Cool capitalism

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Cool capitalism: changing the principles of protest

by Dick Pountain, originally published by Open Democracy  | Jul 26, 2013

It's 45 years since the wave of youth-led rebellions that followed Paris's May Events in 1968, and the anniversary has reawakened "culture war" debates about the nature and legacy of that rebellion. Was it a failed socialist revolution, the collapse of Western morals or the beginning of a new age of freedom and prosperity? Or was it all, or even none of the above? It's certainly the case that, far from destroying capitalism, the attitudes of '68 actually refreshed it and inaugurated 40 years of prosperity for many people in the developed world, a boom that only came unstuck in 2008. The counterculture's rejection of older social conventions, combined with its contempt for work and pursuit of pleasure, turned out to be just what capitalism needed to move it on to its next phase, in which consumption becomes more important than production.

Where once they had colonised far-flung countries to open up fresh markets, Western capitalists turned instead to "colonising" the daily lives of their fellow citizens, by inducing personal identity to become dependent on consuming the right products in the right way. There can be no agreement about what that "right way" is of course, but so much the better because being a rebel and a nonconformist becomes the new norm: "I'm the only one who knows the score, everyone else just doesn't get it". This is the core concept of cool, that modern virtue which turns brands into badges of identity. Wear the right clothes, drink the right wine (or beer), listen to the right music, drive the right car. Where work was once a main source of personal identity – tinker, tailor, nurse, miner, editor - consumption began to usurp it, while in a parallel process the production of real goods was moved to ever-lower-wage economies in the far East.

It's a phenomenon that's been thoroughly analysed in books like Tom Frank's The Conquest of Cool, my own Cool Rules (with the late David Robins) and Jim McGuigan's Cool Capitalism but it nevertheless appears still to elude mainstream historians. French sociologist Luc Boltanski and his colleagues have recently analysed the ways in which capitalists justify the unequal distribution of power and wealth, and how such justifications change over time, in the process identifying three main epochs. The original capitalist spirit as described by Max Weber was ascetic and entrepreneurial, organised by family dynasties, politically liberal but morally strict. This form was undermined by the shocks of the early 20th century – WW1, the Great Depression and the socialist movement – and the next phase adapted to the new circumstances by co-opting certain socialistic ideas. Large corporations, strong trade unions, welfare states, the new phase justified itself by providing economic security and "a fair deal" rather than by moral probity, and it formed the comfortable environment in which post-WW2 social democracy flourished. It was this consensus that the '68 rebellions sought to overthrow, and in France they came fairly close, being foiled by an unlikely alliance of President De Gaul with the Communist Party. 

The '68ers garnered their style from past movements of romantic refusal (German romanticism, Dada, Surrealism) which had rejected bourgeois mores and invented bohemian ways of life. Sexual liberty, non-conventional personal appearance, a distaste for work and an avant-gardism that rejects conformist popular taste were vital impulses and this attitude reached its pinnacle in the Situationist International, whose members were a prime influence on the May 1968 events, with their mordant and witty slogans calling for revolution in everyday life and an end to alienated labour.

Ironically enough, these same attitudes were simultaneously revitalising the advertising industry, which soon grasped that bohemian individualism, far from being a threat to capitalism, could be broken, harnessed and saddled to become its trusty steed (as recently fictionalised in the entertaining TV series "Mad Men"). Having failed to achieve a political revolution '68 spawned a new cultural populism that ushered the third epoch of cool capitalism.

Cool capitalism originally justified itself by promising unlimited freedom to satisfy individual whim, and employing seduction rather than coercion to legitimise the continuing unequal relations of production. For which, the purpose of geographical separation of production from consumption was absolutely essential (sipping sauvignon blanc in a New York art gallery being more seductive than assembling iPhones in a factory in Guangdong). Such freedom was never more than illusory though, based on the claims of advertising fortified by copious supplies of cheap credit in the consuming countries. In the new producer countries the huge electronics factories paid wages that were initially attractive as a step up from rural poverty, but this attraction wears off in the face of dangerous working and living conditions and labour militancy (with the accompanying repression) that is now on the rise.  

Cool capitalism also aspired to revolutionise everyday lives, but in pastiche only, by de-skilling the arts so that everyone can participate and become a "creative". Warhol's dismissal of painterly skill – the synthesizer/sequencer – rapping to replace singing – acting by attitude rather than technique – all of these permit stardom to be acquired democratically without the lifetime study formerly required. Cool capitalism prefers where possible to distribute self-esteem rather than capital (though plenty of that continues to be accumulated, by ever fewer) and this kind of democratic/populist/"anti-elitist" rhetoric is sufficiently powerful to feed people's aspirations toward wealth, despite all visible evidence of dwindling real living standards.    

