Unlike previous forms of production and social relations, which were essentially based on continuity and the preservation of existing conditions and on the “unchanged maintenance of the old order of production,” the capitalist mode of production exists by continuously and relentlessly revolutionizing the instruments of production and the social relations in which it is structured, making incessant change its very foundation. The “total mobilization” of entities is its inescapable basis.
Such prerogatives can be attributed with even greater justification to what Pasolini already classified as “revolutionary, progressive, and unifying neo-capitalism,” which transforms everything in the name of progress, unifying the entire world under the sign of the same, that is, the fetishized economy. What in previous modes of production existed in stable and rigid, if not petrified, forms is now becoming liquid and mutable:
“The constant agitation of production, the incessant questioning of all social conditions, uncertainty and perpetual movement distinguish the bourgeois era from all those that preceded it.”
This trend, inscribed in the premises and promises of capital since its dawn, can be considered fulfilled with the transition to the current absolute phase, corresponding to the era of global flexibility and universal transience.
Everything that was solid has dissolved into thin air and liquefied. There is no longer any stable foundation that can withstand it. To paraphrase Habermas, capital is a “completed project,” fully realized in the real and symbolic immanence of production and exchange.
The precariousness of the real and the symbolic is one of the founding premises and promises of the capitalist power relationship, which today has reached in actu correspondence with its own concept through the function of the universal transience of flexible accumulation. The acceleration of the pace and intensification of the production and circulation of goods, as a result, among other things, of the planned obsolescence dictated by fashion, reveal how the virtual basis of capitalism and the concrete basis of the absolute is that “creative destruction,” the zerstörende Aufbau der Welt evoked by Kafka, which, as a true fury of dissipation that dissolves everything, causes any solid reality to evaporate. Herein lies the intimately nihilistic essence of capital and its cupio dissolvi, as well as the essence of the flexibilization and acceleration that prevail today.
The actions of the abstract intellect promote the interest of the empirical particular against the universal, with the consequence, for Hegel, that it is possible to maintain that “in civil society, the Idea has been lost in particularity,” in the atomistic plurality of unrelated and irreducibly conflicting parts.
A fractured social world is born, in which social inequalities and class divisions are inherent; a realm in which “disproportionate wealth is concentrated in a few hands” and the community dissolves under the unregulated competitive and individualistic pressure of the animal spirits of the economy.
In the dialectical and bourgeois phase, centered on the element of Sittlichkeit—morality—the foundation was provided by security and stability, which also tended to translate into alienation and monotony in the life of the Fordist factory, masterfully immortalized by Robert Linhart in L’etabli (1978).
In the absolute phase, however, the new foundation is provided by mobility and delocalization, flexibility and adaptability, in line with the logic of constant revolution—typical of capitalist dialectics—of the bonds and conditions given.
Through the liberation of bourgeois ethicality centered on sentimental and professional ethical stability, the neo-feudal lord, devoid of unhappy consciousness, can now act without having his “hands tied” by laws and obligations, as one of the favorite expressions of liberal newspeak puts it.
He can thus make work, which is entirely re-commodified, depend exclusively on market supply and not on needs linked to the world of life and rights. For these reasons, with the establishment of the precarious regime, houses are rented but cannot be bought, people live together but cannot marry, abortions are performed in the hope of keeping one’s job instead of having children, and future plans are postponed in the hope of a stabilization that will probably never come. In other words, people are forced to live in existential precariousness and in conditions of permanent mobility.
The destruction of the family and of work go hand in hand, as manifestations of the same process of precariousness in production and existence. Young intermittent workers, alternating between periods of overexploitation and phases of unemployment, struggle to start a family and obtain a mortgage that will allow them to have a home, itself a symbol of the stabilization of existence.
The nomadic and perpetually mobile lives produced by flexible accumulation are, in fact, deprived of the stability linked to the home as the place of stable existential roots of “marriage”: the negation of the permanent job is accompanied by that of the permanent roof.
