Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism

Alienation, Work and Utopia

Greg Sharzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781315278711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book suggests that escapism – the desire to leave one's physical or emotional circumstances for an ideal alternative – is a way to understand the social conflicts that structure our world. Considering this phenomenon across psychology, labour and cultural studies, the author engages with critical theorists such as Lukács, Fromm and Marcuse to examine how escapism appears in our minds, workplaces and utopian imaginaries from fiction to music. In this study, escapism emerges as a constitutive feature of the late capitalist lifeworld – a feature that must be understood in order to create social change.

Defining escapism as a new field of study, Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism: Alienation, Work and Utopia suggests that the phenomenon has much to teach us about contemporary consciousness and how we resist and reshape the edicts of neoliberalism. As such, this book will appeal to scholars of cultural and critical theory, social movements and political sociology.

1

What is escapism?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315278735-1

To escape is to achieve freedom. From the Latin ex, meaning “out of,” and cappa, meaning cape, escape means to shed one's clothing and leave it in the attacker's hands: literally, to “get out of one's cape.” Just like cloaks themselves – a staple of ancient Roman wardrobes – this athletic manoeuvre was common enough to warrant its own word. However, the etymology of escape seems inadequate to describing systemic, rather than individual threats. Pandemics, famine-inducing locust plagues, a global economic depression, the end or at least diminishment of humanity in a tumult of climate change-induced polar melting, extreme temperatures and agricultural collapse – anyone needing a reason to escape does not have to look very far. By definition, these threats cannot be escaped from: they are global, multiple and intersecting. Humanity is faced with challenges well beyond the scope of any individual, yet still possesses a basic yearning for liberation. In these conditions, contemporary escapism is the desire to run from circumstances that do not allow actual change. But while all of humanity is implicated in these crises, not everyone is trapped by them, and the means to escape these patterns vary greatly.

The answer to the question “What is escapism?” lies in understanding the complex interplay of structural and social factors that compose the capitalist lifeworld. This is obviously no easy task, but we can begin by first looking at the social conditions that have generated our need for escapism: the long crisis of neoliberalism. As this chapter will explore, its effects can be felt in social development indicators like poverty and disease rates. The response to this is addiction, in many forms, but addiction itself would not be so powerful for so many if it was not a response to the trauma of an alienating lifeworld. It is surprising, then, that escapism is so understudied. To date, Tuan's (1998) Escapism remains the only major engagement with the concept; but as this chapter will show, it substitutes ethics for a social analysis and arrives at an abstract, and rather conservative view of the role escapism plays in human nature. Yet even if Tuan's book fails to properly engage with history, at least it takes escapism seriously. In this, it remains far ahead of the escapisms of both Right and Left, which this chapter examines in some depth: the former are mired in meritocratic and authoritarian myths, while the Left considers escapism a distraction from the urgent task of facing reality. That reality must indeed be faced – but to do so, we must understand why escapism is such a powerful tonic for so many. It is not a diversion from the social world; rather, escapism constitutes that world.

What happened? The crisis of neoliberalism

The term “escapism” dates back to 1930, and Konzack (2017) suggests it arises from literary critic John Ransom, in his description of the psychology of defeat. In the same light, much of contemporary escapism can be defined as a nostalgia for a cancelled future, the capitalist realism that Fisher (2009) so ably dissected. That future lasted roughly 40 years in the Global North, from post-World War 2 reconstruction to the onset of the neoliberal era in the early 1980s. In that time, social democracy appeared throughout capitalist states in the Global North as a brokered compromise between capital and labour, in which the state would provide universal services and unions would keep their members productive. Governments spent counter-cyclically and corporate wealth was taxed and redistributed at levels that prevented massive wealth inequalities. It was always a partial solution, prone to inefficiencies and the necessary large-scale bureaucracies to coordinate public goods. But for those people it included, its universal coverage delivered public goods like free healthcare, free higher education (including in the arts), social housing and genuine attempts to democratize local government.

To be sure, escapism predates neoliberalism, because capitalist instability and decline predates it, too. Yet social democracy remains in the firmament, its glimmers appearing in things like libraries, schools and public buildings, despite its light having burned out a long time ago. This lingering presence of egalitarianism has left most of us to lament this decline. Hatherley (2009) acknowledges “a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted post-war attempt at building a new society … These remnants of social democracy can, at best, have the effect of critiquing the paucity of ambition and grotesque inequalities of the present.” Social democracy was better for most people than unbridled liberal economics, but it could not fix an underlying problem: an economy that moves according to the private interests of corporations engaged in a life-or-death struggle with each other will only consider the needs of people when pressed to do so. And even then, that economy does so reluctantly.