At first these developments posed a problem for the political Right. Religious conservatives hated (still do) the sexual permissiveness that came with the new freedoms, while US strategic thinkers like Daniel Bell and Samuel Huntington fretted that the rise of a class of over-educated and under-employed "free-riders" was eroding the work ethic and threatening social stability. Eventually though important fractions of the Right realised this new hedonism was in fact a boon to their cause. Cool consumers actually thrived on competition (the founders of all the Internet giants were of this generation), they found trade unionism boring and restrictive and were ambivalent toward the value of education. These new cool classes were actually better integrated into the fabric of capitalism than ever before, and pretty well oblivious to the neo-liberal assault on wages and working conditions that began to bite from the late 1970s onwards. The overall effect is what economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook have called The Winner-Take-All Society, whereby innovations in production and communication technologies skew reward mechanisms drastically in favour of top performers – "Fat cat" salaries at the top and shrinking remuneration for the lower orders. Conspicuous consumption of the sort Thorstein Veblen skewered with such sarcasm back in 1899 reappears, but this time ubiquitous media coverage encourages almost everyone to indulge – and they could too, thanks to unlimited credit...

I trust that I won't need to add much to the already copious commentary on how that worked out. When the smoke cleared after the busts of 2007-8 several unpleasant facts became apparent, all of which are working to the advantage of the Right: sovereign governments have been impoverished by the colossal bail-outs paid to "too-big-to-fail" banks, rendering Keynesian reflation of the sort that ended the Great Depression – public works and the deficit spending of WW2 – no longer affordable; free education can now be depicted as unaffordable too, so students become debt slaves rather than free-riders; and as the middle and employed working classes feel the pinch they increasingly turn on the receivers of benefits rather than on their employers.

The individualist and libertarian aspects of cool capitalist justification explain the otherwise paradoxical political complexion of our 20-somethings in the UK, who combine socially liberal attitudes (anti-racist, pro-gay marriage, soft on drugs) with stark fiscal conservatism (anti-tax, anti-benefits). This was revealed by an Ipsos MORI poll in June, to much consternation in the Guardian. One might have expected the bleak employment climate to nudge young people toward the Left, but instead it's inducing a shocking collapse of solidarity between generations, with increasingly strident accusations that the post-war "baby boomer" generation has consumed free-everything and squandered their birthright. Reconnecting the Labour Party to this generation will prove vastly harder than Blair's task in 1994, as merely reforming relations with the trade unions is nowhere near enough: unions would need to reinvent themselves to defend not only the employed, but the barely-employed and unemployed as well (don't hold your breath waiting).

There's a growing public disenchantment with parliamentary democracy itself in many of the countries that have it, but few practical ideas for reforming it: rather states are shoring themselves up against civil unrest by deploying the latest scientific means of surveillance, pacification and repression, in what Will Davies has recently called the revenge of the "social" in these pages. Extra-parliamentary oppositions like the briefly-successful Occupy movement convincingly show that egalitarian and communitarian aspirations can still be mobilised among young people, but persisting in an anarchistic refusal to engage with the state dooms them to perpetual nuisance rather than major change. (These technological surveillance states may though prove surprisingly fragile in the face of truly major economic, financial or climatic shock). So the answer to "could May '68 happen again?" is that it is doing and will do, repeatedly all over the world, but only a fool would attempt to predict what form, if any, its success could take. All I'm prepared to risk is that as capitalism grows cooler, politics look set to get a lot warmer.          

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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-26/cool-capitalism-changing-the-principles-of-protest

Review: Cool Capitalism by Jim McGuigan

Posted on 28/08/2010 by Martin

Cheesy cover, great book

Ever wondered what makes ‘capitalism’ the only cool kid on the block? How come youngsters today are so much more brand obsessed than their predecessors, yet won’t be able to emulate the living standards of the baby boomers? What exactly are the ‘creative industries?’ Jim McGuigan’s ‘Cool Capitalism’ attempts to answer these and many more questions in this in-depth analysis of how ‘culture’ and ‘commerce’ have entered an uneasy symbiosis over the last century.

