Taylor - Negative capitalism - cynicism in the neoliberal era

Each of us lives in an era where our social lives are determined by financial capital. The scale of debts owed collectively to invisible and unknown creditors is the pretext for increased demands for productivity and consumption, in exchange for vastly increasing living costs, rents, and reductions in social securities and real wages. Each of us has little agency or control over these circumstances, whilst distant banks and an aloof and privately-educated political class intensify their control and management over our everyday lives. Everything (and everyone) begins to break down under the pressure of being a productive consumer, anger and dissent are internalised, self-inflicted, erupting momentarily, whilst a discredited neoliberal political ideology and caste of financial capitalists increase their priva- teering enclosure of public wealth by the day. This is an era of negative capitalism, where ones individual and collective capabilities and quality of life are steadily diminished and disempowered by financial capital. This negation of individuals into economically productive behaviours represents, in the second decade of the 21st century, a new kind of era, with specific disorders (depression, anxiety), specific devices (the internet, smart-phone, and laptop) and a new cultural feeling (cynicism).

The argument here is that many singular discontents with financial capitalism can be understand within a wider process of negation, a process of disempowerment embedded in financial capitalism and primarily transmitted through a corruption of language, and hence thought. To explain this new framework, Ill outline what neoliberalism is in theory and practice, what I mean by negative capitalism, and how this analysis fits into existing accounts of capitalism, before using the bulk of the work to explore specific symptoms of negativity and the peculiar cynicism of the contemporary era. There is no we here. No shoulds or woulds. I wont insult the readers intelligence by claiming that theres a coming change on the horizon, if everyone waits a little longer, or that theres a magical solution here thats never been considered before, a cipher that when uttered transforms everything irredeemably anew. I am 24 years old, a worker and a graduate without a future, and I do not write from a position of academic, social or political privilege: my only stake in financial capitalism is a five figure debt. I am profoundly angry and depressed by what I see around me, but I am also hopeful that a new era can be created by this generation, provided the blurry errors of history, cynicism and individualism can be traded in for strategy and a new social democracy, underlined by a revolution of citizens in law and constitution.

This work differs from other recent analyses, which have often focused on one singular aspect of late capitalism, by offering an overarching framework for understanding the problems of the contemporary era in terms of negation a collective disempow-erment of the public by financial capitalism. It goes ahead and describes specific strategies to challenge negative capitalism and create a counter-politic of social democracy. I make this kind of incautious and bold analysis in order to foment public debate regarding strategy. There is an abundance of nuanced and theoretically subtle arguments that fail to engage an enraged socially-democratic public on its own terms. Therefore this work aims to challenge both the informed reader and the new reader of political philosophy. The work aims to detail the scale of the problem: negative capitalism and its existential costs, and the cultural effects of cynicism. Rather than reel off just a utopian fairy-world of what and why, the intention here is to focus additionally on how, on strategy. I do not claim to know how exactly we all should live, or that we all (assuming that all of you already agree with me, another conceit to avoid) should act or behave in one way or another. The aim is to stimulate response with a series of wild, occasionally arrogant and deliberately inflammatory arguments. The argument does offer a solution to the problems of negative capitalism what is described here as social democracy but this concept is offered to provoke discussion above all else. Cynical passivity is the problem. Nothing less than a basic quality of life is the prize and the end.