Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thanks for coming and thanks to the organizers and it's great to be an event organized by a collective. Okay, so I'm going to speak briefly then about capitalism and consciousness. Some of you may have read my book Capitalist Realism and I've had problems over the years defining what capitalist realism is. I often will default to saying it is a concept, an idea, a belief that capitalism is the only
viable or realistic political economic system. But that isn't really quite accurate because people on an everyday level aren't even thinking about capitalism at all. Never mind that capitalism is the only system that's viable. Really, I think the best way to think about capitalist realism is as a form of what I call consciousness deflation. Just to make a crude schematic point, I would say that the rise of capitalist realism, the rise of this sense of capitalist social relations, capitalist conceptions, capitalist forms of subjectivity, etc., as calcified, inevitable, and impossible to eradicate,
the rise of this sense is directly correlated with the receding of the concept of consciousness from culture. if we go back to the 60s and 70s which is really the crucial period for the development of what came to be called neoliberalism but I think we have to understand neoliberalism not on its own terms, not as what advertises itself about individual freedom the spread of individual freedom fundamentally but as a strategy directly involved, directly aimed at crushing the forms of consciousness that were flourishing and expanding in the 60s and 70s
and i think there are essentially three forms of consciousness uh which we can uh talk about um and which which were interrelating with each other in um fascinating um productive but from the point of view of capital you know extremely dangerous ways at that point. The first is class consciousness. And perhaps one of the most notable things, if you time-travelled someone from the mid-'70s to now, one of the things that you'd most notice about the political scene would be the disappearance of class as a basic conceptualisation.
this was written into the dominant social political models in the US and the UK. The social democracy in the UK and the rest of Europe was really a form of concordance between labor and capital, which assumed that there were these different class interests and they had to be reconciled in some way. The New Deal in the US was similar. I mean, what's happened since then is the elimination of the concept of class, or rather, the elimination of class consciousness. But what that has resulted in is clearly not the elimination of class relations themselves,
but really then their disappearance. And the formula for this is Wendy Brown's formula, class resentment without class consciousness, I think. And this is, accounts for the appeal of something like Owen Jones's book and why that struck a nerve, is that we have forms of class hatred, class humiliation, class subordination, but without the agencies that used to be able to combat them, and without the form of class consciousness, which could, you know, bring, which could expose those forms of humiliation, subordination and counter them. These agencies were widespread up until the 70s. Trade unions
would be the most obvious, but there are all kinds of other agencies and all kinds of other forms of socialization, such as working class self-education. One of the things that we can say that's happened in the meantime, the commodification of education can really partly be seen, and the spread of education, spread of HE can be partly seen as an attempt to commodify and subjugate working class self-education, which was really growing up until the 70s. So the first thing then is class consciousness, the disappearance of class consciousness. And neoliberalism was, I think, fundamentally organized around crushing out class consciousness wherever it appeared. And the destruction of the current stick strategy,
the violent, brutal destruction of trade unions, alongside also then appeals to individualism. And the result of that is desocialization, which we can see even in the decline of things like pubs. as people's individual homes became more connected, you know, via inducements, like the satellite TV, et cetera, like, of course, now smartphones are the final phase of this at the moment. As they became more connected, outside space, public space, became more pathologized. So, yes, so the decline of class consciousness
retreated the agents of class consciousness. and destruction of the infrastructure that allowed class consciousness to exist. You know, none of this is accidental. You know, all of it was deliberate. You know, I think David Graeber is right when he said that we're the world leaders. You know, the world leaders in class subordination in the UK. But we talk about finance products and all of that. It's just a code for class subjugation. But, you know, this is the biggest export product of the UK. is how to subjugate workers. And it has functioned very well indeed. Second form of consciousness, which might seem an outrageous leap from that first form,
but they did conjugate in fascinating ways in some of the most interesting developments of the 60s and 70s, is psychedelic consciousness. We have to think back again to the alien nature of the world in the 60s and 70s, where you had this, you know, psychedelic consciousness clearly does relate to drugs, you know, specifically to LSD, et cetera, but expanded far beyond those who were actually using the drug. I mean, the key thought or the key kind of experience, and it's about a relationship between experience and thought in a certain way, that was extremely widespread in the 60s and afterwards.
