Social Thought & Commentary

The Culture of Capitalism

and the Crisis of Critique
Jason Hickel
London School of Economics and Political Science
and
Arsalan Khan
University of Virginia

Introduction
As over 200,000 people gathered on the National Mall in October, 2010
for the Rally to Restore Sanity, more than a few of Jon Stewart’s fans were
confused as to why exactly he had summoned them there. In fact, many
people on the left end of the political spectrum felt distinctly uneasy about
the whole project, as Stewart’s call for reasonable and polite dialogue
seemed to vitiate his voice as a political critic in the face of increasingly
volatile bombast from the Right. During the weeks leading up to the event,
Stewart mobilized a vision of “the 70–80 percenters” sitting down to dis-
cuss the nation’s issues in a gracious, civil manner regardless of their party
affiliation. This approach to the political process bears a striking resem-
blance to that which President Obama has promoted since taking office in
2009. During his campaign, Obama became famous for the sentiment that
“there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America…there’s not a
black America and a white America; there’s the United States of America,”
as he stated in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Over the past few years, this call to civil agreement has taken the form of
numerous failed attempts to reach across the aisle in the spirit of mutual

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1, p. 203–228, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2012 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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cooperation. Indeed, Obama has even sought to solve several major cri-
ses of capitalism—such as the financial meltdown of 2008 and the BP oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico—with respectful and sometimes even jocular
meetings with the CEOs of the corporations in question. Like Stewart,
Obama seems to believe that if he can just get everyone together at the
same table Americans will be able to tackle these “challenges” (as he calls
them) in a sort of win-win exchange. In the process, he has seen fit to rely
on the advice of neoliberal stalwarts like Lawrence Summers and Paul
Volcker, the very men whose economic policies have helped create the
crises at hand.
How is it that, during a moment of unprecedented social inequality and
a massive recession generated by elite overaccumulation (see Harvey
2011), the Left has failed to articulate a compelling challenge to the eco-
nomic status quo? How have we arrived at a place where the Left’s only
plan for change is to further facilitate market deregulation and advance the
consolidation of monopoly capitalism? How has neoliberalism triumphed
even among those who should be its fiercest critics? Part of this can be
explained by understanding the conception of politics typified by Stew-
art and Obama. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have put it, the
problem is that “the notion of antagonism has been erased from the politi-
cal discourse of the Left” (2001:xiv). This is where the main problem lies,
namely, that the Left in America today promotes a depoliticized politics as
it attempts to distance itself from socialism, reclaim the center, and estab-
lish a “modern” identity. The prevailing model of deliberative democracy
and rational consensus on how to solve America’s “challenges” dispenses
with the notion that capitalist society is shot through with deeply incom-
patible interests, choosing instead to believe that issues such as poverty,
exploitation, and racism can be solved with multicultural tolerance and
interpersonal goodwill. This model reduces structural violence to ques-
tions of individual sentiment, and places capitalism firmly in the non-moral
realm of “science” where it remains insulated from serious political scru-
tiny (Ferguson 2006:69ff). The result, as Laclau and Mouffe have put it, is
that “the forces of globalization are detached from their political dimen-
sions and appear as a fate to which we all have to submit” (2001:xvi).
The Left’s departure from antagonism and hegemony in favor of inclu-
sion and reconciliation proceeds in part from the ethic of multiculturalism,
which rejects “fundamentalism” as the repugnant Other of the modern
subject (Harding 1991). Liberal multiculturalism seeks a “safe” Other, an

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Other devoid of fundamentalisms, an Other that matches up with the ba-

sic tenets of a “generic,” egalitarian human nature; in other words, an
experience of the Other completely deprived of its actual Otherness. For
the Left, Obama has become the embodiment of this vision—a hybrid,
cosmopolitan subject who obviates boundaries and defies essential-
isms, heralding a multicultural world wherein there is no such thing as
incommensurability. The Right, meanwhile, has stepped boldly in to fill
the vacant space of hegemony, ready—like the Marxist-Leninists of a
previous age—to construct grand narratives of antagonism, polarize the
voting population, and stake out fundamentalist frontiers. As if follow-
ing the playbook laid out by Leo Strauss, public personalities like Glenn
Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity—with the financial
backing of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers—have asserted a mo-
nopoly over popular politics. The Left, having relinquished the hegemonic
struggle and armed only with the message of moderation and tolerance,
has found itself powerless to defend its ground.
As a result, neoliberal ideology has become a totalizing way of life,
a worldview that furnishes the terms for everyday praxis and represen-
tation, creates its own forms of political participation and activism, and
promotes a virtually unassailable notion of morality. It is not just a ma-
nipulative ploy to appropriate surplus value, but a regime in the truest
sense of the term—a cultural logic that insinuates itself into every aspect
of lived experience. Neoliberal logic cuts across class divides, religious
and cultural affiliations, and political loyalties. It is articulated not only on
the trading floors of the New York Stock Exchange, not only in university
economics departments, not only in the marble halls of the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund (IMF), but also—crucially—in the poli-
tics of progressive institutions like the United Nations Development Pro-
gram (UNDP), by the fashionable environmentalists doing the rounds in
American universities, by gender and racial justice advocacy groups, and
by charitable philanthropists of all stripes. In other words, neoliberalism
has spawned a form of progressive politics that has no investment in the
radical redistribution of wealth and resources (cf. Gledhill 2005). We argue
that the politics of many contemporary progressives are no less anchored
in a neoliberal ethos than that of their conservative counterparts.
As indicated in the title of this piece, we seek to do two things in the
following pages. First, we attempt to explain the cultural logic that under-
writes neoliberal capitalism today, tracing its origins from the countercul-

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tural movement that came out of Berkeley in the late 1960s. We note that
there was a certain strand of thinking located within the New Left that
was generative of the neoliberal ethos, and that this strand has now come
to dominate the politics of American progressives in particular. Second,
we try to show how progressive politics today partake of and perpetuate
that very same cultural logic: that the logic of capitalism and the logic of
resistance against capitalism have converged. In other words, we seek to
show how the critique from the left not only accepts the basic terms of
neoliberal capitalism, but actually promotes “alternatives” that ultimately
advance its cause. This is the effect of a double process: over the past
few decades, marketing strategies have managed to co-opt dissent and
package rebellion as a consumer commodity at the same time as ques-
tions of poverty and inequality have been thoroughly depoliticized by the
discourse of “development.” We will demonstrate the structural paral-
lels between these two processes, both of which—as with Stewart and
Obama—tend to mystify the coercive dimensions of American capitalism
and foreclose possibilities for critique.

