Futures and Fictions Read online

  MF: This reminds us that, in Thatcher’s notorious remark that I referred to above, she talked of there being “only individuals and their families”. These experiments in collective living cannot but make us aware of the ways in which, under capitalism, and especially since the defeat of the counterculture, the family has re-asserted itself as a massive normative force. In her 1979 essay “The Family: Love It or Leave It”, the late music and cultural critic Ellen Willis noted that the counterculture’s desire to replace the family with a system of collective child-rearing would have entailed “a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude”. Given the failure of that revolution, we are now faced with a situation aptly described by Helen Hester as “domestic realism”, in which the fundamental structures of domestic organisation — physical as well as psychic and cultural structures — have become so embedded that it is difficult to imagine them ever shifting. Experiments like Narkomfin do the crucial work of reminding us that domestic space can be organised in very different ways.

  J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise (recently adapted for cinema by Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump) can be read as a parable about the thwarted desire to escape privatised luxury, and also about the pathologisation of the spaces beyond domestic realism. The inhabitants of the high-rise are all privileged, with the less wealthy living on the lower floors and the super-rich occupying the top of the building. The novel recounts the breakdown of the privatised luxury cells, and the emergence of tribalised groupings, as the high-rise becomes dominated by atavistic violence and Hobbesian struggle. I read this as an analysis of the bourgeoisie’s simultaneous attraction towards, and abhorrence of, the possibilities of life beyond current forms of domestic privatisation. There is a discontent with the current repressions and boundaries, but any attempt to move beyond these strictures will only result in breakdown and savagery. Of course, this savagery is really only a projection of current social relations; it is just that the bourgeoisie is for the most part insulated from the kind of violent struggle that the novel describes. The light and serenity of Narkomfin breaks with the whole reactionary imaginary that High-Rise describes. The world beyond capitalist privatisation can simultaneously be orderly and playful, collective and creative.

  But I suppose one obvious objection to luxury communism is that it is not the limits set by the bourgeois imagination which make it impossible, it is ecological limits: a society based around the principle of “everything for everyone” would, it has been argued, only be possible on the basis of practices that are simply not sustainable.

  JT: Yes, within the capitalist conception of luxury, luxury for all would immediately lead to the destruction of life on Earth. Luxury communism does not tackle the ecological question directly, but it does invite us to think about the relationship between ecological devastation and human pleasure. Despite climate change being a profound threat to all life, the ecological movement has struggled with the problem of how to make resistance to climate change into a truly mass phenomenon. In meetings towards the end of Climate Camp, you would often hear people talking about the problem of sounding like we were preaching green austerity. There was a very strange period at the beginning of the Coalition government and the age of austerity, when the rhetoric of belt-tightening which they used was like a sick echo of ecological rhetoric. An anti-austerity communist ecology would need to be recast as part of the general project of the advancement of human pleasure. The intersection of Earth First! and rave culture in the 1990s was a version of this. There is also something quite luxury communist about part of the spirit of deep ecology; there is plenty about it which is really anti-human as well, but the idea that we should organise society in such a way as to prioritise the aesthetic and spiritual joy of forests and mountains is not alien to luxury communism.

  Politicising the sensual pleasure of the natural sublime also links to the politicising of sensuousness generally. The queer liberation of sex from the dour capitalist constraints of binary gender and reproductive labour is also an aspect of any communist luxury. A wonderful embodiment of this principle is the work of Jack Smith, a filmmaker from the 1960s, whose work absolutely captures the luxuriating, voluptuous spirit of luxury communism. Jack Smith used B-movie tropes and images of sensual luxuriation to create visions of camp, surreal utopias. His films are pantheons of pleasures, inhabited by a bejewelled cast of gleeful queers. They are images of life beyond capitalism, beyond patriarchy; an Atlantis of luxuriant sex and camp splendour, which pushes at the limits of the aesthetic and political imagination. Smith’s manifesto Capitalism in Lotusland (1977) outlines his project for utopian art:

  Let art continue to be entertaining, escapist, stunning, glamorous, and NATURALISTIC — but let it also be loaded with information worked into the vapid plots of, for instance, movies. Each one would be a more or less complete exposition of one subject or another. Thus you would have Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh busily making yogurt; Humphrey Bogart struggling to introduce a basic civil law course into public schools; infants being given to the old in homes for the aged by Ginger Rogers; donut-shaped dwellings with sunlight pouring into central patios for all, designed by Gary Cooper; soft, clear plastic bubble cars with hooks that attach to monorails built by Charlton Heston that pass over the Free Paradise of abandoned objects in the center of the city near where the community movie sets would also be; and where Maria Montez and Johnny Weismuller would labour to dissolve all national boundaries and release the prisoners of Uranus.

