Some contend that capitalism, also known as the market economy plus democracy, is, despite its crises, undergoing an historical stage of great expansion. Others, that these victories are nothing but a forward flight that masks a situation which is growing increasingly precarious by the day. In any case, the signs are that we are living at a time that is quite unlike any other. This seems to be obvious to everyone except those who have made the critique of capitalism their stock-in-trade. There had been indications that the final demise of “state socialism” in 1989 might also put an end to the type of Marxism that was associated, in one way or another, with the “accelerated modernisation” that went on in the “workers’ states”. The field then seemed clear for the formulation of a new social critique, one that was equal to postmodern capitalism and able to re-examine basic questions. But the accelerated impoverishment of the middle classes, a development that almost no one had foreseen, has given a new and unexpected lease of life to the kind of criticism that merely blames the capitalist system for presiding over unfair distribution and producing collateral damage, without ever seriously questioning its very existence, or the type of life it imposes. Often relying on the most obsolete concepts from traditional Marxism, ballot-box Trotskyists, Negrists and other citizenists enter their pleas for a different way of managing industrial capitalist society. In their eyes, social critique boils down to a dualism between exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, conservatives and progressives, left and right, good and evil, i.e. nothing new under the sun. The battlefronts are ever the same. A Karl Marx reduced to a purger of “immoral profits” is thus enjoying a comeback in full media glare. The financial crisis of 2008 has given a whole new impetus to this explanation of the world.
Fortunately, on the fringes of this media-electoral confrontation between liberalism and the “anti-globalisation” movement—which is often nothing but a modernised version of social democracy—other forms of social critique have begun to be formulated. Free of the obligation to issue slogans that draw in the masses, some authors have been specifically focusing their critiques on the real condition of subjects created by capitalism and have challenged the myth of a left, or a far left, heroically opposed to capital which is ever seeking to roll back the “victories” of “workers” or “minorities”. Despite their very great differences, and even their opposition on numerous points, elements of this viewpoint can be seen in authors like Luc Boltanski, Serge Latouche (and, more generally, in authors allied to the “degrowth” movement), Dany-Robert Dufour, Annie Lebrun, Jaime Semprun and Jean-Claude Michéa, just to mention the French authors. Their sources vary widely, ranging from Situationist ideas to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Surrealism to ecology.
What characterises these authors is that they have not elaborated their theories on the basis of a resumption of the critique of political economy, as the critique of value and of commodity fetishism has done. How then can the critique of value’s point of view help to understand the importance and the limitations of these unprecedented forms of social critique? To set the ball rolling, the following remarks seek to analyse some aspects of Jean-Claude Michéa’s work. An author with no university or media affiliations, he has over the last fifteen years garnered an increasingly wide readership.1 Beginning with his first books on George Orwell and on the “teaching of ignorance”, Michéa has set out a very original social critique, above all because it also includes a robust critique of the entire left, which he accuses of being “liberal” and of jettisoning any truly anti-capitalist point of view. Not only does his work contain wholly unarguable aspects, but thankfully includes genuinely new vistas for an understanding of the “apocalypse of our time”. From the point of view of the critique of value, however, his work also contains some expositions of a highly contentious nature. And this is a good sign for the new conditions of critique: there is no longer a sliding scale for determining whether one idea is close to or divorced from another, no more compulsory membership of some intellectual coterie or other’s rule that those who share opinions on “a” must necessarily share them on “b”.