The Neoliberal Cosmology: An Overview

Some of the earliest and most sophisticated ethnographic accounts of
the United States have found the value of individual liberty at the heart of
American culture. In the early 19th century, the eminent theorist of moder-
nity Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) noted that Americans’ conception of lib-
erty was inextricably linked to the notion of ontological equality. According
to Tocqueville, Americans believe themselves to be free inasmuch as they
hold that each individual can rely on their own equal capacity for reason to
make decisions about truth and good without deferring to higher authority.
This is possible because Americans believe that each individual partakes
of a singular, abstract humanity; that every person—regardless of their
social position—is just as good as anyone else. This perspective leads
people to believe in a sort of “imaginary equality”—as Tocqueville calls
it—even in the face of extreme chasms between the rich and the poor.
Regardless of the real inequality of their conditions, Tocqueville found that
Americans did not conceive of themselves as separate classes.
At the same time, Tocqueville noticed that industrial capitalism in the
United States carried the seeds of a new class-based aristocracy; that
the threat of serfdom lurked constantly beneath the surface of the egali-

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tarian nation. In a society where people are able to amass great wealth
and then bequeath it to their progeny, the people at the top would eventu-
ally contribute little or nothing towards the making of their own fortunes.
A society governed by such men would be no different from medieval
dynastic rule with its entrenched, generational hierarchies. Tocqueville’s
prophetic misgivings were proved correct during the Gilded Age, when
growing social inequalities hardened into rigid class distinctions. By the
early 20th century, Americans had begun to recognize that, without a cer-
tain level of “equality of opportunity,” the very idea of liberty was being
gradually sapped of its vitality. The central moral question of American
liberalism became about how to protect the individual’s autonomy and
choice from the encroachment of others, which would require dismantling
class distinctions through redistributive mechanisms.
This was rendered as a formal theory by economists like John May-
nard Keynes (1936), who recognized that capitalism would spawn mass
economic and political crisis if its excesses were not carefully managed.
Like Marxists, Keynesians recognized that the key problem of capital-
ism was the problem of overproduction; expansion requires increasing
productivity and decreasing wages, which generates deep inequalities,
erodes the consumer base, and creates a glut of goods that cannot find a
market. To overcome this, Keynesians promoted public and private sec-
tor investment with the aim of lowering unemployment, creating higher
living standards, raising wages, and increasing consumer demand for
goods. The basic idea was to enforce a class compromise that would
forestall further crises by maintaining a basic degree of social equality.
These principles were applied in the early 20th century to rescue Ameri-
can capitalism from the crisis of the Great Depression. Following Keynes’
recommendations, mid-century capitalism was organized along a Fordist
model, which exchanged a decent family wage for a docile, productive,
middle-class workforce that would have the means to consume a mass-
produced set of basic commodities. Production was characterized by the
assembly line, collective representation through labor unions, and hierar-
chical discipline on the factory floor. David Harvey (2005) has called this
the era of “embedded liberalism,” which furnished the basic tenets of the
New Deal and the Great Society.
This model of production was sustained by a culture that placed value
in conformist consumption, where most people sought to acquire the
same basic set of consumer commodities and had a fairly clearly delin-

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eated notion of “the good life”—a relatively uniform vision of the American
Dream. It was during this period that an additional dimension of American
individualism noticed by Tocqueville became particularly salient, namely,
that individualism furnishes the basis for a very specific form of communi-
ty, one in which the notion of “the public” carries immense currency. Toc-
queville observed that, in a culture that prizes ontological equality, while
each person is suspicious of accepting the authority of other individuals,
their “very resemblance gives them almost unbounded confidence in the
judgment of the public; for it would seem probable that, as they are all
endowed with equal means of judging, the greater truth should go with
the greater number” (2000:519). Under the conditions of embedded liber-
alism, the dominant mode of consumption reflected a specific idea of “the
public,” organized around the symbol of the American worker, as well as a
distinct notion of the “social good” (Taylor 1989) that sought balance be-
tween the forces of capital and labor, between owners and workers, and
between elites and masses. The figure of the American worker emerged
not only as the producer of commodities, but, crucially, also of American
culture more broadly.
Strong labor unions and government played a central role in constitut-
ing “the public” through representation and orienting people towards this
social good throughout the era of the New Deal. But they were not work-
ing alone in this terrain. The notion of “public opinion” emerged as a cen-
tral pillar of marketing strategy from the early 1920s onwards. The term
features in the titles of two highly influential texts, the American journalist
Walter Lippmanan’s Public Opinion (1922) and Edward Bernays’s Crys-
tallizing Public Opinion (1923). Lippmann spoke of the need for “opinion
leaders” and “manufactured” consent, and Bernays, who was Freud’s
nephew, argued that sociological and psychological research should
be mobilized to shift popular perceptions. These early market experts
harbored a deep suspicion of the masses, seeing them as the locus of
irrational and chaotic impulses, and sought to discipline them through
the new media technologies at their disposal. As Jim McGuigan notes,
these market experts held an “elite/mass view of society” and felt it was
their job to “manipulate artfully the irrational impulses of ordinary people”
(2009:104-105). Conformist consumption, then, was not simply a natural
outgrowth of some essential American culture, but a product of competi-
tion wherein labor, industry, and government all had a stake. Conformist
consumption reflected not so much a general consensus, but a power

