Guillem GallifaA book whose title is already revealing . Journalist Sarah Jaffe unpacks the good work of the powers that be, from their well-known misdeeds to the most hidden subtleties, to give an account of the extent to which we live today divided, i.e. commodified and capitalised.
Jaffe spares no references, examples, and witnesses (recalling, at times, Carlos Taibo) to realise the deformities to which we are subjected under the yoke of neoliberalism, which dehumanises us, denaturalises us, and recreates a Matrix that should not envy anything to the most sinister literary dystopias. However, the last chapter of the book, entitled Conclusion, stands out among its pages. What is love?
A reflective synthesis of what has been exposed throughout the immediately preceding pages, fragments of which I share below :
“The neoliberal work ethic has turned our hearts into agendas. The rhetoric of the factory, as cultural critic Laura Kipnis pointed out in her controversial book Against Love (A Diatribe) , has become “the language of love by default”. It has become “the language of love by default”. Love, particularly for the working class, is a complicated business.”
Romantic relationships are not the only ones that have suffered under neoliberalism. Friendship is also a victim of how our working lives are organised. A 2014 study found that one in ten people in the UK claimed not to have any close friends; in a 2019 US survey, one in five millennials claimed not to have a single friend. These studies reflect “an upward trend towards long-term loneliness”. The period of prolonged confinement during the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated feelings of loneliness that many people were already experiencing. We may have Facebook friends, but do we have real friends? We have tried to blame our collective loneliness on the internet.
Since the beginning of industrial capitalism, many entrepreneurs have wanted to extend their control into the home itself. Antonio Gramsci pointed out that “the new type of man demanded by the rationalisation of production and labour cannot be developed unless the sexual instinct is properly regulated and rationalised“. He claimed that industrial entrepreneurs were constantly striving to regulate the animality of humans, to bring under tighter control everything that has made us more than robots, including introducing some discipline into one’s sentimental relationships outside of work. Henry Ford famously sent investigators to the homes of his employees to make sure they were honest, upright, and monogamous and therefore deserving of a higher salary.
“And love, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has documented, has undergone a transformation from conjugal monogamy to something more open, flexible, and often, of course, not at all heterosexual. However, the way we discuss partners or ‘companions’ even the term companion or partner in that it is more neutral as far as neutral is concerned as far as neutral is concerned as far as more neutral is concerned and is still a reflection of the origin of the family as a complementary institution to work.”
“Our creativity, like our love, is not truly free.”
Creation, play, love: human desires, all of them, perhaps even human needs, that have been contained, commodified and put up for sale. As long as we are forced to work for a living, it is only logical that we demand better working conditions. But, in addition to these demands, we must always demand our time: what would we be able to create without the constraints of having to earn a living? As Marx wrote a long time ago (though not so long ago): “The realm of freedom only begins where labour imposed by necessity and by the coercion of external ends ends ends“.
“To begin to create our own little footprint outside our nuclear families, our gangs, to whom we entrust our most terrifying secrets, and transform their fears into clamorous chants that shame the adults who have created this broken society. Student strikes know that a different world is possible because they are already creating it. They make it real every time they reappropriate their time, every time they refuse to do the work that is expected because the world they were supposed to grow up in has failed them miserably.”
“Now that I have finished this book, I feel like I want to make a bet with myself. I wish to try to love things besides my work, even though I have my eye on the date, on the published book in my hands. I dream of someone reading these words and feeling recognised. Furthermore, I dream of breaking through the walls that our professional careers have erected”.
“The strike, in itself, is a way of reclaiming time at work.”