The political choice to impose neoliberal policies was intrinsic to capitalist growth dynamics and the decline in profit rates, rising wages and multiple crises of overcapacity they created. In other words, neoliberalism was an effect, not a cause: the problem was capitalism, not (only) its regulation. The profitability crisis that unravelled the compromise between capital and labour appeared as early as the 1960s when, as Benanav (2019) suggests, economies in the Global North began to deindustrialize, starting a long decline of relative productivity and output. This was temporarily solved by the neoliberal era in which, Harvey (2005) describes, governments began lowering the overall wage share by assaulting unions and reducing social spending. Deficits, supposedly the bête noire of neoliberal policy, increased as corporate tax burdens shrank. Goods previously shielded from the market, like housing and healthcare, could be monetized through the sale of state-owned assets and the availability of cheap credit. The new money in private hands was funnelled into financial markets. Shaikh (2016) describes how neoliberalism imposed a free-trade orthodoxy on all economies, despite the historical evidence that wealthy countries benefited greatly from subsidies and protectionism. It opened developing markets to international competition, extending the reach of global financial institutions and regulating developing economies according to the harsh discipline of structural adjustment. Profit rates did not soar, but they recovered.

Under the new regime, neoliberal debt expansion functioned as a kind of structural escapism: an attempt by ruling elites to delude themselves that profits could be sustained eternally. This is, of course, impossible without regular local and occasionally system-wide shocks. As Marx identified, crises serve a vital purpose: the system suffers from regular bouts of overproduction, in which more is produced than can be sold. A falling profit rate can spark bankruptcies, and the resulting economic turmoil eliminates overcapacity in less-profitable productive facilities. To be clear, this means too much is being produced for a profitable return, not that everyone has their needs met. The resulting unemployment lowers the cost of labour. In other words, capitalism balances its books by removing old machinery and workers from its ledger. For example, Roberts (2020) argues that the economic crisis that followed the Covid-19 pandemic was simply the visible manifestation of a deeper malaise, in which the persistent low profits that neoliberalism was supposed to fix led companies to spend more on production by using cheap labour, rather than new productive technologies. Although a product of different circumstances, neoliberalism was also a response to crisis, which shifted the costs of restoring corporate health to labour.

Those denied the spoils of privatization and financialization, let alone higher wages, maintained their standard of living by borrowing. For example, in Canada, Rozworski (2018) shows that debt as a proportion of disposable income grew from 105% in 1998 to 170% in 2018 – a figure that increased to 177% in 2019, according to financial regulators (FCAC). The availability of cheap credit and speculative bubbles in real estate inflated the asset values of property owners – at least on paper – without raising wages, which stagnated. For those who do not own or manage capital, buying into this dream and putting an imaginary down payment on freedom from insecurity and constraints is deeply attractive. Rationally, we know debts have to be repaid; but statistics show that fully 27% of Canadians borrow to purchase daily living needs like food – even more than Americans, 23% of whom rely on credit cards for basic necessities, Leonhardt (2019) reports. For those unlucky enough not to have gotten on the property ladder before housing speculation became a primary savings vehicle, there are few options besides living hand-to-mouth, a pay cheque away from disaster. In this fashion, debt itself functions as a form of escapism, putting off difficult decisions into the future, in the hopes that finances will improve, or at least not implode.

Poverty

The standard argument against socialism is that capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. This is true in the absolute, non-relative sense, if one considers capitalism to be a system of development. But development in capitalism only happens as a by-product: the goal of the system is profit, and any social benefit is secondary.

