Deadly capital

The continuing relevance of the Frankfurt School to social and cultural research in the twenty-first century is hardly surprising. We seem to be living through the dystopia that they were warning us would result from the advance of consumer capitalism and its associated technicities. More to the point, the irrationality that theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse saw as emerging from the confrontation between reified and atomised individuals and a social order governed by instrumental reason seems to have emerged full blown in contemporary US politics. In what Charles Thorpe calls 'necroculture', the productivist ideology which denies climate change and promotes techno-salvationism is expressed as a complete capitulation to the perceived power of capital, not to preserve life but to reproduce it as something which transcends death.

As Thorpe demonstrates, the kind of displaced religiosity which brought Donald Trump to power is articulated in the rhetoric of the Tea Party and their unifying slogan 'Don't tread on me' (p209) which encapsulates the contradictory demand to shrink the state while, at the same time, strengthening the structures that keep the rest of the world at bay; protectionist economic policies, military power and multi-million dollar border walls. He argues that the peculiar ideology of the Tea Party is a foreseeable result, not only of free market economics but the anxieties which are magnified by the ubiquitous technologies which are necessary to perpetuate the system.

In necroculture then, capital congealed in technological devices is deadly and not only in terms of its escalated ability to distance actors in the theatre of war from the killing fields and flatten distinctions between remote death and kill scores in digital gaming. In Tea Party ideology, for instance, guns have become fetishized to the extent that gun possession is conflated with self-possession; as the only thing that stands between the individual and annihilation by 'the threatening other' (p224). This is summed up in Charlton Heston's famous proclamation to the National Rifle Association in the run up to the 2000 presidential election that his guns would need to be pried from his 'cold dead hands' (p221), a rallying cry that was so successful that he repeated it at every convention.

This kind of proclamation is effective because, as Thorpe points out, it speaks to the eschatological sensibilities of a constituency mired in contradictions. As the personal security that seems to be guaranteed by the US constitution is denied them by the very economic system that it appears to promote, they turn to a quasi-religious sanctification of the constitution itself alongside a distrust of both power elites and those deemed to benefit undeservedly from their tax dollars. Working with Erich Fromm's concept of 'negative freedom' (p205), Thorpe demonstrates the relationship between 'anomic violence' and the atomised and repressed individual set against the 'vagaries of market forces' (p216).

Negative freedom is, essentially, freedom from what are perceived as coercive conditions set against the rights of individuals to complete self-determination which, as Thorpe points out, is not only 'the primary language of justification for the legal protection of private property but is also ideologically identified with the character of [the US] itself' (p205). Positive freedom, for Fromm, in opposition to negative freedom, necessarily entails a wide-ranging social contract which recognises that human beings are only realised in agency conferred by mutual exchange and co-operation. Chillingly, he recognised that the self-defeating nature of negative freedom would 'spur escape into submission to fascism' (p206).

Fromm was an early member of the Frankfurt School who disagreed with Adorno and Horkheimer, who rejected his revision of Freudian ideas, and he has largely been excluded from the history of critical theory and thus from the debates through which it was incorporated into New Left critique from the 1960s onwards.¹ Nevertheless, as Thorpe proves, his arguments in Escape from Freedom (1941) are acutely relevant to the contemporary conjuncture, not least because he seems to have anticipated the psychological effects of social lives wholly mediated by technology (pp23-4). Furthermore, Thorpe's revival...