And you have to think about the scale of this. With this being led by people like the Beatles, nothing had been more famous than the Beatles up to that point. Nothing. So you've got a popular modernist culture with something like the Beatles who basically trained people to expect things to get more and more experimental the more popular they got, which is what happened with the Beatles for their peak years in the 60s. And what they mainstreamed was this psychedelic consciousness with its key notion of the plasticity of reality. The exact opposite of what I was talking about at the start, that things are fixed, they're permanent, they can't change. Reality is just something we have to adjust ourselves to.
This is the pitch of capitalist realism, of the underside, the flip of the neoliberal idea that it's all great, we're all free, we can all make ourselves into anything we want to be, which we, of course, know we can't. The flip of that is this idea, well, you have to... If you don't like it, you have to adjust to it. That's just how things are now. You know, and this story that things will... At a fundamental level, it will be the same, but they'll also get worse. You know, so... which were at work, probably all of us have got this story in one way or another. If you want to keep your job, you have to work longer hours. And you have to work longer hours. You'll have to accept more responsibilities. Don't like it? Well, none of us like it, but that's just how things are now.
And the whinging boss is one of the key forms of this management, of this stage of capitalism where, you know, I don't like it. I don't like any more than you do, but this is how things are. That sense of resignation, fatalism, which is so widespread and which we can't take individual responsibility for because it's been produced at a systemic level. It was produced in order to eliminate that concept that nothing is fixed. Everything is plastic. Everything is mutable. and what these drug trips did was take people out of the currently dominant reality and expose it as provisional, as just one form of organisation of which there could be others.
Not to say that widespread drug use would immediately lead to revolution. It didn't. but that's part of the problem I think was impatience with a lot of the 60s counterculture people flipped out of dominant reality very quickly and assumed that that was just how things were going to go now and everything would follow from that and I think one of the values we need at the moment is a kind of revolutionary patience really there was a kind of impatience in that period and a sense that all of the historical kind of structures, stratifying structures that had dominated human life up to that point
could be dissolved within a generation and it just wasn't as quick as that. They're much more tenacious than that. And what the right bet on was the tenacity of those structures and that they would return. And that it's a long process to dismantle them. The third form of consciousness that was also sort of around in this period, and which neoliberalism had to subjugate, was that which was kind of theorized and practiced through socialist feminism, and which goes under a rubric of consciousness raising. consciousness raising practices then which would the key aspect of which would be that people would
talk about people talk about their feelings but they would relate those feelings to structures you know typically so it's so that very quickly when people got together they would see that they had common problems and that these problems weren't their fault, things that they'd been encouraged to blame themselves for or feel inadequate for could actually be related to structures, typically patriarchy and capitalism and their interrelations. And this obviously touches upon all areas of life, which is why it takes it beyond this kind of standard Leninist model of revolutionary activity, which is entirely based around manual
work and paid labor in factories, et cetera, which, as we all know, in the global north is disappearing anyway, which is partly why there's a lot of melancholia around the question of kind of left-wing political action at the moment. But if we take this optic, if we take the optic of consciousness raising, where the question of work becomes much more general, where it is also including domestic labor, including social reproduction, anything that is involved in social reproduction, which is simply the labor that is necessary in order for society to reproduce itself, which obviously goes far beyond the commodity. and you know
part of the power of consciousness raising is it's kind of molecular contagion that any group of people can engage in a form of consciousness raising it doesn't I guess the key thing of all of the things that I talked about in terms of the issue of consciousness is the transformative power of consciousness itself that consciousness is not then a raised consciousness. It's not simply that facts are recognized that we're already there. When people develop group consciousness, when they develop class consciousness, it's not that they've passively registered something that is already true.
It's that they constitute themselves as a group, which has already changed the so-called world. And so consciousness is immediately transformative and shifts in consciousness become the basis for other kinds of transformation. Of course, this can happen at lots of different levels and consciousness raising is not necessarily only about encounter groups. I mean, to go back to this example from popular culture, you know, popular culture, and particularly coming out of the counterculture, was a form of consciousness raising. And, you know, that's partly why capital had to develop the strategy that it did of what I would call libidinal engineering and reality engineering.
Libidinal engineering meaning all of the machineries of PR, advertising, branding, etc., which capital wheeled out in an intensive form in the 70s and 80s in particular in order to close down these areas of inflated consciousness. What are they for? They're not there to... No one's convinced. literally nobody is convinced by PR, right? You'd have to be an imbecile to believe it. However, it still serves a function. When we hear that Upper Crust is passionate about sandwiches,
we know nobody is passionate about sandwiches, right? Nobody is fooled by it. But nevertheless, it serves this function of making us... So when you're like, you know, like, sub-Uppercrust isn't even the worst. These sub-Uppercrust things that you get on railway stations. It's like six pounds for a baguette. So you've got six pounds for this baguette. Oh, look, the same there. It's nice, you know. And all of my experience is telling you, this sandwich is dry and horrible, and every time I've ate it, it is. But nevertheless, what is it? Oh, I'll buy it anyway, because it looks nice. that we don't believe it, but it's still capable of making us doubt what we actually do know.
