Superfluous Populations, Tittytainment and The Future of Capitalism — Anselm Jappe’s “The Writings on the Wall”

“Horror films sometimes have a happy ending…”

You don’t have to be into critical theory to be familiar with the “the crisis of civilization.” As I began to write this review on Halloween night, Lancet published findings that climate change was having dramatic and likely irreversible effects on global health; the day prior, President Trump’s former campaign manager was charged with conspiracy against the US; and that same afternoon an act of terror was committed not far from my office in downtown Manhattan. If ever there were film genre to describe the profound unease and choleric mood in the West, complete with a soundtrack of police sirens, pop songs, and primal screams, then it’s horror.. Perhaps one where the fast-forward button on the remote control is stuck…x2 x4 x8…. But can the accelerating horrorshow that we are living through have a happy ending, as German critical theorist Anselm Jappe suggests in his book of essays, The Writings on The Wall: On The Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics?

Full disclosure, I am do not consider myself a political radical, nor am I affiliated with left-wing activists or anti-capitalist groups. I’d like to think I’m not a doom-and-gloom junkie either, but my wife might raise an eyebrow there. Mostly, I am reading Jappe’s work (which I am encountering for the first time so forgive me my ignorances) thanks to Zero Books’ call on Facebook for a free copy in exchange for a review. That said, I’d like to think that I stay open and curious about ideas as I get older, and my heart still mourns the pointless suffering of this world, most of which remains invisible and at a distance. I’ve pointed the finger at neoliberal capitalism in everyday conversations about why the ground appears to be disappearing beneath our feet despite the privileges and standard of living it has afforded those lucky enough.

For Jappe, my detached position is problematic — consuming snippets about emancipating society, while playing an ordinary role in serving business-as-usual in the culture industry. I am one of the new realities that his radical critique must confront (or perhaps win over): the anti-capitalist flirt, who blurs the boundaries between supporters and enemies of the system. Or as he puts it: “they read Marcuse and work in advertising, they manage businesses and donate money to the Zapatistas, they declare themselves anarchists and forge careers as administrators.” No points for my attempt at a complicated (if contradictory) life.

So, I approached the Jappe reading with trepidation and worked up my existential courage. The last Zero Books I read was Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a trenchant diagnosis of late capitalism’s self-satisfied boast that it doesn’t get any better than the neoliberal system we have in place, that says, shut up and enjoy the gadgets. As it was on its way to my mailbox, I learned that Fisher had ended his life. Once received, his 81-page book couldn’t have felt heavier, and I found myself staring transfixed at the subtitle on the book cover, Is There No Alternative?

In Jappe’s more scorching analysis, what he calls the Critique of Value, that alternative is not found in the old dogmas of “class struggle” or the inevitability of Communism. Not in Saturday demonstrations, the ballot box, or consumer choices. Throw those quaint notions on the ash heap of history. To propose these outmoded concepts or actions is to misunderstand both the essential and decomposing nature of capitalism and the dehumanizing process we face at the hands of a commodity society. Exploitation of one group by another has occurred throughout human history. In classical Marxist terms, the logical outcome was revolution to control the means of production or for social emancipation from the exploiters. On the contrary, in Jappe’s critique, commodity production is not an presumed site of revolutionary potential to overcome capitalism.

In The Writings on The Wall, Jappe’s Critique of Value returns to the fundamental categories of capitalism to argue that what makes it unique, especially post-1945, is “generalised competition, commodity relations that affect all aspects of life, and money as universal mediation.” While many experts, both on the left and right, claim that this form of capitalism is cyclical and everlasting, with bumps in the road (see the blustery reassurances following the financial crisis in ‘08), Jappe radically argues that they are deluded and what we are now witnessing is the inner limits of capitalism itself due to its fundamental contradiction:

“It is the only society that has ever existed that contains in its foundation a dynamic contradiction, rather than a mere antagonism: the transformation of labour into value is historically doomed to exhaustion because of the technologies that replace labour.”

Now that technology is threatening to make labor obsolete, Jappe claims that it is no longer possible to extract more value from living labor and depleted natural resources. He argues that the development of financialization and credit in the 70s was a turning point in peak capitalism, not to mention the dwindling profits from massive exploitation in Asia and the developing world and the vanishing of the middle class. Jappe begins one of his essays by pointing out that following the 2008 crash, the running counter in Manhattan could no longer fit the astronomical number of public debt, and even the dollar sign had to be removed to show the correct figure. Real value has been replaced by simulation. It appears that Jappe is not the only one to see the writing on the wall, as Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley billionaires who require social stability and compliance for their vast technological empires, have endorsed a Universal Basic Income, further highlighting anxieties around the future of labor, superfluous populations and the fate of liberal democracy.

While the collapse of centuries-old commodity society here and now, perhaps it’s best not to start cheering just yet. Under the ruthless logic of capitalism as defined by Jappe, the global society of labor has been in self-destruct mode. He describes a kind of barbaric, neo-Hobbesian scenario as proletarian solidarity has been eviscerated, and in its place, every individual is in a constant state of war with one another over an ever dwindling piece of the pie. One could say Jappe — who was writing these essays between 2007–2010 during the global financial crisis — anticipated the political response in the current zeitgeist. Popular anger doesn’t necessarily lead to emancipation from capitalism; it can deliver us into the small, political hands of big con men like Trump — truly a simulation of wealth and a figurehead of infantile narcissism. It is not hard to link this “war of all against all” and fear of becoming “human waste” to Trump’s campaign bluster to protect workers with his empty, bygone era #MAGA slogan.

While populists pine for happy days through retrograde social measures and controls, in another version of what may play out, at a State of the World Forum, Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-advisor to Jimmy Carter, floated the idea of “tittytainment” down the road. If 80% of the world’s population is no longer necessary to production thanks to automation, robotics and artificial intelligence technologies, they might need to receive “a combination of basic nutrition and amusement, mind-numbing entertainment, in order to attain a state of lethargic contentment similar to that of a breast-fed newborn.” You know, kind of like Facebook and emerging virtual/augmented reality entertainment. At least we will know what we will be spending our Universal Basic Income on.

Along with the delusion that fixing the system through market regulation is even possible, other present alternatives and left-liberal critics do not go far enough. Jappe dismisses ecological capitalism and the de-growth movement, which hopes to use green technologies to reign in the system’s excesses that are driving us toward planetary catastrophe: “A solution to the environmental crisis cannot be found within the constraints of the capitalist system which always needs to grow, to consume ever more matter, for no other reason than to compensate for the shrinking mass of value.” Meanwhile, to those who dismiss his radical thinking as utopian or naivé, Jappe counters that capitalism’s Homo œconomicus is the greatest utopia ever realised in history (albeit via force, terror, and violence in many cases), so why not strive for a world without private property, hierarchy, domination and exploitation?

Jappe’s Critique of Value strikes me as true, but I don’t have enough of an economist or Marxist background to validate it with any authority. And while the writing may be on the wall for capitalism, Jappe believes the happy ending is up to us to write. And yet, I don’t feel entirely hopeful. As the 20th century stories of humanism and the market unravel, new myths of technology as salvation and Dataism are fast taking hold.