As we know, the verb “to marry” alludes to that ethical stabilization achieved through the construction of a family nucleus within the domestic walls of a fixed residence: the uprooting dynamics of capital today prevent any “marriage” in the very act by which they make existence precarious, eliminating the stable home and the possibility of an ethical family life. From the Marxian “dream of a thing” we have now moved on to the unprecedented “dream of a house,” characteristic of the flexible and rootless condition.
The latter occurs in two ways. Firstly, through temporary and unsecured contracts, young people are unable to obtain a mortgage and buy a house. Secondly, through legalized theft and foreclosures managed by the banking and financial system, the precarious and replebianized middle class is in turn expropriated from their homes and forced into flexibility and existential nomadism.
In order for individuals to accept the nonsense of flexible capitalism as unlimited accumulation and growth, it is of fundamental importance for the neo-feudal lord to transform them into voluntary serfs, willing to fight—just like in Plato’s cave—in defense of their chains and against any potential liberator.
The most effective way to achieve this is to suppress any other dimension of meaning beyond economic fundamentalism, from the family to the supportive community, from promises of alternative happiness to religion. This is what capital has been doing successfully, by annihilating everything that is not capital, so that the economic remains the only available order of meaning and flexibility is naturalized as the only labor and existential horizon: with the result that what exists is increasingly accepted as one’s own ideal, internalizing the gaze, the grammars, and the value horizon of the winners.
The processes that are leading, and in part have already led, to the disintegration of the bourgeois monogamous family and job stability as the foundations of Sittlichkeit—morality—are connected not only as expressions, with identical status, of that stability typical of the dialectical phase and incompatible with the absolute.
In a more detailed analysis, it is possible to understand correctly how the disintegration of one is inextricably linked to the dissolution of the other: by eliminating job stability through precariousness, absolute capitalism makes it impossible, in fact, to constitute the classic bourgeois family nucleus.
In the absence of professional stability and permanent employment contracts, it is impossible to achieve emotional stability based on marriage and ethical family life. The dissolution of one inevitably brings about the disintegration of the other: and the removal of both is inevitably accompanied by the disappearance of the future as an open horizon for planning, replaced by the temporary regime of the eternal and unstable present, which does not allow forms to stabilize or projects to flourish.
This process does not specifically present an “emancipatory” orientation except for the market, which frees itself from two limitations—the fixed and guaranteed job and the ethical family community impervious to commercial relations—that limited and contained its tendency toward unlimited expansion.
However, in order for this aspect to be deciphered, it is necessary to understand the distinction and non-identity between the bourgeoisie and capitalism and, with it, the post-bourgeois and anti-bourgeois dynamics of absolute capitalism. The struggles against the residual fragments of the bourgeois ethical world (from the monogamous family to that, albeit imperfect, communal polis that is the modern sovereign state, from fixed employment to the ethical-religious world of modern values) set in motion a liberation from capital and not from capital, from the Lord and not from the Lord.
Without having understood this key point, progressive forces continue to fight against the bourgeois element and, in doing so, continue to favor the development of post-bourgeois capitalism.
Their battles coincide with those of the market and for the market. Here too, neoliberalism shows itself to be a double-winged eagle: the “Right of money” dictates the structural laws, the “Left of customs” provides the superstructures that justify them on the symbolic level.
Thus, in the case of bourgeois ethics, if the “Right of money” establishes that the ethical element must be eliminated from family life, so that only the single individual remains, without emotional stability and without any intersubjective link other than that modeled on the insociable sociability of do ut des, the “Left of customs” justifies such dissolution by delegitimizing the family as intrinsically authoritarian and violent, and as a bourgeois form worthy of abandonment.
If the “Right of money” decrees that permanent contracts and job stability are an impediment to universal competitiveness and market freedom, and even that flexibility is a condicio sine qua non for the liberation of the market from the restrictions imposed by the labor movement and class struggles, the “Left of customs” sanctifies the ongoing process of disintegration of job stability, denouncing the alienating monotony of permanent employment and warning against the rigidity of bourgeois forms of existence.
