aggravated post-modernism and the you can see a kind of succession here I think
Jameson himself starts off as a pretty old school Adornoite modernist, you know, that he thinks, okay, like Adorno. There's, you know, a lot of mass culture might be rubbish, but it doesn't matter because we still can turn to the denaturalizing power of, you know, modern art, you know, which is separate from the marketplace, which is new, which can only have been made in this time, and which is in some sense rebarbative, you know, It's not really amenable to immediate pleasure. You have to learn to enjoy it, okay? All of those familiar features of the kind of modernist object. But, you know, James is one of the first to realize that this collapses.
That, for one thing, that the energy of culture goes out of modernism. That, secondly, the distinction between high and low culture, which something like Adorno's work depends, collapses. that far from being some kind of pristine zone, immune to commodification, that modernism actually acts as the kind of avant-garde for capitalism, so that what starts off as a modernist art object becomes advertising, etc. And then, you know, so when Jameson's first writing about post-modernism, he's noting this kind of ironic quotation of, former object of modernism in the space of what used to be called popular culture.
But we can't really call it popular culture anymore because in lots of ways there's no alternative to popular culture. Everything has collapsed into that and what's left is this, what's left outside are various forms of kind of kitsch, you know, that sort of do survive, but they have no, they no longer have a convincing claim to articulate the essential energies of the society in which they belong. And so there's initially that stage. I think with Jameson's writing, we can see a kind of staging of a confrontation between postmodern practice and theory and the sort of remaining elements of modernism. And I think effectively we've reached the third phase now
where modernism is so forgotten. the claims of modernism, the idea of a separate culture that is superior, it's not only forgotten but it also is attacked and undermined as elitist in various ways that all disappears and as I say, features which for Jameson were remarkable are for us simply taken for granted now and what Jameson was onto very early and this is a lot of it in his book, big book, Postmodernism, all the cultural logic of late capitalism. And in a way, I guess a lot of my work on capitalist realism takes its cue from that subtitle. Really the idea of Jameson really, in many ways,
reasserting a Marxist grand narrative over postmodernism and saying, actually, we can still understand this in terms of lots of the categories that we derive from Marxist theory. and that, you know, the capitalism is the key agent here. But just as postmodernism disappears and becomes taken for granted, so does capitalism, as it were. You know, after 1989, when capitalism loses its visible antagonists in the Soviet Empire, then capitalism doesn't have to defend itself as such.
It just becomes the horizon of the imaginable. It doesn't have to be named anymore. It's all the more powerful because it's not named. It's just reality itself, the only imaginable reality. and so this all of this is behind then I think this this sense of cultural inertia the sense of unacknowledged or disavowed kind of exhaustion that increasingly pervades culture I think now as I say Jameson never really says
he makes the claim that there is this tendency towards pastiche retrospection he never really explains why that is the case actually and I think my conjecture would be a number of conjectures one of them would be I know hints of this in Jameson anyway that I'm just drawing out really that in times of massive insecurity such as we've lived through in times of massive political economic insecurity and job insecurity which we've all got used to we've all had to live with this as Baradi argues in this book
used to be entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs used to be a special class of people. They used to take risks. You know, everybody else didn't have to worry about risks very much. You know, it wasn't their job to do it. Now, because we're all, that's part of what I call capitalist realism, is we're all entrepreneurs now. We all have to be entrepreneurs for ourselves. We all have to sell ourselves all the time. We all expect to only be in short-term contracts. If you're in a short-term contract, as I am in all of my jobs, then you're effectively applying for your own job all of the time, aren't you? I mean, this means that you're in a permanent state of anxiety. And, you know, that you can't, it's very hard to make demands about your conditions in that situation.
And, okay, so this in effect is what happens over the course of the 1980s. is really a shift from a kind of stability of antagonism, you could say, that defined the social democratic period, also known as the Fordist period, where we had representatives of workers, trade unions, representatives of business, and the role of government was essentially to mediate between these two separate interest blocks. If you're a worker, you would expect to be male, largely. You would expect to, if you wanted to, to work in the same factory for 40 years of your working life.
You'd expect small incremental improvements in your standards of living and pay over the course of their life. life. Small but, you know, that nevertheless, you could predict what your life would be like effectively. That all goes, that all goes during the course of the 80s. You know, when we look around now, who has a job like that? You know, clearly some, the important thing is, you know, it's not just a bad development. And one of the things that's important to resist, I think, is a nostalgia for Fordism, a nostalgia for, oh, good old social democracy when women didn't work and that kind of thing. And, you know, men had boring jobs for 40
years. Great. There are certain benefits of that world in terms of certain kind of psychic stability, which we now absolutely lack. But it doesn't mean that we should hanker for that world. In the UK recently, one of the members of the government, David Willett, said, yeah, it's all women's fault. They actually made the, you know, if women hadn't gone into the workforce, everything would be great. And, you know, in a certain sense, it's true, but why would you, wouldn't want to go back to that situation where that was great, you For whom? Okay, now, when that's...