Capitalism and the Death Drive. Byung-Chul Han
in Marxist terms. It does not even exhibit the famous ‘alienation’ from work. We throw ourselves enthusiastically into our work until we burn out. The enthusiasm is, in fact, the first stage of burnout. Burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive. It is therefore wrong to believe that the multitude will throw off the parasitic empire and establish a communist society.
What is the state of play regarding communism today? Everywhere there is talk of ‘sharing’ and ‘community’. The sharing economy is supposed to be replacing the economy of property and ownership. ‘Sharing is caring’: this is one of the maxims of the ‘circlers’ in Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle. The cobblestones on the way to the headquarters of the Circle company are interspersed with tiles bearing slogans such as ‘Find Community’ and ‘Participate’. But really the slogan should be ‘Caring is Killing’. The digital ridesharing platform WunderCar, which seeks to turn every one of us into a taxi driver, makes use of the idea of ‘community’ in its advertising. But the advent of the sharing economy does not herald the end of capitalism or the creation of a more communal global society in which sharing is valued above ownership, as Jeremy Rifkin claims in his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society.1 On the contrary, the sharing economy ultimately leads to the commercialization of all aspects of life.
The transition from ownership to ‘access’, which Rifkin celebrates, does not liberate us from capitalism. Whoever lacks money also lacks access to sharing. Even in the age of access, we are still living within the ‘ban-opticon’; those without money are still excluded.2 Airbnb, the community marketplace that encourages people to turn their homes into hotels, even economizes human hospitality. The ideology of community, or of a collaborative commons, leads to the total commodification of community. Simple, purposeless friendliness becomes impossible. In a society in which everyone rates everyone else, friendliness is commercialized. People become friendlier in order to receive better ratings. Even at the very heart of the collaborative economy, the relentless logic of capitalism still rules. Paradoxically, despite all this wonderful ‘sharing’, no one gives anything away. Once it begins to sell communism itself as a commodity, capitalism has reached its culmination. Communism as a commodity: that spells the end of any revolution.
NOTES
1 1. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
2 2. Transl. note: see e.g. Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon’, in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11, London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 10–48.
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