In our time, no one has to believe in anything other than capitalism. It believes and desires for us. But in what does it believe and desire? If you push the capitalist who accumulates capital for its own sake, he might tell you that self-interest is the expression of the common good. This, of course, is a compensating ideology. Oddly enough, although we believe and desire in capitalism (our beliefs and desires are captured), we don’t like to admit it. There is an immense self-interest even if we are too embarrassed to admit its existence. For example, in the general election of 1992, voters were too embarrassed to declare they were voting Conservative. Recall, also, the middle class voter to whom Newt Gingrich and the Republicans appealed by running against Clinton on abolishing the welfare state. We hate politicians, but regard our political system to be eminently exportable. We express concern about the poor, but we never blame the movement of capital itself, understanding poverty to be an aberration and not endemic to capitalism. We are suspicious of those who seek to defend capitalism even as we believe in and desire it. How has this happened?
Recall the vast post-war consumer boom. This led to a retreat from any concern that there would be insufficient number of consumers to an explosion of consumer desire, a massive consumption boom with apparently infinite horizons. Finely targeted groups whose desires can be met by ‘short runs’ of manufactured goods. Cutting across all such groups is the sense each individual possesses that they are an individual consumer. Neither workers nor consumers feel exploited by the free market (this is why, for example, Labour were able to drop Clause Four); it flatters them. This leads to a short term and contradictory politics. Clinton turned to Dick Morris, the strategist who understood what mattered was to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups each of which needed to be targeted by specific methods. Techniques of marketing are carried over from the business world to politics. Groups are identified: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘polls and patio’ etc. The political question concerns day to day lifestyle, values and issues. Thus the views of swing voters are sought in focus groups.
This is what the Right know as they campaign on lifestyle issues. As Massumi comments:
The New Right, for all its apparent archaism, has been far more attuned than the traditional Left to the actual lines of forces in late capitalist society. It has perceived that the most volatile pressure points have shifted from class conflicts to subjectivity battles.
This is one way to understand the rise of Neoconservatism: it appeared in the mid 1970s to circumvent the apperance of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘molecularities’: new sexual becomings, new kinds of identities, a break with traditional institutions etc. The problem: how to awaken these becomings-other, and in such a way that we do so together?
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