On ‘Capitalism’s New Clothes’ by Colin Cremin

Crisis, contradiction and collapse are more evident within capitalism than ever. The global financial system, still staggering to its feet after the 2008 collapse (at least in its public effects), lurches from crisis to crisis through the continued instability of the Euro and capital’s remaining over-accumulation. These crises have brought other contradictions into a different light. Inequality within the Western world has risen as the wealthy have increased their dominance over the labouring classes, and structural unemployment is proving stubbornly resistant to government intervention. Moreover, global ecological degradation continues unfettered and largely forgotten in the so-called age of austerity. Whilst climate change predictions are affirmed in front of our eyes, and the interests of capital persist in thwarting Leftist ambitions, there continues to be no ready alternative to capitalism, both in a practical and imaginary sense.

 

While everyone ‘knows’ that capitalism is both unjust and increasingly untenable, we continue to act as if it is not. More than that, capitalism continues to be enjoyable, inducing compliance not through restrictive barriers, but by structuring the very horizon of our desires. Not only have the agents of capital commodified desire such that enjoyment, identity and indeed the Western way of life come to be defined by consumption, but capital has colonised political imagination such that, to repeat Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited quip ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.

 

Yet, if both capitalism and our political imagination have reached a deadlock, so, it appears, has Marxism. Following the breakdown of strict determinist/scientific interpretations of the progress of history and the inevitable collapse of capitalism, cultural explanations dominated by critical theory, the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis came to the fore. Whilst these movements offered productive explanations as to the continued dominance of capitalism by allowing greater prominence to Marx’s notion of superstructure, they largely lost sight of the economic base upon which Marxism, and its critique of political economy, was founded. As a consequence, recent Leftist political practice has been predominately focused around explorations of social and cultural identity and the redistribution of surplus, as opposed to the production of that surplus itself[1]. It is as a result of the demise of the critique of political economy that Marxism has joined the deadlock of our times, unable to move from ‘knowing’ that capitalism is doomed to a form of political action.

 

It is from within these deadlocked circumstances that Colin Cremin’s Capitalism’s New Clothes begins. Cremin, a Marxist sociologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, examines the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced. Identifying primarily with the critical theoretical tradition and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Marxism, Cremin argues that the subjective and ideological processes of enterprise, ethics and enjoyment are the 21^st century injunctions through which capital continues to enslave bodies and minds despite increasingly apparent alienation, exploitation, crisis and failure.

 

Cremin supplements this ideological interpretation with a desire to return to the critique of political economy occupied by more traditional Marxist theory, suggesting that if Marxism has tended to neglect subjectivity and ideology, ‘disillusioned Marxists have neglected political economy’ (p.2). Ultimately, the value of his analysis for Marxist theory and practice rests upon the possibility for renewing the ideological critique of the capitalist super-structure in the 21^st century, whilst remaining committed to classical Marxist concerns about the ‘objectivity’ of the economy. This is a particularly difficult task and Cremin’s reference points – particularly the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory – are riddled with controversy in their adoption of the Marxist narrative.

 

Although Cremin’s analysis appears to require strong theoretical backing, Capitalism’s New Clothes attempts to walk a tight line between the necessity of these debates and the text’s accessibility to a wider audience that has not been introduced to either the Lacanian or Marxist lexicon. Whilst this approach is largely to be admired, in catering to a more popular audience Cremin omits or fails to do justice to some of the complex theoretical issues at the heart of the difficult interaction between Marxism, psychoanalysis and 21^st century capitalism.

 

In particular, although he openly identifies with psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory, regularly utilising concepts of desire and enjoyment, Cremin does not enter into the debate around the difficulties of breaking free from the kind of fantasmatic structures which make social and political change so difficult. Most pertinently, whilst he leans heavily upon psychoanalytic explanations to understand the paradoxical pleasures of capitalism, Cremin does not discuss the other side of the psychoanalytic equation – the Real and exclusion – which are at the core of Žižek’s politics. To some extent this should not be a specific criticism of Cremin’s work, as the explicit task of the text is to examine the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced as a precursor to finding ways to halt this reproduction.