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arrangement which ensured that working families had the means to con-
sume the goods that they produced.
While the idea of “the public” has not lost its significance in America
today, increasingly corporations, marketers, and government see a much
more differentiated landscape marked by multiple “publics,” “niches,”
and “segments.” This articulates strongly with the multiculturalist vision
of the nation as a mosaic of cultures and identities rather than a homog-
enous unity (Friedman 2002). But neoliberalism has not so much done
away with “the public” as a potent cultural object as it has argued that
the aggregate of individual needs and desires are manifest and expressed
in “the market.” As is widely recognized, the key feature of neoliberal
thought has been its argument against state intervention in the function-
ing of the market. This argument has succeeded not by proving the tech-
nical efficiency of markets against the inefficiency of state regulation, as
neoliberal economists like to claim, but by making the moral case that
beneath all acts of regulation lurks hubris and elitism—the desire of tech-
nocrats to manipulate the masses.
Critics of state regulation frequently evoke the idea that regulators
claim to have knowledge that ordinary Americans do not have, insisting
that all efforts to regulate are premised upon and reflect their essential
elitism. This discourse came to prominence in the recent push by the
Democrats to reform healthcare, with Right wing critics claiming that
the Democrats want to place the government between the patient and
their doctor and, therefore, deny individuals the right to “choose” their
own healthcare. In this sense, neoliberal ideologues have precluded all
redistributive measures by invoking the very egalitarianism of American
culture that once secured the New Deal. If marketing strategists like
Lippmann and Bernays were self-conscious of the fact that the nation
was divided between elites like themselves and the masses, and cog-
nizant that theirs was a project of discipline and reform, today’s most
prominent advocates of neoliberalism are fiercely anti-elite and anti-in-
tellectual, claiming to be themselves of the people and for the people.
The Marxist cultural critic Thomas Frank (2001) has aptly called this
phenomenon “market populism,” identifying the now pervasive pen-
chant for heroizing “the market” as an autonomous space of freedom
and choice, demonizing “the state” as an intruder in this autonomous
space, and regarding redistributive measures as a technique of con-
trol that undermines the exercise of freedom. “The market,” then, is the

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ideological linchpin of a neoliberal cosmology, standing in for both “the

public” and the “social good.”
Alongside the valorization of “the market,” the “sovereign consumer”
has emerged as the central character in the neoliberal cosmology (Mc-
Guigan 2009:85). If embedded liberalism was represented by the figure
of the middle-class worker, the producer of national culture and collec-
tive well-being, then the touchstone of neoliberalism has become the all-
powerful consumer who is “said to dictate production; to fuel innovation;
to be creating new services in advanced economies; to be driving modern
politics; to have it in their power to save the environment and protect
the future of the planet” (Gabriel and Lang 1997:1 as cited in McGuigan
2009:85). McGuigan (2009:99) notes that, while the figure of the sover-
eign consumer as “an all rational, calculating subject, forever seeking to
maximize marginal utility in consumption choices,” was a necessary (if
hidden and unacknowledged) character in neoclassical economic theory,
since the 1970s the consumer has assumed a “totemic function” in public
discourse as the agent behind all productive activity.
As we have argued, embedded liberalism reflected the recognition that
the worker was at once a producer and a consumer, and identified the
overall role that consumption played in the maintenance of the economy,
but it never bound consumer activity off from the broader production pro-
cess. This shift directly parallels the bounding off of “the market” from
the broader political and social field. Both the figure of “the consumer”
and the domain of “the market” are now imagined to be sovereign. This
reflects the ways that business and economic theory have spilled out of
their disciplines into public consciousness, just as the corporation has
risen to become the dominant institution in contemporary America.

The Rebellious Spirit of Capitalism: A Recuperative Frame

While the era of embedded liberalism offers a crucial historical counter-
point to the violent inequities of neoliberal capitalism, it certainly had its
problems. Although egalitarian in theory, the idea of the worker as the
representative of national culture was shot through with racial and gender
exclusions, relying on a model of normative personhood that was male,
heterosexual, white, and middle-class. The protest movement that first
developed in Berkeley in the late 1960s must be understood against this

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backdrop. The “counterculture” movement—free speech, women’s lib,

civil rights, etc.—was directed primarily against what they imagined to be
endemic social conservatism in mainstream America. But it is crucial to
recognize that, while there were genuine Leftist elements (such as labor
unions, Black Power organizations, and the Poor People’s Campaign)
that articulated a trenchant class critique and sought a radical departure
from the regime of private property, the general thrust of the movement
was bourgeois and focused on issues of individual freedoms. The primary
constituents of the New Left (students and professors) were largely elite
and upwardly mobile, concerned less about worker exploitation and the
cost of living than with breaking out of what they saw as a suffocating
ethos of mass conformity and moral prudishness. While racism, patri-
archy, and war were among their central concerns, these issues were
rarely connected meaningfully in mainstream discourse to a critique of
capitalist production. Indeed, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
for example, had a very troubled relationship with labor unions, which
they saw as stiflingly bureaucratic, hierarchical, and socially conservative
(Levy 1994, Anderson 1996).
The hallmark of the revolution of the 1960s was the defense of individ-
ual liberty against the constraints of mass conformist society. Resistance
to the draft; the defense of free speech; the right to divorce, abortion,
contraceptives, and other sexual freedoms all referenced the desire to
make choices for oneself, through one’s own reason and according to
one’s own conscience. The movement derived its charter from the logic
of Western social science—specifically the writings of Freud and Dur-
kheim—which posits a fundamental antagonism between the individual
and society. According to this view, the individual self is repressed by
social norms. This perspective came to inform the work of even the most
celebrated Marxist critics of the time. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s
One Dimensional Man (1964)—the flagship text of the Frankfurt School—
railed against how capitalism promotes mass conformity and the “sup-
pression of individuality.” Marcuse argued that capitalism imposes certain
“false” needs and desires on the individual that the individual might oth-
erwise not have, teaching people “to love and hate what others love and
hate.” According to this perspective, the individual’s “true” needs and
desires are suppressed. Freedom, then, means allowing each individual
to determine their own desires and express their inner selves; freedom
lies in the “autonomy” and “choice” of the individual.