Young people are the first victims of the process of destabilization of the world of life and work produced by the absolute phase. They are the privileged “human material” for the grandiose work of “anthropological mutation,” as we might call it following in the footsteps of Pasolini, with which the flexible and deregulated market seeks to forge bodies and minds in its own image and likeness.
As Standing has shown in his studies on labor flexibility, young people are “the hard core of the precariat.” They are the ones who bear the brunt of the shockwave of labor and existential precariousness, as well as the anthropological engineering that seeks to produce the new profile of the homo instabilis, without ethical roots.
The homo precarius corresponds, in effect, to the archetype of the eternal youth, whose situation, depressing in itself, must be understood as temporary and therefore legitimized in the name of futures that are redeemed but always postponed.
Young people are therefore the main victims of this process, artificially managed by those in power, of reshaping the collective imagination in order to ensure that labor and existential flexibility are internalized as an inescapable human destiny, as the necessary consequence of progress, completely obscuring the fact that, when examining the structural links, it is anything but neutral and casual in the context of global class conflict.
The precarious young person is the ideal subject to live as a subordinate and as a neo-feudal servant in the age of globalization. They correspond to a new biopsychic profile that adapts to everything, individualistic and cynical, without perspective or critical awareness, without family or fixed residence, incompatible both with the old proletariat, animated by class consciousness and community ties, and with the old bourgeoisie, with its ethicality and unhappy consciousness.
On the one hand, as we know, young people are the object of incessant and cloying general praise, in the form of that compulsive youth culture that exalts young people qua talis, as if an age of human existence could be elevated to individual merit.
Not only is the figure of the young constantly flattered, but the very generations that no longer fall into this category are exhorted, through devices of consciousness manipulation and consensus control, to behave and act as if they were still within it, through forms of slobbering youth culture that are widespread and extended even among sectors of the population that have long since ceased to be classified as young.
On the other hand, however, the costs of the precariousness of the new mode of production fall mainly on young people, who are increasingly degraded to the status of a “fourth estate” of uprooted migrants forced to flee abroad to find low-skilled and humiliating jobs, which are also strictly part-time.
Absolute capital seeks to expropriate from young people the existential and occupational stability that is essential for them to plan and build their future freely. The prerogative of euntes per mundum (those who go through the world), characteristic of Christian pilgrims, has today become the condemnation of young people, forced into pilgrimage in the new global space of the universalism of class-based globalization.
The unbridled and omnipresent praise of unlimited youth reveals itself to be functional to the precariousness of work and existence, that is, to the maintenance of the population in a condition of forced youth, waiting for the stability and maturity that flexible accumulation programmatically denies to the precarious masses forced to live part-time.
From this point of view, youthism is one of the greatest enemies of young people, if we consider that the praise of eternal youth is, in fact, almost always a veneer that hides the rampant gerontocracy of our society, in which power is firmly in the hands of the older generations.
Excluded from any relevant role, young people today are pushed into the new flexible and migrant fourth estate, destined to set sail to try their luck abroad in often the humblest occupations.
Kept at a safe distance from social guarantees and recognition in everyday life, young people take over the night: they choose it as their kingdom and experience forms of weekend vitality with which to survive the subordinate and depressive condition to which society irrevocably condemns them.
This dialectical dynamic of exalting youth culture and, convergently, reducing young people to human material on which to impose the costs—economic and social, but also existential—of the new precarious form of capital, can be explained by the fact that the new order of production presents itself as naturally youth-oriented.
The dialectical phase was based on maturity and on the figure of the father as auctoritas, with all the negative connotations this could entail in terms of authoritarianism and machismo. The pater familias was capable of protecting the family unit and combining Law and Desire in the education of his children.
For its part, the absolute phase is governed by the figure of the young single person without paternal authority and in permanent immaturity as a spiritual figure. The era of the evaporation of the father and of universal flexibility is, precisely for this reason, the time of permanent youth: one remains eternally young, without one’s own existence stabilizing in the forms of ethical maturity of steady work and marriage, in the triumph of the “ideal of life reduced to consumption and entertainment, which privileges the type of immature narcissist.”
