Abstract
There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility ossify, narrow, or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systemic and synthetic approach to alienation.
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Notes
One exception is Orlando Patterson’s account of natal alienation in Slavery and Social Death (1982). Given its close connection to the institution of slavery, we must defer discussion of natal alienation for another venue. It raises the question of inclusion, exclusion, and alienation in a unique and important way.
Obviously, we do not agree with such conclusions. It is worth recalling that Marx’s formulation of estranged labor, for instance, was – in Paul Ricoeur’s terms – analogical and not deductive (1986:36). In other words, alienation did not occur exclusively in “the economy,” nor could one simply derive all other forms of alienation, e.g. in religion or politics, from “the economy”. One could argue, in fact, that Marx’s account requires a more systematic elaboration that underscores and unites its various capitalist dimensions.
Jaeggi seeks to avoid the “strongly objectivist interpretive scheme” often associated with alienation, i.e. as a phenomenon of socially-induced dysphoria or domination that, moreover, depends on the image of a self divided from the world (2014:32). Such objectivist accounts, she reasons, establish the analyst as the arbiter of human good, rather than the actors themselves (28). Moreover, they establish objective, utopian, and anti-social yardsticks for measuring when alienation has been finally transcended. Essentially, these accounts treat alienation as something that could be overcome, once and for all, with the dawning of a complete, perfect, and worldless self.
We do not treat “future as possibility” and “future as image” as practically distinct. Images of the future indicate senses of possibility. Thus, the former will be evident in the latter by definition. However, “future as possibility” underscores our attunement to the ways that people relate to that which remains outstanding. Our typology of futurelessness, which synthesizes images of the future, as well as other relevant statements, conditions, and processes, illustrates the value in retaining this analytical distinction.
Similarly, Rosa describes modern conceptions of the good life as one where things are available, accessible, and attainable. Under such circumstances, an imperative to act could elicit compulsive appropriation that, in turn, reproduces a system where these acts and the world lose their meaning (2017:40–43).
Furthermore, if we associate disalienation primarily with appropriating action, then we may overlook situations where appropriating actions nevertheless occur in an alienated (i.e. futureless) manner or where people generate possibility in alienating circumstances. Both Jaeggi and Rosa provide excellent examples of the former: a person leads a life of comfort yet feels unable to control or find significance in their lives (e.g. Jaeggi 2014:51–67; Rosa 2017:45–46). More likely to be overlooked are the latter: circumstances where one’s actions may appear fully alienated while a sense of possibility is recovered or remains. For instance, Neil Roberts (2015) argues that enslaved Africans often experienced the flight from slavery, or marronage, internally. How people sustain senses of possibility in otherwise future-denying circumstances is an important question.
A clarification: an unconstrained sense of possibility can undermine itself. Faced with a world of nothing but potential, one would become incapable of action. Thus, it is crucial to recognize that unalienated senses of possibility will have limits. The question is, are any particular limits necessary?
We would be unable to understand, for example, how a circumstance could shift from future-denying to future-nurturing except via appeals to a deus ex machina.
Systems other than capitalism (e.g., feudalism, communism) may produce futurelessness. How futurelessness compares across modes of production, though, is beyond the scope of this paper. Moreover, we will not be able to do justice to comparisons between distinct regimes of capitalist accumulation, e.g. fordist industrial capitalism versus financialized capitalism. Where relevant, we flag questions that invite more sustained and systematic analysis.
Thus, it is important to recognize that primitive accumulation or direct coercion (Marx 1977:873), rather than equal exchange in the capitalist marketplace, is a necessary and ongoing complement to market-based expansion (Dörre 2015; Luxemburg 2003; Ince 2018); force and coercion create capitalist relations and conditions, not just at some fixed point in a time “before” capitalism, but as a distinct, contemporaneous means of ensuring capital accumulation.