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Having fled persecution in Fascist Europe, the critical theorists that de-
fined Western Marxism in the 1960s (Marcuse, Sartre, Adorno, Althusser,
and so on) were preoccupied with the problem of propaganda-fuelled to-
talitarianism. Their critique of American capitalism, then—despite draw-
ing on Marxist principles, specifically the idea of “false consciousness”—
replaced a critique of class, labor, and exploitation with a critique of the
suppression of individual autonomy in totalitarian society. These ideas
found traction in the student movement, whose ultimate goal became
about freedom for individual self-expression. Radical students directed
much of their frustration at the Fordist organization of production and
consumption, with its rigid hierarchies and paternalistic organization of
power. They sought to buck the “repressive” trends of societal conformity
and express their individuality, their true, inner, authentic selves.
Ironically, this critique of American capitalism gave rise to new and
even more pernicious forms of it. The celebration of “individual identity”
and the construct of the unique, creative self provided capitalism with
fantastic new market opportunities. Responding to consumers’ passion
for “authentic,” individual self-expression, companies began to market
products according to various “lifestyle” or “identity” niches that ap-
pealed to the prevailing ethos of non-conformity. According to this new
logic of marketing and consumption, the individual would seek to express
his or her unique and authentic self by purchasing the accoutrements
of the specific niche to which they aspired. Eventually, “counter-culture”
itself became a marketable identity. To be counter-cultural, one would
simply have to consume the commodities symbolically associated with
counter-culture. The new spirit of capitalism was itself a rebellious spirit,
and this has left an indelible mark on the culture of the American Left (cf.
McGuigan 2009).
At the University of Virginia (UVA), shops on the main University strip
feature a popular t-shirt. Sketched on it is the stoic face of Edgar Allen
Poe with the word “Dropout” beneath in bold letters. The rebellious Poe,
who is widely considered to be the inspiration behind our most dark and
morbid literary genres, spent a year at Mr. Jefferson’s University before
going on to become one of the most significant literary figures in Ameri-
can history. The University takes great pride in this fact and has preserved
the memory of Poe in engravings, statues, and monuments throughout
the campus, and tourists can even visit the room that Poe once occupied.
The Poe t-shirt is not “official” regalia, but it nevertheless references the

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University. Of course, the most likely people to understand its significance

are those that attended and probably graduated from the University. What
encourages these UVA graduates to celebrate a man who made himself
by rejecting, at least according to terms outlined by the t-shirt, the very in-
stitution that the students depend on for their future power and privilege?
The Poe t-shirt is but one exemplary symbol of our new capitalist ethic,
an ethic in which the fetishism of commodities is taken to new heights. In
the new commodity fetishism, the commodity stands in for a certain kind
of awareness and consciousness, an identity—often a “political” one—
that claims to be challenging the status quo. The Poe t-shirt refers to
the institution that is the source of the students’ political and economic
status, but it also foregrounds their “political” awareness in the fact that
individual creativity and merit, not degrees, are the real basis of success.
By suggesting an alternative to the University’s claim on Poe as well as
to the “official” university regalia, the Poe t-shirt instantiates the value
of non-conformity and acts as a public disavowal of the students’ own
inherited power and privilege. In a neoliberal age, consumers trade the
signs of institutional power for the mark of a rebellious spirit.
One of us came across a glaring example of this in the London airport:
a pink cashmere cardigan emblazoned with the iconic image of Che Gue-
vara’s face, and priced at an impressive $200. Then there are the posh
bars and clubs built into sordid warehouses that are frequented by hip,
alternative youth in New York. These establishments are often located in
poor areas, and the people that frequent them place value in the fact that
they are not mainstream. These venues represent the opposite of the cor-
poratized, tourist-infested Times Square, though they are no less over-
priced and certainly more exclusive. In these examples and many others,
we find clear evidence in support of Slavoj Žižek’s (2009a) claim that the
new capitalist ethic is one in which “the very act of egotist consumption
already includes the price of its opposite.” Žižek is referring here to high
priced commodities that claim to be advancing some kind of social justice
agenda, like organic foods and other such “responsible” consumer prod-
ucts, but it applies even more clearly to examples where commodities
index alternative social and political identities.
In all of these examples, the commodity-sign carries both the mark of
institutional power and signifies a public disavowal of this very power in
the service of creative self-expression. So, the Poe t-shirt evokes a can-
onized literary figure and also makes a cryptic reference to the university

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he is associated with. Then, in an act of rebellion, it rejects the “official”

version, distancing itself from the mainstream. The pink cardigan makes a
similar move by pasting the face of an iconic revolutionary onto an article
of clothing that one is more likely to see at a polo match than at a protest.
Finally, and this is probably the most forceful of all these examples, there
are the warehouse clubs/bars. The very architecture of these venues
evokes the contrast between power and its opposite; on the inside they
are sleek and stylish with all the trappings of a high-end establishment,
but from the outside they blend into the general working class environ-
ment where they are located. This last example is also the most insidious
since the making of “alternative” space draws wealthier youth into these
areas and inevitably leads to rising prices and gentrification that displaces
the area’s actual working class inhabitants.
This form of consumption is a way to signal one’s rejection of the main-
stream. Today, dissent is a highly valued commodity that is openly bought
and sold in the marketplace. Substantive critical engagement and cri-
tique of capitalist excesses is replaced by an “alternative” consumer ethic
that functions as a recuperative project for capitalism. In a neoliberal age,
capitalism supplies not only a mode of production but also a form of re-
sistance, though one that will never supersede the conditions of capitalist
production. This appropriation of dissent is what Marxist cultural critic
Thomas Frank (1998) has poignantly called “the conquest of cool.” This
phenomenon is best understood as capitalism’s own recuperative frame.
It is recuperative in the sense that it organizes forms of resistance (rebel-
lion/dissent) in such a way that they advance capitalism’s goal of creating
ever-greater consumer demand for commodities that are produced within
a regime that is exploitative at its core. It trades a deeply felt political
urge (revolution) for a passive instantiation of identity and difference (con-
sumerism). It supplies people with a sense that they are expressing their
unique and authentic selves and therefore produces the illusion of choice
and freedom. In the end, each individual seeks to be different and unique,
but they all do so in exactly the same way. By purchasing the signs of
their identity, they mask their conformity in a thin veil of difference.
The “revolutionary” discourse of individual liberty not only supplied
capitalism with new forms of consumption, it also furnished the logic for
new modes of production. Companies began to abandon the hierarchi-
cal organization of factory discipline and focused instead on promoting
more flexible forms of worker self-management and individual responsi-