To any left-wing militant, Michéa’s main idea can only seem like a red rag: he describes “the left” as a form of liberalism. Yet this caustic observation is in point of fact essential for grasping the history of capitalism. It is a view to which the critique of value also subscribes: the first part of my study Les Aventures de la marchandise posits that through part of his work (the “exoteric” part), Karl Marx was “the theorist of modernisation, the ‘dissident of political liberalism’ (Kurz), a representative of the Enlightenment who sought to perfect industrial society under the leadership of the proletariat”.2 Michéa is right to emphasise the fact that capitalism is not by nature conservative and that the bourgeois mentality is not the same thing as capitalism. He offers a sharp analysis of the contribution that many of the post-1968 left’s actions have made to capitalist modernisation, such as the cult of youth, nomadic lifestyles and unaffiliated individuals without qualities (whose best-known advocate was Gilles Deleuze).3 He points out the ambiguities of the “philosophy of suspicion” and “hero trashing” and draws attention to the devastation caused by contemporary education. At the same time there is the sense that his critique of the Enlightenment is always carried out in the name of the “modern project of emancipation” and has nothing to do with some nostalgic yearning for a bygone world and its social order; a yearning that is beginning to spread even to some recesses of “anti-industrial” critique. The author argues against the belief that the growth of productive forces will transform relations of production in an emancipatory sense and rightly sees in the theories of Antonio Negri and his followers an avatar of this two-hundred-year-old illusion.4 Finally, Michéa’s great strength is to lay stress on moral reform in order to escape the quagmire of commodity society. This theme is rarely addressed by those who fancy themselves to be enemies of the system, because the moral imperative assumes that each person is able to make a personal effort to effect a partial escape from the system and should therefore do so, instead of imagining themselves to be its mere victims. Like that of his main inspiration, Christopher Lasch (author of The Culture of Narcissism),5 Michéa’s best work has a genuine air of wisdom about it where the personal and the universal meet.
However, Jean-Claude Michéa’s theories give rise to at least two major objections. The first concerns his refusal to recognise the centrality of the critique of political economy for understanding capitalist society. The second, which to some extent derives from this refusal, relates to the central position that the concepts of “common decency” and “the people” occupy in his thinking.
It is commonly recognised that “historical materialism” constitutes one of the pillars of Karl Marx’s thought and of Marxism in general. This assertion is not false, even though Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels subsequently undertook a deeper exploration of the first, somewhat simplistic, definitions that appeared in their earlier works, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, to which Michéa refers.6 The materialist explanation of history represented a major break with all previous historiography, and a certain one-sidedness, which historical materialism has always retained even with regard to Marx himself, is also due to this need to vigorously uphold a completely new viewpoint. The fossilisation of Marx’s work in latter-day Marxism, which had become the official ideology of a workers’ movement now acting within basic capitalist categories that had ceased to be challenged, equally transformed its original materialist insight into an article of faith and into an obsessive denunciation of “bourgeois idealism”. But, contrary to what Michéa thinks,7 the materialist explanation of history is not logically identical to belief in the benefits of progress about which Marx had begun to express doubts towards the end of his life. If anything, historical materialism goes hand in glove with the “base” versus “superstructure” schema, according to which the activities of material production and reproduction, on the one side, and all the rest of human existence, on the other, have a cause and effect relation to each other. Economic activity is thus held to be always and everywhere at the centre of human life. The acknowledgement of the undeniable importance of other factors, such as language, psychology or religion, has earned Marxism, and Marx himself, the reproach ever since of “economism”, and has impelled many intellectuals who were initially inspired by Marx to relegate Marxism to the status of an “auxiliary science”, still useful for understanding certain economic mechanisms, but absolutely inadequate for grasping the complexity of modern life.
The critique of value has made a radical break with the dichotomy between base and superstructure, not in the name of a so-called “plurality” of factors, but by basing itself on the Marxian critique of fetishism. Commodity fetishism is not a false consciousness or a mystification, but a form of total social existence, which comes before all separations between material reproduction and mental factors because it determines the very forms of thought and action. It shares these features with other forms of fetishism, such as religious consciousness. It could thus be considered as an a priori; one that is not, however, ontological, as in Kant, but historical and subject to development. This investigation into the general codes of each historical epoch also preserves, against the fragmentation introduced by the poststructuralist and postmodernist ways of perceiving the world, a unitary viewpoint. The development of this approach has only just begun, but a facet of its heuristic potential may be instanced in the way it allows the emergence of capitalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be viewed:8 there is a link between the origins of a positive view of labour in monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, the substitution of “abstract time” for “concrete time” (and the production of the first clocks), technological innovations and the invention of firearms; the latter was the cause of the nascent state’s enormous need for money, which powered the transformation of subsistence economies into monetary economies. Against this background it is impossible to establish a hierarchy between “ideal” factors (the concept of time, the work mind-set) and material or technological factors. Equally, there was no mere convergence of independent elements. Here, the ability to abstract and quantify seems to produce this fetishism, this a priori code, this general form of consciousness in whose collective absence the technological innovations or geographical discoveries would not have had the same impact; and vice versa.
