Utopia Or Bust

Benjamin Kunkel UTOPIA OR BUST A GUIDE to the PRESENT CRISIS Utopia or Bust The Jacobin series fe atures short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture fr om a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible fo rmat. The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com. Other titles in this series available from Verso Books: Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant Strike forAm erica by Micah Vetricht Utopia or Bust A Guide to the Present Crisis by BENJAMIN KUNKEL Y VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 2014 ©Benjamin Kunkel 2014 Chapters I, 2, 4, and 6 appeared first, in slightly differentform, in the London Review ofBooks (February 3, 20II; April 22, 2010; 4, May 10, 2012; August 8, 2013 respectively). Chapter 3 appeared first in n+f (June 4, 2010). Chapter 5 appeared first in the New Statesman (September 27, 2012). All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 13579108642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London WlF OEG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www. versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-327-9 (PBK) eiSBN-13: 978-1-78168-328-6 (US) eiSBN-13: 978-1-78168-637-9 (UK) BritishLibrary Cataloguingin PublicationData A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier MT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Press For who can use it It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harm fu l, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fight ers; in place of genuine scientificresearch, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. -Karl Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital What ever happened to Political Economy, leaving me here? -John Berryman, "Dream Song 84" Contents Introduction 1 1. David Harvey: Crisis Theory 23 2. Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Logic of N eoliberalism 51 3. Robert Brenner: Full Employment and the Long Downturn 77 4. David Graeber: In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt 105 5. Slavoj Zizek: The Unbearable Lightness of "Communism" 135 6. Boris Grays: Aesthetics of Utopia 145 Guide to Further Reading 171 Introduction To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction-as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it-I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual. Making matters worse, the relevant public has been a small one consisting of readers of the two publications, the London Review of Books and n + 1, where all but one of the essays here first appeared, and my self-appointed role has likewise been modest. The essays attempt no original contribution to Marxist, or what you might call Marxish, thought. They simply offer basic introductions, with some critical comments, to a handful of contemporary thinkers on the left: three Marxists at work in their respective fields of geography, history, and cultural criti cism; an anthropologist of anarchist convictions; and two philosophers who might be called neo-communists. These are meanwhile only a few of the present-day figures most attrac tive or interesting to me, and even if my discussion of their work does something to clarify the economic and cultural features of the ongoing capitalist crisis, several of the book's deficiencies will be more readily apparent than this 2 UTOPIA OR BUST achievement. The essays here no more than allude to the ecological and political dimensions of the crisis that burst into view in 2008, and they ignore altogether its uneven impact on different countries, genders, generations, "races." The purpose of this modest explanatory volume is never theless immodest. The idea is to contribute something in the way of intellectual orientation to the project of replacing a capitalism bent on social polarization, the hollowing out of democracy, and ecological ruin with another, better order. This would be one adapted to collective survival and well being, and marked by public ownership of important economic and financial institutions, by real as well as fo rmal democratic capacities, and by social equality-all of which together would promise a renewal of culture in both the narrowly aesthetic and the broadly anthropological mean ings of the term. Theory, and writing about theorists, brings no victories by itself. Nor is there any need fo r everyone on the left or moving leftwards to converge on the same understanding of "late" capitalism, in the sense of recent or in decline, before anything can be done to make it "late" as in recently departed. Imperfect understanding is the lot of all political actors. Still, fo r at least a generation now, not only the broad public but many radicals themselves have felt uncertain that the left possessed a basic analysis of contemporary capitalism, let alone a program fo r its replacement. This intellectual disorientation has thinned our ranks and abetted our organizational disarray. Over the same period the comparative ideological coherence of our neoliberal opponents gave them an invaluable advantage in Introduction 3 securing public assent to their policies or, failing that, resigna tion. Gaining a clearer idea of the present system should help us to challenge and one day overcome it. The essays in this short book about a number of other books, several of them long and dense, are collected here fo r whatever they can add to the effort. Social injustice and economic insecurity-bland terms fo r the calamities they name-would make overcoming capitalism urgent enough even if the system could boast a stable ecological fo oting; obviously, it cannot. The odds of political success may not look particularly good at the moment. But the defects of global capitalism have become so plain to the eye-if still, fo r many minds, too mysterious in their causes and too inevitable in their effects that the odds appear better than a few years ago. The crisis has not only sharpened anxieties but introduced new hopes, most spectacularly in 2011, year of the Arab Spring, of huge indignant crowds in European plazas, and of Occupy Wall Street. Today as I write in the summer of 2013, kindred move ments have emerged, massively and spontaneously, in the streets of Turkey and Brazil. Over recent years my own polit ical excitement, anxious and optimistic at once, has led to me to spend as much time thinking about global capitalism and its theorists as about the fictionalcharacters in whose company I'd expected, as a novelist, to spend more of my time. That is one explanation fo r the existence of this book. "So are you an autodidactic political economist now?" a friend asked the other day. I'm no economist at all, but the question catches something of what's happened. In 2005, with the publication of my first novel, I suddenly became a 4 UTOPIA OR BUST "successful" young writer: enthusiastic reviews; a brief life on the best-seller lists; translation into a dozen languages; and an option deal from a Hollywood producer with deep pock ets. These very welcome developments coincided with the worst depressive episode of my adult life. I can't say what caused it, but I remember thinking of the poet Philip Larkin's line about bursting "into fulfillment's desolate attic." Why should it have fe lt desolate? I'd always wanted to write novels and was now in a good position to go on doing just that. Part of the trouble seems to have been that your own fu lfillmentis no one else 's, and therefore not even quite your own. Surely another part was that even the so-called systems novelists I especially admired when I was younger alluded to the principal system, the economic one, more than they described or explained it: a trait of their work that had become less satisfying to me, without my knowing how to do things differently in my own. For now let it be enough to confess that I would like to live in a more fu lfilling society or civiliza tion than a self-destructive capitalist one (where, as it happens, the leading cause of death fo r middle-aged men in the richest country of the world is now suicide) and that these essays have been, among other things, a way of saying so. If they're assembled here in hopes of contributing to left politics, their origin probably lies in a wish to find, outside of art, some of the artistic satisfaction that comes of expressing such deep concerns that you cannot name their source. There are other reasons why a guy with a literary background has ended up producing essays like these. For one thing, as Introduction 5 I've become more confident that nonspecialists can make sense of so vast a thing as capitalism, my deference to ortho dox opinion has correspondingly eroded. I've been some kind ofleftist fo r as long as I've been an adult, but not always one with complete courage of his convictions. For years I felt inhibited by the air of immense casual authority that united the mainstream press, professional economists, and prosper ous male relatives when it came to the unsurpassable virtues of capitalism-a personal difficulty that might not be worth mentioning ifl didn't suspect that in my timidity I had plenty of company.

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