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bility, which made exploitation all the more efficient. Furthermore, taking
advantage of the anti-conformity ethos of the time, neoliberal econom-
ic policy—promoted most prominently by Milton Friedman and Ronald
Reagan—dismantled the paternalistic social compact of the postwar era
and took apart many of the social protections that had been meticulously
built up since the Great Depression, demolishing unions, curbing wages,
eviscerating environmental regulations, and removing tariff barriers (Judt
2010, Harvey 2005). This allowed for an unprecedented and extremely
rapid transfer of wealth from the poorest strata of society to the rich-
est, and from impoverished countries to wealthy ones (Dumenil and Levy
2004). According to the 1996 UNDP Human Development Report, during
the period between 1960 and 1991, the richest 20 percent increased their
share of global income from 70 percent to 85 percent while the poorest 20
percent saw their share shrink from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent. Today, the
wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population controls 40 percent of the
world’s wealth, the wealthiest 10 percent control 85 percent of the wealth,
and the bottom 50 percent control a mere 1 percent of the wealth (United
Nations University 2009). This massive transfer of wealth has happened,
for the most part, with very little resistance because it has been couched
in a language not only of liberty and freedom, but even of rebellion and
dissent, which is leveraged to justify the free market and grant it a certain
unassailable moral appeal.

Development Discourse and the Virtuous Commodity

Over the past few decades, the problem of extreme global inequality has
become the object of concern for progressive-minded Westerners. And
the solution that they propose—with nearly unanimous consensus—is
“development,” usually modified with popular keywords such as “sustain-
able” or “community.” The idea of development holds primacy of place
in the progressive politics of American campuses. Nearly every college
student these days is in some way enamored with the problem of poverty
and the development solution, as evidenced by the enormous surge in
student service projects like Alternative Spring Break. Development, it
seems, is all the rage.
Participation in development projects has become a “rebellious” activi-
ty, in the mold of Che Guevara cardigans and gritty New York clubs. Young
people can demonstrate their disaffection with the excesses of American

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capitalism and mainstream consumerism by going abroad to uplift impov-

erished communities, casting themselves as “global citizens” concerned
about critical political issues. Indeed, they can use these experiences to
craft their identity as “counter-cultural,” thus expressing their individuality
and non-conformism in a radical mold. They come home from Hondu-
ras or Ghana and post pictures on their Facebook profiles of their time
spent working among the poor, holding hungry babies, sweaty from dig-
ging wells or building schools. Such images carry a tremendous amount
of cultural capital, as they flag the most highly valued kind of “alternative”
personal narrative. So valued, in fact, that having a development project
on your resume can be the ticket to a better-paying job in the future, as it
indicates the sort of individual creativity that competitive companies seek.
After graduating from college, students who cultivate alternative identi-
ties along these lines often pursue careers in the development sector,
where they can address the problems of global poverty while still securing
a respectable middle-class income. Professional development work has
come to stand in for substantive political activism. This is revolution made
compatible with consumer lifestyles: development workers can enjoy well-
paying jobs without feeling like they are “selling out.”
Over the past few years, the idea of development has been packaged
into the commodity-sign itself. You no longer need to leave the comforts
of the Western world in order to join the battle against poverty in the most
remote places. Indeed, you can do so every time you make a basic, ev-
eryday purchase. When you go to Starbucks, for example, or when you
buy a bottle of Ethos water, TOMS Shoes, or purchase clothes or elec-
tronics marked with the Product Red symbol, you can participate in the
project of development. The promise that these corporations make is that
a portion of their profits will go to alleviating poverty and saving hungry
children in underdeveloped countries. Product Red, for example, works
with franchises like GAP, Apple, and Nike so that 50 percent of the profit
on marked items (t-shirts, iPods, basketballs, etc.) goes to addressing the
problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The slogan they use says: “Buy RED, save
lives. It’s that simple.”
The virtuous commodity is an extreme example of what Žižek calls
“cultural capitalism”: “we primarily buy commodities neither on account
of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience
provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasur-
able and meaningful” (2009b:52-54). You are not just purchasing coffee,

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or water, or shoes, or organic apples—you are also purchasing an iden-

