The terror of casino capitalism

Correspondent | Friday March 4, 2016 12:14

As  global societies especially  the USA  descends into the dark abyss of an updated form of totalitarianism, Giroux posits that the unimaginable has become imaginable in that it has become possible not only to foresee the death of the essential principles of constitutional democracy, but also the birth of what Hannah Arendt once called the horror of dark times.

The politics of terror, a culture of fear, and the spectacle of violence dominate the global cultural apparatuses and legitimate the ongoing militarisation of public life.

Giroux means that unchecked corporate power and a massive commodification, infantilisation, and depoliticisation of the polity have become the totalitarian benchmarks defining our global societies. In part, this is due to the emergence of brutal modern-day capitalism, or what some might call neoliberalism. This form of neoliberal capitalism is a particularly savage, cruel, and exploitative regime of oppression in which not only are the social contract, civil liberties and the commons under siege, but also the very notion of the political, if not the planet itself.  The dystopian moment facing most of the globe can be summed up in Fred Jameson’s contention “that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” He goes on to say that “We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” One way of understanding Jameson’s comment is through the ideological and affective spaces in which the neoliberal subject is produced and market-driven ideologies are normalised.   There is a growing recognition that casino capitalism is driven by a kind of mad violence and form of self-sabotage and that if it does not come to an end what we will experience in all probability is the destruction of human life and the planet itself. The undermining of public trust and public values has now given way to a market-driven discourse that produces  societies that has lost any sense of democratic vision and social purpose and in doing so resorts to state terrorism, the criminalisation of social problems, and culture of cruelty. Institutions that were once defined to protect and enhance human life now function largely to punish and maim.

Security and crisis have become the new passwords for imposing a culture of fear and for imposing what Giorgio Agamben has called a “ permanent state of exception and a technology of government repression”. Fear now drives the major narratives that define global societies and give rise to dominant forms of power free from any sense of moral and political conviction, if not accountability.

In the midst of this dystopian nightmare, there is the deepening abyss of inequality, one that not only separates the rich from the poor, but also increasingly relegates the poor working classes to the ranks of the precariat.  The ongoing attack on the working class is matched by new measures of repression and surveillance. This new weaponised face of capitalism is particularly ominous given the rise of punishing states and the transformation of many societies especially the United States from a democracy in progress to a fully developed authoritarian society.   Every act of protest is now tainted, labeled by governments and mainstream media as either treasonous or viewed as a potential act of terrorism

Under neoliberalism, Giroux rightly points out, public space is increasingly converted into private space undermining those sphere necessary for developing a viable sense of social responsibility, while also serving to transform citizenship into mostly an act of consumption. Under such circumstances, the notion of crisis is used both to legitimate a system of economic terrorism as well as to accentuate an increasing process of depoliticisation. Within this fog of market induced paralysis, language is subject to the laws of capitalism, reduced to a commodity, and subject to the “tyranny of the moment, emaciated, impoverished, vulgarised and squeezed out of the meanings it was resumed to carry” 

Michael Yates and Giroux make clear on capitalism and inequality that democratic values, commitments, integrity, and struggles are under assault from a wide range of sites in an age of intensified violence and disposability.  I totally agree with these scholar’s arguments that capitalism in the current historical moment is marked by an age that thrives on racism, xenophobia, the purported existence of an alleged culture of criminality, and a massive system of inequality that affects all aspects of society.  It also undermines almost every viable foundation needed for a sustainable democracy, and what it might mean to develop a plan of action to produce the radical imagination and corresponding modes of agency and practice that can think and act outside of the reformist politics of capitalism.

 Capitalism is both a symbolic pathological economy that produces particular dispositions, values, and identities as well as oppressive institutional apparatuses and economic structures. The system is not only about authoritarian ideologies and structures; it is also about the crisis of ideas, agency, and the failure of people to react to the suffering of others and to the conditions of their own oppression.  Neoliberal capitalism has no language for human suffering, moral evaluation, and social responsibility.

Instead, it creates a survival-of-the fittest ethos buttressed by a discourse that is morally insensitive, sadistic, cannibalistic, and displays a hatred of those whose labour cannot be exploited, do not buy into the consumerist ethic, or are considered other by virtue of their race, class, and ethnicity.

Neoliberalism is the discourse of shadow games, committed to highlighting corporate power and making invisible the suffering of others, all the while leaving those considered disposable in the dark to fend for themselves. For Yates, the capitalist system is corrupt, malicious, and needs to be replaced. Capitalism leaves no room for the language of justice, the social, or, for that matter, democracy itself. 

*Solly Rakgomo is a graduate student of Politics and International Relations