 

Conversely, by offering such a convincing and enlightening reading of the reproduction of capitalism, Capitalism’s New Clothes leaves the reader – Marxist and lay alike – unsure of how we can move from the ‘pseudo-activity’ Cremin righty derides, to the proper activity and the ‘iCommunism’ briefly eluded to in Chapter Five (p.134).  As such, although Capitalism’s New Clothes does well to identify the structure of our illusions today and illustrate the value of a psychoanalytically informed Marxism, because it does not consider how to move past these ideological illusions, it risks inviting ever more cynicism from the reader: we now know very well the illusions through which we are imprisoned, but there is little that can be done about it. Moreover, it risks enhancing the suspicion amongst many critics that psycho-Marxism, and Žižek in particular, has little to say on these matters[2].

 

 

Escaping Ideology

 

While Cremin’s Marxist orientation aligns with the critical theory tradition, his starting notion is that the core of capitalism has not fundamentally changed and, as a consequence, the classical Marxist critique of political economy remains both valid and productive. As such, Cremin seeks to situate his critique within ‘a Marxism that subscribes to the labour theory of value without neglecting the complicated effects of desire and language on the capacity of workers to mount an effective challenge against capitalism’ (pp.5-6).

 

Because of the emphasis on restoring political economy, much of Cremin’s analysis is directed against left-liberalism and those who suggest that the mode of production is wholly defined by the relations of immaterial production, including sociologists Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Antony Giddens, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Here, Cremin (p.18-25) suggests that theorists too readily accept that the increasingly overt super-structural face of capitalism now constitutes the entirely of the system. Whilst acknowledging that Western capitalism has moved away from industrial production to be, ideologically at least, dominated by service industries, Cremin asserts that not only does material production play the key role in capitalism, but that the relationship between immaterial labour and capital is not fundamentally different from other forms of labour.  Here the dialectical tension between base and superstructure remains, although the shape of the super-structure has changed: it is these changes which are the basis of Capitalism’s New Clothes.

 

Capitalism’s New Clothes argues that the ideological face of capitalism – the mechanisms that direct how we think and feel in reaction to capitalism – has altered to react to the new demands and difficulties of production. This ideological defence of capitalism should not be thought of as a malign conspiracy theory – although the divisions between the super-elite and the masses do push in this direction – but the automated and subjectivised processes through which members of capitalist economies reproduce society in the interest of the agents of capital by fulfilling societal functions, demands and individual desires. Liberal capitalism does not seek to restrict the activities of its subjects, but it does structure the horizon of their desires[3].

 

The other side of this analysis of the ideological injunctions of capitalism is the construction of what Cremin labels ‘end-capitalism’. End-capitalism has arisen out of the ‘credit-crunch’ and a period of over-accumulation of capital for which all immediate solutions have been previously exhausted (pp.25-9). Moreover, ongoing global ecological degradation, in which the expansion of economic activity is producing environmental depletion and dangerous feedbacks in equal amounts, speaks to the very core of consumptive identity and the constitutive requirement for capital to expand. For Cremin we all ‘know’ that capitalism cannot go on indefinitely.

 

Nevertheless, it does – and, Capitalism’s New Clothes argues that we are enjoying it more than ever. To analyse this paradoxical situation in which we continue to enjoy capitalism despite it moving us ever quicker into an unknown abyss, Cremin focuses upon super-structure and ideology, ultimately suggesting that capitalist subjectivity is defined by dutiful enjoyment and unconscious cynicism. Here the subject outwardly recognises the naked contradictions of capitalism and our abject impotence in responding to these contradictions, yet is not motivated to act any differently, instead acting upon depoliticised and individualised desires and ethical identifications. The system is collapsing around us, but as long as there appears to be ethical solutions to these problems and political causes are kept at a distance, then there is no reason why individual desires cannot continue to be chased.

