Giving to those in need as an act of good will and charity, or celebrating differences that make our social reality vibrant and invigorating, aren’t problematic in and of themselves. Capitalist ideology has a way of co-opting a genuine pursuit of good and subverting it into a profitable means of maintaining the socio-economic status quo. Seeing through this ideology becomes an important project and encountering capitalism’s contradictions becomes inevitable and often uncomfortable to confront.
If I’m the Executive Director of a non-profit aimed at housing the homeless, what do I do with the fact that my job security, and the existence of my organization itself, is totally dependent upon a never ending population of homeless people?
When we think about violence, we usually imagine violent acts: school shootings, acts of terror, physical altercations or abuse, war, or violent video games, movies, and other media. These all clearly can and should be categorized as manifestations of violence that are rampant in the world today, and should not be ignored or discounted. However, in philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s book, Violence, he explores how an even more nefarious violent core lurks beneath these visible violent acts we are confronted with.
The acts listed above, and most instances of violence that are reported on the news and discussed in the pubic square, are examples of subjective violence. As Žižek puts it, this is “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.”
In the face of subjective violence, it’s easy to feel as though whats needed is a subjective solution. I as a subject cannot change laws and restructure society to combat climate change, but I can start a non-profit and build a board of investors. The problem, once again, with subjective attempts at addressing subjective violence, is that it allows the objective violence at best, to go on uninterrupted, and at worst to feed the system of objective violence even further.
We as a society are fascinated with and particularly dedicated to fighting subjective violence, but this focus on the subjective almost always obfuscates the objective violence operating at the same time - usually creating the very conditions in which the subjective violence manifests.
Objective violence feels hidden, or camouflaged, but in reality it is perfectly visible - though not in an obvious way.
Žižek writes that:
Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level… as a [deviation] from the ‘normal’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence [feels] invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which something is perceived as subjectively violent.
We aren’t consciously aware of the oxygen around us, but this doesn’t change the reality that we are completely dependent on it to function as humans. Similarly, our society relies upon certain foundational objective violences in order for our social reality to function. Most notably, perhaps, is that of our capitalist economy and its corresponding ideology.
Capitalism is seen and experienced by many as almost a law of nature. It’s the zero-level standard that exists in “neutrality” and through which most of western civilization is filtered. The fact that this ideology was created and instituted in a material and historic moment is completely disavowed, and it is instead viewed as simply a default. Those who are critical of capitalism are rightfully aware of its inherent violence in the form of exploitation of workers, enabling the richest people alive to continue hoarding their obscene wealth, and its necessary pursuit of infinite profit at the expense of the world around it.
It’s easy to dunk on right wing politicians, billionaires, and adherents of capitalist ideology who shamelessly worship their god of the free market and who seem to wear the destruction of the working class as a badge of honor. What I want to explore are two ways in which the “good guys,” liberal and progressive efforts to fight subjective violence, actually reinforce and enable the objective violence of capital to flourish: philanthropic humanitarianism, and multicultural tolerance.
Liberal capitalist ideology approaches political problems with economic solutions. Homelessness, our healthcare system, resources for schools and children, and environmental initiatives all become economic issues to be addressed by private enterprise, and their primary resources are the philanthropic musings of individuals who find it within their heart to invest.
Progressive capitalists, to quote Žižek, “are true good citizens of the world. They are good people who worry about others… So their goal is not to make money, it is to change the world.” More and more start-up companies promote their mission statements with pride - as if they’re starting a movement - and not just a new mobile app partnering with Venmo and Chrissy Teigen that lets you donate 2% of what you tipped your barista to the local homeless youth shelter.
Progressive capitalists insist that to truly aid people, one must first have the necessary resources, and private enterprise is the most effective method.
“Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation,” writes Žižek. “Progressive capitalists give away with one hand what they first took with another.”
Nike’s Empowering Communities initiative is “investing in communities… with a focus on women, girls, and the Black Community Commitment,” while they simultaneously lobby Congress to revise and loosen the Uyghur Force Labor Prevention Act preventing the use of slave labor, the majority of which consists of women and girls, in sweatshops abroad. Isn’t it easy for us to turn a blind eye though, when Nike’s #PRIDEMONTH Rainbow Flyknit Road Blasters are doing so much to combat hate?
Multiculturalism, identity politics, and insistence on particular differences over universality are all modern markers of a good progressive liberal’s attempt to fight the subjective violences of intolerance and bigotry. While intolerance and bigotry should, of course, be fought and resisted, we must shift our perspective to see why these efforts do little challenge more foundational realities.
The logic of capitalism co-opts even how we view and experience the idea of culture. Rather than culture being a communal and public network of established norms that operates as the binding power of a collective, it is transformed into an “expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies” that individuals and groups identify with. With this shift, cultural differences almost become a naturalized aspect of one’s identity that are to be tolerated by other distinct cultures that all exist in the marketplace of ideas, so to speak.
In a sneaky win for capital, this shift obscures the proper political problems of global inequality, economic exploitation, racism, etc., and neutralizes them into inherent differences between cultures or “different ways of life.” Obviously, holding openness to people and experiences that are different from oneself is good, and prejudice should be actively resisted. That’s not what I’m addressing here.
This distinct capitalist tolerance produces a paradox in which: Certain countries brutalize others (creating economic hardship, limited access to resources and technology, and increased environmental instability) and then attribute the created conditions to natural cultural differences that we must tolerate.
We often hear language around “global capitalism,” but I don’t think a truly global capitalism actually exists. In reality, there are countless mini-capitalisms around the globe, each with culturally subjective benchmarks (imposed by the west) for what constitutes an acceptable market.
$180 million USD have been directed to Liberia over multiple years in order to help them start to develop an infrastructure of 2 foot wide roads that allow motorcycle transportation from village to village. In January 2022 - January 2023 alone, over $75 billion USD have been directed to supporting the economy and infrastructure in Ukraine. How can this be justified? Multicultural capitalism tells us it’s because these drastically different countries have drastically different cultures and therefore have drastically different needs, of course.
“Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real,” explains Žižek. “‘Reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in the interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract’ logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality.”
He continues: “One can experience this gap in a palpable way when one visits a country where life is obviously in shambles. We see a lot of ecological decay and human misery. However, the economist’s report that one reads afterwards informs us that the country’s economic situation is ‘financially sound.’”
Reality doesn’t matter, what matters is the situation of capital.
This logic first transforms material realities created by capital into cultural differences to depoliticize them. It then naturalizes these cultural differences as simply “the way these people are,” which in turn, must be tolerated. Finally, this tolerance successfully neutralizes any effort to address the original material realities, allowing capitalism to continue on the ideological merry-go-round of global exploitation.
This post isn’t coming from a place of nihilism. In fact, I believe exposing the contradictions inherent to capitalist ideology is a project capable of producing and enabling genuine hope for the future. In order to fix something, we first need to call it out - to name it - and I think we often feel as though we’re sitting around, constantly alert, waiting for something to see so that we can name it. But, I think just as often, the opposite is true. There are many things that need to be named before they can even begin to be seen. The objective violence of capital and the futile attempts to bandaid its subjective symptoms may just be some of those things.
All quotes are attributed to “Violence,” by Slavoj Žižek (2008).
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