In its neoliberal phase, capitalism no longer exists as a historical force with capabilities to play a progressive role. On the contrary, it keeps nakedly “asserting its power all the way to the historical limit of its viability”, as Istvan Meszaros puts it. Breaching these limits, neoliberalism, becomes a ‘counter-historical’ force. The symptoms of this breach are evident in the problems of climate change, unemployment, poverty, and hunger amongst other things. In this situation, it becomes essential to create cultural systems to legitimize this structure. Moral pedagogies serve as one of the many ways by which such legitimization is achieved.
At a mental health workshop organized by my college, the central theme of the discussion was combatting depression as a student. Many outrageous claims were made. One speaker opined that the West-inspired search for newness has led the youth to disregard authority. This, consequently, has led to the collapse of the family. Young people are thus left without a moral compass, with many falling prey to unregulated hormones and anarchic addiction. They suffer from a lack of meaning in life, having no central idea to hold on to — something that would have shaped their conduct. Thus, they often take to wanton consumption. Uninterested in the bountiful treasures the society has to offer, they become purposeless individuals prone to ‘anti-social’ activities. The remedy suggested for this alienation was ‘God consciousness’ — belief in a divine force that prevents ‘immoral’ activities and provides ‘meaning’ to life.
The moral normative universe of ‘God consciousness’ in this context needs to be studied through a survey of the relationship between the individual and capitalist society. According to our esteemed speaker, the ideal life is a balanced and progressively linear life full of purpose and meaning. The idea that life is a stable journey towards a fixed goal, is based on capitalist ‘biologism,’ which creates a conception of a ‘strong’ individual. According to this conception, human beings are individuals who want to maximize their innate self-interest through the consumption of commodities. Here, humans are reduced to their natural urges that can be satisfied through consumption of external objects. In a society dominated by the bourgeoisie, the imperative of profit-maximization — expressed in a thingified manner through commodities, money, and property — rules over everyone. It appears that commodities dominate us, even though humans are responsible for their creation. In the words of Karl Marx, relations of domination appear “disguised as social relations between things”. This erases the historical relations that are responsible for the existing state of affairs. We become isolated consumers engaging in transactions with each other.
The coaching industry in India — one of the major sources of depression among young students — forges such commodified social relations. The coaching institutions reduce students to consumers, teachers to instructors, and education to a commodity which can be bought and sold. They project themselves as the sole gateway to a life filled with lucrative jobs and attractive commodities. It is advertised that accumulation of more commodities would automatically translate into boundless happiness and enjoyment in life. Cut-throat competition becomes the norm of the day, where a student is led to believe that they can only attain their ‘dream life’ if they can somehow knock their peers down on the way. The only barrier to attaining this life is the individual’s failure to work hard, feel perpetually motivated, and outperform their fellow students.
Students are thus isolated in a hypercompetitive pool of equally isolated individuals. With little to no social life, they selfishly compete with each other in the hope of attaining that pristine happy life. They write endless stupid tests, attend classes which privilege rote-learning and examination strategies over comprehension, and live in constant uncertainty. They feel lonely and alienated, stuck in a rat race against themselves and their peers. Depression is a natural consequence of thriving in such a lifeless ecosystem. After surviving these horrendous years of coaching and the equally grinding college system, the bubble bursts after they bag jobs with handsome pay packages. They realize that happiness cannot be achieved through the consumption of commodities. The more commodities one possesses, the greedier they become. A sense of inadequacy cripples them and makes them even more depressed.
During the post-Second World War period, social democracy aimed to alleviate the disillusionment associated with consumerist fantasies. This was achieved by prioritizing citizens’ political and constitutional identity over private interests. By sacrificing one’s immediate access to ‘enjoyment’ through unrestrained consumption, the individual gained the pass to participate in the public sphere. For instance, the Nehruvian practice of socialistic planning was based on the idea that ‘nation-building’ required the sacrifices of privileged social sections to protect and uplift the marginalized people. Economically, this meant curbing the greed of the private-sector bourgeoisie through state regulation of their enterprises. Culturally, it meant suppressing majoritarian aspirations so that the minorities could exercise their democratically-guaranteed civic rights. Robust social security systems were important tools for achieving this goal.
However, with the steady erosion of the social security systems through systematic privatization, the consumerist fantasy of absolute unrestrained enjoyment and crass individualism reigns supreme. Now, there are no restrictions on how much we can enjoy ourselves. Without any socially-sanctioned prohibition on an individual’s enjoyment, one is constantly threatened by others’ ability to enjoy themselves. Neoliberalism creates a social order premised on the superfluity of social relations. Since the satisfaction that neoliberal capitalism promises is impossible to achieve, depression becomes widespread. Depression is the experience when the failure to obtain absolute enjoyment is accepted as the unavoidable fact of human existence. The depressed subject accepts that we are destined to repeat failure. By shattering the capitalist idea that markets are the natural way of satisfying a given set of instincts, the depressed subject exposes the folly of our faith in the world. Their inability to participate in the race for jobs, commodities, etc. is a tragic testimony to the fact that the existing reality is deeply dissatisfying.
If capitalist reality produces such widespread unhappiness, why can it not be changed? It certainly can be. Since depression can be politicized to radical ends, it is essential that the socio-economic structures that establish the standards of what is normal and what is not are resisted and overthrown. The individual who engages in commodity fetishism does not see the socio-economic privileges that create the individualist might of the neoliberal ‘entrepreneur’. They think that the ‘successful’ person achieved their goals only through their individual abilities, with no generational wealth or social support. That is why they do not locate the cause of their dissatisfaction in the unjust workings of the society. Instead, they point fingers at themselves for not working hard enough to achieve their goals, and spiral more into the abyss of depression. George Lukacs calls this an ‘escape into inwardness’ in which the capitalist subject asks the wrong question: “Everyone whom this experience [of dissatisfaction] has touched faces the question: How can my life become meaningful? The man who lives in the fetish-making world does not see that every life is rich, full, and meaningful to the extent that it is consciously linked in human relations with other lives.”
It must be realized that ‘meaning’ lies not in attributing an intrinsic purposefulness to life. In acknowledging that there is no pre-established notion of purpose and that the ‘meaning’ of life is a historical phenomenon determined by larger processes, capitalism can be challenged. ‘Meaning’ is not something we give to us, nor is it something we make up randomly. It is a concrete product of antagonisms that can be studied in a scientific manner. By pretending that ‘meaning’ is a primitive, pure fact of existence, notions like ‘God consciousness’ succumb to the alienation they criticize.
Alienation cannot be combated by treating the self as a source of spiritual power that resists corruption by all ‘external’ forces. Rather, we need to understand that individuals are, in fact, powerless under capitalism. There is no reservoir of divine meaning that remains unaffected by the market. All of us are constituted by capital. Tracing the history of the capitalist society and its contradictions and weaknesses is the only way to overthrow it. By deflating the spiritualist view of the world as driven by an innately meaningful story, Marxism enables us to observe how undemocratic and exploitative processes determine our lives.
Thinking of alternatives to capitalism is the only way out. In the words of Matthew Flisfeder: “As human subjects, we experience our freedom…by grasping that reality and actuality are open-ended, never whole on their own, never complete. There is only politics if subjects are free to transform and recreate the actual conditions of existence — to change, that is, the object.” It is imperative that we re-conceive mental health as a crucial arena of class politics. Depression should be treated not as a dehumanized state of irrationality but as an all-too-human result of historical mechanisms that contain essential social lessons.
Lokayata 