In this era of indefinitely prolonged adolescence, maturity survives today only in the form of a highly ideological imperative, which prescribes to young people—in the very act of forcing them to remain as such in the absence of any form of stability—that they become adults by accepting reality without illusions or residual dreams, saying goodbye to those utopias that physiologically accompany youth as a phase, above all at the biological level, open to the future and to perspective.
In Lacan’s syntax, absolute capitalism is the era of the “evaporation of the father” or, if you prefer, the Oedipal era par excellence, in which the father has been murdered and what survives is uninhibited desire without law or postponement: instability, mutability, immaturity, change, the ability to adapt—in other words, all the prerogatives that traditionally distinguish youth—are now elevated to general conditions of the era, valid for all ages.
The evaporated father is thus configured as a society of eternal youth, who will never want—and, in truth, will never be able—to mature their life experiences in stable and ethicalized ways. Furthermore, young people are presented as the ideal subjects of flexible capitalism also because of their innate tendency toward excess and the permanent transgression of limits.
The overcoming of ethical stability and of the figure of the father as the unifying authority—again, in Lacan’s syntax—of Law and Desire is, ipso facto, functional to the advent of today’s parentless society of eternal youth who have elevated immaturity to a lifestyle, precariousness to a value, and compulsive fun to the only law.
It is in this scenario of dark contours that Tocqueville’s prediction is fulfilled. The “new face” of despotism bears an impressive resemblance to what he had feared: an immeasurable mob of qualitatively equal and interchangeable men, interested only in enjoying themselves—the “last men” prophesied by Nietzsche—each alien to the fate of his fellow men, absorbed entirely in himself and his own mindless enjoyment, without identity or tradition, without critical vis and without cultural depth.
And, above them, almost imperceptible, an “immense and tutelary power,” lax and permissive, gentle and provident, which keeps them indefinitely in a state of childhood and immaturity, so that they are always amused “as long as they think of nothing but amusement” and enjoy themselves in the most uninhibited ways, freed from the effort of thinking.
Triumphant capital cannot accept the figure of the pater familias, because he represents the alliance between Law and Desire. He positions himself as the figure of the limit par excellence, educating his children in moderation and awareness of what is lawful and what is not permitted, helping them to mature as members of the community. Capital cannot accept maturity, understood as a phase of ethical stabilization centered on work and stabilized feelings.
In its blind fury for growth and in its amor infiniti, economic fundamentalism must, precisely for this reason, proceed to destroy the limit and everything that represents it, setting in motion a structurally juvenile society, without a father and, therefore, characterized by Desire liberated from the Law, but also by the permanent immaturity of its members, deprived of the paternal model and at the mercy of the ephemeral structure of consumption and pleasure, enemies a priori of all stability, both ethical and affective.
The consumer society, therefore, does not present itself as repressive, insofar as the repressed is an anthropological figure that is inconsistent with the act of consuming. The consumer must, however, be euphoric and disenchanted: they must expect nothing other than consumption, nor must they have values other than those linked to the commodity form.
The repressive form of dialectical capitalism is thus inverted into the permissive form of absolute capitalism: the subject becomes a consumer whose freedom extends without limits as far as his purchasing power reaches. The death of God is therefore followed not by the advent of the Superman predicted by Nietzsche, but by the arrival of the consumer without identity and without depth. Unlike the mature man capable of saying No, the consumer must remain permanently in the condition of an immature child, at the mercy of desires to which he can only yield.
The immaturity inherent in the era of absolute capital is clearly manifested in its inability—consistent with universal flexibility and the hyper-accelerated rhythms of the production and circulation process—to allow maturation over time, but also stabilization in complete and fixed forms, consolidated over time.
Thus, the premonition that Goethe had formulated in 1825 is fulfilled, in a page that, despite the framework of classical bourgeois ethics, seems to accurately describe the era of youthful flexibility, whose fundamental trend he anticipates:
“As the greatest misfortune of our age, which allows nothing to reach maturity, I must consider the fact that the previous moment is consumed in the next, that days are wasted and we always live from day to day, doing nothing.”
