Even its most ardent supporters admit that capitalism died sometime in the 1970s. All attempts to resuscitate it failed. Yet strangely, now that it’s dead, it’s become the only game in town, more powerful and influential than ever. This book is about what it means to live and work in a dead world. A good place to begin is Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s dark YouTube lullaby ‘Waiting for the Tsunami.’ In vivid prose that blends poetry with theory, and acute observation with art, he draws a desolate picture of our present condition. In a dying West rife with war, mental fatigue, financial atrophy and a mania for pointless work, we find our selves adrift, overwhelmed by nothing but a sense of emptiness … and waiting. Bifo begins: before the tsunami hits, you know how it is? The sea recedes, leaving a dead desert in which only cynicism and dejection remain. What is truly petrifying is that something even worse is about to happen. But that is still to come. Meanwhile, we wander through this dying social architecture, slowly suffocating in a desert of extinct codes and inane loneliness. And then on the horizon, we see it. The wave! Although it is still some way off, it’s close enough to make our everyday concerns look absurd and futile. In light of the wave that will surely erase your existence, the command to work, procreate, consume, relax, be happy, be ethical, to obey – in short, the command to live – can now safely be ignored. As the wave draws closer, you feel strangely at ease. No more demands. All you need to do, Bifo concludes, is to make sure you have the right words to say, the right clothes to wear, before it finally wipes you away.
The dark awareness that is provoked by the incoming wave is further unpacked in Bifo’s The Soul at Work:
Breathing has become difficult, almost impossible: as a matter of fact, one suffocates. One suffocates every day, and the symptoms of suffocation are disseminated all along the paths of daily life … our chances of survival are few: we know it. There is no alternative to capitalism.
The somatic desolation described here is grounded in a kind of hyper-hopelessness, an existence more properly defined by its opposite, that of non-living, a life that is already dead. After speaking with workers in a wide range of occupations, both at the top and bottom of the social hierarchy, we will argue in this book that this feeling of non-living is no more pervasive than among the multitude of workers trapped in the modern corporation. Whether in the office, the call center, the service counter, in the creative industries, the retail show-floor or the backroom warehouse, life seems to be far away. We have always known that capitalism accumulates numerical value by subtracting social value, experienced as alienation, disenchantment and dehumanization. But what has now become evident is the sheer pointlessness of our daily endeavors. A quest without end or rationale, slowly poisoning almost every aspect of our lives on the job and even afterwards when we think the daily grind is over. But, of course, it is never over. In an eccentric and extreme society like ours, working has assumed a universal presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where even the unemployed and children find themselves obsessed with it. This viral-like logic of the corporation has even spread into our most intimate pastimes, precipitating a novel and inescapable cultural malaise, writ-large by a complete, irreversible and ominous dead end.
Bifo’s characterization of the living dead paralyzed before the wave is a telling reading of how we experience capitalism today. Most despise it for what it has made us become; yet we have no imaginative energy left to look beyond it. But this bleak parable does miss something important if we are to truly understand the mindset of the dead man working. In Bifo’s rendition, the metaphor of the incoming wave functions well only until the last instant, when it finally does arrive and wipe us away. Unfortunately our predicament is worse. What if that last instant never comes? What if the wave never arrives to end our misery? Perhaps this is the real tragedy underlining the dead man working. Even the hope of non-existence is snatched from us as we are hemmed into a manufactured dead end. We work as if we are about to die, as if we are about to be unburdened from the deadweight of work, but we never actually are until it is too late. Unlike past generations of workers who were told they either work or die on the scrapheap, it is not death that terrifies us today. We would welcome some terminus to relieve us from this living hell. No, what frightens us more than dying is the thought of not dying, being wedded to a life that is not worth living.
Perhaps this is the trouble with so many apocalyptic accounts of Western capitalism today, from Slavoj Žižek’s compelling Living in the End Times to the strange popularity of the ‘end-of the-world’ film Battle LA (which was also voted by many the worst movie of 2011). The expectation of some kind of end or conclusion may inadvertently feed into a seductive ideological distortion: the fantasy of release and escape. A fantasy that we might, for better or worse, someday be finished with all of this. The ideology of exit conceals, however, a mood that is now pervading large parts of our society. Yes, it is unbearable, but also, and paradoxically, unending. The Beckettian stuck-in-a-rut joke …
Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.
… has now become a way of life.
Much of this might be put down to the way work under capitalism has bloated into an inescapable totality, one which is universally loathed yet seemingly without any alternative. A suitable soundtrack to this impasse can be found in the laconic verse of the young Michel Houellebecq. Awaking from a troubled and lonely sleep, contemplating the drab commute to the central business district followed by yet another meaningless day’s work, the poet opines:
The morning. Explosions. Blue everywhere. Always blue; magnificent. The new day unrelenting. When will life be gentle? When will I be dead?
This is not simply the morose reverie of an overpaid, suicidal banker. The pathos of Houellebecq’s poetry lies in the way it conveys the feeling that there is a fate far worse than death. From the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating team building exercise, to the alienating rituals of the service economy, to the petty mind games of a passive-aggressive boss: the experience is not one of dying … but neither of living. It is a living death. As Houellebecq recently said in an interview with the Paris Review: ‘Entering the workforce is like entering the grave … From then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work.’ Although dead, we are nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life. Recognizing that workers at heart feel lifeless has prompted a new wave of managerial motivation techniques gleaned from the growing industry of self-help and new-age spirituality. The corporation now hires ‘fun-sultants’, whose job is to design puerile office games to make us laugh as we work ourselves to death. The now ubiquitous ideology of ‘liberation management’ has realized that no one can exploit workers better than workers themselves (‘leave them alone and they will work forever’). And the trend of injecting authenticity and other life affirming moments into work is a central facet of modern managerialism.