Ideologues will point out that capitalism is the history of wealth creation, so that from 1820 to 2015, the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell from 90% to less than 10%. In an article subtitled “Why everything is not as bad as media tells you”, Niyazov (2019) musters statistics to show that humanity has conquered disease, poverty, war and autocracy. These arguments, however, conceal important questions about distribution and the nature of capitalist power. As Roser and Ortiz-Ospina (2013) point out, living above the poverty line of $1.90 a day does not mean a comfortable life. This is a measure of extreme poverty, but different methodologies give a poverty rate of 13.5% in the US. Aside from data collection issues, there is a methodological problem as well. Prior to 1820, most humans lived on less than $2 a day because they had no need of a money economy: capitalism had not straddled the globe yet, and they could support themselves without relying on the market. Today this is very different: the working class is truly global, and billions must sell their labour power – their ability to work – for a wage in order to buy their vital needs, like housing, education and food on the market. Those who own their own land as small farmers must produce for the market rather than for their own or their communities’ subsistence. Millions more survive through forms of unpaid or unfree labour. And capitalism's inefficiencies and crises also mean that not everyone can find a buyer for what they are selling.

As such, Ferreira et al. (2015) show that poverty rates have only declined slightly in the poorest parts of the world, such as South Asia and Africa, while rates in the middle-income countries of Europe, Central Asia and elsewhere have actually grown. The US is not a substitute for global trends, but it has the virtue of being the richest and most proudly capitalist country on Earth, which should be a good indicator of where we are all headed. Even before the 2020 pandemic sent incomes for everyone but billionaires nosediving, the direction was not good. Alvaredo et al. (2017) suggest that inequality worsened during the neoliberal era: between 1978 and 2015, the share of total US national income going to the lower 50% of the population fell from 20% to 12%, while the top 1% grew its share from 11% to 20%. Income growth for the former group actually fell by 1%. This is in the context of rising savings by the very rich, the only context in which capitalism lets any wealth “trickle down” to the working class. Total wealth in the US as a ratio of net national income rose from 300% in 1978 to 500% in 2015. Meanwhile public property, as a percentage of overall debt, shrank from over 10% to negative levels. The income share of the top 1%, which had declined steadily throughout the 20th century, rebounded sharply with the onset of neoliberalism.

Finally, it is simply difficult to obtain raw data on poverty from most low- and some middle-income countries, which by the World Bank's own admission “create[s] uncertainty over the magnitude of poverty reduction.” This inability to accurately gauge poverty reduction must be considered in tandem with global GDP, which the World Bank (2020) shows rising from $43 trillion in 1994 to almost $85 trillion in 2019. Even if the majority of that figure is speculative, based on artificial inflations of wealth and a lien on future value creation, it is still a major condemnation of a system that can grow to such heights and yet leave a billion people in absolute poverty. Capital's only job is to expand itself, and sometimes it does that well. But more often, it does not, particularly in places like the US, where unionization has declined and various fractions of capital have had unfettered access to power for decades. The effects are horrendous.

Health

Economic insecurity has taken a staggering health toll on core industrialized nations. In a survey of health indicators from 1990 to 2013, the authors of “GBD 2013 Mortality” (2015) found that global life expectancy rose from an average of age 65.3 to 71.5. Intestinal and respiratory diseases and infant mortality lowered in low-income countries, while heart disease and cancer lowered in high-income ones. The dramatic increase in some low-income countries’ life expectancy was due, Torjani (2017) suggests, to improved government spending on healthcare, not some amorphous notion of development or progress. Meanwhile, in the US, Chetty et al. (2016) found a gap of 15 and 10 years’ life expectancy between the richest and poorest men and women, respectively. Khazan (2015) showed that mortality rates for whites between 22 and 56 have been rising since 1999, particularly among middle-aged white people, who are drinking, using painkillers, getting sick and even killing themselves more. Among the 50–54 age group, Case and Deaton (2017) show that the death rate for high school-educated whites was 30% lower than for all black Americans in 1999, and 30% higher by 2015. The researchers call the rise of white middle-aged mortality “deaths of despair,” as people lose hope of earning enough to survive, retire, support dependents or manage chronic health problems. None of this should detract from the health outcomes of American racial and ethnic minorities, who have won this grim race since records began: Carratala and Maxwell (2020) show Americans from all non-white groups fare worse almost across the board, from obesity to asthma to cancer. Ultimately, according to Kochanek et al. (2017), death rates for eight of the top 10 diseases rose in 2016 for everyone aged between 15 and 64 and only declined for the elderly.

Given this levelling of health indicators, an obvious priority might b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• References
• 1 What is escapism?
• 2 Escapism and negative humanism
• 3 Work and protective escapism
• 4 Dystopias and utopias
• 5 The uses of escapism
• Index