This “supersession” of historical materialism—amounting to a veritable Aufhebung in the Hegelian sense—is no easy task; rather it ranks as a long-term project. Unfortunately, the perfectly justified rejection of the materialist vulgate has led many people, since the 1960s, simply to adopt the alternative to the traditional dilemma and return to “idealist” forms of historical explanation. This was the case in the work of Michel Foucault and his “epistemes” from nowhere, together with deconstruction, which sees nothing but “discourses” in operation. Michéa, too, is anxious to put clear water between himself and “historical materialism”.9 Apparently therefore capitalism and liberal society happen to exist because somebody or other dreamt them up and because somebody else set about putting these ideas into practice. According to Michéa, capitalism is “first and foremost a metaphysics (and only subsequently the actually existing system engendered by the political will to experience this metaphysics)”.10 He writes: “I maintain, in fact, that the historical movement that has profoundly transformed modern societies must be fundamentally understood as the logical accomplishment (or the truth) of the liberal political project, as this has been gradually defined since the seventeenth century”.11 In Michéa’s view, liberalism was sought after before it was put into practice, and for over two centuries the “Western political elites” undertook “to materialise dogmas on a worldwide scale”.12
There is nothing wrong of course in stressing the fact that capitalism possesses metaphysical roots and that it is not, as its own hype would have it, just a rational project for world domination that emerged from the Enlightenment and, by definition, lay beyond all metaphysics and all religion. On the contrary, it is demonstrable that economic value and its permanent self-valorisation have not only replaced the old gods to whom sacrifices had to be made, but also that value—and therefore labour, capital and money—are directly rooted in ancient metaphysics. They are, to a large extent, secularisations of what presented itself in former times as overtly religious. Walter Benjamin was one of the first people to reflect on this subject.13
However, Michéa has a completely different take on things: he asserts that the preconditions for the emergence of capitalism had already been assembled at various points throughout history and that capitalism is therefore not the “ineluctable consequence of the degree of objective development”,14 since a particular “political and philosophical configuration” was also necessary.15 He does not, however, describe an impersonal process, in which the organisation of society and ideas are the two sides of the same fetishistic form, but presents us with a philosophy that, according to him, was capable of reshaping reality. His theory is clearly set out thus: the horrors of the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ushered in the liberal project of constructing a society that no longer asked men to be good, but only that they abide by certain rules enabling them to pursue their own interests. A problem arises, however, at this juncture: if a century of massacres in the name of religion serves indeed to explain the genesis of the philosophies of Hobbes or Spinoza, it by no means explains the persistence of this way of thought once the Wars of Religion were over. Had the trauma lingered on? History demonstrates, nonetheless, that ideas quickly fade once the context that ushered them in disappears. When liberalism began to win its first victories, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were many more pressing issues in people’s minds than the Wars of Religion. There are two possibilities: either liberalism was victorious because it was “in line” with the “needs” of capital, once the latter had become the predominant form of social reproduction; or else a deciding role must be attributed to ideas and “elites” who were able to impose them by force or deceit. This second possibility leads to an explanation of capitalism as a permanent conspiracy of evil masters against the good people. Michéa explicitly rejects “conspiracy theories” but it is worth pondering whether they might not in fact be sneaking into his conception of history by the back door.
To the role played by ideas—for example, the “project […] of organizing humanity scientifically”,16 which Michéa describes as an extremely important factor in the formation of the Soviet Union—the same argument that Michéa quite rightly uses against those who attribute a decisive role to technological invention (and who are not solely of a Marxist hue, cf. Marshall McLuhan) may be applied: inventions like the steam engine were made at several points in history, but had to await the advent of all the other social and “psychological” preconditions that were necessary in order for them to be adopted and develop their full potential. This argument also applies to ideas: why did an idea that existed, or could have existed, over a long period of time suddenly begin to play its historical role at this precise moment? Tommaso Campanella desired that scientist-priests run his “City of the Sun”.