And I think the point of consciousness raising is that we can, to have confidence in what we feel, so that we can feel what we know and know what we feel, but we're not stuck in our feelings, that we can relate these feelings to their actual causes. I mean, one of the major ways of deflating consciousness is anxiety, anxiety production. If you're anxious, that is enough to control you. You know, and the overload, I know Alex later is going to talk about work. the key problem that capital had especially raised by the counterculture was how could
recruiting people back into work who had seceded from this was the point of the counterculture I'm not going to work, why bother? It's miserable who wants no more miserable Monday mornings for anybody and what they feared was the working class becoming hippies on a large scale and you know this was a serious danger and lots of the most interesting movements of the early 70s in places like in the US all kinds of crossover there you know black power influence of the counterculture and trade unions
with this new forms of democratic socialism. And really, it's the specter of democratic socialism or libertarian communism that neoliberalism was organized around preventing. You could say that the key eventual moment of neoliberalism was the crushing of the IND government in Chile. Why? Because that was everything that capital feared. because it was no longer the kind of Soviet stereotype of a top-down Stalinist, bureaucratic, dreary monolith. You know, what we... And someone Alex also has worked on with Nick.
You know, in Chile, what they had was a... You know, the so-called socialist internet of the cyber-sin system and a model of kind of devolved power, worker power, and workplace democracy. And the waves of this democratic socialism throughout the US and in Europe and elsewhere also, and that is what had to be stopped. That is what had to be stopped, eliminated from even a possibility of existing. and in place of that then this mandatory individualism the individualism
of neoliberalism has always to be policed has always to be there's always the danger of consciousness being raised again there's always the danger that when people are together that they will do develop a collective consciousness that they will secede from this forms of miserable, angst-ridden individualism, which is kind of our supervised condition. And I think that is where we are at the moment. Fundamentally, I think that this form of capitalist exploitation or capitalist super-exploitation is no longer a commodity exploitation. if we can look back in some ways
at the period of commodity exploitation with to some extent dewy-eyed nostalgia because when capitalism was about commodity exploitation this was a form of dialectical exploitation the commodity had to involve workers workers had to produce it you had to exploit workers in order to get it and the commodity was separate from the workers it was something extracted from the workers' labour. Whereas now, there's a form of more direct exploitation, which is, I think, not the commodity form, but the promotional form. You know, like, why can you be induced to work for nothing, particularly if you're in the cultural sector or whatever? Well, because you can promote yourself. You know, promotional remuneration. And this injunction that we promote ourselves at all times,
that is totally second nature now, and certainly naturalized heavily through social media, etc. Again, it's something we don't think about. And what this allows is a fantasy of capital that it can live without workers entirely, that it's doing you a favor, right? Since work is a form of... allows you to accrue this kind of reputational capital, then the capitalists are doing you a favor by giving you a job. You shouldn't expect to be paid as well. And this is clearly the logic at the moment. But it seems to me that this is not really necessarily sustainable for that much long ago.
You know, it's reached a pitch of a kind of totally dystopian level, really. And I think in a few years' time, we'll realize how bad the period that we've just lived through, or we're still living through, has been. In terms of the reach into capital, into every area of our time and our consciousness. which is only enabled by recent technological developments. Until you had smartphones, capital couldn't administer and injunct you 24-7. It's only with that technological platform that that is possible. Of course, that's not the only use that smartphones could be put to.