But these tricks only end in humiliation. Every worker knows that the rituals of capitalism are inherently against life, even if repackaged in miniature Buddhas on the computer monitor. In the grave, at least no one expects a pretty smile or a half-baked joke. When the economy of work infects one’s early morning dreams, spills over into booze-soaked weekends and reduces almost every social relation to a cold cash exchange, workers are the first to realize that life becomes evacuated, a perpetual living absence no matter how many smiley-faces dot the cubicle. As T.W. Adorno wryly noted in his strikingly prescient analysis of late capitalism, the fact that we continue to live in this petrified air merely indicates that we have learnt to breathe in hell.
What is it about working today that produces a person who exists between life and death, a figure whose only hope is that it might soon all be over? In some ways the dead man working is not an entirely new species. Some enduring features of capitalism are still important to consider here. Karl Marx first revealed the peculiar self-referentiality of our society, a remarkable feature which entailed a qualitative shift in social experience. Whereas most other cultures seem to place something beyond itself to garner motivation – the gods, the supernatural, utopia and so-forth – capitalism exists only for itself. It has become its own final destination. As Marx sighed, this makes for a ‘sad materialism’, because a life determined by the repetitive loop of work and consumption takes us nowhere. Hence the old union lament: ‘do we exist simply to work, or do we work so that we can live?’
To compensate for this dead end nature of capital, we have been witnessing the birth of a new culture industry with its artificial zones of ‘leisure’, whose rationale has been to provide a momentary escape from a society without purpose. Only then can we say: the reason we work is to spend money on something meaningful, be it holidays, our kids or video games. And we might also view the clumsy attempts of industrial psychologists to create spaces of externality as part of this fantasy of a world beyond work. Of course, most employees know this is a swindle. The things in life we could look forward to, beyond the daily grind, are few and often sadly mundane. Consider the scene from the post-apocalyptic film, Children of Men; the film’s alcoholic anti-hero, Theo, captures the experience perfectly when talking to his friend Jasper:
Jasper: What did you do for your birthday?
Theo: Nothing, just like any other day
Jasper: You must have done something?Theo: Nope. Woke up, felt like shit. Went to work, felt like shit.
Jasper: That’s called a hangover, amigo
Theo: At least with a hangover I feel something.
Jasper: You should come and live with me.Theo: Why would I do that? Then I would have absolutely nothing to look forward to.
How do we cope, when the only thing we could still look forward to is a short retreat to the countryside to visit our pot-smoking middle-aged hippie friend? In the same way as with any other soul-deadening activity, through minor thought games, escapism, sexual fantasies, pranks and jokes. But ultimately, by numbing ourselves and waiting for it to end. This is why the greatest fear of today’s managers is not absenteeism like it was in the halcyon days of Fordism. In a new culture of work that demands every fiber of your organism to always be switched on, the enemy to production is what human resource managers like to call presenteeism: being present only in body with every other part of you being far, far away (on a beach, making love, setting a building on fire, etc.) This is why even a child knows that the smile and ‘have a great day’ from a customer-service-worker is fundamentally creepy. Not only is it obvious that they don’t mean it (and why should they?) but there doesn’t seem to be anyone actually behind the smile.
But only with the advent of the postmodern ‘social factory’, in which every waking (and as we shall see in the next chapter, sleeping) moment becomes a time of work, does the dead man working truly appear. Many commentators today, most notably Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have argued that capitalist economic rationality has escaped the factory and offices to become the template for all facets of society. What others have called 24 hour capitalism not only means that at any moment of the day (and night) someone, somewhere is working but also that at any moment of the day everyone is always working.
The real fault-line today is not between capital and labor. It is between capital and life. Life itself is now something that is plundered by the corporation, rendering our very social being into something that makes money for business. We know them. The computer hackers dreaming code in their sleep. The airline stewards evoking their warm personality to deal with an irate customer (‘act as if the airplane cabin is your living room’). The aspiring NGO intern working for nothing. The university lecturer writing in the weekend. The call center worker improvising on the telephone to enhance the customer experience.
What makes capitalism different today is that its influence reaches far beyond the office. Under Fordism, weekends and leisure time were still relatively untouched. Their aim was to indirectly support the world of work. Today, however, capital seeks to exploit our very sociality in all spheres of life. When we all become ‘human capital’ we not only have a job, or perform a job. We are the job. Even when the work-day appears to be over. This is what some have called the rise of bio-power, where life itself is put to work: our sociality, imagination, resourcefulness, and our desire to learn and share ideas. But as we all know, modern corporations cannot provide these drivers of value by their own accord. That’s why we are enlisted to do it for them. Self-exploitation has become a defining motif of working today. Indeed, the reason why so little is invested by large companies into training is because they have realized that workers train themselves, both on the job, using their life skills and social intelligence, and away from the job, on their own time.
So does the dead man working fight back? Is he trying to change his predicament? He is still waiting for the end, but when he realizes that it may not come, resistance becomes a matter of inducing an end. The perplexing question running through the pages of this book is the following: how can we resist capitalism when it has penetrated our very mode of social being? Perhaps the old Marxist argument about class politics still holds true. Being a worker is nothing to be proud of. Meaningful workplace politics ought not to be calling for fairer work, better work, more or less work, but an end to work. Might this also mean the end of the worker? Finding himself paralyzed, crippled, and only half alive, the dead man working has sought to reinvent death by crafting his own private terminus, a final conclusion to what he is. Worryingly, many of these escape attempts are not pretty, involving mind-numbing drugs, self-loathing, aerobics and suicide (as recently witnessed at France Télécom and elsewhere).
Now we must make a harrowing journey through the petrified world of dead work. And although it has not yet arrived, we can see it coming. The wave is gathering strength and sometimes seems close and other times still far off. Will it ever arrive?