Finally, Michéa is right to criticise the retrospective application of modern economic categories to pre-capitalist societies, as Friedrich Engels did in his later work. But “historical materialism” did not only emerge in modern society, it speaks the truth about this society too: capitalist development itself has directly or indirectly managed to subject the totality of human existence to economic imperatives by creating ideologies and spheres of life that must ensure the operation of the economic machine. The totalitarianism of the commodity has therefore realised the materialism proclaimed by Marxism. This observation rings truest when it is borne in mind that the rule of the capitalist economy is not some ethically unfair yet rational and practical project; if anything the latter is the quintessence of the irrational and of self-destruction. Those who denounce Marx’s “economism” believe that they have discovered a shortcoming in Marx’s theory, when in reality they are closing their eyes to the principal defect of capitalist reality: its “actually existing economism”.
The entire critique of political economy is often thrown out with the bathwater of “economism”. For a social critique that seeks to be radical, it is fundamental to recognise that the basic categories of capitalist society—commodity, value, labour, money, capital, competition, market, growth—pertain exclusively to capitalist modernity, and are not indispensable elements of all social life. However, criticising the dominant ideas and believing that the system functions essentially by manipulating people’s consciousness does not go far enough. The critique of the “economic representation of the world”17 is of the highest priority according to Michéa; but it is not just a matter of “representation”, that is, of the predominance of the economy in people’s minds. The real domination of the economy, which affects those who abhor it too, needs overthrowing above all else. Noticeably common within “dissenting” circles is the belief that a crisis of capitalism would occur if only it lost its subjects’ approval.18 However, the environmental crisis clearly points up the complete dissociation between consciousness and what the impersonal mechanisms of competition force us to do on a daily basis. These lines of argument—not to mention theories of deconstruction, which see action in the sphere of representations as the only possible form of action since representations are the only reality—always end up taking us back to that famous sentence in the foreword to The German Ideology, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make fun of the Young Hegelians (the real missing link between sophists and postmodernists) who believed that men drown because they fail to jettison the idea of gravity…
This absence of any grounding in the critique of political economy (even if Michéa relates that Marx criticised political economy) finally leads Michéa to disregard the critique of the subject and the critique of labour. While he provides a spirited description of the miserable forms of contemporary subjectivity, especially among young people, he clings to a simple dichotomy between the liberal logic of capital (in which he lumps the “actually existing” left together with the far left, an analysis that counts among his most robust), on the one hand, and subjects, the “people” and “democracy”, on the other. Now for the second point in our critique.
While the polemical part of Michéa’s analyses is convincing for the most part, the alternatives he proposes are much less so. This is a fate he shares, almost by necessity, with all those who seek to offer a “solution” to the evils they describe. He knows well that his defence of “populism” is open to multiple criticisms. Nonetheless, drawing attention, as Michéa does, to the “bad press” currently surrounding this concept does not yet prove that it is good.
First of all, the claim that “basic human virtues […] are still commonly found among the popular classes”19 can only run up against a multitude of empirical observations. The fact that Michéa, following George Orwell, avoids giving any clear definition of his key concept of “common decency” is not enough to shield it from all criticism. The assertion that “ordinary people” used to, or still do, act with a minimum of moral probity in their everyday lives can indeed be borne out in concrete examples although these cannot be said to be the rule judging by the number of flagrant exceptions to them. Where was the common decency of the Germans during the 1930s? Or of the Russians in Stalin’s time? Might the answer go that by then these societies were largely worn away by the modern logic of personal interest? But, in that case, where was the decency of the Spaniards in the seventeenth century? It is hard to imagine a more indecent society than the one described by Francisco de Quevedo in El Buscón [The Swindler].