The book is divided into six chapters: ‘The Spirits of Capitalism,’ ‘The Great Refusal,’ ‘Consumer Culture’, ‘Market Values,’ ‘Working Life’ and ‘Anti-Capitalism Revisited’, outlining an intriguing arch spanning from the early attempts of capitalism to incorporate the undefinable ‘other’ (in this case arts) into its machinations and how it succeeded in doing so. The cultural price we as a society pay turns out to be enormous.

McGuigan opens his thesis with the following paragraph: ‘Cool Capitalism is the incorporation of disaffection into capitalism itself. ‘Cool’ is the front region of capitalism today for those who are seduced by its cultural appeal and especially for those who aspire, mostly in frustration, to the greatest fruits of a capitalist civilisation. for capitalism to command hearts and minds, it is necessary to mask out its less appealing back region…’

The book comes into its own when describing how the pioneering work of the Hollywood Star System, Advertising and, more recently ‘Cool Hunting’ has usurped all areas of cultural interaction. It tracks the rise and exploitation of people by the ‘creative industries’ and explains how modern day artists have to be ‘entrepreneurs’ if they are to ‘succeed’. It talks about how human interactions have become commodified, and how the illusion of ‘cool’ has been made into a major money-spinner for corporations. It looks at what McGuigan calls NewLiberalSpeak (ie terms like globalization, zero tolerance, employability) and how this represents nothing more than verbal and symbolic violence, used by corporate drones, ‘journalists’ and media types all over. It explores why citizens have been downgraded to the status of ‘consumers’ and are constantly addressed and treated as such.

Having come of age in the 1990s what made this book such an enjoyable and sometimes scary read is that, whilst having thought of myself as immune to all these manipulations at the time, I and every one else I know was very much taken in by what was seen as ‘cool’. I too embarked on a career in the creative industries, moved to a ‘cool’ city and whilst having been mildly successful I’ve now just realised that many of those decisions made were the result of aforementioned subtle manipulations. Once one grows out of this deluded state one develops proper critical faculties (many however never do, described as ‘delayed maturity’ in the book) and is faced with either the binary choice of continuing to play the game, or becoming a ‘failed consumer.’ (It goes without saying that there are other alternatives.)

With the ‘threat’ of socialism and communism apparently diminished, the only cool kid on the block now turns out to be a very pervasive bully, having caused widespread debt, exploitation and unemployment, all of which is now coming to a head for many in the West. As a result many ‘creative’ companies are now realising that it is becoming tougher to create artificial demand (such as the failed 3G video phoning campaigns of the early 2000s) and the whole system is falling prey to its traditionally biggest enemy, hubris.

The only critique of the book as a whole is that whilst it is captivating and absorbing when it comes to exploring the cultural aspects of ‘cool capitalism’ it falters a bit in the last chapter, which commits the old, piscean error of concentrating on a binary system of thought, i.e. capitalism/anti-capitalism, citing the WTO ‘protests’ in Seattle and lots of Naomi Klein. Capitalism, notwithstanding its shortcomings, is and has been the only useful tool for TPTB, and will remain so until it either completely self destructs through the built in limitations, ecological and otherwise, or until it is being replaced by a new tool (anything from Neo-feudalism to Environmentalism).

Nevertheless, the book comes with an extensive number of notes, which invite the reader to explore other publications on the subject. Its clear use of language makes it accessible to a wider audience and its sympathetic, occasionally humorous tone makes it an absolute pleasure to read.

http://hovezak.com/blog/2010/08/review-cool-capitalism-by-jim-mcguigan/

Cool Capitalism

The principal thesis of Jim McGuigan in his Cool Capitalism (2009) is pretty straightforward:

“Capitalism is legitimized today through the extraordinary incorporation of dissent.” (xi)

Capitalism spectacularly incorporates the critique directed against it in order to reproduce itself, by transmogrifying it into something ‘cool’. As Boltanski and Chiapello note in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), more or less everybody today understands that capitalism is an ‘absurd system’ since “wage earners are obliged to surrender labour power to exploitation and accept a life of subordination to the rich and powerful”. The most obvious complain then would be: “Why people continue to accept it?” Capitalism should come with some cunning justifications for its raison d’être in order to keep people tranquil. According to McGuigan, the most effective justifications that capitalism can come up with are to be found in the terrain of its opponents, namely in the critique leveled against it:

“If capitalism can respond effectively to justifiable criticism, incorporate and neutralize the force of the counter argument and cool out disgruntled people, then it is in business, so to speak.”

Possibly there is no better sector that illustrates this point better than advertising, the capitalist activity par excellence. The “Gulliver” advertisement that plays lately in the cinema is a characteristic example.

