At the moment when capital was acting as a class to break unions, dismantle the welfare state, privatize public services, impose information technologies, transfer industrial production to cheaper labor markets, and facilitate expansions in financial services and capital flow, Marxism Today was trying to figure out how to make socialism attractive rather than how to fight back. Proceeding as if socialism were nothing but another product in a political marketplace, Marxism Today’s perspective on the political and economic challenges facing the Left was determined by a capitalist rather than a communist horizon. It embraced the capitalist appeal to individualism at the very moment when it should have emphasized solidarity and collective strength. Tragically, this embrace helped to shore up the individual form that, as we learn from Lasch, was already self-destructing. It no doubt seemed necessary to many at the time, but this is part of the tragedy. Now we know.
The Pressure Is Killing Me
The intensification of capitalism amplifies pressures on and for the individual. These pressures are political: the individual is called on to express her opinion, speak for herself, get involved. She is told that she, all by herself, can make a dif erence. Her responses to ubiquitous demands for feedback take the place of collective action, rendered as either impossible or too repressive to constitute a real alternative. The pressures on the individual are also economic: even in the absence of significant social mobility, the individual is offered up as the most significant determinant of success or failure. In competitive labor markets, attracting buyers for one’s labor power is a challenge. One has to distinguish oneself to get hired or, for some of us, to maintain the fantasy of something like a fair competition (it would be horrible to think that all that debt was for nothing). No wonder that communicative capitalism enjoins us to uniqueness: we are the product we make of ourselves. At the same time, specialization supports marketeers’ interests in ever more granular access to customers, police efforts to locate and track, and capital’s concern with preventing people from coalescing in common struggle. Identification is inseparable from surveillance, personalization absorbed in commerce. Capitalism’s injunction to individuate is the most powerful weapon in its arsenal.
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