tity, namely, that of caring about poor people, that of having cosmopolitan
global awareness, and even that of having critical consciousness. You
purchase the feeling of being a good, thinking, alternative individual. Put
another way, the companies that market these commodities are not just
selling the commodities themselves, they are selling feelings. The exis-
tence of poverty, and the pleasure-giving illusion of fixing it, becomes a
commodity itself, a thing to be bought and sold.
This is an extension of the lifestyle marketing that first emerged in the
early 1970s. But the new cultural capitalism adds an extra ingredient to
the type of consumerism that took hold in the wake of the counterculture
movement by allowing consumers to use commodity consumption not
only as a vehicle for critical self-expression, but also as a tool for obvi-
ating consumerism itself. In this way, the virtuous commodity takes the
notion of fetishism to new extremes. The commodity assumes what Žižek
has aptly called a “redemptive” quality: the commodity becomes the key
not only to our personal pleasure, but also to our sense of moral well-
being. In the act of consumption you buy your redemption from the evils
of consumerism. But the fetish goes even further, promising not only our
redemption as consumers but also the redemption of the suffering world,
promoting the absurd belief that individuals can help fix the problems
caused by mass capitalist consumption through further engaging in mass
capitalist consumption, that they can remediate global poverty by buying
more commodities.
This adds an additional layer of mystification to the commodity fetish-
ism that Marx discussed. The fact that the commodity appears so re-
demptive, so salvific, obscures to an unprecedented extent the relations
of production that lie behind it. Take, for example, the “social business”
initiative launched by Nobel Peace Laureate Mohammed Yunus, the
founder of Grameen Bank, to work with Nike to manufacture $2 shoes for
poor children in developing countries. When this initiative was announced
it was met with enthusiasm from progressives and development-minded
people the world over; everyone wants poor children to have shoes. But
development enthusiasts rarely recognize the fact that the production of
$2 shoes requires the exploitation of workers—perhaps even child work-
ers—in third world sweatshops. By eclipsing the violent relations of pro-
duction that lie behind it, the virtuous commodity reproduces the very
lesions that it is supposed to redress.

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The Culture of Capitalism and the Crisis of Critique

This contradiction parallels the logic of charity more broadly. Char-

ity—or, on a larger scale, development aid—is only possible with excess
profits, but the very act of accumulating such profits requires the exploi-
tation of both labor and the environment somewhere down the line. As
“variable” costs of production, labor and the environment are easier to
manipulate than capital, which comes with the profits of other capital-
ists already entailed and appears as “fixed.” Especially in foreign con-
texts with minimal regulation, corporations realize huge profits by paying
workers less than living wages and by refusing to pay for the pollution
and destruction they cause. In this manner, capitalism externalizes the
costs of its own reproduction. The contradiction, then, is that the very
process of accumulating enough profit to dispense charity is precisely
the process that creates the problems that charity pretends to address.
As Žižek (2009a) has aptly argued, the charitable endeavor merely seeks
to repair with one hand what it utterly destroys with the other.
The crucial trick of the virtuous commodity is that the charity goes
to targets (poor children in Africa, for example) that appear to be exter-
nal to the regime of production, that appear to be in a static, “natural”
condition of want. This process misdirects critical attention away from
the relationships of exploitation that are at stake, enabling capitalism by
obscuring its contradictions. The solution offered by the virtuous com-
modity is an illusion, a fetish. Consumers are not really buying a better
world, they are buying the sense of pleasure that comes with the illu-
sion that they are buying a better world. This is the hidden tautology
that structures the new commodity fetishism; it allows people to rebel
against the inequities of consumer capitalism while continuing to con-
sume at their present rate. In this manner, capitalism colonizes its own
critique. It sells its obverse. It turns people’s unease and discontent with
capitalism into a market, a gap to be filled with yet more commodities—
even more pernicious ones than before.
A very similar irrationality underlies development practice more
broadly; the assumption that everyone in the world should be able to
rise to the basic middle-class standards that the first world enjoys. This
is an absurd fantasy for the obvious reason that the world does not con-
tain enough resources for every person to consume as much as, say,
the average American—we would need a number of additional Earths
for that to be possible. But more importantly, this fantasy obscures the
fact that the very wealth of the first world depends on the poverty of the

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third world. The tremendous wealth that Americans enjoy, for example,
would not be possible were it not for the systematic exploitation of the
labor and resources of poorer countries (Wallerstein 1989, Isbister 2006,
Rodney 1974).
These relationships of exploitation are obscured within standard de-
velopment rhetoric. In the work of Jeffrey Sachs (2006), for example,
poverty and underdevelopment appear as a static state, as if outside of
history and politics and power—a perspective that lends itself to apo-
litical “solutions” that hail technological and technocratic interventions.
As anthropologist James Ferguson (1994) has put it, development acts
as an “anti-politics machine” (see also Ufford and Giri 2003, Crewe and
Harrison 1998). It transforms the revolutionary urge of dissenters into a
passive accommodation with capitalism. Development initiatives allow
for wealthy people—such as service-minded students and philanthro-
pists like Bill Gates—to pretend to address the problem of global pov-
erty without ever having to confront their position within a global class
divide. It allows them to continue accumulating and consuming while
still feeling good about themselves for being charitable, even revolu-
tionary. The mythology of development allows them to believe that they
can eliminate the poverty of the poor without ever having to challenge
the wealth of the wealthy, as if the two were entirely unrelated. In short,
development attempts to redress the problems caused by capitalism
without ever questioning capitalism itself.
Since the 1970s, development has been used as the primary vehicle
for neoliberal globalization in the rest of the world (Mitchell 1995, Coo-
per 1997, Rist 1997). The “structural adjustment conditions” of many
World Bank and IMF development loans to postcolonial countries have
required recipients to lower trade barriers, cut social services, and curb
protections on labor and the environment—all of which provide out-
standing returns in capital, but carry truly disastrous implications for the
poor (Pollin 2003, Klein 2008). In a twist of absolute absurdity, develop-
ment prescribes ever more radical market freedom to fix the problems
created by market freedom in the first place; it seeks to battle the con-
tradictions of capitalism by extending capitalism itself. It is no wonder,
then, that after some 40 years of “global development”—and billions of
dollars of investment—we have so little to show for it besides widening
inequalities and deepening poverty (Rist 2007).

