{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"1.1","pdf_page":21,"physical_index":21,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ed1688b350179f51f17db50b8c36071d6eaff13231104c1a4e645ead9437c4c9"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"The current conjucture is post-political, the argument goes, because the spread and intensification of neoliberal economic policies have subjected states to the demands of corporations and the seemingly inevitable logic of the market. To the extent that state authority is increasingly less able to constrain corporate power, politics matters less. This inability of democratic politic.s to produce viable solutions to. social and economic problems, moreover, resonates with the celebration of the individual in communicative capitalism. The individualization of politics into commodifiable \"lifestyles\" and opinions subsumes politics into consumption. That consumer choices may have\\_ a politics-fair trade, green, vegan, woman-owned-morphs into the sense that politics is nothing but consumer choices, that is, individuated responses to individuated needs. Zygmunt Bauman makes the point well:\n\nbeing an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one's own misery, seeking causes of one's own defeats nowhere except in one's own indolence and sloth, and looking for no other remedies other than trying harder and harder stil . . . . With eyes focused on one's own performance and thus diverted from the social space where the contradictions of individual existence are collectively produced, men and women are naturally tempted to reduce the complexity of their predicament. Not that they find ''biographic solutions\" onerous and cumbersome: there are, simply, no \"biographic solutions to systemic contradictions;' and so the dearth of solutions at their disposal needs to be compensated for by imaginary ones .... There is therefore a demand for individual pegs on which frightened individuals can collectively hang their individual fears, if only for a brief m.oment.20\n\nWith politics seemingly reduced to consumer choice, government similarly contracts, now concerning itself with traumatized victims. Its role is less to ensure public goods and solve collective problems than to address the personal issues of subjects. Accordingly, polsters assess individual preference and satisfaction, as if the polled were the same as the politicized people. Finally, insofar as the economy alone cannot fulfill al the functions of government, one element of the state rises to the fore-security. Thus, accompanying diminished political influence on economic and social policy is the intensification and extension of the state as an agency of surveillance and control.\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n1.1","previous_page":20,"next_page":22}