10 Membranes

» Mervyn King Admits Validity of the Concept of False Consciousness

Not in so many words, but effectively. Here is what he says: the City is responsible for the crash, and the ensuing bank bailouts; these, between them are responsible for the recession and the parlous government finances; these mainly effect people who had nothing to do with what caused them; he is surprised there isn’t more anger about this. 

How could this be? That hoary old Marxist nugget, false consciousness, basically seems about the only workable solution as to why the anaesthetized population of Britain refuses to adequately express anger at what amounts to a massive screwing over by the wealthy on everyone else. It is really, truly extraordinarily shocking when you think about it, but everyone has been drinking the free-market monetarist Kool Aid for so long that they cannot see their own interests, but rather endorse and collude with the minority interests that work against their own. What is fascinating is just how obvious this contradiction has become, underscoring how entrenched and immoveable an ideological strangehold the contemporary false consciousness is. We live in discourses of wealth and freedom that are quite clearly lies – the rich have gotten much richer over the past 30 years, everyone has seen income stagnate – yet people have, in that classic move pioneered by the American Dream, identified their interests with a faint possibility, an illusory carrot, rather than with what is really in their interests, to wit, a more rational distribution of wealth.

The only other factor might be trends noted by the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Zygmunt Bauman. Bourdieu introduced the idea of precarization, the making precarious of people’s positions as a means of social control, expressed perhaps most perfectly in the shifting of power within labour relations in favour of capital. Bauman extends and expands this in his idea of liquid modernity, a place where relations of all kinds lose their fixity and become mobile. He argues that under modernity capital and labour were geographically embedded with one another; they always knew that settlements and accommodations had to be reached as they were not going away and would need an ongoing relationship to function at all.

In liquid modernity this changes. Where labour remains tied to location, capital has become innately mobile, and uses the constant threat of withdrawal as a means of control, shattering the symmetry and destroying the necessary accord, and so stacking the cards entirely in its favour such that it can do as it pleases. The locationally grounded is trumped by the locationally loosed. Bauman was writing this in about 2000; what is incredible is quite how naked this process has become. It is the constant explicit threat: if you don’t like we what we are doing, or make any steps against us, we will leave. The divorce between the locationally tied masses and the elite mobility of capital is quite openly outlined, the gun of tax haven decamping is an ever present one held hard against the head of the populace. This is contemporary capitalism.  

Mervyn King is a Marxist sociologist.