Antagonism

Are we still a society? This question may seem ridiculous at first sight, bu I believe it's one we have to ask ourselves. Seriously ask ourselves, as we've arrived at a point in history that has reduced the world to a "global village" as a result of advanced communication-technologies, the internet foremost, but has us scattered and trapped inside our own private confirmation-bias-bubbles at the same time.

The world has never been more unified and societies have never been more atomized. In the early days of the internet no one could have foreseen how this technology would increase social antagonisms. Most of us thought the opposite would happen, that the internet and the world wide web would increase mutual understanding, and that the sharing of ideas, opinions and information would bring us closer together. We were wrong, because we didn't account for capitalism's fundamental divisive nature. Capitalism, my friends, is the ideology that answers the question if we are a society with a resounding "no." Instead it demands from us a purely individualist and selfish approach to life.

Ayn Rand perhaps followed the foundation of the capitalist ideology most truthfully and most accurately. She correctly argued that the propelling force which makes capitalism work is men's desire to use their productive capacity for the sole purpose of creating wealth for themselves. She abandoned the ridiculous idea of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and instead admitted openly that the aim of capitalism is not to serve the "public good," that some will succeed and many will fail at the goal of creating wealth for themselves. Capitalism is based on the freedom of each individual to achieve whatever heights they are capable of reaching by their own labor, intelligence and will; it's the ultimate vision of a true meritocracy.

However, this ideology creates two opposing classes right off the bat, as Marx correctly stated in his criticism of capitalism; the owner class who privately own the means of production, and the working class who only have their labor and time to sell. These two classes have opposite goals and are in constant conflict with each other. Or they should be; the general lack of class-consciousness, achieved through more than a century of capitalist propaganda, has left us wanting in that department. Ideologies derived from Marx's criticism of capitalism, socialism and communism, answer the question if we are a society with a resounding "yes," and do away with that immediate separation of society into two separate classes.

But the separation between us, the atomization of society doesn't stop with just two classes of course. Like Ayn Rand said: in capitalism each individual life is an end in itself. Each and every agent is obliged for their survival to fend for themselves alone. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's even the moral thing to do according to objectivists. "Greed is good" and "there's no such thing as society" are slogans that gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, when the era of deregulation and emphasis on individual responsibility and neoliberalism began.

The intentional suppression of class-consciousness through propaganda at the behest of the owner class, comes alongside the profitable exploitation of our most basic emotions and our propensity to confirm our own biases. Headlines and click-bait are constructed to anger or frighten us. The same goes for advertisements and commercials that feed on our fear of missing out on something better than we have now. A society built around the singular goal of creating and increasing individual wealth, seizes to be a society at all. That's where we are now; we sacrifice everything on the altar of profits, and that includes human lifes and human well being. The freedom of each individual to increase their own material wealth, infringes on the material wealth of others on a finite planet, and on the environment in which all living things, including ourselves, must live.

No one owns the planet because everyone owns the planet. That's the logical and correct starting point as far as I'm concerned. Instead we've arranged society in such a way that some people own a piece of the planet, and the rest of us live and produce and trade at their behest. And this is reflected in our societies, where there's no more "public good" and only "bootstraps" to pull ourselves up. Modern communication technologies could have taken us into an age of liberal communism, a stateless, moneyless and classless world society in which all our needs are taken care of, where there's no more conflict between "use value" and "exchange value" because we need not trade and instead distribute, where the freedom of the capitalists no longer infringes on the freedom of us all. Unfortunately we're so taken in by the spectacle of Capitalist Realism that we can not even imagine such a world. Like Mark Fisher said in his book, it is indeed easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. I wish it weren't so, because capitalism thrives on antagonism, it destroys society and hurls us into a crisis every time its internal contradictions become unmanageable.

The below linked video is a long conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, in which he explains what he fears will come after the neoliberal incarnation of capitalism we live now. It's not pretty, but he also briefly mentions what could have been... I still am hopeful that we can correct course, partly because everything he says and everything I've written here should be obvious by now. It's time to leave the primitive ideologies of antagonism and enter a more unified future.

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