Producerism

Consumerism is a constant byword of cultural criticism. Consumer culture is bad, consumerism is bad; these can stand in for some kind of richer engagement with Marxism that would inevitably lead one to a non-liberal politics. I most often see this word used by soft lefties being careful about overcommitting with their language. And there is, obviously, something to it. We (and I say "we" because if you are reading this you are almost definitely of this group) consume a whole fucking lot, and are at the very least deluged with demands or supplications to do more of it.

But what of the other half? Where is production? The rhetoric of anti-consumerism treats production as something immune or at least anathemic to perversion. At worst the processes of production are themselves perverted (this being the core of Marxist humanism and the ontologisation of labor)--in which case we need to get back to the "good" production, the essence that is definitively good. (Does anti/consumerist discourse have any concept of good consumption?)

This juncture, of course, points to what is most desired by capitalist reproduction: not a consumer society, as Foucault shows in his 1977-78 lectures on the collapse of anti-scarcity models, but a producer society, and it is around this nexus that late capitalism has been able to incorporate some of the social genetics of an earlier generation of anti-capitalism. The tales of Heroes of Labor have ironically become more accessible as the Stakhanovite ethos has been demythologized into the only means to achieve marginal superiority over the pack (or herd). If there is any substance to theses on the move to an information economy (or whatever one's preferred term for a digital world) it is in capital's much better ability to avoid underconsumption. At the same time we have an increasing pressure to produce, not because we need more shit--no one says that--but because production, in the few hundred years capitalism has been working on this, is now better at the almost-immediate capture of relation into circulable value. Consumption can only make you so stupid before it dulls its own effectiveness; now you need to get to working producing that stupidity, with a fervor and skill only you can know.

This provides some context for why "inoperability" might be, if placed in a Marxist narrative, actually useful.