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Alternative Investments thinks about selling his soul to capitalism

I am excited this morning! A bottle has washed up on the shore with a scrap of yellowed paper in it. Communication from the outside world! My fingers shook as I opened it, cracking off the wax seal with my nails. When I unrolled the paper, I saw that it was a bit of text torn off the bottom of a page. It said: “Workers in capitalist societies must reduce the precious core of their beings to an object that can be bought and sold.”

The title line on the bottom of the page told me that it was by a man called Slavoj Zizek. Now, I know who Slavoj Zizek is. I have heard of him. He is an often impenetrable Marxist philosopher-cum-psychoanalyst. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, he now lives in the capitalist Slovenia, which split off from the Czech Republic just before I was shipwrecked here. He specialises in issuing jeremiads against modern liberal capitalism – or ‘the Neo-Liberal orthodoxy’, as he tendentiously puts it. He cannot, I assume, be very happy about his new Slovenia, with its shiny new IT firms rubbing up against the grottiest of sweatshops. Such inequality. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t like capitalism much.

I am in a funny position on this island. I am maximally free. I am not forced, either by a state, or by necessity, to go out and sell my precious core. I also, alas, am alone. These two facts give me a unique perspective on the sorts of economic life that my (perhaps) more fortunate fellows back in society lead.

Here is what I think about Mr Zizek’s pronouncement. There is no such thing as a concrete precious core of being. My precious core is fluid and changes with the weather. One day I want to lie about and do nothing. Another, I am minded to gather coconuts while I may.

Human populations are only able to exist where there are cooperative groups of individuals to create the conditions necessary for men and women to raise children. Thus co-operative groups of individuals, also known as ‘companies’, are not prisons.

People are free to join or to leave. Of course, Slavoj will say that the structures of society – the capitalist companies in other words – force people to take jobs they wouldn’t otherwise want to. Nobody, if they had a choice, would want to work in a packing factory.

But without some sort of economic life going on, the conditions would be infinitely more difficult for anybody to have any sort of life at all – including no offspring, for which money tends to be needed.

What is Mr Zizek’s alternative? As ever, it is some sort of state authority which decides what the needs of people are, and organises everybody to provide them. Or rather, it forces people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise want to do ‘for the common good’.

When that happens, you really are having the precious core of your being mucked about with unfairly. And there exist no incentives to create something for yourself and your family, which, after all, is the point.

As the sun went down this evening, I mused on the passing of the days, and realised that my first objection to Slavoj Zizek was right: there is no static ‘precious core’ that you are forced to sell. A precious core is something that you create, something that you strive for. It is a process, not a commodity. When I built my own hut here, I created a little bit more of it. It’s unpleasant to work in a dead-end job, but you can strive to claw your way out of it, and in a free society no-one will prevent you. In anyone’s Utopia, on the other hand, someone probably will.