How to fight the barriers of capitalism with poetry

Anthropy≠Anthropocene, Shiiku Collective, 9 March 2023, Strange Brew, Bristol.

Carolyn Dougherty reflects on this event, which promised:

expressive spoken word on fighting the barriers of capitalism, interactive visuals co-created by our robot friends, ambient electronic beats with soft rainforest settings, and the voices of those ready to design a world that can be peacefully navigated by all.”

I’m a woman in my 50s, reasonably well read on utopia but perhaps not entirely up to date. I was hoping for fresh, young perspectives on living joyfully in a world we have (at best) badly and unconscionably damaged.

Instead, I heard several young people perform poems and songs expressing their desires in a world where they feel marginalised. The poems weren’t bad; in fact, I thought a couple were quite good. I’m glad I heard them. But, they primarily dealt with the individual’s inner world.

I hope everyone reading this has had the experience of engaging with a piece of art then stepping out into the world astonished at how your own perceptions have been changed by it. That kind of mental and emotional rewiring doesn’t happen when the art is focused on better understanding the artist.

Self-expression as a tool of late-stage capitalism

It is a genuinely powerful act to declare to others that we are proud to accept something about ourselves that our culture has taught us we should be ashamed of. But I dispute that it ‘fights the barriers of capitalism’ and offers a new vision of our world. Rather, it redraws those barriers further out, to enclose more of us.

Self-expression is something we’re taught to value, even revere, and it is valuable. But it also happens to be the ideal lever for late-stage capitalism to break into our interior world, to appropriate what resources still remain out of its control.

In the late twentieth century, the consumption machine encouraged us to express ourselves by buying things. Things that signified allegiance with whatever group we might want others to believe we were affiliated with. By acquiring, wearing or using things coded to belong to a certain group, we hoped to send signals that encouraged other people to assign us the status and group affiliation we desired to project.

What we now optimistically refer to as late-stage capitalism is much more sophisticated, and much less overt. The machine no longer creates and disseminates the rules for obtaining affiliative or distinctive things. Instead, we are more likely to self-define. We choose the signals ourselves, then inform others what these signals mean to us and should mean to them.

A collection, not a collective

It’s still the same mechanism, keeping us focused on who we are and how we identify. We remain preoccupied with both sending the correct signals and ensuring that others receive them in the correct manner. The capitalists win again, as this preoccupation, even obsession, with what we are signalling precludes any possibility that we might actually pay genuine attention to others.

This situation resulted in a grouping of artists that could more rightly be called a collection than a collective. Individual atomised people pinging packets of information to each other as a substitute for actually communicating, engaging, forming bonds, and creating the conditions for effective collective action.

Towards a post-capitalist utopian poetics

Art that focuses on one’s perception of the world paradoxically brings people closer together than art that focuses on one’s perception of oneself. Perceiving the world is something we all do, and an experience we can genuinely share. (I’m afraid not everyone is thinking about you.)

This kind of art is almost the opposite of the scientific method. Science attempts to organise and achieve an objective description of the world. Its goal is for us to have the same, repeatable, predictable experience. And economics, of course, likes to position itself as a science.

The goal of art is to help us have as many different experiences of the world as there are people. Relating to each other through sharing our experience of the world may be the most effective way to create the kinds of shared experience that could lead to collective action, and someday the creation of what could be a utopia.

Carolyn Dougherty is an economic historian and railway engineer currently based in Bristol. Her research and writing addresses the origins of capitalism and the development of the corporation in early nineteenth-century England. She is a member of the Utopian Book Collective.