Capitalism’s New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment by Colin Cremin

By Colin Cremin

From broadsheet newspapers to tv exhibits and Hollywood motion pictures, capitalism is more and more acknowledged as a procedure harmful to human lifestyles. Colin Cremin investigates why, regardless of this de-robing, capitalism continues to be a robust and seductive force.

Using materialist, psychoanalytic and linguistic methods, Cremin exhibits how capitalism, nervousness and hope input right into a together helping courting. He identifies 3 ways within which we're tied in to capitalism – via a social critical for company and pageant; via amusement and intake; and during the depoliticisation of moral debate by means of executive and company.

Capitalism’s New Clothes is perfect for college kids of sociology and for somebody apprehensive in regards to the ethics of capitalism or embarrassed by means of the enjoyments the approach has afforded them.

“Slicing throughout the evasions and double examine modern debts of enjoyment, Colin Cremin has produced a must-read textual content at the sociology of delight. obtainable, penetrating, unmissable.” —Chris Rojek, Professor of Sociology & tradition, Brunel college, West London

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Extra resources for Capitalism’s New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis

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The assistant has to ‘read’ from the ‘clues’ in other people’s behaviour what the boss might want from her. She needs to be the one who fills in for what he lacks, the objet a, by possessing the attributes the employer demands, what he supposes is the use-value of her labour as relevant to the particular mode of employment. The worker assumes the symbolic position of the lack in the employer: the vacancy that needs filling. Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) refer to a process they call pseudo-individualisation.

One is compelled to be enterprising by virtue of the fact that organised labour is so weak and the demands of capital so excessive. Workers are not simply adapting to changes in the productive forces, they are adapting to the surplus demands of employers. In other words, the qualities workers are now encouraged to possess exceed the material necessities of capital and only serve to strengthen the grip of employers, both materially and ideologically, over every aspect of our lives. Anthony Giddens said, of the changing social landscapes of post-Thatcherite Britain, that social bonds ‘have effectively to be made, rather than inherited from the past’, a ‘fraught and difficult enterprise, but one also that holds out the promise of great rewards’ (1994:106).

A capitalist cannot determine in advance of exchange whether the labour he employs will generate values in excess of its reproductive value and therefore cannot calculate through a simple measurement of labour time the value of the commodity. As Starosta explains, the general social relations between private and independent producers regulate the price of commodities, such as when supermarkets reduce prices to compete with one another. A big budget movie, for example, involves hundreds of ‘knowledge workers’ (2008:309); but if the film is a box office flop, the value of that labour is worthless; the initial investment enters into circulation and profit is generated when the film is successful.

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