Post-capitalist dissatisfaction

Note before getting to the point: this is, clearly, the least sexy headline I've ever written. 

With that clarified, let's begin. 

This idea has been on my mind for a while: capitalism has ceased to be a satisfactory system for the majority of the population. It's no longer just that the number of privileged people benefiting from this inequality-generating machine that is neoliberalism is getting smaller and smaller, it's that many of those who were supposedly part of the theoretical beneficiaries of this system are increasingly far from feeling satisfied with what they receive in return for fulfilling their part of the contract: working, consuming, and not asking too many questions. 

But the feeling that something is not working is increasingly difficult to ignore. As the financial branch has taken control of the entire system, services are becoming poorer; products, worse; treatment, more vexatious. Just take a plane or go for a coffee at one of these new franchises where the staff turns over so quickly that they have no incentive to commit, because, moreover, they probably won't be able to pay the rent, or their children's extracurricular activities, even though they work 8 hours a day or even juggle two jobs. 

Many of us simply cannot afford the houses we live in, nor the lives we lead, which are the ones we were once promised if we played by the rules. But we can't even "posture" anymore: some of capitalism's products are so far beyond our purchasing power that we have to pay for Nike in three installments via microcredits. Maybe it's time to admit that if you have to pay for shoes in three installments to not look poor, then you are, in fact, poor. 

This kind of tactic is the system's way of keeping you running on the wheel like a hamster and a great example of what capitalism has always done best: turning desire into a driving force. Not satisfied desire, but perpetual desire, the aimless yearning, the delusion that there is always something more, better, bigger, more powerful, that one day you will pass the last level and feel fulfilled, a winner, a God of Olympus.

The trap, however, is so obvious that it is sometimes easier to ignore: there is no finish line here, and if there were and you were the first to cross it, you would feel as empty as you feel now. 

The problem is that we already feel this emptiness in our gut and it is a black hole that consumes us and threatens to drive us mad as a society. 

Here, however, an opportunity opens up for the left, a left that for years has been convinced of being what turbocapitalism accuses it of being: a force often burdened by puritanical tics and that has traditionally had problems handling desire as an expression of co-individuality. This conceptual framework must be discarded once and for all, and we must begin to reinvent ourselves. If capitalism is a politics of desire, its alternative should be a politics of satisfaction. Not satisfaction as conformity or resignation, but as liberation: the radical idea that it is possible to have a life that seems sufficient and dignified. 

Something like that sounds pretty good to me. Or as an old painted lady I saw once in the streets of Berlin said: Ponies for everyone!