  The excessiveness of luxury does raise the question of whether the demand for “luxury for all” is much use in a world where the first urgent steps a communist project needs to take are the provision of solid housing, adequate food and healthcare for all. As you have already touched on, Mark, I think the answer to this is that utopian slogans and imaginary realities have a role to play even in a present thrumming with the dull roar of dystopia. The science-fiction and fantasy author Ursula Le Guin has said that in order to concretely create the future, we need to reach beyond narrow capitalist realism: we need poetry and visions of a larger reality. We need to invent fictions about the future, in order to then make them real. This is not just about escapism, in the sense of creating an unreality to take refuge in — though I would argue that escapism is a legitimate, even necessary tool for psychological and imaginative survival within capitalist realism. We build counterpower simultaneously to end capitalism and to survive within it whilst we fight against it; to survive subjectively as well as materially. Our life stories and selves are spitefully measured by a capitalism which demands tireless emotional labour and perpetual performance improvement. Countering — or shooting high beyond — these demands with demands for the grandiose utopias of our imagination can be a way to emotionally renege on the pressure to internalise capitalism’s assessment of ourselves, and refract disposability back onto the system itself.

  MF: I think the provocative concept of luxury communism makes three important moves in the context of recent political struggles. Firstly, the positing of a positive concept — or two positive concepts — provides a break from the tendency to think of left-wing politics solely in terms of resistance and opposition. Framing what we are doing as a struggle for luxury communism rather than against capitalism moves us beyond the automatisms of anti-capitalism. One criticism that has frequently been made of left-wing politics in recent years is that it is clear about what it does not want — capitalism — but is less clear about what it does want. I think this criticism has been justified, and it is not always made by sneering right-wingers. Sometimes it is people who are sympathetic to the left-wing critique of capitalism who have made this point. Particularly after the financial crisis, those people understand all too well the problems with capitalism. What many who are discontented with capitalism cannot imagine is any alternative. This inability to even imagine an alternative is part of what I meant by capitalist realism, and moving beyond capitalist realism entails shifting the emphasis away from capitalism.
r />   Positing something like luxury communism as a positive goal means that we can start to see capitalism as a force of resistance and obstruction. You could say that luxury communism names what capitalism must block in order for it to remain capitalism. This also allows us to reclaim the concept of communism. Perhaps even more so than it did in the Cold War, the concept of communism designates an outside, something which, according to capitalist realism, is as unthinkable as it is undesirable. Now that the Soviet system is a receding referent, there is the opportunity to both rediscover and invent a meaning for communism. At the simplest level, communism can be understood as a social system which maximises the collective capacity to share, care and enjoy: “Everything for everyone”. The concept of luxury communism can help with this reclaiming of the concept of communism.

  Secondly, I think the concept breaks what you might call capitalism’s monopoly on libido. This is what the Levi’s Jeans represented — the idea that only capitalism could produce desirable goods. In the 1980s, there was a UK TV advertisement that played on these associations, showing a teenager smuggling Levi’s into the USSR. This led, quickly, to the conclusion that only capitalism is desirable. This was a mainstay of Cold War propaganda, and of the propaganda that was disseminated after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Ultimately, the reason that communism won’t succeed is that nobody wants it. As you suggest, the concept of luxury communism disarticulates communism from the associations with anti-libidinal drabness. More than that, it invokes a wealth, a “red plenty”, to use Francis Spufford’s term, that makes capitalism’s products seem somewhat tawdry. This is the point that the fictionalised Nikita Krushchev makes in Spufford’s Red Plenty (an extraordinary work, which is very definitely a part of the luxury communist canon): yes, capitalism has produced all kinds of wonders, but it has done so in a chaotic and haphazard way. What would it be like if this wondrous production was managed in the interests of all?

  The third important contribution that the concept alone makes is to shift us out of our current cognitive defaults. As you outlined, according to those defaults, “luxury” and “communism” are antonyms; their conflation does not make sense. So even beginning to think about what luxury communism might mean starts to unglue the habituated patterns of thought established by capitalist realism; it makes demands on the imagination, it already puts us into another world.

  JT: Yes, that is exactly the function of the concept: it is nonsensical, and as such invites you to invent new meanings for “luxury” and “communism”, which immediately sets you off imagining some form of utopia.

  MF: I wonder if the emphasis on utopia is right here, though. I worry that the exiling of left-wing ambitions to a utopian space is the flipside of capitalist realism. Capital seizes what is realistic, what is pragmatically realisable, and we are left with the utopian. It seems to me that one crucial challenge implicit in the idea of luxury communism is the idea that, as you say, there is a sense in which this is actually possible now. The obstructions to an egalitarian reorganisation and redistribution of resources are not material or technological: they are political. So I would suggest that, rather than aligning with utopianism, we should develop a communist realism. Luxury communism is not only radically different from how we live now — it is also realistic, and realisable. It is only nonsensical from the point of view of a system that is itself a nonsense. It is only unrealistic from the point of view of a system which cannot be sustained, and which is prepared to risk everything in order to preserve its own fantasies.