For this reason, flexible and precarious capitalism is, by its very nature, youth-oriented in the sense mentioned above. It glorifies young people because they—without rights and without maturity, without stability and biologically precarious and in fieri—are its privileged subjects of reference; and this is not only because of the limited compatibility of non-young sectors with the new flexible logic (hence the ever-repeated invitation from the tyranny of advertising to non-young people to live as if they were young), but also because the new structure of production and consumption constrains the entire “human park” to live like young people, that is, in provisional and unstable, precarious and never mature forms, transitory and perpetually waiting for a perpetually postponed settlement.
On the other hand, if today one is considered “diversely young” until the age of fifty, this is because one is ideally precarious until the end of one’s working life (whether in social or emotional life), that is, incapable of stabilizing one’s existence in the traditional forms of bourgeois and proletarian ethics, now replaced by the new flexible, post-bourgeois, and post-proletarian mode of production.
The bourgeois maturity of adulthood with possible unhappy consciousness has been replaced by the post-bourgeois immaturity with happy unconsciousness of youth. The ability to project futures by stabilizing existence through ethical forms of life and through the reasoned intertwining of Law and Desire, as expressed in the austere Kantian categorical imperative, has given way to the total and aperspectival presentism of the absolute phase. In this phase, instability as the sum of existence, with its structural impossibility of settling into fixed forms, does not allow for the planning of a future.
It imposes, as its sole imperative, the sadistic commandment of immediate and unbridled enjoyment, autistic and without delay, projecting everything into the hic et nunc of a present conceived, despite its instability, as the only available temporal dimension.
In this scenario of ongoing deseticization and forced precariousness of work and existence, young people undoubtedly constitute the nucleus of a project—as silent as it is violent—of anthropological mutation aimed at transforming them into the new subject subjected to the paradigm of absolute capitalist society.
This depends on reasons of different kinds, some of which we have already alluded to. First, of the three ages that make up human existence, youth is the only one capable of biologically withstanding flexibility as a new generalized lifestyle, that is, the essence of capitalist new feudalism, with its exasperated classism and its theology of the market God, with its contradictory structure of Heraclitean mutation of precarious forms and the extreme maintenance of the very horizon of consumer society.
Secondly, as already pointed out, capitalism in its absolute phase is intrinsically juvenile. This forces humanity to remain in an eternal phase of youth, characterized by instability and a structurally unfinished state, as well as by tendencies toward adaptation and readiness for sudden and radical changes.
For this reason, the age of youth today never passes into maturity, with the consequence that forty-somethings looking for a job and a stable relationship are casually labeled “young people,” just like twenty-somethings.
Youth is seen as stable and permanent, consistent with the paradigm of flexible production, which prevents relationships from stabilizing and taking on a fixed form. If the phase of maturity disappears, old age, for its part, increasingly survives as a mere offshoot of a youth that, like flexibility, aspires to become eternal, without ever arriving at a fixed form, which is immediately demonized as monotonous and restrictive.
The elderly themselves—and today, in the absence of maturity, one becomes elderly as soon as youth ends—are increasingly trying to assimilate the behavior of young people: they follow fashions and try by all means to hide the signs of time and the traces of aging.
The tendency of flexible capital to eternalize youth, that is, precariousness as a way of life, coexists with its cancellation of maturity as the existential phase of ethicality par excellence, and therefore of job and emotional stability.
The phase of maturity corresponds, in effect, to the moment of self-recognition in society, to marital stability, to career advancement, to active political participation, but also, more generally, to the stabilization of a path begun in youth and now becoming, precisely, “mature.”
The erosion of maturity by youth corresponds, then, on the anthropological level, to the transition from bourgeois and ethicized capitalism to a post-bourgeois and post-proletarian capitalism that is flexible and youth-oriented, forcing the whole of society to live as if it were in a state of perpetual youth and, therefore, in a situation of transition that is not yet stabilized—and structurally unstabilizable—both at work and in social and emotional life.
Courtesy: Posmodernia.
Featured: Odd Couple with a Jester, by Quentin Massys (1500).