But the reason that capital practically gives them out for nothing is because it allows this form of super-exploitation that it allows these conditions where you're never free from work, the spectre of work, or the spectre of anxiety. And of course, that doesn't mean that everyone is employed. The key thing is not that you're actually working, but availability for work. So the difference between someone who's unemployed and my job is often quite minimal now. like pointless form filling all day that I have to do is more or less what unemployed people have to do because you know I think a lot of this is to do with related to this question of consciousness is a question of time and you know what has been installed and this country is again the world
leader of I think is this kind of panic and panic anxious time uh where we all feel that we have no time to do anything. That we're constantly harried, agitated. You know, the only time that I'm not anxious that I probably should be doing something else is when I know that I should be doing something else. Right. And that, again, this is something that the digital twitch of smartphones and FOMO, this, you know, fear of missing out, but fear of myth not, is the positive hedonic side of that. The negative side is fear of some obligation that I have forgotten about. and so we're like but again think about the think about the most stereotypical image of
counter-cultural psychedelic time time was dilated it was much slower urgencies were removed it was a time of lucidity different kind of dream right different kind of what is ideology as a form of dreaming in which we live and you know that this this this the brit the dream we live in in britain in 2016 is a constant anxiety dream dominated by urgencies you know what's anxiety dreams are like you've some one thing that you have to do and you can't think about anything else except that one thing but of course when you've done that another one arrives and you've forgotten what the immediate the previous one was and your whole life is this series of embedded urgencies and you know that is enough. That is both the goal and the strategy to impose this form of time on us. You know,
the time of busyness, perpetual busyness without any function. You know, they're inventing this stuff. There's people whose job it is to make us like that. You know, this is quality managers. This is what they're for. They're not there to deliver quality. God, you know, and all of the rhetoric of neoliberalism around efficiency, et cetera. Of course, this doesn't make anything more efficient. Of course, overworking people is not about any economic goal. Again, I think David Graeber is right when he says that neoliberalism is not just an economic strategy. In fact, it's a political strategy. It is a strategy that will always put political goals above economic ones. And the political goal of subordinating workers,
and I would add eliminating this other use of time, this open-ended, unpressured sense of time, that is the number one goal because the spectre of that time is very haunting. If there is somebody in the world, and this is obviously now very much the engine of the right, And this is why they can organize so much against people on benefits, etc. Why can they do that? Because people hate their fucking jobs. People hate their jobs so fucking much that they'd rather be on the dog. So you have to organize a loathing around people who aren't working.
And so the possibility of a life beyond this miserable, angst-ridden, anxiety-dream drudgery is not anywhere. And we've come as close. They've done really well. We've come as close as possible, I think, in Britain in the 21st century to eliminating that possibility as any society has ever come, really. But that's the bad news. good news is I think this all it's all breaking down and we can see the symptoms of that breakdown all around us really, that all certainties are off for good and bad the centre has disappeared Blairites have yet to receive this
news and that's partly why they're in such utter fucking panic because they sort of know at some level that the centre ground that they posited as eternal and which all of their careerist orientation is based around, that has collapsed now and it's never going to come back. And in a lot of ways that's not good because it's led to, I think, the rise of the right and particularly horrific kind of spectres around this kind of migrant crisis of the worst kind of elements of European history, the spectra of them returning. But equally, we can also see what's happened in Greece, in Spain, in Scotland, and even
in England with Jeremy Corbyn is a break from this. It is exactly about the re-socialization in conditions of radical de-socialization. It's about forms of consciousness raising. A lot of the Corbyn thing is simply about people actually enjoying being outside our house and being in groups of other people. And, you know, just a simple thing of consciousness raising. Like, our lives have all been shit and it's not because of us. It's not our fault. You know, capital, this is neoliberalism. It's all your fault, right? It's positive message disseminated, not primarily by politicians, but across all entertainment media. is you can be anything you want to be. Therefore, if you're poor,
if you're unemployed, it's because you haven't worked hard enough. So it's your fault, which is also the message of lots of the dominant forms of therapy which capitalism is trying to foist on us as well. You feel depressed. You haven't worked hard enough and telling yourself a positive story. Okay, but that's, you know, so I think that what we've seen is people, collective awareness in these regions of the world of these strategies. And people developing new kind of structures. And one thing we can say, and this is probably new in my lifetime, is that the left has learned since 2008.
The left has learned stuff. The right doesn't seem to have anything. Practically all my lifetime, every time you think the left has got something, the right has been one step ahead of it. Well, it's been seven, eight years since the financial crash. They've got nada. We kind of have to face this. They haven't got anything, but new kinds of political formation are emerging, new kinds of thinking, new kinds of organisation are emerging on the left. And, okay, Syriza might have been crushed and might not have succeeded fully. You know, Jeremy Corbyn might be crushed, but I think we can be confident that those two things are related anyway, that there is now a new wave.
So, okay, there wouldn't have been Corbyn without Syriza. And if Corbyn is crushed, something else can emerge later. There is a new wave, and I think we can now start to ride it towards post-capitalism, which Alex is going to talk about later. Okay. Can I just leave it there?