 

Such an analysis of the ‘happy consciousness’ is embedded in the critical theoretical interpretation of Marxism within which Cremin places Capitalism’s New Clothes. In particular, he relies upon psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory to understand the role of desire, enjoyment and ideology, the latter being heavily indebted to Žižek’s re-reading of the traditional Marxist understanding. Here Cremin attempts to avoid the ‘cruder materialism of more dogmatic versions of Marxism’ (p.2) by advancing a theory of ideology from which we cannot escape. Ideology, he argues, ‘is our reality. It enables us to make sense out of non-sense’ (p.1), linguistically binding the subject together.

 

Nonetheless, in constructing ideology as a linguistic phenomenon, Cremin does not dismiss materialism entirely. Whilst he moves away from the idea of ideology as a mere reflection of the material base, Cremin suggests that ‘Capitalism’s New Clothes subscribes to a form of ideological critique that makes use of materialist, linguistic and psychoanalytic concepts to theorise the individual and society at this critical juncture’ (p.2).

 

As a result, ideology should not only be understand as the discursive formations through which we make sense out of reality, or, rather through which reality itself is constructed, but has a material edge that binds these formations to the subject. Cremin’s recognition of the materialism of ideology has two vital dimensions, that of the economy and that of the body, reflecting Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations respectively.

 

Retaining a sense in which ideology not only reproduces our reality but does so in the image of the ruling classes – principally by excluding the contradictions within the system itself – allows Cremin to retain a reference to the ‘objective limit’ (p.3) provided by the economy and the possibility that ideological critique can be used to unveil the contradictions of the economy itself. Conversely, and vitally for the argument developed in Capitalism’s New Clothes, what prevents the unveiling of the truth of the mode of production is not just the power of class interests, but the other side of materialism, that of the body – an idea informed by psychoanalysis.

 

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, particularly that advanced by its most notable contemporary practitioner Žižek, suggests that the subject is constitutively alienated by the forced entry of the body into the symbolic order, an imposition that divides bodily instinct from symbolic-imaginary identifications. As a consequence, subjectivity is constituted by a negativity that cannot be extinguished, leading to an endless and excessive desire to return to the (impossible) wholeness of the body. Lacan called this process of lack and excess jouissance, a condition of bodily pleasure that goes beyond mere enjoyment[4].

 

Žižek utilises this Lacanian dialectical materialism to turn Marxist ideology on its head. Ideology remains a false form of consciousness, but is not simply a super-structure by which the universal truth of the relations of production is hidden under a particular illusion constructed by those who control the means of production.  Instead, Žižek argues that ideology represents an attempt to provide a totalising illusion that hides the ultimate and traumatic partiality of the human condition: ideological fantasy offers the means to elide the non-identity between individual and society, between the body and the symbolic order[5]. Such a definition is vital, allowing a much greater understanding of the role of subjectivity and ideology in reproducing capitalism. In particular, Žižek’s understanding of ideology inverts Marx’s classical notion that ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. Instead, Žižek (and here Cremin is in agreement) argues that the logic of ideology today is ‘they know it, but they are doing it anyway’[6]: the illusion is in the doing, not the knowing[7]. This cynicism allows the subject to consciously distance themselves from the contradictions within ideology, a vital move when ideology is under threat.

 

Conversely, Žižek’s Marxism, as practiced within Capitalism’s New Clothes, has proven to be a particularly controversial interpretation. Psychoanalysis and Marxism have a long and difficult relationship. First brought together within the Freudian Marxism of the likes of Eric Fromm, psychoanalysis was initially looked at to provide a theory of subjectivity to explain the continual flourishing of capitalism and the seduction of the working class, a tradition continued in Capitalism’s New Clothes. Yet, although long associated with the prospects of political emancipation, the central difficulty with the combination of these discourses is their respective political ambition. From its inception, Marxism has been defined by both the combination of theory and practice, but also a definite political direction. Whilst psychoanalysis shares the same identification with theory and practice in the name of evoking change, since Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents it has been openly sceptical of normative political ideas.

