The last time I met Peter Fleming, Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour Party, ‘austerity’ was everywhere, Arsenal were in the top four and Brexit’s death-rattle portmanteau wasn’t even
a thing. Even though we meet in the same café we did the first time, since 2015, everything has changed. Well, apart from the austerity bit.
In our first interview, Fleming spoke mostly about banker suicides and boredom in white collar industries. His then-new book,
The Mythology of Work, was an investigation into the meaning of work, the ideology of productivity and the hollowness of employment. I enjoyed it. So much so that I wrote a piece for
Vice entitled ‘
Your Job is Pointless’, taking Fleming’s arguments to their logical conclusion.
Nearly three years later, his new work,
The Death of Homo Economicus, takes a very different view. Focusing on the figure of “economic man”, it argues that neoliberal ideology is facing a legitimacy crisis, evident from political upheavals such as Brexit and the surprising (relative) electoral success of Jeremy Corbyn.
However, instead of tempering its excesses to ensure survival, the neoliberal ideology is doubling down and pushing workers harder, into more precarity, whilst simultaneously waving obscene wealth in their faces.
“I think the power involved in both economy and workplaces has become more naked,” he tells me. “In the last book I was interested in the cultural tricks to get more work time out of us and how we need to identify our own complicity in our overworked-ness.”
Since then, capitalism’s demands have become more overt. It’s almost as if the elite—and we as its audience—have accepted it as a “pure force,” he says. “There's no longer a velvet glove softening the blow of the fist.”
In 2015, Fleming looked at the ‘happiness industry’ and ‘wellness syndrome’ as inventions of post-industrial capitalism to mask its horrors. Now, he says, “that's missing the point. I don't think capitalism needs to disguise its dominance over our lives.”
“For me, it's been quite surprising to find the neoliberal ideology so confident. A lot of people thought the financial crisis ten years ago would pacify the excesses of capitalism, but if anything it's encouraged them.”
The examples in
Homo Economicus make for grim reading. The rise of Uber, Deliveroo, Taskrabbit, Lyft and countless others in the ‘sharing economy’ are well documented, as are the small agitations zero-hour contract workers have done to resist exploitation, such as the recent McStrike or Deliveroo workers protesting pay changes. Fleming criticizes writers such as Paul Mason for being “too optimistic”—which made me laugh.
“I think that practiced optimism is necessary,” Fleming tells me, “because it's trying to counter the sense of resignation on the Left, which had become catatonic. But the pessimistic side of me would say, things are only going to get worse.”
“It hit me when I saw Phillip Green being grilled about BHS at a Parliamentary Commission and he was supremely arrogant and unapologetic. There was no pretense, we all knew who the boss was. Or take Mike Ashley, Sports Direct CEO going through a metal detector and pulling out a huge wad of cash in front of his workers, and the nation's media. I thought, ‘this is a new brazen era of capital’. There's no attempt at softening the image.”
The concept of
Homo Economicus is that humans are consistently rational and individual, make choices based on self-interest and will pursue profit above nearly everything. This model has been used (arguably as a default) in mainstream economic theory since the 70s.
Fleming tells me this has led to “nihiliberalism.” It’s a decent gag, I admit, but hasn’t nihilism been with us for a long time? Fleming counters that it’s more prevalent now than ever—to the extent that there’s little else left.
“In western culture there is nothing but nihilism.” Individualism, he says, is a huge part of that. “Individuality, being different, celebrating difference is a positive thing, but individualism as a conditioning has led to adults to see society as something separate to themselves, and other people—outside of the family—as an obstacle, or an instrument. This leads to a very nihilistic outlook, because it’s such a lonely mindset.”
It is not surprising that most interesting parts of
The Death of Homo Economicus are about the Internet—another instance where liberatory potential has been subsumed by the demands of commerce.
Fleming concentrates a large part of his analysis on the death of Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer credited with developing the RSS feed and “hacktivist” who most famously downloaded and leaked 2.7 million federal court documents stored in
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), a database managed by the
Administrative Office of the United States Courts. (These were public records, but PACER had been charging 8 cents a page.)
Involved in many other freedom of information cases, Schwartz was eventually arrested after being tracked and monitored for months by the FBI. He committed suicide in his flat in 2013 before he could stand trial.
Fleming considers the treatment of Swartz, “a signal to say, well thanks, but the fun is over, and now the Internet is either owned by the nation-state or a corporation.
“The way the Internet has been fetishized by people like Paul Mason is over the top. Technology is not going to save us. We have returned to an era of rentier capitalism in the way the Internet has been colonized and corporatized. The internet is a pseudo public space, the internet is owned, fully now. Other than the real ‘dark web’.”
I suggest that the internet, raised in the age of
Homo Economicus, was always going to end up like this. The idea that something so revolutionary, with a potentially endlessly expansive public realm, would survive intact is kind of laughable now.
“Economic Man is perfect for the digital age,” Fleming says, “because the internet enables you to be forever connected to a revenue stream.”
After our discussion, I’m curious how
Homo Economicus can both be seemingly dead and alive at the same time. By writing this book I wonder if Fleming is trying to will the death of economic man into occurrence. No bad thing, perhaps, but his work is no easy read. It is unapologetically bleak—a correctional slap in the face to anyone on the left who has felt an inch of hope during 2017. There is no attempt to sugar-coat its medicine.
“I'm pessimistic,” Fleming says before I leave, “but I'm also aware that this pessimism is a big industry and it’s an indulgence for a middle-class person like me who doesn't have to be on the picket line. It's a cautious pessimism.”
He smiles, “the new book I'm working on is more positive. I hope.”