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The Culture of Capitalism and the Crisis of Critique

Toward a New Progressive Politics

We began this essay with the observation that, at the very moment when
neoliberal ideologues are zealously advancing the “free market” by invoking
the grand moral principles of liberty and freedom, American progressives
are content to speak in a utilitarian and technocratic language that aims
for “balanced” solutions through rational consensus. This reflects how the
Left in America no longer sees its historical role as one of ensuring socio-
economic justice in the face of exploitation by a clearly defined adversary
like “the Right” or “the elite.” Instead, progressives seem preoccupied
with another, more diffuse constellation of threats: political polarization,
the decline of civility in public discourse, and increasing ideological rigidity
and zeal. This is why some representatives of the American liberal-left, like
Jon Stewart, have been so adamant about blaming “extremists” on both
sides of the political aisle, and why the Obama campaign succeeded on a
relatively vague platform of cooperation, compromise, “hope,” and “unity.”
That this appears to so many as a better kind of politics makes sense within
a cultural framework that sees ideological conflict as illusory rather than
substantive, as a result of misunderstanding and misrepresentation rather
than a product of incommensurable interests or structural inequities. In
such a world, conflict can be redressed through a shared commitment to
civility, consensus building, openness, and diversity.
It bears pointing out briefly that this trend has been paralleled to some
extent by discourses about globalization in culture studies, post-colonial
studies, and, indeed, some strands of anthropology. Jonathan Friedman
(2002) has famously criticized Bhabha (1994), Appadurai (1993), and Mal-
kki (1992) for celebrating hybridity and cosmopolitanism as the antidote
to the chauvinism of nationalist and other essentialist identities, which
they see as inherently violent because they are preoccupied with defend-
ing cultural boundaries against the threatening Other. Friedman rightly
argues that the celebration of hybridity and cosmopolitanism obscures
the violent exclusions that face the vast majority of people who cannot
partake of globalization’s “cut ‘n’ mix culture” (2002:33). Like the forms
of progressive politics that we have discussed above, this literature thor-
oughly depoliticizes globalization and rationalizes neoliberal capitalism.
Fortunately, this has not been the last word on the matter: in the past
decade, a number of anthropologists have gone to great lengths to theo-
rize the violent contradictions of neoliberalism. Kalb, following Polanyi,
insists on seeing globalization as “a political project of globally imposed

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 JASON HICKEL & ARSALAN KHAN

marketization…sponsored by transnational class segments within the

core northern states and its comprador allies in dependent economies”
(2005:177). Friedman (2003) stresses how class polarization has created
cosmopolitan elites who are self-consciously global and hybrid, while at
the same time generating intense forms of cultural closure and chauvin-
ism among those most adversely affected by neoliberal policy. Carrier
and Heyman take a similar approach to the study of consumption, argu-
ing for a radical departure from prevailing “psycho-cultural” analyses that
tend to “ignore or simplify inequalities and conflict” (1997:355).
To quote Žižek (2009a) once again, “The aim of progressive politics
should be to reconstruct society in such a way that poverty will be impos-
sible.” But the altruistic virtues of cultural capitalism and development
hobble this project by obscuring the exploitative relations of production
that generate poverty and inequality in the first place, and by appropriat-
ing the critical capacities of the Left. These new trends appear to sani-
tize capitalism, to obviate its contradictions. They make capitalism seem
palatable and benevolent. Instead of imagining real alternatives to global
capitalism, many progressives today content themselves with promoting
TOMS Shoes, Ethos water, and Alternative Spring Break with evangelical
zeal. This is the extent of capitalism’s hegemony, that it has colonized
our capacity to imagine alternatives, and has transformed our potential
for meaningful political critique and activism into a profoundly depoliti-
cized, consumerist passivity. As a result, progressives in America have
largely abandoned the task of confronting the antagonisms intrinsic to
market capitalism. This is not to say that progressives do not care about
growing inequality and mounting human suffering in America and abroad.
They do. However, in many cases, their energies have been channeled
into the spirit of rebellious and virtuous consumption and the moral proj-
ect of development, which may mitigate the effects of capitalist produc-
tion (although this too is questionable) but will never address the ultimate
causes of our contemporary economic crises.
This is partly the unfortunate, and unintended, legacy of some strands
of thinking located within the New Left of the 1960s, and even within the
much-lauded Frankfurt School. To be sure, the overriding concern with
individual autonomy and authentic self-expression that permeated the
intellectual and political milieu of the 1960s helped secure important
legal and political rights, and made possible the notion of a more inclu-
sive and multicultural nation. Broadly speaking, these legal and politi-

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The Culture of Capitalism and the Crisis of Critique

cal rights have created opportunities for select members of racial and
ethnic minorities and women to enter into an elite world from which they
had previously been barred. Although their place within this elite re-
mains suspect and conditional, often predicated on their ability and will-
ingness to participate in cultural activities that are themselves marked
by race and gender bias, these new rights have not significantly altered
the actual distribution of powers either within America or within global
capitalist society more broadly. Indeed, as we have shown, capitalism
largely appropriated the idea of individual rights and liberties and the
anti-society ethos of the times to facilitate neoliberal forms of consump-
tion and production. Moreover, given that corporations also have the
legal status of individuals, they have taken advantage of the very same
laws that were designed to protect individual rights and freedoms, and
this has facilitated an unprecedented consolidation of corporate pow-
er. What this period furnished in place of a substantial redistribution of
wealth and power is the appearance of freedom and choice. Consum-
ers—at least those with sufficient resources—now have the freedom
to fashion our identities as mainstream or alternative and to choose
between regular, rebellious, and virtuous commodities; but we cannot
opt out of the system, and we are not free to reconsider the fundamental
violence at the heart of our capitalist society.
Progressives in America today remain largely circumscribed within
the neoliberal paradigm. This fact becomes particularly clear in debates
about military policy. For instance, Democrats have fought hard to repeal
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” so that homosexuals can have the freedom to
serve in the military, but they have left the military-industrial complex itself
mostly unscrutinized. Discussions about the War on Terror tend to fall
along similar lines. While certain progressive circles have advanced radi-
cal critiques, the dominant concern remains that “national security” has
come at the expense of liberty and freedom for citizens at home. Gener-
ally speaking, this approach fails to recognize that liberty in America has
always been a privilege primarily reserved for white, middle-class males,
and that its extension or denial to others is largely contingent on the his-
torical needs of capitalism. Furthermore, the notion of liberty that func-
tions domestically as a critique of state overreach is deployed at the same
time to rationalize the belligerent use of military force around the world,
and to underwrite the imperial project of violently restructuring foreign
governments and economies in accordance with neoliberal principles. In

