Historian Yuval Noah Harari notes that liberal humanist morality has been so successful that even the religiously inclined appeal to it when making their case. In liberal humanism, human feelings are the most important thing, and things are judged as good or bad based on how they affect people’s feelings. After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Harari relates how some Muslims said that the cartoons the paper published of the prophet Mohammed were bad because they made Muslims feel bad. They did not appeal to the Qu’ran or to Allah, signalling that ultimate authority really has shifted to the liberal humanist frame (Harari, 2017).
In a similar manner the liberal humanist frame is being further shifted to the capitalist frame. In a YouTube video critical of The Last Jedi, the author attempts to explain the film as “objectively” bad by pointing to its artistic decisions as dividing the fanbase, this divide then leading to decreased sales; commerce as the ultimate judge of quality (Thor Skywalker, 2018). It is notable precisely because it is such a commonplace, unremarkable, and broadly (if passively) accepted assertion. Certainly when discussing media, why should its commercial success be uplifted to the status of objective? Why not any other metric? When pressed on such a matter one could expect the author to respond along the following lines: “The filmmakers (Disney) are (is) a business, the business exists to make money and profits for its shareholders - that is the objective - so all of its output can be objectively judged against that criterion.” But further probing reveals this to be a paper-thin defence. Is the sole purpose of the business to make money? Is that in fact its mission statement? In actual fact any business that is not simply engaged in finance is taking a circuitous route to making money and has other objectives even if they remain implicit. Particularly with art and media there is the objective to gain prestige, or social credit, a fact evidenced by the number of wealthy bankers and real estate moguls eager to spend significant portions of their fortunes on artistic and media ambitions. Film-making is a convoluted, complicated process with generally unremarkable (and certainly unreliable) returns on investment when compared to other economic sectors. A fund that cares only about money does well to avoid investing in the film industry. So could we not just as easily say that Disney’s objective is to maximise social capital while still remaining profitable? There is even corporate speak for this capital - mind share - and it is heavily invoked in industries where profits remain modest or are still yet to come.
Perhaps we should evaluate the work of art based on the true objectives of the artist. Not what he or she thinks is driving him or her, but what is actually going on in the organism. Would it be more “objective” to assess a work of art based on the fitness it bestowed upon its creator? Maybe a work is more successful if it leads to its creator having more offspring, or simply more opportunities for offspring.
The point is that there is no clear reason why the arbitrary capitalist logic should serve as the arbiter of the truly objective perspective. There are plenty of competing viewpoints we could choose, ones we could claim as more objective than that of capitalist logic. So why then does this creeping capitalism go so unchallenged? Why is it repeated so unthinkingly?
For those who would appeal to capitalist logic in a collective sense, that is the mantra of 'the customers are always right', there are two main objections. The first is that capitalism is not democracy, votes are unevenly distributed so that the wealthy can outvote the poor, with the result that the audience is always some select elite of all people and hardly representative of a collective will of the population. This is further undermined by the effects of advertising and socialising in forming collective opinions and wants. The audience wants what it has been shown, and relishes surprise only within the scope with which it has been conditioned to expect it. The media the audience consumes affects its judgement. The second main objection is to note that even a truly collective take on a work is no more compelling a metric for objective than many others. The collective belief of the population in the world’s flatness does not make it any less round - roundness would remain to be discovered by some clever scientist as a simpler solution to needlessly complicated systems upon systems. In terms of an objective reality, the Copernican (heliocentric) system is a better model for what we experience than the geocentric model that preceded it. Collective opinion can be wrong. This may seem odd if applied to art, but no more so than applying the label objective to it. If there can be objective criteria for art, then naturally some opinions are wrong. Any appeal to objectivity that reduces to subjectivity with minimal effort is rather poor.
By no means are such appeals to capitalist logic limited. Cold capitalist logic comes creeping in to substitute for our sense of justice. In discussions around diversity in the workplace it is often argued that diverse workforces are better able to tap into diverse customer bases, thus increasing profitability. The thinking goes, 'female stars and directors are good because women watch movies too and more of them will watch our movie if we cater to them'. This is problematic because it does nothing to address audiences who may have less income (e.g. the poor) because in capitalism votes are grossly unequally distributed, and it implies its opposite: if female (or members of another marginalised group) stars or directors or writers are seen to decrease revenue then out they go. Everything is changeable at a whim, precisely the opposite behaviour of something that is principled.