  JT: Formulating a hegemonic communist realism is exactly what we need to do! Ecological destruction, economic crisis, automation — the material conditions of the present show up the idea of business-as-usual as hopelessly unrealistic. We just have to knuckle down and accept that we are never going to be able to turn the clock back to the neoliberal heyday of the early 1990s! But what we as luxury communist realists need to pull off is the idea that, as the neoliberal status quo begins to melt, dystopia is not inevitable. And I think that unbridled utopianism can play a role in that, by permitting us to imagine versions of the future which are not just dystopias. We need to create a discursive space in which it is not just permissible, but necessary and realistic, to imagine futures we want. To outline them. Plan them. When I interview people about what they want for the future of the world, I often find that they are uncomfortable about expressing desire on a social, rather than individual, level, because it seems preposterous and unrealistic. Creating space for world-desire is the mode of utopianism which luxury communism gestures towards, I think.

  MF: I suppose our disagreement here — which may only be terminological — is that you are seeing utopianism as compatible with (communist) realism, whereas I see utopianism as pointing to something quite different from realism, rhetorically and strategically. I absolutely agree that we have to generate possible futures that are not dystopian, but I do not think that utopia is the only alternative to dystopia. As you suggest, there is a kind of dialectical equivalence of the utopian and the dystopian in the current, collapsed form of neoliberalism. The attempt to save the neoliberal utopia is making dystopia more and more likely.

  I think I would prefer to talk about hyperstition — which has been defined as the process whereby fictions make themselves real — than utopianism. Much of capitalism functions through hyperstitional processes. In fact, you could argue that capital itself is a hyperstition. At a smaller level, the various techniques of hype which capital uses — in which positing the success of a product helps to ensure that very success — are good examples of hyperstitional practices. I believe we need to think about what a communist hyperstitional practice would look like. You could say that the whole theory of class consciousness from György Lukács onwards was an attempt to do just that. Class consciousness would be a kind of self-fulfilling circuit, whereby the new revolutionary subject would produce itself. Class consciousness does not passively reflect an already-existing state of affairs: it actively intervenes to produce something new.

  It is important to extend this kind of analysis to the more “molecular” level of consciousness-raising, something that I know we are both interested in. One problem that the left has had is convincing people that political activity will yield results in the immediate — or at least medium — term, not only in some impossibly distant future. Thinking of what we are doing in terms of consciousness-raising — which in one of its dimensions is the collective practice of dis-identification from dominant categories, concepts and forms of subjectivity — is one way of shifting that. The most important transformation of consciousness — and it has never been more important than in neoliberal conditions of compulsory individualisation — is the recognition that there are common causes for what we ordinarily experience as individual misery. It is not my fault — it is capitalist-patriarchy. We might “know” this, but such knowledge is empty if we cannot feel it and live it, and everything in capitalist culture is designed to make us doubt what we know, and to live and feel inside capitalist categories and concepts. It is only by being together in a particular way that we can break out of this.

  One way of seeing neoliberalism — and the broader neoliberal culture — is as a set of practices specifically designed to obstruct consciousness-raising. Perhaps the most potent weapon in this struggle has been time poverty, and here we can return to the question of luxury. Thinking about having time to luxuriate makes us realise the extent to which time poverty is endemic now. Even the rich seem to lack this capacity for luxuriating. In fact, the rich seem to pride themselves on not having the time to luxuriate. CEOs and other capitalists enthusiastically embrace the domination of their lives by work. It is conspicuous labour rather than conspicuous consumption.

  Time poverty obstructs consciousness-raising, because consciousness-raising requires time: a particular mode of time — a time of absorption and care — which it is extremely difficult to muster in current conditions of precarity and digital twitch. At the moment, there i
s a vicious circle in place. What we want is more time — time to go boating! But we need time now in order to be able to plan and struggle for the liberation of time in the future. The immediate challenge for luxury communism is to intervene in this vicious circle: to find ways of sharing and multiplying the meagre temporal resources we already have. How can we luxuriate now? How can we begin to re-train ourselves to experience time in a way that escapes capitalist imperatives and urgencies?

  JT: My use of utopia is informed by the anarchist use of it, the idea of the propulsive utopia, which animates prefigurative action in the present, which creates space. So the creation of shared time to spend in consciousness-raising groups in which we have the luxury of absorption and mutual care, according to my gloss on it, is utopian. But the word famously is riven by this double-meaning (good-place/no-place), simultaneously signifying hope’s ultimate realisation and its futility. So maybe hyperstition refers better to the luxury-communist-realist emphasis on the realisation of desire. None of this answers the question of time though, which I agree is the most pressing one to answer when considering how to build utopia now, or to hypersitise luxury communism.