 

Cremin’s identification with Žižekian theory defines the text, bringing with it both the strengths and weaknesses of Capitalism’s New Clothes. It offers a renewed conception of ideology, critique and the limitations of political change. Moreover, it offers an explanation of the seemingly paradoxical condition in which we know of the failings of capitalism yet continue to act as if we do not. This new form of what Cremin, following Peter Sloterdijk and Žižek, calls ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (p.25) provides the Marxist problem today: how to evoke the contradictions of capitalism such that the threads of capitalism begin to unravel.

 

This is the Marxism question of our time – and many would be uneasy with the answers that both Cremin and Žižek provide. As I shall return to later, Žižek’s work is highly controversial in that he does not offer concrete solutions to our political predicament. Instead, he suggests that Marxism must focus on unveiling the contradictions within ideology in such a way that society cannot continue to reproduce itself. In particular Žižek is concerned with the kind of political practices that would subvert cynicism, constructing modes of politics that evoke the destructiveness of the Lacanian Real[8]. Capitalism’s New Clothes does not move to these considerations. Instead, it focuses on the first step in breaking from capitalism: understanding the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced and its contradictions disavowed. Cremin sets upon this task by reference to three thematic ‘injunctions’: enterprise, ethics and enjoyment.

 

 

Enjoyable Enslavement

 

Combining the basis tenants of Marxist theories of alienation and exploitation within a Lacanian understanding, Cremin suggests the emmently practical desire to be employable as a notable cause of our implicit daily endorsement of capital. Ironically, as capital fades and drags labour with it, the power of capital over labour has increased such that the pressure to be the object of our present or future boss’s desire – what Cremin labels ‘employability’ – pervades every aspect of the (potential) employee’s life. As the employee seeks employability, they are left to consider how to fulfil their bosses’ desire in order to move towards the ideal job (p.38) Here, not only are workers alienated and exploited by capital, but they are driven to embrace their employability as ‘every stage of exploitation is a stepping stone along the slow march to ideal employment’ (p.43).

 

Yet, while we may be able to obtain the object of our desire, the lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the cause of desire can never be fulfilled: as the lack which is constitutive of the human condition remains, we are continually pushed onto the next ideal under the fantasmatic belief that it will fill this lack. Thus, the desire for employability can never be sated. No matter how many skills and experiences are added to our CV or steps are taken up the organisational chain, desire remains. Thus, not only are workers alienated in their employment, but this alienation itself is exploited by enterprise as the desire for employability is actualised as a commodity in the job market.

 

Here tradition Marxist notions of alienation come into contact with psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and lack. Alienation, at least in the critical theory tradition of the younger Marx, occurs when our creative capacity as humans is channelled into the production of commodities. By contrast, for Lacan the subject is constitutively alienated by its entry into the world of language in which bodily instinct is irrevocably separated from the symbolic-imaginary universe. It is this alienating lack that is commandeered by capital to coerce the desire for employability. Conversely, our constitutive subjective alienation does not mean that Marx’s notion no longer stands, just that there is no non-alienated place to which to return.

 

The effect of employability, Cremin explains, is that ‘the subject who strives for employability does so only in order to be materially exploited by capital. In this way the capitalist jouissance (for surplus value) is knotted with proletarian jouissance (for material security) (p.56)’. So, while workers are exploited in the name of surplus-value (no matter how immaterial the production process), their alienation is constructed in such a way to suggest that with the next step up the employment ladder this lack will be erased. Thus, Cremin suggests that while the worker remains materially exploited, they are also libidinally exploited as desire is co-opted, managed and focused into extending the interests of capital (ibid.). The key for psychoanalytic interpretations of Marxism, Cremin contends, is to seek to change the former whilst recognising the constitutive elements of the latter.

