“You Aren’t Stuck in Traffic, You Are Traffic”

Musings on the simultaneous reality and unreality of Capitalism

I was sitting in traffic the other day. And it dawned on me, as I inched forward, how ridiculous it was that our society seems to be structured so that a majority of us are laboring at roughly the same time, and we are all too busy laboring to visit any of these businesses we work at. Sitting here, listening to soft rock hits of the 80s and 90s while a Groundhog Day freeway scene scrolls past at a snail’s pace, day after day. I had a moment of derealization, where the world seemed unreal and detached from me, like a theatre backdrop. It seemed a cosmic joke, and I felt despair at the fact that I’m trapped into a life that is so repetitive. I do tasks every day that have little to do with me and seem to create or solve nothing.

Research I’ve done in my field lately has only opened my eyes to the fact that the program I work in actually perpetuates the problems tit’s purported to solve. Yet, if my coworkers and I were to rewrite our grant to provide programming that directly helps our clients, we would lose our funding. The things that would solve the problem are explicitly prohibited in the federal bylaws. My cynicism is at an all-time high, and it takes all my strength to get up every day, seemingly chop my own head off, and keep doing what I do, what, for a paycheck?

Over the past few months of contemplating the whys and hows of these scenarios, dominos have been falling in my mind, cascading faster and faster. And now, everything I look at, it’s like I can see in x-ray vision, the ridiculousness of our collective situation, that before I was blind to, only able to think in terms of sheer survival.

Construction workers on the site I drive by plunge the backhoe into the fertile earth, killing rare, medicinal, edible plants. They are building another rectangular, beige eyesore of an apartment building that will sit vacant for years, that nobody wants to live in. The cheapest bidder won. Financed by international money, with no ties to the community, who can afford to wait years for tenants to finally be desperate to pay the exorbitant rent for the tiny apartments. Built with trees cut down from one of the last remaining forest on the coast. I watch a flock of birds flying over the freeway and wonder where they were displaced from. The construction worker, the forester, the accountant, the inventory control specialist at the vinyl siding factory, all following orders, doing what they do to survive. Showing up, putting food on the table. Taking pride in our work because it is what our bodies do for the bulk of our days — seemingly defining our identities.

In a moment of synchronicity, I read somewhere:

“You aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic.”

This phrase is often used, weaponized even, in a very neoliberal way. Usually when this is parroted, the solution that is offered is to drive your car out of traffic, somewhere else. That you, the individual, are choosing to drive to work at the same time as everyone else, choosing to work a 9–5 job. And we, the drivers, could be making the individual choices to leave, and it could solve this whole problem quite easily.

Yet, our bones scream out, I can’t stop going to work, because I need to pay rent, buy groceries, pay the water bill! If I try to get them for free, I’ll be thrown in prison. There is an incongruence between the rhetoric of personal choice and the physical violence of reality. So, are we slaves to this regime? Is this adage utter bullshit because we live under the iron fist of capitalism?

We all seem to be suffering from this collective “psychosis” that we can’t think our way out of. We make these choices, but collectively, and unconsciously. We are collectively agreeing to the way things are- most of them would actually cease to exist if we stopped doing them. We are mostly just policed into place by the cops in our head, and the oppressive *largeness* of capitalism in how it subsumes every aspect of life.

Most capitalist relationships are, similar to race, imaginary concepts with real physical effects, often harmful. Race as a construct was developed in the 1600s as a reaction to enslaved Africans and indentured Europeans joining forces against their debtors/enslavers, to divide the power of the workers against themselves and for the enslaving/ruling class to maintain its power. It has no basis in genetics. But as we are very aware, harmful beliefs and legal constructs harm those deemed non-white at greater rates than those deemed white. So yes, in that way, race has become real, in how our ideologies and beliefs manifest into material reality.

Capitalism and the day-to-day relationships we experience through this system — inflexible 40+ hour work schedules dictated by people “above us”, arbitrary vacation time limits, insurance with high deductibles, transactional interpersonal interactions that don’t foster a sense of empathy, etc. are constructs that also don’t actually exist. We are just collectively agreeing to them and they’d stop existing if we collectively changed our mindsets. But due to the pervasive beliefs about the inevitability of our experiences and the fact that we uphold these beliefs with violent punishment-based systems, therefore, they become real, tangible.

Forces, such as Western imperialism and capitalism that are already powerful uphold themselves through normalization. Michel Focault writes in The Birth of Biopolitics that weaker forces jockeying for a power-over position use force to uphold themselves. But once something is powerful enough, it doesn’t need force, it just needs normalcy. It just needs to become “the way things are”, so ubiquitous that people lose the ability to think of an existence outside of those constraints. That “normalcy”, that invisibility, also functions to erase the violent forces present during the origins of the regime, but that continue at its margins. Police, prisons, and the military industrial complex are the epitome of extreme violence, yet are usually only experienced by those that the regime deems outsiders, threats, or noncompliant to the normalized ideals. Imperialist Capitalism is successfully upholding itself through this type of normalization. That it is the default, and at this point we cannot think our way out of it. The images and thought processes created by capitalism surround us so completely that anyone born into this system could go their whole lives without ever imagining there could be a world that operated any differently, on so many levels.