Decency does of course exist in traditional societies—in the form of solidarity, mutual aid, generosity, and an attitude of not harming others—even if it is often the concern for one’s own reputation that engenders it. It could be defined as competition held partly in abeyance within the group and as a privileging of the gift over commodity exchange. The problem is that this decency is often practised only within the group, and withheld from outsiders. Frequently, it is not extended to foreigners or to transients: with them there is no “chain of gifting”, no gift reciprocity. It sometimes looks as though this decency only functions on the condition that it is not generalised, and even that it is inversely proportional to its generalisability.20 There are groups within which a certain degree of “human warmth”, extended on occasion to visitors, is accompanied by the most extreme maliciousness towards other groups. At times, such a propensity bestows a certain ambiguous charm on the southerners of some countries, in France as in Italy, and in Spain or in the United States. Solidarity and the spirit of gift-giving within a collective can be transformed beyond their original context into corporatism and, in the most extreme cases, into mafia-like behaviour, especially in the cases of certain ethnic or religious minorities. Even the bandits of the past had their codes of honour which amounted to ways of being “decent” among themselves.21 Nowadays, the many forms of ultra-selfishness exhibited by certain “communities” (the xenophobic Lega is perhaps the only modern-day Italian political party to have emerged not from the higher echelons of society but in the bars) are based on the alleged defence that they provide against “stranger danger”, to wit those with whom no relationship based on mutual trust and therefore “decency” is possible.22
It would be nice to think that the process of humanisation largely consists in the deepening, internalisation and generalisation of this decency first observed within circumscribed communities (and normally based on some form of birthright), but examples of this are few and far between. It is true that these positive attitudes still exist. Most people carry out actions on a daily basis that, from the strictly liberal angle of “self-interest”, ought to be judged useless and harmful. Such actions do not, however, necessarily constitute an “alternative” to the commodity economy, because the latter could not exist for very long if a significant part of the business of everyday life was not carried out in this non-commodified form. These non-commodified activities, albeit integrated in the commodity system as its invisible foundation, finally lend themselves to being recuperated in the form of the “retirement sector”, volunteer work, community service, etc., mere caretaking that ensures that everything stays just the way it is. The obvious risk here is that well-intentioned homilies on the gift, self-management and the alternative niche economy ultimately serve no other purpose than the creation of alternative modes of survival that remain totally subordinated to the perpetuation of the commodity disaster.
On the other hand, Michéa can be wholly approved when he says that the task at hand is not to forge a “new man”, one free of vices and human limitations, but to create contexts within which the desire for power of the “Robert Macaires”23 of this world can only find an outlet in harmless activities.24 Nevertheless, what should be explained—and combated—in social life is not so much the desire for power and wealth on the part of some people—which, as such, is not in the slightest bit mysterious—but the passivity of others. Michéa does in fact wonder why there is so little opposition to such a catastrophic world and lays the blame for this at the door of the left, which can only think in terms of technological progress and despises the virtues of ordinary people. Although true enough, this is too cursory an explanation.
His assertions about the historical role of the left have features in common with analyses of the workers’ movement that describe it as an immanent factor of capitalist expansion, analyses that have been put forward by theoreticians of the critique of value. Michéa, however, wants to draw a sharp dividing line between the “left” and the “original workers’ movement”. According to him, the left is “metaphysically” in favour of progress and modernisation, because it regards itself as the heir of the Enlightenment and as the party of change. But—he claims—liberal individualism is the only consistent development of the Enlightenment, and the left merely seeks to “regulate” the details. Conversely, Michéa has it that working-class socialism emerged as an opposition to modernity and absolute individualism, to atomisation and to the dissolution of communities. It was especially at variance with Saint-Simonism from which the progressivist left originates. It was around the time of the Dreyfus Affair that working-class socialism—which was more Proudhonian than Marxist—united with the republican and liberal left, for whom progress is necessarily emancipatory. This historic compromise was again sealed with the advent of the French Popular Front. Michéa contends that the benefits of this alliance are now superseded, and all that subsequently remains of the left is acquiescence to the economy.
For Michéa, the alternative to liberalism and the left is found in that “original socialism” about which he writes in glowing terms. However, the role played by anti-Semitism in Fourier and Proudhon is not something that can be overlooked. It cannot be put down merely to an “error” due to the “spirit of the times”. The first socialists also expressed, alongside many sensible things, the belief that “we”—the people, the honest workers, the masses—are pure and good, and that everything bad comes from the activities of others (Jews, Freemasons) situated for the most part in the sphere of circulation (merchants, speculators). Thus one’s own status as a worker, which, on the contrary, formed the basis for decency, was never seriously questioned. The request was merely for more “decent” working conditions.