 

There is no hidden secret in the operation of employability. As Cremin contends, employees’ actively invest in enterprise and the fate of capital. The downfall of capital is the (short-term) downfall of labour: workers not only need capital to expand, but they seek to be more employable to receive the benefits of this expansion. Employability, Cremin notes (p.69), is entirely unavoidable at this time – it is currently the only feasible mechanism for the worker to materially reproduce themselves. To actively resist is counter-productive: even Marxist academics must play the game.

 

Instead, a standard reaction to this process has been the active process of disidentifying from our employment roles: when workers identify outside of employment but continue to fulfil their symbolic mandate. The worker knows they have to go along with the terms set by capital, but attempts to distance themselves by mocking their own identification (p.64), a cynical strategy that may allow for a more tolerable identity, but does not alter either the workers’ actions nor the relationship between capital and labour.

 

This kind of pseudo-activity is the dominant feature of Cremin second theme, ethics. Directing his critique at depoliticised liberal ethics, Cremin argues that capital has been able to appropriate ethical clothing for its own benefit, such that ‘the determinable locus of the crisis is rendered indeterminate by an ideology, promulgated on the left, that decentres the capitalist laws of motion by expanding the circumference of possible causes of crises with all their manifest symptoms’ (p.74).

 

Here class struggle and the systematic functioning of capitalism are disavowed and instead left-liberal ideologies present the symptoms of capitalism as manageable elements without a central cause or link to the mode of production. Moreover, these ethical elements are converted into commodities through which companies manipulate guilt and enjoyment to induce consumption in the name of a charitable cause: we literally spend our way deeper into capitalism in order to respond to the symptoms it reproduces.

 

In this way, Cremin suggests, individuals are not faced with the overwhelming collapse of end-capitalism, but manageable symptoms that can be responded to within the system – or so the fantasy goes. Moreover, these ethical responses are to be enjoyed, most particularly through the consumption of commodities that represent our ethical ‘identity’, such as Fairtrade items or Bono’s ‘RED’ range (p.100).

 

Whilst there is some value in an ethical response that responds to the symptoms of capital or which preaches tolerance, Cremin suggests that the effect is to flatten all demands into an equivalence such that tolerating different lifestyle choices is placed on the same level as the abject material inequality produced in the interests of capital (p.76). The problem is that symptoms that can be easily countered and included within capitalism – matters of identity that can diversify the consumptive base – are favoured over those symptoms that speak to the core of the contradictions of capitalist political economy. These symptoms are necessarily recognised – we all know about the suffering in Africa or the changing global climate – but the cause is particularised and commodified into more manageable elements.

 

Malaria and AIDS, for instance, can be attended to and vastly reduced through concentrated campaigns involving corporate and political goodwill. These problems are certainly symptoms of capitalism, breeding off the poverty and political insecurity constructed under globalised capital, but there is no reason why they cannot be responded to within capitalism. On the other hand, constitutive symptoms such as absolute poverty, exploitation and inequality, along with ecological degradation, are included within the same category as those particular symptoms that Left-liberals have been able to manage. Without a wider conception of the mode of production, these problems appear entirely manageable within the capitalist horizon.

 

Although Cremin does not expand on this point in detail, perhaps the foremost fantasy of ethical agency within capital is that of democracy. Democratic ideology suggests that all citizens within expressly democratic states have the opportunity to participate in the process of deciding how the country should be organised. What this fantasy elides is the limits placed on this action: not only the obvious limitations of voter apathy and the dictatorship of the majority, such that most elected governments have the official support of around a quarter of the population, but that the key economic elements involved in the material reproduction of society are outside of democratic control. Through neo-liberal reforms this has become increasingly apparent as the state apparatus is sold-off piece by piece. More pertinently, the demands of financial capital have revealed that, in Žižek’s terms, capital is the Real of our time, placing a hard limit on the kind of action available to elected governments[9]. To attempt to raise taxes, advance workers’ rights, protect the environment or provide health care is only possible if the agents of finance do not object.

