Is Anti-Capitalism Enough?

March 31st, 2010 No Comments http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/2036 Is Anti-Capitalism Enough? The New Crisis & the Left Howard Brick The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello translated by Gregory Elliott Verso Books 2006, paperback edition 2007, 656 pages, $39.95. WHETHER OR NOT the current economic crisis and a historic presidential election open up hidden potentials for renewed popular protest and collective action, it is obvious that the radical Left has lost a great deal of its size, visibility, lan and influence since the 1970s. When French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello commenced their work together in the mid-1990s, resulting in this monumental and inventive book, they saw not only that the Right had surged and the Left declined since heady days of revolt in the late 1960s. They also believed that social critique has not seemed so helpless for a century. That is, the practical and theoretical opposition to the status quo was weaker than at any time since the beginnings of the modern mass labor and socialist movement.(1) Why was the opposition so deep in the hole? After all, the signs of growing inequality were evident, and activism persisted through the 1980s and 90s in addressing acute problems and grievances, concerning AIDS, homelessness, the plight of the undocumented, or the lack of modern medical care in the poor world at large. But almost no one talked much any longer of the systemic framework of capitalism that demanded a correspondingly systemic challenge, thought Boltanski and Chiapello (hereafter B&C). In this respect, things may have been different in the United States than in France. Here, plenty of people were talking about capitalism in an overwhelming din of celebration. While the remarkable energy signaled by the burst of the anti-globalization, or global justice movement, promised to revive critique, as B&C put it, those campaigns suffered a sharp setback in the wake of a renewed Right turn following 9-11. Even the momentous antiwar protests of 2003 lost energy steadily as the Iraq war continued.

Now, nearly ten years after B&C first ventured their judgment that capitalism has benefited from the enfeeblement of critique, it remains unclear if much is different.(2) Capitalism has suddenly revealed its fragility for all to see, but it is quite another matter whether the Left now has the standing or the poise to offer the radical, democratic and transitional demands that would, one would think, have a growing audience amidst the present crisis and current calls for change. It is the great ambition of The New Spirit of Capitalism to diagnose the peculiar shape that capitalism has assumed since the 1970s, to explain how and why its new forms have eluded a forceful, concentrated challenge, and to venture proposals for reinvigorating, indeed reinventing an effective anticapitalist critique. Its not as if everything is new: Capitalism, in B&Cs eyes, remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation, amidst the generalization of wage-labor; and anticapitalism critiques of the domination, alienation, inequality, and antisocial egoism spawned by the systemhas kept it company since its very beginning. Yet there has been plenty of room for shape-shifting along the way.