Regardless of Michéa’s views on the matter, there does indeed exist a far-left populism today whose anti-capitalism boils down to invectives against company directors’ “obscene wealth” and to the defence of “honest workers” against finance capital and unearned income. This leftist populism could very well soon find an outlet in the hounding of city “traders” that would only end up reinforcing the system’s “automatic subject”. During the financial crisis of 2008 we could already see some symptoms of this: everyone, on the left as much as on the right, agreed that it was the fault of evil bankers, not capitalism as such. It could also, more innocently, merely ask to no avail for “capitalism with a human face”: a more decent commodity society that abjures certain excesses. To condemn, as Michéa does, “obscene” wealth already presupposes the acceptance of “decent” commodity wealth, even though the latter can only go on to assume obscene proportions. Even left-wing and right-wing politicians are now condemning the “obscene bonuses” of top managers, which implies, nevertheless, that rather more “decent” “golden handshakes” would be acceptable.25 Here Michéa, like Christopher Lasch, seems to believe in the possibility of a self-limiting capitalism. His quotation from the American anarchist author Paul Goodman is therefore highly significant: what kind of social change is he thinking about, if it means that people can simply “go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships”,26 and therefore, also, to the same useless and destructive activities they engaged in before?
Faced with the current overall deterioration of living conditions, it could indeed be argued that the mere defence, or preservation, of ways of life in society that were still common enough fifty years ago, even though there was nothing harmonious about them, should now be looked on as the “lesser evil”. But are these modest goals “realistic”? Could “less obscene” stages of capitalism be regained? Is this not in fact the agenda of the “anti-globalisation” movement or of the late Pierre Bourdieu, against whom Michéa rightly argues? But if the “Fordist-Keynesian” compromise of the post-war era has given way to today’s “turbo-capitalism”, this is not only thanks to the bosses’ hunger for “obscene” profits, but essentially due to the dynamism of capitalist value which at no point brooks any cessation at a given level.
The pages devoted to the crucial roles that “seduction” and the cult of “transgression” play in contemporary domination are among the most outstanding in all of Michéa’s work. However, even these would have benefited too from a deeper reflection on the basic categories of capitalism, since this is key to understanding that capitalism is not at liberty to continue indefinitely in the form of an affluent society. The stagnation of capitalist accumulation on a world scale—inevitable in a competitive market—creates a context of crisis in which the carrot is accompanied more and more often by the time-honoured stick. Capitalism cannot be identified solely with the state, the market, the party of law and order, or with transgressiveness. It is always the dialectical unity of both. Michéa is well aware that today’s capitalism is not triumphant and that, on the contrary, it is undermining its own foundations. Like so many other commentators, however, he sees this as essentially a crisis of recognition, rather than as a gradual implosion of the foundations of value accumulation. “Seduction” is, above all, a matter of competition between capitalist enterprises that are fighting over consumers’ money. But the system as such does not function because it can count on the consent of its subjects, but because it renders any other alternative impossible. It is therefore a mistake to believe that its main concern lies in exerting charm or concealing its real nature. Everyone knows that it is industrial society that is creating a hole in the ozone layer, but this same industrial society has established itself as the only possible form of existence from which an exit no longer even appears conceivable other than in the form of absolute catastrophe.
The old authoritarianism, as well as certain forms of power that seemed to have had their day, still play a much bigger role than either Jean-Claude Michéa or Dany-Robert Dufour would like to admit. Italy is one of the centres of world capitalism, but the Catholic Church is far from participating solely in rear-guard actions on Italian soil. In 2007, it summoned two million people onto the streets to protest against the mere proposal that legislation similar to the French “PACS”27 should be passed in Italy (and open to heterosexual couples only), a proposal that was immediately withdrawn by the Prodi government. In this case as in so many others, “radical” critique is mistaken if it thinks that the left is necessarily the most convenient solution for capital because it would ensure greater support. If the left was more “in tune” with capital, how then can the resurgence of the right, indeed of the most aggressive and at times ultra-reactionary right in most Western countries, be explained?