 

And yet, the democrat fantasy continues. The strongest rebuke to the ‘Occupy’ movement that arose in 2011 has been that the activists should utilise the democratic political process. That if the people really believed in their cause – if they were really the 99% – then their political party would be elected to power[10]. Such a position reveals both the overwhelming fantasy of democratic participation and limitations of democracy itself. Moreover, it suggests that democracy is the ultimate ideology of capitalism: an ideology that is seen to be beyond ideology[11].

 

Cremin’s third injunction is enjoyment. Here he argues that desire and excess are constitutive of the human condition, the issue not being enjoyment, but the form it takes (p.109).  Although desire has no necessary object, it has been all but colonised by capital such that, today, the elementary form of desire is that of consumption. Commodities represent the fantasy of a certain identity or life-style, but when this object is obtained the cause of desire remains and is pushed onto to yet another product that will (supposedly) fulfil our fantasy. In this way, Cremin suggests, we are not forced to comply with the interests of capital. Rather, providing the consumptive desire that capital feeds off is a ‘natural’ process, such is the degree to which identity and ideology are intertwined with the interests of capital. The greatest exemplifier of this process is the idea that restricting our capacity to consume, whether through state regulation or economic scarcity, is considered a constraint on our essential freedom.

 

This overt co-option of desire has been driven by the almost simultaneous left-liberal drive towards the expression of identity and diversity, and the requirement for over-accumulated capital to find a wider range of markets, shifting the locus of Western identity from the place of production to consumption (p.111). Capitalism, Cremin suggests, has ‘liberated the forces of desire’, but these forces have been commodified to allow their reproduction in a way that allows for capitalism to be expand. Here enjoyment becomes a duty, inter-passive and demanded by society. If the Freudian super-ego demanded restraint, Lacan argued that our societal duty is to enjoy (p.112). As a result, 21^st century Western societies have moved from Herbert Marcuse’s one dimensional culture to what Cremin labels ‘undimensional’ enjoyment, exemplified by the role of celebrity culture (pp.125-30).

 

The psychoanalytic question, one upon which Cremin’s argument rests, is what to do with the excess in enjoyment. It is also here that Cremin gets closer to identifying an alternative mode of politics[12], both in suggesting that the cause of our desire needs to be decoupled from the commodity that is identified as the object of the our desire to produce what he labels ‘iCommunism’ (p.134), and that it would be dominated by a revolutionary excess, which he referred to earlier in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of transgression and the Lacanian act (pp.73-5), to which I shall soon return.

 

Whilst the former identification can be referenced to the early Marx and his insistence upon freedom as the basis of a mode of communism freed from the demands of material surplus, there is precious little consideration of how to get to this point. Moreover, the complex psychoanalytic debates around the status of surplus/excess are not given an airing[13]. Such an omission is symptomatic of the more popular and condensed style of the text, and here Cremin admits that ‘Scholars of Marx, or for that matter Lacan, will no doubt find shortcomings in the way concepts are appropriated. Sacrifices are made and liberties are taken with the theories used, but the end result hopefully justifies the means’ (p.6).

 

To some degree we should agree with Cremin on this score, as too often these disciplines disappear into deep theoretical debates that lose sight of the overall purpose of widespread political and psychological emancipation. Capitalism’s New Clothes is both an excellent introduction to the value of a psychoanalytic or Žižekian approach to Marxist analysis and provides a particularly convincing reading into the operation of capitalism, one that considers super-structural interpretations of ideology and subjectivity whilst insisting upon the primacy of more classical Marxist notions of base and the mode of production. The ultimate value of this approach for Marxist analysis is to provide a renewed sense of the operation of ideology in the 21^st century, both in terms of the contextual mechanisms of that ideology, identifying, for instance the role of ethical management, unbridled yet commodified enjoyment and cynicism in reproducing capitalism in the face of its increasingly apparent contradictions, as well as providing a rehabilitated notion of ideology itself, one that is neither a direct representation of class interests nor a moment of discursive contingency. Indeed, this is the central strength of Cremin’s analysis – the ability to combine Marxist and psychoanalytic materialism into an ideological critique of capitalism.