Such capitalist attitudes to social justice can never lead to any kind of progress. At best they can get the system to a better balance with itself, enabling some out of date systems to catch up. For example, women are valued for their disposable incomes, but they only have this income because of their presence in the workforce. In an oppressive society where women were denied the right to make discretionary purchases there would never be any incentive to cater to their interests. The system would reach a “happy” equilibrium where men were the centre of the universe. Women don’t get the vote because of capitalist logic, that takes a sense of justice, capitalist logic can then work on certain systems to bring them more in line with the new order, but it is not itself a revolutionary agent.
In the political economic sphere, calls for decreasing wealth inequality increasingly put forward (and emphasise) the idea that more equal distribution of wealth leads to increased economic growth1. While certainly the case must be made that equalising wealth will not lead to lower material wealth for the majority, the appeal to economic growth rather than to our own sense of fairness or justice represents a shift away from values to the relentless logic of capitalism. We could well ask 'why do we desire increased economic growth?' If the past three decades have demonstrated anything to the western world it is certainly that economic growth is perfectly compatible with decreasing standing for the majority, lower well-being and declining happiness. Each of us can become poorer even as "we" become richer. And even granting that we all become richer owing to more equality, this thinking puts an ever-growing society as an ultimate goal and value rather than a more equitable, stable or contented one.
The question is how did it get to this? How did capitalist logic become so all-encompassing that its gross application to media and social justice became a commonplace in pedestrian discourse? How did capitalism come to subsume all moral and ethical values of society so that nothing can be justified unless it also makes money? I believe the answer lies in how capitalism has worked to subsume the superstructure that is supposed to contain it and unchecked, has been quietly replacing values, morals and our sense of justice.
Wolfgang Streeck notes that in the decades since the 1970s, economic policy has been widely turned over to non-democratic institutions, namely central banks (Streeck, 2016). This has arisen from a policy of growth deriving from the insulation of markets against the caprices of democracy and political redistributions. Concurrent with capitalism's escape from politics it has been transforming social institutions. Sport metamorphosed from a social institution with an ethos of asceticism to one of consumerist narcissism in less than three decades (Streeck, 2016). As consumers became more accustomed to the conveniences of consumer choice, they began to demand this paradigm throughout the social realm so that even politics has come to be viewed in terms of a producer-consumer dynamic. Increasing privatisation of formerly public institutions is a consequence of the consolidation state, a philosophy of governance dedicated to austerity so as to reassure financial markets of the sanctity of their debts (Streeck, 2016).
As capitalism achieved escape velocity from the auspices of government, encompassing the world with seemingly inevitable globalisation, the globalist capitalist economy came to be seen as simply 'the economy'. A total global system becomes unimpugnable, unavoidable, inevitable, and finally natural. Streeck proposes that the culture wars that dominate political discourse have been incited precisely to divert attention away from the political economy. This behaviour was exhibited in the 2016 US election by the Clinton campaign which (at least initially) saw Trump as an ideal opponent, against whom they were able to keep the conversation on cultural grounds rather than wading into the muddy economic waters experienced in the Democratic midterms. To the extent that the global capitalist frame is unchallenged it is permitted to ossify in public consciousness into a fixed background, forming a kind of Cartesian space for all activities. Objective measures require fixed frames of reference and to the extent we are all imprisoned within global capitalism we find ourselves surrounded by its logic.
The capitalist subsumption of values has more to it I believe than just capitalism's ascendance to a post-democratic vantage point and its pervasiveness in global affairs. The twentieth-century was witness to incredible socio-cultural change, upending old value systems and generating new ones while failing to negotiate a consensus. In increasingly diverse and fragmented societies there is rising dissonance in underlying values and assumptions, these values are in turn increasingly prescribed by a capitalist frame to which all aspects of the individual are simply parameters to be differentiated and commodified for the accumulation of profit. Capitalism has survived the twentieth-century above all else, making competing systems of all kinds appear impotent by comparison.
In ages past one might appeal to a transcendental god as the source of ultimate truth, or to a quiet but still discernible inner voice, but now the higher power with which truth resides is the logic of capitalism.
Footnotes
1 I suspect very many capitalists see through this line of argumentation, recognising that even while overall growth may increase, this comes at the expense of their share so that their own absolute wealth declines and perhaps more importantly their relative standing in society definitely declines. For the super-rich, policies to depress the lower classes are just as important as those to uplift their own standing, and the best policies do both (for example income transfer from the many to the few).↩
References
Harari, Y. N. (2017) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind [Lecture]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgeyUd_piiU&t=106s (Accessed: 27 August 2018).
Streeck, W. (2016) How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso.
Thor Skywalker (2018) Was the Last Jedi an Objective Mistake by Lucasfilm? Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dYjr7mESMg&t=733s (Accessed: 26 August 2018)