Similarly, the system does not hypocritically praise the virtues of the family just to make a concession to “popular values” as Michéa likes to think:28 the family, even though it is an obviously pre-modern structure, and however much it may constitute an obstacle to the total pliability of today’s workers, is not merely some archaic remnant. It is also the most important element of the “dark side” of commodity logic which encompasses activities that do not directly enter into the production of value and are therefore not immediately “profitable”, but without which profitable production could not take place. Not even the most postmodern capitalism could ever manage to do without the family.
It is true that the term “conservative” has today acquired a different meaning to the one it once had and that it is often a matter of defending—and preserving—the minimum conditions for human life. However, in this undertaking no reliance on those that political terminology dubs “conservatives” will be possible. There is no, or no longer, such thing as an “enlightened” conservative, or one who, at the very least, sticks to their own professed principles. What little resistance to mindlessness there is can nonetheless still be found among people termed “leftists”. A most basic measure of decency could take the form, say, of not dumping one’s children in front of the television or PlayStation.
Where might the human energies be found that could save us from Adam Smith Blind Alley?29 Jean-Claude Michéa’s observations on the negative role of resentment are quite appropriate. Yet if only psychologically healthy people can bring about revolution or implement worthwhile change,30 we really are in a pickle, and capitalism will have discovered a foolproof way of going on forever. Indeed, each and every moment sees capitalism create the mindset that renders all escape from it so difficult.
1.His main publications: Jean-Claude Michéa, Orwell, anarchiste tory [Orwell, Tory Anarchist] (Paris: Climats, 1995); L’Enseignement de l’ignorance et ses conditions modernes [The Teaching of Ignorance and Its Modern Conditions] (Paris: Climats, 1999); Impasse Adam Smith: Brèves remarques sur l’impossibilité de dépasser le capitalisme sur sa gauche [Adam Smith Blind Alley: Notes on the Impossible Left-Flank Supersession of Capitalism] (Paris: Climats, 2002); Orwell éducateur [Orwell as Educationalist] (Paris: Climats, 2003); tr. David Fernbach, The Realm of Lesser Evil [2007] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); La double pensée: Retour sur la question libérale [Doublethink: Liberalism Revisited] (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 2008).
2.Jappe, Les Aventures de la marchandise, p. 12.
3.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are still regarded in many circles as ultra-subversive thinkers. In reality they serve as classic examples of how libertarians morphed into liberals between 1970 and 1990. Regardless of what their subjective intentions may have been, they were elite representatives of a seemingly ultra-radical critique that went well beyond traditional politics and appeared to be “tuned in” to the most deep-seated aspirations of the post-’68 era, but which turned out in the end to have been a warm-up for the “new spirit of capitalism”, i.e. for postmodern capitalism. Indeed, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello often quote them in their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), op. cit. But in order to obtain a particularly striking confirmation of the “modernising” role played by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, one need only log on to the virtual reality called Second Life. This kind of “game”, which was all the rage a few years ago (and which has nothing subversive about it in anyone’s eyes: the Church, political parties and multinationals have created their own official avatars for it), achieves an extreme realisation of the reputedly transgressive desires of the postmodern subject crystallised in the Anti-Oedipus era: permanent nomadism, the abolition of space and instant travel anywhere, the opportunity to choose one’s gender at any moment, the abolition of age and ageing, immortality and invulnerability, the absence of annoying physical needs (eating, drinking, sleeping), the non-existence of arduous activities, a permanent holiday and party mood… This infinite and thoroughly “deterritorialised” world does however have one important limitation not unreminiscent of the reality of First Life: everything, even the acquisition of sexual organs (since the avatar provided free at the outset is asexual, a veritable “organless body”), has to be paid for, beginning with real money (credit cards are accepted), which can then miraculously mount up through various virtual activities. No actual trench digging or factory work is involved of course, rather the offering of “services” ranging from real estate deals to prostitution to other avatars is the basic principle. Indeed, the abolition of space is relative: while travel is even faster and cheaper here than with Ryanair, the earth is nonetheless finite and, in order to find accommodation or undertake any activity, land must be bought payable in Linden dollars (as with all currencies, the exchange rate with real dollars changes from day to day). In addition, the free play of desires is just as relative: no harassment of other avatars is allowed, only the establishment of relationships on a consensual basis in return for payment at some point. It is true that the latter aspect was missing from the original celebration of “desiring machines”, but this is always the problem with the “small print” that tends to be overlooked before signing up… Second Life is not just an extremely accurate depiction of the capitalist economy (it is easy to understand), but also of contemporary life in general: the absence of the most natural, biological and physical limits, and the hyper-presence of the limits created by society. Just like in reality, it is possible to give birth at the age of sixty, change sex or have a whole-face graft, but money is required upfront even to bed down somewhere.
