What all-encompassing power do the “anti-system” invoke to justify their struggles? Conspiracist naïveté, always eager to enjoy fabulous tales, imagines superhuman spheres where beings so powerful they don’t even have names gather together. These villains amass, under their signature, spells capable of tilting the mathematical web of global finance in their favor. That alone suffices to keep millions of tiny, helpless subjects under their cloak of terror and need. Their will, organized into an invisible superorganism, is the supreme realization of the most ambitious sovereigns.
To oppose them is to resign oneself to a wild, marginal life, dwelling in the constant danger of annihilation—professional, social, or even biological. Many claim to dare it, but no one who actually does can speak of it, so everyone lies, though perhaps amid so much imposture the thread of truth still gets woven in.
Does this “system,” this “capitalism,” this “neoliberalism” really exist? Few things can be defined by a list of properties, and certainly not those grand words that try to name historical processes and gather under their cloak the face of an entire world. To say capitalism is to say too much or too little, or to say very old things under a new name. I won’t attempt to theorize here, but I will say it seems to me more like a note intensifying within the flow of a melody than a new melody altogether. Trade, currency, and consumption have existed since ancient times, and they have always ruled. Why do we now call ourselves “capitalists”? Not, I repeat, because of any novelty, but because of the power of a world and its techniques, capable of turning absolutely everything into merchandise—and doing so starkly, without the old hiding places in metaphysical authorities. Today those authorities are silk masks that can no longer hide anything. Everything is business, so do not look for any other way of “valuing” things. What system can there be here but an inertial machinery that has been accelerating for centuries? There is no “system” we can oppose. At most, we can choose to live by peculiar, austere customs. Nor do congregations of powerful men exist, piloting some immense ship. Conflicts run through us as they always have, as do inequalities, even if today we live them in comfort. We can be warriors in everyday social struggles—because the global struggles crush us—and indeed it’s desirable that we be so, but we won’t be fighting any monster, only the swells of our own voyage.
The amoral inertia we call capitalism is not some monstrosity maliciously grafted onto our world; it is our own world in its logical unfolding. And its opponents are its product just as much as any commodity.