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the Muslim world, this is the very process that—because of the humilia-
tion, poverty, and conspicuous inequalities that it generates—bloats the
ranks of militant movements. In light of this, any thorough critique of the
War on Terror will require that scholars and activists examine the links be-
tween American imperial interests in the Muslim world and the systemic
needs of capitalist accumulation.
As we have suggested, rebellious and virtuous consumption are prod-
ucts of a neoliberal logic that posits market solutions for political and
economic problems, celebrates “the consumer” as the supreme agent
of change, and obscures the coercive dimensions of capitalism that gen-
erate the very problems that these forms of consumer activism aim to
remedy. These trends are deeply depoliticizing, and have largely eclipsed
the movements in America that genuinely challenge the onslaught of neo-
liberal capitalism. Living wage campaigns, for example, have attempted
to address the problem of worker exploitation at home by trying to bring
about a return to the social compact of the pre-1970s. The anti-sweatshop
movement has drawn attention to the ruthless exploitation that character-
izes capitalist production in the third world. The anti-globalization move-
ment confronts IMF structural adjustment programs and opposes the ne-
farious bi- and multi-lateral trade agreements Western powers press onto
weak Third World governments. These forms of activism all picked up
steam in the 1990s, especially among American college students. While
they were never intended to transcend the conditions of capitalist pro-
duction, they have brought into sharp focus the violent exploitation of
labor and the deepening global inequalities that define the neoliberal age.
As a corrective to the absurdities of cultural capitalism, these projects
deserve the renewed support of mainstream progressives.
In view of neoliberalism’s voracious attack on the poor around the
world, some prominent Leftist academics are now calling for a return to
Marxist class analysis and class-based political activism. These analysts
often exhibit hostility to what they consider the intellectual focus on “cul-
ture” and the political commitment to “identity politics” (see for example
Chibber 2006). While we sympathize with this renewed focus on “class”
insofar as it serves to anchor a critique of capitalist excesses, we cannot
endorse the assumption that class is more “real,” grounded in objective
material conditions and relations of production, while other “identities”
are subjective and serve as ideological tools that mystify these mate-
rial conditions. On the contrary, our own approach is greatly indebted to

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some of the intellectual currents that were constitutive of the New Left,
especially those who, following Gramsci, took seriously the notion that
capitalism is best understood as a cultural or ideological system (cf. Guha
1983, Chatterjee 1993). Indeed, we concur with Laclau and Mouffe’s con-
tention that—contra structural Marxism—class has never been an ob-
jective location (cf. Thompson 1968), that class cannot be understood
as a privileged locus of political critique, and that “class opposition is
incapable of…reproducing itself automatically as a line of demarcation in
the political sphere” (2001:151). The failure of the Left has been its failure
to deconstruct the central categories of Marxist theory (such as class in-
terest), and to fabricate new, more compelling political antagonisms with
which to mobilize Americans’ political imagination.
The argument in this essay, then, is not that “class” is more objective,
nor that it is more worthy of attention than the struggles for recognition of
racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, indigenous groups, third
world nations, or other disenfranchised populations. Rather, our argu-
ment is that in a regime that distributes social worth according to what
one possesses and consumes, radical politics must reconnect consump-
tion to production and “tackle issues of both ‘redistribution’ and recogni-
tion’” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001:xviii). Indeed, our criticism of neoliberal-
ism is that it goes well beyond prior forms of capitalism—such as that
which Tocqueville noticed—in decoupling redistribution from recognition,
claiming to grant ontological equality but refusing on moral principle to
reckon with the history of structural violence that underpins the modern
capitalist system. This position mystifies the fact that without substantive
redistribution, recognition is not a meaningful achievement. Progressive
movements that disaggregate issues of recognition from those of redis-
tribution, then, participate in a neoliberal logic that masks the very struc-
tural inequalities that they aim to redress.
As we have demonstrated in the pages above, consumer activism and
development discourse have a profoundly depoliticizing effect in that they
presuppose the fundamental features of neoliberal cosmology: the idea
that “the market” is a distinct and autonomous domain and that the “sov-
ereign consumer” is the principal agent of change. These are precisely
the features of the neoliberal cosmology that progressive politics must
dismantle. For the Left to reverse this trend would require calling out the
violent antagonisms latent in neoliberal capitalism. As Laclau and Mouffe
have put it, “The Left should start elaborating a credible alternative to the

224
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neoliberal order, instead of simply trying to manage it in a more humane

way. This, of course, requires drawing new political frontiers and acknowl-
edging that there cannot be a radical politics without the definition of an
adversary. That is to say, it requires the acceptance of the ineradicability
of antagonism” (2001:xvii).
In today’s political arena, this would require constructing a narrative
that draws equivalences between the plurality of antagonisms that con-
stitute the new social movements that have arisen since the 1960s in ad-
dition to reconstituting antagonisms between working people and cor-
porate elites. The Occupy movement that began in New York’s Zuccotti
Park has made remarkable strides in this direction by getting people to
close ranks under the banner of “The 99%” and by articulating a shared
moral struggle against a clearly-defined adversary. The movement pre-
supposes the critique outlined in this essay inasmuch as it rejects the
commodification of dissent and moves beyond concerns about individual
self-expression. But, at least at the point of writing this, Occupy has been
emphasizing national inequalities without paying much attention to global
ones. Eventually, Occupy will need to highlight and challenge the pro-
cesses of extraction that generate general affluence for the 99 percent in
the West through austerity and dispossession for billions of people in the
third world. Since neoliberal capitalism is organized on an international
scale, real change will require a movement that is international in scope.
Our collective well-being depends on forging global solidarities. n

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