Steal As Much As You Can by Nathalie Olah

Author:Nathalie Olah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912248575
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Problem with Inclusion*

Under capitalist realism, quality is conflated with whatever succeeds in the market economy. When this is translated to the battleground of personality politics, we find ourselves rewarding those who display as little divergence from the status quo as possible, given our (market) fear that anyone else is incapable of achieving mass appeal. To appreciate how far this thinking is able to supplant the rational faculties needed in order for a democratic society to properly function, consider the following two cases of collective amnesia.

The first comes from the centrist and liberal contingent in the UK, who, feeling they had no clear representation in party politics since the departure of Tony Blair, made repeat calls for a centrist leadership candidate in the shape of a David Miliband, or even a British equivalent to Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau. Tune into LBC or the Radio 4 Today programme and you’ll hear people describing any one of these (relatively) young, white, able-bodied men as “looking the part” or having the appeal of a “true leader”. The structural racism, sexism, ageism and classism at play in this assessment is almost too obvious to dwell on, but its motivations can never be divorced from the realities imposed by capitalist thinking. This assessment is all the more absurd for the fact that the only examples of such leadership figures in recent memory also account for two of modern politics’ most dire and embarrassing legacies. The first is of course Tony Blair, whose tenure was exposed fairly unequivocally as being little more than an elaborate PR-sham dreamed up by Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, and which led to one of the gravest political mistakes made in recent memory. The other was David Cameron, once the first prime minister reputed to have copulated with a dead animal, now responsible for causing — and subsequently abandoning — the biggest constitutional crisis in modern British history.

I don’t want it to seem as though I misunderstand the underlying principle of democracy here, but instead seek to highlight that the concurrent evolution of democratic societies alongside capitalism has delivered us to a point where suitability has been transposed by a maddening fixation on the external and superficial indicators of market attractiveness. On the one hand, and in its more extreme guise, this equates to a perpetuation of the white, male power stereotype. But its mechanisms have also become more agile in an era of heightened activity in identity politics, broadening its scope to include a slightly wider set of demographics — judged purely along lines of age, gender and race — but nevertheless remaining just as prohibiting in terms of values, style, delivery and taste.

This amounts to something similar to the false advertising techniques employed by Blair during the 1990s, and allows the perpetuation of the status quo to continue under the guise of a more progressive and inclusive politics. This is an accusation that’s been levelled at the Democratic Party in America, particularly since the election of Barack Obama

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