Professor of Politics at University of Sydney
Rethinking Capitalism
Readers interested in the emerging politics of the
human/non-human and the deep and difficult tensions between capitalism
and democracy are bound to find stimulating a recent public lecture by
one of the world’s leading social scientists, Bruno Latour.
Delivered in late February 2014 at the Royal Danish Academy of
Sciences in Copenhagen, ‘On some of the affects of capitalism’ is
Latour’s powerful attempt to raise questions about why it is that we’ve
come to accept commodity production and exchange as a naturally given
‘fact of life’, and what might be done about it. Note his reference to
the new science of the making and unmaking of public ignorance (‘agnotology’)
and to the global significance of a uniquely Australian model of wilful
ignorance championed by the Abbott government. Latour calls it the
‘Australian strategy of voluntary sleepwalking toward catastrophe’.
The full text of the lecture is available here. Followed by a remarkable Tony Abbott quotation, the opening moments of the lecture are pasted below:
‘“If the world were a bank, they would have already bailed it out”.
Such is the slogan painted by Greenpeace militants in one of their
recent campaigns. It says a lot about our level of intellectual
corruption that we don’t find such a line simply funny but tragically
realistic. It has the same bleak degree of realism as Frederick
Jameson’s famous quip that: “Nowadays it seems easier
to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism!”.
Polity Press
Click to enlarge
If you call the world, I mean the world we all live in, “first
nature” and capitalism our “second nature” — in the sense of that to
which we are fully habituated and which has been totally naturalized —
then what those
sentences are saying is that the second nature is more solid, less
transitory, less perishable than the first. No wonder: the transcendent
world of beyond has always been more durable than the poor world of
below. But what is new is that this world of beyond is not that of
salvation and eternity, but that of economic matters. As Karl Marx would
have said, the realm of transcendence has been fully appropriated by
banks! Through an unexpected turn of phrase, the world of economy, far
from representing a sturdy down to earth materialism, a sound appetite
for worldly goods and solid matters of fact, is now final and absolute.
How mistaken we were; apparently it is the laws of capitalism that Jesus
had in mind when he warned his disciples: “Heaven and earth will pass
away, but my words will never pass away.” (Matt 24-35).
Videnskabernes Selskab/Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
Click to enlarge
This inversion of what is transitory and what is eternal is no longer
a joke, especially since what should be called the “Australian strategy
of voluntary sleepwalking toward catastrophe” is being implemented to
the full after the last election: not content to dismantle the
institutions, scientific establishments and instruments that could
prepare his constituency to meet the new global threat of climate
mutations, the prime
minister, Tony Abbott, is also dismantling, one after the other, most
departments of social science and humanities. Such a strategy makes a
lot of sense: not thinking ahead is probably, when you are an Australian
and given
what is coming, the most rational thing to do.
“Not thinking” seems to be the slogan of the day when you consider
that in the United States alone something like a billion dollars, yes,
one billion, is being spent to generate ignorance about the anthropic
origin of climate mutations. In earlier periods, scientists and
intellectuals lamented the little money spent on
learning, but they never had to witness floods of money spent on
unlearning what was already known. While in times past thinking
critically was associated with looking ahead and extracting oneself from
an older
obscurantist past, today money is being spent to become even more
obscurantist than yesterday! “Agnotology”, Robert Proctor’s science of
generating ignorance, has become the most important discipline of the
day.
It is thanks to this great new science that so many people are able
to say in their heart “Perish the world, provided my bank survives!”. It
is a desperate task to continue thinking when the powers of
intelligence are dedicated to shutting down thought and to marching
ahead with eyes wide closed.'
Evidence that Latour is on to something was provided just a week later by the after-dinner remarks of Tony Abbott to forestry industry officials. His biblical words deserve deep meditation:
‘Man and the environment are meant for each other. The last thing
we do – the last thing we should want – if we want to genuinely improve
our environment is to want to ban men and women from enjoying it, is to
ban men and women from making the most of it and that’s what you do.
You intelligently make the most of the good things that God has given
us.’
The full video of Latour’s address in Copenhagen follows:
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