There is a profound sense of separation that causes a lot of this. We are incredibly alienated from what we produce. Each of us is a small cog in the large machinery we call “supply chain” or “production of goods” or whatever you want to call it. This is international in scale- none of us could ever really conceive of the entire process from “raw good”, aka, a piece of the Earth or its inhabitants, to a product on a shelf that we purchase with pieces of paper with numbers on them that someone else decides represents a chunk of our time spent laboring. Even further, a large percentage of us work in service sectors, where we aren’t even directly involved in putting together the product in any way- we are only involved in promoting this product to others or facilitating its movement, indirectly. As automation advances, fewer and fewer people are even involved at all with production of goods. It is literally impossible for us to understand it well enough to make an ethical decision about what is being produced. We are so separated from the knowledge of what surrounds us and how it got there, that it becomes this alien thing that is sold back to us. Can we really be sure we are producing what we truly want or need?

During the early Industrial Revolution, production through generationally-passed high craft gave way to hierarchically managed mass production, complex processes becoming broken down into compartmentalized steps. That atomization of roles within the production process is known as Scientific Management, also called Taylorism. Charlie Chaplin wonderfully captured the essence of the dehumanizing nature of working under scientific management in the opening scene of his film Modern Times. Those processes lost some steam during the Great Depression, but were revived with a vengeance in the form of Fordism during the postwar era.

I bet most folks reading this learned in their youth that the Industrial Revolution transformed our lives and increased our standard of living, by allowing more items to be made faster and thus, supplying more needed items to more people. On some levels, this makes sense. But the economic conditions in which this occurred, a top-down controlled condition, and the social-ideological changes that accompanied living within these conditions, led to changes that decreased our quality of life in ways that aren’t really discussed in the average high school social studies class.

Let’s use a factory in my small Wisconsin hometown as a case study. Chilton is a town, the bulk of whose inhabitants are the descendants of immigrants from central and northwestern Germany — a lot of chain migration, particularly from what is now known as the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Within that culture, brewing beer and toasting the grain to make the malt that went in the beer was a family affair, something that was done with your friends and neighbors. You made a party out of it. A group of businessmen pooled their resources to industrialize this process and create a small factory — Chilton Malting. For most of my life, the smell of toasting barley was a key feature of Chilton, a smell that represented “home”. That factory was later bought out by a larger European malting corporation. That company moved the business elsewhere in 2014, the plant sitting vacant to this day.

During that industrialization process, what started as a craft passed down through the generations became parsed into small roles. Each person in the factory was responsible for their role. And since that factory was large, what began to happen is that the craft knowledge was no longer understood as a whole, as each person only saw a small fraction of the process. And since it was now available for purchase, families no longer made their own. The craft was no longer passed down, and that knowledge was lost. Now, not even the small tasks are known to us, and all we are left with is a rotting building, no paychecks, and no knowledge of our cultural process of barley malting or beer brewing.

Guy Debord, in his book Society of the Spectacle, states it this way:

“The general separation of worker and product tends to eliminate any direct personal communication between the producers and any comprehensive sense of what they are producing. With the increasing accumulation of separate products and the increasing concentration of the productive process, communication and comprehension are monopolized by the managers of the system. The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.”

Through this metamorphosis, we became dependent on larger forces to sell back to us which we used to create in our communities. And when we can’t even afford that, we are left with nothing. This is exacerbated by the fact that much of what we produce is thrown away to create false scarcity. Just ask anyone who’s worked at a grocery store. Even if we are making more goods, enough to provide for all workers as originally promised, when it is hoarded and disposed of before distributing to workers, or purposely designed to fail prematurely, the original intent is sabotaged.

Our relationships to objects, each other, and culture itself changed during this industrial transformation. When production was held in community, we related to people directly, and knew most everyone involved in the processes. Now as these processes become separated from our direct experience, we relate more to the objects as they are presented back to us as finished products, and the relationships we have with people become more brief and transactional. Objects and material aesthetics have become the conduit through which we express ourselves and our identity, rather than before industrialization, where our relationships defined who we are and how we described our role in community.

In pre-industrial times, cultural items, such as malted barley, folk painted furniture, or clothing, facilitated culture, which was the relation between people that accompanied the creation and use of the item. The culture wasn’t the beer itself but the making of it together, the time spent in community. Without the context of the relationships of creating and doing in community, culture is “represented” within objects as a stagnant idea, an image, not as a verb. Culture is now purchased or consumed, and the only thing that is experienced is the accrual of objects from an isolated place. Really, that isn’t culture at all, but the appearance or aesthetics of culture. What was once directly lived, now is mirrored back at us through images, through consumption.

These “images” that mediate our “social relations” — whether news, advertising, media, or entertainment — are the language of the separation between humans and our individual labor

We are no longer linked so naturally in community through the fruits of our labor which we create together. We are linked solely by our one-way relationship to these images, which are sort of a central, ubiquitous hub that keeps us isolated from each other. These images and the relationships that are mediated through them- “The Spectacle” that Debord is describing- somewhat reunites the separated workers, but it reunites us only in our separateness.