 

At the same time, the underlying effect of this analysis – exemplified by the penultimate chapter on ecology – is strong pessimism. The natural Marxist question to stem from Cremin’s (psycho)analysis is ‘What can be done – how can we break from the enjoyment that binds ideology and subjectivity to the interests of capital?’  Moreover, given Cremin’s insistence upon the continued salience of the labour theory of value and political economy, do the more traditional notions of class struggle and the proletariat still hold political traction?

 

Whilst each chapter of Capitalism’s New Clothes concludes with a brief reflection on the possibilities for breaking with the identified mechanism, this is certainly not the main thrust of the text. Instead, Cremin is intent of revealing why capitalism is able to reproduce itself – it is unclear whether he holds any real sense in which ideology could be broken. This might not be a specific criticism of the text, given its stated aim to understand why capitalism remains so seductive, not how to break from its grasp. Nonetheless, it is necessary to consider the consequences of the content and style of Cremin’s analysis, particularly in regards to the practice of psychoanalytic/Žižekian Marxism.

 

 

The Prospects for Practicing Psycho-Marxist Politics

 

The strengths and weaknesses of Capitalism’s New Clothes are reflected in Cremin’s analysis of ecology in the penultimate chapter. Cremin productively reflect upon the constitutive inability to respond to the global ecological crisis within a mode of production that demands and requires ever increasingly economic growth and offers a psychoanalytic reading of the pleasures of ignoring such a crisis in the name of commodified enjoyment and ethical management. Not only has ‘Green’ become the ethical code word for much of left-liberalism, but it has become big business as well with companies seeking to appropriate some of the ethical value in the signifier. Naturally, none of this is part of an effective response to the global ecological crisis.

 

Indeed, ecology operates as the ultimate impossible limit of capitalism, as economic growth is unable to solve the problem, nor are we able to repress the jouissance of consumption. As Cremin quotes Beck in suggesting (p.153), any politics that wishes to remain within the parameters of capital and respond to ecology must become an ‘anti’ politics, creating ‘a kind of international case system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to (energy) poverty in perpetuity’.

 

Yet, Capitalism’s New Clothes offers no particular response to either the crisis of ecology or Leftist political practice, leaving itself almost in a place of cynicism – psychoanalytic inclined Marxists know that the world is doomed, but there is nothing that can be done about it as the depoliticisation of ecological degradation has left it without a political subject who is either responsible for the mess or is capable of providing a solution.  In this sense, the ideological identification and critique of cynicism is no more effective than the left-liberal pseudo-activity that Cremin so heartily rejects. If the problem presented in Capitalism’s New Clothes is that knowledge about the failure of the system does not lead to change in the system, then it is also doubtful that knowledge about this kind of cynicism will make a direct difference either. Instead, and perhaps this is what should be taken from Cremin’s work, ideological analysis and critique can provide an opportunity to reconsider the possibilities for political action today.

 

There is much more to be said, however, on the relationship between psychoanalysis, Marxism and political action. Although Lacan was critical of the prospects for utilising psychoanalysis for political ends, an extensive political discourse has developed around his work[14]. This discourse has two sides: the analysis of ideological attempts to move past the constitutive lack around which sociality is riven and the analysis of the necessary failure of these attempts and the presence of the Real. Based around the concepts of jouissance, fantasy and desire, the first form of analysis provides both a commonplace and effective mode of ideological critique, which Cremin has used to great effect in this text, although his notion of the non-commodified enjoyment of ‘iCommunism’ appears under-developed.