4.Concerning Antonio Negri, see Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz, Les habits neufs de l’Empire: Remarques sur Negri, Hardt et Rufin [The Empire’s New Clothes: Remarks on Negri, Hardt and Rufin] (Paris: Lignes/Léo Scheer, 2003).
5.Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit.
6.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 40.
7.Ibid., p. 44.
8.Jean-Claude Michéa also proposes to explain the emergence of this “western exception”, but he situates its genesis in the seventeenth century, which is certainly too late. See ibid., p. 6.
9.Ibid., p. 44.
10.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 130.
11.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, pp. 1-2.
12.Ibid., p. 43. It should also be pointed out that today’s liberals would balk at thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville. Some of the latter’s considerations must be reckoned among the best warnings ever pronounced against the dangers posed by the “soft” totalitarianism of a wholly liberal commodity society.
13.See Walter Benjamin, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, “Capitalism as Religion” [1921], Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).
14.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 63.
15.Ibid., p. 64.
16.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 43.
17.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 53.
18.Jean-Claude Michéa’s assertion that “the highly developed capitalist system would collapse all at once [!] if individuals ceased the constant, mass internalisation of the fanciful prospect of unlimited growth, technological progress and consumption as a way of life and basis of one’s self-image” thus comes across as doubtful to say the least (“Conversation with Jean-Claude Michéa”, À contretemps [Out of Time], no. 31, July 2008, p. 8, included in La double pensée, op. cit.). Michéa also claims quite correctly that “we are completely free to criticise the movie that the system has decided to screen for us […] but we have absolutely no right at all to change the script” (ibid., p. 10).
19.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 129.
20.On the question of the potential generalisation of indigenous movements and the demands of traditional groups more generally, see Luis Bredlow, “Notes sur la résistance, la tradition et l’indigénisme” [Notes on Resistance, Tradition and Indigenousness], Illusio (Caen), no. 6/7, 2010, pp. 257-261 [originally published in Spanish: “Apuntes sobre resistencia, tradición, indigenismo”, Etcétera, no. 43 (2008), pp. 33-36].
21.It would perhaps be fairer to say that decency can be found everywhere and in all social strata, but always as an exception. This is the meaning of Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three.
22.One could criticise this use of terms such as “solidarity”, “human warmth” or “dignity” as synonyms for common decency. But the deliberate vagueness of Jean-Claude Michéa’s use of the term makes such shifts in meaning unavoidable.
23.A literary figure of the nineteenth century, the very image of the cynical arriviste.
24.It is worth recalling here the fact that in Gypsy communities, the “richest” person is generally not the one with the most but the one who gives the most to others.
25.It is almost comical that when Jean-Claude Michéa wishes to provide an example of “indecency”, he cites a luxury restaurant for dogs and cats. Frankly, even the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy would probably agree that this is a bit over the top!
26.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 113.
27.PACS [Pacte Civil de Solidarité], a form of civil union.
28.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 75.
29.Michéa, Adam Smith, op. cit.
30.“From the moment that socialist struggle draws on the support of the common decency of ‘ordinary people’, it assumes, as Camus emphasised, the ability to love life (and thus the psychological maturity) without which no really generous action is possible. Whenever this psychological and moral basis is lacking, ‘revolts’ against the established order—no matter their apparent ‘radicalism’—can only draw their motivations from anger, hatred, envy and resentment…” Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 132.