At this point, the Spectacle functions rather autonomously. Advertisement, social media, and other entertainment influences our desires- this should come as no surprise. But if we take a look at how it really functions, Spectacular culture functions as a positive feedback loop. There is no single leader who is controlling what products are being pushed to us. Yes, advertising departments are in charge of creating this content. And it is well documented that advertising firms use psychological concepts that are manipulative, which muddies consent. But technically, we the consumer are the pusher of what gets made. The problem is that we don’t truly know what we want beyond what we are told we want, or believe that our choices are. Advertisers and the companies they represent respond to consumer trends, but consumer trends respond to advertisers. It becomes an empty cycle that repeats, and no one knows where to point the fingers. Innovation doesn’t really happen- what tends to get made and remade is that which has already been made- it gives consumers comfort. Innovation then tends to be minimal compared to that which is possible by the whole of the human imagination. Mark Fisher, describing this never-ending loop in his book Capitalist Realism (which as a concept is strikingly similar to the Spectacle), notes,

“We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV’s Big Brother had superseded Orwell’s Big Brother. We the audience are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences as its only mandate — but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly, these circuits are not confined to television: cybernetic feedback systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the delivery of all ‘services’, including education and government.”

So, what if we were to try to wrestle our sense of community, culture, and reality back into our own hands? Stick it to the “man? This is where we find out that there is no singular “man”.

If all of us workers driving on this freeway were hit by some magical cloud of radioactive dust that made us simultaneously snap out of the delusions of capitalism and stop what we’re doing, together, there would still be these threats over our heads we’d have to contend to. We’ve become situated within different positions of power over others, or lack thereof. Some of us hold positions, like landlording, owning lithium mines in Africa, managerial positions that can take away people’s jobs and healthcare, carceral positions with guns who can lock you in a cage, etc, that wield coercive, often violent power over others’ ability to meet their basic needs- even life and death.

Just like us, the ruling class — those with these coercive tools at their disposal — also operate under the same delusions we do. They are empowered by being allowed to use coercive violence to uphold what conditions they believe will lead to their continued benefit — the continuance of the system exactly as it currently functions.

Just like us, they live in the Spectacular world and have just like regular workers, lost sight of the full process of production- what is made, why and how, the scale of production. They, like us, operate with spectacular images functioning as reality. They, like us, make decisions that, within the scope of what they know and what they can fathom as reality, benefit them within their lives. The type of lifestyles advertised to them as “desireable” is what they are living- and it reinforces the idea that they have what they truly want. The system whose violent power they wield and hide behind is that which is burning our planet- including themselves. The deceivers are also deceived.

They are afraid that if they give up the delusion and stop using the coercive power, the people that have been on the receiving end of punitive violence (the majority of us) for centuries will enact their revenge, take all their stuff, throw them in a cage, and basically reverse the roles. They are building their underground bunkers in New Zealand as we speak. They are afraid of getting a taste of their own medicine, really. But will they? Would we hurt them back? Or would we move on and live our lives in freedom? Punishment is a carceral, capitalist concept. Would it serve us to capitulate it for ourselves? Wouldn’t liberation mean moving on from that way of thinking about harm? Does it make sense to imprison the imprisoners and continue the cycle of violence?

But of course, if this is the horizon of our collective imaginations, people can only imagine their own futures through the lens of the present ways of being.

Neoliberal Capitalism operates as an internalized mental state that upholds itself with physical manifestations. It actually has no leader. Even though we can point to certain billionaires who benefit egregiously from the system, they did not create it, nor are they in charge of everything bad that happens within it. If we were to kill Jeff Bezos, and all those other billionaires you don’t know the names of, the system would keep going. Someone else would just step in their place — these antisocial relationships have become concretized in the system itself, and change the people who step into those roles to slowly take on the antisocial qualities needed to be successful in that role. Even people who dream of “changing things from the inside” slowly erode into upholders of the systems they hated before they got that job. Success within those roles at this point requires those qualities. Those who don’t take those qualities on and uphold harmful policies created under those ideals are fired or fail.

Individually, we can’t exit traffic without feeling the brunt force of coercive violence concretized into our current reality. Even though many of us could take individual steps to “leave”, “go off the grid”, that would leave the most marginalized folks facing violence. Leaving individually would not help them, and would likely put them at greater risk, as it would isolate them and lead to continued ignorance about the issues they are facing, which affect us all to some degree.

But we can possibly exit traffic collectively. This really entails huge shifts in how we collectively view “reality”, as a psychological, unconscious movement that runs within and between us, largely unspoken, for which we don’t have the words yet. The difficulty of thinking our way out of current lived reality is that it hasn’t ever existed, and our new thoughts are always based on our previous experiences.

The psychological roadblocks presented by the vastness of the Spectacle/Capitalist Realism make building a different world seem unreachable, this is true. But the more we investigate these mechanisms, the better equipped we can be to think outside of it.

Stay tuned for part 2 where we’ll take a deeper look at some of those mechanisms.