Some write about financialization as a process that is wholly distinct from commodification (e.g. Konings 2018:22–23; Ascher 2016:64). While we do not dispute the need to distinguish them, it is not clear why we should treat financialization (a series of techniques that make possible the speculative attempt to profit on the future) and commodification (a series of techniques that make possible the speculative attempt to profit on the sale and purchase of “goods”) as separable and sequential, as if the former replaces the latter. One might just as well consider financialized exchange as a distinct species of commodification or, at the very least, as a process that abets new forms of commodification.
Even so, we should not assume that global finance capital has the same implications everywhere. Sunder Rajan (2017), for example, explores how the financialized, speculative Euro-American pharmaceutical industry has sought to “harmonize” clinical trials and patent law in India with “global standards” - i.e., standards amenable to their push for growth through both acquisitions and expanded consumer markets. He found that public mobilization, the Indian Supreme Court, and Indian manufacturers of generic pharmaceuticals shaped the extent to which global pharmaceutical giants could dictate the terms in India. Thus, it would be wrong to say that finance capital is irrelevant to the Indian national context, just as it would be wrong to say that finance capital simply controls the conditions for pharmaceuticals in India. Such variations suggest comparative questions about the systemic generation of futurelessness.
In a notorious example of austerity logic, Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) argued that excessive government debt, especially when it comes from public spending, leads to economic disaster since high debt levels trigger “crises in confidence” and “debt intolerance,” which will lead to punishing interest and exchange rates for undisciplined states.
It is important to clarify that futurelessness is not only a product of contemporary capitalism. Prior to the current financialization of the economy, for instance, the economists James Buchanan and Richard Wagner observed,
“Inflation destroys expectations and creates uncertainty; it increases the sense of felt injustice and causes alienation. It prompts behavioral responses that reflect a generalized shorting of time horizons. ‘Enjoy, enjoy’ – the imperative of our time – becomes a rational response in a setting where tomorrow remains insecure and where the plans made yesterday seem to have been made in folly” (quoted in Cooper 2017:31, emphasis added). The point is not that Buchanan and Wagner accurately diagnosed the social and moral consequences of inflation; it is only that the economic crisis appeared to them as alienating. What they attributed to inflation was, we would argue, the contextually-specific appearance of a phenomenon endemic to capitalism. Thus, we believe that the broad framework can apply, mutatis mutandis, to other periods of capitalist accumulation. But we focus on financial capitalism to provide a substantive basis for discussions and comparisons of futurelessness.
We appreciate that many people enjoy working and consuming. Our use of ‘involuntary’ signals the systemic imperative to work, make money, and consume. We address more ‘voluntary’ responses to such imperatives below.
Having too few options may certainly exhaust, as well. We take no strong position on whether too many or too few options are more likely to lead to futurelessness. Those are empirical questions. On excess versus scarcity in social science, see Abbott (2014).
As Gowan (2010) has shown, therapeutic discourse can be used to deny possibilities, too. She found that within the institutions managing homelessness, homeless people were routinely discouraged from imagining future possibilities and told to focus on the present and self-help.
Rorty on Entitled Opinions, 11/22/2005 [original air date], accessible here [accessed on 10/23/2019]: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/richard-rorty-future-philosophy-0; He clarifies that some version of a Nordic-style welfare state would be desirable, though this does not affect the substance of our claim.
There are two important qualifications. One, we make no claims to have exhaustively described futurelessness as a systemic or social form. This is a matter that we hope to explore elsewhere. Two, we see no reason why futurelessness will not also take distinct psychological forms. It may be worthwhile to consider the relations and distinctions between these forms of futurelessness.
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Both authors contributed equally in conception and execution. We thank Michael Berman, Zach Levenson, Rick Moore, Mustafa Yavaş, several anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their engagement, demands, and recommendations. An astonishingly receptive audience at the UNCG Ashby Dialogue on capitalism, democracy, and authoritarianism gave us much to think about and further confidence to proceed.
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Skotnicki, T., Nielsen, K. Toward a theory of alienation: futurelessness in financial capitalism. Theor Soc 50, 837–865 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09440-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09440-6