 

Conversely, the other side of psychoanalysis holds a more destructive power, one at which Cremin only hints. For Lacan, humanity is inherently alienated through our entry into language, which creates an incompleteness that we strive to overcome throughout our existence. This striving is defined by desire and framed by ideological fantasies through which we make sense out of the non-sense of reality. In order to create this coherent framework, however, something must be lost or excluded. Lacan suggests that this point of failure marks the presence of the Real, that impossible point within a discourse that is only visible in its effects[15]. As a consequence, the Real holds with it a political destructiveness that Cremin hints at in his reference to the ‘psychoanalytic notion of transgression’ (p.73) and Žižek’s ‘politics of the impossible’, which Capitalism’s New Clothes ‘openly endorses’ (p.3).

 

These politics, however, are in no way straightforward, bringing with them a number of controversies and interpretations, particularly around the destructiveness of the political approach and the difficulty of instituting ‘the politics of the Real’ within the Marxist tradition that relies upon a normative understanding. This review is not the place to consider these objections, but it is worth noting both that Žižek’s interpretation of Marxism moves beyond that presented in Capitalism’s New Clothes and that these politics have proven troublesome.

 

Nonetheless, there is a strong value in Žižek’s approach – particularly given the corner into which Cremin paints himself. The implicit conclusion of Capitalism’s New Clothes is that capitalism has reached a stage in which its contradictions are without political traction. If knowledge of the symptoms and contradictions of capitalism have not proved any political traction, as Cremin suggests, it is also doubtful whether an awareness of this cynicism will prove any more effective. Thus, whilst Cremin strongly suggests that we have reached a stage of end-capitalism in which the ‘twin crises of economy and ecology present us with the objective limits of [the] system’ (p.3) and that we need to enter into the politics of end capitalism, he gives no indication as to how this might occur and the implied conclusion is that only capitalism can decide when it is finished.

 

Žižek makes a similar conclusion in the sense that capitalism is collapsing upon itself and no alternative currently exists[16]. Yet, his are not a politics of patience, but an overtly Marxism consideration of the evoking the revolutionary overhaul of political economy by reference to the Real aspects that it excludes from itself, most pertinently the excluded masses of the new lumpenproletariat, to whom Cremin makes brief reference (p.26) but does not consider any further consequences. It is these excluded masses – the central contradiction within the capitalist mode of production and the point of exclusion within its ideological image – that provides the strongest political traction.

 

If Capitalism’s New Clothes ends with the conclusion that there is no subject of climate change and thus no prospect of driving revolutionary change other than the contradictions of capitalism itself,  Žižek begs to differ. Certainly, capitalism remains ideologically seductive, but it also continues to produce the germs of its own demise. While Cremin was keen to assert that 21^st century capitalism should not be considered only as super-structure, as if the ideological mechanisms he uncovers were the totality of capital, and draws our attention back to the economic foundations of capital, those economic foundations played only a small role in his analysis.

 

There is considerable value in the critical theory tradition of ideological critique, and Cremin adds much to this in his analysis of the ideological mechanisms that dominate capitalism today. Ideology seduces bodies and minds not through repression but through structural mechanisms that make the reproduction of capitalism appear to be entirely ‘natural’, whether through injunctions of ethics, employability or enjoyment. Conversely, Marxism should be careful to move away from the contradictions that define capitalism. This is the ultimate value of Žižek’s Marxism: the ability to both engage with ideology and reveal the structural contradictions that continue to haunt Marxism.

 

Nonetheless, these contradictions should not be considered in isolation from ideology. If capitalism is to be taken as naked, ideology itself must come to grips with the Real. Whilst Capitalism’s New Clothes reasserts the value of psychoanalytic Marxism for understanding capitalism, enjoyment and the subsequent limits of critique, it goes no further in advancing the valid concerns that psychoanalysis constructs a discursive prison from which it cannot escape. More than that, by not asserting any psychoanalytic possibility for breaking free of these limits, Cremin advances the suspicion that psychoanalysis has nothing more to say on these matters.

 

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