From capitalist to communist abstraction:The Pale King's cultural fix

Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital, by Jason W. Moore, London and New York, Verso, 2015, vii + 316 pp., US$29.95, £19.99 (softcover), ISBN 978-1-78168-902-8

“…2, 213-226 cultural configurations of humanity and gender rights, though seemingly just social issues, actually precipitate new rounds of accumulation as 'ecological surplus' to be appropriated, thereby driving down costs system-wide (231-235). Indeed, the normalisation of such roles constitutes a 'cultural fix' that precedes and allows specific 'ecological regimes' to develop (Shapiro 2014;Hartley 2015).…”

Regulating Desire: The Nature of Exhaustion in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall

“…To naturalize capitalism's hierarchies and obfuscate its violence, a succession of hegemonic states-Genoan, Dutch, British, then American-have developed a "cultural fix," which reproduces "durable class relations" outside of the labour process (Shapiro 2014(Shapiro , p. 1262. In the Keynesian period, the fix materialized in the post-war nuclear family's investment in civic responsibility, (white) middle-class growth, and religion, built upon a globalized network of cheap food, cheap oil, cheap labour, and the free work of housewives (Federici [1975(Federici [ ] 2012Shapiro 2014Shapiro , pp. 1255Moore 2015, pp.…”

“…Here, she rejects any form of temporality that might challenge her privileged sense of the present and blocks out empathy with other beings, living or dead. From following Else through the estates to momentarily assisting Sara's sister-mainly out of boredom-with the removal of the wall panel that conceals the dumb-waiter shaft, Penny's "openness to experience" precludes sustained interest in challenging the status quo (p. 164), reflecting the "apathetic individualism" of neoliberal subjectivity (Shapiro 2014(Shapiro , p. 1265. Her indifference to complex connections contrasts with Else's registration of how cheap nature and cheap labour are precisely what enable bourgeois comfort.…”

“…In Hotel World, the hotel brand promises the bourgeois consumer the experience of infinite surplus and comfort, naturalizing his/her superiority to, as well as difference from, service sector workers and most of humanity. In Tales from the Mall, the mall's production of scarcity and competition, and its commodification of sexuality, embraces the "liquidity" of contemporary neoliberalism, where social good is abandoned for "competitive selfishness" (Shapiro 2014(Shapiro , pp. 1265.…”

World-literary resources and energetic materialism

“…This is crucial for Moore's thorough and agile reworking of Marx's conception of value to account for the un(der)paid work/energy on which accumulation rests. Relatedly, Moore draws on Stephen Shapiro's (2014) Marxian invocation of the "cultural fix" -expanding on David Harvey's "spatial fix" -to capture how culture is required to uphold neoliberal capital by normalizing increasingly flexible and invasive forms of energetic extraction and naturalizing not only unpaid human work, "but also new epoch making practices of appropriating unpaid work by extra-human natures" (Moore 2015, 198; see also Shapiro 2014). Together, Shapiro and Moore have thus helped underline the centrality of culture and cultural production to the cyclical continuity of capitalism, and specifically to the current -perhaps final -circuit of capitalist accumulation, that of neoliberal capital.…”