Capitalism and feelings of guilt
In I was here and I remembered you. (Anagrama, 2024), Anna Pacheco infiltrated the underworld of luxury hotels to try to find out how the workers of these establishments perceived their work, considering that many of them could never afford a night's accommodation in the hotels where they work.
At one point, Pacheco confesses that she assumed a priori that constant contact with luxury and wealth beyond their reach would awaken the class consciousness of that workforce constantly subjected to demands for excellence, but she herself admits that the same thesis is repeated time and time again. On the one hand, the employees of these hotels accept the world as it is, and on the other, their great aspiration is to stop working in the hospitality industry, although most likely their working life will be reduced to working for one hotel after another, earning more or less the same or rising to middle management. Blue-collar workers will never become white-collar workers, let alone management positions. In any case, and to continue with the interesting facts, administrative staff, despite receiving the same salaries as kitchen, bar, and cleaning staff, tend not to be unionized.
Obviously, there's an allegory here, one about how late capitalism works and also, I would add, about these preambles to dystopia that we've had to live through. The paradox lies in what Pacheco, quoting Mark Fisher, calls "reflexive impotence." She compares it to the aftertaste left by series like The White Lotus either SuccessionContrary to what one might expect, our instinctive reaction to obscene opulence is not nausea, but desire: wanting to live, even for a few days, like those we should identify as our oppressors.
This instinctive reaction, where the hypothalamus weighs more than class consciousness, has often been used as a somewhat perverse argument to defend a society divided between exploiters and exploited, an argument that amounts to saying that any criticism of the accumulation of wealth is hypocritical, because deep down we are all the same. In fact, we already do: don't we go on vacation too? Don't we have plasma screens, cell phones, cars? Don't we all go to the same beaches? Don't we fly in airplanes? Have we never rented Airbnbs? Don't we have the latest generation MacBook Air?
The idea here is this: if you accept the game's rewards, you are as much a part of it as those who exploit you. But this is a specious argument, for a fairly obvious reason. As Laura Llevadot recently told me: "There is no inside and outside of capitalism, there is capitalism and there is not." So we have no choice. Here's the big trick: in this game, you can be both exploiter and exploited at the same time, gentrifier and gentrified, dispossessed by touristification and a tourist. At times, it seems you can't escape being one.
Of course, this isn't a carte blanche to surrender to mindless consumerism. Quite the opposite: we must become aware of how the market uses this kind of emotional blackmail to paralyze any possibility of change, because these are the trees they plant in front of our noses so that we don't see the forest.