“Gulliver” complains to the abstract (if not universal) figure of the corporate man that he will not tolerate to be befooled and exploited by his obscure machinations, crying out in a manner that eventually anyone with a minimum anti-capitalist sensibility would endorse:

“And you know what Mr Orange corporate man; I’m not your puppet!”

While one is consciously aware that this anti-corporate rant is a form of denial of advertisement’s “own effectiveness”, there is still a subtle reflexive game going on between the ad and its audience. This subtle game according to McGuigan is played particularly between the cool advertisements and their key focal groups, which are the youth and the so called ‘culturati’, the urban professionals. As Judith Williamson, the author of Decding Advertisements mentions:

“Advertising can incorporate its mythic status (as a lie) into itself with very little trouble. Advertisements will always recuperate by using criticisms of themselves as frames of reference which will finally enhance, rather than destroy their ‘real’ status”

Apart from putting forward this interesting idea, McGuigan’s book does a good job aggregating bibliographical resources that concern with the different stages of capital accumulation.

In the first chapter, the “Spirits of Capitalism”, he discusses Marx and the Marxist economist reading of capitalism with its scientific appeal. After that he summarizes the most important works of Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, Chiapello and Boltanksi and Jeremy Rifkin. In all these moments he delineates the process of “culturalization” of contemporary capitalistic economies and the ways that “the Protestant ethic of earlier capitalism has gradually superseded by a much more “hedonistic ethic”. In so doing he is particularly cautious not to reduce economic phenomena to cultural processes and vice versa. In a telling instance, he denounces as “utter nonsense” the claim that cultural production is more important than physical production in the world economy. In that sense he is also careful to keep a distance from the term post-Fordism, rather preferring the term neo-Fordism which in his opinion characterizes better the global economies today.

Chapter two discusses the idea of art as the “Great Refusal”, in Marcuze’s terms. What happened to this essentially Romantic idea of art? McGuigan states that the ideal of the Romantic artist is much more present in contemporary world than we thought it were. He goes on to trace the origins of artistic autonomy since the time of the separation of arts from the control of the church. This moment is institutionally located in the opening of Academie Francaise back in 1635. He discusses how this autonomy was performed and understood through the years, from Courbet-as the prototypical bohemian- and Baudleire-as the prototypical aesthete-, up to Jackson Pollock and the attitude-obsessed YBA’s. In between, he talks about the contradictions of the “politically committed” artist in modernity discussing in relative length the examples of Picasso, Rivera and Kahlo.

The three following chapters are devoted to the discussion of various aspects of market capitalism and its pervasive impact on contemporary culture. As McGuigan argues, following a discussion on Bourdieu and Harvey, neo-liberalism, particularly through the creative industries, has colonized culture and basically turned it into a discourse of economics. As the creative economy mantra has it anyway:

There is thus an economic aspect to creativity, observable in the way it contributes to entrepreneurship, fosters innovation, enhances productivity and promotes economic growth.(UN Creative Economy Report, 2008:3)

 An array of  intriguing concepts of cultural theory are also discussed in these three chapters, like Beck’s idea of individuation that McGuigan develops at relative length or Raymond Williams’ of “mobile privatization” which seems to be largely up to date nowadays, given the popularity of portable devices such as iPods and laptops.  McGuigan ties these concepts with the neo-liberal attempt for ideological and political legitimization.

He goes on to make the usual attack to the “precarious” working conditions. This attack can become rather clumsy at times sounding somewhat conservative if it is not followed with demands for more creative work (something that BIFO beautifully discusses here http://multitudes.samizdat.net/What-is-the-Meaning-of-Autonomy). The slogan “jobs for life” can not be the sole demand for the left since it appears as a rather clumsy regression to the safety net of job fixation. This can be connected to a general nostalgia to Keynesianism and social democracies that runs through McGuigan’s book.   

In the final chapter McGuigan revisits the anti-capitalist tendencies today, trying to discover ways that capitalism can be challenged. The usual suspects are discussed again here as Nomai Klein, Hardt and Negri and Petras and Veltmeyer.

Overall Cool Capitalism is quite a stimulating book with some up to date debates concerning the transition to a more culturally oriented capitalism. Moreover, it does a good job providing good bibliographical sources and explaining in an accesible language concepts and ideas of some leading social theorists. The only remark I would have is that it sometimes falls into the de facto binary rhetoric of bad capitalism/good socialism , but it generally keeps the balance fairly well.

http://contemporaryculturalproduction.blogspot.kr/2010/09/normal-0-false-false-false.html