The market is an anxious social fantasy, supporting the purported natural order in the economic realm. ‘Late capitalism,’ in its current usage, is a catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality and super-powered corporations and shrinking middle class. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. We are told that structural barriers to aspiration, achievement and contentment will melt away in our fantasy “choice” economy. All we have to do is buy the right products. Underneath the freedom of always being your own boss is the reality of fiscal precarity mixed with never having enough time for yourself. All happiness and dissatisfaction is reduced to lack of positive attitude. Since social class is no longer relevant, everybody ends up with the socio-economic position they deserve.
Frederic Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. Postmodernists contend that there is no objective truth, rather truth is constructed by society. All ideas of morality are not real, but constructed. Consistent with postmodern doctrine is the belief that institutions, such as science and language, are oppressive institutes of control. Postmodernity then corresponds to a phase of capitalism where mass production of standardized goods, and the forms of labour associated with it, have been replaced by flexibility: new forms of production – ‘lean production’, the ‘team concept’, ‘just-in-time’ production, along with diversification of commodities for niche markets. Last but not least, financialization creates profit through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production; enriches a select few at the majorities’ expense. Because of the way financial services are measured, GDP data does not measure changes in inequality.
Governments in the West implement a series of tax and financial policies to stimulate a consumer society, while undermining and weakening social safety nets. We have reached a stage in the development of capitalism underpinned by financialization. One of the main features of late capitalism is the increasing amounts of capital investments into non-traditional productive areas, such as the expansion of credit. If the ideas that material affluence is the key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, and if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame. Supported by the proliferation of opaque financial products market, “shadow” institutions have emerged with heightened speculative behavior, and corporate and even household governance increasingly focuses on quick returns from speculation on financial assets, exchange rates, real estate, and mergers and acquisitions, often fueling asset price bubble.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) believed the world intrinsically has no objective meaning, but through a combination of free will, awareness, and personal responsibility, we can create our own subjective meaning. For Kierkegaard, the present age is a reflective age – one that values objectivity and thought over action, lip-service to ideals rather than action, discussion over action, publicity and advertising over reality, and fantasy over the real world. Kierkegaard observes, “Everyone one wants progress, no one wants change.” Kierkegaard argues, without anxiety there would be no possibility and therefore no capacity to grow and develop as a human being. Kierkegaard argues anxiety is essential for creativity – if there were no possibilities there would be no anxiety. “The most common form of despair is not being who you are,” Kierkegaard observes. It is in our anxiety that we come to understand feeling that we are free, that the possibilities are endless.
It has been over a century now since Friedrich Nietzsche explored nihilism and its implications for civilization. Nietzsche saw that the old values and old morality simply didn’t have the same power that they once did. For Nietzsche nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning. He believed we could eventually work through nihilism – in the process destroy the main interpretations of the world, thus open the opportunity to discover the correct course for mankind. In the last thirty years changes in technology, education and economics have intertwined to create today’s cultural conditions. Nietzsche claims there is no objective fact of what has value in itself – culture consists of beliefs developed to perpetuate a particular power structure. The system, if followed by the majority of the people, supports the interests of the dominant class. Political nihilism involves the destruction of illusions, the negation of mythology and the removal of the elite who profit from the existing propaganda of artificial confusion.
A famous work from the Renaissance (1516), Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, presents an ideal society whose inhabitants exist in an imaginary world under seemingly perfect conditions. Utopia is a world in which order and symmetry are highly valued. Instead of maintaining the upper and lower classes that existed in Europe at this time period, the people of Utopia share their wealth with one another. The sharing of wealth creates order and symmetry because everyone is the same class. Disrupted order of the class system and in daily life that peasant revolts caused in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance could not take place in Utopia because everyone is equally wealthy. Also, during the time that Utopia was written, guilds existed to reward and benefit specialized labor. The citizens of Utopia saw all trades as equal, none being more prestigious than the other. Every trade and tradesman treated the same, created symmetry in the citizens of Utopia’s work lives. Many see this work as a satire.
The Victorian age saw the publication of one of the most groundbreaking and influential fantasy novels of all time – Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865……… “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” Not only did this novel introduce a female protagonist who is not punished for venturing out on her own adventure without a male guardian or companion during the repressive Victorian age, but the entire premise of entering a new world of fantastical creatures through a mystical doorway has become its own subgenre. According to Charles Frey and John Griffin, “Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people play, authority, time, and death.”
The Enlightenment and the rise of market capitalism transformed Western culture significantly. Individualism became the dominant ethos, with self-fulfillment and personal authenticity the highest goods. Happiness became a fundamental right, something to which we’re entitled as human beings. Carl Cederström, a business professor at Stockholm University, traces our current conception of happiness to its roots in modern psychiatry and the so-called Beat generation of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He argues that the values of the countercultural movement – liberation, freedom, and authenticity – were co-opted by corporations and advertisers, who used them to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. Late capitalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Capitalism knew what every great system before it, from feudalism to tribalism to empire, had. The ultimate form of regulation wasn’t extrinsic, money – it was intrinsic. When, if, people believed – then not a finger needed to be lifted to control them. And by now, capitalism used its cultural hegemony to control American society wholesale. Not a single dissenting view – was capitalism really good for Americans? – was allowed in a single mainstream article, book, essay, on a single TV show, movie, or film. Capitalism was the only thing that was allowed to be – and though no one really understood it, this was the ultimate form of social regulation. Left to its own devices, capitalism is the act of constructing a monopoly. The real problem capitalism regulated society, for its own benefit, its own advantage and profit, and still does, in every regard, socially, culturally, politically, economically.
Slavoj Zizek observes: “Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself; an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.” Ideology is always a reflection of the economic system predominant at any given time. However, there is antagonism in the present economic system. The social-ideological fantasy of the middle class is to construct a vision of society that is not split by antagonistic divisions – a system that is complementary and allows everyone to advance themselves – is a necessary counterpart to the concept of antagonism. Fantasy is precisely how the antagonistic fissure is masked. The neoliberal ideological fantasy differs noting that classes are like extremities, members each contributing to the whole according to its function. Fantasy is a means for ideology of late capitalism to take its own failure into account in advance.