There is a huge amount to be said here on the idea of *enclosure*. But it exceeds the capacity of this post. But it is worth reading about because it reveals a good deal more on the psychology attending to the material conditions in play. And Locke’s theory of property is predicated upon the idea of *improvement*. Locke saw the landlord whose land is improved by the work of his laborer as more industrious than the laborer himself. Such was the mindset at the dawn of capitalism. And so it is today.
John Steppling, “Rebuilding Jerusalem”.
Improvement. Progress. Growth. The moral good of ownership and exploitation, deeply intertwined with the Protestant ethics uncovered by Weber.
As per Locke, the contention, the mindset, is here that managerial domination is morally superior to mere natural labour; that alienated domination is a more refined expression of progress in comparison to the primitive activity of the menial labourer. A modern manifestation of the same complex of ideas is how neoliberalism regards poverty as immoral.
This background gives a certain form to the ritualized act of stock purchasing (or investments in general) in the context of Western capitalism.
The act as such is suffused with symbolic significance. It’s a sacrifice, a risk-taking endeavour laid at the altar of growth and prosperity, which if pleasing to those trickster deities of the market will bring fruits and blossoming not only to yourself but to the world at large.
And the most astonishing thing is that even this act of unadulterated avarice, this leveraging of economic power towards partaking in the exploitation of the surplus value generated by impoverished labour in our glorified colonies, is experienced as an act of white saviourship. The symbolic framing, far from the exercise of privilege, is the offering up of your blood and sweat for the benefits of the poor and down-trodden, so that the growth made possible by your rightfully amassed capital may also trickle down to them.
In other words, there’s actually a tinge of heroism in the symbolic and cultural framing of fucking buying stock for profit.
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In connection to debt, there’s a profound relationship between this deeply entrenched ritual and its mythological links to growth, prosperity, progress and the Faustian exceptionalism of industrial society. The notion of growth must be maintained, since it’s one of the most important spiritual values under capitalism and technological civilization.
“The psychology attending to the material conditions in play.” Indeed. Nominal growth, even on real conditions of economic contraction, stagnation, or resource depletion, is also, entirely apart from its structural role in the economy, indispensible for the existential framework of our society, for the preservation of the dominant worldview.
The proliferation of debt is naturally a complex structural phenomenon, there’s no question about that, but our culture and its symbolic reality also engenders a certain psychological attachment to certain narrow forms of economic expansion.
This attachment is in one sense made manifest in a hampering of this culture’s ability to envision economic arrangements and ways to organize production outside of this framework, outside of the debt-fuelled growth model which anchors our identities, our self-value, and our existential security.
In the social reality, despite all change, the domination of man by man is still the historical continuum that links pre-technological and technological Reason. However, the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the “objective order of things” (on economic laws, the market etc.).
To be sure, the “objective order of things” is itself the result of domination, but it is nevertheless true that domination now generates a higher rationality—that of a society which sustains its hierarchic structure while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale. The limits of this rationality, and its sinister force, appear in the progressive enslavement of man by a productive apparatus which perpetuates the struggle for existence and extends it to a total international struggle which ruins the lives of those who build and use this apparatus.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
In connection to the preceding statements one could put it such that, we’re libidinously attached to nominal or symbolic economic progress, so it’s more or less impossible for us to consciously and intentionally embrace a relocalization of production on a no-growth framework.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Debt, the Jungian shadow-form of growth. The unreality of growth is papered over by equally unreal debt. This is never going to be repaid:
But the charade continues. The pretense of growth and prosperity remains, even as the sheer volume of the US homeless population has effectively rendered it a third world country.
All the same, debt inevitably has an impact on the real relations emerging and operating throughout the economy. The proliferation of debt is a significant structural risk, to an extent cemented by a pseudo-spiritual preoccupation with a certain set of entrenched rituals and modes of meaning.
As a statement in support of the distribution of resources and means of production, I find it hard not to agree with the general sentiment here.
It’s really not that complicated.